Critical Literacy Lessons for the Intellectual Properties of Learning from Bede and Alcuin of York
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Stanford University makes this peer-reviewed final draft available under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial License. The published version is available from the publisher, subscribing libraries, and the author. Willinsky, John & Provençal, Johanne. (in press). Critical literacy lessons for the intellectual properties of learning from Bede and Alcuin of York. International Journal of Cultural Studies. Critical Literacy Lessons for the Intellectual Properties of Learning from Bede and Alcuin of York John Willinsky [email protected] Johanne Provençal [email protected] Abstract The concept of intellectual property, which has been largely absent from education in critical literacy, has much to contribute to it. Intellectual property rights have become increasingly crucial to issues of access to and economics of research and scholarship today and how such rights are associated with learning and the work of the learned is relevant to critical literacy. To begin to establish how intellectual property has long played a role in the critical shaping of learning, this paper considers the eighth-century examples provided by Bede and by Alcuin of York in the medieval monastic development of learning in the West. These examples illustrate how a cultural history of the proto-concept of intellectual property can illuminate the special and distinct status of learning in the production and circulation of knowledge. If we are to appreciate why we might expect a certain class of intellectual property, closely associated with the production of knowledge in institutions such as universities, to be regarded as a public resource and goods, then we need to appreciate how this sense of the public good has long been a part of the educational history of the West. To that end, Bede and Alcuin of York are considered as medieval historical precedents for an opening up of literacy and learning that is relevant to digital era issues over long-established tensions between a cloistered literacy (and learning) that is placed at a remove from the world and an opening up of literacy, learning, and access to knowledge. Keywords: Critical literacy, intellectual property, Alcuin, Bede, scholarly communication. Introduction One thing that is arguably critical to literacy today is an understanding of intellectual property. It is critical in the sense that, while the legal and economic structures of intellectual property determine access to knowledge and more broadly underwrite the information economy, it hardly figures in literacy education at any level. People may possess a rather cursory understanding of the commercial value of copyright, the sins of plagiarism, and the legalities of downloading digital content, but clearly much more is at stake with intellectual property. When the United Nations Declaration of Human declares that ‘everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to…share in scientific advancement and its benefits,’ as set forth in Article 27, that human right is mitigated by the intellectual property regimes governing the sharing of cultural artifacts and scientific advances (Kunz, 1949). Intellectual property provides the legal and economic basis for ensuring gross inequities in the global circulation of knowledge (Krikorian & Kapczynski, 2010); it comes into play in struggles over the control of indigenous knowledge (Battiste & Youngblood, 2000). The digital era has only increased the importance of intellectual property questions in thinking about the politics of knowledge and the sharing of learning on a global scale. It is the site of disputes over the confinement of culture and freedom of expression, from hip hop music to documentary films (Macleod, 2005). Such disputes have given rise to widely embraced alternatives to current copyright restrictions, principally through Creative Commons licensing for cultural, educational, and scholarly works (Lessig, 2004) and open source licenses for software (Weber, 2006). Here, then, is political, economic, and ethical grist for critical literacy education. Here is the value of understanding the principles and history behind this concept that governs literacy’s status as a property, as an economic force and human right. Yet as things now stand, the realm of intellectual property goes largely missing from otherwise admirable considerations of critical literacy for the ‘new information age’ (Avila & Moore, 2012; Gounari, 2009), given little more than mention in passing (Luke, 2011; Warnick, 2002). With this article, our goal is hardly to take on the whole of the relationship among intellectual property, critical literacy, and cultural studies. Rather, we take up, within this bigger picture, one ancient episode from the long historical association of intellectual property and learning. Our hope is to demonstrate how this history can inform current deliberations over intellectual property that bear directly on our own work as scholars, namely, the public status of research and scholarship. To do so, we reach well back 2 before the term ‘intellectual property’ had taken hold (in the nineteenth century) to show how learning first gave rise to a type of property within the medieval monastery that continued to be distinguished, as a form of intellectual property, by how it was fostered within the special economic and legal standing of the universities that followed on from the monasteries in the Late Middle Ages. To this day, the intellectual properties associated with this institutionally sponsored learning are accorded rights and privileges.1 Put another way, there are historical, legal, economic, and moral grounds for treating works of sponsored research and scholarship today as a different order of intellectual property than the copyrighted music of Lady Gaga, for example. However, such distinctions between what Yochai Benkler (2006) identifies as the ‘nonproprietary’ and ‘nonmarket’ works of the learned and that of other intellectual property producers tend to be obscured and lost to sight amid the growing capitalization and commodification of higher education, as attested to by a burgeoning literature on the ‘the perils, rewards, and delusions of campus capitalism,’ to use the subtitle of one recent book (Greenburg, 2007), and ‘the commercialization of higher education,’ in the case of another (Bok, 2004).2 The issue has infected the whole area of scholarly publishing and the circulation of research and scholarship, marked by corporate concentration and high profit margins (Beverungen, Böhm & Land, 2012). In Washington, commercial journal publishers continue to lobby against legislation that supports public access to federally financed research (Willinsky, 2009; Phelps, Fox & Marincola, 2012). More broadly, efforts to introduce open access publishing models that take advantage of the new digital publishing technologies are being resisted, where they are not being exploited as ways of increasing publisher revenue (Suber, 2012; Willinsky, 2006). So while the intellectual property status of work in the academic community is only one small aspect of this larger intellectual property issue, and admittedly far along the literacy scale, it is where we live. Thus, getting our own house in order, and understanding how we have arrived here, is itself an act of critical literacy and, as such, seems a likely starting point, for ourselves as for introducing the issue to others. To turn to the historical context that informs this paper, the initial point to be made is that learning has long held a privileged place within the formation of intellectual property. The first copyright act in the English-speaking world – the Statute of Anne, 1710 – is cast as ‘An Act for the Encouragement of Learning.’ It recognizes the limited rights of an author over their work, while containing multiple protections of the universities, including legal deposit of every book 3 published and a right to force booksellers to reduce their prices. Yet such a law only encodes what was already a common, if often violated, practice. It gave legal weight to a concept of intellectual property (although this term did not come into use until the nineteenth century) that had been taking shape for some time. A century or more earlier, the king was granting patents for certain inventions and the privilege to printers to print whole classes of books as a means of controlling and censoring the press. Yet many centuries earlier, the medieval monasteries of the Christian West were one of the principal institutions of literate activity during the Middle Ages. They form an institutional precursor to the medieval universities, even as they included women, and in positions of authority and leadership, where the universities barred the door to women for many centuries (Weik, 2011). Over the course of the Early and High Middle Ages, a relatively small number of learned nuns and monks gradually established how the careful preparation of texts, enriched with commentary and glosses, served the learning of the larger religious community. To present the briefest of overviews of our larger argument before settling into examining two instances in more details: these works were valued as properties, commonly owned by the community, to be copied and circulated within the network of monasteries. While we can readily imagine the learned monk (if not so much the nun, who was just as active) writing and illuminating manuscripts in cooperation to serve the reading needs of the larger monastic community, it