In this work, translated from the Italian edition of 2003, Giorgio Caravale uses the records of the Congregations of the Inquisition and the Index to examine two areas that concerned both inquisitors and censors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: mental prayer and superstitious religious practices. He demonstrates the ways in which the Congregation of the Index, and its censors, attempted to frame the permissible boundaries of Counter-Reformation devotional practice through examining, correcting, expurgating, and banning religious literature, especially those works written in the vernacular and aimed at popular audiences. While Caravale charts several shifts in the inquisitorial hierarchy’s policies and priorities, he maintains that ecclesiastics and censors successfully reframed mental prayer as an orthodox practice, rescuing it from unfortunate associations with Protestantism and even medieval heresies. The effort to purge liturgies and religious devotion from long-practiced popular superstitions, particularly emphasized during Clement VIII’s papacy, however, according to Caravale, was not successfully accomplished.
In the first seven chapters, Caravale examines the ways in which texts that advocated mental prayer came into disrepute in the mid-sixteenth century. Catholic reformers before the Reformation had emphasized mental prayer as an antidote to superficial devotions and merely going through the motions of ritual observance; but some of the phrases and language used to promote mental prayer later came to have an unfortunate concordance with certain aspects of Protestant theology. For example, Caravale points out that Savonarola’s exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, which recommended mental meditations keyed to the prayer’s passages, in may ways resembles Martin Luther’s own exposition, except for the latter’s emphasis on justification by faith alone. When church figures such as Carlo Borromeo attempted to revive mental prayer (alongside collective prayer) in the 1570s as a valid means of inculcating faith, it was the censors who made an effort, according to Caravale, to make sure that the popular literature promoting mental prayer was sufficiently orthodox by correcting or expurgating any passages that seemed to limit or negate free will, deemphasize good works, or denigrate outward worship. Passages concerning these subjects could smack of Lutheranism if not carefully composed to express orthodox Catholic faith.
In chapter 5 and chapters 8–10, Caravale explains how the Congregation of the Index and its censors also made an effort to expurgate prayer, and religious devotion in general, from its more superstitious elements. In 1571, Pius V banned vernacular forms of the offices and litanies; around the same time the ecclesiastical hierarchy revised the Roman Missal and Breviary, which the Congregation of the Index then attempted to impose uniformly in churches (and to control the sale of them in bookshops). Caravale characterizes the efforts of Clement VIII (1592–1605) as the culmination of attempting to control prayer and eliminate superstition. But Clement VIII and the Congregation had to allow for local variations by permitting those who could establish legitimate precedent for their variant liturgies and practices to continue to use them, once properly examined by ordinaries and inquisitors. Caravale also argues that Clement VIII allowed for individual responsibility in religious development by permitting the laity to buy books listed on the Index and keep them, unread, pending submission and expurgation. But by the latter half of the seventeenth century, Caravale detects the signs of a failed project, as he explains in chapters 10–12. Caravale attributes this to three factors: the ecclesiastical hierarchy’s decision to emphasize greater control over the laity at the expense of leaving many popular superstitions intact; the elimination of vernacular texts leaving a void in lay enthusiasm for devotion; and the mechanisms of censorship, accordingly, no longer being focused on expurgating superstitious elements from the texts that were allowed to be published. In what Caravale characterizes as a “fracture between rules and reality” the reality of superstitious practice remained (238).
Presenting such a thought-provoking book to readers of English is commendable. Caravale reconstructs, in admirable detail, the interventions of individual censors into specific texts to build his case, complemented by both Congregations’ correspondence with regional tribunals. Although Caravale admits that the Congregation and tribunals simply did not have the staff to examine each and every text, he demonstrates that the Holy Office’s censors did manage to shape the contents of religious literature in early modern Italy.
