Many noteworthy authors were put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum because their works caused moral controversies
The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was a changing list of banned books which was active from 1560 to 1966.
It featured thousands of blacklisted books and publications including the works of Europe's intellectual elites. Catholics were forbidden to print or read them and Catholic states could adopt and adapt the list.
Which authors were on the Index librorum prohibitorum?
Many noteworthy authors were put on the Index librorum prohibitorum because their works were seen to cause religious, political and moral controversies.
Famous names on the Roman Index include Greek and the Roman authors like Ovid and Petronius, religious reformers like Martin Luther, Philipp Melanchthon and Jean Calvin and humanists like Erasmus of Rotterdam, Hugo Grotius and Nicodemus Frischlin.
Political thinkers like Niccolò Machiavelli, Jean Bodin and Montesquieu were included, as well as philosophers such as René Descartes, Francis Bacon, Baruch Spinoza, David Hume, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, George Berkeley, Auguste Comte and Jean-Paul Sartre. Natural scientists like Nicolaus Copernicus, Paracelsus and Johannes Kepler were also on the list.
Poetry and fiction was also added to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, including works by poets and novelists like Giovanni Boccaccio, John Milton, Jean de la Fontaine, Madame de Staël, Daniel Defoe, Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola, André Gide, D.H. Lawrence and many more.
Why authors were added to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum
The boundaries between what the Index Librorum Prohibitorum permitted and what it banned were sometimes very thin and unpredictable.
Erasmus of Rotterdam's Adagia, a popular collection of proverbs, was banned together with his entire opus, only because he did not take a sufficiently critical stance against the Protestant Reformation.
Though exorcism was an acknowledged method of casting out demons and the devil, popular exorcism manuals like Flagellum daemonum by Girolamo Menghi were banned because they contained rites which were not compliant with the official Church liturgy.
Montesquieu's proposal to divide political power into legislative, executive, and judicial in his De l'esprit des lois was considered to be politically subversive at the time. But it had a strong impact on numerous state and political regulations and constitutional acts. Though widely popular, Machiavelli's political works were banned because they dealt with politics outside of the Church's authority.
Baldassare Castiglione's Il Cortegiano was the central reference work for aristocratic courtly etiquette throughout Europe. It was put on the Index because of its satirical comments and jokes at the Church's expense.
In order to prevent further opposition to the geocentric worldview, Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium was put on the Index in 1616 - more than seventy years after it was first published!
D'Alembert and Diderot's Encyclopedie was banned because of its materialistic and empirical views of science, while Johannes Trithemius’s Steganographia was condemned because of its occultist content.
The Italian writer Ferrante Pallavicino experienced fierce revenge and was executed in Avignon because of his anti-papal and anti-Jesuit satires. Two notorious libertines and pornographers from the 17th and 18th century, Donatien Alphonse François Marquis de Sade and Nicolas-Edme Restif were in fierce personal disputes, but they appeared together on the Roman Index Librorum Prohibitorum as well as on other censorship lists of the time.
The blog post is a part of the Rise of Literacy project, where we take you on an exploration of literacy in Europe thanks to the digital preservation of precious textual works from collections across the continent.