Landgraf Moritz der Gelehrte. Ein Kalvinist zwischen Politik und Wissenschaft. Edited by Gerhard Menk. (Beiträge zur hessischen Geschichte, 15.) Pp. 264 incl. 21 black-and-white and 7 colour plates. Marburg: Trautvetter und Fischer, 2000. DM 49.80. 3 87822 112 6

[...]an admirably clear contribution reviews the realities of book control and censorship in post-Reformation German-speaking Europe at local level. [...]as the footnotes to the articles in this collection show, there is an extensive bibliography for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mainly in Italian and German, on the Curia, on careers of cardinals and their households, on the papal and cardinalatial families who came to form the upper elite of Roman society, on their cultural patronage, on cardinalatial factions and clientelism, on ecclesiastical and civic ceremonial, and on the relations between the papacy and the civic elite identied with city government. Rather, taking advantage of new editions of the various sixteenth-century indices of forbidden books and of the recent opening of the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the work examines the impact of censorship on areas such as popular spirituality (Edoardo Barbieri), duelling (Claudio Donati), the Talmud (Fausto Parente), imaginative literature (Ugo Rozzo), law (Rodolfo Savelli) and with a suggestive hypothesis about the paradoxically positive eects of censorship on the development of seventeenth-century science astrology (Ugo Baldini). [...]both tendencies leave a bleak impression and aord little evidence for the forging of a positive or dynamic new culture: in banning Petrarch, Boccaccio, Castiglione, Machiavelli, Ariosto, Bandello and countless others the Italian Church turned its back on an extraordinary culture that was eagerly taken up in other European countries.