Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy , by Hannah Marcus
- Autores: Alessandra Celati
- Localización: Nuncius: annali di storia della scienza, ISSN 0394-7394, Vol. 38, Nº. 1, 2023, págs. 199-201
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
Hannah Marcus, Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 356 pp. 40 halftones, 2 tables. ISBN: 9780226736587.
In 1600, Cesare Cremonini, one of the most “investigated thinkers in the early modern Catholic world,” turned “from censured to censor” (p. 73), accepting to participate in the “honorata impresa” of expurgating medical books. This calculated choice was meant to help his image in the eyes of the Church, integrating him with the authorities prosecuting him. This is just one of the multiple stories that Hannah Marcus deploys to illustrate and discuss the “complex interplay between intellectual control and the demand for prohibited knowledge in Counter-Reformation Italy” (p. 34). Focusing on medical knowledge, Marcus explores the censorship mechanism as a negotiated process in intellectual and social respects. While Cremonini and his Paduan colleagues failed to fulfill the Catholic demands, other medical doctors volunteered with enthusiasm in the censoring effort, and hundreds of physicians asked and obtained licenses to read prohibited books.
