INDEX LIBRORUM PROHIBITORUM 1948 Last printed edition; Sartre, Moravia, Gide.

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INDEX LIBRORUM PROHIBITORUM SS.MI D. N. PP. XII. Iussu Editus. ANNO MCMXLVIII, p ublished by Typis Poliglottis Vaticanis, Vatican 1948. This 1948 edition is the last fully printed edition of the Index. Our copy also includes the separate 1954 sheet (Index Additus) which forbids the reading of all the works (Opera Omnia) of the following modern authors: Jean Paul Sartre, Alberto Moravia, and Andre Gide. This sheet is quite Scarce. 508pp. Bound in boards. Book in VG+ condition, 1954 sheet is VG. The Index Librorum Prohibitorum ("List of Prohibited Books") was a list of publications prohibited by the Roman Catholic Church. The avowed aim of the list was to protect the faith and morals of Roman Catholics by preventing them reading of so-called "immoral" books or works containing theological errors. The various editions also contain the rules of the Church relating to the reading, selling and censorship of books. Books that passed inspection were printed with nihil obstat ("nothing forbids") or Imprimatur ("let it be printed") on the title page. The list was not simply a reactive work. Roman Catholic authors had the opportunity to defend their writings and could prepare a new edition with the necessary corrections or elisions, either to avoid or to limit a ban. Pre-publication censorship was encouraged; self-censorship, however, was incalculable. The idea of a religious list of prohibited books finds early precedent in the ancient Christian debates concerning the formation of the Bible canon in response to Marcionism and spurious Gnostic writings. Many gnostic works were rejected by the church and burned, hidden or destroyed. In the Middle Ages, The first list of prohibited books was not published in Rome, but in Roman Catholic Netherlands (1529). Venice (1543) and Paris (1551, under the terms of the Edict of Châteaubriant) followed this example. The first Roman Index was the work of Pope Paul IV (1557, 1559). The work of the censors was considered too severe and, after the Council of Trent had revised the church legislation on the prohibition of books, Pope Pius IV promulgated in 1564 the so called Tridentine Index, the basis of all later lists until Pope Leo XIII, in 1897, published his Index Leonianus. The very first lists were the work of the Sacred Congregation of the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church (later the Holy Office, now the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith). In 1571, a special congregation was created, the Sacred Congregation of the Index, which had the specific task to investigate those writings that were denounced in Rome as being not exempt of errors, to update the list of Pope Pius IV regularly and also to make lists of corrections in case a writing was not in itself damnable but only in need of correction and put on the list with a mitigating clause (e.g., donec corrigatur (forbidden if not corrected) or donec expurgetur (forbidden if not purged)). This sometimes resulted in very long lists of corrections, published in the Index Expurgatorius. Prohibitions made by other congregations (mostly the Holy Office) were simply passed on to the Congregation of the Index, where the final decrees were drafted and made public, after approval of the Pope (who always had the possibility to condemn an author personally—only a few examples, such as Lamennai and George Hermes). The Congregation of the Index was abolished in 1917, when the rules on the reading of books were again elaborated in the new Codex Iuris Canonici. From that date on, the Holy Office (again) took care of the index. The Index was regularly updated until the 1948 edition. This 32nd edition contained 4,000 titles censored for various reasons: heresy, moral deficiency, sexual explicitness, and so on. Among the notable writers on the list were Desiderius Erasmus, Edward Gibbon, Giordano Bruno, Laurence Sterne, Voltaire, Daniel Defoe, Nicolaus Copernicus, Honoré de Balzac, Jean-Paul Sartre, Nikos Kazantzakis, as well as the Dutch sexologist Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde, author of the sex manual The Perfect Marriage. A complete l... read more

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