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Long-term research project: The Roman Congregations of the Inquisition and the Index, 1542-1966

Subject Area Roman Catholic Theology
Term from 2002 to 2017
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 5352904
 
Final Report Year 2025

Final Report Abstract

For more than 400 years, from the Reformation until the Second Vatican Council, popes systematically banned books. This chapter is so firmly entrenched in the collective memory that even non-Catholics and the non-religious are familiar with the papal „Index of Forbidden Books“, which serves as a counterpoint to freedom of expression and the press. The volumes of foundational research developed in this long-term project provide a unique research tool for the history of papal book censorship, making the sources accessible and analytically useful. First, the project fully edits the socalled Bandi through which book bans were officially announced in Rome from the 16th to the 19th centuries, forming the basis of the „Index Librorum Prohibitorum“. The edition offers precise bibliographic identification of the forbidden books and a critical apparatus on the respective processes of creation and revision. Second, a systematic repertory on book censorship is being created, listing all censored books, both banned and „absolved“. This includes bibliographic identification along with information on the individual censorship procedures: authors of the censors’ reports, the outcomes of the procedures, and the archival locations of the process documents. Third, a prosopography provides bio-bibliographic profiles of the censors and congregation staff, elucidating their roles, curial careers, networks, and intellectual milieus. Additionally, it lists the reports prepared by each censor on book censorship, along with their bibliographies and relevant secondary literature. The long-term project systematically cuts a path through the largely unexplored material of the ADDF, which became newly accessible at the project’s start in 2002, comprising 5,500 archival units in total. For the 16th to 19th centuries, 606 bandi were compiled in a scholarly edition. The systematic repertories document approximately 4,750 censorship cases handled by the Roman Inquisition and 978 sessions of the Index Congregation, with about 7,800 deliberations in total. In the biographical section of the project, around 2,240 cardinals, officials, and expert reviewers who censored books on behalf of the popes have been bio-bibliographically described. The conclusion of the foundational research, funded by the DFG, opens up the possibility of studying Roman book censorship not only in specific or synchronous terms but increasingly from the perspective of the „longue durée“. The reconstruction of the long-term, defining argumentative structures of Rome’s confrontation with heterodox contemporary phenomena – some of which still resonate in today’s discussions – is thereby placed on an entirely new foundation.

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