Church, Censorship and Culture in Early Modern Italy

by Edited by Gigliola Fragnito , Translated by Adrian Belton

• ISBN13: 9780521661720
• ISBN10: 0521661722
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-10-29
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	vi
List of contributors	vii
List of abbreviations	x
Introduction	1	(12)
Gigliola Fragnito
The central and peripheral organization of censorship	13	(37)
Gigliola Fragnito
How to doctor a bibliography: Antonio Possevino's practice	50	(29)
Luigi Balsamo
The Roman Inquisition's cndemnation of astrology: antecedents, reasons and consequences	79	(32)
Ugo Baldini
Tradition and change in the spiritual literature of the cinquecento	111	(23)
Edoardo Barbieri
A project of `expurgation' by the Congregation of the Index: treatises on duelling	134	(29)
Claudio Donati
The index, the Holy Office, the condemnation of the Talmud and publication of Clement VIII's index	163	(31)
Fausto Parente
Italian literature on the index	194	(29)
Ugo Rozzo
The censoring of law books	223	(31)
Rodolfo Savelli
Index of names	254