37: Censorship in Early Modern Europe and its Ramifications with Hannah Marcus

Jewish History Matters

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What is censorship? How can we identify it, and understand how it functions and what are its effects? Hannah Marcus joins us for a fascinating discussion about her research on the history of the censorship of scientific and medical texts in early modern Italy which opens up a wide-ranging set of issues about the nature of censorship in historical context and the control of knowledge in more recent times, too.

Hannah Marcus is an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard. Her research focuses on the scientific culture of early modern Europe between 1450 and 1700. She is writing a book titled Forbidden knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy.

In our conversation we discuss a different form of censorship from what many people assume or expect—instead of burning books, we find a phenomenon where scientific texts deemed illicit by the Catholic church (often because they were written by Protestant authors) were made licit through a process of editing and expurgation, where certain passages or names were crossed out or blacked out. Clearly, censorship is a process of the restriction and control of knowledge, but what we see here is process whereby censorship was a mechanism for making available, at least to certain people. By looking at censorship-as-promulgation, as opposed to censorship-as-restriction, we flip on its head our common understanding of what censorship is and assumptions about how it works that gives us a broad framework for thinking through censorship and the control of knowledge in more contemporary contexts as well. In this respect this episode brings forward important issues about why history matters at large, and also the way in which Jewish history intersects with a wide range of fields.

Last year, Hannah joined the Starr Fellow seminar at Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies and she was amazingly able to come to almost all of the sessions, which is quite a feat in general—made all the more so if we consider that she herself isn’t a historian who focuses on Jewish history in particular. Of course, her research on censorship intersected with the discussions we were having about the history of the book in general. But it just was so fabulous to have someone like Hannah join us who doesn’t focus on Jewish history, but wants to engage with the kinds of questions and issues that Jewish history brings up. Hannah’s work demonstrates how the toolkit of Jewish history is something that scholars of all types can draw upon, and how Jewish history is useful for a range of scholarly and intellectual activity, both for those of us who are studying the Jews specifically and also the many more people who work on and think about other subjects.

It’s also a very important and interesting issue on its own. Even though we aren’t always talking about Jewish history so specifically, we highlight some of the ways history matters broadly. When we study and talk about censorship in a historical context, like so many other historical topics, we find conceptual tools and comparative frameworks that allow us to pose questions and consider important topics. In this way we can learn from the past so that we can understand the complex nature of censorship, both in early modern Europe as well as in more contemporary contexts as well.

Some books, articles, and topics we discussed in the episode include:

• Some of Hannah’s articles on theses topics include:
  • “Expurgated Books as an Archive of Practice” (Aug. 2017)
  • “The Mind of the Censor: Girolamo Rossi, a Physician and Censor for the Congregation of the Index” (2018)
  • “Bibliography and Book Bureaucracy: Reading Licenses and the Circulation of Prohibited Books in Counter-Reformation Italy” (2016)
• Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, The Censor, The Editor, and The Text: The Catholic Church and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon in the Sixteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007)
• Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing
• Annabel Patterson’s notion of the hermeneutics of censorship, see: Censorship and Interpretation. The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (University of Wisconsin Press, 1991)
• Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century
• Matthew Kirschenbaum’s work on editing and erasing digital files, also see Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing