When science was a sin: How the Inquisition "cleansed" Portuguese libraries

By: Nicolau Ferreira, from the Público website, Lisbon (http://www.publico.pt/)

The "eraser" of censorship in the 16th and 17th centuries was iron gall ink. If it was too concentrated, the ink used to expunge texts from a work could burn the paper. If it was in smaller quantities, the censored words would become legible again. In any case, this aspect of the Inquisition affected the reading of works, giving them an insidious connotation of sin and guilt. Technical and scientific literature in Portugal did not escape this control, as in the case of the books of Amato Lusitano, a Portuguese Jewish doctor who fled the Iberian Peninsula.

"Any expurgation disturbs confidence in reading scientific books – an act that stems from the desire to know more," argues Hervé Baudry, from the Center for Cultural History at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of the Nova University of Lisbon. The effect that censorship had on the scientific and cultural development of the country is still difficult to quantify, says the French historian, a speaker at a workshop on libraries and scientific books from the 15th to the 18th centuries at the National Library in Lisbon. But Hervé Baudry is only at the beginning of a research project on what he calls a "clean library," that is, the expurgation of books from the 16th and 17th centuries.

How did censorship work?

The Frenchman analyzed the censorship in 105 copies of five medical works, which are in libraries across the country, and systematized how the Inquisition's censorship took place, a work unprecedented in Portugal. The works analyzed were by four authors: the Portuguese Amato Lusitano and Gonçalo Cabreira, a surgeon contemporary with Lusitano, and the Spaniards Andrés Laguna, a humanist physician who dedicated himself especially to pharmacology and botany, and Oliva Sabuco, a philosopher and physician.

"This censorship was effective, systematic, and had a routine aspect to it," he explains. Those responsible for the purge did not see themselves as "owners" of the books they "cleaned," they followed a list of prohibited passages.

Thus, Jewish dates, medical cases about sexuality in the Church, or sayings accompanying traditional medicinal recipes appeared crossed out in medical texts. "Censorship is the technical, formal response [of the Inquisition] to the enormous growth of the book as a vehicle for heterodoxy," emphasizes Hervé Baudry.

In the second half of the 15th century, between 15 and 20 million books were printed in Europe. In the following century, this number multiplied tenfold. Although the autos-da-fé were the best-known rituals of the Inquisition, and its bloodiest aspect, in which "heretics," from Jews to sodomites, were burned at the stake, book censorship was intense.

There were lists of books by banned authors, but there was also the Expurgatory Index, where passages from many other books had to be cut. Among them were the works of Amato Lusitano, Seven Centuries of Medicinal Cures and Dioscorides' Materia Medica; of Gonçalo Cabreira, Treasure of the Poor; another by Andrés Laguna, Pedacius Dioscorides; and the fifth by Oliva Sabuco, New Philosophy of the Nature of Man. "In libraries, when these works were published and read in the 16th and 17th centuries, they were all controlled. Whoever read them knew they were entering a minefield," says the researcher, considering that one of the effects was a climate of psychological fear in society.

The impact that the expurgation had on Portuguese scientific culture is difficult to assess. It is necessary to examine each book individually. The work Seven Centuries of Medicinal Cures, where the famous Portuguese physician recounted medical cases, is an example of a book that was heavily censored.

Amato Lusitano was Jewish, studied in Spain, and had to flee the Iberian Peninsula to maintain his faith. In the Centuries, Hebrew dates were omitted. There are medical cases about sexuality described by Amato Lusitano that are censored simply because they are associated with the Church, explains Hervé Baudry. One example of a completely expurgated passage listed in the Index concerned a pregnant nun. "A nun, one of those who live in religious life away from the crowd, felt unwell, saying that something was moving in her belly. (...) In reality, this woman had become pregnant from male semen after having been in the bath," reads the original.

Some texts were left untouched.

In another case, which Hervé Baudry says is not on the official purge lists, Lusitano's comment about pregnancy between two women is censored. But the narrative of the case itself is not crossed out: "Two neighboring Turkish women, by virtue of many acts of coitus, incubi and succubi, contaminated and polluted each other. One was a widow and the other had a husband. (...) In this work of coitus and embraces, the womb of the widow succubus absorbed (...) not only the semen of the incubus woman, but also some virile semen left before in her womb. By virtue of this semen she became pregnant."

The direct effects of this type of censorship on the scientific discussion of the time are uncertain. The books that Hervé Baudry studied only dealt with medical cases, but the historian argues that it is impossible for censorship not to alter society, especially when it lasts for centuries, but it is necessary to study works from other disciplines, such as physics, natural history, or law, to have a global perspective.

On the other hand, there are texts that have not been touched. This is the case of the emblematic work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, by Nicolaus Copernicus, where the Polish astronomer expounds, in 1543, the heliocentric theory (at the time, the Church defended that it was the Sun that revolved around the Earth).

According to science historian Henrique Leitão, copies of this work in Portugal and Europe do not show any signs of censorship. "Works that were rarely consulted, due to their highly technical nature and accessibility only to specialists, often lack the required expurgations," infers the researcher from the Interuniversity Centre for the History of Science and Technology (CIUHCT) in Lisbon and one of the workshop organizers.

The inventory of inventories.

Very little is known about Portuguese scientific culture over the last 500 years, which explains why its output was scarce and lacked prominent figures, with few exceptions such as the mathematician Pedro Nunes. Analyzing the role of the scientific book will help us understand this situation. "The book plays an absolutely central role in establishing scientific culture. It not only accumulates but also transmits information. It serves as a meeting point for people, catalyzing social phenomena," explains Henrique Leitão.

At the conference, the researcher spoke about scientific books in Portugal, starting from a "paradox": the historiographical obsession with trying to understand the causes of Portugal's failure to achieve modernity, while at the same time the history of science is ignored in this effort, a gap that the researcher tries to fill. "There is no notion of modernity that does not involve science. I find it strange that historians revolve around the question of modernity and then do not pay attention to science. A paradox of Portuguese historiography."

Henrique Leitão and Luana Giurgevich, an Italian researcher also from CIUHCT, are finalizing the first stage of cataloging all the books in Portuguese libraries from the 16th century until 1834, when the male religious orders were abolished. These libraries, whose catalogs were a key research tool, belonged mainly to monasteries and convents. In some, the catalogs were created voluntarily; most were mandated by the Marquis of Pombal. Almost all the books are lost, but knowing what existed in each place can help reveal the circles of Portuguese scientific culture and may help to understand why modernization failed.

"In the collections of the National Library, we noticed that the copies had ownership marks from former convents," says Luana Giurgevich. This is how the idea of ​​creating 'an inventory of the inventories' of these collections, which had been nonexistent until now, was born, in order to 'understand reading habits' and see 'what kind of science is associated with what kind of order'.

While still preliminary, the results (which will be published by the National Library) indicate that the 200 libraries targeted by the research contained hundreds of thousands of books from the 16th to the 18th centuries. The library of the Monastery of Santa Maria de Alcobaça, with approximately 16 volumes, was one of the most complete.

Scientific books could make up between 8 and 10% of some collections. In others, they were practically absent. But this work showed that most 16th-century science books existed in Portugal. Their use is unknown.

Fragility of scientific institutions

"We need to take a close look at the great collectors of scientific books," says Henrique Leitão, recently elected a full member of the International Academy of the History of Science. "Until now, the work [in the history of science] has been the analysis of texts. But it is very interesting to study reading practices. Who were the book collectors? Who read them? How were they acquired? We need to move from texts to institutions and to practice at a social level."

At that time, great thinkers emerged, people who revolutionized science, such as Isaac Newton. Unlike Portugal, the scientific culture of the Royal Society of London at that time is well known, when Newton published his Principia in 1687, where he enunciated the three laws of classical mechanics.

"At the Royal Society of London, a group of gentlemen met to conduct experiments," recounts another speaker at the workshop, Adrian Johns, from the University of Chicago in the US. "It was the first time that a group of people called themselves 'experimental philosophers' and consistently used philosophy to arrive at an experimental practice," says the historian of science.

These gentlemen fueled their scientific experiments with constant reading and discussion. In meetings, they debated the readings, the results of the experiments, and proposed new experimental procedures. "These reading protocols were not natural; they had to be learned and gave rise to continuous scientific investigation," says the Briton. From what little is known, the scenario would be very different in Portugal. "We don't see true scientific discussions," says Henrique Leitão. "They quickly became personal rhetorical disputes, and the scientific content was lost."

According to the Portuguese historian, this problem stems from the "fragility of scientific institutions," where poor-quality education has a "devastating" effect on science and modernity: "There is a complex set of issues that needs to be studied gradually. We will try to understand this age-old problem. It cannot be a conjectural reason. We see this even today, when the performance of Portuguese universities is a disgrace, except for a few honorable exceptions."