Projects / Programmes
Forbidden Books in the Slovenian Lands in the Early Modern Period
| Code |
Science |
Field |
Subfield |
| 6.07.00 |
Humanities |
Literary sciences |
|
| Code |
Science |
Field |
| H390 |
Humanities |
General and comparative literature, literary criticism, literary theory |
| Code |
Science |
Field |
| 6.02 |
Humanities |
Languages and Literature |
forbidden books, clandestine literature, libraries, censorship, Catholic Church, Habsburg Monarchy, Counter-Reformation, Enlightenment
Researchers (10)
Organisations (2)
Abstract
This project represents the first systematic study of the censorship of books in the Slovenian territory in the early modern period. Slovenian researchers have paid no attention whatsoever to the topics. The main reason for this is the nationalist orientation, which from the end of the nineteenth century onwards limited research to literature and culture in Slovenian. This also resulted in a lack of interest in the censorship of books. Specifically, because the seats of the Church and state censorship were in Rome and Vienna, and because of the cosmopolitan and transnational nature of the book culture, these developments were part of European, not just Slovenian space.
The first stage of the project will prepare theoretical and historical bases for investigation. The collaborators will explain possible deffinitions and forms of censorship. They will describe the role and development of the censorship in the literary culture in the Slovenian lands to the late twentieth century—to wit, its constant and its changing ideological and structural elements. The research will then in detail define the mechanisms of the state and Church censorship in the early modern Habsburg Monarchy. The research will reveal the role of the Church Index librorum prohibitorum, the state Catalogus librorum prohibitorum, local bishops, the Jesuit order, the Inquisition, and imperial officials.
The second stage of the project will include studies that will reconstruct the inventory of prohibited books in the Slovenian lands. They will be carried out at old diocesan and monastic libraries, especially in Ljubljana, Koper, Kamnik, Nazarje, Škofja Loka, and elsewhere. In addition, research will be conducted at public libraries, especially in Ljubljana, Graz (Austria), and Zagreb (Croatia), which keep the estates of many monasteries and of many noble and bourgeois families.
In the third stage of the project, researchers will analyze the impact of censorship on literature and culture in the Slovenian lands. The major topics will include forbidden Slovenian authors (P. Trubar), clandestine literature (J. L. Schönleben, Protestant literature in Prekmurje), self-censorship (J. W. Valvasor), controversial works that Slovenian authors had to have printed in the Protestant north (F. Wützenstein) or had to leave in manuscript (Late Baroque priests during the Josephinism), the Slovenian censors (J. Kopitar and M. Čop), the purchase of books on the black market (Venice), the development of the society’s relationship towards forbidden books, the extent to which the authorities tolerated the reception of forbidden books, the accessibility of these types of books at public and private libraries, and so on. Special attention will be dedicated to proving how literature and culture in the Slovenian lands were influenced by world classics whose use was prohibited or at least restricted: erotic poetry by ancient writers, Machiavelli’s Il Principe, Boccaccio’s Decameron, the satirical tales of Till Eulenspiegel, the Epistolae obscurorum virorum, Adagia by Erasmus of Rotterdam, Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnaso, La Fontaine’s Contes et nouvelles, Milton’s Paradise Lost, essays by French materialists, and so on.
This research will also use state-of-the-art IT support for both data processing and the final presentation: researchers from the Jožef Stefan Institute will integrate the workflow with digital humanities standards (XML, TEI) and web technologies. A website with an inventory of forbidden books will be designed featuring digital images, metadata, and transcriptions of selected fragments with scholarly commentary. The project will conclude with a scholarly volume summarizing the project’s results, and with an exhibition of forbidden books at the National and University Library and an accompanying catalogue presenting the project’s results to the public.
Significance for science
The proposed project has a literary-historical nature, but it also innovatively integrates with literary theory, cultural and legal history, and IT. This type of interdisciplinary approach, which is still rare in Slovenia, will enrich the methodology used in literary and other studies mentioned above. The project topic (i.e., book censorship in the Slovenian lands in the early modern period) has not received sufficient research attention and, apart from the individual publications by the project head, has not been studied before. In addition, the project focuses on obtaining, publishing, and explaining exclusively new data. The results will therefore be relevant for the humanities, social sciences, and technical disciplines, but especially for the history of the book.
The publications comprising articles, a scholarly volume, a website, an exhibition, and an exhibition catalog will open up a new area of research (i.e., book censorship in the Slovenian lands in the early modern period) and stimulate further research. This type of research is much more common elsewhere in Europe, but it mostly focuses on preventive state censorship. The proposed project will study rare topics or topics that have even been overlooked in European research: the impact of Church censorship on literature outside of Italy, informal restriction of the freedom of the press after the relaxation of censorship during the reign of Emperor Joseph II, illegal circulation of forbidden books in private houses, and so on. The main innovation of the proposed project as compared to European research is the analysis of an extensive inventory of forbidden books (especially the owners’ notes and marks in them), based on which it will be possible to reconstruct not only the ownership and the places and manners of purchasing these books, but also the principles of the relationship between literature and censorship from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. A synthesis of these data will contribute significantly to the history of literature, book and library culture, and censorship, especially in what is now Slovenia, but also in other areas of the former Habsburg Monarchy, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Republic of Venice.
New findings are also expected with regard to standardizing the metadata entries on books. TEI recommendations include a very detailed module for describing manuscripts, but this is not directly meant for describing books. In addition, metadata entries are envisaged for manuscripts as physical objects, whereas in the proposed project these entries will refer to several copies of the same book. Therefore, specific details of the TEI schema will probably have to be adapted to the project goals. This will be an original contribution, also of interest to the international TEI community, which holds annual conferences and publishes a research journal. In addition, improvements to the platform for converting Word documents into TEI format will also arouse research interest: a research article on this is planned to be published as part of digital humanities forums.
Significance for the country
The results will have an important impact on cultural heritage protection because they will document and evaluate segments of the oldest and richest Slovenian, Austrian, and Croatian libraries unknown or poorly known to date. The project’s publications will stimulate the state administration (the Ministry of Culture), the management boards of state and Church libraries (e.g., the National and University Library and the Ljubljana Seminary Library), and the professional community (especially librarians, curators, and conservators) to engage in planned protection and conservation of valuable book and manuscript material, which is often inappropriately kept or in need of restoration (e.g., in the Franciscan library in Novo mesto) and thus endangered. For this reason the project will be co-financed by the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, one of the main goals of which is to protect Slovenian cultural heritage. The project will have the most direct effect on the National and University Library (Slovenia’s main national and university library), which will host an exhibition on forbidden books and publish a catalog for this exhibition, and on the Library of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, which will collect bibliographic data.
The results will also be very useful in education. The freely accessible website will be designed so that it can be used in primary school, secondary school, and university instruction for Slovenian and world literature and history. This audience will find the books presented by the website relatively inaccessible because of the language (German and Latin) therefore the inventory will be equipped with rich illustrations (scans) and commentary (in Slovenian and English). The findings presented in this way will help instructors and students learn more about specific issues, such as the inclusion of early Slovenian book culture within the European context. In addition, the findings will help them understand and move beyond certain national myths perpetuated by the academic programs themselves (e.g., about the intentional destruction of Slovenian-language books in the early seventeenth century).
The new materials discovered (e.g., rare or unknown books and manuscripts) will attract the attention of the general public, especially in the local environment where such works are found, where they were written, or where their author came from. For example, this is anticipated for the newly discovered Poljane Manuscript (ca. 1800), a Baroque religious text written in Slovenian that was not published in printed form because it did not correspond to the Josephinian views on pastoral work.
Most important scientific results
Interim report,
final report
Most important socioeconomically and culturally relevant results
Interim report,
final report
