The opening of the archives of the Roman Inquisition and of the Index of Prohibited Books, in January 1998, enables us to think afresh about the history of two organisations more notorious than understood. Both have been considered, almost exclusively, from the perspective of their victims, such as Galileo Galilei. This book uses hitherto secret sources of the Inquisition and Index to reconstruct the history of Roman censorship in its first, formative years from the standpoint of Galileo's judge. Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621) was a censor for the Index and a consultor to the Holy Office, before becoming cardinal-inquisitor and (three centuries after his death) a saint and Doctor of the Church. His career provides a paradigm of how an intellectual could make his way to the top in Counter-Reformation Rome. Censored by Pope Sixtus V, Bellarmine responded by supressing the pontiff's version of the Vulgate and by repressing the Sistine Index of Prohibited Books. A new interpretation - including a revaluation of Galileo's first "trial"- of Roman censorship is offered in this book. Based on unpublished sources from the archives, which it edits and interprets for the first time, The Saint as Censor will alter our understanding of the Roman Inquisition and the Index.

In nineteenth-century Europe the ruling elites viewed the theater as a form of communication which had enormous importance. The theater provided the most significant form of mass entertainment and was the only arena aside from the church in which regular mass gatherings were possible. Therefore, drama censorship occupied a great deal of the ruling class's time and energy, with a particularly focus on proposed scripts that potentially threatened the existing political, legal, and social order. This volume provides the first comprehensive examination of nineteenth-century political theater censorship at a time, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when the European population was becoming increasingly politically active.

The overall purpose of the studies collected together in this volume is to explain the shaping of Hispanic historiography in the Early Modern period by examining the continuities and discursive complicities between the writing, criticism, theory and censorship of history. This book sheds light on the so-far neglected circulation of ideas and practices between these four areas, and highlights the constitutive nature of a wide spectrum of forms of censorship from repression to criticism in shaping the interests, principles, methods and problems of Early Modern Hispanic historiography. Examining the various fronts that converge in this disciplining discourse of history helps expand and improve our understanding of the relations between historiography and civil and ecclesiastic literary censorship, and the implications of the ideological control of historical writing and theory. In many respects their hypotheses, results and conclusions can be extrapolated to Western historiography in the Early Modern period. This book will be of interest to historians of both historiography and Hispanic censorship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in general to scholars of historical, literary and political culture in the Early Modern age.