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The Invention of Printing

Note 75 — IX

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If the book was objectionable, it was burned and the author was imprisoned. According to the Roman law, the condemnation of death attached not only to the author and buyer of a proscribed book, but to him who chanced to find it and did not burn it. In 1328, Pope John XXII condemned two authors who had written a book in eight chapters, full of grievous heresies—for they had undertaken to prove that the Emperor Louis of Bavaria had the right to discipline, install or depose the pope at his own pleasure, and that all the property of the church was held by it through the sufferance of the Emperor. Lacroix, Histoire de l’imprimerie, p. 26.

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