property as long as ideas had been written down" (North 1380; emphasis added). Writing

in the thirteenth century, for instance, St. Bonaventura suggested that a book may be

produced by a scribe, compiler, or commentator, all of whom would have worked

collaboratively (Woodmansee 17). Until the Renaissance-the word author first appears

as a variant of auctor circa 1550-authorship was limited to transcribing ideas that were

handed down by tradition. "From the Middle Ages right down through the Renaissance,"

Martha Woodmansee argues, "new writing derived its value and authority from its

affiliation with the texts that preceded it, its derivation rather than its deviation from prior

texts" (17).6 But this attitude began to change in the early modern period. Imitation was

no longer regarded as a servile reproduction of ancient texts and ideas. Instead, it was

infused with the spark of originality, such that authorship became an act of imitation that,

drawing on Petrarch's definition of imitation as "the resemblance of a son to his father,"

Jacqueline Miller calls the addition of a "mysterious something" to the original (121).

However, while the "author" may have been born circa 1550, he did not fully come to life

until later.

 For even after authorship wrested itself from the pull of antiquity, it continued to be

a collaborative activity. As Woodmansee notes, even Dr. Samuel Johnson's Lives of the

Poets, which helped create the notion of individual authorship, was itself a collective and

collaborative composition "between Johnson, the poets he immortalized, the London

booksellers-and countless others" (18).7 Yet, Johnson's text went a long way in

"establishing a pantheon of great authors whose 'works' differed] qualitatively from the

sea of mere writing" (Woodmansee 18)-a gesture very similar to early auteurism

practiced at Cahiers du Cinema-and helped foster the myth of the solitary genius. What