§ 92. THE PRINTING-PRESS AND THE REFORMATION. 5638
teenth century, for selfish purposes.! Cash payments to authors were, down to the eighteenth century, rare and very low. Few could make a decent living from writing books; and, we may add, few publishers acquired wealth from their trade, which is very uncertain, and subject to great losses. “ Habent sua fata libelli.”
But, while the progressive Reformation gave wings to the printing-press, the conservative re-action matured gradually a system of restriction, which, under the name of censorship and under the direction of book-censors, assumed the control of the publishing business with authority to prevent or suppress the publication and sale of books, pamphlets, and newspapers hostile to the prevailing religious, moral, or political sentiments.2. The Peasants’ War, which was kindled by inflammatory books, and threatened a general overthrow of social order, strengthened the re-actionary tendencies of Protestant, as well as Roman Catholic, governments.
The burning of obnoxious books by public authority of church or state is indeed as old as the book-trade. A work of Protagoras, in which he doubted the existence of the Greek gods, was burned at the stake in Athens about twenty years after the death of Pericles. The Emperor Augustus subjected slanderous publications (libelli famosi) to legal prosecution and destruction by fire. Christian emperors employed their authority against heathen, heretical, and infidel books. Constantine the Great, backed by the Council of Nicea, issued an edict against the writings of Porphyry and Arius; Accadius, against the books of the Eunomians (398) ; Theodosius, against the books of the Nestorians (435). Justinian commanded the destruction of sundry obnoxious
1 Kapp (I. 318) mentions that the electors of Saxony from 1571-1670 received no less than a hundred and ninety-two ‘‘ most humble”’ (alleruntherthdnigste) dedications from various authors, and that the magistrate of Ziirich received thirty-eight from 1670-1685.
2 On the history of the book censorship (Biichercensur) and press perse cutions, compare the ninth and tenth chapters of Kapp, I. 522 sqq.
564 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 To 1580.
works, and forbade their re-issue on pain of losing the right arm (586). The ecumenical synod of 680 at Constantinople burned the books which it had condemned, including the letters of the Monothelitic Pope Honorius.
Papal Rome inherited this practice, and improved upon it. Leo I. caused a large number of Manichzan books to be burnt (446). The popes claimed the right and duty to superintend the religious and moral literature of Christendom. They transferred the right in the thirteenth century to the universities, but they found little to do until the art of printing facilitated the publication of books. The Council of Constance condemned the books of Wiclif and Hus, and ordered the bishops to burn all the copies they could seize (1415). 3 |
The invention of the printing-press (c. 1450) called forth sharper measures in the very city where the inventor, John Gutenberg, lived and died (1400-1467). It gave rise also to the preventive policy of book-censorship which still exists in some despotic countries of Europe. Berthold, Archbishop of Mainz, took the lead in the restriction of the press. He prohibited, Jan. 10, 1486, the sale of all unauthorized German translations of Greek and Latin works, on the plea of the inefficiency of the German language, but with a hostile aim at the German Bible. In the same year Pope Innocent VIII. issued a bull against the printers of bad books. The infamous Pope Alexander VI. prohibited in 1498, on pain of excommunication, the printing and reading of heretical books; and in a bull of June 1, 1501, which was aimed chiefly against Germany, he subjected all kinds of literary publications to episcopal supervision and censorship, and required the four archbishops of Céln, Mainz, Trier, and Magdeburg, or their officials, carefully to examine all manuscripts before giving permission to print them. He also ordered that books already printed should be examined, and burnt if they contained any thing contrary to the Catholic