What I have tried to demonstrate is that the Middle 
     Ages for various reasons and from various causes did not 
     possess the concept of ‘authorship’ in exactly the same 
     significance as we have it now. Much of the prestige and 
     glamor with which we moderns invest the term, and which 
     makes us look upon an author who has succeeded in 
     getting a book published as having progressed a stage 
     nearer to becoming a great man, must be a recent 
     accretion. The indifference of medieval scholars to the 
     precise identity of the authors whose books they studied 
     is undeniable. The writers themselves, on the other hand, 
     did not always trouble to ‘quote’ what they took from 
     other books or to indicate where they took it from; they 
     were diffident about signing even what was clearly their 
     own in an unambiguous and unmistakable manner. 
     The invention of printing did away with many of the