The Sacred Congregation of the Index was created in 1571 in order to update the Index librorum prohibitorum issued by the Council of Trent, which it did in 1596 with the publication of the Index of Clement VIII.
After this date the Sacred Congregation was not dismantled, but it became instead the main book censorship agency of the Catholic Church. Between the beginning of the Seventeenth Century and the middle of the Eighteenth Century, censorship authorities remained  substantially unchanged, though they had to manage through Church’s internal tensions and to cope with the changing social environment.
The present work deals with three points. First comes the description of the Congregation’s structure, with an emphasis on its stability in the period and the different duties of its members. The second part focuses on the Index, the principal instrument employed by the Church to notify the book prohibitions. In this period, the material shape and inner arrangement of the Index were changed, and its various editions were published as a response to the claims of different actors. The last part of this work deals with the relationship between the Church and the Catholic authors. From the second part of the Seventeenth Century on, censors became less and less worried by the spread of Protestant books in Italy, while their attention focused increasingly on the Catholic world, as they tried to persuade Catholic authors to amend their works following the censors’ wishes and orders.
Keywords: Censorship; Index librorum prohibitorum; Sacred Congregation of the Index.

This paper tackles the problem of ecclesiastical censorship in a period when Enlightenment culture brought about major changes in the jurisdictional politics pursued by several Italian States from the second half of Eighteenth Century to the break represented by the French Age. The objective is to analyse the strategies that the Catholic Church formulated in order to govern press and culture in a time of secularization.
Wherever possible, i.e., in the pontifical dominions, there was a high degree of continuity with the past: the repressive action exercised by the institutions in charge of censorship (not only the Index, but also the Inquisition) continued. Outside the Papal States, however, Catholic hierarchies met with significant resistance as state censorships other than those of the Roman Church were organized. To respond to the crisis of the inquisitional system dating from the Sixteenth Century, the Catholic Church shifted its emphasis from repression to persuasion, facing its enemies on the common battlefield of the written word. Waging a “war of books”, in which the Roman hierarchies promoted the publication of refutations of volumes put in the Index of Librorum Prohibitorum, was essential, while the Church made a massive effort to control reading through the use of encyclicals, pastoral instructions, catechisms and handbooks of conduct that dictated rules for books and reading. Rather than being an effective court of repression, the Index in the late Eighteenth Century seems to have cooperated in creating an ideological apparatus for resisting the new, broadly inspired by Counter-Enlightenment principles, that was to prove useful in guiding the Church’s action well beyond the beginning of the Nineteenth century.
Keywords: Enlightenment; Jurisdictional Politics; War of Books.

The paper analyses, through the records preserved in the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the policies and strategies of the Congregation of the Index during Nineteenth Century until 1917, when this istitution was abolished and its competences were taken over by Holy Office. The paper focuses on the control especially towards books written by authors which tried a mediation between Catholic Church and modernity (Rosmini, Gioberti, Ubaghs, Lamennais...) and towards new literary genres such as novels.
Intransigent trend, connected to “Civiltà cattolica” and Jesuits and Holy Office, became more powerful within the Congregation of the Index.
In addition to that the scepticism on the real possibility of control the reading in a more and more secular world was increasing. The Officiorum ac munerum reform promoted by Leone XII at the end of Nineteenth Century will be a failed occasion.
Keywords: Censorship; Catholic Church; Nineteenth Century.

This essay concerns the “forbidden” libraries of a few lay intellectuals in Italy during the Sixteenth Century. These private collections contained some texts openly condemned by the religious authority. In case such books were found the entire library was often confiscated or destroyed.
Even a limited number of forbidden texts, given into account the difficulties to obtain them and the possible consequences of their possession, allows us to presume that the owners were converted or were at least interested to the new religious ideas coming from Germany.
Obviously we know only about the few collections snatched by the Inquisition or that have a surviving catalogue: certainly a small fraction of the ones existing. We know also that forbidden texts were present in a few important collections that were never scrutinized due to political opportunity, as it was the case for many libraries of Venetian aristocracy.
It is surprising that the religious authority, since the end of the Fifteenth Century, gave very limited attention to the libraries as a place where many forbidden text may be collected. A neglect that continued almost to the end of the next century, up to the Clemente VIII’s Index of 1596.
The study also covers a series of collections containing indicted books, often targeted with confiscations or bonfires. Among those most relevant, in this wide range of situations, we point out the libraries of the Count Adriano of Spilimbergo (Friuli), of the great philologist Ludovico Castelvetro, of the humanist Luigi Groto (also known as the “blind man from Adria”), of the publisher and scholar Paolo Manuzio, of the bibliophile Gian Vincenzo Pinelli. The author doesn’t neglect to mention the several minor collections with a few forbidden works that were acting often as real travelling libraries for small and not so small groups of dissidents.
Keywords: Italian Libraries; Forbidden Works; Sixteenth Century.

Some years after the publication in 1596 of the Index librorum prohibitorum, the Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Books decided to acquire the titles of all books owned in Italy by monks, friars and regular clerics, with the collaboration of the superiors of the religious orders and congregations. In order to accurately identify the owned volumes, and verify if they would fall into the categories of books prohibited, suspect, or to purge, precise bibliographic criteria were prescribed.
When the guidelines were followed, the identification of individual issues was made possible. All documents acquired in such circumstances are currently preserved at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, but they must be integrated with the documents of the Congregation of the Index stored in the Archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Since several years the group of Research on the Investigation of the Congregation of the Index [RICI] is transcribing these lists of titles of books, identifying the corresponding printed editions, and including all these data in an online website, open for consultation by scholars.
Keywords: Book and libraries; Regular Orders; Sixteenth Century.

The roman catholic censorship and the Holy Office of inquisition have been considered and studied in the last century as the most detestable means of the catholic reaction to heresy and to modern science and philosophy in the Sixteenth Century. Treating this issue, has always involved a general view of history of modern Italy, focused on the theory of a cultural and social “delay” of the country in comparison to modern Europe, a “delay” caused by those ecclesiastical institutions. This ideological view has been recently questioned. New researches founded on documents for a long time not available, have increased our knowledge of the real organization, functioning and consequences of catholic roman censorship; on the other side, religious and intellectual censorship become now a topic of the historiography devoted to the protestant countries as well. In this context, this essay faces the problem of the doctrinal and theological grounds, and of the general and specific terms of the attitude of the different catholic modern institutions exercising censorship (Index librorum prohibitorum, Holy Office, Master of the Sacred Palace), towards books and authors in the philosophical field.
The catholic Counter-Reformation adapted to the new situation created by the invention of printing, and by the Reformation, the doctrines and the legal instruments that during the Thirteenth-Fifteenth Centuries were established with the aim to detect the teaching of ancient philosophy in the universities. The doctrines, founded on saint Paul, some ancient Fathers, and saint Thomas, assessed that conflicts between theology and philosophy should be always solved in favour of the first.
The Council of Trent added that nobody could propose any interpretation of biblical passages in a personal view, ignoring or fighting the traditional interpretation of the Fathers. Many philosophers and scientists of the Sixteenth Century and Seventeenth Century tried to present their theories as not contradictory with the Holy Scriptures, or much more compatible with catholic theology, as the Aristotelian were, but they engaged themselves in a personal exegetical activity, that the Church could not allow them. Other subjects treated here in a new perspective are the theological and philosophical culture of the catholic roman censors, the relations between central offices and peripheral structures (bishops, inquisitors, universities), and the mains affairs of philosophers and philosophical books treated by the catholic roman censorship, until the beginning of the Seventeenth Century.
Keywords: History of Church; Censorship; Modern Philosophy.

This essay analyzes catholic censorship on demonological works in order to evaluate if those books are involved in the roman strategy. The control of books was intended to stem the circulation of ideas that might have been expected merely to open a door to heterodoxy, but over the years the category of heresy was extended to include any divergence from the pronouncements of Rome. On the political front, the Index settled upon works that questioned the legitimacy of the Church’s temporal power and even historical reconstructions that failed to defend ecclesiastical claims.
This article highlights the Italian circulation of some demonological works (moreover of Bodin’s Démonomanie, Wier’s De praestigiis, Del Rio’s Disquisitiones). The reception of Bodin’s works in Italy was biased by the suspicion that he could be a crypto-Jew, so it was seriously hindered any possibility that his works might be freely read. Del Rio’s work was denounced by an ecclesiastical so it was a different case-study: although the Jesuit condemned magic and witchcraft, he was accused to spreads some magical remedies. In the Seventeenth Century the Congregation of the Holy Office and the Congregation of the Index paid attention to books devoted to change procedural claims and to exorcisms.
Keywords: Demonology; Censorship; Index.

It is hardly known that the Orlando furioso became a case of Roman censorship in the Sixteenth Century. Yet it kept the Roman censorial authorities occupied over decades, and after repeated denunciations and examinations eventually its expurgation was commissioned. This paper will introduce the Furioso’s case, from a historical-philological perspective, using manuscript documents from the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana which are yet partially unknown.
A question crucial to Sixteenth-century censorship and likewise to the case of the Furioso is: how dangerous are in fact the favole, should they be censored if heterodox ideas are detected in them, or could they be excused as favole, since their readers would not take them to heart? For this reason I will focus on the reception of the Furioso, on the one hand on its reception through the censors, and on the other hand its reception by the reader as an aspect of censorship. I will endeavour to show how the Furioso’s censors dissect and understand the poem and how they deal with its complex semantic structure. In so doing, I will also demonstrate in what way its reception through the reader played an important part in the censorial assessment, considering thereby the sixteenth-century phenomenon of exegetical paratexts of Furioso-editions and including the case of Simon Fórnari’s commentary on the Furioso, which may shed light on the censorship of writing about poetry.
The study will pay particular attention to the censors’ dealing with the mingling of sacred and profane in order to show that they were not only interested in the formal aspects, but that they suspected poets of hiding heterodox ideas in their works. In the case of Ariosto, who is accused of Lutheranism, it is for instance ideas close to Protestantism. The comic and fictional nature of a text such as the Furioso was in fact recognised to be an additional danger, since it let a text appear innocent and harmless, masking the inherent danger.
Keywords: Censorship; Reception History; Romanzo.

The essay presents the critical edition of the journal written by the Master of the Sacred Palace Raimondo Capizucchi in 1678-81. The Master of the Sacred Palace was the highest censor of the Roman Curia in the early modern age, member both of the Inquisition and of the Congregation of the Index of prohibited books. His journal offers an innovative view on the functioning of the censorial apparatus of the Catholic Church: in fact, it shows the internal rules of ecclesiastical censorship and the negotiations which originated from the confrontation between authors and censors in the early modern age. This document allows us to reconsider the censorial work in the broader dynamics of the Roman micropolitics and networks of patronage.
Keywords: Roman Censorship; Early Modern Age; Master of the Sacred Palace.

The congregation of the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition originated with the bull Licet ab initio (July 21,1542) of Pope Paul III. The creation of the new congregation led to centralization of inquisitorial activities, carried out for centuries by the bishops and local inquisitors in the various dioceses of the Catholic world. By 1566, the Roman Inquisition found permanent seat in the Palace of the Holy Office, which was purchased by Pope Pius V by the heirs of Cardinal Pucci.
Soon, the Roman Inquisition became the first congregation of the Roman Curia, extended its fields of competence, to take care of almost all aspects of social and religious life, the crimes against the faith to crimes against morals and customs. Since the publication of the Roman Index of 1559, among the prerogatives of the congregation returned to full censorship of books and also control the printing, as well as permission to read forbidden books, an area shared with the congregation of the Index, instituted by Pius V in 1571.
Established in 1593, the Archive of the Holy Office was subjected to an overall reorganization of material in the second half of the Eighteenth Century. With the theft ordered by Napoleon I (1809), the store suffered heavy losses. At the return of documents in Rome (1816), were retrieved doctrinal and jurisdictional matters, but the serious criminals were lost, with the exception of some known processes, such as Galileo.
Until the Napoleonic era, the Archive of the Congregation of the Index was kept at the Dominican convent of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, where was located the secretariat. In 1917 Pope Benedict XV suppressed the Congregation of the Index, attributing competences to the Holy Office. In this occasion, the archive of the Index was united to that of the Holy Office.
The history of the Index as a list of forbidden books covers a time span of over four centuries. Between 1559, when the first papal Index, and 1966, when it was abolished by Pope Paul VI, the Index librorum prohibitorum was updated twenty times.
Keywords: Inquisition; Index; Archives.