[CATHOLIC INDEX OF PROHIBITED BOOKS]

Very rare pocket edition of the list of books prohibited since the Tridentine Index of Pope Clement VIII (1592-1605), which had added some eleven hundred volumes to earlier lists of censored works compiled by the Catholic Church, this new edict issued under the auspices of the cardinals in charge of the index. Included is Nicholas Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, published 1543 but newly banned in 1616, pending corrections; Copernicus ‘non correctus’ duly appears here. There is also a separate entry banning ‘all books that teach the mobility of the earth, and the immobility of the sun’ (libri omnes docents mobilitatem terrae, & immobilitatem Solis). It is perhaps surprising that such an important entry appears, alphabetically, only under the innocuous title of ‘Libri’, and there are no separate references to direct readers to the injunction. It is unclear who wrote this general prohibition, which was more decisive than the text of the March 1616 meeting on which this edict was based; the original wording had suspended Copernicus’s work pending correction and had threatened similar works with prohibition or suspension ‘respectively’, i.e. on a case-by-case basis (aliosque omnes idem docents respective prohibendos vel suspendendos). Indeed, one of the works specifically mentioned and prohibited in the 1616 meeting, Antonio Foscarini’s Lettera sopra l’opinione de Pittagorici e del Copernico della mobilità della terra et stabilità del sole (1615), does not appear here, presumably because it was now considered covered by the general injunction; another, however, Didacus of Alcalá’s commentary on Job, does appear separately. The former head of the Office, Paolo Emilio Sfondrati, had died in 1618, which means that Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621), who was credited with the wording of the 1616 decree, was most likely to have implemented the 1619 changes (see Pierre-Nöel Mayaud, La Condamnation des Livres Coperniciens et sa Révocation (Rome, 1997), pp. 38, 52). English works included are King James I’s Basilikon Doron, published 1599, and Sir Henry Savile’s eight-volume Eton edition of Saint John Chrysostom, published between 1610 and 1613. Curiously so is Mercator’s Atlas ‘non correctus’.

‘The ‘Index of Prohibited Books’ is the classic example of censorship. It is a catalogue produced by papal authority of books considered to be dangerous to religion and morals which Roman Catholics should not read without dispensation … Until the end of the sixteenth century the ‘Index’ was used mainly to help in the Vatican’s fight against the Reformation’ (Printing and the Mind of Man (1967), pp. 49-50). Later it was expanded to include liturgical or dogmatic works not approved by the Holy See as well as immoral or obscene ones. Supplements were issued until 1961.