It is often said that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” But to the ancient Romans, a plagiarius was a kidnapper, a slaver who carried off the children or servants (including slaves) of another for his own selfish purposes. It is impossible for a banker to trust a thief, and practically unthinkable for a scholar to trust a plagiarist. Plagiarism is generally deemed a crime, sometimes a tangled, even sophisticated one, but a crime nonetheless. It can be neatly summarized, as by the literary historian Christopher Ricks: “The morality of the matter, which asks of us that we be against deceit and dishonesty, is clear, and is clearly defined.”
A deeper look into the history of information can hardly bring into dispute this essential ethical point, though greater context may also admit greater complexity and allow for greater subjectivity. Poets need muses; mathematicians, numbers; astronomers, stars. All scholars, furthermore, need books and libraries—spaces, both material and intellectual, fitted and singled out as essential repositories that capture and preserve the proof of literary and philosophical res gestae, whether great or modest. Like scholars, plagiarists have also always needed libraries to ply their trade, though preferably of the less well-cataloged variety.
Not all forms of theft are purely repugnant or derivative. There have always been blundering thieves, but also very talented ones. The *canons of classical literature, and their *Renaissance revival during the fifteenth century, admit to this, particularly through the sophisticated notion of a skillful, even ingenious imitatio (imitation, and in Greek, mimesis), though forms of genius in one age can inspire mockery in the next. As popular *vernacular literary forms and *literacy expanded dramatically by the eighteenth century, Alexander Pope relegated a small army of everyday literary imitators to membership within a mock-heroic “Dunciad.” The sentiment was echoed by his fellow Scriblerian Jonathan Swift’s famous mantra: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign: that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”
Plagiarism is indeed stealing another’s ideas and words, and claiming them as your own. That much is clear. But at what point does one person’s recombobulation of another’s thoughts become something else, even across a spectrum—from a dunce-worthy parroting, to an inspired tertium quid that becomes a new great idea and singular contribution shaped from an admixture of the thoughts of others? The poetical locus classicus for plagiarism from the ancient Roman Martial (Epigrams, I.52) offers some insight: “I commend you my little books—that is, however, if I can call them mine when your poet friend recites them. If they complain of harsh enslavement, come forward to claim their freedom.… If you shout this three or four times, you will make the kidnapper ashamed of himself.” Martial’s “little books” were only as powerful as they were numerous, made so by placing them into the hands of those who could commission further scribal copies honoring their original author. Fidentius, the “poet friend” of Martial’s addressee Quintianus, apparently recited Martial’s epigrams as his own, thus enslaving the poet’s verses. The credit of Martial’s literary genius subsisted within a predominantly oral premodern literary culture.
Anxiety about literary fame continued to loom large throughout the manuscript age, and for good reason. The ancient Roman elegies of Propertius hung by the thread of one, perhaps two, known medieval scribal copies. Petronius’s Satyricon seemed lost altogether, save the apparently solitary medieval witness in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus. Early monastic *scriptoria inspired bustling urban scribal industries beyond the cloister, and as Renaissance “bookhunters” rediscovered and commissioned multiple scribal copies of theretofore “lost” ancient texts in out-of-the-way libraries, literary survivals—and subsequent opportunistic imitators and plagiarists—could flourish.
The mechanical and intellectual corruption of texts through manuscript copying occurred within a near monopoly over literacy and scribal activity by the medieval Roman Catholic Church. Orthodox and traditional knowledge could predominate over “new” forms of knowledge, and some medieval textual forms took on corporative and anonymous generic qualities. The literary accumulation of Christian auctoritas (authority) in *florilegia and preaching manuals could be interpreted as plagiaristic, where original sources were inconsistently referenced, though many collections such as Thomas of Ireland’s popular Manipulus florum (Handful of flowers) were often fairly meticulous in crediting sources. Vincent de Beauvais’s *encyclopedic Speculum maius (Greater mirror) cites hundreds of sources, but with some imperfections of quotation since all his references came from unique, and potentially flawed, manuscripts.
Renaissance critiques of these pressures on literary invention (often unfairly characterized as atavistic) found much medieval literature to be inimical to the individualizing virtues of personal inventio (invention) and ingenium (talent) more readily associated with the fifteenth-century revival of classical learning in the West. A dynamic and increasingly efficient public sphere, such as we associate with the mature era of *early modern print, was less in evidence in the medieval West and, thus, contemporary authorial accusations or documented commissions of plagiarism are not so easy to discover or to reconstruct. Plagiarism was simply easier to find, if also more complicated fully to comprehend, with the advent of rapid-fire printing with movable type from the mid-fifteenth century onward. The concomitant diversification of reading audiences (albeit still quite elite and erudite) across a wider geographical range coincided with the emergence of a new authorial demographic, and corresponding readership, of humanists dedicated to the textual revival, and critique, of sources from any historical period. Polyglot *philologists adept in languages ancient and modern, and learned editors and commentators, turned these critical analytical methods to pagan and Christian texts. The “arch-humanist” Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) attained his tremendous reputation (and lucrative career in scholarly publishing), in part, through his reliance on sophisticated stationers capable of carrying his exacting standards on to the printed page. Erasmus praised as Herculean the skills of Aldus Manutius and leaned on his Basel printer Froben as the primary *publisher of his great Christian humanist works.
Even still, Erasmus himself stood at the heart of one of the major disputes over plagiarism of the early modern period regarding rival claims to the invention the runaway best-selling academic *genre of “adages”—pithy ancient quotations with accompanying philological essays. Technically, the Italian humanist Polydore Vergil came first with his Proverbiorum libellus (Booklet of proverbs, 1498) containing fairly concise entries on three hundred ancient wisdom sayings. Erasmus’s Collectanea adagiorum (Collections of adages, 1500) followed shortly thereafter with a similar format, by then eight hundred entries strong (140 overlapping with Polydore’s selection). Erasmus’s Adagiorum chiliades (Thousands of adages, 1508), printed by the great Aldus, quadrupled his earlier piece in size, though Polydore did not raise the red flag of plagiarism in print until 1521 (citing a 1519 letter to an English diplomat). Polydore’s salvo was anticipated two years prior in a letter from Erasmus to Guillaume Budé, claiming he had never heard of Polydore until long after his 1500 Collectanea. Erroneously, Erasmus claimed precedence for his 1500 first edition, perhaps confusing Polydore’s 1498 Proverbiorum libellus with a later Venetian edition of the same. Such disputes would become legion in the era of print and often remain unresolved. Not without irony, in his famous 1508 Aldine Adagiorum chiliades Erasmus relocated the proverb amicorum communia omnia (“friends hold all things in common”) to the first position (I.1.i). Regardless of who may have taken the very first draught, all lovers of ancient wisdom, it seems, will have drunk from the same spring.
Accusations of plagiarism often take to extremes commonplaces of readerly and authorial practice within the interplay of the imagination, memory, and the love of language. Though he venerated classical literature, Michel de Montaigne deployed a less proprietary approach to humanistic literary activity than many of his contemporaries. He, too, held his favorite authors “in common,” simply carving their wise proverbs into the ceiling rafters of his famous tower library (including several also in Erasmus’s Adages) without explicit attributions. So, too, in many of Montaigne’s Essais (composed ca. 1570–92; first ed., 1580) are there similarly excised and decontextualized nuggets of the ancients, often quoted explicitly, but also paraphrased, perhaps unwittingly “stolen,” or simply reworded in some textual variation. Echoing Erasmus on amicitia, Montaigne reminds his reader that “truth and reason are common to everyone, and no more belong to the man who first spoke them than to the man who says them later” (Essais I.26). Following the classical apiarian metaphor of the scholar as a honeybee who gathers nectar from various flowers to make honey and wax (running straight through Seneca, Macrobius, Erasmus, and, indeed, Montaigne himself), his resulting “attempts” (essais) at formulating original thoughts were, often, just that, efforts to bend the arts of humanist reading to original self-explorations and syntheses. Montaigne’s first language was Latin, not French; he was steeped profoundly in ancient literature, so much so that it may have been impossible for him to credit all to all, even if he had intended to.
Quiet, scholarly retreat to a well-stocked personal library was not the first option of every reader or writer who wished to scale the ever-competitive and often slippery ladder to literary fame. Few who wished to be remembered like a Montaigne may have shared Montaigne’s ecumenism about the imperfect nature of authorship and originality. In the English vernacular, early etymological confusion conflated “plagiarism” in Sir Thomas Elyot’s Dictionary (1538) with the Latin plaga, a wound caused by a whip, presumably a classical punishment for kidnapping. That punitive association was readily extended to the office of the schoolmaster and his scourge by generations of Latin grammar students, and frequently deployed in the titles of literary satires for whipping and punishing as derivative any lesser claimant to literary achievement. Charges of plagiarism would emerge as a commonplace within these satires and invectives throughout the early modern period, inspiring a procedure of literary outing and punishment that relied on an adept mixture of wide reading, apparent native cleverness, and a certain delight in public shaming made possible on a massive scale through print.
Still, even by 1646 Sir Thomas Browne envisaged no “epidemic” of printed plagiarism in his Pseudodoxia epidemica or Enquiries into very many received tenets and commonly presumed truths, since plagiarism, itself, was as old as the hills and well preceded the creation of a public sphere driven by movable type: “Thus may we perceive the ancients were but men, even like ourselves. The practice of transcription in our days was no monster in theirs: plagiary had not its nativity with printing, but began in times when thefts were difficult, and the paucity of books scarcely wanted that invention.” Mendacity, ancient and modern, could be found in “a certaine list of vices committed in all ages, and declaimed against by all authors, which will last as long as human nature, or digested into common places may serve for any theme, and never be out of date until Doomsday” (I.6.21–22). Neither Montaigne nor Browne was an apologist of plagiarism, though their broad-minded sentiments on originality were perhaps tempered by firsthand experience of their own brutally partisan historical moments amid the French Wars of Religion and the English Civil Wars.
Charges of plagiarism in print were forever problematized by the absence of formal legal intellectual property rights that favored authors over publishers. In England, primary power over mainstream print (and its implicit censorship) devolved to the private monopoly of the London Stationers’ Company, at least until the Licensing Act of 1662 was allowed finally to lapse in 1695 and succeeded by the Copyright Act of 1710. The latter effectively transferred *copyright from publishers to authors and shifted press control into the regulatory hands of government and the law courts. Gradually, public conceptions of an “authorial text” could be seen as integral to the creative powers and personal well-being of original authors. This sentiment could even elide with a kind of protonationalism, as when the dramatic critic Gerard Langbaine, in his Momus triumphans: or, The plagiaries of the English stage (1688), decried as the very “worst of plagiaries, [those] who steal from the writing of those of our own nation. Because he that borrows from the worst foreign authors, may possibly import, even amongst a great deal of trash, somewhat of value: whereas the former makes us pay extortion for that which was our own before.”
These events coincided with a broader, and often retrospective, impulse to identify within postclassical vernacular literary and philosophical traditions a well-defined, native canon of authorial genius. In England, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Milton were arrayed alongside Bacon, Locke, and Newton, in a continuous expression of “national” virtù. To these bright flames of literary distinction were drawn many plagiarist moths, from the obscure to the infamous. Much as Martial’s Fidentius, the teenaged Robert Baron cut whole swathes from the verses of Waller, Lovelace, Suckling, and Milton, claiming them as his own in his Cyprian academy (1647) and Pocula castalia (Cups of Castalian waters, 1650). The cantankerous Scottish neo-Latinist and literary critic William Lauder unleashed a far more sweeping plagiaristic controversy, however. What began simply as his promotion of the verse psalm translation of the Scots poet Arthur Johnston grew to a stupendous cause célèbre that embroiled several of the leading figures of the Augustan age. Where Alexander Pope had lavished great praise on Milton’s poetry, that came at the great expense of Johnston in his Dunciad (4.111–12), setting Lauder off into a seven years’ war to establish the epic poet Milton as, in fact, the plagiarorum princeps (prince of plagiarists) of English letters.
The vehicle of Lauder’s venom was the respectable Gentleman’s Magazine, a ubiquitous periodical digest of news, literature, and criticism. There Lauder accused Milton of lifting much of the structure, and thousands of lines of verse, of Paradise Lost from several neo-Latin texts of the first half of the seventeenth century, including epic poems by Hugo Grotius and the Jesuit Jakob Masen. Resting as it did on books obscure to the point of being nearly unobtainable (and, thus, impossible to interrogate further) in mid-eighteenth-century England, Lauder’s twisted obsession to rip to shreds Milton’s authorship of “things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme” could not resist detection for long, however. It soon emerged that the ostensible filching was in fact a sequence of citations stolen by Lauder from William Hog’s Paraphrasis poetica (Poetical paraphrase, 1690), a latter-day translation of Milton into Latin. Several confessions of guilt for the imposture by Lauder, including one dictated by Dr. Samuel Johnson himself (albeit largely retracted by Lauder in a postscript) could not blunt John Douglas’s Milton Vindicated (1751), an utter demolition of Lauder’s literary critical sand castle.
Plagiarism motivated by commercial profit, rather than literary fame, was hardly alien in the eighteenth century, particularly in the realm of erudite literary compilations. Even the greatest of them all, the massively ambitious *Encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert, borrowed significantly (not always with explicit citation) from Ephraim Chambers’s earlier Cyclopaedia (1728). This may not have pained Chambers though, who explained of “dictionary-writers” (Chambers’s term for authors of encyclopedia entries), in his own entry on “Plagiarism,” that their “occupation is not pillaging, but collecting contributions.”
At the dawn of industrial mass print publication, critical estimations of plagiarism could remain mixed and muddled amid expansive notions of human subjectivity and authorship. Lamenting the exponential production of cheap print, the great Parisian bibliographer Charles Nodier published his Questions de littérature légale: Du plagiat (Questions of legal literature: On plagiarism, Paris, 1828), condemning plagiarism, but with the caveat that “it would be unjust to qualify as plagiarism what is truly only an extension or a useful amendment” to what another has written. There was room for a kind of “plagiat autorisé” (authorized plagiarism) since “there are ideas that can gain from a new expression; established notions that a more felicitous development may clarify.” Here, Nodier notably juxtaposed plagiarism with discussions of authors’ contractual rights, pirated editions, spurious printed rarities designed solely for gullible bibliomanes, which combined to form a widening, not-so-creative corner of the marketplace of ideas.
Ironically, Nodier himself dabbled in what he might have condemned. His Histoire des sociétés secrètes de l’armée (History of the secret societies of the army, 1815) presents a fabulous spy-versus-spy “history” of a military coup against the Napoleonic regime. The far more pernicious conspiratorial Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903) told of a global Jewish cabal bent on worldwide economic and cultural domination. This double-plagiarism drew on the anti-Semitic, mid-nineteenth-century writings of Maurice Joly, his Dialogue aux enfers (Dialogue in hell, 1864), and Eugène Sue’s novel Les Mystères du peuple (Mysteries of the people, 1849–56), unleashing a “warrant for genocide” popularized, variously, by Adolf Hitler and Henry Ford.
In the twenty-first century, plagiarism seems to receive greatest attention in the cutthroat competitive world of higher education. Policy standards against plagiarism are often attached to procedures for adjudication and sanctions, though these are hardly standardized across institutions. They rely implicitly on the discretion and interpretation of teachers in the classroom who often face increasing teaching loads and class sizes, and the seemingly limitless increase of online content. The double-edged sword of complex search functions and instant data retrieval on the *internet may have ushered in a “golden age” of plagiarism. Countervailing “Plagiarism Detection System” (PDS) software deploys a complex array of methodologies from the fields of computer science and computational linguistics that include “fingerprinting” “bag of words” vector space retrieval, citational pattern analyses, and stylometric analyses for authorship attribution. The cost propositions of real investment of human resources and operational vigilance in the detection and prosecution of plagiarism are nevertheless real and often prohibitive. And, thus, plagiarism remains, as perhaps it has always been—an intellectual, practical, and subjective snarl rooted in a desire for justice, expressed to promote creativity, but undermined by the inexorable increase of information in all its forms.
Earle Havens
See also books; computers; documentary authority; excerpting/commonplacing; forgery; intellectual property; money; readers; teaching