Index librorum prohibitorum sanctissimi domini Benedicti XIV.
8vo (17.5 x 11.2 cm). 232 pp., with engraved frontispiece, engraved device on title page, and woodcut initials and tail-pieces. Bound in contemporary sprinkled calf, spine in six compartments, spine gold tooled with gold-tooled red morocco label, red sprinkled edges. Light rubbing and staining to boards, endpapers renewed. Marginal paper flaw and marginal tear to frontispiece, minor hand soiling to title, ink ownership inscription at p. 5, otherwise quite clean. Scarce newly enlarged edition of Pope Benedict XIV’s (1675-1758) index of forbidden books, compiled by Tommaso Agostino Ricchini (1675-1762), Secretary of the Sacred Congregation of the Index, and opening with an engraved frontispiece of the famous image of apostolically sanctioned book burning. The volume’s first 44 pages contain a dedication to the recently deceased pope, Ricchini’s address to Catholic readers, and the full apparatus of rules, regulations and decrees first issued with the Tridentine Index of 1564 and updated over two centuries by the emendations of various pontiffs. The main body of the volume consists of an alphabetical listing of banned books from Abelard to Zwingli. In addition to the usual theological and magical works are numerous titles from the fields of literature, history and science. Still included are the 1620 edition of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus and Kepler’s Epitome Astronomiae Copernicae of 1619, even though the general prohibition on heliocentric works had been lifted in 1758. Also listed are Dante’s De monarchia, the Essais of Montaigne, La Fontaine’s Contes et Nouvelles, various titles by Voltaire, Richardson’s Pamela, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the works of Rabelais. An addendum updating the 1758 list through September of 1761 – the “Novissima Appendix” – includes Diderot’s Encyclopédie, a work whose twenty-eighth and final volume would not appear until 1772.
* Reusch, Index der verbotenen Bücher, II, p. 877.
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