Freedom of the Press? Catholic Censorship during the Counter-Reformation

Sascha Becker, Francisco Pino and Jordi Vidal-Robert

No 2021-04, SoDa Laboratories Working Paper Series from Monash University, SoDa Laboratories

Abstract: The Protestant Reformation in the early 16th century challenged the monopoly of the Catholic Church. The printing press helped the new movement spread its ideas well beyond the cradle of the Reformation in Luther’s city of Wittenberg. The Catholic Church reacted by issuing indexes of forbidden books which blacklisted not only Protestant authors but all authors whose ideas were considered to be in conflict with Catholic doctrine. We use newly digitized data on the universe of books censored by the Catholic Church during the Counter-Reformation, containing information on titles, authors, printers and printing locations. We classify censored books by topic (religion, sciences, social sciences and arts) and language and record when and where books were indexed. Our results show that Catholic censorship did reduce printing of forbidden authors, as intended, but also negatively impacted on the diffusion of knowledge, and city growth.

Keywords: Censorship; Counter-Reformation; Elite Human Capital; Political Economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D7 J24 N93 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-lma and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://soda-wps.s3-website-ap-southeast-2.amazonaw ... r/sodwps/2021-04.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Freedom of the Press? Catholic censorship during the Counter Reformation (2021)
Working Paper: Freedom of the Press? Catholic Censorship during the Counter-Reformation (2021)
Working Paper: Freedom of the Press? Catholic Censorship during the Counter-Reformation (2021)
Working Paper: Freedom of the Press? Catholic Censorship during the Counter-Reformation (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ajr:sodwps:2021-04

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://www.monash.edu/business/soda-labs/home

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SoDa Laboratories Working Paper Series from Monash University, SoDa Laboratories SoDa Laboratories, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ashani Amarasinghe ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).