The Censor as Reader: Censorial Responses to Bodin's Methodus in Counter-Reformation Italy (1587–1607)

Abstract

SUMMARYThis essay investigates censorial responses to Jean Bodin's Methodus (1566) in Counter-Reformation Italy, using evidence from Italian libraries and archives to shed new light on the process that led to the inclusion of the work in the Roman Expurgatory Index of 1607. By examining the diverse, and sometimes conflicting, opinions that Catholic censors expressed on Bodin's text and the ‘errors’ it contained, the essay shows that even a relatively cohesive ‘reading community’ such as that of Counter-Reformation censors could nurture fundamental disagreement in evaluating the content and dangerousness of a book, as well as in devising appropriate countermeasures. Censors often made sense of the same texts in utterly different ways, based not only on their own intellectual interests and backgrounds, but also on the different interpretive strategies that they adopted. In light of this fact, the article suggests that early modern censorship should be seen less as a purely repressive practice than as a peculiar type of readership, characterised (as are all forms of readership) by instability, controversy and active ‘meaning-making’.