47. Hannah Marcus, FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
A fascinating history of medical censorship in Italy that focuses on the century after the Reformation
Hannah Marcus, Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science and Censorship in Early Modern Italy. Chicago: Chicago University Press. 2020.
The history of censorship is fascinating. Censorship in the popular imagination largely seems to involve book-burning, or preventing things from being made, read, or shown in their entirety, for a given geographical region or the world entire. In reality it's a lot more present in the blacked-out lines in the response to a freedom-of-information request, and subverted in ways comparable to the backchannel PDF articles passed between numerous academics who publish in prohibitively expensive-to-access journals on account of the career-benefiting prestige and then make it quietly known among their peers and students that they're happy to send a copy of the article to anyone who asks, in fact don't even bother asking just pass it on. (This is far from every university-employed scholar, I should note.) Censorship is as much a question of access, licit and otherwise, as it is of erasure and destruction: it's a negotiation between different forms of authority, or between authority and those who would question it. The license to see is not the license to (re)produce.
Hannah Marcus's Forbidden Knowledge examines that negotiation in post-Reformation Italy between (mainly) medical doctors and the censorship apparatus of the Catholic Church. Censorship became a particularly fraught issue in the wake of the Reformation on account of Protestant thinkers being considered damned and their works anathema to good Catholics, and on account of the heightened scrutiny that philosophical and natural philosophical works attracted in a new, confessionally-divided Europe. (They attracted scrutiny before, of course, but the Reformation ushered in new and lasting divisions and baptised them in blood.)
For Italian doctors, this presented a set of interesting challenges -- particularly in the Papal States but also across the Italian states, as local church authorities took their cues from Rome -- since many novel and useful discoveries in medicine (and pharmacology, by their standards) were made and subsequently published by men on the wrong side of the confessional divide. And intellectual developments by men who preferred to adhere to the Catholic Church could be anathematised for diverging too far from orthodoxy. Marcus discusses how doctors engaged with the institutions and apparatus of church censorship to preserve and circulate "useful" medical and (natural) philosophical texts in an expurgated form, or to access the unexpurgated versions under the system of licenses that developed. Some doctors entered wholeheartedly into the process of expurgation and censorship; others sought to evade the restrictions placed on their access to censored (or censorship-worthy) material. The enthusiasm of the institutions of the Catholic Church for censorship and expurgation varied by location and by year, and different individuals took different approaches.
This is an interesting and readable work of history that digs into both intellectual and institutional history to throw light on the processes of censorship and its social and individual effects. I found it fascinating.