668 mario infelise
government needed to maintain constant checks in this area, and above
all it had to prevent churchmen from augmenting an ecclesiastical juris-
diction that was in competition with that of the secular authority.38 it
must be kept in mind, though, that this endemic conflict between the
Church and republic also ensured that Venice would maintain a more
autonomous publishing industry and, especially, a greater circulation of
books than anywhere else in italy.
after the great controversies of the interdict years and the conces-
sions to the papacy in the mid-17th century during the War of Candia,
the republic resumed its anti-curial stance towards the end of the cen-
tury. its jurisdictional politics maintained this more aggressive stance
throughout the first half of the 18th century, culminating in 1765 with the
drastic limitations imposed on the powers of the Venetian holy office.
it must be noted that the reform of censorship took place in what was
now a completely transformed political and cultural climate. By the mid-
18th century, those responsible for censorship were nearly always litterati
chosen because of their intellectual openness. men such as Carlo lodoli,
gasparo gozzi, and giovanni francesco scottoni were supported by the
reformist faction of the patriciate, which desired a more state-sponsored
system of control for reasons both political and commercial, in the hopes
of reanimating the Venetian publishing industry. even those controlling
book imports from abroad showed a new willingness to experiment, and
in doing so definitively shook the protectionist system conceived in the
first years of the Counter reformation.
it was only in the last decade of the 18th century, with fears that the
ideas of revolutionary france might spread and infect italy as well, that
the republic tried, alongside other italian princes, to turn back the clock.
But this effort met with little success in the wake of the great curiosity
which the revolutionary fervor aroused.
Book Consumption and Popular LiteratureCarlo ginzburg’s well-known work The Cheese and the Worms (1976),
which recounts the dramatic story of menocchio, a miller from friuli tried
and condemned by the inquisition for having read orthodox texts and
interpreted them heretically, used a novel methodological approach to
38 Paolo sarpi, “Sopra l’officio dell’inquisizione,” in sarpi, Scritti giurisdizionalisti (Bari,
1958), pp. 119–212.