Church, Censorship and Culture in Early Modern Italy

The recent opening of the archive of the former Congregation of the Holy Office in Rome (the office of the ‘Inquisition’) has yielded an extraordinary wealth of documentation which is already altering dramatically many long-standing views on the repressive activity of the Roman church during the counter-Reformation. Drawing extensively upon this archival source, this book highlights the wide gap between the Church’s aim to exert control over all knowledge and actual implementation. The plurality of the central offices, their contradictory decisions, and the inadequacy of the peripheral offices combined to hamper truly effective censorship. But despite this failure in developing a unified expurgatory policy, such prohibition as there was had a disastrous effect upon Italian culture, and for centuries Italians - jurists, scientists, Jews and common readers, as well as scholars - were deprived of their most cherished books.

• Covers a wide range of subjects - law, astrology, literature, devotional texts, Hebrew books - in order to discuss how the Church’s censorship affected them • Draws upon newly-available archival material from the Archive of the Holy Office • Throws new light upon one of the most important and disputed chapters in the history of the church in Italy

1. Introduction Gigliola Fragnito; 2. The central and peripheral organisation of censorship Gigliola Fragnito; 3. How to doctor a bibliography: Antonio Possevino’s practice Luigi Balsamo; 4. The Roman Inquisition’s condemnation of astrology: reasons and consequences Ugo Baldini; 5. Tradition and change in the spiritual literature of the Cinquecento Edoardo Barbieri; 6. A project of ‘expurgation’ by the Congregation of the Index: treatises on duelling Claudio Donati; 7. The Index, the Holy Office, the condemnation of the Talmud and publication of Clement VIII’s Index Fausto Parente; 8. Italian literature on the Index Ugo Rozzo; 9. The censoring of law books Rodolfo Savelli.

‘… so much fascinating material in such a comparatively short space of time …’. Times Literary Supplement

\' … a welcome addition to our knowledge of the effects of ecclesiastical censorship of books on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy.\' Journal of Ecclesiastical History