But I am happy to say that my participation in the roundtable, "Productive Anachronism," at the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo this last Thursday evening inspired me to return to this blog and post the text of my paper. I hope to conjoin this paper with ones posted by fellow participants Rick Godden, Robin Wharton, and Anna Wilson, so that more potentially "productive" conversation can be had in the blogosphere.
Fruits and Flowers for Pedagogical Thieves
As my contribution to the
roundtable, I want to characterize the late medieval pedagogical tradition of
reading, glossing, and rewriting Aesopic fables as a premodern form of intellectual
theft, usually associated with certain types of academic thievery, such as
copying and pasting, full scale textual appropriation, and silent citation,
that have become increasingly visible in this early digital age. On the one hand, acknowledging the poorly
kept secret that so-called innovative or seminal work always comes from
somewhere else threatens to weaken our claims to "credit" for a
particular research finding or publication.
On the other, we have developed rigorous criteria for citing our
sources, such as footnotes and endnotes that simultaneously recognize and
marginalize the material we rely on, all the while retaining our rights to
authorship to this compiled corpus we have assembled.
If
we recognize our scholarship as a remixed object of previous scholastic work,
we are in a position to understand the long history of textual appropriation, which is productively embodied by
the dissemination and production of the most popular version of Aesop's fables
after the twelfth century, the elegiac
Romulus, a series of sixty verse fables that survive in at least 170
manuscripts and fifty printed editions published in five countries by the end
of the fifteenth century.[1] In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
throughout Europe, students and their teachers paraphrased and elaborated upon
this collection through extensive glosses, making them flexible works in
progress, ripe for correction and appropriation, rather than finished products
to be consumed "as is."
I
want to trouble our common claims to original authorship and explore the
affinities that these medieval practices of fable revision share with the
pervasive digital practice of remixing.
Remixing, as a recognized enterprise, has been occurring for decades
behind the closed doors of publishing houses, music studios, and film editing
rooms, but the emergence of read-write platforms such as blogs and wikis render
such media mashups much more visible. Raffaele Simone predicts that such
remixing will lead to the disintegration of textual corpora, in which "the
protective membrane of the texts will decompose and they will once more become
open texts as in the Middle Ages with all the standard concomitant
presuppositions." The digital practices of creating new texts
out of old ones complicate the copyrighted claims to authorship or
"membrane" in ways that anonymous medieval fable writers,
commentators, and glossators would have considered necessary for their own
textual production or classroom pedagogy.
As Kathleen Fitzpatrick
has recently suggested, the characterization of scholarly work as remixing
might shift us "away from a sole focus on the production of unique,
original new arguments and texts to consider instead curation as a valid form
of scholarly activity, in which the work of authorship lies in the imaginative
bringing together of multiple threads of discourse that originate elsewhere."[3] Refashioning the production of knowledge as a
form of "curation" would acknowledge the creative appropriations that
scholars and teachers already tacitly embrace, effectively making transparent
their conversion of old texts into new ones.
The expansion and canonization of
Aesopic fables would have been impossible without the capacity to selectively remix
textual corpora. And in at least one
sense, "mixing" and "appropriation" have always been
central values of fable writing and reading.
Take for example the
opening lines of the prologue to the elegiac
Romulus, which employs horticultural language to express the ways in which
fables are composed and then used by their readers:
Ut iuvet et prosit conatur pagina
presens:
dulcius arrident seria
picta iocis.
Ortulus iste parit fructum cum
flore, favorem
flos et fructus emunt:
hic sapit, ille nitet.
Si fructus plus flore placet,
fructum lege, si flos
plus fructu, florem, si
duo, carpe duo. (1-6)
[This present work ventures
to be pleasurable and useful; serious things are more alluring when they are
embellished with sport. This garden
brings forth fruit with flowers. The flower
and the fruit win favor, the one by its flavor and the other by its
beauty. If the fruit pleases you more
than the flower, steal the fruit; if the flower more than the fruit, steal the
flower; if both, take both].
This fable
writer characterizes this enterprise as one that mixes the serious with the
playful, and more precisely the serious "embellished" by the
playful. The word used here is picta, which would normally refer to
something "painted," implying that the sport inherent in fable telling
serves as a veneer for what lies underneath.
Yet, the fruit (the serious message) is not privileged over the flower
(the aesthetic attributes of the fables).
Instead, the fabulist uses the aggressive verbs lege (steal) and carpe (take)
to explain what readers might do to the fable text, taking either the fruit or
the flower, or both. While we might
expect that readers would select particular aspects of a text to take away, the
writer perceives his material as an open source, in which "both" or
"all" may be taken.
One reader who embraced this fable thievery was the fifteenth-century Scottish
schoolmaster Robert Henryson, who composed one of the earliest and most
influential fable collections in English known as the Morall Fabillis. In his own
version of the Romulan prologue, Henryson offers the following line, translated
almost directly from his source: "And clerkis sayis, it is richt
profitabill / Amangis ernist to ming ane merie sport" (20-1).[4] By claiming that he learned this mantra from
"clerkis," he characterizes the elegiac
Romulus as a collection collaboratively compiled by a number of unnamed
authorities. Perhaps more interestingly, he alters the relationship between
"sport" and "ernist" ["serious things"] slightly,
moving away from the Latin "seria picta iocis," or “sport painted
upon serious matter,” towards a more balanced "mix," the result of
Henryson's "to ming." He
appears to endorse appropriation and remixing as characteristics of fable
writing, but his next use of "ming" a few lines later is accompanied
by a direct citation of a singular authority (26-8). The
naming of Aesop reflects a growing tension between the diversity of Henryson's
source material, the compilers and commentators who contributed to the elegiac Romulus, and the location of
authority in a single author. On the one
hand, it was conventional to cite Aesop as the origin for fables, but on the
other, Henryson had just attributed the sentiment of "serious things mixed
with sport" to anonymous "clerkis." This is a contradiction, but if we read on,
contradiction is not the only problem: Henryson offers three different versions of this line within the space of
ten lines. In the first instance, he
offers a fairly faithful rendering of the aphorism, making just one significant
substitution: rather than translate dulcius
as "sweeter" or "more alluring," he selects “richt
profitabill,” which privileges the moral profit of the fables over their
aesthetic delights. The second version,
however, offers a more qualified perspective than the first: rather than
suggest that any kind of frivolity may be mixed with serious things, he revises
it slightly, saying “With sad materis sum merines to ming.” As if he is dissatisfied with either
translation, his third version is the original Latin line itself. While this kind of translation and citation
might seem repetitive and contradictory, this redundancy reflects the redundant
nature of many fable collections, which offered multiple versions of the same
fable in the same manuscript.[5] Henryson may have been influenced by his
immersion in this pedagogical tradition, but it is also important to note that
his three renderings of the line cleverly mimics the three levels of
appropriation encouraged by the Romulan prologue: stealing one, seizing
another, and then taking the whole thing.
Understood this way, Henryson steals the fruit, seizes the flower, and
then, having decided he wants them both, he takes both, offering his own remix
of the Aesopic mantra.[6]
This anachronistic application of remix culture should
encourage us to reconsider our own perceptions of scholarly originality,
ownership, and even the very nature of critique. On the practical level, we might support the efforts
to taxonomize digital remix culture or develop responsible reforms to copyright
law.[7] Yet, I believe that any resistance to
copyright restrictions must be accompanied by changes in intellectual
dispositions, away from myths of individuality and genius, and toward good
faith collaboration and appropriation. That
is, research would acknowledge its roots in the rich work it draws from, and
then disseminate that research publicly through creative commons licensed work,
open-access journals, wikis, and blogs. This reorientation toward our
work as an assemblage would necessarily lead to revisions in our approach to critique
as a destructive process of unveiling what had previously been obscured. As an
alternative, Bruno Latour offers a disposition he calls
"compositionism": "a
reuse of critique; not an even more critical critique but rather critique
acquired secondhand – so to speak – and put to a different use."[8] Jamie "Skye" Bianco takes Latour's compositionism a step further by asking,
"what might happen if this critical impulse, described as
"reuse" (remix) and "secondhand" (mashup), operated not
through creative destruction but creative construction, or . . . composing
creative critique?"[9] As I hope I have expressed here, I do not
merely believe this "might happen."
The production of the Aesopic corpus during the Middle Ages depended
upon its status as an open resource, in which writers and readers intimately
interacted, actively revising and expanding fable collections, blurring the
boundaries between the text and its critics.
[1] Léopold Hervieux, ed., Les Fabulistes Latins depuis le siècle d'Auguste jusqu'à la fin du
moyen âge (New York: Burt Franklin, 1960), 1:472-684 and 2:602-31; Gerd
Dicke and Klaus Grubmüller, Die Fabeln
des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit: Ein Katalog der deutschen Versionen
und ihrer latenischen Entsprechungen (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1987),
lxvi-lxviii; Edward Wheatley, Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer, and His Followers
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 3.
[2] Raffaele Simone, "The
Body of the Text" in The Future of
the Book, ed. Geoffrey Nunberg (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1996), 239-51, at 249.
[3] Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing,
Technology, and the Future of the Academy (New York: New York University
Press, 2011), 79.
[4] My quotations from the Morall Fabillis are from The Poems of
Robert Henryson, ed. Denton Fox (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1981).
[5] For example, one fourteenth-century Austrian
manuscript, Codex Vindobonensis Palatinus 303, is a veritable cornucopia of Aesopica, containing five different
collections (and one solitary fable).
Even one set, known as the prose Romulus, appears twice. The first time the prose Romulus
fables appear, they appear as prefaces to the elegiac Romulus. Given their appearance later in the
manuscript, it is likely that these prefaces were written by students to
demonstrate their knowledge of the fable tradition, including the variations of
each fable.
[6] If
we move beyond Henryson's prologue, we find that he applies this practice of
remixing to texts beyond the fable tradition.
As Jill Mann has recently argued, Henryson is not content simply to
rewrite Aesopic mainstays. Rather he
merges the fable genre with another animal corpus that centers on the exploits
of one Reynard the fox, the Roman de
Renart. See Jill Mann, From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in
Medieval Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 262-305.
[7] Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the
Hybrid Economy (New York: Penguin, 2005).
[8] Bruno Latour, "An Attempt at a
'Compositionist Manifesto,'" New
Literary History 41.3 (Summer 2010): 471-90, at 474.
[9] Jamie "Skye"
Bianco, "The Digital Humanities Which Is Not One," in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed.
Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 96-112, at
107.
