Soon, most regions-and many individual cities-had created their own indexes of prohibited books. By the end of the sixteenth century censors were simply copying titles from the Frankfurt Book Fair catalog into the Index. It didn’t actually matter what books said there were already too many for the Roman censors and theologians even to skim them all. So were books printed anonymously or without specifying a printer, date, or place of publication: these were too suspicious. At first, Catholic censorship was a relatively straightforward matter: all Protestant books, and all Protestant authors, were banned. Catholic censorship persisted another four hundred years, making the Index the “longest-lived, and least understood” mechanism of censorship in history, as Robin Vose writes in a new book on the subject. The Roman Index of Prohibited Books was first published in 1559. From the beginning of the Catholic Church as an institution, churchmen sought to control the power of words-to shape good readers and eliminate bad ones. But humans misunderstand we grope for meaning we struggle to be understood. As Dante put it, angels “make themselves…completely known to each other,” communicating directly from divine spirit to divine spirit: a kind of transcendental laser beamed between celestial heads.
A bad reader’s soul was endangered for eternity. How to teach the Word of God, how to translate Scripture, how to gloss and explain it: these were problems of grave concern to premodern Christians, and getting them wrong was beyond life-and-death.
Frontispiece of the Index of Prohibited Books under Pope Benedict XIV, 1758
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