Amanuensus

By Deane Barker • • tags: definition •
Updates
This content has been updated 1 time since it was first published. The last update happened .

Definition: a person whose employment is to write what another dictates, or to copy what has been written by another

Why I Looked It Up

A very strange passage in Cutting for Stone tells of an infant twin who is confronted with a woman’s breast for the first time:

Though I am in possession of the breast, stroking it, palpating it, I am also [my twin’s] amanuensis.

I suppose he was saying that he was somehow communicating with this twin about this strange thing he had found.

Update

Added on

In The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, there is this inventory of a wealthy Roman citizen:

…fifty-nine slaves, five notaries, two amanuenses, one scribe, and a book repairer, along with a cook and barber

It was presented in the context of how important written records were to Romans, that wealthy people would have staff dedicated to reproducing them.

Later in the same book:

…a restless quarrelsome man who had in his youth been Petrarch’s secretary and amanuensis…

Links from this – Cutting for Stone September 21, 2021
Absolutely stunning novel. I had heard of the book for years. My mother was born in Ethiopia in the 1940s (my grandparents were missionaries from New Zealand), and several people had told me that the story in the novel resembled my mother’s experience there as a child. The book was purchased for me...
Links from this – The Swerve: How the World Became Modern June 1, 2023
This is a book about a poem. It follows a book-hunter in the 15th century named Poggio, while he manages to save the last remaining copy of On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, which is an explanation of Epicurean philosophy. The poem makes lot of secular claims. In the middle of the book, they’re...