Censorship in the Renaissance

In the early 1490s, Girolamo Savonarola devoted two spiritual works to the theme of prayer. These were the Sermone dell'oratione and the Trattato in difensione e commendazione dell'orazione mentale (1492), which were followed two years later by the Espositione sul Pater noster (1494). 2 Savonarola's criticism targeted the rituals and the devotional practices of the laity in their following of the precepts of Rome. In these writings, Savonarola -anticipating by two decades the invective of Querini and Giustiniani's Libellum ad Leonem decimum 3lashed out against the mechanical recital of the Lord's Prayer and the psalms, criticising voiced prayer as an end in itself, the symbol of sterile worship. In his view, a return to the inspiring and healthy principles of the early Roman Catholic Church was needed, since «God seeks from us interior knowledge without so much ceremony». 4 External ceremony stimulated devotion, and constituted an intermediate passage in man's search for God. Voiced prayer should be nothing more than a prelude to mental prayer. Its prime purpose was to create the conditions to enable man to lift «his mind to God so that divine love and holy contemplation are ignited». 5 The moment the ascendant state is attained, words become not only useless but a hindrance to communication with God.

ISBN: 978-0-7727-2036-8, 2008

in Michel Plaisance, Florence in the Time of the Medici. Public Celebrations, Politics, and Literature in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. Translated and Edited by Nicole Carew-Reid, 2008 pp. 141-173: Litterature and Censorship in Florence at the End of the Sixteenth Century

Reading and Censorship in Early Modern Europe Barcelona 11 13 De Diciembre De 2007 2010 Isbn 978 84 490 2655 3 Pags 57 78, 2010

Cf. also the recent Italian translation: Lettera al Papa (Letter to the Pope) (1995). 4. «Dio cerca da noi el culto interiore senza tante cerimonie»; Savonarola (1976: 176). 5. «Acciochè l'uomo levi la mente a Dio e s'accenda del divino amore e delle sante contemplazioni»; Savonarola (1976: 171).

This essay investigates censorial responses to Jean Bodin’s Methodus (1566) in Counter-Reformation Italy, using evidence from Italian libraries and archives to shed new light on the process that led to the inclusion of the work in the Roman Expurgatory Index of 1607. By examining the diverse, and sometimes conflicting, opinions that Catholic censors expressed on Bodin’s text and the ‘errors’ it contained, the essay shows that even a relatively cohesive ‘reading community’ such as that of Counter-Reformation censors could nurture fundamental disagreement in evaluating the content and dangerousness of a book, as well as in devising appropriate countermeasures. Censors often made sense of the same texts in utterly different ways, based not only on their own intellectual interests and backgrounds, but also on the different interpretive strategies that they adopted. In light of this fact, the article suggests that early modern censorship should be seen less as a purely repressive practice than as a peculiar type of readership, characterised (as all forms of readership) by instability, controversy, and active ‘meaning-making’.

2021

Jesuit Philosophy on the Eve of Modernity, 2019

This chapter sketches the origins and development of the debate over the notion of a uniform and solid doctrine and its impact on Jesuit philosophy. More precisely, it outlines how Jesuits thought about and actually exercised censorship in philosophy, how much liberty of philosophizing they allowed for, and what institutional means they established to enforce solidity and uniformity in doctrine.