European restrictions on the right to print , Germany The historical context in which the
Index appeared involved the early restrictions on printing in Europe. The refinement of
moveable type and the
printing press by
Johannes Gutenberg changed the nature of book publishing, and the mechanism by which information could be disseminated to the public. Books, once rare and kept carefully in a small number of libraries, could be mass-produced and widely disseminated. In the 16th century, both the churches and governments in most European countries attempted to regulate and control printing because it allowed for the rapid and widespread circulation of ideas and information. The
Protestant Reformation generated large quantities of polemical new writing by and within both the Catholic and Protestant camps, and religious subject matter was typically the area most subject to control. While governments and the church encouraged printing in many ways, which allowed the dissemination of
Bibles and government information, works of dissent and criticism could also circulate rapidly. As a consequence, governments established controls over printers across Europe, requiring them to have official licenses to trade and produce books. The early versions of prohibition indexes began to appear from 1529 to 1571. In the same time frame, in 1557 the
English crown aimed to stem the flow of dissent by chartering the
Stationers' Company. The right to print was restricted to the two universities (Oxford and Cambridge) and to the 21 existing printers in the
city of London, which had between them 53
printing presses. The 1557
Edict of Compiègne applied the death penalty to heretics and resulted in the burning of a noblewoman at the stake. Printers were viewed as radical and rebellious, with 800 authors, printers and book dealers being incarcerated in the
Bastille. At times, the prohibitions of church and state followed each other, e.g.
René Descartes was placed on the Index in the 1660s and the French government prohibited the teaching of
Cartesianism in schools in the 1670s. The
Copyright Act 1710 in Britain, and later copyright laws in France, eased this situation. Historian Eckhard Höffner claims that copyright laws and their restrictions acted as a barrier to progress in those countries for over a century, since British publishers could print valuable knowledge in limited quantities for the sake of profit. The German economy prospered in the same time frame since there were no restrictions.
Early indexes (1529–1571) The first list of the kind was not published in
Rome, but in Catholic
Netherlands (1529);
Venice (1543) and
Paris (1551) under the terms of the
Edict of Châteaubriant followed this example. By the mid-century, in the tense atmosphere of wars of religion in Germany and France, both Protestant and Catholic authorities reasoned that only control of the press, including a catalogue of prohibited works, coordinated by ecclesiastic and governmental authorities, could prevent the spread of heresy. Paul F. Grendler (1975) discusses the religious and political climate in Venice from 1540 to 1605. There were many attempts to censor the Venetian press, which at that time was one of the largest concentrations of printers. Both church and government held to a belief in censorship, but the publishers continually pushed back on the efforts to ban books and shut down printing. More than once the index of banned books in Venice was suppressed or suspended because various people took a stand against it. The first Roman
Index was printed in 1557 under the direction of
Pope Paul IV (1555–1559), but then withdrawn for unclear reasons. "The Pauline Index felt that the religious convictions of an author contaminated all his writing."
Sacred Congregation of the Index (1571–1917) In 1571, a special
congregation was created, the
Sacred Congregation of the Index, which had the specific task to investigate those writings that were denounced in
Rome as being not exempt of errors, to update the list of Pope Pius IV regularly and also to make lists of required corrections in case a writing was not to be condemned absolutely but only in need of correction; it was then listed with a mitigating clause (e.g., ('forbidden until corrected') or ('forbidden until purged')). Several times a year, the congregation held meetings. During the meetings, they reviewed various works and documented those discussions. In between the meetings was when the works to be discussed were thoroughly examined, and each work was scrutinized by two people. At the meetings, they collectively decided whether or not the works should be included in the Index. Ultimately, the pope was the one who had to approve of works being added or removed from the Index. It was the documentation from the meetings of the congregation that aided the pope in making his decision. being condemned in 1633 This sometimes resulted in very long lists of corrections, published in the , which was cited by
Thomas James in 1627 as "an invaluable reference work to be used by the curators of the
Bodleian Library when listing those works particularly worthy of collecting". Prohibitions made by other congregations (mostly the Holy Office) were simply passed on to the Congregation of the Index, where the final
decrees were drafted and made public, after approval of the
Pope (who always had the option to condemn an author personally—there are only a few examples of such condemnation, including those of
Lamennais and
Hermes). An update to the Index was made by Pope
Leo XIII, in the 1897 apostolic constitution , known as the . The
Sacred Congregation of the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church later became the
Holy Office, and since 1965 has been called the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The Congregation of the Index was merged with the Holy Office in 1917, by the of Pope Benedict XV; the rules on the reading of books were again re-elaborated in the new . From 1917 onward, the Holy Office (again) took care of the Index. '' was placed on the Index, Adolf Hitler's book was not. contained 4,000 titles censored for various reasons:
heresy, moral deficiency,
sexual explicitness, and so on. That some
atheists, such as
Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche, were not included was due to the general (
Tridentine) rule that
heretical works (i.e., works that contradict Catholic dogma) are
ipso facto forbidden. Some important works are absent simply because nobody bothered to denounce them. Many actions of the congregations were of a definite
political content. Among the denounced works of the period was the Nazi philosopher
Alfred Rosenberg's
Myth of the Twentieth Century for scorning and rejecting "all dogmas of the Catholic Church, and the fundamentals of the Christian religion". Markedly absent from the Index was Adolf Hitler's book . After gaining access to the
Vatican Apostolic Archive church historian
Hubert Wolf discovered that had been studied for three years but the Holy Office decided that it should not go on the Index because the author was a head of state. The Holy Office justified that decision by referring to chapter 13 of
Paul the Apostle's
Epistle to the Romans regarding state authority coming from God. The Index was not listed as being a part of the newly constituted congregation's competence, leading to questioning whether it still was. This question was put to Cardinal
Alfredo Ottaviani, pro-prefect of the congregation, who responded in the negative. The Cardinal also indicated in his response that there was going to be a change in the Index soon. A June 1966 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
notification announced that, while the
Index maintained its moral force, in that it taught Christians to beware, as required by the natural law itself, of those writings that could endanger faith and morality, it no longer had the force of
ecclesiastical positive law with the associated penalties. The
canon law of the
Latin Church still recommends that works should be submitted to the judgment of the local
ordinary (typically, the bishop) if they concern sacred
scripture,
theology, canon law, or
church history, religion or morals. The local
ordinary consults someone whom he considers competent to give a judgment and, if that person gives the ('nothing forbids'), the local ordinary grants the ('let it be printed'). Members of religious institutes require the ('it can be printed') of their major superior to publish books on matters of religion or morals. ==Scope and impact==