Index Librorum Prohibitorum
The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was a changing list of publications deemed heretical or contrary to morality by the Sacred Congregation of the Index ; Catholics were forbidden to print or read them, subject to the local bishop. Catholic states could enact laws to adapt or adopt the list and enforce it.
The Index was active from 1560 to 1966. 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 Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae, which was on the Index from 1621 to 1835; philosophers, such as Antonio Rosmini-Serbati and Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason ; 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 preemptive censorship of books.
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 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 1557 Edict of Compiègne applied the death penalty to heretics and resulted in the burning of a noblewoman at the stake. 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.
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.
Early indexes (1529–1571)
The first list of the kind was not published in Rome, but in Catholic Netherlands ; Venice and Paris 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.Paul F. Grendler 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, 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 Index Leonianus.
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 Historiae animalium ; 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.
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 or donec expurgetur ).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 Index Expurgatorius, 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 were simply passed on to the Congregation of the Index, where the final decrees were drafted and made public, after approval of the Pope.
An update to the Index was made by Pope Leo XIII, in the 1897 apostolic constitution Officiorum ac Munerum, known as the Index Leonianus. 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.
The Sacred Congregation of the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church later became the Holy Office, and since 1965 has been called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The Congregation of the Index was merged with the Holy Office in 1917, by the motu proprio Alloquentes Proxime of Pope Benedict XV; the rules on the reading of books were again re-elaborated in the new Codex Iuris Canonici. From 1917 onward, the Holy Office took care of the Index.
File:Mein Kampf dust jacket.jpeg|thumb|upright=0.6|Although Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg's book Myth of the Twentieth Century was placed on the Index, Adolf Hitler's book Mein Kampf was not.
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 rule that heretical works are ipso facto forbidden. Some important works are absent simply because nobody bothered to denounce them. Many actions of the congregations were of a definite political content.Among the denounced works of the period was the Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century for scorning and rejecting "all dogmas of the Catholic Church, and the fundamentals of the Christian religion". Markedly absent from the Index was Adolf Hitler's book Mein Kampf. After gaining access to the Vatican Apostolic Archive church historian Hubert Wolf discovered that Mein Kampf had been studied for three years but the Holy Office decided that it should not go on the Index because the author was a head of state. The Holy Office justified that decision by referring to chapter 13 of Paul the Apostle's Epistle to the Romans regarding state authority coming from God. However, somewhat later, the Vatican criticized Mein Kampf in the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge about the challenges of the church in Nazi Germany.