This section of the exhibition offers a basic introduction to ecclesiastical censorship: its nature, historical origins, and theological rationale. Beginning with a book that exemplifies the drastic physical intervention of sixteenth-century censors, these selections include an Index librorum prohibitorum that invokes a Biblical precedent for the burning of books, a fifteenth-century printing of the earliest papal decree against heretical writings, catalogues of condemned books from the earliest phase of the Protestant Reformation, and a sixteenth-century defense of censorship by ecclesiastical authorities.

                   

Erasmus Expurgated

Index librorum prohibitorum

Decretum Gelasianum

Catalogus haereticorum

Effigy of the Heretic

In Defense of Censorship