Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy by Hannah Marcus

Abstract

Reviewed by: Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy by Hannah Marcus Jane Stevens Crawshaw Hannah Marcus. Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. xii + 356 pp. Ill. $45.00 (978-0-226-73658-7). One of the rich and revealing examples of material culture included in Hannah Marcus’s new book on early modern Italian censorship is a mid-eighteenth-century woodstove. It takes the form of a bookshelf which displays volumes by leading figures of the Protestant Reformations. A banner on the stove reads “Library consecrated by fire” and the figure of a priest gestures expressively atop the piece (p. 200). The dynamics of destruction and construction, purification and pollution, [End Page 267] damnation and salvation are shown, in this piece, to be vividly coexistent. The same is true of Marcus’s excellent study, which demonstrates the manifold ways in which these forces and ideas shaped the religious, intellectual, and cultural life of the Italian peninsula during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet, as this careful and considered volume shows, the culture and processes of censorship, through which religious authorities sought to negotiate the new divisions and heresies codified during Europe’s Reformations, were complex and contested. Marcus’s study concentrates on the attitudes and actions adopted toward books that were written and read by physicians in early modern Italy, as well as the book collections they amassed. It recognizes that, in relation to medical learning, the Catholic Church often had neither the ability nor the desire to prohibit texts in their entirety for reasons of perceived utility and influence. Indeed, what emerges is a characterization of censorship as an ongoing, reciprocal, and negotiated endeavor. Alongside the publication of indexes of prohibited books, Catholic authorities developed complex systems for licensing and expurging texts. This latter approach, described by Cardinal Agostino Valier as “trimming off all that is superfluous and pernicious and putting together what good there is from one and the other” (p. 85), had a significant influence on the material form of books, the knowledge they contained, and the communities of authority and expertise which were required to adjudicate on those “pernicious” and “good” elements. The book explores these themes in an introduction, seven chapters, and an engaging epilogue. Chapter 1 explores the rich intellectual and personal connections that linked Protestant and Catholic scholars across the European “medical republic of letters” and the ways in which these relationships were used to try to circumvent restrictions imposed by the Roman indexes of prohibited books from 1559. Despite efforts to ban books outright, there were extensive calls to “correct” medical texts and facilitate Catholic readership. Chapter 2 highlights the practical challenges involved in this work of expurgation. During the 1590s Catholic authorities attempted to utilize the expertise of scholars at the University of Padua to carry out this work for medical texts. The few incentives and contested oversight for this burdensome and complex task meant that these efforts failed. This was not always the case, however. Chapter 3 considers the case of the physician Girolamo Rossi of Ravenna who was an arduous and willing censor for the Roman Inquisition. Chapter 4 moves from the focus on the readers and censors to the compilation of their work in the published Roman Index of expurgations in 1607. Chapter 5 assesses the structure for licensing readers to access prohibited medical books, establishing the widespread use of this process on the basis of surviving licenses and, more commonly, inscriptions in the early pages of medical books. The impact of censorship practices on the material form of books is continued in chapter 6, which demonstrates the range of ways in which a book might be expurged: by cutting out key pages, sections or names, pasting over the same or using ink to transform characters, black out sections and deface names and images, sometimes explicitly as an act of damnatio memoriae. Yet for all of these efforts to consign people and ideas to be forgotten, the years of Catholic censorship coincided with a period of book collecting that was underpinned by [End Page 268] the ideal of a “universal library” and drive for...