Monday, June 15, 2009

On this day in history...


This is an interesting little bit of trivia from yesterday, June 14th:


On this day in 1966 - The Vatican announced the abolition of the index librorum prohibitum (index of prohibited books), which was originally instituted in 1557.


I had no idea the Vatican kept a list of banned books (although I suppose I shouldn't be surprised). I am surprised, however, that I haven't read many of them; you know how I feel about Banned Books, after all. Of course, there are a whole lot of titles from the 1600's in Latin and Italian, so that may explain some of it. You can look at a partial list here. They are sorted by author, not by year, which can make it difficult to find anything recent. (The latin titles don't help much.)

According to Wikipedia, books on the list are primarily science and philosophy. Many important authors, read today in universities around the world, are included, such as Voltaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, Rene Descartes, Galileo, John Milton and Francis Bacon. Imagine getting a Catholic school education that didn't include some of these authors!

Now, there is one author not on the list above that I assumed would be a shoo-in for this list. And yet, his works were never included. Who am I referring to? Guess you'll have to look in the Comments and find out!

5 comments:

Lisa said...

Who is the obvious candidate, missing from the Vatican's list? Charles Darwin According to Wikipedia, his works were never included, although other works that "reconciled evolutionary theory and Catholic philosophy in ways unacceptable to the church" were included.

Steven Bollinger said...

Yes, Darwin's absence from the Index is interesting, as are Nietzsche's, Schopenhauer's, Marx' and other's. The most prominent authors added to the Index since the mid-19th century seem to have been Heinrich Heine and Emile Zola. Both Jews, but maybe I shouldn't go there. Maybe there simply is not much rhyme or reason determining who is on the Index and who is not.

Nicole (Linus's Blanket) said...

I had no idea. I don't even know if he fit the parameters but my first thought was Einstein.

Eros1691 said...

Hey this might be shoking but here you go....
The list of banned book of the Vatican is 103,000,000.
The whole lot of book containd theories about supernatural power develop by the mans body, and the most shoking theories about magic and his powers and developers.....
This lis was develop 6000 years ago for a branch of the ortodox london church, its called Necessarius the church of the necessary evil. if you want more inf this is my msn:
panda_boy16@hotmail.com

Eros1691 said...

BTW please DON'T tell anybody that I told you....I belong to Anihillatus ortodox church of russia that is the counter part of the Necessarius church......