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

by John Willinsky

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.
 

400 pages, Hardcover

Published January 2, 2018

Reviews

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book with mammoth scope and ambition: to survey the intellectual history that underpinned the development of modern copyright laws. As the title suggests, Willinsky starts with St Jerome and takes it up to the first modern copyright legislation in the early 18th century, which provides an enormous amount of background context. It's a dense work, stuffed full of footnotes, most of which present tantalizing branches off the main argument, but Willinsky holds to his key questions, which have to do with how intellectual and learned communities, from the early monastic tradition forward, thought about the ownership of ideas. The book picks up a lot of steam in the early modern period, covering the rise of humanism, the flourishing of European universities, and the role of scholarly societies. He also helpfully notes the nastier entanglements with colonialism, slavery, and the rise of industrial capitalism through this period, but stays true to the theme of learning and the ways in which the infrastructures of learning have been valued -- differently but consistently -- throughout the past fifteen hundred years of Western history.

[Stefan Szczelkun · Rating 4 out of 5]

To my eyes this was not primarily about copyright but rather provides a readable account of the last 1500 years of European literary history. I needed such an account in one book and was pleased, in particular, to be introduced to the contribution made by the network of monasteries.
Women were part of this era of monastic learning and Willinksy tells the extraordinary tale of Radegund (520 - 587), who after suffering as a victim of war, established the Sainte-Croix in Poitiers circa 560, as a refuge for herself and other ‘women of nobility’. p.44. Her monastery was open to a ‘more literary and humanistic culture’. She used this place to write against the ravages of war and was a vegan. She was an ascetic to the point we might see as self-harming today.

By the 7th Century the monastery was the “wealthiest political unit in western Europe, monasticism had become a fully public institution, identified with stability and political success.” J.W. quoting Peter Brown (2013)

Although the astringent 'Rule of Benedict' tended to dampen down creative thinking in the monasteries there was still progress.

“In the C13th the Franciscans had became known for the communal libraries they managed in association with the universities… they categorised books by subject; assigned them call numbers; created collection catalogues, including union catalogues across different collections; preserved works in book presses… and sold off less useful works.” p.167

Then we race through the subject of Cathedral schools and the influence of Arabic scholars, in particular their commentaries on Aristotle. Later on Petrarch's islamophobia tries to reduce this influence and we see the start of an imperialist mindset.
Into this scene the universities appear to produce cadres required by the new city states. They have to fight off the weight of the church to get some space to think and develop a secular intellectual space which is able to reference classical texts and be relatively free from fear of accusations of heresy. But knowledge and discourse is all still in Latin, in slow moving hand-written manuscript form.
Then printing with moveable type comes along to explode the European reading scene. After a fascinating chapter on Erasmus and his best selling collection of 'Adages' in which we learn how he works closely with his printer, actually writing in the print workshop.
Willinsky leaves the story at the Statute of Anne in England 1710 which gives authors rights and actually is about intellectual property.
Willinsky does not refer to the Radical Enlilghtenment, and stays within relatively conservative territory, which he injects with moments of colour and subversion. He also seems to misjudge the earlier influence of the medieval Goliards... For more detail on all the above and the significance of the Goliards, as I see it, see my longer review here:
https://stefan-szczelkun.blogspot.com...

[MaryEllen Elizabeth Hart · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Willinsky engages the reader with his historical perspective supporting the virtuous embrace of learning as a common good while acknowledging the formidable challenges that the digital world places on the protection of intellectual property and applications of copyright law!