The Intellectual Properties of Learning: A Prehistory From Saint Jerome to John Locke

Description

PDF_OA is open access version (final, un-copyedited draft).

Chapters 1-7 are really the only ones worth reading, as ch. 8 begins with the anti-Scholasticism, anti-Thomist, godless humanist Petrarch.

Table of Contents

• Front matter
• 1. The Commonwealth of Learning

Monastery and School

• 2. The Medieval Monastic Paradox
• 3. Learning in the Early Middle Ages
• 4. The Patronage of Medieval Learning
• 5. The Learned Turn of the High Middle Ages

University and Academy

• 6. The Translation Movements of Islamic Learning
• 7. The Medieval Universities of Oxford and Paris
• 8. Humanist Revival
• 9. Learned Academies and Societies
• 10. Early Modern Oxford and Cambridge

Locke and Property

• 11. A Theory of Property

• 12. An Act for the Encouragement of Learning

• Epilogue

• Bibliography

Willinsky is the founder of the Public Knowledge Project and advocate of open-access (OA)
Providing a sweeping millennium-plus history of the learned book in the West, John Willinsky puts current debates over intellectual property into context, asking what it is about learning that helped to create the concept even as it gave the products of knowledge a different legal and economic standing than other sorts of property. Willinsky begins with Saint Jerome in the fifth century, then traces the evolution of reading, writing, and editing practices in monasteries, schools, universities, and among independent scholars through the medieval period and into the Renaissance. He delves into the influx of Islamic learning and the rediscovery of classical texts, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the founding of the Bodleian Library before finally arriving at John Locke, whose influential lobbying helped bring about the first copyright law, the Statute of Anne of 1710. Willinsky’s bravura tour through this history shows that learning gave rise to our idea of intellectual property while remaining distinct from, if not wholly uncompromised by, the commercial economy that this concept inspired, making it clear that today’s push for marketable intellectual property threatens the very nature of the quest for learning on which it rests.

Some great quotes:

• Alcuin of York, King Charlemagne's tutor, wrote to him in 796 AD: "nothing [is] better for developing a life on the best principles than philosophy, discipline, and education.” (Willinsky p. 62)
• Alcuin of York's sciptorium's entrance: "Writing books is better than planting vines, for he who plants a vine serves his belly, but he who writes a book serves his soul." (Willinsky p. 66)

• St. Augustine, De doctrina Christiana bk. 1, ch. 1: "For all the things which do not give out when given away are not properly possessed when they are possessed but not given away." (Willinsky p. 82)

• This ed.'s transl:

For a possession which is not diminished by being shared with others, if it is possessed and not shared, is not yet possessed as it ought to be possessed.

Latin original:

Omnis enim res quæ dando non deficit, dum habetur et non datur, nondum habetur quomodo habenda est.

* akin to the Dominican "*contemplari et contemplata aliis tradere* " (derived from [*S.T.* III q. 40 a. 1](https://isidore.co/aquinas/summa/TP/TP040.html#TPQ40A1THEP1) ad 2)!

• (Deely's Four Ages of Understanding argues St. Augustine founded semiotics in De Doctrina Christiana.)

On p. 102 Willinsky incorrectly claims "the new orders of mendicant Franciscan and Dominican friars, so active in learning, did not accept women." Who were Bl. Diana, St. Clare, et al., then?

p. 120fn5: "In many cases, works by Aristotle and other Greek writers were initially translated into Syriac by Eastern Christian scholars and then rendered in Arabic."

p. 40: marginal note at end of manuscript of St. Gregory the Great's Moralia in Job by 10th century by copyist Florentius of Valeránica, qutoed in Introduction to Manuscript Studies p. 23, from Madrid Biblioteca Nacional MS 80:

Because one who does not know how to write thinks it no labor, I will describe it for you, if you want to know how great the burden of writing: it mists the eyes, it curves the back, it breaks the belly and the ribs, it fills the kidneys with pain, and the body with all kinds of suffering. … As the last port is sweet to the sailor, so the last line to the scribe.

Reading St. Luke's gospel, I found a verse that is very apropos for paywalling/copyright/etc.:

Luke 11:52: "Væ vobis, legisperitis, quia tulistis clavem scientiæ"

Mt. 13:10ff. also seems relevant to intellectual property issues: "Quare in parabolis loqueris eis?" (e.g., St. Jerome using ad hominem s for the sake of simpletons and reasoned arguments for the learned). It seems copyright might be good for preventing simpletons from accessing what only specialized people can understand.

St. Augustine De doctrina Christiana lib. 1 cap. 1:

Omnis enim res quæ dando non deficit, dum habetur et non datur, nondum habetur quomodo habenda est.

This should be the our anti-© motto! And it's akin to the Dominican "contemplari et contemplata aliis tradere " (derived from S.T. III q. 40 a. 1 ad 2)!