Between policing and literary criticism: Habsburg censorship of literature in Lombardy-Venetia

Abstract

The article looks at censors’ statements from the Venice State Archive and asks whether the parallels between censors speaking on literary texts and the mode of literary criticism can be productively analyzed with the help of these archival materials. The Venetian censorship bureau, established in 1814/15 in the context of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia and forming part of Habsburg Empire, is a welcome source given the comparative paucity of censors’ statements in other parts of the Empire in the early nineteenth century and during the pre-revolutionary Vormärz period. In particular, the paper examines a set of censors’ statements from 1818, containing on the whole arguments in favor of the publication of manuscripts (or circulation of foreign books). Among them figure a number of justification strategies employed by the censors, which point beyond the usual censorship categories of offences against religion, the authorities and morals. The paper looks at various statements on “modern classical” texts (e.g. Schiller’s “Song of the Bell”, Ossian, James Thomson), as well as the ways censors developed in order to engage with contemporary literature. The main case study in this respect is dedicated to the Italian translation of a historical novel by Jane Porter, The Scottish Chiefs (1810), published as I capi scozzesi in 1822–23. The way censors reflected critical discourses on the one hand, and reacted to materials from the books on the other, immediately situates them in the context of literary criticism and the statements themselves are found to constitute a valuable source for book history, the history of reading, as well as for the development of censorship in the nineteenth century.