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

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.

Author Biography

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.