You Could Look It Up (22 page)

A reporter covering the event—mostly out of bemusement—went on to identify the lexicographer and language columnist Ben Zimmer, editor of the pathbreaking
Visual Thesaurus
, as “a major geek.” In some circles that might have led to a libel suit, but most of the DSNA participants embraced the nerdiness of the event, even performing dictionary-related songs at the conference-ending banquet. Peter Sokolowski, editor at large for Merriam-Webster and editor of
Merriam-Webster's French–English Dictionary
, was excited by one of the more technical
presentations and tweeted to his thousands of followers, “Just heard a talk on French verb classification. Geek out.”

Anyone who has read this far in this book without being a member of the DSNA should head at once to
http://www.dictionarysociety.com/
. The subscription to the annual journal,
Dictionaries
, is worth the price of admission.

CHAPTER
9

THE INFIRMITY OF HUMAN NATURE

Guides to Error

To care about truth is also to care about falsehood. Any system dedicated to the discovery and dissemination of truth will at some point need to deal with departures from that truth. A few antireference books, therefore, offer dutiful catalogs of the things we should not believe.

Nowhere is the quest for truth more urgent than in religion, and some of the bitterest struggles with error happen in the religious arena. Modern democratic states have tended toward a live-and-let-live policy, but through most of our history, authorities have been substantially less forgiving. Christianity, for example, has a long history of wrestling with, and often suppressing, error. Jesus was the way, the truth, and the life—but finding that way, knowing that truth, and living that life required first knowing what Jesus actually said. This gave the early figures in the Church the difficult task of figuring out which writings constituted the inspired Scripture. The Hebrew and the Christian Bibles are not unified books, but rather miscellaneous writings collected long after they were written. The pieces were written over more than a millennium, with the earliest dating from the eleventh or tenth century
B.C.E.
and the latest in the Christian Bible from the end of the first century
C.E.
But these few dozen books are not the only writings from that period to survive: many other candidates for inclusion were circulating. Identifying the divinely inspired ones was difficult.

The so-called Muratorian fragment, a list of books of the Bible, was
written in the seventh century but seems to be a copy of something much earlier, perhaps from the late second century
C.E.
, between about 170 and 200. This fragment gives the earliest known version of the Christian canon, which both codified the accepted books and rejected others. Churches were forbidden to use the latter in the liturgy. The canon, in other words, is both a list of sacred books and a list of banned books.

The bans continued with later writings on religious matters. Any books that promoted heresies such as Montanism and Marcionism in the second century and Arianism in the fourth were in due course proscribed by the Church. And once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, a series of ecumenical councils, beginning with the First Council of Nicaea in 325, went further in delineating the true and the false, with the concomitant banning of anything that did not make the cut. Pope Anastasius banned Origen’s works in the late fourth century, and Pope Gelasius in 496 issued the Gelasian Decree, with a list of authentic Scripture, recommended reading, and heretical and apocryphal books. Early Christians found a justification for their exclusion of offensive doctrine in the Bible itself. Acts 19:19 reads, “Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men.” If the Apostles could burn books, surely the Church was within its rights in doing the same.

Christians had been registering and tabulating heresy since the earliest days of the Church, but two developments in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Germany made the project much more urgent. The first was Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press around 1450. The number of books, both the number of new titles and the number of copies of each title, boomed, and the authorities grew uncomfortable. In 1469, Pope Innocent VIII went so far as to decree that all books had to be approved by religious authorities before they could be read; François I of France went further and banned all printed books, with a death penalty for printers, in order to be certain that nothing slipped through. The second development was the Protestant Reformation, which began when Martin Luther nailed his famous ninety-five theses to the church door
at Wittenberg in 1517. Now there was a huge new category of heresy, one that threatened a mortal wound to Holy Mother Church. That both of these revolutions, printing and Protestantism, happened in the same region and within a few decades of each other is one of the most significant conjunctions in the history of Europe.

This energetic propagation of heresies prompted one of the most influential but also paradoxical reference books in all of European history—a book in which everything is wrong. It was variously known as the
Index librorum prohibitorum
or the
Index expurgatorius
, but it was usually enough to call it simply the
Index
: books the Roman Catholic Church deemed heretical. Not all were related to Protestantism, but that was clearly the most important category of heresy in the sixteenth century. As historian Benedict Anderson puts it, the
Index
was “a novel catalogue made necessary by the sheer volume of printed subversion.”
1

Registers of problematic books had been published starting in the 1520s, but the first official printed list came in 1544, when the Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris issued a catalog of banned books. It proved both influential and in need of rapid updating, so new editions followed in 1545, 1547, 1549, 1551, and 1556. The theologians at the University of Leuven (in what is now Belgium) offered their own index in 1546, again with revised editions following in rapid succession. A Portuguese list appeared in 1547; the first Italian list—a Venetian index—appeared in 1549; and a Spanish list was printed in 1551.

The most influential of all the versions, though, came from Rome a few years later. In 1557, Pope Paul IV gave the Congregation of the Inquisition an urgent task: to come up with a complete list of banned books. One list was prepared quickly—probably too quickly, because the Church authorities found it unsatisfactory and declined to print it. In January 1559, though, a longer version appeared. It was the first one to come from Rome, and it was the first one actually to be called an
Index
. Because it was prepared under Paul IV, it has become known as the
Pauline Index
.

More than a thousand books appeared in it, all of them forbidden to the laity. There are three rubrics for each letter of the alphabet. The first group, “Auctores quorum libri & scripta omnia prohibentur” (“Authors all of whose writings are banned”), listed heretical authors, including
John Calvin, Martin Luther, and William Tyndale. (Luther in fact was listed under both
L
for “Lutherus” and
M
for “Martinus Lutherus.”) The second category was “Certorum auct. Libri prohibiti” (“Banned books of known authors”): works such as Girolamo Savonarola’s first sermon on Exodus and his commentary on Job, Polydore Vergil’s
De inventoribus rerum
, and commentaries on Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
. The final category, “Incertorum auct. Libri prohibiti” (“Banned books by unknown authors”), listed anonymous books, such as
Brevis & compendiosa instructio de religione Christiana
(
Brief and Compendious Instruction in the Christian Religion
),
Germanicæ nationis lamentationes
(
Lamentations of the German Nation
), and
Cur ecclesia quattuor Evangelia acceptavit
(
Why the Church Has Four Evangelists
).

The most sweeping bans appeared against Protestantism, the most obvious threat to the Catholic Church. A prime example was Henry VIII, once
defensor fidei
, “defender of the faith,” who appeared on the list
of forbidden authors as “Henricus viij Anglus.” The other Abrahamic faiths were also viewed as enemies, and “Thalmud Hebræorum” (the Talmud) and “Alchoranus Mahometis” (the Qur’an) were both interdicted. Closer to home, Cornelius Agrippa and Rabelais were among the forbidden authors, and the twenty books of the Catalan theologian Ramon Lull that Pope Gregory XI had condemned in 1376 went on the list, even though Lull would eventually be beatified by one of Gregory’s successors, Pius IX. The
Decameron
(“Ioannis Boccacij lib. inscrip. Cento nouelle,” “The book written by Giovanni Boccaccio,
A Hundred Stories
”) was excluded as too racy. It is surprising to see the Bible on the list, but there are dozens of them, most of which earned their way there with doctrinally dodgy commentary, as with “Nouum Testamentum apud Ioannem Crispinum 1555, Cum omnib. similibus libris Noui Testamenti” (“The New Testament published by Johan Crespin in 1555, with all similar books of the New Testament”). Toward the end of the book was a list of publishers whose works were banned—simply printing the works of heretical authors earned a spot on the
Index
.

But a single list was not sufficient. Another
Index
was prepared by a commission established by the Council of Trent in 1564, under Pius IV, known as the
Tridentine Index
. This one established ten general norms that influenced Catholic censorship for centuries. The first nine covered categories always automatically banned because of their heresy; the tenth reasserts the need for approval before publication. These Tridentine rules prohibited all books by heretical authors on matters of religion, all obscene works, and works on astrology, divination, and the occult. This council ruled that the Vulgate—the Latin translation of the Bible, prepared by Jerome in the fourth century—was the only “official” Bible, and that no religious books could be printed without the approval of the Church.

All the versions of the
Index
forbade not only the publishing but also the reading of these books, with the penalty for disobedience being excommunication from the Church. The
Index
, however, was never seen as a comprehensive catalog of forbidden books. Canon law allowed for both censorship in advance of publication and condemnation of books already published, and the Vatican made liberal use of both kinds of prohibition. Even Bible reading was permitted only by those licensed by a bishop or inquisitor.

For the first few decades, the process by which a new
Index
was compiled was strictly ad hoc. In 1571, though, Pope Pius V created a new organization within the Church: the Congregation of the Index, a permanent body charged with censoring new publications. It was busy. In 1588, Pope Sixtus V ordered a new and expanded
Index
in which the ten Tridentine rules would be replaced by twenty-two new rules, but Sixtus died before it was complete, and this
Index
would go unpublished. The version of the
Index
issued by Clement VIII in 1596 topped two thousand banned books, and by the middle of the eighteenth century, it had grown to more than four thousand writers and works. Each edition republished the previous one with new additions.

Several broad categories of offense were likely to get a book into trouble. Any theological text that contradicted Church doctrine was certain to wind up on the prohibited list: an attack on Trinitarianism, for instance. John Milton’s writings were forbidden for their bitter attacks on the Roman Catholic Church: “The increase of Popery is at this day no small trouble and offence to the greatest part of the Nation.”
2
Mysticism was not tolerated, nor was Gallicanism, which tried to give the civil authorities control over the Church. Neither were some books that had nothing to do with theology. The most famous examples appeared not long after the early versions of the
Index
: works that promoted the heliocentric theory of Copernicus, according to which the sun rather than the earth is the center of the universe, were proscribed. Books that ridiculed the clergy were of course candidates for banning, and their authors’ protestations that the satire on abusive priests was really meant to strengthen the Church by drawing attention to abuses were ignored. The final category was smut: anything lascivious was quickly suppressed. The Marquis de Sade’s
Juliette and Justine
was banned, as was Gustave Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary
, which may seem comparatively tame today, but in the 1850s shocked the world with its sympathetic portrait of an adulteress.