Course:LIBR548F/2012WT1/Index Librorum Prohibitorum

Index Librorum Prohibitorum

Index of Forbidden Books

The Index of Forbidden Books (Latin: Index Librorum Prohibitorum) was a published list of books and authors forbidden to faithful Catholics. The publications of the Index began in 1559 during the papacy of Paul IV and continued, at intervals, until 1948. The Index finally ceased to be published in 1966. It is important to note that while the Index of Forbidden Books is the most famous catalogue of banned books, it is by no means the only one to have existed in a printed form, and neither is it a comprehensive list of those books that were seen as potentially dangerous to the Catholic community. It is a list of those works brought to ecclesiastical attention.

Governance and Purpose

Though officially printed by the Vatican and presumably approved by the Pope himself, the Index was governed by a body known as the Congregation of the Index. The first edition of the list met with strong criticism for its stringent rules – for instance, all books by heretics (non-Catholics), printed by heretics, or lacking in identified authors or printers fell under a blanket prohibition without any exceptions allowed. This first version of the Index is known as the Pauline Index, and one of its notable consequences was the “expurgating,” or cleansing and editing, of Talmudic texts. In some cases, the banned books were burned (see: Libricide). The rules were revised by Pope Pius IV and the Council of Trent to try and make the Index more effective in its role in the Counter-Reformation movement.

Initially the Congregation of the Index judged questionable books by whether their theology matched the official doctrine of the Church, but later, issues of morality also came into play, leading to bans on love stories, poor language, and so forth. A famous example is the Copernican doctrine of heliocentrism. Ecclesiastics simply could not find a way to make it fit into the doctrines derived from Scripture. Historians studying the early versions of the Index and its localized predecessors usually point out that it arose at this time because of the impact of printing. Books were more accessible, allowing ideas, such as the various forms of Protestantism, to spread and “infect” a large geographic area far more quickly than they would have in the manuscript era. As the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment followed hard upon the heels of the Reformation, the Church’s attempts to retain control of the Catholic community by enforcing official doctrine became more desperate. Therefore, the Index was important and theoretically enforceable.

Format

The format of the Index also changed from its early versions to later ones. The Pauline Index lists authors alphabetically by first name, with each letter of the alphabet divided between the blanket-ban of heretical authors and printers, non-heretical banned authors, and anonymous banned authors. Later versions take a format that is far easier to use, arranging authors alphabetically “and then indicating the status of their works.” This made it possible for authors to have certain texts prohibited without having their entire body of work forbidden. Still later versions, beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, promoted the idea of banning by topic or class. Each Pope who published an Index had a slightly different approach, though the general purpose remained the same.

A facsimile of the Pauline Index has been digitized and made available online for free. It can be found here: Pauline Index - Facsimile

Notable Names on the Index

Several authors who continue to be famous today were banned by the Index at various times. Perhaps the best-known is Galileo Galilei, whose works were prohibited from the time of his writing to well into the twentieth century. Some authors whose writings fell under prohibition ended up being beatified or canonized! This shows, as Marilyn Rye describes it, “the Church’s changing position in an increasingly secular world from a dominant authority in a closed medieval world order to a more remote institution with diminished authority in the modern era.” Many important writers of the Enlightenment ended up listed in the Index, such as Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot. When novels began to arise, many of those authors were prohibited.

Nearly every resource exploring the Index and its purpose eventually remarks on what seems to be an inevitability of human nature: by banning the books, the Index actually made them more popular and desirable.

Sources

• Rye, M. (1981). Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries, 44(2), 66-81.

A remarkably useful and practical article specifically exploring the Index in a purely historical context. Rye tracks the history of censorship within Church history and local printings of banned book catalogues before the Papal Index began, and postulates some reasons for its endurance and role in the changing role of the Catholic Church in the modern world.

• Eisenstein, E. (2005). The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Eisenstein is a solid source for the history of printing in Europe. While the references to the Index are focused more about print history as a whole, her analysis helps to put the Index in its proper context throughout the “printing revolution.”

• Fragnito, G., ed. (2001). Church, Censorship, and Culture in Early Modern Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This book is a collection of connected essays, all translated from Italian, and inspired by the opening of the archives of the Congregation of the Holy Office of Rome (encompassed the Inquisition, and as of 1917, the Index). Again, it is not about the history of the Index itself, but works to show its effect. Chapter 7 is particularly useful on this subject, as it discusses the role of expurgation in making some books acceptable.