Medieval Hackers

MEDIEVAL HACKERS MEDIEVAL HACKERS Kathleen E. Kennedy punctum books ¬ brooklyn, ny MEDIEVAL HACKERS © Kathleen E. Kennedy, 2015. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ This work is Open Access, which means that you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors, that you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that you in no way alter, transform, or build upon the work outside of its normal use in academic scholarship without express permission of the author and the publisher of this volume. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. First published in 2015 by punctum books Brooklyn, New York http://punctumbooks.com The BABEL Working Group is a collective and de- siring-assemblage of scholar-gypsies with no leaders or followers, no top and no bottom, and only a middle. BABEL roams and stalks the ruins of the post-historical university as a multiplicity, a pack, looking for other roaming packs with which to cohabit and build tempo- rary shelters for intellectual vagabonds. We also take in strays. ISBN-13: 978-0692352465 ISBN-10: 0692352465 Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press, @ http://punctumbooks.com/about/ If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contributions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a welcoming port elsewhere. Our adventure is not possible without your support. Vive la open-access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490-1500) TABLE OF CONTENTS X 1: Medieval Hackers? // 1 2: Hacking Bread Laws // 29 3: The First Hacker Bible // 55 4: Tyndale and the Joye of Piracy // 81 5: Selling Statutes // 117 Homo Hacker? An Epilogue // 139 References // 149 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS P Even small books are the product of legions, and a book this long in the making has many people behind it. I thank Aaron Hawkins: he and my brother were the first Linux users I knew, at a college in a cornfield in the middle 1990s. I wrote the kernel of this book idea on the proverbial bar napkin in front of physicist Bob Klepfer, and the delightfully learned chemist and musician Jon Singer served as a further sounding board. To them and many other scientists and engineers, including Chris Dayton, John Tierney, and Laura Guer- tin, I offer thanks. You made this book happen. In front of the backend lies the GUI, and I must thank my network of medievalists and Early Modernists for helping me craft this. The archival research for this book began to take shape on an NEH Summer Seminar organized by John King, James Bracken, and Mark Rankin, and I cannot thank them enough for the opportunity. When I told Brantley Bryant and Karl Steel that I had this book idea, they sent me to Eileen Joy at Punctum, knowing that the people behind an experimental press making use of creative commons licenses would see the potential in my little attempt at media ar- chaeology. Together with my reader Jen Boyle, and punctum’s Edi- torial Associate Paul Megna, who formatted, copy-edited and proofed the book, and the support of many other medievalists, we have all brought you this book. Thank you. Chapter 1: Medieval Hackers? X Hackers are the last thing most people would associate with the Middle Ages. I copyrighted that sentence as I typed it into my phone while waiting in a grocery line. Indeed, the sentence was copyrighted whether I intended it or not, as under current American law, text is copyrighted the moment it is fixed in media. Such a short description of a textual event hides a wealth of cultural norms, norms which I hope to explore in this book. I am an author. I am the author of that sentence I wrote in the grocery line. However, until I shared that sentence, I had an audience of one, myself. Copyright is fundamentally about who has the right to share a text, that is, who has the right to copy that text, and also who has the right to alter that text. Ultimately, copyright determines who can profit legally from the copying of a text. Historically, however, anyone could copy a text, and profit from that copy. To- day if I wish to publish my sentence professionally, as the author I am unlikely to retain the copyright of it. Instead I exchange the copyright with a professional publisher, who then has control over making copies of the sentence I wrote, 2 MEDIEVAL HACKERS and over who else can use my sentence. The fact that something else has occurred instead is a tribute to punctum books’s interest in openness, commonness, and freedom of information. As with any cultural practice, copyright has a long history that extends back before there were laws devoted to copyright in the eighteenth century. In the late Middle Ages, authors shared their texts freely. Once completed, a text could be copied by anyone with the skills to do so, and the evidence is overwhelming that this copying included what we today would call “derivative works.” That is, copyists felt free to translate texts into other languages, add or subtract material to or from texts, and insert texts into other texts. In every way medieval copyists treated texts as common to all, something we might call “public domain,” or, more generally, an “information commons.” Occasionally, a king or a clergyman attempted to control this free movement of texts, and then we see people, “medieval hackers,” mounting defenses of this information culture. This book will trace intellectual proper- ty norms from late medieval England until the crown and a group of printers collaborated successfully to control print- ing in the 1550s. Despite such channeling, this book consid- ers how the medieval norms of commonness, openness, and freedom of information are still present in our textual culture in the culture of computer hackers. I will also explore how these norms challenge modern copyright law. The people involved in translating both the Bible and the parliamentary statutes in late medieval England used the very terms of openness and access that hackers use today: they stress commonness, openness, and freedom. This book traces the striking similarity of vocabulary used by contemporary legal theorists and hackers and that of early translators such as the anonymous translators of the Wycliffite Bible, the first complete translation of the Bible into English, later Bible translators such as William Tyndale and George Joye, and early legal translators such as John Rastell. As modern hackers would say, in late medieval England the desire for sacred and secular law in the vernacular was “an itch that had to be KATHLEEN E. KENNEDY 3 scratched,” not just for the good of the translators, but for the common good. 1 The major distinction between medieval hackers and modern hackers is that these ideals and the information commons that enabled them were normative in manuscript culture, came to be restricted under the early Tudors, and are now marginal, as are hackers themselves. It is the rhetoric shared by the medieval information commons and modern hackers that led me to that sentence typed at the grocery store: “hackers are the last thing most people would associate with the Middle Ages.” When we think of hackers we think of computers, of programming, maybe even of crime. We are not wrong to think so: today hackers are most frequently computer programmers, and some hackers commit crimes. However many hackers argue that this is a reductive way of thinking about hacking. These hackers counter that hacking is bigger than computer programming. They claim that it is a culture, an ideology. The hacker ideal is a community of equals who gain entrance to the community and position among its hierarchies through skill. This skill is often quite physical, skill at making things, but at a more fundamental and idealistic level it is about hav- ing the skill to make something do what the hacker wants it to do, whether or not that thing was designed originally to perform that action. Yet the existence of the notion of “hacker” suggests that this level of skill and control is not the norm today. That we have a word for “hacker” at all suggests that distance, institutional control, or some other physical or cultural barrier prevents manufacture and repurposing from being commonplace. Such hacking might appear to be strictly limited in time, place, and culture, but I argue instead that hackers are truly medieval, thanks to their relationship with the information commons. Sadly, today many of us think very little about this commons, to which we all have access. The information commons is the “public domain” loosely understood. As we will see in detail later in this chapter the information com- 1 Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux 4 MEDIEVAL HACKERS mons includes all “texts” which the public has the right to circulate and modify as they desire. The information commons does not end with large digital libraries such as Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org), The Internet Archive (archive.org), or Google Books, but extends to a range of computer code, and in the past extended much, much further.

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