Banned Books Bard Historians Love, Fall 2023 (In No Particular Order)
Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis (1470): Subject of the first known calls for censorship and suppression after the advent of movable type in Europe. Archbishop and humanist Niccolò Perotti objected to the edition's philological quality and asked the pope to establish a commission to validate all subsequent editions for proper Latinity.
George Gemistos Pletho, Νόμοι (Laws) (c. 1440s): Pletho (d. 1452) was a late Byzantine philosopher and teacher who was controversial for his teaching. In 1460, after his death, his esoteric religious text, Νόμοι, or Laws, was discovered and burned by Orthodox authorities who claimed it advanced neo-pagan religious rituals and beliefs.
Marsilius of Padua, Defensor Pacis (c. 1325): One of the most famous treatises of political thought from the late Middle Ages, Defensor Pacis was written amid conflict between the Holy Roman Emperor and the pope and was aggressively anticlerical. It argued forcefully that the church had no place in validating or exercising political authority and that all temporal sovereignty came only from the people. The book infuriated the papacy and was censured by a number of popes in the 14th c. and beyond.
Writings containing the Teachings of Mani. He found a lot of opposition in several regions (e.g. in China, where an 8th century edict prohibited the circulation of his thought, or in Sassanian Iran where he eventually died under torture).
The Wycliffite Bible -- aka the late fourteenth-century (illegal) English translation of the bible. After 1407, the bibles, and often their owners, were burned upon discovery. The Middle English language is wonderful: the allegorical sense of scripture, eg., is a "goostly undirstonding" (ghostly understanding). All of the MS copies I've seen in person are enormous books--hiding in plain site, as it were.
Any of the medieval manuscripts with illuminations in which the faces and names of saints have been effaced--often done by the books' owners to keep them from being confiscated and destroyed by Henry VIII's henchmen after England's break with Rome.
The Wanton Wife of Bath (broadside ballad, c. 1600): The Wife is stopped at heaven's gate and told by a string of biblical male figures that she can't enter because of this or that sin she committed on earth. She shows the hypocrisy of each of these men, citing examples from their own lives. Christ then appears and opens the gate for her. Printers were jailed for printing and/or disseminating it in England during the first half of the
seventeenth century.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, ou de l’Education (1762). This highly influential book on education was banned (and, indeed, burned) in France and Geneva.
Diderot, Denis, and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, Editors. Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers... (1751-1772) Paris: André le Breton, Michel-Antoine David, Laurent Durand and Antoine-Claude Briasson. This project was officially tolerated, unofficially tolerated, and officially condemned.
The quarterly journal Tropiques published in Martinique by Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, and René Ménil, 1941-1945, censored by the Vichy government.
Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, Milan, Mouton, 1958
Jinpingmei (Plum in the Golden Vase; a late imperial pornographic novel), restricted to all readers except "research experts and high-level cadres" (PRC state designated for "internal circulation" rather than general distribution during the 1950s-1970s.)
Leon Trotsky's collected writings in Chinese translation, banned from 1964 to 1976 to all readers except top party and government leaders as documents of "revisionism" (PRC state designated for "internal circulation" rather than general distribution during the 1950s-1970s.)
Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, and almost all classical and neo-classical Western political economy and economics, limited access to high-ranking scholars only (PRC state designated for "internal circulation" rather than general distribution during the 1950s-1970s.)
René Maron. Batouala, véritable roman nègre recipient of top book prize, the Prix Goncourt, in France in 1921, but then it was banned (1928) by the Colonial Ministry in the colonies for its criticisms of colonial abuses.
Frantz Fanon. Wretched of the Earth (1961). Banned in France immediately after publication.