The (English: Index of Forbidden Books) was a changing list of publications deemed heretical or contrary to morality by the Sacred Congregation of the Index (a former dicastery of the Roman Curia); Catholics were forbidden to print or read them, subject to the local bishop.Grendler, Paul F. "Printing and censorship" in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy , Charles B. Schmitt, ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1988, ) pp. 45–46 Catholic states could enact laws to adapt or adopt the list and enforce it.
The Index was active from 1560 to 1966.The 20th and final edition of the Index appeared in 1948; the Index was formally abolished on 14 June 1966 by Pope Paul VI. It banned thousands of book titles and blacklisted publications, including the works of Europe's intellectual elites.
The Index condemned religious and secular texts alike, grading works by the degree to which they were deemed to be repugnant, potentially misleading or heretical to the Sacred Congregation of the Index at the time. The aim of the list was to protect church members from reading theologically, culturally, or politically disruptive books. At times such books included the works of theologians, such as Robert Bellarmine, and astronomers, such as Johannes Kepler's (published in three volumes from 1618 to 1621), which was on the Index from 1621 to 1835; philosophers, such as Antonio Rosmini-Serbati and Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781); and editions and translations of the Bible that had not been approved. Editions of the Index also contained the rules of the Church relating to the reading, selling, and pre-emptive censorship of books.Index Librorum Prohibitorum, 1559, Regula Quarta ("Rule 4")
Background and history
European restrictions on the right to print
The historical context in which the Index appeared involved the early restrictions on printing in Europe. The refinement of moveable type and the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg changed the nature of book publishing, and the mechanism by which information could be disseminated to the public. Books, once rare and kept carefully in a small number of libraries, could be mass-produced and widely disseminated.
In the 16th century, both the churches and governments in most European countries attempted to regulate and control printing because it allowed for the rapid and widespread circulation of ideas and information. The Protestant Reformation generated large quantities of polemical new writing by and within both the Catholic and Protestant camps, and religious subject matter was typically the area most subject to control. While governments and the church encouraged printing in many ways, which allowed the dissemination of Bibles and government information, works of dissent and criticism could also circulate rapidly. As a consequence, governments established controls over printers across Europe, requiring them to have official licenses to trade and produce books.
The early versions of prohibition indexes began to appear from 1529 to 1571. In the same time frame, in 1557 the English crown aimed to stem the flow of dissent by chartering the Stationers' Company. The right to print was restricted to the two universities (Oxford and Cambridge) and to the 21 existing printers in the city of London, which had between them 53 printing presses.
The French crown also tightly controlled printing, and the printer and writer Étienne Dolet was burned at the stake for atheism in 1546. The 1551 Edict of Châteaubriant comprehensively summarized censorship positions to date, and included provisions for unpacking and inspecting all books brought into France.The Rabelais encyclopedia by Elizabeth A. Chesney 2004 pp. 31–32The printing press as an agent of change by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein 1980 page 328 The 1557 Edict of Compiègne applied the death penalty to heretics and resulted in the burning of a noblewoman at the stake.Robert Jean Knecht, The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France: 1483–1610 2001, p. 241 Printers were viewed as radical and rebellious, with 800 authors, printers and book dealers being incarcerated in the Bastille. At times, the prohibitions of church and state followed each other, e.g. René Descartes was placed on the Index in the 1660s and the French government prohibited the teaching of Cartesianism in schools in the 1670s.A companion to Descartes by Janet Broughton, John Peter Carriero 2007
The Copyright Act 1710 in Britain, and later copyright laws in France, eased this situation. Historian Eckhard Höffner claims that copyright laws and their restrictions acted as a barrier to progress in those countries for over a century, since British publishers could print valuable knowledge in limited quantities for the sake of profit. The German economy prospered in the same time frame since there were no restrictions.Geschichte und Wesen des Urheberrechts (History and nature of copyright) by Eckhard Höffner, 2010 (in German)
Early indexes (1529–1571)
The first list of the kind was not published in Rome, but in Catholic Netherlands (1529); Venice (1543) and Paris (1551) under the terms of the Edict of Châteaubriant followed this example. By the mid-century, in the tense atmosphere of wars of religion in Germany and France, both Protestant and Catholic authorities reasoned that only control of the press, including a catalogue of prohibited works, coordinated by ecclesiastic and governmental authorities, could prevent the spread of heresy.Schmitt 1991:45.
Paul F. Grendler (1975) discusses the religious and political climate in Venice from 1540 to 1605. There were many attempts to censor the Venetian press, which at that time was one of the largest concentrations of printers. Both church and government held to a belief in censorship, but the publishers continually pushed back on the efforts to ban books and shut down printing. More than once the index of banned books in Venice was suppressed or suspended because various people took a stand against it.
The first Roman Index was printed in 1557 under the direction of Pope Paul IV (1555–1559), but then withdrawn for unclear reasons. In 1559, a new index was finally published, banning the entire works of some 550 authors in addition to the individual proscribed titles: "The Pauline Index felt that the religious convictions of an author contaminated all his writing." The work of the censors was considered too severe and met with much opposition even in Catholic intellectual circles; after the Council of Trent had authorised a revised list prepared under Pope Pius IV, the so-called Tridentine Index was promulgated in 1564; it remained the basis of all later lists until Pope Leo XIII, in 1897, published his .
The blacklisting of some Protestant scholars even when writing on subjects a modern reader would consider outside the realm of dogma meant that, unless they obtained a dispensation, obedient Catholic thinkers were denied access to works including: botanist Conrad Gesner's ; the botanical works of Otto Brunfels; those of the medical scholar Janus Cornarius; to Christoph Hegendorff or Johann Oldendorp on the theory of law; Protestant geographers and cosmographers like Jacob Ziegler or Sebastian Münster; as well as anything by Protestant theologians like Martin Luther, John Calvin or Philipp Melanchthon. Among the inclusions was the Libri Carolini, a theological work from the 9th-century court of Charlemagne, which was published in 1549 by Bishop Jean du Tillet and which had already been on two other lists of prohibited books before being inserted into the Tridentine Index.Paul Oskar Kristeller (editor), Itinerarium Italicum (Brill 1975 ), p. 90.
Sacred Congregation of the Index (1571–1917)
In 1571, a special congregation was created, the Sacred Congregation of the Index, which had the specific task to investigate those writings that were denounced in Rome as being not exempt of errors, to update the list of Pope Pius IV regularly and also to make lists of required corrections in case a writing was not to be condemned absolutely but only in need of correction; it was then listed with a mitigating clause (e.g., ('forbidden until corrected') or ('forbidden until purged')).
Several times a year, the congregation held meetings. During the meetings, they reviewed various works and documented those discussions. In between the meetings was when the works to be discussed were thoroughly examined, and each work was scrutinized by two people. At the meetings, they collectively decided whether or not the works should be included in the Index. Ultimately, the pope was the one who had to approve of works being added or removed from the Index. It was the documentation from the meetings of the congregation that aided the pope in making his decision.
This sometimes resulted in very long lists of corrections, published in the , which was cited by Thomas James in 1627 as "an invaluable reference work to be used by the curators of the Bodleian Library when listing those works particularly worthy of collecting". Prohibitions made by other congregations (mostly the Holy Office) were simply passed on to the Congregation of the Index, where the final decrees were drafted and made public, after approval of the Pope (who always had the option to condemn an author personally—there are only a few examples of such condemnation, including those of Lamennais and Hermes).
An update to the Index was made by Pope Leo XIII, in the 1897 apostolic constitution , known as the . Subsequent editions of the Index were more sophisticated; they graded authors according to their supposed degree of toxicity, and they marked specific passages for expurgation rather than condemning entire books.Lyons, Martyn. (2011). Books: A Living History. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications. , p. 83
The Sacred Congregation of the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church later became the Holy Office, and since 1965 has been called the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. The Congregation of the Index was merged with the Holy Office in 1917, by the of Pope Benedict XV; the rules on the reading of books were again re-elaborated in the new . From 1917 onward, the Holy Office (again) took care of the Index.
Holy Office (1917–1966)
While individual books continued to be forbidden, the last edition of the Index to be published appeared in 1948. This 20th edition contained 4,000 titles censored for various reasons: heresy, moral deficiency, sexual explicitness, and so on. That some atheists, such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, were not included was due to the general (Tridentine) rule that heretical works (i.e., works that contradict Catholic dogma) are ipso facto forbidden. Some important works are absent simply because nobody bothered to denounce them."The works appearing on the Index are only those that ecclesiastical authority was asked to act upon" (Encyclopædia Britannica: Index Librorum Prohibitorum). Many actions of the congregations were of a definite political content."The entanglement of Church and state power in many cases led to overtly political titles being placed on the Index, titles which had little to do with immorality or attacks on the Catholic faith. For example, a history of Bohemia, the Rervm Bohemica Antiqvi Scriptores Aliqvot[...] by Marqvardi Freheri (published in 1602), was placed on the Index not for attacking the Church, but rather because it advocated the independence of Bohemia from the (Catholic) Austro-Hungarian Empire. Likewise, The Prince by Machiavelli was placed in the Index in 1559 after it was blamed for widespread political corruption in France (Curry, 1999, p. 5)" (David Dusto, Index Librorum Prohibitorum: The History, Philosophy, and Impact of the Index of Prohibited Books).