Forbidden Ideas

A book becomes forbidden when someone with the power to stop it decides its ideas will do damage. This collection takes in the heresies that councils and inquisitors condemned and the Index of Prohibited Books, which Rome first published in 1559. It covers the grimoires and books of divination that the rules of the Tridentine Index banned outright in 1564, and Copernicus, whose On the Revolutions the Congregation of the Index suspended in 1616. In 1644 John Milton warned Parliament, in print, that whoever destroys a good book ‘kills reason itself’.

A ban says more about the censor than about the book. The 1559 Index banned the entire output of sixty-one printers, whatever the author, subject or language.

The shelf holds gospels left out of the canon, Wilhelm Reich, the literature of prohibited plants and psychedelics, and the critics of psychiatry and of religion. The twentieth and last edition of the Index appeared in 1948, and in June 1966 it lost the force of church law.