Knowledge and Hermeneutic Plagiarism during the Renaissance (1250–1650)

Knowledge and Hermeneutic Plagiarism recounts the Renaissance from an unexpected angle: not as a cradle of originality, but as a laboratory of hermeneutical appropriation. From Pliny's imperial encyclopedism and Toledo's translations to the reinventions of Ficino, Vico, and Paracelsus, the book shows how copying, translating, and silencing were constitutive techniques of making knowledge. Rather than moralizing "plagiarism," the work reveals its structuring function: memory as selection, the canon as construction, and authority as the editing of the past. By tracing the transition from Italian patronage to the English moralization of usage and French standardization, an archaeology of modernity emerges in which to preserve is to define, and to innovate is to recombine. The result is a perceptive and provocative intellectual history that transforms our understanding of authorship and legacy—and explains why so many "origins" are, in fact, works of editing.

This work is not only a contribution to intellectual history—it is an invitation to rethink the moral, cultural, and philosophical boundaries of authorship. Key audiences include historians of philosophy and Renaissance studies, scholars of intellectual history, hermeneutics, and philology, and researchers in the history of science and technology.