Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Forbidden Books

Episode Date: September 20, 2022

What makes a book bad? Does it have to be nonsensical? Heretical? Libellous? Sexy?Well for 500 years, a panel from the Roman Catholic Church attempted to grapple with this distinction.Today Betwixt the Sheets, we find out what this collection of people deemed unsafe for the eyes of their worshippers.Kate is joined by Robin Vose, a professor of history at St Thomas University in Canada to find out what made the cut, and what didn't.*WARNING there are naughty words in this episode*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Edited and mixed by Anisha Deva.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!You've been listening to a History Hit podcast. Please take a couple of minutes to fill out this survey with your feedback, we'd really appreciate it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Again, my lovely betwixters, this is Kate Lister, and this is your fair do's warning. Fair do's, it's an adult theme covering adult content, adult, naughtiness. And as usual, I'll keep swearing because I just don't seem to be able to stop myself. But if any of that isn't for you, just give us a swerve, and I'll catch you next time. Then Hugo Copernicus de Fo Voltaire and Pope Pius II,

What do all these men have in common? Well, each of them had a piece of their work or two placed onto the Roman Catholic Church's Index Laboreum Prohibitum, or the Index of Prohibited Books, an actual list of banned books. But who made these decisions, and what made a text bad enough to make the list? Today, betwixt the sheets, we're going to find out.

What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Hello and welcome back to Betwixta Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society, with me, Kate Lister. From the 1540s until 1966 people, 1966, the Catholic Church compiled lists of texts and writers

and occasional works of art that they deemed to be damaging to their worshippers. It was an actual list of who was naughty. Today I'm talking to Robin Vose about censorship, the index and its reach. And why talking about sex was often not actually seen as a problem unless it included monks and nuns.

I'm ready if you are. So, hello, and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets Professor Robin Vose. How are you? I am delighted to be speaking with you. This is wonderful. I'm so thrilled to have you here. You are one of my favorite types of guests, because until I got your book and until I was doing the research,

this isn't a subject that I was familiar with at all. So now I'm endlessly fascinated by it and have a million questions. This is your new book, The Index of Censored Books. What is it about, in a nutshell? Well, I mean, it's one of those titles that sort of explains it all, and it's got the subtitle, 400 years of censorship. So, you know, the index of forbidden books, prohibited books, was a technology of censorship, really,

that functioned for over 400 years in the Catholic Church, in listing and determining which books and also some pieces of art and a little bit of music was considered completely forbidden for all good Catholics to read. And it's just an interesting story not only of censorship, but of literature and art itself, too. I hadn't realized that it was like an actual list. Like, obviously, I'm aware that the Catholic Church

and other religions, of course, they do, ban text, or they disapprove of them, or they come out very strongly and go, oh, no, don't do that. But I just wasn't aware that this was an actual list. I mean, it was kind of new to me, too. I'm a historian of the Inquisition of religious conflict, but the actual technology of making a list, compiling a list, or actually in this case, multiple lists,

because over the 400 years it does get quite complicated. But yeah, it is a new thing and an unusual thing. As you say, all religions and all regimes, anyone with power, tends to censor what they don't like. But what I discovered as I did the research is that, you know, you can go back and you can find Egyptian pharaoh censoring things, but they don't list things. Because, of course, it's just a different context. When you've got artistic productions, be they written or visual, that don't have mechanical

reproduction, they're not such a threat. You can destroy one manuscript. You can destroy one piece of the pirates. You can destroy one author. But once you get into the modern period, this is really a model. modern 16th century phenomenon and on, once you have printing. And in some ways, one of the other things that surprised me about my research here was it didn't just start in the 16th century. It actually had a second rebirth in the 19th century, because once you get further technologies

of recording, the index actually got even more sophisticated and more serious. I'm just trying to visualize this. I'm going to get into the history of a minute. But when we say it's a list, like it's an actual book, like Santa's list of like who's naughty and who's nice, It's an actual book somewhere in the Vatican of the naughty books. Precisely. And not just the Vatican. Again, there were multiple versions of this, and they were related. You had the Spanish Inquisition, the Portuguese Inquisition, the Roman Inquisition, the Venetian Inquisition. There were a number of these different branches of Catholic discipline.

They did talk. They did share notes. So their different lists and indexes did overlap at times. But one of the other funny things in the research and in the book is a lot of times they didn't overlap. and they clashed and they fought and they censored each other. No. As they debated one book being okay or in some cases they were debating whether somebody was a saint or a heretic and they censored each other being a Spanish Inquisition. There's an image in the book of a Spanish Inquisition index that's been banned by the Roman

Inquisition because it contains things that they think are good. Wow. Okay. Right. So we're going to get into it. I mean, that's just amazing, isn't it? But when did this start? And was there like a particular book that made people in the Catholic Church get together? Do you know what we need? We need a list. We're going to start a list. What happened? So at the risk of going back too far, I'll actually start in the Middle Ages before there was a list.

So you see some antecedents which end up on the list eventually. So you had some of these one-off bands on a scholar like Peter Avalard. And then in the 14th century, we have an inquisitor, quite a notorious inquisitor of Nicholas Amaric, who I believe creates the first actual list. but it's in manuscript, and it's only a few books. He bans about 20 titles in all and a few authors. He doesn't mention their name. But at this point, we're still in manuscript, 14th century. So his list doesn't really have much of a life to it. It circulates, but nobody really pays much attention to it.

You fast forward to the 16th century, and here again, you've got this interesting confluence. Books are now being printed, so they're more of a threat. But this also means that you can now print a list. So Amoryx list finally gets printed in the 16th century. It's a medieval list, but it gets printed. This is 200 years after Raymerick's death. By this time, half the books on his list don't exist anymore.

No one's ever read them, they're long gone. But they still get listed because they're on a list, and the list has to be exhausted. So it's absurd. You've got books that don't exist being banned. But the other big trigger is, of course, Martin Luther. Right, yes. Because print and the Reformation come together.

The Reformation is a huge threat to Catholic authority. And so when we're looking at stages in development of the index, again, a surprising thing that I discovered in all this is it's not actually the inquisitors at first or the popes who come up with the idea that, oh yeah, we need a list, right? No, they came quite late to the game, actually. It was university professors like me. Oh, of course it fucking was. We need a list. You get it. You've met these colleagues.

This is precisely what happened. So it actually began at the University of Paris as a bitch fight between a bunch of. bunch of professors over whose books should be allowed in the classroom. There's nobody that can do bitchy like academics. Nothing ever changes. Does it surprise me at all? You know, I do touch on that in the book. This is modern history.

We still do exactly the same thing. And in fact, there is a direct genealogical link that I make in the book that might upset some people, but it's an absolutely clear direct genealogical link between universities and how we discipline knowledge through examinations. and PhD tribunals and so on, and the Inquisition. They are the same institution. Wow. And the way that, in fact, peer review emerges in the 18th century

is precisely because some professors were worried that the index wasn't being used anymore. That's where it comes from. And so they needed their own internal method of policing knowledge, exactly. Oh, my goodness. So peer review is the new version of the index. It functions differently, of course. That's blown my tiny brain wide open. And also makes me feel a little bit better about some of those shitty reviews I got from peer review.

They're the modern inquisitors. The Paris University Theology Faculty compiles the first list in 1544, the first printed list. Again, there were a few little manuscript lists. People always jot it down books they hated. And there were a few circulating in the 1530s. But they actually take this important step of printing it in the 1540s, 1544 to be precise. And they update it annually for a few years after that. And it's almost all Protestant literature, but gradually a few other things slip in.

They find a little bit of naughty literature they don't like. Okay. Some of the classics are a little bit titillating for classroom use, it turns out. See, that, I really wanted to know that. Like, what is the benchmark that we're dealing with here? Like, it's one thing to read a book and go, I don't like it. No one else should be like to read it. But was there, like, a criteria?

How does something get to be censored? And especially when it comes, I mean, text that the Catholic Church would regard as heretical. Okay, I sort of see what you do. But like sexy texts is like, was there a priest out there going, I am this much aroused and anything over this is that's on the list? That's a great question. And it's, of course, a complicated question and a complicated answer because sex has its own complicated history.

And the attitudes of the church towards sex are often quite surprising too. And this whole history reveals a lot about that. So, yeah, as you say, there's multiple categories of problems with books and with art. On the heretical front that contradicts a dogma. But this is where sex can overlap with that because one of the dogmas that they worried about with sex was if you're teaching some sort of libertinism that claims that it's not really sinful to indulge in certain things. Adultery, homosexuality, although they go back and forth on homosexuality. But adultery is pretty bad. You know, that's Ten Commandment type stuff.

So if you've got a text that either explicitly or at least implicitly implies that adultery is not bad and not sin, that counts as a heresy. Wow. So you see, you can get sex into the heretical category that way. The other thing that actually upset them more than sex per se, it's surprising how late they focus on sex per se. It's really the 19th century, late 18th century, we can talk about that. In the 16th century, when they're first starting out on all this, the sex that only really bothers them is priest and nun sex. Oh, kinky. Because then it becomes anti-clerical. Right, of course. Anticlerical, and of course this helps the Protestants make their points about Catholic corruption and so on. An example I love to give is they did ban Boccaccio's to Cameron.

This is a medieval 14th century text, contemporous with the guy I mentioned before Nicholas Amory. And it was very popular. I mean, it circulated in manuscript widely, and then it was translated, it was printed, and everyone loved it. Popes loved it, great stuff. Big hit. Yeah, and it's not all that sexy. There's a few raunchy stories in it. A couple of ankles. On display, yeah.

Yeah. But there's a few stories that are a bit anti-clerical and make fun at the expense of monks and nuns. So there's one in particular story that comes to mind on day four, where some Randy monks sneak some nuns into their cells for the night. Now, this was fine until the Protestant Reformation and then everyone's worried about anti-clerical stuff. So they banned it. They put it on the index. But Pope still wanted people to read it. Everyone said it was an outcry of the Venetian publishers.

we can't undermine our book industry this way. So everyone agreed, well, we've got to do something. We've got to not ban it, but just cut out that bit. Oh, my. So they hired a guy who rewrote the DeCameron in 1573 and just changed that story. So now it wasn't nuns and monks getting it on in the cells, but it was university students sneaking women into their dorm rooms. And that was fine.

So the sex was fine as long as it wasn't with nuns and monks. That's wow. I mean, there's some mental acrobatics going on. there, isn't there? That's the thing about the medieval church is like, we always like to think it was anti-sex. But it wasn't because that's the bind that they find themselves in, is that you need people to have sex, otherwise there's no more Catholics. In some context, sex is mandatory. Yeah, right? And we're talking about the Renaissance period here. And of course, the other aspect, it's not necessarily involving sex, but it often does overlap with sex. And that's nudity.

I mean, the churches are full of nudity. And popes are commissioning nudes. Michelangelo's putting nudes on the Sistine Chapel. And some people find that. arousing. Again, it's not necessarily sex, but it can be, and there's an obvious connection. And so allegedly pornographic images and pornographic stories do start to get on to the index. To the naughty lift. It's a gradual thing, because again, there's pushback. Some people say, no, that's just a beautiful nude. We want that. You can't ban that. So it's not just suddenly they, or always, they say that all sex is bad and all nudity is bad. In fact, it goes back and forth for centuries. And again, I would argue, well, I do argue in the book and others have too, that it's

really the French revolution and the libertinism that comes from that, the anti-church libertinism that really forces their hand and makes them put people like the Marquis de Sade on the index of forbidden books. I would be surprised if he didn't make that list. Okay, but here's some other surprises that hit me there. Okay. Marquis de Sade. Good guy to get on your list of prohibited books if you're a Pope or a priest. But then what about all the people who were Marquis de Sade adjacent who didn't get on the list? Good point. They were quite selective in what they put on. And I think by this time they had just given up and they really couldn't compile everything because there was just so much porn circulating around. And they could only read so much of it. So, I mean, the Marquis de Sade had some

colleagues, shall we say, who were working on side project. The Count de Mirobeau published something called the Erotica Biblion, sort of the Bible of Erotica. And it's an incredibly boring book about pornography, I might say. A boring book about porn? Right, okay. Yeah, well, it's very scholastic and academic. Oh, God. Miserable. And I would never have read it if it hadn't come up on the index of forbidden books. So, you know, they're actually exposing me to more porn than I ever would have looked at otherwise. So he shared a cell with the Marquis de Sade. So those two guys get on, and that's understandable. But then there was a guy, Nicholas Restif de la Breton, Exact contemporary, new sad, hated sad, wrote his own series of pornography works, including

the perverted peasant, the pornographer, and a foundational work on foot fetishism, the Pied de Fanchette. Classic. Some of his work got on the index, but the pornographer and the Pia de Fanchette didn't get on the index. Why? I wonder why not? I suspect they just, as I said, they just gave up at a certain point. You know, his name was on it, figured out for yourselves. By the time you've got the printing press boom and sort of mass reproduction,

how many priests must have they been employing to try and read all of this porn coming out? Yeah, they did give up at a certain point. They tried to set up commissions. As early as 1571, they set up a commission adjacent to the actual Roman inquisition. You know, it started in the universities, but it did eventually get into the inquisitions by the later 1500s. And they set up a side gig at the Vatican, the congregation for the index. And their entire job was to review books.

But even they were swamped within 10 years and sort of gave up and sort of relied on denunciations at that point. If someone sent them their favorite horrible book, they would have a look at it. Okay. But it would often end up on a queue. Some of these books took 40, 50 years to get banned because they just didn't get around to reading them. And when they did, there was disagreement and back and forth. So they gave up on that in 1917. They ended the congregation of the index in 1917 and just sent it all of the Inquisition and said,

you lot sort this out, we've given up. 500 years of banned books. Exactly. And it never completely ended. The last index was printed in 1948. Wow, that feels really recent. Quite recent. And they kept issuing decrees of censorship after that. There was a feminist text by Jacqueline Martin that was banned in the 1950s, memoirs of a woman in love. And it wasn't until 1966, I think, that they issued a final decree saying,

look, we're not going to even issue decrees anymore. Nevertheless, we're still leaving it in all good Catholic's hands to exercise their own judgment in consultation with their priests. Some things still shouldn't be read. We're just not going to manage the list anymore. We just can't keep on top of it. Yep. As I said, there is still an institution. There is still an inquisition. It has a different name now. It's a congregation for the doctrine of the faith. It sounds a lot less scary than the inquisition. Yeah. They still have a building right next to the Vatican, St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. And they still evaluate writings, chiefly theological writings, and they still issue their opinion, if this is good, bad, or indifferent. It's just

they don't follow up and make a list or have any sort of disciplinary action. What was the disciplinary action? I mean, it's like one thing to put a book on your list. And I love the idea they're just being kind of like a whole office full of priests reading this stuff and I'm trying to judge. But all right, so it gets on the list. But then what happens? What happens to the author? What happens to anyone caught reading it? In so many of these cases, the author was already dead, or in many cases, the author didn't even exist, because there's a lot of absurdity in this list. What's absurd? Well, there's errors where they've got books on here that are half-remembered things or things miscopied from other lists. Okay. I mean, they had typos that put people on that didn't exist

and left people off that did exist. So often there was no repercussion for an author, and often, depending on the context, an author or a collector who had the books or a librarian or a bookseller, might just get a slap on the wrist, maybe a fine, have their books confiscated. So often it wasn't that big a deal. But there were cases where it was a very big deal indeed. And, you know, again, context matters. So often this would overlap with other political or religious issues. A famous example that I talk about is Giordano Bruno, who was a priest himself, a Dominican. and he was burned at the stake over his writings.

But other things, too. He was a very naughty boy on all kinds of levels. Right. But, you know, his books were put on the index and he was burned at the stake and this was part of the trial against him. He was burned in 1600. Unfortunately, when the memo got to the Spanish Inquisition, they misspelled his name. So by the time you get to the 1700s, the Spanish Inquisition list is saying that a Dutchman named Jordan of Hola, a philosopher, is on the list. had never heard of a guy called Giordano Bruno. Right. Okay, so it's not full proof then. Not that that

made much difference to poor Bruno being burnt at the state. What was his book about? What did, what did he write about to warrant that? He wrote a number of things. This guy had a fascinating career and, you know, many books have been written about him. He speculated about the nature of the universe, about existence of parallel worlds, alien beings on other planets, that kind of thing. And this was the beginning of all the troubles over Galileo and Copernicus. So that got him in a bit of trouble. He also thought he knew a thing or two about demons summoning. Right.

And how to keep the demons on your good side. He consorted with Protestants. He spent quite a bit of time at the court of Queen Elizabeth in England. He hobnaved with a bunch of people. He may have met Shakespeare for all I know. So he mixed with the wrong company. He did some predictions and astrological things for people. So he meddled with magic, demons, dicey theories about the universe, but probably consorting with Protestants was the final straw.

And he was unrepentant, too. I mean, a lot of people could get their sentences commuted if they begged forgiveness. He was a bit of a saucy character. But he wasn't alone, too. I shouldn't imply that this was unique. It was particularly egregious. But we've got cases of booksellers who were arrested in Venice in the 1580s at a time when the wars of religion were quite hot. and they were Protestant sympathizers

and they were selling Protestant books and they failed to properly beg forgiveness and they were drowned in the lagoon of Venice as their consequence. And the charge would be your book is on this list? Again, it's sort of a cascading series of charges

that initiates the charge. We caught you with these books. They're on the list but then in the trial it comes out that you are consorting with Protestants. There's a reason why you've got the books in other words, right? You are a herring. essentially. Again, I think if someone was just caught innocently with a copy of some book by a Protestant in their library, they would say, oh dear, I had no idea, so sorry, please do burn it,

and they would probably get off with a slap on the wrist. It was the people who were deliberately contumacious, as they would say, they'd gotten severe trouble. I'll be back with Robin after this. All this month on Gone Medieval from History Hit, I'll be asking, who really were the Vikings? How did they become so successful in spreading across Northern Europe and beyond from the late 8th to the 11th centuries? What are the stories we tell about them and what legacy did they leave behind for us today? I'm Dr Kat Jarman and throughout September I'll be examining the big questions about the Vikings with a host of experts and answering all of your burning questions about the Viking age as well.

So for everything you always wanted to know about the Vikings, subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Getting off the list once you'd got on to it. Was there any appeals process that a pornographer could apply to and just be like, no, take me up the list? Oh, yeah. Several ways of getting off the list, in fact. Again, it's 400 years of history.

It's quite complicated. The first way was to have your naughty book downgraded. Okay. So at first they just banned books. It was just prohibitions straight up. With cases like Boccaccio and several others, they realized this is a good, book, but there's just some bad bits to it. So they started a parallel index called the index of ex-pergated books. And you could get moved over onto that. They'd actually have

line numbers and say, if you just remove line 15 on page 275, this book is fine. Of course, that got complicated once you had multiple editions with different paginations. It was a disaster. And those indexes got so unwieldy that it was crazy. The earliest indexes are just 20 or 30 pages long. By the end of it, it was 2,000 pages long. Wow. So you could get moved over onto an expurgatory index and have your books sort of downgraded that way. There were also cases by the mid-1600s where they just gave up and they just said, look, some books, we're not going to bother listing anymore. The list is getting too long. They did have general categories by that time that they would just say, look, anything written by a Protestant is bad. We're not going to list them all

anymore. And they did have a category where they said anything lascivious. Use your own judgment or, you know. Yep, again vague. This is where it gets contradictory, though, because they said anything lascivious is off the list, but then they kept banning specific books like Marquis de Satt, so it wasn't that neat and tidy and efficient. So some books got just dropped off the list because there no longer seemed to be a need to keep them on. They were covered by a general category.

They needed to shorten the list. They were streamlining it. By 1948, the book is back to a manageable size, just a couple hundred pages. So they took things off. There were a series of sort of purges of the index where they tried to lighten the load, as it were. So yeah, you could get off in those ways. And there were sort of an appeals process where a new commission looked at the book with fresh eyes and decided, yeah, no, actually, we don't mind this anymore. But there were several books that they tried to get off from this. Was there like one person at the top of All Is Chaos who had the final yes or no in compilates? Or was this just like the shared Google document from hell of just like everybody's making so many different changes? That's a great analogy.

It all depends on who you are in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, of course. The popes would have liked to be the final say, and Pope certainly claimed to have the final say. But we have this movement within the church called Gallicanism that claims that, well, no, you don't have final say here in France. It would be the hierarchy of the French. And you had kings who also meddled with this, and emperors who meddled with this, and university professors who meddled with it. There's some university professors, Catholic theology professors, who still claimed, the authority, because they knew the truth, they studied the truth, they had the authority to contradict a pope and discipline a pope. And then you had inquisitors and national inquisitions

in Spain, Portugal, and so on, who also thought they knew better than the popes at times. Is it true that some popes wrote erotic books? In fact, it is, yes. The Pius II in the 15th century wrote a fairly juicy romance story called The Tale of the Two Lovers, and it's widely believed to be autobiographical. He wasn't always a pope. It wasn't always a pope, that's true. No, he had had a few adventures as a younger man, and he wrote about them quite shamelessly.

And again, this is not problematic in a medieval context where everyone's reading chivalric romances and lots of lords and ladies having dalliances together. Again, as long as you're not stealing someone else's wife, it's not necessarily adultery. Okay. So the tale of the two lovers, I admit I haven't gotten around to reading that one yet. I think it's probably fairly tedious.

But it was clearly erotic and that was never put on the index. However, it's not like they forgot about old pious. He was on the index or he was a problematic case, shall we say. By the 1590s, 150 years after he had been Pope, they did a review of some of his commentaries on church councils. Of course, that was a big deal in the time of Trent and all the church councils. And he had written this before he was Pope, and he was an attendee at the council, and he had a few sort of criticisms about the church and about the popes. This was in the time of the schism of the late Middle Ages. So they had a commission that reviewed that piece of writing, and they decided that was problematic. I think they ended up expurgating it. It was a problem to completely ban a pope at that point,

but they did put it on the ex-pergatory index to get him corrected as it was. But they never went back to ban the tale of the two lovers, which was quite widely known. So the tale of two lovers, not a problem. A Pope's notes to what is essentially a town council meeting. On the list. Yeah. And that can do me. So what was the last book to be put on it? Do we know? The technology had reached a point where they had given up with annual updates. So they had a series of individual decrees. They would issue a decree saying, this book is bad. Please put it on the next version of the index. And then they'd get around to a new publication of the index a few years or sometimes decades later. So the last published version, as I said, was 1948. They still had a few

decrees after that through the 1950s. I mentioned Jacqueline Martin's feminist text. Jean-Paul Sartre put on the list. They toyed with the idea of putting Graham Greens, the power and the glory, on the list in the 50s. Graham Green. Yeah, British novelist, quite well known, and he was a convert to Catholicism, so they worried about the PR effect of all this. So in the end, they decided not to put him on the index or to issue a decree, but they did send around the archbishop to have tea with them and tell him he'd been a very naughty boy. That's a very British solution. Yeah.

He issued a secret apology he sent to the Inquisition. It might have been a bit tongue in cheap, but he did say. Sent an apology to the Inquisition. It just sounds wild. Did you say that there was artwork on it as well? Well, yes and no. So art generally fell under the category of general bands. They did have a couple of general bands on lascivious images.

It was something that was debated at the Council of Trent, and the Spanish Inquisition worried about it too. So they talked about the possibility of having a separate list of band artworks. Then this was in late 1500s. Again, art doesn't get reproduced in the same way that books do. So you can't really have a list of, you know, author title and they're not being circulated in print version. So they abandoned that.

I mean, the church itself did censor a number of artworks. And so I do talk about that in the book. So there was a relationship between the censoring of books on the index and the general theory of banning lascivious or irreverent images and then actual inquisition cases. But a few of my favorites would be, first of all, Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. And this is the fig leaf campaign. They went around putting fig leaves over some of the nudes. Oh, of course they did. He just exploded gay all over the 16th.

When you get close up and you look at some of the images, you just like, Michaelangelo, really? It was after his death. They did that because he actually stood up for himself and he got the popes to stand up for him too. There was a cardinal who really didn't like the nudes and there were a few other minor functionaries who really went after him on this. But the Pope stood up for him during his lifetime and he actually got his revenge. He painted a caricature of one of his critics onto the Sistine Chapel as a denizen of hell, quite nude with a snake about to bite his cock. And that's on the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican. After Michelangelo's death, they did appoint a new painter called El Brigatone, is known as the loincloth painter, who would go around painting loincloths on people

or bits of foliage that would cover up their naughty bits. Wow, that... So they did that. The other story of a nude, that's not the Roman Inquisition, but the Spanish Inquisition. As I said, they were starting to get quite upset about nudity and sex in the wake of the French Revolution. And there were all these affranchisados, all these sort of pre-thinking libertines in Spain as well, inspired by the French Revolution. And one of them was, in fact, the Prime Minister, Manuel Godoy, who commissioned a couple of works from Goya, one of which is quite famous in the Prado,

the naked Maja. Yes, first depiction of pubic hair, I think. It's a lovely painting. There's the clothed versions and the naked version, and he kept that in his private study, which was literally next door to the Spanish Inquisition headquarters. So, of course, they knew about it, and they came around and seized the naked Maja and said that this was beyond the pale, this was a banned artwork, and took a while to get it back to the Prado. But it wasn't just nude images. The other great story is in Venice. There was a painting of the Last Supper

that was made by Veronese, one of the great Venetian Renaissance artists, traditional huge painting of the Last Supper. But an Inquisitor came and had to look at it and said, well, okay, there's no nudity here, that's fine. But I don't like the dog gnawing a bone in front of the Lord's dinner table. No.

It's quite irreverent. And this was also just a matter of power. They were just trying to flex their muscles. So he says, okay, you've got to overpaint that dog. I recommend you put a Mary Magdalene or something there, something quite pious. Veronesa is quite powerful at this point, very famous painter. And he said, no, I'm not going to do that. Tell you what I'll do.

I'm changing the title. It's no longer the Last Supper. It's dinner at Levi's house. Oh, my God, that's amazing. It's still hanging in Venice. It's beautiful. And there's the dog. And, you know, you've got the Lord.

and all his apostles and they're having dinner at Levi's house. It's not the last supper, so it's not so irreverent. Oh, that's, and that kind of shows the problem with any kind of censorship, doesn't it? Is it the devils and the details? I learned a lot about the absurdity and the futility of censorship from this book. Can you censor things, really? You can, and you can make things disappear, and there are many cases that. As I said, there's a number of books that are funny because they're on the index, and that's the only record we have of them. So you can make things disappear. You can make people disappear. Of course, we don't know how many books or artworks were just not created because of this disciplinary atmosphere, right? Self-censorship and so on. But the other irony of

censorship is that it often backfires. You see this in the States right now with all their attempts to ban books in schools and it just makes them become bestsellers and everyone wants to read them. I mentioned the erotica biblion. I mean, I'll never get back the hours that I spent pouring through that. And I would never have read it if it wasn't for... one shade of gray. Yeah. If it wasn't for the fact that it was on there, there's quite a lot of boring literature that ends up on the index that I would never

have looked at if it wasn't for the index. The index has inadvertently created a parallel history of banned books that would otherwise be forgotten, sometimes rightfully so. Wow. Pornographic books, theological books, scientific books, books about magic, all kinds of things that I now know about, and I'm trying to share with other people and with my students, only because the index put all this work and money into making a record of it. Records create history. Isn't that called the Barbara Streisand effect or something? Because she famously tried to have a picture of a house taken out of the media.

There was a case and then everyone was really interested in the case. Now everybody's seen the picture in, but it just amplifies it. I didn't know that one, but that's lovely. I'll look that one up. We can think of all kinds of examples, right, where you've got a book that becomes famous because it's erotic or because it's scandalous in some way. Salman Rushdie's Satanic verses, who's currently in hospital at the time of recording, isn't he? So, like, this stuff is, you know, can be irreverent and silly, but there's really serious consequences. You know, the reason why they ended the index in the 40s for the 60s

was because they realized after 400 years of trying that this is a fool's errand. You cannot do this. People are endlessly creative, and they will keep circulating things. And again, you can make an example of someone. you can martyr someone like a Salman Rushdie, and that's a terrible pact of politics.

But if you're serious about actually censoring things, it's a fool's errand. You can try, but you're never going to do it. As somebody that's recently, what is effectively free speech, I suppose, isn't it? It's throughout the centuries, especially because we now, there's all this debate around council culture, and is it a thing, is it not a thing?

I'm just wondering what you have to say about the idea of free speech, and is that a concept that exists? I go round and round with it, because sometimes I think that freedom of speech does exist, but freedom of consequence it doesn't. And then other times I come back to think that it's an absolute. You've either got it or you haven't got it. What's your thoughts on it? I'm still developing my thoughts on it.

I think most people are and should be because it's a complicated question. It's easy to say something absolute and to say, I believe in absolutely free speech, I believe in absolutely unfettered communication of every sort. And in many of my best moments, I do say things like that. I tend to be on the libertarian side of things personally. And I think that when in doubt, it is better to just keep your nose out of it and let people make their own decisions. But then when you get really pushed and you really start thinking about it deeply, then you have to confront things that make that harder to maintain with any degree of consistency. And you start to fall into hypocrisy.

One of the lovely things about being a historian is you can try to stay out of these modern political debates and say, well, I'm just commenting on what happened. I'm not giving you my opinion on it, and I'm not telling you what to do in the present. But in this case, I did follow it into modern times, and I did try to wrestle with it in the present. You know, I have been involved with these debates on my own campus and Canada, where I live, in the political realm. We fight very hard to preserve academic freedom, and that's related to freedom of speech, and these are important things to uphold. But where it gets complicated, and I think cancel culture debates have really brought this forward, in a way that I still haven't got my head around, but I think it's important that it's been done,

is to note that there's a difference between banning someone, censoring someone, or amplifying them, right? Because there are people whose voices don't get heard, not because we censor them, but just because we don't listen to them. And then there's other people who say things that are perhaps much worse and much less valuable than what got ignored or suppressed through other means,

who, through money or politics and people, privilege, get their voices amplified. So that's not fair either. There's no equal playing field, I guess, is what I'm saying. It's not as easy as just saying, well, we should all have free speech, and it's all equal. We all know that some people's speech counts more than others and gets heard more loudly and distributed more loudly. So why are we okay with letting really offensive and horrible things and dangerous things in some case when you're talking about, you know, inciting violence against people and you're actually threatening people with your word. Why is that okay in the name of free speech when we've got any number of people who have never benefited from free speech because they simply

have no access to media, they have no access to the sort of privilege that gets people on podcasts or gets their books written. And if you look at the arts, I thought about that a lot too. I mean, art is expensive to produce depending on the medium. How many films aren't made just because you have no access to Hollywood. How many theater productions are not made just because you didn't kiss up to the right people? So it's not as easy as just saying, I believe in total freedom for everyone. The world is more complicated than that. Power, privilege, institutional suppression of things. These are all still there. If I could just talk about the academic world for a second, I believe strongly in academic freedom. But when I look at it more closely, I realize, well,

how many people get into the academy to use that freedom? And then how many of them, get their books published because it turns out publishers and editors have a certain amount of power there. And we do have mechanisms of peer review where our peers can read things and prevent us from getting a PhD, prevent us from getting hired into a university, or end our careers by making sure we never get published. So there are de facto means of censorship that are not the index. They're not as blunt as what we normally think of with state censorship or church censorship. But there are these sort of casual or informal means of censorship there nonetheless. So I'm still struggling with that. I think we all should keep struggling with that. I don't think we should assume that we have

simple answers and then start screaming at other people and telling them that if they don't agree with us, they're horrible. I think these are really hard things that we have to work out on a case-by-case basis. It's so interesting to hear you say that, because again, I can't quite work out where I am on this, because, I mean, basically really what it comes down to is I should be able to have free speech. I I just be not to say whatever I want, but if I don't like what someone else is saying, then I have an issue with it. And I use I as, you know, capital. We all do that. Because that's when you start to get into difficulty. It's like, well, okay, should that person be allowed to say these really, really racist, hateful things then? Is that okay?

And then suddenly you're like in a, ooh, is it? I think you've just summarized my book and, in fact, the history of censorship right there. The history of censorship, both the index is 400 years, but also all the other parallels that I've looked at, it's always a matter of, I don't like it. It's all subjective, and then it's all just a question of who has the power to make the decision. And so, you know, I reflect on this in the conclusion that if there's any consolation to be taken out of this story, to remember that we should always, yeah, have our say. If you think this shouldn't be censored, work with like-minded people to prevent censorship. But if you think something is horrible, I don't think people should

necessarily be afraid to say that and have your opinion tested by the rest of society. Because The other thing I discovered in all this research is that culture changes over time. And what is offensive to one society is not offensive to another. You know, this is history. Things change. If we look at homosexuality, for example, and how that's been banned and suppressed, and people have just been so horribly forced into the shadows as a result of bans on homosexuality and the expression of homosexuality and homoerotic content, we're in a historical moment now where some countries are starting to permit homosexual expression. And I think that's

wonderful and most people in my milieu think that's wonderful and I think that we should never take that for granted we have to keep fighting to keep these sorts of freedoms because there could very well there is a backlash in the US we certainly see it and I think we're seeing it in other places too it can be taken away so easily but there's always going to be a struggle we can't just pretend that we'll win the struggle and it'll be over it's always going to be there if other people think that homosexuality is still bad fine make their case but then don't be surprised if others are going to fight back on it. And then it's just a matter of power and history who wins.

Oh, Robin, you have been so wonderful to talk to today. If people want to find out more about you and your book on the list, where can they find you? You want to read the list yourself. One of the great things about our culture nowadays online is you can Google it and find the actual list on Google books, many of them. The book is published by Reaction Books in the UK and distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US. And advanced copies can be ordered now on all your favorite online distributors. I still don't have a copy myself, so I'm looking forward to them being in bookstores in the next month or two. And are you on social media? I am on Facebook, and I try to do Twitter, but that can be quite toxic in the censorship and cancelling world, too. So I'm going to try and

do more of that once the book is out. I'd love to have discussions with people on Twitter there. There's also, if anyone's interested in Inquisition History as well. There's an Inquisition History website that I helped to design at the University of Notre Dame in the U.S. where I started this research. So if you Google my name, Vos and Inquisition, that will generally pop up. Once the book's out, I'm hoping to welcome some more discussion on Twitter. As I say, I think it's important to keep talking about this. You're brave man, Robin.

Thank you so much for talking to me today. You've been a superstar. I have enjoyed it tremendously, and I hope we don't get cancelled and censored too quickly, but eventually it'll happen. It's inevitable. Thank you. Thanks very much. I hope that you've enjoyed that episode

and thank you so much to Robin for joining me. I found that so fascinating. I just loved the fact there was a list of naughty books. But if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts before we get put on a list of naughty podcasts and you can never listen to us again.

Join me again between the sheets, The History of Sex Scandling Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.