Tag: Catholic history
Dispatches from the Houghton Library, Part One
As an academic librarian with a deep interest in historical and contemporary book censorship, I can’t imagine a better way to spend my vacation than with the very books deemed too dangerous to read. This post is my first dispatch as a visiting fellow in publishing history at the Houghton Library, Harvard’s main repository of rare books and manuscripts.
![Index des livres interdits [Index of Prohibited Books], Vol. XI (1600-1966), Edited by J.M. de Bujanda, with Marcella Richter, 2002](https://www.oif.ala.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/index-des-livres-interdits.jpg)
The Catholic Index of Forbidden Books: A Brief History
The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was a list of books banned for lay Roman Catholic readership. Officially — though the Church was never fully explicit in its means of prosecution of such rules — any individual who dared read any books included on this list risked excommunication and, thus, spiritual damnation.