Openness/Secrecy, Authorship, Ownership: Studies in the Technical, Practical, and Knowledge Traditions of Premodern and Early Modern Europe

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Contemporary scientific and technical cultures include beliefs and practices concerning how knowledge is transmitted, who owns the knowledge, and at what point it should be openly disseminated (or whether it should be kept secret). Science is often presumed to be open, while technology is secret. Such understandings and the practices related to them are shaped by a complex system of intellectual property law as well as by institutional and tacit, individual practices. Yet the historical foundations of such values, laws and practices are not well understood. The purpose of this project is to complete a book-length history of the values of openness, secrecy, authorship and ownership of intellectual property as these pertain to premodern traditions of knowledge, practice and technology. The study will examine technical and practical writings from antiquity through the early seventeenth century. In method the study will first examine particular texts, then explore how those texts were appropriated, understood or misunderstood, and utilized by later cultures. The study will also examine how attitudes toward the transmission of knolwedge and towards authorship were influenced by changes in the conceptualization of knowledge itself and by changes in the relationships among the ancient categories of knowledge (episteme), technical production (techne), and military action (praxis). The book will demonstrate how values concerning the ownership and transmission of knowledge are widely variable and depend on particular cultures and societies rather than on universal structures of thought.