Plagiarism

I've no idea if they're true, but as its exam and dissertation-handing-in season, some may be interested in these observations from Roland Barthes. He comments that the concept of plagarism was virtually unknown and hardly conceived of by the more collective medieval mind and is largely a product of modern, individualistic, monocular society.

Plagiarised from Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics p120 ish.

Of course, the good of medievals were much less concerned about consistency of spelling too: a way for them to express their individuality, perhaps?