SELCS

Censorship and Iconoclasm: Texts and Images under Control in Early Modern Europe


Course code: ELCS6037
Tutor: Dr Chiara Franceschini
Level: intermediate
Mode of Assessment: 2 assessed essays of 2000 words each
Term: taught in term 1

Practices of censorship had long been in existence; but with the advent of the printing press and the explosion of confessional conflicts in early modern Europe, the need for keeping texts and images under control became far more urgent. It was at this time that modern censorship was founded. In the Catholic South as well as in the Protestant North, mechanisms for controlling culture were established. At the same time, images and texts became more and more targets of popular or private iconoclasm.

This course will provide an introduction to the history of censorship and iconoclasm in early modern Europe by adopting a comparative approach. We will deal with the Roman Congregation of the Index, a central Catholic agency established in order to edit and expunge ‘dangerous’ books systematically, and with Calvinist endeavours to control cultural outputs. We will study the attempts which were made to emend or suppress unsuitable visual representations and also address issues of ‘preventive censorship’ imposed by authors on themselves, as well as strategies for evading and escaping censorship. The course will hopefully include a practical session in the British Library where examples ranging from emendation, expurgation, censorship, erasure and effacement of texts and images will be studied.

Introductory readings

  • Church, Censorship and Culture in Early Modern Italy, ed. by G. Fragnito, Cambridge 2001.
  • Ingeborg Jostock, La censure négociée: le contrôle du livre à Genève, 1560-1625, Genève 2007.
  • Michael Camille, Obscenity under Erasure. Censorship in Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts, in Obscenity : social control and artistic creation in European Middle Ages, ed. by Jan M. Ziolkowski, Leiden, Brill, 1998, pp. 139-154.
  • Brian Cummings, Iconoclasm and Bibliophobia in the English Reformations 1521 - 1558 in Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England, ed. by J. Dimmock, J. Simpson and N. Zeeman, Oxford University Press, pp. 185-206.