The role of theoretical debate in the evolution of national and international patent protection: from the French Revolution to the Paris Convention of 1883

Abstract

freedom and intimacy (74–76). Walter SMelion describes a case inwhich zones of bodily privacy and domestic privacy correspond in his essay on the c 1600’s manuscript, ‘Vita S Joseph beatissimae Virginis sponsi’, which features images of the heart of Joseph and of the child Christ’s instruction in his parents’ home and workshop. The spiritual privacy of Joseph’s heart is, however, not a zone of hidden authenticity but a work in progress, crafted and improved by Christ, just as his parents’ home is also a semi-public workshop (334–35). The volume’s commitment to a comparative approach is fulfilled through its range of disciplinary approaches, but not through a global study of early modern privacy. The one essay that addresses the world beyond Europe helps to indicate how richly productive such a wider scope might be. Hang Lin’s study of published examination essays in seventeenth-century China articulates ‘private’ and ‘public’ in terms of the state’s monopoly on providing authoritative sample civil-service exam essays. This assertion of control over knowledge by the state was challenged, and eventually defeated, by private scholars, many of whom had failed these examinations. The increasing popularity of books of sample essays written by such private scholars sapped the state’s control of Confucian orthodoxy. This example, Lin argues, shows the transformation of ‘private’ into ‘public’ knowledge as private interests came to define public opinion more successfully than the state. This volume’s case studies of early modern privacy deserve attention from researchers interested in tracing the roots of the modern concept of privacy: in particular, from researchers interested in the European traditions that influenced the landmark 1890 formulation of privacy by Louis D Brandeis and Samuel D Warren in the Harvard Law Review (1). This volume is a valuable contribution to interdisciplinary work in the history of ideas and social history that should profoundly shape future studies of privacy.