In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.4 (2003) 644-645



[Access article in PDF]

Church, Censorship and Culture in Early Modern Italy. Edited by Gigliola Fragnito (trans. Adrian Belton) (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2001) 264pp. $59.95


This collection of articles on ecclesiastical censorship in Italy between the 1550s and 1630s is a landmark in the historiography of that controversial subject. In her introduction, Fragnito charts the trajectory of the history of censorship in the peninsula, stressing the significance of the opening of the Roman archives of the Inquisition and the Index in 1998. She notes the tendency of earlier scholarship to focus on the censors' preoccupation with theological works, while minimizing or ignoring their efforts to sanitize books in other disciplines—for example, law, philosophy, natural science, and popular literary and devotional works. The authors of the articles in this collection have utilized the now- accessible material in the archives of the Inquisition and Index—"minutes of the Congregation meetings: the advisory opinions of the consultors, the correspondence between the Roman offices and bishops and inquisitors, the mountains of expurgations of printed texts and of corrections of these texts prior to their printing (11)." In summarizing the thrust of this recent scholarship, Fragnito argues that "the complex picture that emerges from reconstruction of the vicissitudes of certain categories of books, and from analysis of the operation of the agencies charged with implementing the Roman directives, demonstrates that accurate assessment of the extent ... of Rome's control over the written [End Page 644] word requires us to go beyond the lists of authors and works set out in the indexes, and beyond deceptive clarity of prohibitions and suspensions (8)."

In her chapter on the evolution of the Italian agencies responsible for book censorship in the second half of the sixteenth century, Fragnito revises the traditional view of an increasingly effective and repressive process that reached its climax in the publication of the Clementine Index of 1596. Her analysis instead emphasizes the bitter disputes among the censors who disagreed about which books should be prescribed outright, and which might be made palatable after revisions. Quarrels also erupted about which agencies (the Roman Inquisition, the Congregation of the Index, the Master of the Sacred Palace in the Vatican, or the bishops) should exercise authority over censorship, a struggle that was ultimately won by the inquisitors. Fragnito's study of the machinery of censorship is followed by a cluster of well-researched essays that examine the surveillance and control of printed books in specific disciplines. Ugo Baldini explores the censors' convoluted response to astrological texts; Fausto Parente's focus is the Hebrew Talmud; and Rodolfo Savelli writes on the censorship of legal works. The articles by Edoardo Barbieri on spiritual literature and by Ugo Rozzo on secular works emphasize the difficulties facing the censors in their efforts to cleanse literally thousands of titles of material that they deemed subversive and pernicious.

One important conclusion to be drawn from these essays is that "the censorial apparatus was not the well-oiled machinery that has often been depicted: rather it frequently jammed, and changes of mind, reversals and dithering gave it a markedly erratic course (4)." Contributing to the problems confronting the officials was the wide gulf separating resources and goals, seen most notably in the inability of censors to amend suspect texts so that the revised versions could be printed. The backlog of titles requiring emendation increased dramatically, leaving thousands of works that could not be reprinted without a nihil obstat from the censors. Publishers could occasionally stymie the efforts of censors to ban books that were popular and profitable. Although the authorities sought to prohibit works of "chivalrous science" that included references to dueling, these titles continued to circulate widely, "tacitly tolerated by a significant part of the ecclesiastical hierarchy of noble extraction and culture (8)." Yet, despite all of these pressures seeking to weaken the process, Fragnito concludes that book censorship had a profoundly negative influence on Italian culture. A substantial segment of Italy's literary heritage was proscribed, most notably, vernacular Bibles and...

pdf

Share