Banned Books Week

This week is the annual Banned Books Week, commemorating non-censorship. Check out the official site. While usually discussions on banned books touch prissy US parents trying to ban Mark Twain from libraries, I decided to look through the original and the best book censorship list. Yep, nobody knows how to do it like the Catholic church so I looked through their Index of Prohibited Books.

I found a copy of the full index as of 1948 here. Good summary of famous works included is here. Doing a copy paste revealed there were more than 4000 books on the list, perhaps 5000! (There were so many it almost crashed my computer so I couldn’t get an exact number). And they relaxed a lot from the 19th century onwards so there are literally thousands from the Enlightenment era. Here are some I found of note:

• Erasmus Darwin — that’s Darwin’s grandfather who also wrote about evolution! But he believed in a progression toward perfection — too optimistic!
• Jeremy Bentham — too utilitarian
• Madame Bovary — too saucy
• Dumas (all romance novels) — perhaps not saucy enough?
• Hobbes, Voltaire, Mill, Rousseau — too Enlightened. In fact banning these ones was most telling
• Pascal — too wagerey
• Maimonides — too Jewish. Couldn’t work out the book from the Latin (De idololatria liber cum interpretatione latina et notis Dionysii Vossii), anyone have a clue?
• Locke — and the book that was banned is called “The reasonableness of christianity as delivered in the Scriptures” — for of course Protestantism was worse than heresy
• Bacon — too empirical!
• Kant — too categorical!
• Hugo — too hunchbacklike! Chief villain is Catholic deacon and too villainy. Also the villain can’t keep it in his pants — too prophetic!
• Descartes — too heady. Too ontological, proves the existence of God too much.
• Hume — too skeptical
• Sterne — too sentimental.

But the feeling I got wasn’t of dramatic villainy but of petty villainy. Looking at the kind of books that were banned, you get the impression of the petulant child — very close to the Spanish Inquisition from Monty Python than anything else. To illustrate the point, I looked at the last 5 English titles in the list (the vast majority are in Latin) just to get a feel of what was banned:

• Monks and their decline.
• Six discourses on the miracles of our Saviour.
• Discovery of a new world or a discourse tending to prove that’tis probable there may be another habitable world in the moon, with a discourse concerning the possibility of a passage thither.
• An enquiry into the nature and place of hell.
• Principles and connexion of natural and revealed religion.