Dove non arriva la legge. Dottrine della censura nella prima età moderna (review)

Abstract

Dove non arriva la legge. Dottrine della censura nella prima eta moderna. By Lucia Bianchin. [Annali dell'Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento: Monografie, 41.] (Bologna: Societa editrice il Mulino. 2005. Pp. 389. euro25.50 paperback.) The book analyzes the ideas about censorship expressed by Jean Bodin, Pierre Gregoire, Justus Iipsius, Johannes Althusius, and Johann Angelius Werdenhagen. The views of these authors on a subject crucial to late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe were not influenced by the actual organization of the papal control system on culture and book circulation, but relied mostly on a reappraisal of ancient Roman censorship. The moral and political censorship implemented by the Roman republic was generally described, in the texts here examined, as a powerful means to enforce social discipline and to prevent conflicts and dissent fatal to the state. Bianchin outlines first the historiographical background of her research, discussing some recent contributions concerning the processes of confessionalization and social-disciplining in both Catholic and Protestant areas, between the Peace of Augsburg and the Thirty Years' War. She then compares the Catholic censorship system-intended to prevent printing and reading of books dangerous to the faithful-and the Protestant one, instrumental in enforcing strict religious obedience through the control of moral and social behavior. The third chapter turns upon the ancient Roman magistrate called censura, charged with maintaining the census-a list of the citizens and of their properties compiled for fiscal and military purposes-and supervising public morality. Neglected in medieval legal tradition, the ancients' model met with a revival during the sixteenth century. At the beginning of the earlymodern period, Bianchin points out, legal literature testifies to a new interest in the indicium censorium, a sort of judgment founded on equity, sanctioning vices, bad habits, and moral infringements not subject to the law: But only in the first chapter of the sixth book of Bodin's Republique (De la censure) does the account of the establishment and development of the Roman censura lead to a doctrine of censorship that entrusts to the state the task of imposing moral discipline and restraining offenses like gambling, idleness, drunkenness, vagrancy, and licentiousness. The Bodinian idea of moral control-easy to connect to the rigorous concept of state sovereignty asserted in the Republique-provided a basic reference to later writers dealing with the role of censorship in the organization of the state. In his Syntagma juris universi (1582), then in the De Republica libri sex et viginti (1596) the French canonist Pierre Gregoire follows faithfully Bodin's argument, claiming moreover for the government a wider control over private life and marriage. He, nevertheless, warns against the excesses of censores, the cause, in his opinion, of the ruin and disuse of the Roman magistrate. …