This book opens with two arresting insights. First, John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) might be regarded as the third installment of his Two Treatises of Government (also 1689). In other words, the philosophical question of how our minds acquire knowledge is surprisingly connected to the regime of individual property rights and the apparatus of (limited) government that supports them. If we want to understand how scholarly learning both belongs to an idealized intellectual commonwealth yet must also be treated as a thing to be owned, sold, bought, traded, and shared, we could do worse than to study Locke—or his forebears (pp. x-xi). Second, “works of learning … differ from other types of property, intellectual or otherwise” (p. 8). Academic books, journal articles, and scientific data sets merit a higher level of privilege and protection than trade secrets, “the fine properties of Apple and Disney,” or even the novels of Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison (p. 18). With an eye to today's digital-era concerns, John Willinsky, an education scholar and open-access pioneer, seeks in this work to ground his advocacy of publicly accessible knowledge in a deep historical context.

Willinsky enumerates six characteristics that constitute the “intellectual properties of learning,” to quote the book's foundational pun: (1) access, (2) accreditation, (3) autonomy, (4) communality, (5) sponsorship, and (6) use. While never fully defined, these quasi-Mertonian norms (p. 7n18) ensure that the fruits of knowledge should be widely available, its pursuit adequately funded and supported, its authors and creators properly acknowledged, and its exploration not unduly constrained by nonacademic interference. Copyright is the modern institution that guarantees these principles and balances them against rival interests, but before the British Parliament made it law by in 1710, just after Locke's time, scholars had long been wrestling with these same six concerns.

Willinsky reaches back to the Church Fathers to excavate the prehistory of intellectual property in scholarly learning. His book is organized around a set of canonical figures familiar to any student of late antique through early modern European and Islamic intellectual history, among them Jerome, Augustine, Benedict, Cassiodorus, Isidore, Bede, Alcuin, Anselm, Bernard, Abelard, al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Avicenna (Ibn Sina), Averroës (Ibn Rushd), Aquinas, Petrarch, Erasmus, and Locke himself. He also gives ample weight to the institutions that housed and nurtured scholars, including monasteries, universities (Paris, Oxford, and Bologna), learned academies (the Crusca and Lincei in Italy and the Royal Society in England), and libraries (Oxford's Bodleian). Radegund and Hildegard, two female monastics, are included in an admirable but inconsistent effort to recognize women's contributions, along with their marginalization.

It may seem churlish to ask a book that already covers nearly fourteen hundred years to tack on another seven hundred. But conceptually, it is hard to justify spending so much time on the span from Jerome to Locke while completely omitting classical antiquity. Concerns of authorship and attribution, patronage and support, and the material circumstances of manuscript copying and elite academic leisure powerfully shaped the careers, works, and influence of the Sophists, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and their successors. The later innovations of Latin Christians and of Muslims can hardly be understood without reference to the Greeks and the Romans. So why start with Jerome? Willinsky's answer is not entirely convincing (cf. pp. 21-31).

A more serious conceptual problem is Willinsky's failure to deploy his six principles historically. Each chapter consists essentially of a series of biographical vignettes and potted summaries of renowned intellectuals in whose careers he finds one or more of his six principles validated. To be sure, all these stories are wonderfully retold, full of evocative details, factually accurate, and grounded in assiduous research in both (translated) primary and secondary sources. But the narrative is not analytically organized to show how the transformations illustrating Willinsky's six principles occurred, and why. Thus, at the argument's culmination, he simply redescribes Locke's theory of property as a series of seven (not six) principles and briefly catalogs instances where previously discussed scholars anticipated each one (pp. 282-90). This is anachronistic and arguably teleological. A similar criticism applies to changes in the institutional support for learning, in which monasteries, universities, academies, and libraries are judged by their contributions to an ideal regime of learning realized in fits and starts as we move toward the present (see, e.g., pp. 111, 180, 229, 239-40, 268, 289-90).

On a number of occasions, we do glimpse Willinsky's six principles arising directly from the evidence instead of being awkwardly fitted around it. A true smoking-gun moment arrives when Erasmus asks, “Why should I not myself claim a proprietary right in the works of Jerome?,” given the immense work of editing and commenting upon what until then had been “abandoned,” “ownerless” works (p. 202). The argument is indeed most successful when it analyzes specific scholarly practices, like Erasmus's editing, that reflect evolving conceptions of property. Others include the monastic gloss (as a kind of academic commons, pp. 67-72), the medieval university's pecia system (regulating the copying and sale of manuscripts for teacher and student use, p. 178), and pre-1710 book licensing (pp. 297ff.). But missed opportunities abound. For example, we learn much about the two great medieval translation movements, from Greek to Arabic and from Arabic to Latin, but too little about the reasons that the practice of translation might have been seen as appropriation, or expropriation, or original scholarship, or something else entirely. A better method, then, might have been to hone the focus and deepen the analysis of specific moments when a major thinker implicitly or explicitly reformed the relationship between scholarship and property, extending this approach from Erasmus and Locke to the entire pantheon of figures found in this book. (A superb model is Daniel Hobbins's study of Jean Gerson, Authorship and Publicity Before Print [2009].)

Most off-putting is a consistent recourse to presentist value judgments, not as incidental lapses, but as telling indicators of Willinsky's faith in transhistorical norms of an intellectual commonwealth. As he passes through history, he congratulates scholars who successfully anticipated the twenty-first-century open-access paradigm he supports and gently castigates those who fell short on account of misogyny, ethnocentrism, or racism. While Charlemagne honored “the individual's right to education” (p. 283), medieval universities were marred by “unreasonable exclusion of women” (p. 111), and Locke showed “gross insensitivity to the actual horrors of the Atlantic slave trade … another warning of learning's limits and shortsightedness in realizing its own ideals” (p. 276; cf. 149, 278, 317 for more). It would have been better to grapple forthrightly with the ways learned intellectual property remains captive to inequalities of power and is shaped by them along multiple dimensions.

We very much need a work that does for the pre-1710 period what Peter Baldwin's The Copyright Wars (2016) does for the time after 1710, or Adrian Johns's The Nature of the Book (1998) for Locke's era, or the same author's Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (2010) for the entire epoch of print. Willinsky's book does address that need, but could have been executed with more conceptual rigor and historical understanding.