Burning the Arian books after Nicaea

A very nice image has appeared on Wikipedia here, albeit with a daft title.


Bookburning
Bookburning

“Drawing on vellum. From MS CLXV, Biblioteca Capitolare, Vercelli, a compendium of canon law produced in Northern Italy ca. 825.” Click on the image to get the full size image.

Of course the people doing the burning at the bottom are all tonsured, and I suppose represent the church, not the state.

While we’re on the subject of freedom of speech, I enjoyed the note at the bottom:

The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that “faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain, and that claims to the contrary represent an assault on the very concept of a public domain”.

Well said.  Attempts by libraries to extort money through blocking circulation of images like these are scandalous.

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