Libri, biblioteche e cultura degli ordini regolari nell’Italia moderna attraverso la documentazione della Congregazione dell’Indice. Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Macerata, 30 maggio—1 giugno 2006 (review)

The suppression of the Congregation of the Index in 1917 and the transfer of its competencies to the Holy Office (that continued to publish the Index of Prohibited Books until 1966, when it ceased to enjoy the force of ecclesiastical law) resulted in the transfer of part of its archive to the Vatican Library. Amongst these documents was a series of lists of books held by male religious orders in the Italian peninsula, now catalogued at Vat. lat. 11266–11326, which was the direct result of an investigation carried out under the orders of Pope Clement VIII to ascertain the effectiveness of the new edition of the Index published under his authority in 1596 and carried out in 1599–1603. These sixty-one volumes constitute a major bibliography on the Tridentine reform. The 19,000 manuscript pages list almost 1 million titles from some 9,500 libraries belonging to thirty-one male religious orders. Even given such a scale, however, the census is incomplete. The majority of libraries belong to the various branches of the Franciscan order, and there are two glaring absences: the Dominicans and the Jesuits. Nevertheless, this census provides an invaluable snapshot of the culture of the religious orders the generation after Trent, particularly now that the contents of the Vatican Library volumes, which are fully searchable by library and title or a combination of the two, are available free of charge online ( http://ebusiness.taiprora.it/bib/Ricerche.asp ). There are also lists of a few female convents as well as of a handful of laypeople. Although Romeo De Maio first brought the existence and significance of this unique resource to the attention of scholars as long ago as 1973 (“I modelli culturali della controriforma. Le biblioteche dei conventi italiani alla fine del Cinquecento” in the same author’s essay collection: Riforme e miti nella chiesa del cinquecento [Naples, 1973], pp. 355–70), which was followed by the summary catalog: M. M. Lebreton and L. Fiorani, Codices vaticani latini: Codices 11266–11326. Inventari di biblioteche religiose italiane alla fine del Cinquecento (Vatican City, 1985), it was only with the advent of the research project “Ricerca sull’ «Inchiesta» della Congregazione dell’Indice” (RICI), led since its inception some ten years ago by Roberto Rusconi, that the foundations for a comprehensive study of this resource have been laid.

Given the sheer scale of the enterprise, not even a volume as substantial as the one under review can offer anything approaching a comprehensive guide to the findings. However, what the volume does most usefully and what makes its purchase by research libraries a must is to provide not only the historiographical context within which the findings need to be located but also a series of case studies, many of which come with useful documentary appendices, that illustrate the questions that can be posed and the answers that can be found via the database. After a pair of essays outlining what was involved in the drafting, publication, and application of the 1596 Index by Rusconi and Gigliola Fragnito, author of a pioneering account of the subject as relating to censorship of vernacular bibles (La bibbia al rogo [Bologna, 1997]), the bulk of the volume offers both studies of individual and groups of libraries and discussion of where RICI sits in relation to two preexisting major projects: the British Library-led Incunabula Short Title Catalogue in a chapter by Ugo Rozzo, the doyen of books and censorship in Italy; and one by Rosaria Maria Servello on EDIT16, the Italian government-supported Union catalog of sixteenth-century books. There is also a substantial essay by Danilo Zardin on the various ways in which...