Church, Censorship and Culture in Early Modern Italy

Description

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.

Gigliola Fragnito is Professor of Early Modern History in the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy, Universit... degli Studi, Parma. Her many publications on early modern Italian church and government include La Bibbia al Rogo ('The Bible at the stake'), Il Mulino, 1997.

'... 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