ABSTRACT
On 4 May 1515 at the tenth session the Fifth Lateran Council approved the bull Inter sollicitudines that mandated the prepublication censorship of printed books by ecclesiastical officials and assigned spiritual and fiscal penalties on those failing to observe this decree. Although this was the first time that a church council had legislated such procedures, the practice of censorship was common in Western societies from ancient times. The earliest documented effort to exercise censorship over the printing press comes from Renaissance Rome, but it had nothing to do with religion or politics. In the early months of 1470, the humanist bishop and papal bureaucrat Niccolo Perotti wrote to the Roman humanist Francesco Guarneri to propose that pope Paul II impose a system of prepublication censorship in the city to assure that only good editions of classical authors were printed.
