Forbidden knowledge : medicine, science, and censorship in early modern Italy / Hannah Marcus.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Marcus, Hannah (Historian of science), author.

Contributor:

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Science--Censorship--Italy.

Science.

Medicine--Censorship--Italy.

Medicine.

Libraries--Censorship--Italy.

Libraries.

Censorship--Italy--History.

Censorship.

Libraries--Censorship.

Italy.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xi, 356 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2020.

Summary:

"Forbidden Knowledge explores the censorship of medical books from their proliferation in print through the prohibitions placed on many of them during the Counter-Reformation. How and why did books banned in Italy end up back on library shelves in the seventeenth century? Historian Hannah Marcus uncovers how early modern physicians evaluated the utility of banned books and facilitated their continued circulation in conversation with Catholic authorities. The process of selective censorship and licensing resulted in a vast, dispersed archive of books that have been "corrected" with pens, knives, glue, and paper. Marcus tracked them down to learn more than the effectiveness of religious censorship. She explores how censorship created new avenues of expertise and opened up new discussions about the utility of knowledge. Through her careful combing of the archives, Marcus highlights how talk of utility, once thought to have begun during the Scientific Revolution, in fact began earlier, emerging from ecclesiastical censorship and the desire to continue to use banned medical books. What's more, this censorship in medicine, which preceded by sixty years the Copernican debate in astronomy, has had a lasting impact on how we talk about new and controversial developments in scientific knowledge. Forbidden Knowledge is a masterful, timely book about the interplay between efforts at intellectual control and the utility of knowledge"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: 1. The Medical Republic of Letters and the Roman Indexes of Prohibited Books

2. Locating Expertise, Soliciting Expurgations

3. The Censor at Work

4. Censoring Medicine in Rome's Index Expurgatorius of 1607

5. Prohibited Medical Books and Licensed Readers

6. Creating Censored Objects

7. Prohibited Books in Universal Libraries.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

Other Format:

ebook version :

ISBN:

9780226736587

022673658X

OCLC:

1139669641

Publisher Number:

99986732042