Plagiarism hunting in early modern Europe (1665–1730): Knowledge circulation and its limits

This project elucidates why and how European scholars began to pay a new kind of attention to plagiarism in the seventeenth century. By examining treatises, journals, correspondences, and institutional archives, the study will map changing discourses of plagiarism and originality. The central hypothesis of the project is that plagiarism hunters relied on new infrastructure to detect their targets: evolving media and institutions within the intellectual community put the spotlight on plagiarists who had previously flown under the radar.

The project therefore offers a whole new perspective on the significance of these transformations and highlights the role of learned networks, institutions, and humanistic competences in reshaping notions of intellectual property and academic integrity.

The project will shed new light on scholarly norms that are still essential to the world of research and education. This story, while largely neglected, is consequential for histories of early modern knowledge, which often struggle to make sense of originality. Currently historians navigate two diametrically opposed approaches: an older style of history still embraces the agency of individual genius as an agent of change whereas others entirely discard originality as a historical category.

This study, instead, contributes to staking out a new path by relating changing attitudes towards originality and plagiarism to the emergence of new research infrastructures in the early modern period.