Originality and authority

 Nowadays we value originality, the individual's novel thinking or being inspired with a new thought or image.

I make that statement less confidently than I would have done, even 5 years ago, because of the ubiquitous use of AI, which ensures that so much on the internet looks and reads the same. No sooner does a person ask to check a fact than AI offers to write a text or provide an image. I always tell it - quite bluntly - that I will use my own brain, photographs and images but many people accept. The result is a bland similarity that masks any unique personality, voice or idea. Rant over!

If we look at the Preamble to the Wife of Bath's Tale in Chaucer's  The Canterbury Tales, (not her portrait in the General Prologue), we see that she starts by distinguishing between experience and authority. By this she means that she has learned from the school of life rather than from recognised and revered texts. She continues - at length - to defend this position, interpreting classical and biblical references to her own end, the defence of her many marriages. Although she has denied the importance of authorities, she shows her own familiarity with them - but her gloss on them is undeniably humorous.. Had women written the texts, she claims, there would have been emphasis on the evil of men. Comic she may be - but she is right!

It was when her fifth husband, Jankin, (with whom she fell truly in love at her previous husband's funeral because of his shapely legs and feet) read to her from his book of wicked wives that she became incensed. The work was full of classical references to misbehaving women which enraged her. 

What this goes to show is that, until comparatively recently in historical terms, knowledge of the classics and the Bible was held in higher esteem than creative talent. Shakespeare borrowed many of his plots and this was not considered to be plagiarism. 

Perhaps it was Romanticism that altered that sense of priority, with its emphasis on the individual and inspiration, like an Aeolian harp, gifting a writer with ideas. Originality became important - let us not squander it by laziness and copying from AI.