In a 1994 essay on microshistory, Edoardo Grendi wrote about the idea of the “normal exception” (Grendi 1994). The Italian historian referred mainly to Menocchio, the protagonist of Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, as an “exceptional” figure and the name of an exceptional case, through which the “normal” range of agency and life possibilities of subaltern groups could be indirectly grasped.

Many years have passed since microhistory was the latest fashion in historiography, but the complex, extremely erudite, nuanced, and very carefully researched book by Hannah Marcus shows how its legacy is still with us, reinterpreted in creative and innovative ways. In Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science and Censorship in Early Modern Italy, Marcus examines not so much the “effectiveness” of Catholic agencies of censorship between the middle of the sixteenth and the middle of the seventeenth century, but rather “the cultural and scientific products of censorship” (6). In doing so, Marcus understandably restricts her focus to medical books, and combines several different approaches, from history of the book to history of medicine, from Inquisition studies to critical bibliography, from material history to the history of reading. The results are outstanding as Marcus focuses on what she calls the “paradox of censorship.” The author argues that the practices of expurgating books—namely the efforts orchestrated by the Catholic authorities to make clerics, experts, and professionals correct books suspected of heresy by materially removing names, words and phrases from them—had three major effects. First, it created new spaces for discussion of scientific knowledge; second, it created an elite of physicians who were able to read everything albeit “critically”; third, it allowed for the elaboration and consolidation of a discourse on the medical—and broadly speaking scientific—“utility” of knowledge that validated the expertise of laypeople, and that blended Catholic piety with scientific identity. In this way, Marcus’ book contributes in a very refined way to the process of the re-consideration of the relationship between early modern science and Catholic culture, one of the most interesting debates concerning early modern Europe in current historiography.

Going back to microhistory: although she embraces methodologies such as close reading of archives and individual stories, at first sight Marcus seems to focus on figures who are not exceptional but normal, not heretics but orthodox zealots, not deviants but embedded in mainstream culture, such as the expurgator physician and historian Girolamo Rossi. Rossi, who left a wealth of traces of his work as a censor, is the main character of chapters 3 and 4. Through his story, Marcus describes not only practices of expurgating the most famous “heretic” medical authors, but also how the culture of censorship penetrated into the censor’s mind. Therefore, together with a few other figures in the book, Rossi embodies the paradox of censorship: eager to read suspect books and at the same time eager to help the Church create a completely Catholic culture, and careful to always please the Church in his own publications. In this case, Marcus writes about a “normal guy” who helps her illuminate the norm, and indeed, the reader of Marcus’ book is sometimes left to wonder about the extent to which the experience of a reader like Girolamo Rossi can be generalized. But the “normal exception” comes back in the Epilogue.

After a rich methodological introduction in which the author presents a very bold definition of “medical books” in early modern Europe as “all those texts that early modern physicians considered to be relevant to their work as doctors and to the role of physicians in society” (21), the book follows a clear and well-structured narrative arc.

Chapter 1 examines how the community of medical learned professionals reacted to the first Italian index of prohibited books issued in 1559 (The Pauline index, from pope Paul IV). The chapter focuses on the “medical republic of letters” and on how physicians and naturalists used their own networks to get books and permissions. The 47 physicians whose books were featured in the Pauline index were there predominantly because their authors were part of heterodox religious groups, much more than for the medical content of their writing. Marcus shows that after 1559, Catholic physicians intensified their contacts with Protestant colleagues and printers, highlighting the inter-confessional character of the medical republic of letters. As a counter-response to the professionals’ preoccupations and complaints, Catholic authorities began to understand that banning books altogether was not the best option, and that correcting useful medical books might be the way to go.

Chapter 2 focuses on attempts by Church authorities—dispersed in many institutional branches such as the papacy, the Congregation of the Index, the Holy Office of the Inquisition, and the Master of the Sacred palace—to develop official lists of expurgations at the turn of the sixteenth century. Marcus focuses on the case history of the community of physicians in Padua, the seat of perhaps the most important medical faculty in Europe, looking at its interactions with the censors, and how they subtly sabotaged the project of establishing official lists of expurgations. By the 1590s, the Congregation of the Index had in fact decided to “delegate the work of composing official expurgations to local dioceses” (52) instead of doing it all in Rome. In this chapter, we encounter another embodiment of the paradox of censorship, the Aristotelian heterodox philosopher Cesare Cremonini, tried several times by the Inquisition for his daring materialist interpretations of the Stagirite’s views on the human soul. In time, Cremonini agreed to be part of the group of expurgators.

Chapter 3 centers on Girolamo Rossi, physician in Ravenna, and on his work of expurgation on thirteen medical books. Marcus uses Rossi to argue that “the expurgatory moment not only reconfigured texts, it also changed the culture of reading and interpretation in Italy” (23). Unlike many studies on the Inquisition, in this chapter Marcus claims that her focus is on a “voluntary [lay] participant” in Catholic censorship, not on a victim of it or on ecclesiastical figures (78). While Cremonini was a classic, simple opportunist, Rossi let the expurgation system penetrate into his mind, as Marcus shows by analyzing his manuscripts, from which also emerge clear practices of self-censorship. The argument that censorship itself created a class of censorship-minded readers is convincing, but more work is needed to describe to what extent the experience of Rossi can be generalized.

Chapter 4 analyzes Rossi’s and other Italian censors’ expurgations alongside the only official document ever published in this period, the 1607 Index Expurgatorius. This document is carefully compared to its Spanish and French analogues, as well as to its Neapolitan manuscript predecessor, and here Marcus delves deeper into the actual scientific content of the expurgations. The author highlights how the passages to be erased from books were those concerning superstitions, magic, and some parts of so-called judicial or predictive astrology. However, the main aim of the expurgation process was to remove the references to the network of Protestant authors and personalities from the Catholic medical republic of letters, while leaving the scientific content of their books largely untouched (114).

Chapter 5 combines qualitative and quantitative analysis in the description of the requests of licenses to read banned or expurgated books (the author sampled over 6,000 requests from all the corners of the peninsula). Catholic censorship culture emerges as a system of granting exceptions to the norms, and a canon of heretic (in various different ways) medical authors emerges from these requests (161), including Cardano, Arnald of Villanova, Amatus Lusitanus, Gessner, Fuchs, Libavius, and Paracelsus. Speaking of Paracelsus, Marcus confirms the revisionists accounts contesting the old idea of a slow penetration of Paracelsianism and chemical medicine into Italy, supposedly due to a strong belief in Galenism, by showing the very large number of readers’ requests for licenses to read the “Luther of medicine” (159). The discourse on the utility of these texts is also very important: in their requests, physicians “cited professional necessity, the importance of healing, and the utility of the texts themselves” (164).

Chapter 6 analyzes the material practices of expurgation of a corpus of books with the tools of critical bibliography, and emphasizes one of the main threads running through the whole book: the system of censorship depended on a vast network of scholars and clerics who interpreted and enacted censorship in a variety of ways, depending on their status, personal preferences, intellectual views, etc. In other words, the system of Catholic censorship was not a system of domination but a network of everyday power relations. This chapter focuses on the materiality of the censored books and highlights the relationships between intellectual history, material objects, and the minds of the readers; it also describes the three major means of expurgating books: “striking through objectionable words or phrases with a pen, cutting them down or scraping them away with a knife, or gluing scraps of paper over controversial sections” (168).

Chapter 7 explores how books entered Catholic libraries—the case studies are the Ambrosiana in Milan, the Vatican library, and the Marciana in Venice—and how the dream of universal libraries coexisted with the conflicting idea of policing the boundaries of Catholic orthodoxy.

Finally, in the Epilogue the microhistorical technique of exploring individual cases of normal exceptions comes back where one would not have imagined it: in the story of Galileo’s trial and condemnation. Marcus briefly but incisively retells the events of the Galileo affair, from the 1616 ban on Copernicanism to the 1632 trial after the publication of the Dialogue, against the background of the intellectual and practical infrastructure of the expurgation system and of the rhetoric of the utility of scientific knowledge. Marcus takes us through the Enlightenment and concludes that “although Galileo was condemned, the justifications of utility and professional expertise that he advocated were the winning discourses of scientific rhetoric in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries” (236).

Despite the open issues regarding the mapping out of the effective extension of the “minds of the censor,” this book, written with clarity, passion and erudition at the same time as being extremely well-researched, is a model of history writing and has the potential of becoming a classic.