Church, Censorship and Culture in Early Modern Italy
Adrian Belton translator Gigliola Fragnito editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Cambridge University Press
Published:21st Jul '11
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Hardback£90.00(9780521661720)
2001 essay collection on the Italian Church's attempt to control and censor 'knowledge' during the counter-Reformation.
Drawing upon a wealth of archival material, this 2001 book deals with one of the most controversial subjects in Italian historiography, namely the success or failure of the Church's policy during the counter-Reformation to exert rigorous control not just over theology but over all branches of knowledge.The opening of the archive of the former Congregation of the Holy Office in Rome (the office of the 'Inquisition') yielded an extraordinary wealth of documentation, 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 2001 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.
Review of the hardback: '… so much fascinating material in such a comparatively short space of time …' Times Literary Supplement
Review of the hardback: ' … a welcome addition to our knowledge of the effects of ecclesiastical censorship of books on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy.' Journal of Ecclesiastical History
ISBN: 9780521202329
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 16mm
Weight: 420g
280 pages