Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (review)

In the Bellicorum instrumentorum liber, a treatise on mechanical devices composed in the 1420s, the physician and engineer Giovanni Fontana described a new type of fountain. He began his description in normal Latin. With astonishing irony, Fontana then switched into a cipher of his own invention to continue the description: "All parts of the Fountain, and the complete figure of this thus are depicted clearly so that you can understand with facility" (111).

Fontana's ciphered description points to a deep-rooted tension present in early technical treatises. Should technical secrets, be they recipes for dyes or designs for mechanical clocks, be revealed to all in written treatises, at the risk of placing them in the hands of commercial competitors or enemy states? Or should they remain the preserve of a guild or workshop? Criticizing a bipolar historiographical tradition of ascribing noble ideals of openness to science and economically motivated secrecy to technology, Long provides a rich framework for a far more nuanced and complex account of early technical authorship. Her book is really a prehistory of "what we now call intellectual property" (1), and, as such, covers an impressive disciplinary range—from the history of alchemy to architecture, from engraving to mechanics, and from glassblowing to medicine. Long is concerned to analyze the cultural and economic conditions that promoted, on the one hand, the emergence of written technical treatises and "technical authorship," and, on the other hand, the emergence of patents, privileges, and laws designed to protect intellectual property from piracy and plagiarism.

Long's central thesis is that "medieval urbanism, the rise of merchant culture, the expansion of artisanal trades, and the development of merchant and artisanal guilds—all closely related phenomena—provide the context for the development of proprietary attitudes towards craft knowledge" (89). These proprietary attitudes were manifested in two distinct phenomena: "the burgeoning of craft secrecy to protect craft knowledge from theft and the development of the privilege or patent as a limited monopoly on inventions and craft processes" (89). Venetian glassmaking, and legislation concerning penalties for those who took the secrets of the craft outside Venice, constituted an important early example of a state coming to realize that "craft knowledge and inventions constituted property" (95). Venice was also the first state to pass a general patent law, in 1447, in recognition of the fact that "men of ingenuity" were an asset to the republic, and should be provided with protection in the form of a limited monopoly on devices that had not been made before in the Venetian domain.

Long argues that the last point was crucial. Absolute originality was of no importance for early patents and privileges, which were restricted to a specific locale, and, if anything, promoted plagiarism and the transmission of technological secrets from one state to another—a fact that would later be exploited spectacularly by Galileo in his attempt to receive a patent in Venice for the Dutch invention of the telescope. Renaissance courts provided the context for the development of a new kind of technical author, one who advertised his skills and inventions through texts in order to receive a position at court.

Clearly, someone like Albrecht Dürer could be described as an author in a number of different ways—an author of treatises on drawing, of woodcuts that are occasionally pirated, of paintings, and of certain technical devices described in the pages of his treatises. Each of these forms of authorship relates to a different system of reward and arguably has its own history. The combination of the history of literary authorship on technical subjects and intellectual property of techniques and devices in a single study provides a series of extremely rich case studies but occasionally makes Long's argument difficult to follow. Nonetheless...