Forbidden Prayer: Church Censorship and Devotional Literature in Renaissance Italy

309 Pages·2012·1.54 MB·English

by  Giorgio Caravale

Forbidden Prayer
Church Censorship and Devotional Literature in
Renaissance Italy
Giorgio Caravale
Forbidden Prayer
To the memory of my father
To my mother
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Forbidden Prayer
Church Censorship and Devotional Literature in
Renaissance Italy
GIoRGIo CaRavaLe
Università di Roma Tre, Italy
Translated by
PeteR Dawson
© Giorgio Caravale 2011
all rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Giorgio Caravale has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
Italian original edition: L’orazione proibita. Censura ecclesiastica e letteratura devozionale
nella prima età moderna, © 2003, Firenze, olschki.
Published by
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Caravale, Giorgio.
Forbidden prayer : church censorship and devotional literature in Renaissance Italy. –
(Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700)
1. Devotional literature – Censorship – Italy – History – 16th century. 2. Devotional
literature – Censorship – Italy – History – 17th century. 3. Catholic Church – Prayers
and devotions – Censorship – Italy – History – 16th century. 4. Catholic Church
– Prayers and devotions – Censorship – Italy – History – 17th century. 5. Catholic
Church – Doctrines – History – Modern period, 1500– 6. Censorship (Canon law –
History – 16th century. 7. Censorship (Canon law – History – 17th century. 8. Italy
– Church history – 16th century. 9. Italy – Church history – 17th century.
I. title II. series
264’.02’00945’09031-dc22
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication Data
Caravale, Giorgio.
Forbidden prayer : church censorship and devotional literature in Renaissance Italy /
Giorgio Caravale.
p. cm. – (Catholic christendom, 1300–1700)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
IsBn 978-1-4094-2988-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) – IsBn 978-1-4094-3992-9 (ebook)
1. Censorship – Religious aspects – Christianity – History. 2. Devotional literature –
Censorship. 3. Devotional literature – Publishing. 4. Italy – Church history – 16th
century. 5. Italy – Church history – 17th century. I. title.
BR115.C38C395 2011
242’.8024509031–dc23
2011029465
IsBn 9781409429883 (hbk)
IsBn 9781409439929 (ebk)
IV
Printed and bound in Great Britain by the
MPG Books Group, UK
Contents
Foreword vii
Note to the English Edition xi
PART I InneR DevoTIon, LuTheRAnIsm, AnD ChuRCh
CensoRshIP In The FIRsT hALF oF The sIxTeenTh
CenTuRy
1 The Pater Noster from Savonarola to Seripando 3
2 Mental Prayer and the Spirituali 27
3 Serafino da Fermo and Lorenzo Davidico 43
4 Pier Paolo Vergerio and the Antidevotional Controversy 55
PART II suPeRsTITIous PRAyeR AnD mysTIC PRAyeR:
ChuRCh CensoRshIP FRom The InDex oF PAuL Iv
To ThAT oF CLemenTIne
5 Towards Renewed Inwardness 71
6 Mental Prayer and Catholic Orthodoxy 89
7 Censorship and Self-Censorship in the 1580s 97
8 From Heresy to Liturgy 147
PART III TowARD The FAILuRe oF The sTRuggLe
AgAInsT suPeRsTITIon: The CLemenTIne InDex In ITs
FIRsT yeARs oF APPLICATIon
9 The Making of Liturgic Uniformity: Mere Wishful Thinking? 165
10 A Fight against Superstition or a Struggle against
the Illiterates? 191
11 First Signs of Surrender 225
vi FOrbIDDen PrAyer
12 roberto bellarmino and Tommaso Campanella:
An Unexpected encounter 245
Bibliography 261
Index 289
Foreword
The aim of this book is to describe the attempt made by the Congregations
of the Inquisition and the Index during the sixteenth century and the early
decades of the seventeenth to purify certain devotional texts written in
vernacular Italian, eliminating any heterodox elements or encrustations
of superstition that they might contain and imposing strict uniformity in
all liturgical and devotional practices. More specifically, a series of works
will be considered whose subject is religious but not necessarily theological
or liturgic, intended to maintain or increase the devotion of the faithful,
whether lay persons or ecclesiastics;1 treatises and even simple little
devotional works over which the ecclesiastic organs entrusted with the task
of keeping a watchful eye on Roman orthodoxy exercised their authority,
either preventing the circulation of those parts of writings they deemed
most harmful or surgically removing them. The subject of prayer, the
leitmotiv of the entire work, makes it possible both to trace the evolution
over the decades of the contents and forms of this type of spiritual or pious
literature and to analyze at the same time the development of ecclesiastic
censoring strategies with regard to this important sector of contemporary
book production.
The attempt by Rome to impose rigid uniformity in the liturgic and
devotional practices of the faithful was triggered by the gradual spreading
of Protestant doctrines throughout the Italian peninsula and by the
subsequent condemnation in the Index in 1559 of several texts devoted to
prayer. In these works the compilers of the Pauline Index discerned – or
believed they had discerned – clear evidence of heterodoxy, occasionally
somewhat arbitrarily likening to the message of the Reformers examples
of an inward spiritual religiosity that sank its roots in a rich medieval
tradition that continued to flourish in the late fifteenth century and the
early decades of the sixteenth. The battle engaged against the peril of
Protestantism was to continue, albeit with less pressing urgency, into the
1 In addition to G. De Luca’s classic work, Introduzione alla storia della pietà, Rome,
Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1962, see E. Barbieri’s recent paper, Tradition and change
in the spiritual literature of the Cinquecento, in Church, Censorship and Culture in early modern
Italy, ed. by G. Fragnito, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 111–33, published
in fuller form in ID. – D. ZarDin, Libri, biblioteche e cultura nell’Italia del Cinque e Seicento,
Milan, Vita e Pensiero, 2002, pp. 3–61. For a general introduction to the topic, U. roZZo’s
Linee per una storia dell’editoria religiosa in Italia (1465–1600), Udine, Forum, 1993, continues to
be fundamental, while a more recent work is Il libro religioso, also edited by Rozzo and by Rudj
Gorian, Milan, S. Bonn ard, 2002.
viii FoRBIDDEn PRayER
decades that followed, engaging fields of doctrine that were relatively
remote. Mystic treatises on the subject of prayer were censured, even by
a process of significant self-censorship, often as the result of the fact that
the defenders of Roman orthodoxy, with some exaggeration, likened the
question of the mystic expropriation of human will (and the consequent
total abandonment to the will of God) to the Lutheran doctrine of the
bondage of the will.
It was only after setting up a first sturdy bulwark against Lutheran
infiltrations, with the Index of 1559, that the Church authorities
committed themselves to the work of purifying prayer and liturgy from the
superstitious and apocryphal encrustations that had sedimented over the
centuries. This process drew vigor from the reformist demands still present
in the Roman Curia, but certainly owed much to the insistent Protestant
criticism of the external manifestation of Catholic religious practices. In
other words, the process fulfilled, on the one hand, a broader program
of inner reform of the Church and of a precise restoration of ecclesiastic
tradition and, on the other, the need to subtract certain arguments from
Protestant polemics.
In actual fact, the project of redefining and purifying the Church’s
orthodox patrimony and the related re-establishment of an inward,
intimist dimension of religion, which the head-on opposition in the early
part of the century had unilaterally attributed to the Protestant enemy,
was destined to gradually lose strength, with the setting of the sun on the
generations of ecclesiastics who had themselves promoted the project and
especially with the gradual disappearance of the Protestant menace.
The conquest and the social and religious control of the uneducated
faithful masses very soon became the primary objective of ecclesiastic
action. In the last two decades of the sixteenth century the censor’s alarm
at the most disparate cultural and religious expressions of the universe
of the ‘unlettered’ grew at a rate that was inversely proportional to the
attention paid by the organs of repression in Rome to the devotional style
of mystic prayer which – intended to conduct ‘nuns and gentlewomen’ to
the very threshold of impeccability – distinguished itself by its innately
elitist attitude.
The control of the religiosity of the ‘simple’ became the strategic
priority of the Church of the Counter-Reformation, and the fight against
using the vernacular became the symbol and instrument of that priority.
as part of an offensive aimed at imposing ecclesiastic mediation as the
sole channel for cultural production and enjoyment, many texts which
in recent decades had satisfied the devotion of the ‘simple’, introducing
them to an inner, intimist religiosity, were taken out of circulation. In
this context, the fight against superstition lost much of its meaning and
effectiveness. The need to involve the faithful on the emotional plane,
FoREwoRD ix
the firm intention to arouse the interest of the great mass of the faithful,
together with the widespread conviction that the specter of heresy had
finally been driven out of Italy, turned the elements of superstition targeted
by the project for the purification of the patrimony of orthodoxy into
useful instruments of control in the hands of the ecclesiastic hierarchy.
The devotional armamentarium, which until the earliest years of the
seventeenth century had been the object of a process of censorship not
lacking in historical perspective and philological exactitude, was exploited
in order to stir the imagination and the emotions of the faithful, as part
of a cultural design that now totally renounced the encouragement of the
faithful believers’ sense of individual responsibility and their power of
discernment. Compared to the lucid and pugnacious declarations of war
on any kind of intermingling of the sacred and the profane pronounced by
the ranks of the Tridentines, this was a significant reversal of intent.2
In the absence of any strict regulation or action designed or intended
to counteract all forms of superstition, the ambitious project of creating
liturgic and devotional uniformity turned out to be wishful thinking.
In addition to the not uncommon obstacles related to the difficulty of
operating the machinery of repression, plus cases of localized resistance,
there was also the ambiguous attitude of the Church hierarchies, which
formally continued to propound rigid rules of prescription and prohibition
when they themselves belied and disregarded those selfsame rules, bending
them in order to achieve their higher objective of conquering the masses.
The decree of 1601 on litanies and prayers – though initially designed
with slightly different intentions – soon became not only the symbol of the
failure of the project of uniformity but also the symbol of an increasingly
more precisely defined ecclesiastic strategy, inasmuch as it provided for a
dual system of rules which governed the recitation of litanies in public but
also allowed ample scope for ‘unofficial’ liturgic and devotional practices
in private. These concessions had the effect of slackening the censor’s
hostility to ‘superstitions’, formally recognizing the existence of a gap
between the official rule and actual custom.3 This was a renunciation by
the Roman authorities of any attempt to fill an ever-more manifest hiatus
between doctrine and religious practice – a renunciation that was also a
strategy, one in which it is perhaps possible to discern far off the deep
split between official religion and the conscience of those who keep the
2 The unsuccessful Catholic battle for the separation between the sacred and the
profane was also dealt with by P. burke, Popular culture in early modern Europe, new york,
Harper & Row, 1978, chapter 8.
3 on these issues see now also G. Fragnito, Proibito capire. La Chiesa e il volgare nella
prima età moderna, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2005, pp. 232–59.