Dangerous Books

Censorship and Culture in Early Modern Italy

Series: 

Author:
Giorgio Caravale
Translator:
Frank Gordon
In the centuries between the invention of printing and the birth of copyright, even the most enlightened men and women believed in the need to monitor the circulation of books and repress ideas considered harmful to society. What distinguished the Roman censorship system from the control mechanisms in force in other parts of Europe? And, above all, how did ecclesiastical censorship influence the development of Italian culture during the modern age? This book reconstructs the tools Rome used to prevent the spread of books considered dangerous and, at the same time, the stratagems authors, printers, and readers used to circumvent these controls. Censorship meant elimination, suppression, and deletion, but also replacement, restitution, and rewriting. The success of the religious and cultural policy of the Counter-Reformation also depended on the ability to provide the faithful with a series of texts to replace books that were no longer available. The books disappeared and then reappeared in different forms, distant but not entirely new compared to their original appearance.

Translation of: Libri pericolosi: Censura e cultura italiana in età moderna (Editori Laterza, 2022).
Copyright Year:
2026
E-Book (PDF)
Availability:
Not Yet Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-75612-0
Publication:
25 Jun 2026
Paperback
Availability:
Not Yet Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-75611-3
Publication:
16 Jul 2026
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Giorgio Caravale, Ph.D. (2000), is Professor of Early Modern History at the University Roma Tre. He is co-editor of the Catholic Christendom (1300–1700) book series (Brill). He has published extensively on Inquisition, heresy, Reformation, and book censorship, including Forbidden Prayer (Ashgate, 2012) and Beyond the Inquisition (Notre Dame University Press, 2017). He is the editor of the Companion to the Italian Reformation, forthcoming with Brill.
List of Illustrations
Introduction

Part 1 In the World of the Book

1 Protecting the Book
 1 The Printed Book: a New Beginning
 2 The Fragile Legal Status of the Book
 3 (Partial) Commercial Protection

2 Controlling the Book
 1 Printing with Licence
 2 Knowledge for the Few
 3 On the Necessity for Censorship

3 A System of Censorship
 1 Better to Forbid Than to Prevent
 2 One Book to Monitor the Others
 3 The Frontiers of Contagion
 4 Books on the Bonfire

4 Rome and the Others
 1 An Elite Alliance
 2 The Other Europe

Part 2 Books under Control

5 Anticlericalism
 1 The ‘Fomenter of All Heresies’
 2 ‘Little Writings’
 3 Anticlericalism in the Counter-Reformation

6 The Reason of Church
 1 An ‘Illegitimate Order’
 2 Machiavelli and His (Infidel) Followers
 3 An Ecclesiastical ‘Reason of State’

7 From Philosophy to Science
 1 The Fragile Thread of the Double Truth
 2 Atomism, Corpuscularianism, and Atheism
 3 A New Enemy
 4 Science on Trial

Part 3 Looking down the Social Ladder

8 The Campaign against the Vernacular
 1 Rome and the Empire of Latin
 2 Beyond the Confines of the Sacred
 3 In the Classroom
 4 ‘Fables and Novellas’

9 Censorship and the ‘Unlettered’
 1 Fogli volanti, libelli famosi, and Superstitious Prayers
 2 Historiette, ‘Rhyming Verse’, and Astrological Predictions

10 Controlling the Gaze
 1 An Art without Heresy
 2 ‘Custody of the Eyes’
 3 The Irreverence of the Everyday and the ‘Historical Rule’
 4 Serving the ‘Uneducated’

11 Censoring the Spoken Word
 1 An Inextricable Interweaving
 2 Controlling and Guiding the Spoken Word
Historians of the book, Cultural historians, librarians, under-graduate and graduate students, historians of religion, politics, science, art, philosophy, anthropology. Keywords: Censorship; Prohibited Books; Index Librorum Prohibitorum; Expurgation; Self-Censorship; Manuscript Circulation; Printed Book; Reading Licenses; Booksellers; Readers; Printers; Holy Office; Counter-Reformation; Vernacular Language; Book Burning; Clandestine Market; Republic of Letters in Exile; Italian Reformation; Utility vs. Curiosity; Dissemination of Knowledge; Rewriting; Propaganda; Authorship; Copyright; Erasmus of Rotterdam; Niccolò Machiavelli; John Calvin; Torquato Tasso; Decameron by Boccaccio; State Censorship; Jesuits; Reformation.
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