Abstract

The paper reconstructs the tension between the then emerging approach of emphasising authorial innovation and the traditional learned practice of adapting and reusing existing texts, which was cultivated in the early modern ars excerpendi. In 1717, a case of plagiarism occurred in the midst of a new historiographical genre (Reichshistorie) and attracted much attention. Complementing existing scholarship on early modern theories of plagiarism, the examination focuses on how learned communicative practice treated plagiarism. Contrary to the norm established in the discourse on plagiarism, the plagiariser and his work were not excluded from the respublica literaria. Instead, the case became part of academic memory, and was itself frequently reported in a plagiaristic manner. In closing, a comparative glance at the juridically‐based treatment of a current case of plagiarism (a politician's dissertation of 2009) is taken. The paper argues that the contradiction between the theoretical norm and the actual eighteenth‐century management of plagiarism resulted from the familiarity of unmarked „copying“ in pre‐modern scholarly practice. The paper shows that early modern learned culture, although characterised by Steven Shapin as a „moral economy,“ neither felt compelled to impose its crucial ethical norm in a case of open non‐conformance, nor did it consistently observe this norm for routine processes.