Gigliola Fragnito, ed. Church, Censorship and Culture in Early Modern Italy.

Trans. A. Belton. (Cambridge Studies in Italian History and Culture.) Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 264 pp. illus, index. $59.95. ISBN: 0-521-66172-2.

The title of this book is a misnomer. By the "Church" little more is meant than the Congregation for the Index, the erratic activities of which are largely identified with censorship, to the regrettable exclusion of the Holy Office. The concept of culture is never defined but assumed to be equivalent to the printed book. Art, architecture, and painting, with which the Roman Inquisition concerned itself, are excluded. A prevailing indifference to historiographical debate in English or German on related themes and, with two laudable exceptions (U. Baldini and E Parente), a narrow range of reference to both primary sources and secondary literature make this book a typical product of the empirical research into the early modern period now current in Italy.

The criteria by which the work will be assessed are set out by the editor in her introduction and in the blurb: "The recent opening of the archive of the former Congregation of the Holy Office in Rome ... has yielded an extraordinary wealth of documentation which is already altering dramatically many long-standing views on the repressive activity of the Roman church during the Counter Reformation.... This book [draws] extensively on this archival source."

So the initial claim, belied by the fact that two of the eight essays (by E. Barbieri and U. Rozzo) make no reference to archival sources and that few others display any substantial acquaintance with the documentation of the Holy Office.

The historical errors and distortions that follow from this omission vitiate the book. The Holy Office and the Congregation for the Index were not comparable in power or status, and to describe them as "the two supreme Congregations" (702, my italics) is to present a travesty of the truth (compare Sixtus V's apostolic constitution Immensa aeterni Dei, of 22 January 1588). Little attention is paid to the irregularity with which the Congregation for the Index met or to the detail of its working methods. Instead, the editor substitutes her hypothesis of a struggle for primacy, in the sphere of censorship, between that inefficient organization and the Supreme Tribunal, based on no cited knowledge of "the extraordinary wealth of [inquisitorial] documentation."

Assertion substituted for argument, cliches are confirmed. "Irreparable damage [was] wrought to the literary heritage," it is claimed at page 34, "by the erratic directives due to [sic] the conflict between the Holy Office and the Index." Yet the church's attempt to reshape and redirect orthodox culture, interestingly discussed in L. Balsamo's essay on A. Possevino's bibliography, is amply attested both in the censura librorum of the Holy Office and in the many and various efforts at expurgatio made by the Congregation for the Index. Repression is too crude a model for the activities of both organizations, some of whose leading members (R. Bellarmine, C. Baronio, etc.) functioned both as censors and as authors. The phenomenon is subtler and more ambivalent than the black and white brushstrokes of G. Fragnito's introduction suggests, and some of the better essays in this book, such as U. Rozzo's account of prohibited Italian literature, would have profited from an attempt to relate formal condemnations to the practice of rewriting entailed by expurgatio.

Useful treatments of specialist themes--C. Donati on treatises on dueling, F. Parente on the Talmud, and R. Savelli on law books--contribute to remedying this defect, but only one essay in this book displays a full and magisterial command of the sources. U. Baldini's study of the Roman Inquisition's condemnation of judicial astrology demonstrates how prohibition contributed to excluding that subject from "the standard typology of scientific publications," with the paradoxical result that "the Holy Office and the Index, by defending a doctrinal orthodoxy that included substantial parts of the medieval vision of the world, created the conditions for its superseding." The range, both intellectual and geographical, of this study sets it apart from the others, and its combination of concreteness and originality "dramatically alters" the commonplace of ill-defined hostility attributed (on no evidence) to the Roman Inquisition "when faced in the sixteenth century with the greatest danger of culturally and religiously suspect ferment" (5) allegedly created by the printed book.

A knowledge of Italian is often required to reconstruct, or to guess, what the authors might have meant. Poorly translated ("invested at the central level," 2, "chivalrous science," 8, "extremely widely indeed," 76; "the Rome Inquisition," 102; "the generic nature," 134 et passim) and inadequately edited ("Franciscus de la Pinta" 238, n. 48 is not, as the index, 261, implies, a separate figure but the Latinized name of Francisco Pefia, ibid.), this work has been produced in palpable haste. More care, more capacity for historical reflection, and--above all--more acquaintance with the primary sources might have left U. Baldini's essay less isolated in the depth and insight of its scholarship.

PETER GODMAN

Conventodi, San Francisco, Umbria, Italy