by Jack Lynch
This energetic propagation of heresies prompted one of the most influential but also paradoxical reference books in all of European history—a book in which everything is wrong. It was variously known as the Index librorum prohibitorum or the Index expurgatorius, but it was usually enough to call it simply the Index: books the Roman Catholic Church deemed heretical. Not all were related to Protestantism, but that was clearly the most important category of heresy in the sixteenth century. As historian Benedict Anderson puts it, the Index was “a novel catalogue made necessary by the sheer volume of printed subversion.”1
Registers of problematic books had been published starting in the 1520s, but the first official printed list came in 1544, when the Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris issued a catalog of banned books. It proved both influential and in need of rapid updating, so new editions followed in 1545, 1547, 1549, 1551, and 1556. The theologians at the University of Leuven (in what is now Belgium) offered their own index in 1546, again with revised editions following in rapid succession. A Portuguese list appeared in 1547; the first Italian list—a Venetian index—appeared in 1549; and a Spanish list was printed in 1551.
The most influential of all the versions, though, came from Rome a few years later. In 1557, Pope Paul IV gave the Congregation of the Inquisition an urgent task: to come up with a complete list of banned books. One list was prepared quickly—probably too quickly, because the Church authorities found it unsatisfactory and declined to print it. In January 1559, though, a longer version appeared. It was the first one to come from Rome, and it was the first one actually to be called an Index. Because it was prepared under Paul IV, it has become known as the Pauline Index.
More than a thousand books appeared in it, all of them forbidden to the laity. There are three rubrics for each letter of the alphabet. The first group, “Auctores quorum libri & scripta omnia prohibentur” (“Authors all of whose writings are banned”), listed heretical authors, including John Calvin, Martin Luther, and William Tyndale. (Luther in fact was listed under both L for “Lutherus” and M for “Martinus Lutherus.”) The second category was “Certorum auct. Libri prohibiti” (“Banned books of known authors”): works such as Girolamo Savonarola’s first sermon on Exodus and his commentary on Job, Polydore Vergil’s De inventoribus rerum, and commentaries on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The final category, “Incertorum auct. Libri prohibiti” (“Banned books by unknown authors”), listed anonymous books, such as Brevis & compendiosa instructio de religione Christiana (Brief and Compendious Instruction in the Christian Religion), Germanicæ nationis lamentationes (Lamentations of the German Nation), and Cur ecclesia quattuor Evangelia acceptavit (Why the Church Has Four Evangelists).
TITLE: Index auctorum, et librorû, qui ab officio sanctæ Rom. et Vniuersalis Inquisitionis caueri ab omnibus et singulis in uniuersa Christiana Republica mandantur, sub censuris contra legentes, uel tenentes libros prohibitos in bulla, quæ lecta est in Cœna Dûi expressis, et sub alijs pænis in decreto eiusdem sacri officij contentis
COMPILER: Office of the Roman Inquisition
ORGANIZATION: Alphabetical by first names and titles of anonymous works
PUBLISHED: Rome: Antonio Blado, January 1559
PAGES: 72
ENTRIES: 1,130, including some duplicates
TOTAL WORDS: 5,700
SIZE: 8″ × 5″ (20.5 × 13 cm)
AREA: 20.6 ft2 (1.9 m2)
LATEST EDITION: Index librorum prohibitorum, SS. mi D.N. Pii PP. XII iussu editus (Vatican City: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1948)
The most sweeping bans appeared against Protestantism, the most obvious threat to the Catholic Church. A prime example was Henry VIII, once defensor fidei, “defender of the faith,” who appeared on the list of forbidden authors as “Henricus viij Anglus.” The other Abrahamic faiths were also viewed as enemies, and “Thalmud Hebræorum” (the Talmud) and “Alchoranus Mahometis” (the Qur’an) were both interdicted. Closer to home, Cornelius Agrippa and Rabelais were among the forbidden authors, and the twenty books of the Catalan theologian Ramon Lull that Pope Gregory XI had condemned in 1376 went on the list, even though Lull would eventually be beatified by one of Gregory’s successors, Pius IX. The Decameron (“Ioannis Boccacij lib. inscrip. Cento nouelle,” “The book written by Giovanni Boccaccio, A Hundred Stories”) was excluded as too racy. It is surprising to see the Bible on the list, but there are dozens of them, most of which earned their way there with doctrinally dodgy commentary, as with “Nouum Testamentum apud Ioannem Crispinum 1555, Cum omnib. similibus libris Noui Testamenti” (“The New Testament published by Johan Crespin in 1555, with all similar books of the New Testament”). Toward the end of the book was a list of publishers whose works were banned—simply printing the works of heretical authors earned a spot on the Index.
But a single list was not sufficient. Another Index was prepared by a commission established by the Council of Trent in 1564, under Pius IV, known as the Tridentine Index. This one established ten general norms that influenced Catholic censorship for centuries. The first nine covered categories always automatically banned because of their heresy; the tenth reasserts the need for approval before publication. These Tridentine rules prohibited all books by heretical authors on matters of religion, all obscene works, and works on astrology, divination, and the occult. This council ruled that the Vulgate—the Latin translation of the Bible, prepared by Jerome in the fourth century—was the only “official” Bible, and that no religious books could be printed without the approval of the Church.
All the versions of the Index forbade not only the publishing but also the reading of these books, with the penalty for disobedience being excommunication from the Church. The Index, however, was never seen as a comprehensive catalog of forbidden books. Canon law allowed for both censorship in advance of publication and condemnation of books already published, and the Vatican made liberal use of both kinds of prohibition. Even Bible reading was permitted only by those licensed by a bishop or inquisitor.
For the first few decades, the process by which a new Index was compiled was strictly ad hoc. In 1571, though, Pope Pius V created a new organization within the Church: the Congregation of the Index, a permanent body charged with censoring new publications. It was busy. In 1588, Pope Sixtus V ordered a new and expanded Index in which the ten Tridentine rules would be replaced by twenty-two new rules, but Sixtus died before it was complete, and this Index would go unpublished. The version of the Index issued by Clement VIII in 1596 topped two thousand banned books, and by the middle of the eighteenth century, it had grown to more than four thousand writers and works. Each edition republished the previous one with new additions.
Several broad categories of offense were likely to get a book into trouble. Any theological text that contradicted Church doctrine was certain to wind up on the prohibited list: an attack on Trinitarianism, for instance. John Milton’s writings were forbidden for their bitter attacks on the Roman Catholic Church: “The increase of Popery is at this day no small trouble and offence to the greatest part of the Nation.”2 Mysticism was not tolerated, nor was Gallicanism, which tried to give the civil authorities control over the Church. Neither were some books that had nothing to do with theology. The most famous examples appeared not long after the early versions of the Index: works that promoted the heliocentric theory of Copernicus, according to which the sun rather than the earth is the center of the universe, were proscribed. Books that ridiculed the clergy were of course candidates for banning, and their authors’ protestations that the satire on abusive priests was really meant to strengthen the Church by drawing attention to abuses were ignored. The final category was smut: anything lascivious was quickly suppressed. The Marquis de Sade’s Juliette and Justine was banned, as was Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which may seem comparatively tame today, but in the 1850s shocked the world with its sympathetic portrait of an adulteress.
Over its long history, the Index has included Francis Bacon, Pierre Bayle, Henri Bergs
on, George Berkeley, Auguste Comte, Jean d’Alembert, René Descartes, Denis Diderot, Dumas père & fils, Edward Gibbon, Thomas Hobbes, Victor Hugo, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, Nicolas de Malebranche, Blaise Pascal, Ernest Renan, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benedict Spinoza, Voltaire, and Émile Zola. Some names catch us unawares. The novel Pamela by Samuel Richardson seems a model of piety. The Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus remained a devout Catholic, even in the midst of the Protestant Reformation, but his satires on the abuses of the clergy were enough to put him on the first Roman Index in 1559. Books could also come off the list. Johannes Kepler’s Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae was banned in 1621, but a mere 214 years later, in 1835, it was deemed safe. Copernicus and Galileo were removed in 1822.
From its origins in the 1520s through its last edition in 1948, the Index attempted to combat more than four hundred years of heresy. The First Vatican Council in 1870 considered reworking the whole system of censorship, but nothing came of it. Not long after that, Pope Leo XIII revised the legislation somewhat, with a new version—this time known as the Leonine Index—in early 1897. This Index was reissued and revised several times; it reached a twentieth edition in 1948, listing five thousand prohibited titles. Still, Leo’s work was less about banning individual titles than about laying out principles to guide the faithful. Nonetheless, the Index’s days were numbered. The Second Vatican Council, convened by Pope John XXIII in 1962, called for a Church more open to modernity. The pastoral constitution known as Gaudium et spes—“Joy and Hope”—was officially promulgated on the last day of the council by Pope Paul VI. It included the provision “Let it be recognized that all the faithful, clerical and lay, possess a lawful freedom of inquiry and thought.” The new openness to freedom of thought was followed shortly afterward by the official demise of the Index: on June 14, 1966, the practice of banning books was officially brought to an end.
A very different attempt to patrol the borders of truth produced one of the strangest books ever published in any genre. It does not quite deserve to be called a reference book, but then, it does not really fit in any other category.
Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica—the title, made up of Latinized Greek roots, means something like “outbreak of false belief”—is an imposing compendium of error. Browne was a quirky English polymath who studied at Oxford and became a physician, publishing a spiritual autobiography called Religio Medici (The Religion of a Physician) that became a wholly unexpected bestseller in 1643. Though Browne was devout, his main concern was not false Christian doctrine but folk beliefs without foundation. And his four-hundred-page Pseudodoxia is chock full of these misguided beliefs.3
We make mistakes, Browne explained, because we are human: “The first and father cause of common Error, is the common infirmity of humane nature; of whose deceptible condition, although perhaps there should not need any other eviction, then the frequent errors, we shall our selves commit, even in the expresse declarement hereof.” In the Bible between the Fall and the Flood, he pointed out, “there is but one speech delivered by man, wherein there is not an erronious conception.” Some errors were attributable to “an invisible Agent,” who “playes in the darke upon us, and that is the first contriver of Error, and professed opposer of Truth, the Divell”—Satan himself. And Browne warned that youthful errors, however innocent, eventually turn into rigid dogma: “we are very sensible how hardly teaching yeares do learn; what roots old age contracteth into errours, and how such as are but twigges in younger dayes, grow Oaks in our elder heads, and become inflexible unto the powerfullest arme of reason.” His book becomes an extended attack on credulity, or “an easie assent, to what is obtruded, or a believing at first eare what is delivered by others.”4
Browne’s approach is almost scientific, and it shows the influence of the Baconian project—Francis Bacon’s idea that we arrive at truth by observing the natural world and testing our assumptions against reality. After each erroneous assertion, Browne lines up all the authorities on either side, often switching into Latin and Greek for sentences at a time. He then applies his own reason and experience, and sorts out the truth as he understands it. The range of subjects he addresses is overwhelming. To browse Browne’s “Alphabetical Table,” the subject index appended to the fourth edition, is to get a glimpse of the glorious miscellaneity of Browne’s mind. A typical run of entries:
Aqueducts, why commonly adorned with Lyons heads
Arabian learning what
Arcadians, their antiquity. In what sense elder then the moon
Archimedes his burning glasses. His removing the earth
Areopagus, what
Argus
Aristotle. His arguing for the eternity of the world. Never disputed the ebbing and flowing of the Sea. His Maxime touching felicity
Aristotle, a Proselyte of Moses law.5
TITLE: Pseudodoxia Epidemica; or, Enquiries into Very Many Received Tenents and Commonly Presumed Truths: By Thomas Brovvne Dr. of Physick
COMPILER: Thomas Browne (1605–82)
ORGANIZATION: Book 1, error; book 2, plants and minerals; book 3, animals; book 4, humans; book 5, the arts; book 6, geography and history; book 7, astronomy
PUBLISHED: London: printed for Thomas Harper for Edward Dod, 1646
PAGES: xx + 386
TOTAL WORDS: 187,000
SIZE: 10½″ × 6¾″ (27 × 17.5 cm)
AREA: 205 ft2 (19.2 m2)
WEIGHT: 2 lb. 10 oz. (1.2 kg)
Book 3 takes up false beliefs about animals, and the first creature examined is the elephant: “There generally passeth an opinion it hath no joynts; and … that being unable to lye downe, it sleepeth against a tree, which the Hunters observing doe saw almost asunder; whereon the beast relying, by the fall of the tree falls also down it selfe, and is able to rise no more.” Other animals are surrounded by their own legends. Some claimed that the chameleon “liveth onely upon ayre, and is sustained by no other aliment.” But Browne found the claim “very questionable … there are found in this animall, the guts, the stomack, and other parts officiall unto nutrition.” If chameleons ate only air, then “their provisions had beene superfluous.” “That a Bever to escape the Hunter, bites off his testicles or stones, is a tenent very ancient,” but one should not believe it.6
Many of the claims Browne responded to came from Scripture: “That a man hath one rib lesse then a woman, is a common conceit derived from the history of Genesis, wherein it stands delivered, that Eve was framed out of a rib of Adam.” Browne noted that simple “reason or inspection” will point out the error, “for if wee survey the Sceleton of both sexes and therein the compage of bones, wee shall readily discover that men and women have foure and twenty ribs, that is, twelve on each side.”7 He was careful never to disagree with Scripture itself, but he worked hard to stamp out misunderstandings of the Bible.
Some of his challenges to widespread beliefs were subtle, and they show that he cared about precision. What about the belief that “the heart of man is seated in the left side”? Browne found it “refutable by inspection,” which may come as a surprise to anyone who has not studied medicine. But in fact “the base and centre thereof is in the midst of the chest.” The “Mucro or point thereof inclineth unto the left,” but for the most part the heart is in the center.8
Browne’s style is as distinctive as his strange mission to catalog errors. A perfectly characteristic sentence:
Although who shall indifferently perpend the exceeding difficulty, which either the obscurity of the subject, or unavoidable paradoxologie must often put upon the Attemptor, will easily discerne, a worke of this nature is not to bee performed upon one legge, and should smell of oyle if duly and deservedly handled.9
Browne never met a sesquipedalian Latinism he didn’t like. He adored making up words, most of them based on obscure Greek and Latin roots. The Oxford English Dictionary records Pseudodoxia as the first appearance of 589 words, including alliciency (attractiveness), ambilevous (the opposite of amb
idextrous), bombilation (a humming sound), cecutiency (partial blindness), deuteroscopy (second view or ulterior meaning), equicrural (having legs of equal length), exantlation (the act of drawing out, as water from a well), festucous (like straw), lithontriptic (having the property of breaking up stones in the bladder), ophiophagous (feeding on snakes), and retromingent (urinating backward). An improbable number of his words have stood the test of time: he was the first to use approximate, carnivorous, continuum, hallucinate, perspire, ulterior, and veterinarian. He was also the first to take existing words and give them new forms, turning additional into additionally, electric into electricity, consistent into inconsistent, medicine into medical, and select into selection.
The book at times verges on the unreadable, with the polysyllabic words and the paragraph-long sentences conspiring to keep all but the most learned and devoted readers from understanding a page. But, contrary to expectation, Pseudodoxia Epidemica was a hit: there were eight separate editions, several reprintings in Browne’s collected works, and Latin, Dutch, German, and Danish translations. Browne kept revising the text with each new version, and a substantial public was eager to join Browne in his reformation not of the Church but of learning itself.
The two books, the Index and the Pseudodoxia, seem superficially similar: both are collections of things the faithful should not believe. The most serious problem for the Protestant Browne, though, was exactly the opposite of the one facing the Catholic Church: in his view, people were too inclined to accept arguments on the basis of authority—or, to translate this into Brownish, “the mortallest enemy unto knowledge, and that which hath done the greatest execution upon truth, hath beene a peremptory adhesion unto Authority.” The “establishing of our beliefe upon the dictates of Antiquities”10 was the root of all evil: physicians still looking back to Galen and physicists relying on Aristotle. The new epistemology that would eventually be labeled the scientific method was the way out. For the Church, on the other hand, the problem was an outbreak of freethinking—people taking stances on important matters they were not qualified to consider. Thus the Church reasserted its authority to keep contrary opinions out of circulation. The subtitle of the Index could easily be The Dangers of Skepticism and the Importance of Authority; the subtitle of Pseudodoxia could just as easily be The Dangers of Authority and the Importance of Skepticism.