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By Root 2197 0

patrons in the church and at court, and later to a more dispersed and shadowy "public." Printed books became tools with which the enterprising could, if they were lucky and resourceful, lever themselves into positions of prestige. The mathematician Galileo Galilei achieved remarkable success in a series of such moves. John Dee tried less successfully to do the same in Elizabethan London. Paracelsianism itself was a veritable phenomenon of the international book trade, being made up of dozens of tracts, some genuine, many spurious. In artists' and sculptors' studios, in the marketplaces of cities where traveling empirics touted their medical remedies, in the workshops of instrument makers, and above all in the bookshops and printing houses of Venice, Paris, and Amsterdam, artisans and others increasingly laid claim to authority through the means of printed authorship. Their claims came before new audiences, too: audiences that were essentially unknowable, but that stretched far beyond court, church, and university At a time of Reformation, when religious war loomed across the continent, addressing this confusion was a matter of millennial importance. With the nature, authorship, reception, and use of knowledge all in doubt, the vital need for newways to articulate the creation and appropriation of ideas - and to distinguish the authentic from the spurious-was evident to all.

LAW, POLITICS, AND PRINT

When and where exactly did people begin to refer to intellectual purloining as piracy? The answer is clearer than one might suppose. It is easy to establish that the usage emerged in English before it did in other European languages. It is more difficult to establish the exact moment the term was coined, but it seems clear that it occurred some time in the mid-seventeenth century. In around 16oo piracy seems not to have carried this meaning at all, except on a few isolated occasions as a metaphor. It appears nowhere in Shakespeare, Ben Jenson, Spenser, Marlowe, or Dekker-or, for that matter, in Francis Bacon, Hobbes, or Milton. This was the first age to see the sustained production ofprinted dictionaries of English, but the connotation was not mentioned in any of them, whether by Cawdrey (1604), Bullokar (1616), Cockeram (1623), Blount (1656), or Coles (1676). John Donne did once refer to poetic and antiquarian plagiarists as "wit-pyrats" in 1611, and in the early Restoration Samuel Butler likewise called a plagiarist a "wit-caper," a caper being a Dutch privateer.8 But although these hinted at the later usage, they seem to have been oneoff instances. Besides, they addressed not commercial practice, but personal plagiary- a term that itself started to be widely used only around 16oo.9

At the other end of the century, however, piracy suddenly appears everywhere. It is prominent in the writings of Defoe, Swift, Addison, Gay, Congreve, Ward, and Pope, and pirate suddenly starts to be defined in dictionaries as "one who unjustly prints another person's copy"10 Very soon after that, it can be seen invoked in learned or medical contentions. In a briefly scandalous case of the 1730s, for example, a physician named Peter Kennedy made the provenance of the term clear when he accused a rival of an attempt to plagiarize his discoveries - or rather, Kennedywrote, "to downrightpyrate him (as Booksellers call it)."' 1 It was a concept that had started as a term of art in the seventeenth-century London book trade, apparently, and was now being appropriated for contests of authorship in other domains. Overall, the evidence for this is unambiguous. And in fact a closer examination indicates that the innovation can be more precisely dated to around 166o-8o. At any rate, Donne's seems to be virtually the only example predating the middle of the century, while on the other hand citations start to multiply rapidly in the Restoration. And dictionaries of other European languages published in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries then show the term spreading-first to France, then to Italy, and at length to Germany too. Piracy is therefore