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Horace Rumpole — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 09:08:34 -0800

Just in time for Banned Books Week, the Bridwell Library at SMU presents "Heresy and Error": The Ecclesiastical Censorship of Books, 1400-1800.

By: kmz

kmz — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 09:30:55 -0800

Ah, Savonarola vs the Papacy. It's like Mao vs Stalin. Or Honored Matres vs the Unknown Enemy.

By: Xoebe

Xoebe — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 09:47:40 -0800

Anyone struck by the fact that the George Bush Memorial Libary [sic] is located at SMU? Just kidding, snark aside, this is pretty cool. Something about having to keep lists of prohibited books hits me as funny, ironic, and somewhat paradoxical. Maybe it's the Barbara Streisand effect.

By: koeselitz

koeselitz — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 11:06:27 -0800

This is interesting – thanks, Horace. I'll be enjoying going through these. One interesting thing to note is that this history is more politically complicated than one would like it to be. For one thing, "The Church" here is just about every Christian authority during those centuries; no one can beg off, and everyone from Protestants to Catholics and everything in between seems to have been guilty here. Furthermore, the historical consequences are interesting. This is a bit before the scope of this exhibition, but I've always been fascinated by the Condemnation of 1277, which represented the repudiation at the University of Paris of the works of Aristotle and to some extent Thomas Aquinas. This condemnation was lifted some decades later when St Thomas Aquinas was finally canonized, but by then the Condemnation had fundamentally changed the political hierarchy at the University; and some have argued convincingly that this major shift in the life of the mind represented the first step toward the scientific revolution and the modern political project.