Abstract
Horace observed that “a word once uttered can never be recalled.”¹ In 1552 the jurist Diego de Simancas—a member of the General Council of the Spanish Inquisition, bishop of Ciudad Rodrigo, hater and prosecutor of the archbishop of Toledo, Bartolomé Carranza—stole this line from Horace and concluded that “books of heretics must be sent to the fire … because they can endure for centuries and infect those that come after their publication. And while the voices of heretics can only fill a city, books can pass from region to region, from kingdom to kingdom.”² Simancas expressed a centuries-old