Abstract

BECK VARELA, Laura. "En el Expurgatorio de España se determina lo que se debe tachar". Censorship of Legal Literature in Portugal (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). Rev. hist. derecho [online]. 2018, n.55, pp.1-12. ISSN 1853-1784.

The works of Matthaeus Wesenbeck (1531-1586) and Arnoldus Vinnius (1588-1657) were quite popular among early modern Portuguese lawyers and law students, in spite of their Protestant affiliation and their presence in the various catalogues of forbidden books. Covering a long time frame and different censorship rules -from the 1624 Index of Mascarenhas until the reforms of the Marquis de Pombal by the end of the eighteenth century- the circulation of Vinnius' and Wesenbeck's legal commentaries show the daily difficulties and the creativity displayed by readers and censors alike. They had to develop strategies to cope with the absence of clear rules for the daily expurgation of printed texts. Seen from a transnational and comparative perspective, both case studies suggest the insufficiency of the old binary schemes of censorship history. They offer also elements to draw an "Iberian" history of the reading discipline of early modern catholic jurists in the age of ius commune, in which the expurgation practice played a fundamental role.

Keywords : Censorship ; Inquisition ; Legal literature; Ius commune; Portugal ; Comparative history.

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