Censura Librorum Et Propositionum Bellarminiana

The opening of the archives of the Roman Inquisition and of the Index of Prohibited Books, in January 1998, enables us to think afresh about the history of two organisations more notorious than understood. Both have been considered, almost exclusively, from the perspective of their victims, such as Galileo Galilei. This book uses hitherto secret sources of the Inquisition and Index to reconstruct the history of Roman censorship in its first, formative years from the standpoint of Galileo's judge. Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621) was a censor for the Index and a consultor to the Holy Office, before becoming cardinal-inquisitor and (three centuries after his death) a saint and Doctor of the Church. His career provides a paradigm of how an intellectual could make his way to the top in Counter-Reformation Rome. Censored by Pope Sixtus V, Bellarmine responded by supressing the pontiff's version of the Vulgate and by repressing the Sistine Index of Prohibited Books. A new interpretation - including a revaluation of Galileo's first "trial"- of Roman censorship is offered in this book. Based on unpublished sources from the archives, which it edits and interprets for the first time, The Saint as Censor will alter our understanding of the Roman Inquisition and the Index.

Regulating Knowledge in an Entangled World uses case studies from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries to study knowledge transfer in early modern knowledge societies. In the early modern period the scale, intensity, and reach of exchange exploded. This volume develops a historicised understanding of knowledge transfer to shed new light on these fundamental changes. By looking at the preconditions of knowledge transfer, it shifts the focus from the objects circulating to the interactions by which they circulate and the way actors cement their relations. The novelty of this approach shows how rules and regulations were enablers of knowledge circulation, rather than impediments. The chapters identify changing patterns of knowledge transfer in cases such as sixteenth-century Venice, the Spanish Empire in the Americas, continental Habsburg, early seventeenth-century Dutch at sea, and the Offices of the Catholic Church. Through the perspective of ‘regulating’, this volume advances the historiography of knowledge circulation by forging a new combination of histories of circulation and of institutions. By bringing together historians from intellectual history, economic history, book history, the history of science, religion, art, and material culture, this volume is useful for students and scholars interested in early modern knowledge societies and changing patterns of knowledge transfer.

This volume explores key aspects of the transmission of learning and the transformation of thought from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period. The topics dealt with include metaphysics as a science, the rise of probabilistic modality, freedom of the human will, as well as the role and validity of logical reasoning in speculative theology. The volume will be of interest to scholars who work on medieval and early modern philosophy, theology, and intellectual history.

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) won fame and infamy as a natural scientist and visionary theosopher, but he was also a master intelligencer, who served as a secret agent for the French king, Louis XV, and the pro-French, pro-Jacobite party of "Hats" in Sweden. This study draws upon unpublished diplomatic and Masonic archives to place his financial and political actitivities within their national and international contexts. It also reveals the clandestine military and Masonic links between the Swedish Hats and Charles Edward Stuart ("Bonnie Prince Charlie"), providing new evidence for the prince's role as hidden Grand Master of the Order of the Temple. Swedenborg's usage of Kabbalistic meditative and interpretative techniques and his association with Hermetic and Rosicrucian adepts reveal the extensive esoteric networks that underlay the exoteric politics of the supposedly "enlightened" eighteenth century, especially in the troubled "Northern World" of Sweden and Scotland.