Open-source authorship? Towards new categories for the theological textual production at the University of Vienna (XVth c.)

Matteo Esu (LabEx Hastec, IRHT-CNRS, Paris)

The literary genre of the so-called ‘Commentaries on the Sentences’ of Peter Lombard constituted
for at least three centuries (XIIIth-XVth) the basis of theology teaching and production, and each
advanced student had to lecture on it (eventually composing his own commentary) to obtain
the title of doctor theologiae. A historiographical tradition has described their evolution in a polar
and one-sided way: after the commentaries on the ‘golden years’ of the Scholasticism (Thomas,
Bonaventure, Scotus), subsequent authors did nothing but produce imitations and copies of the
aforementioned, extrapolating and weaving pieces together, often adding little or nothing
original. For some time now, scholars have gone beyond this narrative, recognizing a specific
evolution in the genre of the Commentary. However, an undeniable textual fact remains: the
diffusion of plagiarism (or copy-and-paste technique) in many texts of the fourteenth and

fifteenth centuries. How to explain and describe this phenomenon of bricolage textuel in non-
anachronistic and judgmental terms ?

The speech focuses on the Vienna faculty of Theology, a field of research yet to be thoroughly
explored ; here, within the so-called Vienna Group Commentary (VGC), the ‘loan’ of entire
textual sections was a current and already documented practice. After having explained this
phenomenon according to some cultural and social causes, I will introduce the two
contemporary concepts of rhyzomatic textuality and open-source authorship to better grasp
and describe such a situation. The hypothesis will be grounded on different case-studies from
the textual tradition of the VGC, its transmission and evolution. In the background, the belief
that new conceptual categories and theorization can help us better understand intellectual
practices that could seem far from our academic traditions.