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introduction Categories and Key Words Local Meaning in Long-Term History This book investigates openness, secrecy, authorship, and ownership—what we now call intellectual property. Ranging from antiquity to the early seventeenth century, it draws substantially on writings from technical, craft, and practical traditions. Sources include books on catapults, agriculture, and generalship; evidence derived from artisanal contexts, such as ancient and medieval craftguild records; treatises on painting, architecture, machines, mining, and pottery making; alchemical treatises, magical texts, and Neoplatonic writings that elucidate esoteric beliefs and practices. Rather than contributing to the substantive content of a particular discipline—say, the history of agriculture or the history of architecture—it explores attitudes and practices involving the possession of knowledge and its transmission. It investigates the cultures of knowledge—whether knowledge is open or secret; which topics become the focus of written authorship and why; when and in what contexts people consider knowledge to be property ; and what they take knowledge to be. The ways in which practical and craft cultures have interacted with learned traditions are a significant focus. During most of antiquity the separation of craft know-how from more theoretical knowledge was characteristic. In late antiquity, however, certain alchemical sources integrated material operations and the quest for higher knowledge, while craft magic harnessed the higher world of the spirit for material ends. In contrast, most late antique Neoplatonic sources indicate a quest for understanding, or gnosis, that was specifically opposed to material corporeality. The world of material artifacts was created largely by artisans, who before the fifteenth century handed down their craft knowledge and skill apart from the world of books and learning, for the most part orally, through apprenticeship systems either formal or informal. In the context of medieval urbanism from the thirteenth century, for the first time significant evidence emerges for proprietary attitudes toward craft knowledge, indicated both by craft secrecy and by patents for invention. This book argues that from the early fifteenth century there was closer interaction between the technical arts, political power, and knowledge. Indications for such a development include the great expansion of open traditions of authorship on the mechanical arts and a simultaneous renaissance of Neoplatonic writings that promulgated both secrecy and the use of utilitarian magic aimed at changing the material world. This study contributes, finally, to the longstanding issue in the history of science concerning the nature of the contribution of the mechanical arts to the rise of empirical and experimental methodologies within the new sciences of the seventeenth century. Openness, Secrecy, and Authorship belongs to intellectual and cultural history as well as to the history of science and technology. Yet it recognizes that science, technology, and even history are present-day terms whose meanings may be inappropriate or misleading for past cultures even when cognate terms exist in the diverse languages of those cultures. For example, scientia in Latin means “knowledge ” in a broad sense and has none of the methodological or disciplinary meanings that we today associate with science and scientist. Similarly, the ancient Greek word techneμ refers to material production of all kinds, from making soup to constructing catapults, and the reasoning associated with that production. The term mechanical arts, which came into use between the ninth and twelfth centuries , included painting and sculpture as well as the construction and operation of machines. It engages a complex of meanings quite different from those of the modern word technology.1 Conceptual categories change from one historical period to another. For example , Aristotle delineated three areas of human activity: first, material and technical production (techneμ); second, action (praxis), such as political or military action, that requires judgment in contingent or uncertain situations (phronesis); and third, theoretical knowledge or knowledge of unchanging things (epistemeμ). Aristotle’s separation of material production from action and from theoretical knowledge presupposed a hierarchy with techneμ at the bottom and epistemeμ, or theoretical knowledge, at the top.2 Such categories and the relationships between them exert a crucial influence on the construction of knowledge itself. For example, seventeenth-century experimental philosophers attempted to legitimate claims about the natural world by manipulating machines such as air pumps. Thereby they challenged traditional Aristotelian categories by bringing together techneμ (manipulation of machines and instruments) and epistemeμ (theoretical knowledge). Seventeenth-century Aristotelians countered the experimentalists with the argument that this combination was a category mistake involving the improper fusion of separate conceptual entities.3 2 Openness, Secrecy, Authorship [3.136.97.64] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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