Book burning

The burning of books has a long history of being a tool utilized by authorities both secular and religious, in their efforts to suppress dissenting or heretical views that are believed to pose a threat to the prevailing order.

After the First Council of Nicea (325 CE), Roman emperor Constantine the Great issued an edict against nontrinitarian Arians which included a prescription for systematic book-burning: "In addition, if any writing composed by Arius should be found, it should be handed over to the flames, so that not only will the wickedness of his teaching be obliterated, but nothing will be left even to remind anyone of him.

And I hereby make a public order, that if someone should be discovered to have hidden a writing composed by Arius, and not to have immediately brought it forward and destroyed it by fire, his penalty shall be death.

[11] In 1759 Pope Clement XIII banned all publications written by Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus from the Vatican, and ordered that all copies of his work be burned.

[15] 'The writings of Nestorius were originally very numerous',[16] however, they were not part of the Nestorian or Oriental theological curriculum until the mid-sixth century, unlike those of his teacher Theodore of Mopsuestia, and those of Diodorus of Tarsus, even then they were not key texts, so relatively few survive intact, cf.

[2][21] De Landa wrote on the incident that "We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they (the Maya) regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction".

According to American historian David Cressy, over "the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries book burning developed from a rare to an occasional occurrence, relocated from an outdoor to an indoor procedure, and changed from a bureaucratic to a quasi-theatrical performance".

[24] Following John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, slaveholders and their supporters spread panic about abolitionism, believing that anti-slavery conspiracies would lead to widespread slave revolts.

[25] Anthony Comstock's New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded in 1873, inscribed book burning on its seal, as a worthy goal to be achieved.

[29] In 1588, the exiled English Catholic William Cardinal Allen wrote "An Admonition to the Nobility and People of England", a work sharply attacking Queen Elizabeth I.

To this day, his followers mourn "The Burned Book" and seek in their Rabbi's surviving writings for clues as to what the lost volume contained and why it was destroyed.

[33] The following year, according to the afterword to the historical novel "De gevleugelde," Arthur Japin says that when Dumont returned to Brazil, he "burned all his diaries, letters and drawings.

"[34] After Hector Hugh Munro (better known by the pen name Saki) was killed in World War I in November 1916, his sister Ethel destroyed most of his papers.

[42][43] In Catholic hagiography, Saint Vincent of Saragossa is mentioned as having been offered his life on condition that he consign Scripture to the fire; he refused and was martyred.

The fire was halted in a timely manner - saving countless irreplaceable books, diligently collected by many generations of Habsburg emperors and the scholars in their employ.

This library contained copies of titles that were burned by the Nazis in their campaign to cleanse German culture of Jewish and foreign influences such as pacifist and decadent literature.

A similar case concerns the noted American poet Emily Dickinson, who died in 1886 and left to her sister Lavinia the instruction of burning all her papers.

In 1937, during Getúlio Vargas' dictatorship in Brazil, several books by authors such as Jorge Amado and José Lins do Rego were burned in an anti-communist act.

[3][11] Kjell Ludvik Kvavik, a senior Norwegian official, had a penchant for removing maps and other pages from rare books and he was noticed in January 1983 by a young college student.

Hesitant to make the accusation against Kvavik public because it would greatly harm his career, even if it was proven to be false, the media did not divulge his name until his house was searched by police.

Here, a senior official in the Norwegian government was disgraced and the University Library was only refunded for a small portion of the costs which it had incurred from the loss and destruction of rare materials and the security changes that had to be made as a result of it.

Well-organized and assuring patrons of the library that no harm would come to them, group members systematically smashed microfiche machines and threw books into the nearby waterway.

An article in The New York Times reported that "Booksellers that sell on Amazon say the retailer has no coherent philosophy about what it decides to prohibit, and seems largely guided by public complaints.".

Reported as "just like the ritual burning of books in Nazi Germany", a book-burning ceremony was held by students of the "socially harmful cult" Universal Medicine, an esoteric healing business which was owned by Serge Benhayon.

[81] In 2019, the French-language Providence Catholic School Board in southwestern Ontario held a 'flame purification' ceremony and burned around thirty recently banned children's books.

Shortly after the introduction of the new law, books written by prominent Hong Kong pro-democracy figures, including Joshua Wong and Tanya Chan, have been removed from public libraries.

[86] In February 2021 some religious communities in the United States have started holding book burning ceremonies to garner attention and publicly denounce heretical beliefs.

Two members of a Virginia school board Rabih Abuismail, and Kirk Twigg, have condoned the burning of recently banned books to keep their ideas out of the minds of the public.

[88][89] In September 2023, Missouri State Senator and gubernatorial candidate Bill Eigel showed off a flamethrower at a campaign event and vowed to burn "woke pornographic books [...] on the front lawn of the governor's mansion" if elected.

[93] In the Sikh religion, any copies of their sacred book, Guru Granth Sahib, which are too badly damaged to be used, and any printer's waste which bears any of its text, are cremated.