Book burning
Book burning is the deliberate destruction by fire of books or other written materials, usually carried out in a public context. The burning of books represents an element of censorship and usually proceeds from a cultural, religious, or political opposition to the materials in question. Book burning can be an act of contempt for the book's contents or author, intended to draw wider public attention to this opposition, or conceal the information contained in the text from being made public, such as diaries or ledgers. Burning and other methods of destruction are together known as biblioclasm or libricide.
In some cases, the destroyed works are irreplaceable and their burning constitutes a severe loss to cultural heritage. Examples include the burning of books and burying of scholars under China's Qin dynasty, the destruction of the House of Wisdom during the Mongol siege of Baghdad, the destruction of Aztec codices by Itzcoatl, the burning of Maya codices on the order of bishop Diego de Landa, and the burning of Jaffna Public Library in Sri Lanka.
In other cases, such as the Nazi book burnings, copies of the destroyed books survive, but the instance of book burning becomes emblematic of a harsh and oppressive regime which is seeking to censor or silence some aspect of prevailing culture.
In modern times, other forms of media, such as phonograph records, video tapes, and CDs have also been burned, shredded, or crushed. Art destruction is related to book burning, both because it might have similar cultural, religious, or political connotations, and because in various historical cases, books and artworks were destroyed at the same time.
When the burning is widespread and systematic, destruction of books and media can become a significant component of cultural genocide.
Historical background
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.Books infested with bookworms were sometimes burned in the Medieval era as a rudimentary form of pest control, rather than targeted censorship.
Hebrew Bible (7th century BCE)
According to the Hebrew Bible, in the 7th century BCE, King Jehoiakim of Judah burned part of a scroll that Baruch ben Neriah had written at prophet Jeremiah's dictation.Burning of books and burying of scholars in China (213–210 BCE)
The burning of books as a means of government control goes back to Shang Yang, who had exhorted Duke Xiao of Qin in the fourth century BCE to burn books. In 213 BCE Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of the Qin dynasty, ordered the burning of books and burying of scholars and in 210 BCE he supposedly ordered the premature burial of 460 Confucian scholars in order to stay on his throne. Though the burning of books is well established, the live burial of scholars has been disputed by modern historians who doubt the details of the story, which first appeared more than a century later in the Han dynasty official Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian. The event caused the loss of many philosophical treatises of the Hundred Schools of Thought, with only treatises on agriculture and medicine as well as a collection of divinations allowed to survive. Treatises which advocated the official philosophy of the government survived.Christian book burnings (80–1759 CE)
In the New Testament's Acts of the Apostles, it is claimed that Paul performed an exorcism in Ephesus. After men in Ephesus failed to perform the same feat many gave up their "curious arts" and burned the books because apparently, they did not work.
And many that believed, came and confessed and shewed their deeds. Many of them also which used curious arts, brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver.
After the First Council of Nicea, 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. As soon as he is discovered in this offense, he shall be submitted for capital punishment....."
Nevertheless, Constantine's edict on Arian works was not rigorously observed, as Arian writings or the theology based on them survived to be burned much later in Spain. According to the Chronicle of Fredegar, Recared, King of the Visigoths and first Catholic king of Spain, following his conversion to Catholicism in 587, ordered that all Arian books should be collected and burned; and all the books of Arian theology were reduced to ashes, along with the house in which they had been purposely collected.
According to Elaine Pagels, "In AD 367, Athanasius, the zealous bishop of Alexandria... issued an Easter letter in which he demanded that Egyptian monks destroy all such unacceptable writings, except for those he specifically listed as 'acceptable' even 'canonical'—a list that constitutes the present 'New Testament'". for 367 CE, which prescribes a canon, but her citation "cleanse the church from every defilement"
Heretical texts do not turn up as palimpsests, scraped clean and overwritten, as do many texts of Classical antiquity. According to author Rebecca Knuth, multitudes of early Christian texts have been as thoroughly "destroyed" as if they had been publicly burnt.
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.
Burning of Nestorian books (435 CE)
Activity by Cyril of Alexandria brought fire to almost all the writings of Nestorius shortly after 435. 'The writings of Nestorius were originally very numerous', 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.Muslim book burnings (650 CE - 15th century CE)
, the third Caliph of Islam after Muhammad, who is credited with overseeing the collection of the verses of the Qur'an, ordered after that in the destruction of any other remaining text containing verses of the Qur'an in order to ensure that his version become the only source for others to follow. During the Muslim conquests of the Middle East, many libraries, such as that of Caesarea Maritima, were burned, and during the conquest of Khwarazm books were destroyed in order to weaken the identity and resistance of the local population. Books of other religions were also explicitly burned. In 923, Manichean books were burned at the public gate of Baghdad together with a portrait of Mani. Similarly, Sikandar Shah Miri, sultan of Kashmir, forced Hindu conversions and burned books in the fifteenth century.Often books were burned for belonging to another Muslim denominations. During the Abbasid invasion of Oman in 892, the army of Muhammad ibn Nur burnt books of the Ibadis, which probably also contributed to the paucity of sources on early south-east Arabia's history. The Sunni Ghaznavid ruler Mahmud burned after his sack of Rayy a great part of the city's library books as he considered the books, many of them Shiite, heretical. A similar thing happened during the Seljuks takeover of Buyid Baghdad in 1059 when the famous dar al-'ilm was burned.
Books were also burned in Muslim Spain between the tenth and twelfth century under the Ummayyad, Amirid, Abbadid, Almoravid and Almohad dynasties, often of writers that were deemed heretical or a challenge to the rulers. During the rule of caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub the possession of books on logic or philosophy was forbidden and many books, including those by the famous Ibn Rushd, burned.
French burning of Jewish manuscripts (1244 CE)
In 1244, as an outcome of the Disputation of Paris, twenty-four carriage loads of Talmuds and other Jewish religious manuscripts were set on fire by French law officers in the streets of Paris.Spanish burning of Aztec and Mayan manuscripts (1560s CE)
During the Spanish colonization of the Americas, numerous books written by indigenous peoples were burned by the Spaniards. Several books written by the Aztecs were burnt by Spanish conquistadors and priests during the Spanish conquest of Yucatán. Despite opposition from Catholic friar Bartolomé de las Casas, numerous books found by the Spanish in Yucatán were burnt on the order of Bishop Diego de Landa in 1562. 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 regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction".Book burnings in Tudor and Stuart England (16th century CE)
The founding of the Church of England after King Henry VIII broke away from the Catholic Church led to the targeting of English Catholics by Protestants. The dissolution of the monasteries led to the destruction of many libraries and Edward VI, Henry's son, encouraged his subjects to destroy all books that were associated with "old learning". Throughout the Tudor and Stuart periods, Protestant citizens loyal to the Crown attacked Catholic religious sites across England, frequently burning any religious texts they found. These acts were encouraged by the Crown, who pressured the general public to take part in such "spectacles". 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".With the Bishops' Ban of 1599 the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London ordered an end to the production of verse satire and the confiscation and the burning of specific extant works, including works by John Marston and Thomas Middleton. Nine books were specifically singled out for destruction. Scholars disagree about what properties these nine books have in common to cause official offence.