page_title: Index Librorum Prohibitorum
section_title: Early indices (1529–1571)
hierarchical_section_title: Index Librorum Prohibitorum / Background and history / Early indices (1529–1571)
caption_attribution_description: English: Index_1557
context_page_description: The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was a list of publications deemed heretical or contrary to morality by the Sacred Congregation of the Index, and Catholics were forbidden to read them without permission.
  There were attempts to censor individual books before the sixteenth century, notably the ninth-century Decretum Glasianum, but none of these were either official or widespread. In 1559, Pope Paul IV promulgated the Pauline Index, which Paul F. Grendler believed marked "the turning-point for the freedom of enquiry in the Catholic world". After less than a year, it was replaced by the Tridentine Index which relaxed aspects of the Pauline Index that had been criticized and had prevented its acceptance. The 20th and final edition appeared in 1948, and the Index was formally abolished on 14 June 1966 by Pope Paul VI.
  Pope Paul IV established the Index of Prohibited Books which banned thousands of book titles and blacklisted publications, including the works of Europe's intellectual elites. This index condemned religious texts, readings of romance, and graded authors based on their degree of toxicity.
context_section_description: The first list of the kind was not published in Rome, but in Catholic Netherlands (1529); Venice (1543) and Paris (1551) under the terms of the Edict of Châteaubriant followed this example. By mid-century, in the tense atmosphere of wars of religion in Germany and France, both Protestant and Catholic authorities reasoned that only control of the press, including a catalog of prohibited works, coordinated by ecclesiastic and governmental authorities could prevent the spread of heresy.
  Paul F. Grendler (1975) discusses the religious and political climate in Venice from 1540 – 1605. There were many attempts to censor the Venetian press, which was one of the largest concentrations of printers at that time. Both church and government held to a belief in censorship, but the publishers continually pushed back on the efforts to ban books and shut down printing. More than once the index of banned books in Venice was suppressed or suspended because various people took a stand against it.
  The first Roman Index was printed in 1557 under the direction of Pope Paul IV (1555–1559), but then withdrawn for unclear reasons. In 1559, a new index was finally published, banning the entire works of some 550 authors in addition to the individual proscribed titles: "The Pauline Index felt that the religious convictions of an author contaminated all his writing." The work of the censors was considered too severe and met with much opposition even in Catholic intellectual circles; after the Council of Trent had authorised a revised list prepared under Pope Pius IV, the so-called Tridentine Index was promulgated in 1564; it remained the basis of all later lists until Pope Leo XIII, in 1897, published his Index Leonianus.
  The blacklisting of some Protestant scholars even when writing on subjects a modern reader would consider outside the realm of dogma meant that, unless they obtained a dispensation, obedient Catholic thinkers were denied access to works including: botanist Conrad Gesner's Historiae animalium; the botanical works of Otto Brunfels; those of the medical scholar Janus Cornarius; to Christoph Hegendorff or Johann Oldendorp on the theory of law; Protestant geographers and cosmographers like Jacob Ziegler or Sebastian Münster; as well as anything by Protestant theologians like Martin Luther, John Calvin or Philipp Melanchthon.  Among the inclusions was the Libri Carolini, a theological work from the 9th century court of Charlemagne, which was published in 1549 by Bishop Jean du Tillet and which had already been on two other lists of prohibited books before being inserted into the Tridentine Index.
caption: Title page of the first Papal Index, Index Auctorum et Librorum, published in 1557 and then withdrawn.
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