The censorship of the Church of Rome and its influence upon the production and distribution of literature, volume 2 (of 2)Putnam, George Haven
History
The censorship of the Church of Rome and its influence upon the production and distribution of literature, volume 2 (of 2)
Putnam, George Haven
Freedom of the press; Liberty of conscience; Prohibited books
In 1479, Pedro de Osma, a professor of Salamanca, was condemned by the
Council of Alcala for certain heresies. The professor was required to
make public recantation holding a lighted candle, and the book in which
his errors were set forth was burned by the secular authorities. In
1316, the inquisitor, Juan de Llotger, on the report of an assembly
of experts, assembled at Tarragona, condemned the works on spiritual
Franciscanism by Arnaldo de Villanneva. The sentence in which the
tracts were condemned formed the model of a long series of similar
prohibitions. Towards the close of the 14th century, Nicholas Eymerich,
who won fame as a strenuous inquisitor, secured the condemnation of a
long series of books including some twenty works by Raymond Lully and
several of Ramon de Tarraga.[10] In Castile, during the latter part
of the 13th century, the censorship of the Scriptures was evidently
relaxed. In 1267, Alfonso X caused a Castilian translation to be made
of the Bible, a copy of which, in five folio volumes, is preserved in
the Escorial.[11] In 1430, Rabbi Moyses aben Ragel completed the work
of translating the Old Testament which had been undertaken in 1422,
under the instructions of the Master of Calatrava. He secured for his
task the aid of certain Franciscans and Dominicans who supplied the
Catholic glosses. An illuminated manuscript of this version still
exists in the collection of Condé, Duke de Olivares.[12] During the
14th and 15th centuries, a number of versions of different portions of
the Scriptures were executed in Catalan. One of these was prepared by
the Carthusian, Bonifacio Ferrer. Of this, an edition was printed in
1478 at Valencia, which edition had been revised by the Jesuit, Jayme
Borell. This volume was issued on the eve of a general proscription of
the Scriptures in the vernacular.
Excepting for the instance of censorship in Aragon, there appears to
have been up to the close of the 15th century, no obstacle to the
printing or the distribution in Spain of versions of the Scriptures
in the vernacular. Carranza, Archbishop of Toledo, writing in 1557,
says that before Lutheran heresies emerged from hell he knew of no
prohibition of the Bible in the vulgar tongue.[13]
Cardinal Ximenes at first took strong ground against the circulation
of all versions of the Scriptures, and even stopped the work that had
been begun by the Archbishop of Granada, in translating into Arabic
the Scripture text used at the matins and in the mass. In 1519,
however, the Cardinal had printed at Alcala a polyglot edition of the
Old Testament, known in bibliographies as the Ximenes Bible. In this
edition, the text of the Vulgate was placed in a column between the
text in Greek and that in Hebrew. Mendham quotes the Cardinal as saying
that the arrangement recalled the crucifixion where Christ was placed
between two thieves.[14]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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