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Church, Censorship and Culture in Early Modern Italy

Adrian Belton translator Gigliola Fragnito editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:21st Jul '11

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Church, Censorship and Culture in Early Modern Italy cover

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