No bookseller should refuse to lend a book to the student who wished to make a new copy from it, and who offered security and complied with the terms fixed by the university.[1]
Seal of the Masters and Scholars of the University of Paris.[From Lacroix.]
Before any newly written book could be offered for sale, it must be submitted to the rector of the university, who had the power to suppress it,[2] or correct it, and who, if it was approved, fixed its price.
↑The prices allowed to stationers in 1303 for the use of their copies seem pitiably small. A treatise on the Gospel of Matthew, 37 pages, was priced at 1 sol; Gospel of Mark, 20 pages, at 17 deniers; St. Thomas on Metaphysics, 53 pages, at 3 sols; a treatise on Canon Law, 120 pages, at 7 sols; St. Thomas on the Soul, 19 pages, at 13 deniers.
↑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.
