The Scourge of Plagiary: Perversions of Imitation in the English Renaissance

Abstract

When satirists first used the Latin legal term plagiary (literally “kidnapper”) as a metaphor for literary misappropriation in English at the turn of the seventeenth century, their mistaken belief that it derived from the word for whip (plaga) fit well with their humanist education: students were beaten for their failures to imitate successfully in the same way that kidnappers had presumably been punished in ancient Rome; they were whipped. This folk etymology helps explain why the earliest recorded accusations of plagiarism in English take place in satires associated with the scourge; it also illustrates how definitions and accusations of plagiarism were themselves often plagiarized. England’s satirists publicly whipped each other for their own private failures of imitation as they had learned to do in the early modern grammar school in ways that resonate with how plagiarism is identified and punished today.