Only 54 years have passed since the Catholic Church decided to abolish theIndex of prohibited booksi.
Created in 1559 by Pope Paul IV, theIndex librorum prohibitorum it was the list of publications banned as heretical. Over the centuries it was updated more than 40 times, until the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - the old Holy Inquisition - decided to suppress it on February 4, 1966.
The decree with which the Roman Inquisition promulgated the first index prescribed, penalty of excommunication, “that no one yet dares to write, publish, print or have printed, sell, buy, lend, as a gift or under any other pretext, receive, keep, keep or have kept any of the books written and listed in this Index of the Holy Office".
Among the first banned books were the Talmud, all the works of Niccolo Machiavelli, the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio and the De Monarchia of Dante Alighieri. They also appeared in the Index 45 editions of the Bible, as well as all Bibles in vernacular languages.
In the most recent editions, the list included a great many central authors in the history of European philosophy, science and literature. Here is a short list as an example.
Foreigners:
- bacon
- Balzac
- Bergson
- Descartes
- Defoe
- Dumas (father and son)
- Flaubert
- Hugo
- Hume
- Lace
- Locke
- Montesquieu
- Pascal
- Rousseau
- Sartre
- Spinoza
- Stendhal
- Voltaire
- Zola
Italians:
- Alfieri
- Bruno
- Cross
- D'Annunzio
- Foscolo
- Galileo
- Guicciardini
- Leopardi
- Moravia
- Machiavelli
- savonarola
