Spain and the Americas and Banned Book Week

Marineo
Expurgated copy of Lucio Marineo, Opus de Rebus Hispaniae Memorabilibus … (Alcalá de Henares, 1533) | Folio DP64 .M33 1533

Here at the Rare Book Collection, we are fond of noting that one of the surest ways for a book to become rare is for it to be banned. Controversial books and those made scarce by suppression, they often find their final resting places at the RBC and other rare book repositories.

For Banned Book Week this year, we turn to some of the volumes in our new exhibition at Wilson Library, Chronicles of Empire: Spain in the Americas. This evening, October 1, at 5:30 p.m., there will be a special viewing of the show before a public lecture by Dr. David Stuart, the renowned expert on Mayan writing. At that time, the public is invited to tour the exhibition, which documents Spain’s exploration and settlement of the New World.

Just fourteen years before Columbus’s discovery of America, a papal bull had established the Spanish Inquisition to fight heresy. Eventually, the censorship of reading matter became one of the Inquisition’s central activities. The Catholic Church had sought to control the circulation of texts from the early fifteenth century on, and with the advent of printing, efforts were intensified. In the 1540s the universities at Paris and Louvain published indexes of prohibited books, and the Spanish Inquisition issued its own version in the 1550s.

In the 1580s, with so many “objectionable” passages in texts having been identified, the Inquisition embarked on the compilation of a new kind of index, one of books to be expurgated. The inked-through example above is an official history of Spain by the Sicilian-born scholar Lucio Marineo. It is open to a section on the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella and a discussion of those Jews who had converted to Christianity but practiced Judaism secretly. Such Jewish converts were the primary targets of the Inquisition in its early years. A manuscript note on the title page, by Fr. Decio Carrega, tells us that he has expurgated lines of text that were condemned by the Spanish Inquisition. Carrega, active in the early seventeenth century (close to a hundred years after the book’s publication), was a Dominican inquisitor.

The Spanish crown also sought to control directly the writing of Spain’s history, including its exploits in the Americas.  Chronicles required government approval for publication, and they could be banned entirely following publication if, upon further examination, they were judged to promote an unflattering image of Spain. Francisco López de Gómara’s Historia general first appeared in 1551 and went through nine editions before November 17, 1553, when Prince Philip ordered that all copies be collected and set a fine of 200,000 maravedis for anyone who dared to reprint. The chronicle’s account of the civil wars in Peru presented a particularly unfavorable view of Spanish conduct.

Somehow, the RBC’s copy of Gómara’s history survived that royal order (below left), and its title page has been given new life over 450 years later in the design of the Chronicles of Empire exhibition poster and flier (below right).

López de Gomara, Flatow F3051 C69
Francisco López de Gómara, Historia general de las Indias (Medina del Campo, 1553) Flatow Folio F3051 C69
Rare Book Collection poster
Rare Book Collection exhibition poster, design by Anna Morton based on title page woodcut (left)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are numerous other banned books to be seen in Chronicles of Empire, including famous chivalric romances and novels that Spain forbade to be exported to America. The Spanish crown feared that the indigenous population, whom they wished to educate and evangelize, would be unable to distinguish fiction from fact and would be confused by such literary works. Copies of the books found their way to the New World, nonetheless.

The exhibition Chronicles of Empire is part of the commemoration “One Hundred Years of Latin American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.” If you are unable to join us this evening, the exhibition is on view during regular Wilson hours through January 10, 2016.

Henrietta, the Woman Behind Bowdlerism

Almost a year ago, University Librarian Sarah Michalak, read from the 1818 second edition of The Family Shakespeare at the event “Banned and in the Rare Book Collection.” The Family Shakespeare exemplifies the nineteenth-century editorial phenomenon of expurgating literature on moral grounds. This came to be known eponymously as “bowdlerism,” after the Bowdler family, who proudly claimed three generations of Shakespeare expurgators.

Title page of the 1807 edition
Title page of the 1807 edition / PR2752 .B7 1807 / Whitaker Fund

Sometime after the event, the RBC acquired the first edition of The Family Shakespeare, which was issued with no named editor by a small provincial printing house in Bath, England in 1807. The first edition has been attributed historically to Dr. Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825). But in his book, Dr. Bowdler’s Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America, Noel Perrin convincingly argues that the 1807 edition was actually edited by Thomas’s sister, Henrietta Bowdler (1750-1830), whose name was omitted from the title page.  By the time the first edition of The Family Shakespeare appeared, Henrietta was already a published author and a well-known bluestocking. Perrin estimates that Henrietta excised about ten percent of Shakespeare’s words, taking special care to eliminate any hint of religious irreverence.

We can see Henrietta Bowdler’s editorial influence at work in her expurgation of Macbeth. In Act II, Scene 3, Henrietta cut the Porter’s entire opening speech and comedic exchange with Macduff, relegating the Porter to a non-speaking part in Shakespeare’s drama. The photograph below shows the beginning of Scene 2 in The Family Shakespeare, as morally conscientious readers might have encountered it.

Bowdlerized text of Macbeth
Bowdlerized text of Macbeth

Later editions of The Family Shakespeare were edited by Thomas Bowdler, who modified and in some cases reinstated many of Henrietta’s cuts. Perhaps feeling that his sister went too far in her moral zealotry, Thomas Bowdler reinstated the drunken Porter’s speech in his 1818 edition, but in a dramatically truncated form that rendered it almost unintelligible. His unintentionally comedic expurgation was brought to life by Sarah Michalak’s reading at the Banned Books Event.

UNC is one of the first libraries to acknowledge Henrietta Bowdler’s contributions in the library catalog record. How information is organized and presented to the public is far from value neutral.  When catalogers suggest changes to the authority records, they draw on documentary evidence and scholarly research to support their claims. The Rare Book Collection is grateful for the hard work and advanced research skills of our technical services staff, and we are excited that our library records reflect the contributions of previously overlooked and marginalized authors and editors, like Henrietta Bowdler.