Includes bibliographical references (pages 493-521) and index.
Summary:
From the Council of Trent to Vatican II, the Roman Church forbids its faithful reading books by their inclusion in the list of prohibited books, the Index librorum prohibitorum. In the nineteenth century, all or part of Balzac's fictional works, George Sand, Victor Hugo, Eugène Sue, Dumas father and son, Flaubert, Stendhal and Zola underwent a listing. The decrees, however, did not mention for what reason or in what circumstance the Congregation of the Index had banned Le Lys in the valley, Notre-Dame de Paris, Les Miserables, Madame Bovary or Le Rouge et le Noir. It would still be impossible to reconstruct the trials and know the content of the debates, if the Holy See, in the name of "repentance" desired by John Paul II, had not opened the historical archives of the Congregation for research learned. After a brief historical review of canon law in the field of books since the invention of printing, Jean-Baptiste Amadieu exposes the unfolding of the lawsuits brought to the works of fiction for the nineteenth century French in the light of the archives of the Index : the denunciation of the work, its detailed examination by a reporter, the preparatory congregation of the consultors, the general congregation of the cardinals, the promulgation of the decree by the pope. What was, however, the exact degree of observance of the Roman prohibitions in a century when ecclesiastical discipline hesitated between a ecclesiological Gallicanism in full ebb and the increasing docility with regard to Curie's decisions? --Translation of back cover by Éditions du Cerf.
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