Index Librorum Prohibitorum: The Index of Forbidden Books — The Original Banned Book List
Banning books is almost as old as moveable type.
Centuries before anti-freedom of reading groups like Mom’s For Liberty or the states of Florida and Utah came along, the granddaddy of modern mass censorship – the Roman Catholic church – drafted its own list of books containing ideas it didn’t want its flock to know about.
Index Librorum Prohibitorum depicts the Holy Ghost supplying the book-burning fire.
Thusly the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Index of Forbidden Books, was created in 1559. It was sort of abolished in 1966.
Because books so seldom write themselves, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum also banned the authors of the books it didn’t want people to read. Often ALL books by particular authors were banned.
Once German inventor and failed entrepreneur Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg worked out a system for combining metal moveable type and a machine called a printing press, books and other printed stuff could be mass-produced. Between 1436 and 1450 Gutenberg developed the hardware and techniques for casting reusable individual metal letters.
Intellectual property rights being poorly developed in the 15th century, opportunists quickly ripped off Gutenberg’s invention and methods. Within a few decades, at least 270 cities in Europe had printing presses and printers trying to turn a profit. Books were still somewhat expensive, but there were a lot more of them and more people were learning how to read.
Posthumous portrait of Gutenberg. No contemporary depictions survive.
Luther’s original complaint list, the Ninety-five Theses or Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, were hand written. But this was before Facebook, so the best way to spread a disruptive idea was to have it printed and distributed on the streets.
And so it was.
This is where printing, books and publishing got caught in the middle of differences of opinions about sin, money and God – three things that go together like marshmallows, graham crackers, and chocolate bars.
Portrait of Martin Luther (1529) by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Public domain
Luther had a big problem with what, at the time, was one of the Catholic church’s largest sources of revenue: indulgences. Indulgences, not to be confused with rich fattening foods, were essentially Get Out Of Hell Free cards that could be purchased from traveling priest salesmen or your local cathedral.
Buying an indulgence meant that because the Pope endorsed them, when the indulgence buyer died, their soul could get out of purgatory, a kind of pre-Hell. Indulgence marketing even developed a catchy slogan: “As soon as a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs.”
At the time the whole Reformation rave was getting started, one of the most lucrative things to print were indulgences, a market niche than didn’t pan out in the long run. The Protestant Reformation as a whole pumped out large quantities of polemical new writing by both Catholics and Protestants. These religious written works were typically what either side wanted to suppress the most.
An example of printing spreading dangerous ideas: A single page printing of Luther’s Ninety-five Theses in two columns. Public domain
While governments and the church encouraged printing in certain ways. Printing allowed the dissemination of Bibles and government propaganda. At the same time works of dissent and criticism could also circulate rapidly, and you can’t have that.
Governments established controls over printers across Europe, mandating official licenses to trade and produce books.
England’s monarchy established a state printing company in 1557. The right to print was limited to the universities of Cambridge and Oxford and to 21 printers already doing business in London. The French crown burned printer and writer Étienne Dolet at the stake for atheism in 1546. The wide-ranging censorship rules of the Edict of Compiègne in 1557 included the death penalty for a number of religious and publishing-related offenses including going to Geneva or publishing books there.
Protestants and Catholics accused each other of being heretics. Both sides saw that controlling the press and creating a catalogue of prohibited works would be super-effective in stopping the spread of heresy.
The first official indexes of banned books appeared in the Netherlands in 1529, 1543 in Venice and 1551 in Paris.
There was almost immediate push back from printers on banning books or shutting down printers. This was especially true in Venice where there was a large concentration of printers. The Venetian indexes were withdrawn more than once because of opposition, according to historian Paul F. Grendler.
Rome got into book banning business in 1557 under the direction of Pope Paul IV, when it published its first Index, which it quickly withdrew. A new and improved Index, known as the Pauline Index, was published in 1559. It banned the entire works of some 550 authors in addition to a number of individual titles. The Pauline Index held that an author’s religious convictions “contaminated” all his work. The index included everything by Machiavelli and Erasmus, for example.
The master title page of Index Librorum Prohibitorum (in Venice, 1564)
A revised index, called Tridentine Index, was published in 1564. It remained the basis of all subsequent Catholic banned book indices until 1897 when Pope Leo XIII, published his version, the Index Leonianus.
The 20th and last edition of the Index was published in 1948. It covered 4,000 titles censored for heresy, moral deficiency, sexual explicitness, etc. The reason some atheists, such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, were not included was because heretical works are automatically banned. Catholics should just know not to look at those sorts of things.
Some works weren’t banned because nobody bothered to denounce them.
Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” was not included because of some interesting religious reasoning involving the powers of a head of state originating from god.
The works of Charles Darwin were never included, so no monkeying around there.
Because the world can never have too many banned book lists, the Catholic church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum was not alone.
The Holy Roman Empire’s book censorship list preceded the publication of the Roman Index. The church’s Index was not recognized in France. French officials decided what books to ban. Spain had its own Index Librorum Prohibitorum et Expurgatorum, which largely followed the church’s.
While the Roman Catholic church is no longer publishing lists of prohibited books and writers, it didn’t exactly get rid of the Index. It’s still around in the form of a more-or-less formal guilt trip.
In June 1966, an organization within the church, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said the Index still had moral authority but pushed responsibility for not reading the banned books off onto individual Catholics. In 1985, while still a Cardinal, conservative Pope Benedict XVI basically said the books on the Index are still a no-no.
Who are some of cool crew on the Index?
Index members include Simone de Beauvoir, Nicolas Malebranche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel de Montaigne, Voltaire,
Galileo being condemned in 1633, a victim of the Index.
Denis Diderot, Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, André Gide, Nikos Kazantzakis, Emanuel Swedenborg, Baruch Spinoza, Desiderius Erasmus, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, René Descartes, Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne, John Milton, John Locke, Nicolaus Copernicus, Niccolò Machiavelli, Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal, and Hugo Grotius.
The first woman indexed was Magdalena Haymairus, added in 1569. She was indexed for her totally scandalous children’s book Die sontegliche Episteln über das gantze Jar in gesangsweis gestellt (Sunday Epistles on the whole Year, put into hymns).
Exactly why did the Index Librorum Prohibitorum lose its mojo? Laziness.
Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, then the Pope’s right hand man other than Jesus, allegedly said in 1966 that there was too much contemporary literature. The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith could not keep up.