Introduction

From the editors: From the Syllabus is a new series from Not Even Past designed to spotlight thought-provoking essays, texts, and other teaching resources that generate great classroom discussions. Each installment features an introduction by a leading educator explaining on what we can learn from each featured resource. From the Syllabus will serve as a useful guide to students and teachers alike. It will also introduce readers to some of the vital, exciting work historians do in the classroom.

In this first installment of From the Syllabus, Madeline McMahon, an Assistant Professor in the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of History, shares and reflects on a 2017 essay by historian Hannah Marcus, which McMahon has used to teach students about censorship–both contemporary and as practiced by agents of the early modern Catholic Church. Marcus’ essay and McMahon’s introduction reveal that this always-controversial phenomenon has a long and fascinating history.

Faces and names inked out, letters reshaped into seemingly meaningless forms, blank paper glued over chunks of text, pages cut off: the early modern books that Hannah Marcus examines are in bad shape. In her essay, “Expurgated Books as an Archive of Practice,” Marcus looks at efforts to expurgate prohibited books – to purge them of the offensive material and make them readable for early modern Catholics. The Catholic Church issued the first Index Librorum Prohibitorum (list of prohibited books) in 1559. But many of the prohibited works could, in fact, be read by pious Catholics, “so long as they are expurgated.” Expurgation left behind material traces. Marcus reframes this destruction as evidence for how people read with pen in hand. Much like the annotations and underlining commonly found in early modern books, expurgation, too, was a way of highlighting, except in this case, what not to read instead of what should be read.

This past year, I’ve taught Marcus’s essay in two different history classes at UT Austin: my early modern global Catholicism lecture course and my book history capstone seminar.

In my Catholicism class, we had already been to the Benson, where we’d seen broadsides listing prohibited books and books to be expurgated put out by inquisitors in colonial Mexico, like this one. Our discussion centered around making sense of expurgation practices in the broader context of Catholic censorship, but the students were also quick to connect, thoughtfully, early modern practices to contemporary issues, including TikTok’s algospeak and more.

In the history of the book class, we practiced expurgation. Students read an early modern text with a pen in hand—one student going so far as to rip a page into pieces. The students read and censored with different early modern identities, as lawyers and theologians, Jesuit mathematics professors, and hard-up booksellers. Their circumstances shaped how they responded to a fictitious request from the Congregation of the Index to expurgate the work. The students found that, to expurgate the work, they had to engage with the text’s arguments and subtle undertones, and their own expertise or needs in their fictional early modern role deeply affected their censorial suggestions.

In both classroom contexts, Marcus’s piece surprises the students. Censorship, it shows, was not a zero-sum game: access was provided and denied on a sliding scale. Early modern Catholic censorship mediated access, and understanding that helps us think about the motivations behind censorship, and the rational of those who, variably, defied the system, tried to work through it, or worked around it. And one paradox of censorship—that sometimes, the more you ban something, the more you draw attention to it—is shown on a material level, as crossing out text also highlights it. Precisely because censorship requires close reading a text, as the students found, the myth of the mindless censor fades away to reveal a different (perhaps more insidious) reality, that censoring something is an intellectual exercise as much as a political one.

If after reading this piece, you want to know more: check out Marcus’s recent, award-winning book, Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy (2020).

Expurgated Books as an Archive of Practice

By Hannah Marcus

Note: This essay was originally published by Archive Journal in August 2017 and is reproduced here under the terms of Creative Commons License CC BY 4.0. Some additional illustrations have been added by Not Even Past.

The above images are taken from copies of sixteenth-century books of natural history and medicine. However, at a glance, it is difficult to identify who wrote these texts. The letters of the authors’ names have been transformed with pen and ink into a jumble of nonsense characters. From Conrad Gesner’s name above the image of the moose to Leonhart Fuchs’s name above his commentary on Galen, these books bear witness to the practice of ecclesiastical censorship in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. By juxtaposing individual, censored objects from different library collections, we can analyze expurgated books as an archive of practice that documents and reveals the historical practices and material processes of censorship.

Following the Reformation, Catholic authorities in Paris, Louvain, Portugal, Spain, and a number of Italian cities published Indexes of Prohibited Books, lists of texts that Catholics could not read. These prohibitions established that while the works of some authors, like Martin Luther or John Calvin, needed to be burned, other works, including Gesner’s History of Animals, were instead deemed worthy of expurgation, a practice that Catholic authorities regularly referred to as “correction.” Instead of destroying the whole book, some parts of the text were removed, and the rest was allowed to remain.1 Expurgation was a form of Catholic compromise, allowing prohibited books to continue to exist in an altered form. This compromise created enormous intellectual, legal, and logistical hurdles for local inquisitions and, in Rome, for the Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Books. Expurgation also created a project for book owners, book sellers, bishops, and local inquisitors who were responsible for physically altering books to comply with the ever-shifting rules about which parts of them were allowed. These readers and churchmen took on the project of expurgation with pens, blades, paper, and glue. The corrected, expurgated books, like the examples shown above, are repositories of information about how they were used and altered to comply with ecclesiastical decrees. These two examples are striking in the similarity of their approaches, but books were expurgated in a variety of ways that have left a range of physical evidence within their pages.

In 1991, John Tedeschi published an article describing the history of the archives of the Roman Inquisition, detailing their destruction, movement, and eventual scattering among collections in Rome, Paris, and Dublin. He concluded that the records of the Holy Office were a dispersed archive.2 While the remaining administrative records of the Roman Inquisition housed in the Vatican have been opened to scholars since 1998, expurgated books also document Catholic efforts to control intellectual life in early modern Europe.3 I approach these expurgated books as another archive of the Roman Inquisition, an archive that has always been dispersed.4

Scholars of the inquisitions in Italy have used a combination of official rules and decrees, and actual trial records to explain the history of these institutions in Italian communities.5 The combination of legalistic and normative sources allows us to consider both how the prosecution and persecution of heresy operated in theory and in practice. Examining expurgated books as normative sources about the practice of censorship, in essence, opens a new archive for the study of the control of books as intellectual and material objects. Each censored book is an artifact with the power to reveal clues about its own history. Furthermore, there are many thousands of expurgated books in libraries around the world. My research brings together these artifacts from different periods and different libraries.6

The image shown above of the moose is one of many illustrations of quadrupeds in the first volume of Conrad Gesner’s History of Animals (1551). Before the manuscript addition, the headline of the page originally read “Conradi Gesneri Tigurini.” Yet, the inked addition to the text was actually a deletion in this case. By obscuring the printed name it effectively removed the author’s name from the work, a practice required across the Italian peninsula after the Pauline Index of Prohibited Books banned Gesner’s books in 1559.7 Books written or edited by Leonhart Fuchs were also banned in 1559, including the copy shown here of Fuchs’s commentaries on the ancient physician Galen of Pergamon’s On Maintaining Health. A reader censored Fuchs’s name, transforming the letters so that “Leonharti Fuchsii” was no longer legible.

While the Fuchs edition contains the transformations of his name without further comment, the copy of Gesner’s History of Animals reveals additional clues about how and why it was censored. On the flyleaf, an inscription details the owner’s justification for keeping the prohibited book.8 In a small, neat script that matches the hand and ink of the expurgations and the marginalia throughout the volume, the owner explains, “Without danger of anathema this book on the history of animals … can be read. According to the mandate of the Reverend Inquisitor of Pisa, Magister Lelio de’ Medici…” The mention of Lelio de’ Medici, the Franciscan Inquisitor of Pisa from 1586-1603, allows us to date and contextualize the expurgations enacted on this volume. The period of de’ Medici’s appointment in Pisa coincided with the Roman Congregation of the Index’s edict that local experts in Pisa take the lead in correcting books of medicine and philosophy written by heretics.9 Gesner’s name was not the only part of the text that the dutiful Catholic reader altered. Names of other heretics, like Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther, have been “expunged and erased” from the pages. The owner of this book also indicated differences between Biblical quotations provided by the Zwinglian Gesner and the Catholic Vulgate edition of the Bible. By changing the characters in Gesner’s name and obscuring other names and passages throughout the book, the parts of the text that Catholic readers should not see were deleted.

There is no evidence that the same person who expurgated Gesner’s book under the direction of Lelio de’ Medici also expurgated Fuchs’s text, and while the practice of transforming letters in the names of heretics was unusual, these two examples are not unique. I have identified additional copies expurgated in this method that are currently held in libraries in Genoa, Padua, Rome, and the Vatican.10 While each expurgated book contains particular information about how it was used and handled, examining multiple copies can help to establish what kinds of practices were commonplace and which examples are historically surprising. As scholars, we must take the opportunity both to read deeply into individual copies and to bring together many examples of expurgated texts to constitute an archive of practice.

Looking at multiple copies of the same book is hardly a new research methodology; descriptive bibliographies and censuses of books have done this work for many years. In the most innovative of examples, scholars treat all of the copies of an edition as a starting point not for establishing an ur-text, but as an opportunity to trace interrelated readers’ marks, wandering provenances, and the people that shaped the objects before us today.11 My research takes this approach a step further by bringing together expurgated books as an archive of practice, alongside the better-known archives of inquisition trial documents, official edicts, and even parish-level records. If we treat the interventions into books themselves as a unifying and organizing characteristic that constitutes an archive, we can consider the ways that archives both exist within and might also transcend time and space.

When censorship did not eliminate or completely destroy a text, we are left with thousands upon thousands of objects that can constitute an archive of practice.12 We can look across copies to understand that the transformed letters above the image of the moose and the altered letters in Leonhart Fuchs’s name are not entirely exceptional practices, but are illustrative of the ways that early modern readers interacted with their books amidst a culture of censorship.13 We can expand this archive still further to put these objects into conversation with mutilated portraits of Erasmus or copies of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, from which the Babylonian sonnets have been sliced with a razor.14 Examining expurgated copies of books further complicates the traditional distinction between archives and records, revealing how these censored objects straddle the worlds of legal, material, social, cultural, and intellectual history.15

Bringing together the history of material objects and the analytic category of the archive has led Virginia Reinburg to explore French Books of Hours as “archives of prayer,” and Mary Laven to recently describe ex-votos as “archives of miracles.”16 Identifying expurgated books as an archive of practice, rather than a particular archive of a particular practice, has the advantage of transcending the specific case of censored books to open up a broader analytical category. This move, from archive as single repository to archive as witness to historical practices, allows scholars to work across traditional collections to address broader questions of historical use. As researchers, we can identify a practice of interest, like expurgation, and then assemble an archive from which to study the phenomenon, embedding our understanding of the practice within the rich texture of historical context. This methodology fuses the role of the archivist and historian, situating the researcher explicitly as the “co-creator” of the assembled archive.17

However, in the case of expurgated books, assembling the archive is not a straightforward process. Tracing provenance can provide some clues for identifying expurgated books. Books that spent the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Northern Europe are rarely expurgated, since Northern Europe was predominantly Protestant and there was, therefore, no need to comply with the laws of Catholic censorship. On the other hand, copies of books written by Protestant authors with provenances traceable to early modern Italian libraries are much more likely to bear the signs of censorship. Important collections, like those in the Vatican Library, present something of a quandary. While many of the owners of the book collections there were Catholic, Popes and Cardinals had reading privileges beyond those available to most readers in Italy; the books in these collections may or may not be expurgated.18 Libraries in the United States are a step further removed from the confessional geography of early modern Europe, and finding censored books based on provenance is exponentially complicated by the fact that many of these texts circulated for many years before arriving in their institutional homes. To take the copy of Gesner’s book shown above as an example, we know that it has traveled from where it was printed in Zurich, across the Alps to the home of an early owner in Pisa, and then across the world to the collection of Steven J. Gould, and finally to the library at Stanford. Reassembling these widely dispersed books to create an archive of practice requires digging deeply into the histories and provenances of local collections.

After identifying a collection likely to hold multiple examples of expurgated books, the next challenge is searching the catalogs. Catalog entries, both online and in card catalogs, only occasionally mention when a book is censored. Without further specification about the type of censorship, the record might indicate that a copy is a reprint of a work that was targeted for correction by Catholic authorities, rather than a book that shows physical signs of expurgation.19 In this case, the work had been censored, rewritten, and reprinted, but the object that has arrived on the library desk is not physically expurgated.

Since catalogs rarely mention works as “expurgated,” I have been rethinking the ways that censorship has altered texts. The images from works by Gesner and Fuchs might be plausibly listed as “altered in pen” or even more vaguely as containing manuscript additions. To take another example, if large portions of text in a book are blacked out, and if the cataloger does not recognize the intervention as censorship, it might be noted instead as containing “ink damage.” Another way of expurgating a book was to glue blank paper over portions that needed to be hidden from orthodox Catholic eyes. When these books were later sold on the antiquarian book market, dealers would often try to remove the pasted-on pieces of paper, leaving once-expurgated books instead with “water stains” from trying to melt the glue, and more generally causing “damage to title page.” Both phrases occasionally turn up expurgated copies of books in American catalogs. Italian catalogers are especially aware of the long shadow of ecclesiastical censorship in their country, and “frontispizio mutilo,” the Italian equivalent to “damaged title page,” vividly captures the cultural perception of censorship as a defacing, mutilating, or maiming of the page, not just happenstance harm that the object incurred.

Focusing on the effects of censorship on books also reveals that expurgation causes some pages to go “missing.” In libraries with catalog entries that include collocation formulas for the books in their collections, a note that folios a1-a2 or a2-a3 are missing regularly signals that a book is expurgated. One of the common changes to volumes required by Catholic law was the removal of dedicatory epistles written by Protestant authors or dedications praising Protestant dedicatees. Indeed, the copy of Fuchs’s commentary on Galen at the New York Academy of Medicine is missing *2-*6, the pages that contained the dedication from Fuchs to the abbot of the Zwiefalten Abbey. In books like Cardano’s commentary on Ptolomey’s Quadripartito, a collocation formula missing a folio or two in the middle reveals that the highly problematic horoscope of Jesus Christ was removed from the book.20 Cross referencing expurgatory indexes alongside collocation formulas can reveal why certain pages in particular tend to go missing from books that were prohibited but could be corrected. While early modern censors regularly described removing passages from books as “canceling” them, searching for “canceled” copies in library catalogs returns the bibliographical use of “cancel” that catalogers are familiar with: a leaf removed in the course of printing a book (and often replaced), not a censorial intervention after publication.

In addition to ink damage, papering over passages, and removing whole pages, parts of books could be covered with gesso, pasted together, and transformed into a jumble of random characters. By looking across this archive of practice we can acknowledge both the individuality of each censor’s interaction with a text and generalize about the common approaches used across many texts. One goal of my research is to establish a typology of the forms of book expurgation by attending to the interventions censors made in hundreds of early modern medical books.21 This work is more than a cataloging intervention: the material practices of early modern censorship reveal the ways that censors and scholars engaged with prohibited books. Expurgation was both a process that required substantial work to determine what material should be expurgated, and a physical task to be executed upon many thousands of prohibited books circulating in Italy. Attention to how prohibited books were physically altered treats these books as an archive that provides insight into the practice of expurgation and the actors involved in book censorship. Additionally, stabilizing the language of expurgation will influence descriptions in catalog records and make these fascinating objects easier to find. Clearer catalog entries would open the door for future research on the material instantiations of censorship and facilitate better communication between scholars and librarians about the physical attributes of these texts.

Using expurgated books as an archive of practice requires consulting many distinct and dispersed copies of books, a process that is becoming easier thanks to massive digitization projects based at major libraries around the world. Digitization has made it possible for scholars to consult multiple copies of the same early modern book without travel. Searching Google Books for Conrad Gesner’s De historia animalium yields expurgated examples from libraries in Spain and Italy, alongside a pristine copy from the National Library in Austria. Searches for other prohibited authors from Fuchs to Petrarch to Erasmus turn up similar results: a mix of copies that appear in clean condition and others with indications that names and passages have been blacked out or pasted over in compliance with the Index of Prohibited Books. With more copies of early modern books readily available, it becomes increasingly clear that books with signs of censorship are a common condition for early modern imprints, not a bibliographical anomaly.22

I want to invite scholars to use the example of expurgated books to reconsider what it means to be part of an archive or a collection. Expurgated books are not united by their content or provenance, but by their shared, physical experience of censorship. The dispersed archive of expurgated books is an archive of the Catholic inquisitions that was never intended to exist. But bringing these books together has the potential to do more than identify copies of books that sat side by side in libraries 400 years ago.23 More radically, this methodology creates a new archive of texts and objects that share intellectual proximity because of their physical states. These books are by-products of the early modern disputes over religious and intellectual authority, vestiges of the power of early states.24 However, the dispersed archive of expurgated books is a collection that we are convening outside of the exigencies of the early modern era. In contrast to national archives, institutional archives, or even the proliferation of personal archives, expurgated books can be studied together as a material archive, an archive of practice.25 Learning to interact with books in ways that complied with a culture of censorship was a skill that early modern scholars mastered, and one we are only now beginning to recover.

---

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Ryan Kashanipour, Nicole Ferraiolo, and two anonymous readers for their insightful comments that substantially sharpened this essay. I would also like to thank Richard Calis, Caroline Duroselle-Melish, and Roger Gaskell for inspiring conversations and for sharing citations.

Hannah Marcus is the John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of the History of Science and the Associate Faculty Director of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the scientific culture of early modern Europe between 1400 and 1700.

1. The classic study in English of ecclesiastical censorship in early modern Italy has long been Paul F. Grendler’s The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540-1605 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). There has been extensive scholarly attention to the Catholic Church’s role in censorship, especially since the 1998 opening of the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The literature is vast, but the most influential publications in English have been Ugo Baldini and Leen Spruit, Catholic Church and Modern Science: Documents from the Archives of the Roman Congregations of the Holy Office and the Index (Roma: Libreria editrice vaticana, 2009); Gigliola Fragnito, Church, Censorship, and Culture in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Peter Godman, The Saint as Censor: Robert Bellarmine between Inquisition and Index (Leiden: Brill, 2000). [↩]
2. John Tedeschi, “The Dispersed Archives of the Roman Inquisition,” in The Prosecution of Heresy: Collected Studies on the Inquisition in Early Modern Italy (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991), 23-45. [↩]
3. On the opening of the ACDF, see Accademia nazionale dei Lincei and Congregazione per la dottrina della fede, L’Apertura degli archivi del Sant’Uffizio romano: Roma, 22 Gennaio 1998 (Rome: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 1998); Anne Jacobson Schutte, “Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio: The Opening of the Roman Inquisition’s Central Archive,” Perspectives on History, May 1999. [↩]
4. Historians of early modern Europe have recently considered the concept of practice in relation to both the material history of books and textual production and early modern political economies. On scholarly practices see, for example, Anthony Grafton, Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); William Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); and Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). On practice and political economies, see Noah Millstone, Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 13-17; Corey Tazzara, “Managing Free Trade in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Information, and the Free Port of Livorno,” The Journal of Modern History 86 (September 2014): 493-529; Corey Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno and the Transformation of the Mediterranean World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming); Jacob Soll, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). [↩]
5. On a legal approach to inquisition see Edward Peters, Inquisition (New York: Free Press, 1988) and, more recently, Thomas F. Mayer, The Roman Inquisition: A Papal Bureaucracy and Its Laws in the Age of Galileo (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Thomas F. Mayer, The Roman Inquisition on the Stage of Italy, 1590-1640 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). For an approach to these materials from trial records see, for example, Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Christopher F. Black’s recent synthesis combines a legal account with details from studies of trials. See The Italian Inquisition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). [↩]
6. On opportunities for bringing together fragmented and allied collections, see Michael J. Paulus, Jr., “The Converging Histories and Futures of Libraries, Archives, and Museums as Seen through the Case of the Curious Collector Myron Eells,” Libraries & the Cultural Record 46, no. 2 (2011): 185-205. [↩]
7. For what was prohibited on the Index of Prohibited Books and when, the standard source is Jesús Martínez de Bujanda, Francis M. Higman, and James K. Farge, Index des livres interdits (Sherbrooke, Québec: Centre d’études de la Renaissance, Editions de l’Université de Sherbrooke, 1984-1999). [↩]
8. As found in Stanford’s copy of Conrad Gesner, Conradi Gesneri medici Tigurini Historiæ animalium lib. I.[-V.] (Tiguri: Apud Christ. Froschoverum, 1551), call number: RBC QL41 .G37 1551 F V.1, copy 1. The Latin inscription reads: Sine Anathematis periculo liber iste del historia animalium quadrupedum viviparorum legi potest Nam ex mandato D R I Inquisitionis Pisane duxcasis Magisteri Lelii medices expunsta ac obliterata sunt ex albo. que[m] delenda visa sunt. [↩]
9. On the assignment of expurgation to communities around Italy see Gigliola Fragnito, ed. Church, Censorship, and Culture in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001). On the censorship of books of medicine, see Hannah Marcus, Banned Books: Medicine, Readers, and Censors in Early Modern Italy, 1559-1664 (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2016); Ugo Baldini and Leen Spruit, eds., Catholic Church and Modern Science, v. I, t. 1, 603-64. [↩]
10. Marcus, Banned Books, 213-14. [↩]
11. Perhaps the best census of an individual book is Owen Gingerich, An annotated census of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus (Nuremberg, 1543 and Basel, 1566) (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2002). Daniel Margocsy, Mark Somos, and Stephen Joffe are currently conducting a similarly thorough census of copies of Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica. On bibliography as the social history of texts, see the classic study by D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For how scholars are currently rethinking the field of bibliography, see, for example, Michael F. Suarez, S.J., “Hard Cases: Confronting Bibliographical Difficulty in Eighteenth-Century Texts,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 111, no. 1 (March 2017): 1-30. [↩]
12. Krzysztof Pomian has described an archive as emerging from people or institutions who understood the preservation of documents as more problematic than maintaining them. This is an intriguing suggestion in the context of expurgated books because works that were expurgated were deemed worthy of preservation despite the need to destroy parts of them. Krzysztof Pomian, “The Archives: From the Trésor des Chartes to the CARAN,” in Rethinking France: Les Lieux de Mèmoire, ed. Pierre Nora, vol. 4, Histories and Memories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 27–99. [↩]
13. On the expression “culture of censorship” see Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Caroline England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 232. [↩]
14. For censored Erasmus see Silvana Seidel Menchi, Erasmo in Italia, 1520-1580 (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1987). On censored copies of Petrarch see, Peter Stallybrass, “Petrarch and Babylon: Censoring and Uncensoring the Rime, 1559-1651,” in For the Sake of Learning: Essays in honor of Anthony Grafton, eds. Ann Blair and Anja-Silvia Goeing, vol. 2, (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2015), 581-601. [↩]
15. On the complicated definitions of archives and records in early modern Europe see Alexandra Walsham, “The Social History of the Archive: Record-Keeping in Early Modern Europe,” Past and Present 230, no. 11 (November 2016): 13-18. [↩]
16. Virginia Reinburg, French Books of Hours: Making and Archive of Prayer, c. 1400-1600 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Mary Laven, “Recording Miracles in Renaissance Italy,” Past and Present 230, no. 11 (November 2016): 191-212. [↩]
17. Focusing on evidence of expurgation as an archive of use and practice goes some way toward achieving Terry Cook’s goal of archives that document “function, activity, and ideas, rather than primarily reflecting the structures, offices, and persons of origin.” Terry Cook, “The Archive(s) Is a Foreign Country: Historians, Archivists, and the Changing Archival Landscape,” The American Archivist 74, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2011): 629-31. [↩]
18. There are also collections in the Vatican Library with non-Catholic provenances, most notably the Palatine collection seized from Heidelberg as booty in the Thirty Years War. Jill Bepler, “Vicissitudo Temporum: Some Sidelights on Book Collecting in the Thirty Years’ War,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 32, no. 4 (Winter, 2001): 955-57. [↩]
19. The Congregation of the Index originally intended for corrected books to be reprinted as clean, Catholic copies of previously prohibited texts; in reality, this rarely occurred. [↩]
20. On Cardano’s geniture of Jesus see Anthony Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 150-55. [↩]
21. Marcus, Banned Books, chapter 5. [↩]
22. Roger Stoddard helpfully placed censored books alongside books with other signs of use and provenance in his exhibition catalog Marks in Books, Illustrated and Explained (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Library, Harvard University, 1985). [↩]
23. On learning from provenance and changing collections see Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote, eds., Books on the Move: Tracking Copies Through Collections and the Book Trade (New Castle, Delaware, and London: Oak Knoll Press and The British Library, 2007). [↩]
24. There is a lot of excellent recent research on the relationship between archives and sources of power and authority in early modern Europe. See, for example, Filippo de Vivo, Andrea Guidi, and Alessandro Silvestri, eds., “Archival Transformations in Early Modern European History,” European History Quarterly 46, no. 3 (2016); Elizabeth Yale, “The History of Archives: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 18 (2015): 332-59; Laurie Nussdorfer, Brokers of Public Trust: Notaries in Early Modern Rome (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Ann Blair and Jennifer Milligan’s “Introduction” to their special issue of Archival Science 7, no. 4 (2007): 289-96. [↩]
25. On the formation and proliferation of personal archives in the early modern period see Elizabeth Yale, “With Slips and Scraps: How Early Modern Naturalists Invented the Archive,” Book History 12 (2009): 1-36, and her recent book Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). See also Walsham, “The Social History of the Archive,” 18-23. [↩]

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.