by Henry Kamen
Inevitably, condemned books filtered into the country. In Barcelona in 1569 the bookshops were still selling “many forbidden books.”89 Their continuing entry is demonstrated by the case in Madrid of Joseph Antonio de Salas, knight of the Order of Calatrava, whose library was offered for sale to the public on his death in 1651. It was then found that among the 2,424 volumes in the collection, to quote the censor, “there were many books prohibited or unexpurgated or worthy of examination, either because they were by heretical authors or were newly published abroad by unknown writers.”90 There were 250 prohibited works—a proportion of one in ten—confirming that foreign books were smuggled regularly and often successfully into Spain, despite the death penalty attached to the offense.
The second major control was at the point of contact between a book and its potential reader. Libraries and bookshops were at intervals visited and checked. Bishops were encouraged to inspect all libraries in their dioceses, and at Salamanca University a score of the staff went carefully through the library to weed out any dangerous books. As early as 1536 Thomas de Villanueva was employed by the inquisitor general to visit bookshops in Valencia. A lightning check in 1566 in Seville is described thus by an inquisitor: “at a fixed hour, nine in the morning, all the bookshops of Seville were occupied by familiars of the Holy Office, so that they could not warn each other nor hide nor take out any books, and later we came and made all the shops close and are visiting them one by one.”91 In reality, such visits were few and far between. They also took place only in big towns where there was an inquisitorial presence. And even there, as the inquisitors of Barcelona admitted in 1569, the bookshops “have not been visited for many years.”92 Bookshops, moreover, pleaded ignorance if found with books that needed censoring. In Barcelona in 1593, as we have seen, they said that no copies of the Index were available, and they were consequently unable to monitor forbidden items.93 On this occasion, some booksellers were fined. It is the only recorded case of any action being taken against bookshops in that city.
The task of censorship obviously took many years. Total prohibition was in principle easier. In Barcelona in 1560 the inquisitors appointed a Jesuit to be their censor. With the Index by his side, he advised worried librarians of religious houses “what books they can keep and which they have to tear up and burn.”94 Expurgation, on the other hand, was more onerous. One censor reported to the Inquisition that to expurgate a private library in Madrid worth 18,000 ducats he had labored eight hours daily for four months.95 Benito Arias Montano, whose task was to check the entire library of the Escorial, inevitably took a little longer. One way or the other, both authors and booksellers always found reason to complain.96 A few privileged readers were conceded exemption from the system. Up to the 1540s it had been common for the Inquisition to allow individuals special licenses to read or keep prohibited books, usually for purposes of study (how, for instance, could one refute Luther without first reading him?). After 1559 all such licenses were suspended, and not until the 1580s were exceptions made.
The greatest damage of all, in any system of censorship, was suffered by the book itself. Some books probably disappeared altogether, and not exclusively through the fault of the inquisitors. A report drawn up for them at the end of the sixteenth century says that
many, to avoid taking their books to the inquisitors, burn not only those prohibited and to be expurgated but even those that are approved and harmless, or else get rid of them or sell them for a pittance. In this way an infinite number are neither examined nor corrected, but are eventually lost to nobody’s advantage, for their owners suffer great losses and, what is more important, a great many good books disappear.97
Clumsy expurgators of books tore out pages, cut them up carelessly or defaced them horribly by inking out passages and pictures. To avoid this sort of mistreatment, book owners preferred to have their property examined by a cultured expurgator, such as the Jesuit father Gubern in Barcelona in 1559. There, apparently, “no one shows resentment even though he scores through the rare and precious books they have.”98 An even more preferable alternative, adopted by many book owners, bookshops and institutions, was to get hold of a copy of the Index and carry out the expurgations without letting anybody else handle the books.99
Literature collected during searches was, from the end of the sixteenth century, not burnt but sent to the nearest tribunal for further judgment. There it remained until disposed of. Thus in December 1634 the tribunal of Saragossa had in its keeping 116 copies of the Bible, 55 copies of various works by Erasmus and 83 volumes of the works of Francisco de Quevedo.100 Later generations sometimes preferred to store the prohibited books. The Escorial was used regularly for this purpose. In 1585 the prior reported that its library possessed “many prohibited books sent at different times by His Majesty, and kept there by license from Don Gaspar de Quiroga.” The volumes included unlicensed Bibles, the Koran and works by Savonarola and Machiavelli. Half a century later the practice was still being carried on, for in 1639 the Escorial possessed a total of 932 prohibited books.101 Laudable as this may appear, it was not practiced everywhere, with the result that some works condemned by the Inquisition may have been wiped out of existence. In the early seventeenth century there was a plan, supported by both inquisitors and booksellers, to set up a central store of banned books; but “none of those in favor of setting it up wished to take on the task of doing it,”102 so nothing was done.
There were always strong differences of opinion over the criteria to be adopted in censorship. Everyone agreed on the need for control, but they also disagreed on the methods. No one, even in that day, was so sanguine as to believe that the inquisitors knew best. A Salamanca professor, Francisco Sancho, was one of those who in the 1550s tried to advise the Suprema;103 and there were many others who did likewise. It was a Spaniard resident in Rome, Bartolomé de Valverde, chaplain to Philip II, who in 1584 protested to Cardinal Sirleto, then the director of the Roman Index, over the poor quality of his censors, “condemning works they have never read. . . . They are usually nonentities who know not a word either of Greek or of Hebrew, and lack either judgment or capacity. They are paid nothing for reading innumerable books, and therefore to discharge themselves from a task little to their taste, they take the way out which confers on them an air of learning, and suppress the books.”
Malicious and ignorant inquisitors were not a rarity, and none put his personal ambition to greater use than Inquisitor General Fernando de Valdés, who undermined the career of Juan de Vergara and destroyed that of Bartolomé Carranza. In general, however, the involvement of the Inquisition in cultural matters was governed less by the personality or inadequacy of the inquisitors than by the social climate. In literature, no less than in religious matters, prosecutions were set in motion largely by denunciations made by private individuals, so that the Inquisition, although prosecutor, was seldom the initiator. This can be seen in the brush that Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, had with the Inquisition, when current suspicions of conversos and illuminists caused him to be denounced because of his religious practices while a student at Alcalá in 1527.104
At Alcalá he developed links with others who were interested in improving their spiritual lives through the formation of small prayer groups consisting not of clergy but only of lay people.105 Ignatius had a group consisting of three or four other young men, who dressed in a singular way—in long habits with hoods—and met in each other’s rooms for prayers. The circle was later widened with the addition of some women. Unfortunately, these happened to be the very months that the alumbrados were attracting the attention of Church authorities. At the end of 1526, Ignatius and his friends were warned by an officer of the Inquisition to change their spiritual methods and to dress more conventionally. The following April, Ignatius was arrested by the bishop’s tribunal on related charges, and a couple of months later was forbidden to teach his ideas publicly. In the summer he moved from Alcalá in order to get away from the harassment and settl
ed in Salamanca, but was detained there for the same reasons and warned that he should study more before trying out spiritual methods. In addition to the doubts about his prayer activities, there was a lurking suspicious in the minds of the authorities that he and his friends were Jews or conversos. Ignatius indignantly rejected these suspicions, and ever thereafter treated with contempt the anti-Semitic attitude of officials in Castile. In the autumn, he left the hassle behind him, traveled north through Barcelona and took the road for Paris, where seven years later he and a group of friends founded the Society of Jesus. Ignatius never returned to Spain, where for a long time there continued to be a strong current of suspicion directed against him and his followers. Prominent clergy and prelates, usually from the rival Dominican order, never ceased to insinuate that the Jesuits were heretics. In 1553 a Dominican theologian was still insisting that Loyola had fled from Spain because he was an alumbrado.106
The change in the cultural climate in the 1550s had a crucial influence on the Inquisition, which hardened its attitudes rapidly under Valdés. Ideas that might in other times have been tolerated were now discouraged. One of the great sticking points was the use of language. Prior to the European Reformation, interpreting the sacred texts of the Church had been the preserve of a minority of scholars versed in arcane languages: Latin above all, but then also—with the humanists—Greek and Hebrew. Even in the early days of the Inquisition there were conflicts between scholars. University men had a long-standing dispute between “grammarians” (literary scholars) and theologians. In 1504 the Inquisitor General Diego de Deza confiscated the papers of the humanist Nebrija. Nebrija had dared to maintain that as a philologist he was no less capable than a theologian like Deza of determining the texts of Holy Scripture. Subsequently Nebrija was able to rely on the full protection of Cardinal Cisneros. In an Apologia ten years later, he accused Deza of seizing his writings “not to examine them or condemn them, but to stop me writing. That good prelate wanted to wipe out all traces of the two languages on which our religion depends [Hebrew and Greek].” The humanist commented indignantly on the injury to scholarship: “Must I reject as false what appears to me in every way as clear, true and evident as light and truth itself? What does this sort of slavery mean? What unjust domination when one is prevented from saying what one thinks, although to do so involves no slight or insult to religion!”107
The Reformation brought a different dimension to the fore, that of making Scripture and other sacred texts available to a public that had no knowledge of languages. Were ordinary readers capable of reading the text correctly or should vernacular translations be controlled and even prohibited? It was an issue that split learned opinion throughout Europe, and the Inquisition sooner or later had to take a stand on a number of questions.
How could one distinguish between orthodox and unorthodox piety if both used the same language? How could one grasp the real meaning of a religious text? Dissenting from the tendentious interpretation put on Carranza’s writings by Melchor Cano, his fellow Dominican Juan de la Peña argued that “it is impossible to avoid all the methods of expression used by heretics, unless we learn our speech all over again.” Yet the inquisitors were, of course, right to suspect—as in the case of the alumbrados and even more of the exiled Juan de Valdés—that heterodoxy was sheltering behind pious language. This did not stop many from criticizing the 1559 Index. In September that year, a Jesuit wrote:
The faint-hearted have reacted by becoming more faint-hearted and those dedicated to virtue are in dismay, seeing that the inquisitor general has published an edict forbidding almost all the books in Spanish that have been used up to now by those who try to serve God; and we are in times when women are told to stick to their beads and not bother about other devotions.108
On a number of crucial matters, therefore, opinions were sharply divided.
As might be expected, some of the bitterest intellectual conflicts of the period originated not in the Inquisition but among university professors. Personal malice and partisan interest were, then as now, potent forces. The drive against Erasmus at the University of Valencia in the 1520s, for example, took the form of a personal campaign promoted by the rector, Juan Celaya. On his initiative, the faculty refused a chair to the humanist Pedro Juan Oliver,109 a move that may have prejudiced the development of classical studies at the university. Perhaps the most notorious conflict in which university men made use of the Inquisition for their own purposes originated in the malicious denunciations of some of his colleagues made by a professor at the University of Salamanca, León de Castro.
In December 1571 Castro and a Dominican colleague, Bartolomé de Medina, laid before the Inquisition at Valladolid some accusations against three professors at the university. The three in question were Luis de León of the Order of St. Augustine, Gaspar de Grajal and Martín Martínez de Cantalapiedra. The denunciations said that they had taken heretical liberties with their study of Scripture and theology. Fray Luis in particular bore the brunt of the attack. Famous as a theologian and celebrated now as one of Spain’s finest poets, at the age of thirty-four he was elected to a chair at Salamanca. He thereby aroused the hostility of his rivals, who slandered him because of his converso descent and accused him of uttering dangerous theological propositions. It was said that he questioned the accuracy of the Vulgate translation of the Bible; preferred the Hebrew text to the Latin; translated the Song of Songs as a profane love song instead of a divine canticle; and held that scholastic theology harmed the study of Scripture.110 Grajal111 was arrested on similar charges on 22 March 1572. Five days later Luis de León and Martínez were taken into custody. Blind belief in the justice of their cause and in the benevolence of the Holy Office cheered the prisoners, but they were soon disillusioned. For Fray Luis it was to be the beginning of an imprisonment that lasted four years, eight months and nineteen days. Cut off almost completely from the outside world in the cells of the tribunal at Valladolid, his only consolation was the permission he received to read and write in his cell, out of which emerged his classic devotional treatise The Names of Christ. From the first he was aware of a campaign against himself, and he complained of the incredible slowness of the trial. On 18 April 1572 he wrote from his cell: “I have great suspicions that false testimony has been laid against me, for I know that in the last two years people have said and still say many things about me that are transparent lies, and I know that I have many enemies.”
He awaited justice, yet none was forthcoming, nor was there any promise of an early trial. His constant appeals were of no avail. A year later, on 7 March 1573, he was writing to the inquisitors: “It is now a year since I have been in this prison and in all this time you have not deigned to publish the names of witnesses in my case, nor have I been given any opportunity of a full defense.”
He was finally sentenced to a reprimand which involved retraction of the several propositions he was said to have held. In prison he had suffered despair, fever and humiliation. Release from the cells came in mid-December 1576. Weary but undefeated, he greeted his freedom with characteristic restraint:
Aqui la envidia y mentira
Me tuvieron encerrado.
dichoso el humilde estado
del sabio que se retira
y de aqueste mundo malvado,
y con pobre mesa y casa,
en el campo deleitoso,
con solo Dios se compasa,
y a solas su vida pasa
ni envidiado ni envidioso.
[Here envy and lies held me in prison. Happy the humble state of the scholar who retires from this malicious world and there in the pleasant countryside, with modest table and dwelling, governs his life with God alone, and passes his days all by himself, neither envied nor envying.]
Restored once more to his rostrum at the university, he is said to have begun his first lecture with the words, “As I was saying last time . . .” But for his enemies this was not the last time. In 1582 he was summoned to a second trial for having uttere
d rash propositions. The inquisitor general, Gaspar de Quiroga, intervened on his behalf and in 1584 he escaped with a warning to avoid controversial issues in future.112
Less fortunate than Fray Luis were his other colleagues at the university. Gaspar de Grajal, who had been arrested five days before, was thrown into the cells of the Inquisition. There his health gave way, and he died before judgment could be passed on him. A colleague from the university of Osuna, Alonso Gudiel, who was professor of Scripture there, was also arrested in the same month on the basis of Castro’s accusations. Before this case had been dealt with he also died in prison, in April 1573. The only one to outlast his treatment was Cantalapiedra, who had been professor of Hebrew at Salamanca and whose whole life had been dedicated to the study of Holy Scripture. His term of imprisonment in a Valladolid cell exceeded even that of Luis de León. It lasted for over five years, from March 1572 to May 1577, and despite his constant appeals for a quick decision there was no hurry to bring him to trial. Eventually he was freed but never regained his academic post. “I have labored to interpret scripture before the whole world,” he told the inquisitors in 1577, “but my only reward has been the destruction of my life, my honor, my health and my possessions.”113 The bitter lesson he drew from this was drawn by many other contemporaries: “it is better to walk carefully and be prudent”(sapere ad sobrietatem).
The work of León de Castro was not yet over. The Hebrew scholar and humanist Benito Arias Montano had spent several years collaborating with Netherlands scholars on the preparation, patronized by Philip II, of a new Polyglot Bible, which was printed and issued in Antwerp in 1571 in eight volumes.114 Provisional approval was secured from Rome in 1572 and 1576. There was, however, considerable criticism of the project in Spain. In 1575, writing from Rome, Montano complained of “a great rumor which a certain León de Castro of Salamanca has raised in that university, to criticize and discredit the greatest work of letters that has ever been published in the world, the Royal Bible which His Majesty has for the benefit of Christendom ordered to be printed in Antwerp under my direction.”