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Abstract
Medieval, pre-print authorship differs significantly from modern authorship in that it is often anonymous, derivative, collaborative or 'conspiratorial.' While the invention of the printing press completely revolutionized book production and led to an unprecedented diversification, availability, and affordability of printed material, it also profoundly changed authorship models and introduced new material and legal constraints. With publishers acting as gatekeepers, and with copyright laws limiting imitative and derivative authorship, informal authorship became difficult and derivative authorship dangerous from a legal point of view. However, the introduction of digital mediums eliminated some of these constraints, allowing medieval authorship models to re-emerge in a number of genres which were initially considered 'fringe,' but which have been gradually joining the mainstream over the course of the last decade: fantasy fiction, videogames, and fanfiction. This paper analyzes two cases (the continuation of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time fantasy series by author Brian Sanderson, and the expansion of the World of Warcraft universe from the initial MMORPG to a complex network of canonical and non-canonical works, including fiction, visual art, animation, and cinema), and argues that medieval authorship practices are present in both. Our conclusion is that due to the popularity and profitability of fantasy franchises and to the flexibility of digital mediums, such authorship practices are gradually spreading upwards and inwards into mainstream publishing and are likely to become increasingly common in decades to come.
Keywords: medieval, authorship, fantasy, video games, fanfiction
While the invention of printing liberated the book from the constraints of scarcity and laborious production, and allowed unprecedented diversification and dissemination, it also brought about material and legal concerns, such as the necessity of a fixed form, authors' rights and royalties, and copyright laws. The impact of these concerns on the act of writing and on the formulation of authorship models cannot be overstated. With publishers acting as gatekeepers, informal authorship became difficult, the dissemination of material produced by non-professional authors almost impossible, and derivative authorship dangerous from a legal point of view.
It is not surprising, therefore, that once some of these constraints were removed by new digital mediums, older and almost forgotten authorship models (anonymous, imitative, interpretative, corrective, collaborative, 'conspiratorial') started to re-emerge. This happened despite the fact that many of their...