IMC 2016: Sessions
Session 1332: Dangerous Books: Readers' Responses to Heretical Literature, Apocryphal Sources, and Other Suspicious Texts, 500-1500
Wednesday 6 July 2016, 16.30-18.00
Organiser: | Irene van Renswoude, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences, Amsterdam |
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Moderator/Chair: | Yitzhak Hen, Department of History, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva |
Paper 1332-a | Banned Books before the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Language: English) Index terms: Ecclesiastical History, Language and Literature - Latin, Manuscripts and Palaeography, Religious Life |
Paper 1332-b | Spinning Apocrypha: Hrotsvit of Gandersheim and the Dissemination of Apocrypha for Court and Cloister in Ottonian Saxony (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Latin, Religious Life, Women's Studies |
Paper 1332-c | 'Libri hereticorum sunt legendi': Jan Hus and His Defence of John Wyclif, 1410 (Language: English) Index terms: Ecclesiastical History, Language and Literature - Latin, Religious Life, Theology |
Abstract | Catalogues and lists that prescribed which books were good to read and which ones should be rejected circulated long before the Index of Forbidden Books (1559). To what extent were the warnings and prohibitions of such lists followed in practice? Were heretical and suspicious books actually banned from being read? Or was there room to discuss the (fluid?) line between acceptable and unacceptable reading? This panel examines the responses of readers and authors to 'dangerous books' from the early to the late Middle Ages. Paper a takes a closer look at the prohibitions in medieval book lists and studies the annotations of readers in the margins of rejected texts. Paper b demonstrates the fluidity in categories of acceptability; it shows how Hrosvit of Gandersheim (fl.960) was attracted to apocryphal sources and re-introduced texts that ought to have been suppressed. Paper c discusses the argumentative strategies of Jan Hus's polemical tract 'Why the books of the heretics should be read' (1410) written against the decree to burn John Wyclif's books. |