Piercing Proverbial Crows’ Eyes: Theft and Publication in Renaissance France
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ironic Latin proverb “cornicum oculos configere” was classically illustrated by the example of Gnaeus Flavius, celebrated for his theft and valuable but unauthorized publication of Rome’s legal secrets. Erasmus’s discussion of the proverb in the Adages consequently focuses on the tension within the transfer of knowledge between openness and secrecy, and on the fragile status of intellectual authority within a scholarly domain made increasingly public by the printing press. This article uses the example of Flavius to trace the idea of theft within Renaissance attitudes to the possession and dissemination of knowledge. It compares the reception of Flavius in three contexts: Erasmus’s ambivalence towards publication as a form of theft in the Adages; ancient criticisms of theft as social presumption; and the more positive representation of epistemological theft in the works of four Renaissance French jurists. It thus argues that Erasmus represents a turning point both in the reception history of Flavius and in attitudes to intellectual theft—and thereby to intellectual property—in the Renaissance.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".