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The Intellectual Properties of Learning The Intellectual Properties of Learning The Intellectual Properties of Learning A Prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke JOHN WILLINSKY The University of Chicago Press chicago and london The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2017 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2017 Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5 isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 48792- 2 (cloth) isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 48808- 0 (e- book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226488080.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Willinsky, John, 1950– author. Title: The intellectual properties of learning : a prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke / John Willinsky. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2017038019 | isbn 9780226487922 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226488080 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Learning and scholarship—History. | Learned institutions and societies—History. | Intellectual property. | Universities and colleges— Europe—History. Classification: lcc az231 .W 55 2018 | ddc 001.2—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038019 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z 39.48- 1992 (Permanence of Paper). Contents Preface • ix Acknowledgments • xiii chapter one • 1 The Commonwealth of Learning part one: monastery and school chapter two • 21 The Medieval Monastic Paradox chapter three • 49 Learning in the Early Middle Ages chapter four • 73 The Patronage of Medieval Learning chapter five • 89 The Learned Turn of the High Middle Ages part two: university and academy chapter six • 117 The Translation Movements of Islamic Learning chapter seven • 153 The Medieval Universities of Oxford and Paris chapter eight • 181 The Humanist Revival chapter nine • 209 Learned Academies and Societies vi contents chapter ten • 241 Early Modern Oxford and Cambridge part three: locke and property chapter eleven • 273 A Theory of Property chapter twelve • 297 An Act for the Encouragement of Learning epilogue • 319 Bibliography • 325 Index • 361 300 CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM Jerome (ca. 347–420) Augustine of Hippo (354–430) FALL OF ROME Benedict of Nursia (480–547) Boethius (480–524) Cassiodorus (ca. 485–585) Radegund of Poitiers (520–587) Isidore of Seville (ca. 560–636) 60000 Bede (ca. 672/3–735) Al-Mansur (714–775) ʿABBASID CALIPHATE Alcuin (ca.735–804) CAROLINGIAN RENAISSANCE Al-Kindī (801–873) CATHEDRAL SCHOOLS Al-Farabi (872–951) 90000 Gerbert d’Aurillac (946–1003) Avicenna (980–1037) Anselm of Canterbury (ca. 1033–1109) Peter Abelard (1079–1142) Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) Gerard of Cremona (1114–1187) ARABIC-LATIN TRANSLATION MOVEMENT Averroës (1126–1198) 120000 UNIVERSITIES Robert Grosseteste (1175–1253) Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374) Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) PRINTING PRESS Thomas Bodley (1545–1613) 150000 Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) William Laud (1573–1645) Federico Cesi (1585–1630) Henry Oldenburg (ca. 1619–1677) John Fell (1625–1686) John Locke (1632–1704) ROYAL SOCIETY STATUTE OF ANNE 1710 1800 figure 1. Timeline of book’s principal figures and events, 300 to 1710. for Jan Preface This book could be said to have started with a line from John Donlan’s poem entitled “An Economics of Happiness.”1 The poem’s title is promising enough for an inquiry into scholarly publishing, but that wasn’t my initial point of inspiration on first reading it. The poem begins, “I’ll see your mistake and double it.” This, too, might have proven a poignant spark for considering my own scholarship. But what actually gave me pause was the second line: “Orange King Billy, Our Guide to the Open Bible.” I was intrigued by this somewhat obscure reference to William of Orange’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, as I later learned, in which he restored Britain to Protestantism after defeating the Catholic convert James II. It signaled the country’s return to a Bible made accessible— or open— which is to say, in the English language of the people, rather than the Latin edition of the defeated King James II’s Catholicism. This championing of the open Bible spoke to the work that I had been doing over the last decade and a half on finding ways to open scholarly jour- nals to readers beyond the university libraries that could afford to subscribe to them— ways to open them to researchers around the globe, to physicians looking for the latest studies of a new treatment, and to poets seeking to learn more about, say, the role of small magazines in promoting poetic mod- ernism. My work in this area has involved developing the technical means and economic models that can provide scholars and public alike with free 1. John Donlan, “An Economics of Happiness,” in Spirit Engine (London: Brick Books, 2008); the poem is available online. x preface online access to this body of knowledge. This whole venture of creating open access to research and scholarship was very much an enterprise of the digi- tal era, but King Billy was a reminder of a larger historical story around a struggle for openness and access. When I asked John Donlan about King Billy and the Open Bible— as he is conveniently married to my cousin Mariam Clavir— he explained that, as a child, he earned a dollar each year on July 12th by carrying a sign that read “Our Guide to the Open Bible” as he walked carefully behind another youngster on horseback playing King Billy in an Orange Parade that was held in a little town north of Toronto. Such an Orange Day commemoration of William’s victory is celebrated in a number of Canadian and US communities in what may be these countries’ longest- standing annual parade. This reference to the open Bible and William III, Prince of Orange, soon led me to John Locke, who cast himself at one point as the philosopher of that Glorious Revolution. After six years of political exile in the Netherlands, Locke had returned to London shortly after William and Mary’s crowning. While in hiding across the channel, he had completed the manuscripts of two landmark works—Two Treatises of Government and An Essay concerning Human Understanding— that had much to say about property rights, the na- ture of knowledge, and the realm of learning generally. I was hardly the first to have that moment of realization: the questions I was working on, around access to research, were not born yesterday. The access issue was not simply a child of the internet, but had a fascinating, illuminating history that might well in­­form the way forward. In the Two Treatises of Government, published upon his return to England in 1689, Locke sets individual claims to property and liberty against the di- vine right of kings. In Locke’s highly influential account of property rights, he reminds readers that the world was originally given in common to all hu- mankind and that the ownership of things is only justified by what it contrib- utes to the common stock of all. Is that sort of exclusion warranted, a number of us were now asking, in the case of research and scholarship? In An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke declares his intention to serve “the Commonwealth of Learning” by clearing away obstructions on the path to knowledge. It left me wondering if the Essay might stand as Locke’s third treatise of government, dealing with the common wealth of learning and how it might best be governed. Following the example of Billy, could Locke be our Guide to Open Learning? Could today’s move toward open access be deeply rooted in the history of learning, rather than arising, as it had for me, out of the immediate and profound changes taking place preface xi in the shift from print to digital publishing? It was enough to set me off and running with a history inspired by the challenge that Locke set himself in the Two Treatises: “It seems to some a very great difficulty, how any one should ever come to have a property in any thing.”2 In searching for concrete histori- cal examples of how we had come to have a property in a work of learning, I was drawn further and further into the past. I decided that a reasonable stop- ping point— and thus the starting point for this book—­ was the fourth century and Saint Jerome, whose prolific writings and translations established what monasticism could do for learning in the Latin West. In the history that fol- lowed from Jerome, it became clear both how anyone within this historical tradition had come to have or find a property in a text, and how the learned properties at the heart of the commonwealth of learning were distinguished and set apart from other goods. It all spoke to a tradition that I was now fully engaged in facilitating for scholarly publishing in the digital era, but without this sense of how it might be deeply rooted in the past. In the late 1990s I was among those excited by the educational prospects of the internet as a new medium for sharing more of what was known. While a professor of education at the University of British Columbia, I was able to create the Public Knowledge Project in 1998 to explore such pros- pects with a modest endowment from Pacific Press, which owned Vancou- ver’s two principal newspapers, and gave the money to support work at the intersection of literacy and technology.
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