The review for the SHARP News deals with the new book, written by Robert Darnton. This excellent book represents a peak in Robert Darnton’s long-term research and should indeed become compulsory reading for all those interested in censorship and, more generally, mechanisms of control in the age of print. Darnton takes the reader on an exciting voyage through censorship as exerted by three authoritarian systems in three different centuries: eighteenth-century France, the British Raj, and Communist East Germany. Instead of starting from definitions, he provides subtle “ethnographic” insights into day-to-day censorial practices. By offering “a ‘thick description’ of how censorship actually operated”, he argues that the understanding of this phenomenon has to overcome not only the Manichean view of a writer struggling against a wicked censor but also the idea that anything that hinders communication can be labeled censorship. Although censorship in the three analyzed systems took quite diverse shapes and nuances, a common feature was its profound connection to the power structures. For Darnton, censorship is essentially bound to the state, to its monopoly of power and its ability to sanction. Moreover, it is precisely such a political understanding of censorship that prevents the object of research from dissolving as merely one of the many possible constraints in communication.
F.30 Professional assessment of the situation
COBISS.SI-ID: 40732461The lecture described the distribution of books, forbidden by the Roman Index librorum prohibitorum and the Austrian Catalogus librorum a Commissione Aulica prohibitorum, in Slovenia in the early modern period. It described three categories of forbidden books: religiously, politically, and morally suspicious books. The reception of these books was presented chronologically: inconsistent bookselling policy and consequently huge influx of suspicious prints because of the forced co-existence of the Protestantism and Catholicism in the second half of the 16th century, enforcement of the consistent regard of the Index during the Counter-Reformation around 1600 with demonstrative burnings of forbidden books, gradual abandoning of formally still strict rules of the censorship in the second half of the 17th and the first half of the 18th century, and radical reform of the censorship under Emperor Joseph II.
B.04 Guest lecture
COBISS.SI-ID: 40030765In the interview, L. Vidmar described the history of burning and destroying books in Slovenia, first, the two burnings of the Protestant books in Ljubljana in 1600 and 1601. L. Vidmar emphasized that these two burnings (contrary to common belief) did not differ from other contemporary burnings of books in Catholic and Protestant parts of Europe, and did not specifically attack Slovenian Protestant books that presented only few percent of contemporary libraries in that area, but targeted Protestant books in general. All contemporary burnings of books, including burnings in Slovenia, were carried out in the same manner: by order of a prince, in close cooperation of the Church and state authorities, publicly, in exemplary way, and with emphasis on heretical character of burned books. Vidmar emphasized that burnings during the Counter-Reformation were not the only example of massive destroying of the books in Slovenia. Books that were not in the accordance with dominant ideology of a state were also extensively destroyed under Joseph II, but especially under Fascism, Nazism, and Communism in the 20th century.
F.29 Contribution to the development of national cultural identity
COBISS.SI-ID: 39417901