In 1992 in the small town of Barcarrota in Badajoz they carried out work on a house. They are demolishing an ancient partition. And the beak crashes into an unexpected material. Its about a book. In total, they find ten printed books and a manuscript that have been sandwiched since the mid-16th century. They find the Lazarillo de Tormes in an edition from 1554, a true gem, but there is also a book on palmistry, another by Erasmus of Rotterdam and yet another on exorcisms, there is nothing, against any type of curses.
But there is also the Sandwich Prayer, belonging to the popular piety of the time, and the shameless homosexual erotic dialogue La cazzaria - from cazzo, penis -, which circulated throughout Europe. What did such disparate books have in common to have been hidden? The answer now takes the form of an exhibition at the National Library of Spain in Madrid: Bad Books. Censorship in modern Spain, which covers through a hundred works the prohibition of books from the 16th to the 19th century, when the Inquisition was abolished - although it would have a resurrection with Ferdinand VII - by the Cortes of Cádiz.
Because what unites the books found in Barcarrota is appearing directly or generically in the indexes of prohibited books that began to be prepared in the 16th century, first in the universities of Paris and Louvain, by their theologians, then throughout Europe, and more. later passing the baton directly to the Inquisition. “The owner had walled up the books for fear of the repression generated by the index. And that saved some very valuable items. And the most unique thing is that in a tiny Extremaduran town, in the mid-16th century, there are books in French, Latin, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. It indicates how the book circulates in Europe,” explains María José Vega, professor of Literary Theory at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and curator of the exhibition.
An exhibition full of indexes of banned books and books crossed out and mutilated, sometimes line by line, other times smeared with ink or pasted another piece of paper on top. And those were the luckiest books, because they did not appear in the indexes of prohibited books but in the expurgatory indexes, a purely Hispanic invention. Thus, in the exhibition there are books such as Dante's Divine Comedy in which all the prohibited fragments were patiently crossed out, such as when the author places pontiffs and ecclesiastics in hell or talks about the lasciviousness and greed of the Popes.
“Since the first index of banned books appears, the pressure on booksellers is great because they see how their businesses are ruined. So here it is decided that in certain cases the book will be allowed to circulate, but crossing things out, expurgating it. If it is going to be banned because a heretic is mentioned, we cross out the name, if it is banned because of an inconvenient scene, we cross out the scene or tear it out. Rome never saw this policy well,” explains Vega. A Rome and a Papacy whose interests often did not coincide when it came to prohibiting with those of the Hispanic Empire.
The first index of prohibited books, remember, had appeared at the University of Paris in 1544, and shortly afterward the University of Leuven, one of the centers of the Spanish empire, would publish its own. “Two major factors lead to the invention of indices. One is the multiplication of books thanks to the printing press and another is the immense impact of Lutheranism on European culture," explains the commissioner, who recalls that before the indexes there was already censorship, for example with edicts, but "at a time Given that, that is not enough and some institutions begin to make handwritten lists of the books that they have already been prohibiting as heretical or magical. And these lists for internal use soon become interesting that they circulate and have legal support to ban books. They are invented by the most important universities in doctrinal matters. From there, many indexes will appear.”
And remember that the prohibitions begin with the texts of Luther and other reformers and are expanded. “You start by prohibiting heresy and you end up prohibiting almost everything. The first indices are in fact very small, the last ones are monumental,” he points out. And long-lasting: in Rome they are in force until 1966 when the Second Vatican Council ended them. In Spain, however, the latest index is from 1790.
The list of books banned by the indexes in Spain will be long. La Celestina was unpublished for two centuries. Of course, all Luther. But also the ideas of the Enlightenment: all of Voltaire and Rousseau, and some of Diderot, including the Encyclopédie. Also the spiritual writings of Fray Luis de Granada and the mystic Miguel de Molinos. But also the popular divination books of the time, which ranged from palmistry to metoposcopy, reading the future in the lines of the forehead and its correspondence with the planets: imagining that the future could be written went against the doctrine of free will. And the irreverent and anticlerical Renaissance theater did not fare very well.
And neither do the books of popular piety, with prayers that grant gifts like the ejaculations of the Sandwich Prayer. “The Inquisition will soon deal with what it considers superstition in Catholicism itself, probably in reaction to Protestant criticism, who always saw the cult of saints as Catholic excesses. And then he began to eliminate perfectly Catholic prayers because he understood that they bordered on superstitious,” says Vega.
A separate chapter is censorship due to gender issues. On the one hand, remember, writing in religious cloisters always had filters. It was reviewed by teachers and bishops. "And women readers have a special situation, diffuse censorship. Strong censorship is what the inquisition exercises in the indexes of banned books, but women's reading was subject to many filters, to many instances of power that vetoed their access. to books: parents, guardians, teachers".
Thus, a specific literature is generated about which books women should not see, "for example, pastoral literature or love fiction, that is, perfectly permitted books." A moralistic literature is generated which, he explains, "warns that the maiden should not be allowed to read profane books that deal with certain topics because they awaken bad thoughts, that girls should only occupy themselves with devout books and even that it is not advisable not even that they know how to read because then what happens happens. This is how it shows books by Juan de la Cerda or Juan Luis Vives, who in the Instruction of the Christian Woman examines the effects of reading on the tender spirits of women. The Franciscan Francisco Ortiz contrasts the useful reading of the psalms with the useless reading of "the Celestinas, Dianas, Boscanes, Amadises, Esplandianes" and other books full of "portentous lies" that lead the readers to desire, lust and sin.
The commissioner finally warns that “censorship is not only an exercise by which a book is banned, something that no longer happens today, but also a way of intervening in consciences, an instrument of social control, of creating convictions. These instruments change, but they do not always disappear over time. They take on other forms.”
