I bought myself a present. I love the writer/artist Austin Kleon. He has a new book, Steal Like An Artist Journal. I’m flipping through the pages, seeing a little of everything. 

The first image I came across relates to scribes so well. Kleon describes simply the difference between plagiarism and creative repurposing. He calls it good theft and bad theft. And he compares the two. 

This is relevant for scribes because the way we create scrolls may come close to what he calls “Bad Theft”. Bad theft to Kleon is stealing from one source, without any alteration or remixing. Or degrading the original work.

Manesse Codex Inspiration

My work.

I’ve come close to this myself. I love the Manesse Codex. As I’ve posted before, it’s a leading reason why I became an illuminator. I changed the heraldry, used different materials, reversed the image, removed the frame, but its source is obvious. 

Sure the creators are long gone. Many are even unknown to researchers. And Wikimedia says on their file “attribution not legally required.” The original creators won’t know.