Dove non arriva la legge. Dottrine della censura nella prima età moderna (review)

The book analyzes the ideas about censorship expressed by Jean Bodin, Pierre Grégoire, Justus Lipsius, Johannes Althusius, and Johann Angelius Werdenhagen. The views of these authors on a subject crucial to late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe were not influenced by the actual organization of the papal control system on culture and book circulation, but relied mostly on a reappraisal of ancient Roman censorship. The moral and political censorship implemented by the Roman republic was generally described, in the texts here examined, as a powerful means to enforce social discipline and to prevent conflicts and dissent fatal to the state.

Bianchin outlines first the historiographical background of her research, discussing some recent contributions concerning the processes of confessionalization and social-disciplining in both Catholic and Protestant areas, between the Peace of Augsburg and the Thirty Years' War. She then compares the Catholic censorship system—intended to prevent printing and reading of books dangerous to the faithful—and the Protestant one, instrumental in enforcing strict religious obedience through the control of moral and social behavior. The third chapter turns upon the ancient Roman magistrate called censura, charged with maintaining the census—a list of the citizens and of their properties compiled for fiscal and military purposes—and supervising public morality. Neglected in medieval legal tradition, the ancients' model met with a revival during the sixteenth century. At the beginning of the early-modern period, Bianchin points out, legal literature testifies to a new interest in the iudicium censorium, a sort of judgment founded on equity, sanctioning vices, bad habits, and moral infringements not subject to the law. But only in the first chapter of the sixth book of Bodin's République (De la censure) does the account of the establishment and development of the Roman censura lead to a doctrine of censorship that entrusts to the state the task of imposing moral discipline and restraining offenses like gambling, idleness, drunkenness, vagrancy, and licentiousness.

The Bodinian idea of moral control—easy to connect to the rigorous concept of state sovereignty asserted in the République—provided a basic reference to later writers dealing with the role of censorship in the organization of the state. In his Syntagma juris universi (1582), then in the De Republica libri sex et viginti (1596) the French canonist Pierre Grégoire follows faithfully Bodin's argument, claiming moreover for the government a wider control over private life and marriage. He, nevertheless, warns against the excesses of censores, the cause, in his opinion, of the ruin and disuse of the Roman magistrate. A contemporary of Grégoire, just as dismayed by religious struggles as Grégoire, was Iustus Lipsius, also a resolute advocate of censorship, charged with keeping orthodoxy and public order. Loyal to his strictly political point of view, he urges, however, the prince to a wise and shrewd use of such a hateful and frightening means. In the Politica methodice digesta of Johannes Althusius, the discussion on censorship loses any scholarly mood and couples with the Calvinist model of discipline, closely connecting civil and religious power. Althusius is not only a political writer. The third edition of his main work (1614) reflects his experience as syndic and elder of Emden, the Calvinist city in Eastern Frisia known as the "Geneva of the North," where he died in 1638. In chapter XXX of the Politica the role of censorship as a complementary and arbitrary judgment on a number of moral and social faults reaches its fullest extent, supported by the strengthening of the inquisitorial action and by a penalty system including fines, the brand of infamy, and imprisonment in workhouses. Concerned with the unavoidable abuses of rulers, Althusius argues anyway for a censura regum, entrusted to the collective magistrate of the ephors. So a doctrine of censorship attains to the status of a system of constitutional limitation on royal...