Article ID: CBB939734836

The Censor as Reader: Censorial Responses to Bodin's Methodus in Counter-Reformation Italy (1587–1607) (2016)

unapi

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 are all forms of readership) by instability, controversy and active ‘meaning-making’.

...More
Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB939734836/

Similar Citations

Book Michelson, Emily; (2013)
The Pulpit and the Press in Reformation Italy (/isis/citation/CBB001550011/)

Article Tarrant, Neil; (2014)
Censoring Science in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Recent (and Not-So-Recent) Research (/isis/citation/CBB001420237/)

Article Laura Simoni Varanini; (2003)
La "Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo" fra Galileo e Bruno (/isis/citation/CBB554864820/)

Book Natacha Fabbri; Federica Favino; (2018)
Copernicus Banned: The Entangled Matter of the anti-Copernican Decree of 1616 (/isis/citation/CBB869881150/)

Book Gennaro Cassiani; (2022)
Tommaso Bozio. I saperi scientifici e i libri “lincei” (1548-1610) (/isis/citation/CBB199056166/)

Book Dániel Margócsy; Somos, Márk; Joffe, Stephen N.; (2018)
The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions (/isis/citation/CBB947458283/)

Book Kavey, Allison; (2007)
Books of Secrets: Natural Philosophy in England, 1550--1600 (/isis/citation/CBB000774266/)

Book Krämer, Fabian; (2014)
Ein Zentaur in London: Lektüre und Beobachtung in der frühneuzeitlichen Naturforschung (/isis/citation/CBB001510178/)

Article Francisco Malta Romeiras; (2020)
Putting the Indices into Practice: Censoring Science in Early Modern Portugal (/isis/citation/CBB223674544/)

Article Beretta, Francesco; Lerner, Michel-Pierre; (2006)
Un édit inédit: autour du placard de mise à l'index de Copernic par le maître du Sacré palais Giacinto Petroni (/isis/citation/CBB000931271/)

Article Prete, Ivano Dal; (2014)
“Being the World Eternal …”: The Age of the Earth in Renaissance Italy (/isis/citation/CBB001450158/)

Chapter Dario Generali; (2016)
Il fondo librario Bartolomeo Corte della Biblioteca Braidense di Milano (/isis/citation/CBB815421660/)

Article Luís Campos Ribeiro; (2020)
The Bounded Heavens: Defining the Limits of Astrological Practice in the Iberian Indices (/isis/citation/CBB478312733/)

Chapter Henninger-Voss, Mary; (2007)
Comets and Cannonballs: Reading Technology in a Sixteenth-Century Library (/isis/citation/CBB000774653/)

Book Hannah Marcus; (2020)
Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy (/isis/citation/CBB635940733/)

Article Leen Spruit; (2016)
Roman Censorship of Science and Natural Philosophy: 16th–17th Centuries (/isis/citation/CBB513454885/)

Authors & Contributors
Marcus, Hannah
Joffe, Stephen N.
Jonathan R. Olson
Bragagnolo, Manuela
Somos, Mark
Ribeiro, Luís Campos
Concepts
Censorship
Science and religion
Counter-Reformation
Books
Inquisitions
Reading
Time Periods
16th century
17th century
Early modern
Renaissance
18th century
Places
Italy
Portugal
Rome (Italy)
Milan (Italy)
England
Spain
Institutions
Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Rome)
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment