Reading and censorship in Early Modern Europe

About this book

"This collection of essays, based on the papers of an exploratory workshop funded by the European Science Foundation and held in Barcelona 2007, examines the multifaceted fashion in which early modernity approached the problems and possibilities of book censorship. The contributors consider the moral, religious, political and literariy dimensions of censorship, approaching it not only as an institutional practice, but also as a discourse which plays a constitutive role in setting the conceptual and practical limits of freedom of conscience and expression in a variety of domains. In both respects, the institutional and the discursive, this voluime builds upon recent (and not so recent) research into early modern censorship. Its focus is Catholic Europe--Spain, Portugal, Italy and France--but at several points it draws on, and we hope feeds back into, scholarship on a much broader geographical range"--María José Vega and Julian Weiss, Introduction, p. 10.