Hannah Marcus, Forbidden Knowledge

This fine first book by Hannah Marcus explores the censorship of medical writings by the Reformation-era Roman church and the medical community’s reactions to those efforts. Marcus’s account is based on research in an impressive array of (northern) Italian libraries and archives and in the monumental Baldini and Spruit documentary collection on scientific matters in the Congregations of the Inquisition and Index. These resources preserve extensive discussions among clerics and lay people about how and whether to read particular medical texts—an understudied area of early modern censorship. In contrast to theological texts and some scientific works, ecclesiastical concerns regarding medical texts were not mainly about the ideas in the works, but the origins of those ideas. Heterodox authors or simply non-censorious references to heretics were not acceptable to sixteenth-century Church authorities. As Marcus ably shows, efforts to expurgate problematic medical texts sought to enable, rather than prevent, access to those

Art · Censorship · Literature · Medical science · Political science · Sociology · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History of Science and Medicine · Medicine · Classics · History · Law