Censorship and Book Circulation in Eighteenth-Century Italy
During the eighteenth century some Italian governments changed the regulations concerning censorship, and asserted the state's role in the control of the production and circulation of books. Paradoxically, the existence of different regulations for censorship in Italy revealed itself to be an instrument of corrosion of the control mechanisms by making the access to forbidden books less difficult than in countries in which there was a centralized control system. In the years comprised between the 1760s and the 1780s there had indeed been transformations similar to those of other European countries, pointing towards that «revolution in readership » which had increased the occasions for having access to books; multipling the number of readers, discovering a new public, which was to have great importance especially in the nineteenth century: women readers, which publishers addressed with fashion journals and almanacs. In some Italian cities the opportunities to read had increased in the eighteenth century: in public libraries, in coffee houses, in literary societies, in the cabinets de lecture books and newspapers could be browsed and read without having to buy them. The urban guidebooks and the récits de voyage of foreign travellers (as the Spanish Jesuit Juan Andrés, and as Jerôme de de Lalande, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) are important sources that provide informations about cultural transformations as the opening of libraries, book collections both privat and public, for the selected public and the opening of new reading occasions for a wider public.
Restricted accessResearch articleFirst published March, 2005pp. 5-17
