John Willinsky describes The Intellectual Properties of Learning as a “history of learning through institutional succession” between the fifth and eighteenth centuries (4). It tells the story of individual scholars (monastics, clerics, schoolmen, philosophers, and scientists) and the institutions that fostered learning. “Learning” here is Western learning transmitted through texts that undergo a “process of correction without end, punctuated by moments of consensus and agreement” (279); for Willinsky, the intellectual production of learned texts establishes intellectual property. Originating in antiquity, “intellectual property” reflects “distinctive practices and norms” (properties): access, accreditation, autonomy, communality, sponsorship, and use (17).

This book contains three sections. The first focuses on Christian writers and institutions seeking to resolve the distance between Athens and Jerusalem. For Saints Augustine and Jerome, this was done by applying Latin philology to Christian texts. Later monastics, including Saint Radegund, the Venerable Bede, Saint Anselm, Hildegard of Bingen, Abelard, and Bernard of Clairvaux, following the Rule of Saint Benedict, found spiritual merit in copying, correcting, glossing, and commenting upon learned texts. In their sponsorship and use of learning, monasteries engaged in the “distinctive practices and norms” that characterize intellectual property. The Carolingian Renaissance strengthened the monasteries and encouraged schools associated with them. In the early medieval universities, the “learned book” as a piece of “intellectual property” acquired a “new standing as something to be possessed as well as mastered” (112).

The second section, “University and Academy,” moves from religious to secular learning, beginning with the Abbasid Caliphate, which amassed libraries, translated ancient Greek texts (especially Aristotle), and encouraged legal, scientific, and medical studies. As this learned tradition grew, scholars translated Arabic, Islamic, Persian, and Jewish texts into Latin. Avicenna and Averroës helped expand this learning across Europe. Willinsky credits the medieval universities’ foundation to this textual transmission: “In Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and elsewhere, the learned were gathering to share, discuss, and teach the relatively sudden profusion of a diverse body of works” (155), creating a demand for learned books. Interest in such learning, however, was not confined to the universities, which in Scholasticism developed a rigorous interpretative strategy. Outside the universities, scholars rejecting Scholasticism turned to their own text-based project of discovering, recopying, translating, and disseminating Latin and Greek learning through an elite educational curriculum (Humanism). The support of wealthy patrons enabled Petrarch to establish a new scholarly approach, which flourished in the century between his death and the establishment of printing. Fortunately for Humanists, including Erasmus, printers like Venice's Aldus Manutius and Basel's Johann Froben fostered learning by inviting scholars into their printing houses to live and work. The burgeoning of secular learning produced academies and learned societies (e.g., Florence's Platonic Academy, London's Royal Academy) whose members dedicated themselves to intellectual pursuits. Early modern Oxford and Cambridge Universities embraced an openness to the New Learning. Thomas Bodley's Oxford library offered “public” access to all learned books, and Archbishop Laud promoted learned university printers over the London Stationers’ ruthless commercialism. Part 3 recounts how learned property finally acquired promotion and protection in English law's 1710 Statute of Anne, “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning,” which Willinsky argues derives authority from John Locke's notion that laboring on a property confers a right in it.

Readers familiar with Willinsky will appreciate the book's effort to establish learned discourse's persistent characteristics (intellectual properties) as a precedent for taking action to foster scholarly excellence, property rights, and access in a digital age. A New York Times op-ed piece noted that in fostering political action, “you can get a lot of facts wrong if your story is right” (David Brooks, 23 July 2018). Willinsky's story is right—some of the facts, however, are not. For example, Willinsky traces Petrarch's interest in everything ancient Roman to his experience walking through Rome while under the Roman Colonna family's patronage. (Petrarch took minor orders, was part of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna's household in Avignon during the “Babylonian captivity,” and lived most of his life in Provence's Vaucluse—though he visited Rome.) Willinsky relied on an 1878 and a 1907 biography in making these observations—so much for respecting a “process of correction without end.” The material on print culture through the Statute of Anne misunderstands many printing-house practices, monopoly and privilege, censorship, and politics (see, for example, Andrew Pettegree's The Book in the Renaissance and Ian Maclean's Scholarship, Commerce, and Religion). For scholarship, even when used for political ends, facts matter.