The Index of Prohibited Books, by Robin Vose

At a time when, at least where I live in the United States, book challenges and removals are at an all-time high, how could I resist a book that looks to one of the oldest efforts to systematically keep dangerous books out of the hands of the public? In The Index of Prohibited Books, Robin Vose takes us through the four-hundred-year history of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. The Latin name—and the power of the Catholic Church behind it—makes the Index sound ominous, but Vose reveals a much more complicated history than I expected. Even before its first edition appeared in 1560, Catholic officials and scholars had to fight against an unstoppable flood of newly printed material on all topics. Even if the Catholic Church could keep up with the rising tide of books and pamphlets, they didn’t have the reach or authority to enforce their proscriptions. I couldn’t help but read this book with a smirk on my face. Book censors are always doomed to fail.

The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was not the first attempt by a powerful organization to censor information. Vose takes us all the way back to Akenaten’s iconoclasm (and his subsequent near-erasure from Ancient Egyptian history) to show us how old this idea is. Ideas are powerful things and not having access to some information can obscure reality from people. There may be examples of successful censorship and erasures that we’ll never know about, of course, but we still know about Akenaten’s monotheism and we know about nearly all of the authors and books listed in the various editions of the Index. One of my favorite parts of Vose’s Index was when he shared some of the Protestant responses to the Catholic Index:

“Thus in 1627 the first head of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, Thomas James, obtained and reprinted his own version of the Catholic Index as a bibliographical resource. Noting that Index compilers had in fact done rather a good of over the years of listing all the greatest works of Protestant scholarship, James urged his fellow librarians to use such efforts as a collector’s guide…”

I love this bit of evidence of subversive (intentionally or otherwise) librarians.

James’s use of the Index as a buyer’s guide also illustrates the second problem of establishing widespread censorship: enforcement. Vose noted that some booksellers and printers (especially in the sixteenth century) were subjected to raids and had their stock burned. Galileo was famously placed under house arrest by the Roman Inquisition for his scientific views. Giordano Bruno received a violent death for his scholarship of magic and heretical (to Catholic eyes) ideas. But these seem to be rare instances of actual punitive action. Instead, the Catholic Church seemed to rely on Catholics to police themselves. The lack of enforcement was further complicated by two things. First, by the mid-1600s, large parts of Europe were Protestant and in open defiance of Catholic authority. Second, the Index was not a single effort. The Roman and Spanish branches of the Catholic Church produced rival Indexes. If the Catholic Church couldn’t agree on one list, what were faithful Catholics to do?

The third issue at play—after there being too much material for Index compilers to deal with and having no way to really enforce their proscriptions—were the vagaries of historical movements, social mores, and the will of whatever pope was in charge. Some popes and Index makers were, well, catholic in their censoring, going well beyond their initial brief of censoring heretical (especially Protestant) ideas. Some popes didn’t care about censorship efforts and just didn’t make the effort to publish new editions of the Index. Still other popes would reverse previous decisions and actually censor previous editions of the Index itself, an occurrence that also tickles me. Vose points out two works that turned out to be so popular that they were un-censorable: the works of Ramon Llull and the Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio. Spanish censors simply refused to let Llull be censored. In Italy and other places where the Decameron was popular, there wasn’t enough political will to rip copies out of readers’ hands.

So while the Index represents something that is anathema to me, other librarians, and free thinkers throughout history (censorship), Vose’s history turned out to be surprisingly comforting for me. In spite of all the efforts of censors and the real, demonstrable dangers of censoring stories and ideas, there will always be pushback. Students in various states here in the U.S. are creating reading clubs for books that reactionaries have taken out of schools and public libraries. More people are standing up at town council meetings and school board meetings to argue against removing books. I can only hope, however, that current efforts to remove books meet the same fate as the Index, which was closed down with no fanfare in 1966. Of course, this isn’t to say that I want to wait 400 years for people to read what they like; we should all fight like hell against any attempt to censor books. Rather, we can take this history lesson as a dose of hope when we feel discouraged. Censors are never on the right side of history and their attempts to hide or destroy ideas they don’t like are always doomed to fail.