[656] Alph. de Castro de justa Hæret. Punitione Lib. I. c. viii. Dub. 4.—Carenæ Tract. de Modo procedendi Tit. XVII. § 9.
Yet in Spain the intense popular devotion to the Virgin rendered the Inquisition very sensitive in its reverence for her. In 1642 an inquisitor, Diego de Narbona, in his Annales Tractatus Juris alluded to an assertion of Clement of Alexandria (Stromata, Lib. VII.) that some persons believed that after the Nativity the Virgin was inspected by the midwife to prove her virginity. Although he condemned the statement as most indecent and dishonoring to the Virgin, his work was denounced to the Inquisition of Granada, which referred it to the Inquisitor-general. Narbona in vain endeavored to defend himself. It was shown that in the Index Expurgatorius of 1640 the passage of Clement, as well as those in all other authors alluding to it, had been ordered to be borrado, or expunged, so that the very memory of so scandalous a tale might be lost. Narbona alleged in his defence a passage in Padre Basilio Ponce de Leon, but the Inquisition showed that this had likewise been borrado, and, as every one who possessed a copy of a book containing a prohibited passage was bound to blot it out and render it illegible, he was culpable in not having done so.—MSS. Bibl. Bodleian. Arch S. 130.
[657] Reusch, Der Index der verbotenen Bücher, II. 843, 986.—Addis and Arnold’s Catholic Dictionary s. v. Immaculate.
[658] Reusch, op. cit. II. 989.
[659] Mosheim de Beghardis, pp. 368, 378.—Eymeric. pp. 311-16.
[660] Albertini Repertor. Inquis. s. vv. Libri, Scriptura.—Raynald. ann. 1501, No. 36.
[661] Concil. Lateran. V. Sess. IX. (Harduin. IX. 1779-81).
These rules were probably enforced only where there was an Inquisition in working order. In the edition of Nifo’s work, De Cœlo et Mundo, printed at Naples in 1517, there is an imprimatur by Antonio Caietano, prior of the Dominican convent, reciting the conciliar decree, and stating that in the absence of the inquisitor he had been deputed by the Vicar of Naples to examine the work, in which he found no evil.
In the Venice editions of Joachim of Flora, printed in 1516 and 1517, there is not only the permission of the inquisitor and of the Patriarch of Venice, but also that of the Council of Ten, showing that the press was subjected to no little impediment.
In the contemporaneous Lyons edition of Alvaro Pelayo’s De Planctu Ecclesiœ (1517), however, there is no imprimatur, and evidently there was no censorship, and the same is the case in such German books of the period as I have had an opportunity of examining.