In Italy, the fulminations of the Church in regard to heretical or dangerous literature were, in form at least, as severe in their penalties and as sweeping in their prohibitions as those which emanated from the inquisitors in Spain. There appears, however, to have been no period during which there was any consistent consecutive system applied throughout the entire Italian peninsula in carrying out the regulations that had been formulated by the Inquisition of Rome or by the Congregation of the Index. The successive papal Indexes were produced at considerable and very varying intervals. There is no evidence in the series of these Indexes of any definite policy in regard to the terms of years to be covered or the extent or the classes of the literature which was to be considered. From time to time, as successive popes assumed the papal chair, there would come one possessing a larger measure of literary interests or a clearer perception of the influence of literature upon the religious conditions of the community. Instructions would then be given for the production of a new papal Index, the lists in which would include, in addition to the more important of the titles in the preceding Indexes, the works of the later period the use of which was to be forbidden. As will be made clear in the detailed record of the papal Indexes, the attempt was made but once in Rome to produce an _Index Expurgatorius_. The popes and the members of the Congregation, who had the immediate responsibility for the work, appear to have shrunk from a task with which the Spanish inquisitors had charged themselves without hesitancy, namely the reshaping of books which had already come into circulation and influence, in such manner as to eliminate heretical passages or expressions which might in any way conflict with sound doctrine. The fact that through such eliminations and interpolations the purpose and character of the work might be materially altered and the author might be made responsible for utterances or opinions which were not his own, or the further fact that through any such reshaping the literary form, and sometimes even the actual sense of the narrative, was practically sacrificed, did not trouble the minds of the revisers selected by the Spanish inquisitors.