La fabbrica dei divieti: gli indici dei libri proibiti da Clemente VIII a Benedetto XIV (review)

This volume has been published by one of the few genuinely independent publishing houses in Italy and is the thirty-sixth in the series called 'Il sapere del libro', a kind of pun meaning both 'the learning to be found in books' and 'the knowledge of books'. In addition to translations of significant modern texts on bibliography and book history (by Fenlon, McKenzie, Foot, McKitterick, Richardson, Woodward, and Wilford), this interesting series also includes new work by Italian scholars on the theory and principles of bibliography and on the history of the book. Within the framework of this nonconformist editorial programme concentrating on the history of printing, publishing, and reading, the publisher has also, with remarkable cultural foresight and investment, supported large-scale projects such as encyclopaedias and other reference works: its lavishly illustrated dictionaries on book history and on binding, with expert and lucid entries accompanied by extensive and up-to-date bibliographies are useful even indispensable reference tools, of unique value for librarians, collectors, and scholars, not only in Italy.

The present study by Elisa Rebellato is further testimony to Bonnard's programme of renewing and enriching the history of the book as a discipline in Italy. Moving away from the standard perspective, and drawing on documents that have only recently become available thanks to the opening up of the Vatican archives for the Holy Office responsible for the Index, the author focuses on Italian religious censorship, which played so large a part in stunting the progress of the country's secular culture. Even the choice of time-span reveals the freshness of approach: it starts at the end of the sixteenth century in order to analyse the complex period between 1596, when a new and up-to-date index based on the previous Council of Trent index was promulgated by Clement VIII, and 1758, when a modernized and enlarged list of prohibited books and authors was published under the auspices of Benedict XIV, a highly educated churchman who was not averse to certain Enlightenment principles and who established new kinds of criteria for the censors and the judgements which they issued.

In Rome there were two different institutions that dealt with the censorship of books, one of which was more severe or less permissive than the other: the Congregation of the Holy Office and the Congregation of the Index. Their mutual rivalry lasted for centuries, since there were no significant shifts in the power each wielded to cause this situation to change. The direct result was a flood of prohibitions which showed no sign of diminishing over the course of time: the title of Rebellato's book, 'The Factory of Prohibitions', is an ironic reference to this persistent and unstoppable flow of censorship.

The study turns its back both on the traditional institutional history of the Council of Trent and its Index, with its cardinals and dogmas, intellectual positions and final promulgations as well as the political history of the ideological (and theological) reasons why a work or an author was condemned. Rebellato's attention focuses instead on the ways in which the prohibitions were issued and circulated, by means of the indexes and their extremely numerous reprints —there were over two hundred separate editions in as many years. Her book reconstructs the detailed publishing history of these editions and in so doing the history of the Index as a whole. It is more than simply a broadening of Reusch's classic study or the continuation of De Bujanda's multi-volume masterpiece; it completes the history of the spread of the censorship of printed books by means of a critical and analytical account of the editions published between 1596 and 1758 placed in their original diachronic context. Other recent studies have shown us —and the present book also clearly demonstrates —that prohibitions could be enforced (but...