Libri di lettere all’Indice. Censura, autocensura ed espurgazione dei testi epistolari nel XVI secolo

Printed Epistolary Collections: Censorship, self-censorship and expurgation in 16th century’s. Studies on religious history have focused on the relationship between vernacular imprints circulation and the spread of heterodoxy. In many anthologies of vernacular letters, printed in Venice between 1542 and 1555, we find high concentration of authors who were at that time under investigation by the Inquisition, since they were suspected to have to do with heterodox doctrines, i.e. Bernardino Ochino, Marcantonio Flaminio, Pietro Carnesecchi, Pier Paolo Vergerio. The research on the many editions of a single anthology leads to reflect on the different uses that publishers and editors had conceived for their books over such a brief period. As a matter of fact, in the first 1540s a proper printing campaign took place through a strong flow of book and booklets of varied heterodox nature. Among those, epistolary anthologies were only one of the strategies aiming at legitimating irenic doctrines and requests of a reform within the Roman Church straight before the Council of Trent. In the following decades, as a consequence of intransigent positions prevailing and of the Inquisition’s power getting less and less contested, epistolary anthologies were deeply transformed: the letters by authors on the Index or investigated by Inquisition were expunged or clipped, furthermore, some editions were listed on the Index waiting for bowdlerisation. By analyzing anthologies that had been published in more than one edition, among those handling with political, religious and cultural issues, it is possible to verify which kind of modification they had to undergo: expunging, substitution, clipping and addition of new parts or texts, as well as changes in the paratext, that may have altered the way of reading the same text from an edition to another.