The Curses of Modernity: Inquisition, Censorship and Social Discipline in Italian Historical Thought

Abstract

In this article, I consider the narratives framing Italian-language accounts of ecclesiastical censorship in early modern Italy and its impact on the modern Italian state. I set out Adriano Prosperi, Vittorio Frajese and Gigliola Fragnito’s interpretations of the significance of the Roman Inquisition and the Congregation of the Index. Although each of these historians engaged with the theories of modernity developed by such scholars as Max Weber and Michel Foucault, I argue that their narratives were informed by a desire to explain a different historical problem. Weber and Foucault sought to demonstrate that the achievements of modern society were achieved through the creation of structures of social discipline that impinged upon individual liberty. The historians I consider here addressed a different question. They were seeking to consider whether the suppression of individual liberty enacted by the Catholic Church’s disciplinary structures prevented Italy’s progress to modernity and statehood. These arguments were initially formulated during the mid-to-late nineteenth century by such scholars and politicians as Bertrando Spaventa and Francesco de Sanctis, whose thought had been shaped by exposure to Hegelian historical and philosophical thought. In this paper, I argue that in Italian historical discourse, accounts of the nature and effects of ecclesiastical censorship have been framed by what is, in effect, an inverted Protestant narrative of progress.

1. Introduction

Since the nineteenth century, scholars have produced an extensive literature that considers the influence of religion on the development of modern European societies. The broad contours of the debates generated therein will be familiar to most. The field was initially shaped by a Protestant narrative of progress. Taking their cue from the writings of scholars such as G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) and latterly Max Weber (1864–1920), Protestant historians assigned their religion a key role in the creation of the modern world, whilst lambasting Counter-Reformation-era Catholicism for delaying or even actively seeking to prevent these developments. The story of the influence of these narratives in Italy in the age of the Risorgimento is, perhaps, less well known. From the middle of the nineteenth century, scholars such as Bertrando Spaventa (1817–1883) and Francesco de Sanctis (1817–1883) drew on Hegel’s account of history to develop a novel interpretation of Italy’s political development. Their work inaugurated a distinctive tradition of scholarship, which I have elsewhere referred to as an Italian liberal historiographical tradition, which lamented the Counter-Reformation Church’s influence on the development of modern Italy. Historians working within this tradition have been especially interested in the effects of the Church’s centralized organs of censorship and control: the Roman Inquisition and the Index of Forbidden books. These institutions, they argued, were developed in response to the proto-modernizing tendencies of the Renaissance and the Italian reformation, movements that generated ideas and habits of thought that foreshadowed the Enlightenment. By suppressing free thought, the Inquisition and Index played a central role in impeding the development of the modern Italian nation (Tarrant 2018, 2019).

From the second half of the twentieth century, Italian discussion of the relationship between Catholicism and modernity has been deeply influenced by two further historiographical traditions that originated in Germany. Each offered new means to rethink traditional associations between Protestantism and progress. The first originated in the work of Catholic historian Hubert Jedin (1900–1980), who argued that between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, Catholic history was driven by two distinct, but related, impulses. The first was the Catholic Reformation. Spanning a period from the mid-fifteenth to the late eighteenth century, this movement sought to revitalize the faith and to correct abuses. It began as a series of independent, local movements for reform, but, by the mid-sixteenth century, the papacy assumed leadership of these disparate reforms and began to co-ordinate the implementation of a unified and coherent program defined at the Council of Trent. The second movement, the Counter-Reformation, was essentially defensive. Exemplified by the Inquisition and Index of Forbidden Books, it sought to repel the Protestant onslaught. As John W. O’Malley, observed, Jedin considered the two movements to be closely related. Indeed, he noted that “For Jedin, Catholic-Reformation-and-Counter-Reformation constituted a true epoch”, that is, a transitional period in Church history that linked the medieval and modern eras. Although formulated within the specific context of Church history, Jedin’s periodization was significant because it rejected Protestantism’s claim to a monopoly on modernity (O’Malley 2000, pp. 46–71, quote 53). The second historiographical innovation was the development of the concept of confession building, which was first used by Bernd Moeller in 1962 but subsequently developed by Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard in the 1970s and 1980s. They maintained that by creating and deploying systems of social discipline to enforce religious unity, sixteenth-century rulers laid the foundations for the creation of absolutist states supported by efficient bureaucracies. Since these developments were propagated by rulers from both sides of the religious divide, each confession could be considered to have participated in the process of modernization (Boettcher 2004; Lotz-Heumann 2001).

These novel historiographical perspectives were subsequently incorporated into post-war Italian scholarship. At this time there were, and indeed there remain today, often sharp divisions between Catholic and lay historians. During the 1950s and 1960s, however, both groups began to take an interest in Jedin’s work. Encouraged by Delio Cantimori (1904–1966), a number of lay historians, including Giuseppe Alberigo and Cantimori’s student Adriano Prosperi, turned away from their traditional focus on the Inquisition and its victims and instead studied the means deployed by the Church to exert its power at a diocesan and parochial level. Jedin also influenced Catholic historians such as Paolo Prodi (1932–2016), whose early work included a study of the reforming bishop, Gabriele Paleotti (1522–1597). These shared interests also meant that, for a short period which lasted until the early 1960s, lay and Catholic historians could enjoy better communication (O’Malley 2000, pp. 78–82).

The suspension of hostilities between Catholic and lay historians soon began to break down, however. Cantimori, for one, grew concerned that Jedin’s work was encouraging too many scholars to emphasize Catholic reform whilst downplaying the significance of the Counter-Reformation. Catholic historians also began to question the value of Jedin’s work; Prodi, for example, gradually became disenchanted with his ideas. Prodi, nevertheless, continued to consider how the Catholic Church influenced the formation of modern Italian society. His most famous work, the Papal Prince, charted the establishment of the papacy as an absolute monarchy. Importantly, he argued that the new tribunals and congregations that constituted the new bureaucracy were not the product of Tridentine reform, but instead reflected contemporary movements towards political centralization. As O’Malley noted, Prodi’s thesis “largely eviscerates the papacy of the significance Jedin attributed to it” (O’Malley 2000, pp. 82–91; Prodi 1987).

How have these historiographical innovations shaped debates about the influence of the post-Tridentine Church and its structures of discipline and censorship over the last thirty years? In 2013, Simon Ditchfield offered a summary of the present state of the field. He argued that although Catholic historians have absorbed the insights gleaned from the concept of a Catholic Reformation and confession building, it has encouraged among them a tendency toward what he termed “we-tooism”, that is, a profound need to assert the significance of their faith in the development of the modern world (Ditchfield 2013, pp. 19–20). Conversely, he noted the following:

At the hands of “lay” historians of the Counter-Reformation (and I use “lay” in the Italian sense of the word as meaning anticlerical or aggressively secular), this attempt to exorcise what might be called the “the curse of Max Weber” (that only Protestantism has a claim to having contributed to modernization) has undergone a more sinister twist in recent years. By bringing the advent of the confessional center stage, Adriano Prosperi and others have replaced Weber with Michel Foucault, with the confessional box substituting for the panopticon as the all-seeing eye of authority.

(Ditchfield 2013, p. 20)

Ditchfield is surely right to affirm that the concept of social discipline has played a central role in studies such Prosperi’s Tribunali della coscienza. It is also clear that this idea can also be seen in the various works of Gigliola Fragnito and Vittorio Frajese that detail the creation and use of ecclesiastical structures of censorship and their relationship to later forms of social police (Prosperi 1996; Frajese 2008, 2014; Fragnito 1997, 2005, 2019). In this sense, their work echoes the arguments of historians of confessionalization—and indeed Weber and Michel Foucault (1926–1984)—for it charts the evolution of centrally directed bureaucratic structures designed to coordinate the implementation of social discipline. In this article, I argue that the conception of Catholic discipline expressed in their work stems from a different conception of the history of modernity, and indeed of Enlightenment.

To trace the origins of Prosperi, Frajese and Fragnito’s conception of modernity and Enlightenment, I intend to build upon an argument that Ditchfield made in a further article in which he suggested that modern Italian historical writing must be read within the context of a venerable historiographic canon. He observed that the writings of figures such as Girolamo Tiraboschi (1731–1794), de Sanctis and Croce “still constitute the ‘deep structure’ for contemporary historians of the Italian peninsula”. Building on this suggestion, and those made in some of my earlier works, I argue that when the modern authors discussed in this essay considered the effects of censorship and social control on the development of modern Italy, they were not primarily addressing either Weber or Foucault’s arguments. Instead, they were each in their own way engaging with the legacy of the arguments produced within the tradition of scholarship inaugurated by Spaventa, de Sanctis and their peers. In this latter context, disciplinary power was not conceived as a constitutive feature of modernity, but as a force that repressed its advocates and ultimately delayed its development (Ditchfield 2008, p. 604; Tarrant 2018, 2019). Although these arguments provided Prosperi, Frajese and Fragnito with a common point of departure, I suggest that their conceptions of censorship and its influence on the development of the modern state varied according to the significance they afforded to Jedin’s historical writings.

Whilst I here describe the contours of the debate about the nature of modernity and the respective roles of Catholicism and Protestantism therein, it is not my intention to engage in any detail with their merits or limitations. On the contrary, I seek simply to set out their salient features—or at least those that I consider relevant to this discussion—in order to accurately situate the highly influential accounts of the history of discipline and censorship produced by Prosperi, Fragnito and Frajese. By clarifying their conception of the relationship between post-Tridentine censorship and social discipline, on the one hand, and modernity on the other, we can gain a clearer understanding of the narratives structuring their work. I hope that realizing this relatively limited ambition will stimulate renewed consideration of how we conceptualize the history of the Italian Catholic Church between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and specifically the role played by its organs of censorship. More broadly, indeed programmatically, I suggest that these reflections can provide a basis for re-assessing whether it remains beneficial to interpret this complex history from the teleological perspective of modernity.

2. The Curses of Modernity

Max Weber is unquestionably associated with the idea that the Protestant faith, or rather faiths, was central to the advent of modernity. In the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), for example, he explained how an emphasis on predestination created amongst the faithful a desire for reassurance of salvation. This psychological need, he argued, caused Protestants to strive for material success in this world, for they believed that it would serve as a sign that they were one of the elect who would be admitted to the next. By the modern age, the theological imperative driving industrious behaviour had been forgotten. All that remained was the urge to accumulate wealth, a desire that left humans, in Weber’s famed formulation, trapped in an iron cage (Weber 2001). Weber made two further contributions to theories of modernity relevant to this discussion. First, he defined the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Weber 1970, p. 78 emphasis in the original). Second, he argued that bureaucracies represented the acme of modern governmental form because they offered a rational means to organize and govern nation states. For Weber, bureaucratic government was driven by the actions of princes who used it to dominate their territories, where necessary, by the application of coercive power (Weber 1970, pp. 196–252). The theory of confession building, which contends that the churches of early modern Europe played a key modernizing role by contributing to the development of disciplinary structures that helped to create centralized absolute states, therefore owes an evident debt to Weber’s ideas. Consequently, if the theory of confession building helped to banish the “curse of Weber”—conceived here as Protestant exceptionalism—it did so by acknowledging Catholicism’s role in the construction of a fundamentally Weberian conception of modernity.

Whilst Weber considered rational, bureaucratic government to be productive, he acknowledged that its exercise could compromise individual rights. We might term this insight “Weber’s other curse”. Like the Protestant work ethic, it was a paradox hardwired into his conception of modernity: enlightened rationality may bring material benefit to societies, but it sometimes did so at the cost of personal freedom. In this respect, Weber described a system of rational bureaucratic government that was undergirded by principles that stood at odds with a vision of Enlightenment conceived primarily as the juridical recognition of inviolable individual rights. It was also in some senses antithetical to liberal—but no less enlightened—notions of government that were developed within Britain and the United States, and it has certainly been acknowledged as such by earlier commentators. This point is, perhaps, most visible in discussions of the concept of “police”. To take one example, in the early 1950s, George Rosen described the idea of “medical police” in early modern Germany, that is, the mass surveillance of populations for the purpose of improving public health in order to further the ends of the state. Rosen drew unfavourable comparisons between German models of public health and a supposedly more liberal British approach rooted in persuasion and education (Carroll 2002).

Although, as Patrick E. Carroll has noted, the distinctions between British and German forms of public health may be overstated, Rosen’s work on medical police exposes a number of salient features of the concept of “police” that help us to situate it within a bureaucratic context. He contended that this idea emerged in the context of cameralism, that is, the specific forms of mercantilism that emerged within the German states during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These states promoted and perfected a science of bureaucratic government that enabled them, amongst other measures, to enforce forms of social discipline designed to promote the health of the population. Whilst potentially beneficial to individuals, these measures were designed to serve the best interests of the state and relied upon surveillance and enforced compliance. Crucially, such forms of social policing could only be conceived and operated in sophisticated bureaucracies. It was, therefore, the product of an advanced and highly developed governmental machine that had attained the capacity centrally to gather and process data, and co-ordinate and enforce responses to that data at a local level. Put simply, without modern bureaucratic infrastructure, there could be no police (Rosen 1953).

Foucault came to intellectual maturity in the years after the Second World War. He was influenced by a developing crisis of confidence in the idea of modernity and progress. Although scholars such as Weber had offered searing critiques of enlightened modernity, the rise of fascism and the revelation of the horrors of the Holocaust stimulated yet fiercer criticism. To take one important example, in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Theodoro W. Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) set out their vision of the paradoxical nature of modern society, noting the “inscrutable unity of society and domination” and unequivocally declaring that “Enlightenment is totalitarian” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997, pp. 6 and 21). Foucault’s own critique of Enlightenment developed the ambivalence that lay at the heart of the work of Weber and Horkheimer and Adorno. In Discipline and Punish, he noted that “The ‘Enlightenment,’ which discovered the liberties also invented the disciplines” (Foucault 1991, p. 222). Foucault was here referring to techniques of power exemplified by the panopticon, that is, Jeremy Bentham’s ideal prison. Human bodies arranged in time and space, whether in factories, schools or prisons, could be readily monitored and controlled. Although individuals were constrained in these institutions, Foucault considered discipline to be always and necessarily a productive force. Organized labour, for example, enabled the development of efficient modern capitalist industrial manufacturing processes. Discipline also facilitated the development of knowledge: trained minds and bodies could be used to gain a new mastery of the natural order. The development of novel scientific and technical knowledge in turn enabled the more effective exercise of coercive power. Knowledge/power was therefore not simply a structural feature of modernity; it was both integral to and constitutive of the Enlightenment. Indeed, this was the paradox that lay at the heart of Foucault’s concept of Enlightenment. The intellectual, political, bureaucratic and social developments of the classical period unleashed unprecedented technical, scientific prowess that fostered material improvement, but which simultaneously left individuals ever more tightly bound by the fetters of power (Foucault 1991, pp. 133–228).

3. From Social Discipline to Social Police in Early Modern Italy

Weber and Foucault’s accounts of discipline were designed to address key questions about the nature of modernity and to present a history of its development. The Italian-language histories of censorship and social discipline with which we are concerned in this essay unquestionably deal with similar themes, but within the specific context of assessing the Church’s role in the formation of a unified Italian state. In the preface to the 2009 edition of Tribunali della coscienza, Prosperi remarked that “The question that inspired this book—I remembered more than a decade ago—is among the oldest and most frequently recurring in the history of Italy: what are the historical reasons for the Catholic Church’s hegemony over Italian society?”1 (Prosperi 1996, p. ix). He was especially concerned with establishing how it had responded to the challenges presented by the Reformation and the steps that it had taken to reassert its prestige within, and re-establish its power over, Italian society.

Understanding the Church’s presence in Italy was, Prosperi maintained, a task that defied simplification. It was a history shaped by various influences, including the politics, institutions and culture of the Italian peninsula. From the age of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) to that of Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), commentators had emphasized political factors over all others. Concentrating on a limited range of questions such as how the Church had maintained and enhanced its power, they had described how the papacy used its religious hegemony to consolidate its political and territorial influence, developments that effectively prevented the establishment of Italian political unity. Ranke had, Prosperi noted, nevertheless also recognized that political power alone could not have enabled the Catholic recovery in the post-Reformation era and that it was therefore also necessary to consider how the Church revitalized religious life. This theme was subsequently embraced by Catholic historians from Ludwig von Pastor (1854–1928) to Hubert Jedin (Prosperi 1996, p. xlv).

Prosperi remarked that after the Second World War, Catholic historians rejected long-standing historical assumptions about the relationship between reform and the modern world. This was a significant departure for, as he noted, “At that time, the triad of (Protestant) Reform—Revolution—Modern World constituted the unquestioned conceptual framework for interpreting the course of history, the essential signs for orienting oneself, for establishing positive and negative values, and for attributing to each nation its place in the journey of civilization”2 (Prosperi 1996, p. xlvi). The struggle to establish modern civilization, and efforts to secure moral and intellectual reform, had, he continued, been hitherto conceptualized as a revolt against the status quo. It was for this reason that modernizing change was traditionally associated with Protestantism. Prosperi continued by noting that the horror of the Holocaust had stripped traditional conceptions of modernity of their lustre, leading some scholars to question whether these events were made possible by the subjugation of the individual to bureaucratic authority. According to Prosperi, the curdling of the ideal of modernist rationality caused historians to question cherished beliefs about the Europe born of the Reformation. This development, in turn, opened a space for the reconsideration of Catholic Europe and its contribution to modernity. For Prosperi, then, the same post-war crisis of modernism that inspired critics of Enlightenment from Horkheimer and Adorno to Foucault also provided the impetus behind the development of this new historiography of the Catholic Church (Prosperi 1996, pp. xlvi–xlvii).

Prosperi was equivocal about the value of this new wave of revisionist historiography. In remarks that clearly alluded to Jedin’s influence, he observed that “To study the history of the Church in Italy in the post-war era has, for the most part, been to describe structures of ecclesiastical organization at a diocesan level: parishes and dioceses, bishops and cardinals, system of benefices, pastoral visits, seminaries for the clergy, parochial records and so forth”3 (Prosperi 1996, p. xlvii). Echoing Cantimori’s later reservations about the impact of Jedin’s work, Prosperi maintained that although these historiographical developments have delivered an image of a Church renewed, their emphasis on Catholic reform has served to occlude “all of the aspects of harsh and police-like control of orthodoxy that resumed within the tribunal of the Inquisition”4 (Prosperi 1996, p. xlvii). His work offered a corrective to this tradition of Catholic revisionism by documenting the creation, work and influence of the Roman Inquisition. Expanding this perspective, he also sought to show how the Inquisition’s activities were supported by missionary activity and the work of confessors. Using, respectively, persuasion and repressive force, the missionary, confessor and inquisitor established the Church’s hegemony over the masses. During the process, they discovered the complexity and importance of “cultural dominion as the interiorized control of entire mental universes”5 (Prosperi 1996, p. xlix).

It is, however, important to add that although Prosperi criticized those working within Jedin’s paradigm for ignoring the Inquisition, he acknowledged that there also existed a significant body of work concerning this institution. Indeed, it would be hard not to, for Italian historians had been studying the Inquisition and its effects on Italian society since at least the Risorgimento, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s lay historians continued to expand upon this rich tradition. To take one important example, Prosperi cited the works of Massimo Firpo. The latter has worked tirelessly in the archives to reconstruct the Inquisition’s efforts to purge the spirituali—individuals with dogmatic views similar to, and in some instances derived from, the Protestants—from the ecclesiastical hierarchy during the mid-sixteenth century. More specifically, working with Dario Marcatto, he has shown how Cardinal Carafa (1476–1559)—the dominant figure in the early Roman Inquisition—sought to use the new institution to persecute figures such as Cardinals Pole (1500–1558) and Morone (1509–1580), whom he suspected of heresy. His work has helped to construct a vivid picture of conflict within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church throughout the religious crisis of the mid sixteenth-century, one that was eventually won by the forces of reaction aided and abetted by the Inquisition. For Firpo, these events showed that there had never been a meaningful Catholic Reformation, at least not one conceived in Jedin’s terms (Firpo and Marcatto 1981–1995, 1998–2000; Firpo 2005). Given this wealth of scholarship, it appears that when Prosperi criticized historians’ neglect of the Inquisition, his remark was directed at scholars working within Jedin’s paradigm. Prosperi’s own work, nevertheless, also needs to be read in this context. His study of the Church’s efforts to Christianize Italian society does not describe the Counter-Reformation, understood as a reaction to Protestantism, but instead the dark underbelly of Catholic Reform. It demonstrates how, in order to achieve its pastoral ends, the Church used mechanisms of social discipline to establish hegemony over ordinary Catholics.

In Prosperi’s work, the post-Tridentine Church has an ambiguous relationship to modernity. In an argument that recalled the suggestions of Weber, Prodi and historians of confessionalization, he maintained that the foundational Roman Inquisition was important because it marked a turning point in the construction of a renewed papal bureaucracy. The new institution enabled the papacy to centrally direct the investigation of heresy and, where necessary, apply officially sanctioned coercive violence. Its activity was coordinated by a Congregation of Cardinals, a new system of administration that subsequently provided a model for the reorganization of the papal curia. Even within the new bureaucratic structures of the curia, the Inquisition was unique, for, as Prosperi noted, “for nearly two centuries the Holy Office of the Roman Inquisition was the only central power operating in the Italian peninsula”6 (Prosperi 1996, p. xliv). Furthermore, the Inquisition’s use of the Italian language in its voluminous correspondence helped to promote and standardize its use across the peninsula. As Ditchfield has noted, with these arguments Prosperi “provided a powerfully suggestive account of the birth of contemporary Italy in the institutions of the Roman Catholic Church during a period of crisis in the middle years of the sixteenth century” (Ditchfield 2008, p. 602).

Prosperi also argued that the post-Tridentine Church had negative impacts on society. He suggested that the Roman Inquisition was emblematic of one of two alternate strategies that the Catholic Church could employ to meet the Protestant threat. Recalling Firpo’s depiction of a divided ecclesiastical hierarchy, Prosperi maintained that the choice of these strategies divided the clerical elite. He contrasted Cardinal Carafa’s desire to prosecute a “spiritual war” against the Protestants with the evangelicals’ preference for negotiating with them at a council. Pursuing his strategy, Carafa directed the Inquisition to uproot and suppress a nascent Italian Reformation. Once this threat had been quelled, the Inquisition was deployed in support of a campaign to Christianize the Italian countryside. Prosperi conceived of these efforts in Gramscian terms, likening them to the attempt to impose hegemony on subaltern classes. In an echo of the work of Carlo Ginzburg—who like Prosperi had been a student of Cantimori—he suggested that when the Church focused its attentions on the elimination of witchcraft and folklore, it had the effect of rending modern Italians’ connections to a pre-Christian culture. By these means, the Church substituted for these true expressions of italianità, a homogenized orthodoxy that served further to entrench its hegemony (Prosperi 1996, pp. xlvii–xlix, 33–153 and 368–99. C.f. Ginzburg 2013a, 2013b).

Perhaps more significantly for our purposes, Prosperi also argued that the Church’s desire to use the means at their disposal to penetrate and dominate minds had ramifications for the censorship of literary works. For example, he discussed the case of the poet Torquato Tasso (1544–1595), who voluntarily submitted himself to the Inquisition’s scrutiny to ensure the orthodoxy of his work (Prosperi 1996, pp. 547–48). For Prosperi, this vignette illustrated how the Church achieved control over society by encouraging Catholics to internalize their rules and amend their behaviour accordingly. He further developed these ideas in later works, in which he maintained that it was reductive to conceive of the relationship between scholars and censors as a “confrontation between an oppressed lay culture and obscurantist ecclesiastical world”7 (Prosperi cited in Fragnito 2019, p. 18). There was instead a close relationship between the laity and censors. He maintained, for example, that literary academies internalized the values that the Church had established and willingly sought to impose them on themselves, thereby creating a homogenous culture. The literary community was, therefore, subject to a form of self-censorship, rather than one imposed by the organs of censorship. This conception of censorship certainly recalls the concept of self-discipline developed in several of Foucault’s works, but it does not exactly conform to the idea of disciplinary power exemplified by the panopticon (Foucault 2001, c.f. Foucault 1991, pp. 135–229). If the early modern Catholic Church did attempt to penetrate and dominate individual consciences, it did so solely in order to compel their adhesion to orthodoxy. In this reading of history, surveillance and self-discipline were not the necessary condition of modernity, but a series of specific techniques deployed by a single institution to exert its hegemony. In this respect, it was a solely repressive form of power, one that Foucault considered un-enforceable (Foucault 1980, pp. 117–19).

In the years since Prosperi completed his work there has been a rapid expansion of interest in censorship and the Inquisition, a development encouraged by the fact that scholars have gradually been permitted enhanced access to the Archives of the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith. By the later 1990s, several historians—notably Gigliola Fragnito, whose work is discussed below—were able to refer to materials held in these archives, and they were fully opened in 1998. As Vittorio Frajese has observed in his work Nascita dell’Indice (2006), prior to these developments, scholars were permitted only partial access to a limited range of documents. Consequently, they necessarily drew partial and potentially misleading conclusions about the nature of ecclesiastical censorship. The opening of these archives revealed that whilst the Inquisition’s records were incomplete, those of the Congregation of the Index were largely intact, allowing the reconstruction of the manner in which the Church’s centralized systems of censorship functioned. As Frajese noted, these materials enabled historians to address long-standing concerns in Italian historical writing. “The politics of censorship”, he wrote, “constitutes a fundamental link between the religious crisis, the creation of the Papal Monarchy and Italian culture, that is to say, between the political and cultural processes in the formation of modern Italy, and research has begun to probe their potential”8 (Frajese 2008, pp. 6–7).

Frajese welcomed historians’ access to these new primary materials, but he cautioned that it was necessary to consider whether existing categories remained suitable for their analysis. He argued that for too long Jedin’s work had provided a framework for conceptualizing censorship. Whilst Prosperi complained that Jedin’s ideas had led historians to ignore the Inquisition, Frajese contended that his distinction between the Counter- and Catholic Reformations had led historians “to think of ‘censorship’ in contradistinction to, or rather as the true opposite of the reforming measures employed by the Council of Trent”9 (Frajese 2008, p. 8). In other words, whilst Jedin’s work had encouraged some historians to recognize that Catholic reform had paved the way for a Catholic modernity, the Counter-Reformation—best represented by the practice of censorship—constituted a countervailing influence. For Frajese, such models were inherently flawed: to conceptualize censorship as a purely repressive activity was, he maintained, to interpret the actions of past actors according to modern “cultural codes”. Contemporaries, whether ecclesiastics or those that they sought to control, would not have recognized their activities as repressive, but as an integral part of the Church’s reforming agenda. Since eradicating error and promoting true belief were two sides of the same coin, it was impossible to distinguish between a repressive Counter-Reformation and a pastoral Catholic Reformation. Instead, Frajese sought to conceptualize censorship as “an organ for the government and reform of the Church”, the history of which began before the outbreak of the Protestant threat10 (Frajese 2008, p. 9).

Frajese developed these arguments in Nascita dell’Indice and Censura in Italia (2014), works that offered a detailed reconstruction of the origins and development of the Index of Forbidden Books. As Frajese stressed in the latter book, the history of the Index was not simply an account of the production of a list of banned books, but also the story of the development of a series of bureaucratic structures invested with the authority to regulate both the production and reading of books throughout the Italian peninsula (Frajese 2008, p. 24). Beginning in the late fifteenth century, he traced the development of the mechanisms of censorship. Building on a number of his earlier studies, he described the creation of the Inquisition, the first papal index drafted by the Inquisition in 1559, the work undertaken at the Council of Trent to moderate and revise this earlier list and the eventual establishment of the Congregation of the Index in 1571. Frajese also drew attention to ongoing tensions between these various organs of censorship and showed how they reflected theological divisions within the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The cleavages he described broadly conformed to those identified by Firpo and Prosperi, with the Inquisition pushing for a notably harder line on questions such as the circulation of vernacular bibles and the Talmud than either the bishops or the Congregation of the Index. Frajese also showed that the disputes within the Church culminated in the early 1590s, during the pontificate of Clement VIII (1592–1605), when the Inquisition intervened to prevent the promulgation of a revised Index of Forbidden Books drafted by the Congregation of the Index until a series of their objections had been resolved (Frajese 2008, pp. 39–220).

Whilst Frajese’s arguments served to confirm and enrich the picture of a post-Reformation Church riven by internal division, he nevertheless also pointed to a unity of purpose in ecclesiastical censorship. In a series of remarks that recalled Jedin’s arguments, he expanded on his point that censorship should be conceived as a type of reform that was designed to address failings that predated the Protestant Reformation. He noted that “The Italy of the Renaissance had sinned and that sin demanded expiation and penitence”11 (Frajese 2008, p. 271). He later asserted that the abuses within Italy had embraced institutional failings, lapsed personal morality, a decline in collective behaviour, and the corruption of language and doctrine. The Protestant reformers had drawn attention to these failings and encouraged the Italian Church to search for means to remedy them. For Frajese, this program of reform and purification was clearly outlined in the measures drafted by the Tridentine Fathers, and subsequently supported by all members of the Church, from the cardinals of the Congregations of the Inquisition and Index to local inquisitors and bishops. The Holy Office, nevertheless, assumed a central role in the co-ordination of these reforms. Perhaps more significantly, he noted that individual Catholic authors wanted to be sure of the orthodoxy of their work. For Frajese, this explained why individuals such as Tasso willingly, and at times proactively, submitted their work for censorship, and why there was limited organized resistance to censorship (Frajese 2008, pp. 271–89; see Frajese 2014, pp. 46–49, as well).

In Censura in Italia, Frajese extended his story into the modern age by describing how the Church’s systems of censorship were superseded by those of the state. In the first half of the book, Frajese addressed the establishment of the Roman Inquisition and the Congregation of the Index and described their operations until the eighteenth century. In the remainder of the work, he described the development within Italy of “police”, that is, a system of public discipline associated with civic authorities. This was designed to allow the state to have authority over a “complex of economic, hygienic and moral conditions intended to ensure the security and health of civic life”12 (Frajese 2014, pp. 138–39). Censorship was eventually incorporated into the competence of the police. For Frajese, the links between the Inquisition and police were, however, either weak or non-existent. Although he acknowledged that in the city of Venice the Inquisitor di Stato and Esecutori contro la Bestemmia had fulfilled functions similar to those of the later police—not only controlling taverns, discouraging gambling and overseeing the book trade, but also offering succour during crises such as floods or fires—they were not the origin of the new system. He instead argued that these novel systems of government originated in northern Europe—specifically, France and Austria—and that they were subsequently imported into Italy. Although the disciplinary structures constructed by the Church may have fulfilled some functions that we might term “police-like”, in Frajese’s account they were not—strictly speaking—police. Moreover, police did not evolve out of the existing ecclesiastical structures. Indeed, a key part of Frajese’s story is a re-calibration of the relative power of Church and State, which enabled the latter to assume control of these functions.

Finally, I shall turn to consider the work of Gigliola Fragnito, who in a trilogy of monographs—La Bibbia al rogo, Proibito capire, and Rinascimento perduto—and a series of articles and edited collections has made significant contributions to our understanding of the structures of censorship. These studies have variously considered restrictions enacted on the vernacular bibles and the circulation of Italian literature. Enriching the picture presented by Prosperi and Frajese of an ecclesiastical hierarchy riven by disputes, in La Bibbia al rogo she has shown how disputes over the legitimacy of the vernacular bibles were driven not only by doctrinal disputes, but also by institutional and jurisdictional rivalries within the Church. The Inquisition sought to reverse traditions of reading the bible in the vernacular that dated back to the fifteenth century. They were opposed by members of the episcopate who sought to use means such as the Tridentine Index to protect their authority to supervise access to these materials. The stage was set for further conflict between these parties within the Church, which were played out between the various organs of censorship and in disputes over future iterations of the Index of Forbidden Books. In these works, Fragnito has also provided a rich picture of the effects of censorship on ordinary Italians, whilst offering a nuanced account of the Church’s ability to enforce its will at a local level.

In the introduction to Rinascimento perduto—the most recent of the three texts discussed in this essay—Fragnito made clear that any similarities between her work and those of Prosperi and Frajese concealed fundamental differences in interpretation. At the heart of her work lay a rejection of the argument that the creation of ecclesiastical structures of censorship was a stage in the establishment of a monopoly on the legitimate application of violence and could therefore be considered an important stage in establishing a modern state conceived in Weberian terms (Fragnito 2014; 2019, p. 17). Indeed, Fragnito maintained that the Roman Inquisition was deeply implicated in keeping Italians divided. In her earlier work, Proibito capire, she argued that these institutions were not only exceptional but, importantly, that their interventions in society were often unjustified and unwarranted. She observed that

With the pretext of protecting the “common people” from the dangers of lapsing into heterodoxy and moral transgression, the censors extended their control to include literary and devotional works, that had achieved great renown: chivalric romances and poetry with religious themes were struck by the hostility of the religious hierarchy towards the “petulance” of the poets and the mixing of the sacred and the profane.13

(Fragnito 2005, p. 9)

Texts of this sort had once been used in Italy’s scuole di abaco to teach literacy; they were gradually removed and replaced with catechisms and prayers. Fragnito believed that through these actions the Roman Inquisition hindered both the process of creating a literate society and the linguistic unification of the Italian peninsula. These measures also functioned as means to exercise “a more pervasive social control over the masses and preserve social structures”14 (Fragnito 2005, p. 9).

Fragnito also rejected specific arguments advanced by both Prosperi and Frajese concerning self-censorship. She was strongly critical of Prosperi’s idea that censorship could be conceived of as a partnership between censor and censored. She accepted that Prosperi might be correct in asserting that academies supervised the literary outputs of their individual members by means such as controlling access to the press, but argued that it was far more difficult to sustain the proposition that individual members became—in effect—the Congregation of the Index’s collaborators and consultants. Moreover, she argued, the evidence suggested that the academicians were also often reluctant to comply with the censors’ demands. Turning to address Frajese’s arguments, she criticized his contention that it is anachronistic to conceptualize censorship as a repressive force, and that it should instead be regarded as part of a process of reformation designed not only to combat Protestantism, but also to remedy the corruption and immorality of the Renaissance.

Whilst critical of Prosperi and Frajese’s arguments, Fragnito did not reject the idea of self-discipline entirely. On the contrary, in Rinascimento perduto she explicitly accepted that it was beyond dispute that the Church had adopted a “pedagogical model based on persuasion rather than coercion”. She nevertheless explicitly affirmed its repressive intent, noting that “It is, however, equally beyond dispute that we are dealing with a pedagogy with a repressive face designed to maintain control over minds and consciences, to mould them and subjugate them, depriving them of the instrument of critical autonomy, in this manner reducing Catholics to the state of ‘perpetual minors,’ according to the effective definition of Paolo Prodi, over whom the Church could more easily exert its power”15 (Fragnito 2005, p. 20).

With its echo of Immanuel Kant’s definition of the state of Enlightenment as an escape from self-imposed immaturity, Fragnito’s invocation of Prodi’s formulation provides a means to understand her interpretation of the events of the sixteenth century. For Fragnito, the systems of censorship that the Church imposed were designed to prevent the free exercise of independent thought. In this instance, the narrative arc of the history that she traced in La Bibbia al rogo is instructive. It begins with an account of the circulation of vernacular bibles in the relatively free intellectual climate of late quattrocento Italy. The events of the Reformation focused debates on this question. Although some liberal ecclesiastics argued for greater access to scripture in the vernacular, an intransigent wing within the Church—best represented by Carafa and the Inquisition—lobbied for greater restrictions. The story of the sixteenth century was that of the gradual victory of the intransigents and their seizure of the mechanisms of censorship. The forces of the Counter-Reformation were victorious, but perhaps more significantly they had displaced the voices of those within the Church who had continued to sustain the values and ideals of the Renaissance. In effect, one possible future for Italy—one informed by the liberal humanism of the Renaissance—was supplanted by a less palatable alternative shaped by the reactionary Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation (Fragnito 1997).

This theme of the extension of censorial control exercised by a reactionary party within the Church continued through her subsequent two books, which examined the censorship of literature. Far from having any beneficial modernizing effects, the development of these forms of censorship and control, and the evolution of the pedagogical project that they supported, caused Italy lasting damage. Whilst Fragnito emphasized that books and manuscripts continued to circulate in a clandestine manner within Italy, and that it was impossible to prevent books entering the peninsula from northern Europe, the systems of censorship and control had two significant consequences. In the first instance, they led authors to regulate the content of their work, a development that affected the content of entire literary genres. Secondly, Fragnito argued that the post-Tridentine Church radically reshaped Italians’ reading habits. To illustrate this point, she described the case of Maria of Portugal, the Princess of Parma. Her Jesuit confessor suggested that she had chosen to refrain from reading the poetry of Francesco Petrarch or Orlando Furioso in order to avoid its vain and frivolous content. “This had been”, Fragnito observed, “the post-Tridentine pedagogical project that would have disciplined women and, through them, all of society” (Fragnito 2005, p. 15). By encouraging women to internalize a disdain for secular literature, the Church sought to promote a new morality. For Fragnito, these developments combined with the restriction on reading vernacular bibles and devotional literature to produce an aversion to reading amongst the population of Italy. This development could, she suggested, explain why in the 1500s the people of the Italian peninsula had enjoyed a relatively high level of literacy, but by the eve of unification they had fallen far behind comparable nations. The combined effects of censorship and this pedagogical project were long-lasting and explain why present-day Italy continued to be a nation of ‘weak readers’ (lettori deboli) (Fragnito 2005, pp. 20–25).

4. An Alternate Curse?

Max Weber and Michel Foucault argued that although modern bureaucratic society unleashed tremendous productive power, it was underpinned by disciplinary structures that served to entrap individual humans. The purpose of their studies was to undercut, or at least pose questions of, essentially Protestant narratives of progress, considering whether modern society was necessarily beneficial to humanity. Whilst Prosperi, Frajese and Fragnito drew on a number of their insights, they were each responding to a different question, namely the following: Did the disciplinary structures created in post-Reformation Italy have the, perhaps surprising, effect of creating structures that fostered the development of modern Italy? Their histories of censorship were therefore responding to an inversion of the Protestant narrative progress, one that assumed that the Catholic Church impeded progress towards modernity. Although, as we have seen, their answers differed markedly, this original question can be situated in—and derives its relevance from—a narrative that posited a decline in Italian culture, or at least a period of arrested national development, caused by the actions of the post-Tridentine Church. They were each considering the question of whether the seeds of modernity lay in events that Italian historians have long associated with the onset of Italy’s supposed decadence.

This highly specific conception of the development of Italian modernity was first developed during the period of the Risorgimento by scholars inspired by the intellectual developments of northern Europe. Adapting Hegel’s account of world history, scholars such as Betrando Spaventa argued that the Italian Renaissance rather than the Protestant Reformation was the wellspring of European modernity. During this period, Italy’s philosophers laid the foundations for a model of rational thought that later inspired the northern Enlightenment. Spaventa maintained, however, that within Italy the Catholic Church used instruments such as the Inquisition and the Index of Forbidden Books to suppress these habits of thought. These constraints on intellectual freedom stalled Italy’s journey to modernity and inaugurated a period of national decadence. For Spaventa, Italy was only able to recommence its development when Italians began to study the works of the thinkers of the northern Enlightenment. His exact contemporary, Francesco de Sanctis, offered a slightly different view of Italian history. He agreed that the Renaissance was the origin of modern, enlightened rationality, and that from the later sixteenth century the Church had delayed its development within Italy. He maintained, however, that there remained an unbroken thread—represented by science—that connected the thought of the Renaissance and that of modern Italy (Tarrant 2018, pp. 364–67; 2019, pp. 1133–36).

These ideas were taken on and developed by later generations of scholars. For his part, Croce accepted the broad contours of de Sanctis’s argument. In Storia dell’Italia nel età del barocca (1929), he argued that the Renaissance did indeed represent the origins of modern rational thought, and that it inspired not only philosophical speculation, but also innovative rational approaches to religion. Like his intellectual predecessors, he argued that the Counter-Reformation Church smothered this movement, ushering in a period of Italian cultural decadence. Croce’s conception of the Counter-Reformation nevertheless differed sharply from that of Spaventa. He suggested that its repressive aspects had been overstated, and that its true effect was to cause a crisis within the minds of Italian intellectuals. The Counter-Reformation captured Italy’s finest minds, by encouraging them to focus on the task of defending the institutional Church against the Protestant threat (Tarrant 2019, pp. 1136–41).

To achieve these ends, the Church preserved key parts of Italy’s cultural inheritance. Croce observed, for instance, that Italians’ facility with Latin remained far greater than that of Protestants. For Croce, Italy’s decline began because these cultural resources were used to serve no purpose higher than buttressing the political power of the Church. Art, literature and music were all stripped of any lasting value. With their energy thus diverted, Italian intellectuals were unable to engage in rational thought about the temporal world, thereby preventing them from constructing a modern nation. The politically restored Church nevertheless possessed the capacity to enforce religious orthodoxy, which according to Croce yielded perhaps surprising social utility. By exercising these powers, the Church was able to maintain Italy’s religious unity, preventing it from sliding into religious warfare and preserving its moral order, thereby preserving a society that was by the nineteenth century ready to reconnect with the legacy of the Renaissance and assume its rightful place in the modern world. This was “the curse of Croce”: ecclesiastical power could preserve but not produce. Whilst the Church maintained a religion that provided Italians with some sense of unity, it simultaneously hampered their nation’s progress to modernity (Croce 1993; Tarrant 2019, pp. 1136–41).

As Ditchfield has noted, it is possible to detect Croce’s “studied ambivalence” in Prosperi’s work. Despite his often-scathing appraisal of the role played by repressive institutions such as the Inquisition, in Tribunali della coscienza Prosperi approvingly cited the passage from Croce’s Storia dell’età barocca, in which the latter had argued that the Church continued to play a socially useful role in the modern age. Echoing this view, Prosperi argued that the Church continued to offer a sense of unity during such bleak moments in modern Italian history as the murder of the Prime Minister, Aldo Moro (1916–1978), by the Red Brigade (Ditchfield 2008, pp. 600–2; Prosperi 1996, pp. xl–xli, l–li and 213–14). Croce’s influence was also expressed in Prosperi’s distinctive conception of the Inquisition’s contribution to modernity. He presented an image of the Inquisition as an advanced bureaucratic institution, which enabled the effective application of ecclesiastical discipline across the Italian peninsula. This papal bureaucracy was not constructed as a means to pursue rational government, however, but to impose upon the people of Italy a religious settlement determined at Trent. For Weber, the occasional infringement of individual rights was the unfortunate result of bureaucratic administration; in Prosperi’s account, this was the essential purpose of the reconfigured papal curia that emerged from its encounter with Protestantism. For Prosperi, the renewed bureaucracy had the effect of shoring up the papacy’s political power. Whilst this development enabled the papacy to enforce orthodoxy, it was not designed to inspire or encourage reform but to dominate and command obedience. As for Croce, and so too for Prosperi, the Church could preserve but it could not produce.

If Prosperi’s work can be understood and interpreted in light of this earlier historiography, I suggest that this is also true of the work of Frajese and Fragnito. In Frajese’s case, this may appear a difficult argument to make, for ostensibly his work owed little to the conception of modernity advanced by either Spaventa or de Sanctis. In the first instance, Frajese explicitly rejected the idea that censorship should be conceived as a repressive force. Although he shared with Prosperi the belief that the construction of a renewed bureaucracy—inspired by the model of the Inquisition—heralded the creation of a new papal monarchy, he held a different understanding of the imperative driving these developments. Despite the nuances of his discussion, Prosperi described the construction of a bureaucratic institution that was designed to enable the Papacy to dominate individual consciences. Frajese rejected this idea. Echoing Jedin, he argued that its essential purpose was to effect meaningful reform of both individuals and Christian society. This argument also separated Frajese’s work from that of Prodi, for it implied that rather than simply reflecting wider changes in political governance in the early modern period, the construction of the papal bureaucracy was driven by a genuine reforming impulse. Finally, Frajese’s understanding of the Renaissance as an age of corruption that required reform—again an idea that recalled Jedin’s work—stood sharply at odds with the Italian liberal vision of an age of promise that contained the seeds of Enlightenment. Although Frajese’s arguments contradicted the tenets of the liberal historiographical tradition, it is, however, possible to discern their influence on his work in relief.

In Nascita dell’indice, Frajese framed his contribution as a corrective to what he considered a misleading dichotomy between the Catholic and Counter-Reformations established in the work of Jedin. This division of the historiography into two incommensurable camps may reflect the views expressed in the literature, although Frajese did not cite any works to substantiate his point. As we have seen, however, Jedin would not have recognized a contradiction between Catholic and Counter-Reformations. Indeed, Frajese’s belief that censorship and reform were closely related was wholly consistent with Jedin’s ideas. The insurmountable divide between Catholic and Counter-Reformation that he identified instead appears to reflect a distinctively Italian reaction to Jedin’s work. Whilst Italian historians inspired by Jedin’s ideas researched aspects of Church reform, they tended to avoid discussions of activities associated with the Counter-Reformation. They thus ceded discussion of one half of Jedin’s Catholic-Reformation-and-Counter-Reformation dyad to “lay” historians (in the sense defined by Ditchfield), such as Massimo Firpo, who were more critical of the Church’s history. Informed by earlier liberal narratives that framed the Controriforma as a restraining influence on Italian modernity, these histories have advanced a concept of censorship as a repressive force that served to constrain, even suppress, the advent of modernity. Frajese’s approach derives its potency from the fact that he was responding not simply to Jedin’s work, but to this distinctive Italian rendering of its implications.

Placing Italian debates about the nature and effect of early modern ecclesiastical censorship within the context of the Italian liberal historiographical tradition also makes it possible to understand Fragnito’s criticism of Prosperi and Frajese’s work. Of the three authors discussed in this essay, Fragnito offered the most damning portrait of the Counter-Reformation and the effects of censorship and social discipline. She maintained that during this period the Roman Catholic Church constructed a series of instruments that allowed it to wield repressive and unjustified power over all areas of Italian life, the effects of which are still felt in a society with an instinctive aversion to reading. Fragnito left implicit the connection between Italy’s fortunes in the post-Reformation era and the decline of literacy and the distancing of Catholics from religious knowledge by means such as the use of Latin liturgy. For Fragnito, it seems that the Church’s actions were designed to prevent the free exercise of independent thought. Italians were thus preserved—in Prodi’s pregnant phrase—as “perpetual minors”, a development that effectively severed their links to the culture of the Renaissance and limited their capacity to progress to modernity. Fragnito’s eponymous Rinascimento perduto (Renaissance Lost) was conceived in similar terms to the Renaissance depicted by Spaventa, de Sanctis and Croce; that is, as an intellectual movement driven by rational thought that pointed the way to an alternative future for Italy. It was a modernity informed by the rationality and promise of Kant and Hegel, yet one seemingly untarnished by the paradoxes exposed by Weber or Foucault. There was, however, no ambivalence in Fragnito’s assessment of the Counter-Reformation Church’s role in the history of modern Italy: it suppressed the Renaissance. In this respect, her work was informed not by the arguments of de Sanctis or Croce, but instead by the curse of Spaventa.

5. Conclusions

Prosperi, Frajese and Fragnito have each produced important and highly influential histories of censorship and social discipline in post-Tridentine Italy. Their accounts are informed by an eclectic range of sources, and it is possible to detect the influence of figures such as Weber or Foucault. Nevertheless, the questions that these historians have sought to answer were framed by a distinctive narrative of Italian national development forged in the heat of the Risorgimento. Inverting Protestant narratives of progress, Italian liberal historians of the nineteenth century sought to show how Italy could simultaneously be the source of modernity and yet by the nineteenth century remain relatively unmodernized. At the heart of their strategies to explain how this apparent paradox had come to pass lie the actions of the post-Tridentine Church and the structures of censorship and discipline that it built. This has meant that debates about the nature, extent and significance of ecclesiastical censorship and discipline are structured by narratives that are in turn informed by qualitative judgements about their impact on the modern Italian state and society. Consequently, we are left with one final paradox to consider. It may be the case that we can only arrive at a new understanding of the influence of the religious crisis of the sixteenth century on modern Italian society if we abandon teleological readings of the pre-modern period. By freeing ourselves from these narratives, we can re-examine the significance of the Church’s disciplinary structures, and then—should we so choose—use this new research as the basis to revise our understanding of their role in the events that led to the creation of a unified Italian state.