Before Plagiarism: Lawyers and Copynorms in Europe, 1300–1600

This essay uses the concept of 'copynorms', social norms about copying expressive works that can be distinct from legal norms about the same, in order to understand the meaning of intellectual property among Roman law and canon law jurists from the fourteenth through the sixteenth century. Assembling a series of examples taken from the offhand remarks (obiter dicta) of jurists, including a long discussion of the notorious and widespread charge that the fourteenth century's most famous lawyer Bartolus of Sassoferrato stole ideas from his friend and fellow jurist Franciscus de Tigrinis, we show that what we call plagiarism, already in the late Middle Ages, was understood as a theft of someone else’s honor. Even if no legal norms governed their intellectual output, premodern jurists existed in a self-regulating community bound by copynorms, a community in which creativity was valued and plagiarists were denounced, commonly by using the stronger Latin term furtum (theft) to describe their infraction before the term “plagiarism” came to be recovered as a synonym for it in the Renaissance. We argue that copying without attribution must be understood as a wrong or offence within an economy of prestige, heightened by the competition for praise, honor, and success in the premodern legal profession.