I have attempted to base upon these schedules and records some conclusions as to the actual influence of the general system of censorship, as connected more particularly with the enforcement of the penalties prescribed by the Indexes, upon the production and distribution of literature in the several communities which recognised to a greater or less extent the authority of the Church. An interesting indication of the extent of this influence is given through the records of the business of the printer-publishers and booksellers of the period, in such States as Italy, Spain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and England. Finally, I have attempted, in the closing chapters, to make a study of the literary policy of the modern Church as indicated in the latest of the papal Indexes and in certain utterances by representative Catholics concerning the censorship policy of the Church, which have come into print during the past quarter of a century. In collecting the material for the several schedules of Indexes, decrees, etc., I am chiefly indebted to the treatise of Heinrich Reusch, _Der Index der Verbotenen Bücher_, published in Bonn in 1885. Dr. Reusch’s work may be described as monumental in the thoroughness and authoritativeness of its scholarship. The information presented in regard to the series of Indexes and decrees is most comprehensive and precise. The compass of Reusch’s three volumes (which comprise twenty-four hundred closely printed octavo pages) renders them, however, unavailable for the use of the general reader. I have knowledge of no work in English which presents, with any measure of completeness, the record of the Indexes, and of no book in any language which attempts a general survey of the purpose and results of the censorship of the Church. It has seemed to me, therefore, that I might render some service to the study of the conditions affecting literary production and distribution, by utilising certain portions of the material collected by Reusch in a work prepared for English-speaking readers, which should present the schedule of the Indexes and a summary of the more noteworthy of the decrees, edicts, briefs, etc., having to do with censorship, and by connecting with this a study of the results secured through this censorship policy of the Church and of the range of its influence.