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credulous. When challenged, he can uphold his faith. The point is that he does so by appealing to exactly the mechanisms that in the Europe of 16oo were supposed to guarantee a certain veracity in printed books. When told that romances are "false, untrue, harmful, and of no value to the nation," and that they should certainly not be imitated in one's life, Quixote thus has a ready answer. "Books that are printed with a royal license and with the approval of those officials to whom they are submitted, and read to widespread delight, and celebrated by great and small, poor and rich, educated and ignorant, lowborn and gentry, in short, by all persons of every rank and station; can they possibly be a lie"?" Licenser and public, elite and people, all concurred. What greater authority could there be?

Don Quixote appeals here to a mechanism that was widely adopted to bring the craft of print into harmony with political order: the license. A license was a statement of approval issued by a state or ecclesiastical officer, and in most countries one was required before any book could be published. In practice the rule was often ignored, and the very fact that Cervantes puts these words in Quixote's mouth demonstrates the difficulty that any licensing system faced if it really meant to impress readers. How effective it was, either in suppressing dangerous or false books or bolstering orthodox ones, is doubtful. But the mechanism operated in close conjunction with two other devices that were to prove critically important for our story: patents and registers. Patents were open letters from a ruler that had been used in the Middle Ages for many different purposes. Within a generation or two of the invention of the press they were being sought to protect titles from unauthorized reprinting; the first is thought to be that issued in Venice in 1486 to Marcus Sabellicus for his history of the city. 12 In every respect, this kind of "privilege" was equivalent to one granted for a mechanical invention, for a newly imported craft, or for a monopoly in a trade. It would continue to be applied to books for centuries. A register, meanwhile, was a book in which printers and booksellers of a particular city entered the titles of works they intended to publish. Its purpose was to maintain communal order, and at the same time to uphold the reputation of the craft community. Contests over particular editions could be resolved by booksellers and printers by reference to these registers, leaving the impression that the trade was inherently orderly. In some cities, entries in registers became secure enough to act as de facto properties, enduring for generations.

All later literary property regimes can be traced back to these two mechanisms. In tandem with licensing, they acted to shape the identity of print and the nature of the book in early modern European commonwealths. But at a fundamental level they were hard to reconcile: one appealed for its authority to the prerogatives of a state, the other to the autonomy of a craft. One aimed at securing interests within the commonwealth, the other at securing interests within the trade. Implicit in the tensions between them was therefore a major unresolved problem of political authority. That problem plagued sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury regimes as the first recognizably modern states came into being. It set craft and economic interest against monarchy and conventional morality In the realm of print, when the clash happened, the invention of piracy would be the result.

PIRATE PRINCIPLES

Piracy and literary property both originated as phenomena of the press. And both would remain deeply entwined with the fortunes of print until new media began to proliferate around i9oo. We cannot even ask the right questions of our own culture, let alone answer them, without grasping how they took shape in that earlier age. In particular, the history of piracy is a matter of not just precepts but practices-artisanal crafts, policing strategies, ways of reading, and the like. As we trace these practices through the generations,