La prassi della censura nell’Italia del Seicento. Tra repressione e mediazione (review)

This is a survey of ecclesiastical censorship from the first papal Index of general authority of 1559 (not 1558 as Cavarzere asserts) and ending in the early eighteenth century. The author has done extensive research in the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (ACDF) in Rome, which contains the surviving papers of the Congregations of the Index and Inquisition and other materials. Although the book mentions individual censorship cases, its purpose is to provide an overview of papal censorship in Italy. The book begins with an account of the system of ecclesiastical censorship. Other chapters describe the censors, press censorship, the censorship of various forms of literature, self-censorship, the impact of censorship on society, and persons who avoided strict censorship. The book is sweeping and well written. It includes references to a considerable amount of recent scholarship, but not always the older scholarship. Unfortunately, the lack of balance prevents this book from being the needed survey.

The first sentence of the book refers to the decadence of Italy in the seventeenth century, and page after page leaves no doubt that the “repressive Roman system,” “ecclesiastical censorship,” “omnipresence of Roman ecclesiastical censorship,” “papal repression,” and “internal police” were responsible. Once in a while Cavarzere mentions “the marriage of repression and mediation,” but mediation always failed. Since the opening of the ACDF archive in the late 1990s numerous scholars have published detailed studies showing nuanced and complex stories of attempts at expurgation, compromises, and bureaucratic backing and filling, as well as significant repressive censorship. Moreover, recent scholarship has also demonstrated that ecclesiastical censors recognized that they should not cut Italians off from European scholarly and cultural developments. So they created a system of permissions that enabled thousands of clergymen, scholars, and even ordinary laymen and lay-women to hold and read prohibited books. Cavarzere is aware of these developments, and he acknowledges that seventeenth-century censorship necessitated collaboration between church and state. But he does not see these exceptions as significantly modifying ecclesiastical repression. This is a legitimate point of view. But it is not the only one.

Sometimes Cavarzere reaches too far; for example, he sees the censorship of opera as part of seventeenth-century clerical repression. What would he make of the fact that nineteenth-century civil censors forced Giuseppe Verdi to make changes in his masterpieces? In the last chapter Cavarzere surveys the breaches in the wall of Roman repression such as the significant number of books printed in Venice that skillfully propagated libertinism, anticlericalism, and unbelief. In addition, Cavarzere correctly points out that influential clergymen and laymen held prohibited books in their libraries and made them available to others without penalty. Cavarzere argues that these exceptions paved the way for the Italian Enlightenment. But how pervasive could Roman repression have been when such works were printed and read in the seventeenth century? The account also jumps around chronologically, does not provide enough dates, and assumes a considerable amount of knowledge of censorship cases. In short, this is one point of view about the impact of seventeenth-century censorship, but probably not one that will win general assent.