Tarrant, Neil; (2022) Hannah Marcus, Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2020. [Review]. Renaissance Studies , 36 (5) pp. 776-777. /10.1111/rest.12782.

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Abstract

Since the late 1990s, there has been increasing interest in ecclesiastical censorship and its impact in early modern Italy, a development that has been encouraged by the opening of the Archives of the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith (ACDF) in 1998. Such historians as Adriano Prosperi, Vittorio Frajese and Gigliola Fragnito have used newly available documents to reconstruct various aspects of the process of censorship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, expose its practical limitations, and debate the extent to which the laity participated in this work. These studies have been complemented by Ugo Baldini and Leen Spruit’s monumental collection of sixteenth-century documents relating to science held in the ACDF, published in 2009. Their study allowed them to conclude that during the sixteenth century very few individuals (perhaps no more than three) were placed on trial for articulating scientific ideas or saw their work censored on account of its scientific content. Instead, works were censored either because they were written by heretics or because they contained superstitious ideas.

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