| Popis: |
This article proposes a first approach to uses and meanings of scandal in the Golden Age, understood here as a specific type of heterodoxy, a form of dissent, one of the categories of propositiones damnabiles and hence an instrument of censorship that enabled writing, and fundamentally vernacular prose, to be monitored and controlled. An overview of the meanings of scandal is based on two kinds of source: the treatises de fide (or those sections devoted to the subject in the treatises of dogmatic theology) and the indexes of prohibited books, promulgated in the second half of the sixteenth century, between 1544 and 1596. Also taken into account, albeit as secondary sources, are some judgments and opinions on matters of dogma that enable us to identify and evaluate works that were considered and prohibited because they were scandalous. In this discursive context of the dogmatic and the censorious, scandal always appears as a major cause of prohibition for books, and is frequently associated with two other terms, with which it seems to share conceptually permeable boundaries: the male sonans and the offensive (or which offends pious ears, pias aures offendens). An examination of the paratexts of all the indexes of prohibited books in the sixteenth century demonstrates that these are the three categories used to judge heterodoxy in prose works when the deviation has not reached the gravity of heresy or error of faith. The scandalous, as well as the offensive and the male sonans form part of the list of notae theologicae or qualificationes which is defined in the theological treatises and was adopted by those who compiled the prohibitory catalogues in Italy, Spain, France and Portugal. An analysis of the senses applied to scandal in sixteenth-century theological works enables us to postulate the relevance of the work of Melchor Cano (De locis theologicis) as providing a basis for interpreting these notae minores as less than heresy, and to discover their usefulness for curbing religious criticism in fictional prose. A note of scandal was applied above all to some of the works and colloquies of Erasmus, to almost all the Erasmian dialogues, to Boccaccio’s novella and its sixteenth-century imitators. It is also one of the notes justifying the censure of Bartolomé de Carranza’s Comentarios al Catecismo and the late prohibition of the Celestina. Its use also explains the prohibition of many non-heretical works in the Spanish and Portuguese catalogues of the sixteenth century. |
