This is a collection of stories of authors who have lost their fortunes and sometimes their lives after writing a book. The liberty of a person's conscience was unknown in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Why should a man be drawn and quartered for writing what we know is the truth? What must it have been like to have lived in that era. At the time it was dangerous to say that the earth went around the sun and many other theories were treated in the same way. (Summary by Michele Eaton)