THE ITALIAN NOVELLA UNDER SUSPECT: GIOVANNI FIORENTINO'S "PECORONE" AND LITERARY CENSORSHIP IN RENAISSANCE AND BAROQUE SPAIN
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1344/transfer.2023.18.40455Keywords:
Pecorone, novelle, censorship, Inquisition, 16th centuryAbstract
The Pecorone is a collection of fifty tales written in the late 14th century by Giovanni Fiorentino. However, the first edition dates from 1558. The Inquisition quickly decreed its prohibition, first in Italy in the 1970s and shortly afterwards in Spain. This article sets out to analyse the reasons why the work was censored, which presumably had to do with the immoral character that the censors considered some of its stories had and with the distrust that the novelle genre aroused in the counter-reformationist Europe of the second half of the century. We will thus follow the trail of the different prohibitions in the indexes of the Spanish Inquisition –starting with Gaspar Quiroga’s index of 1583– comparing them with other European indexes. Luis Gaitán de Vozmediano’s translation of one of the tales in 1590 is also studied. This translation is an obvious example of self-censorship which purpose must have been, on the one hand, to avoid problems with the Inquisition and, on the other, to bring the text closer to the conservative and intransigent ideology in matters of morality that had been imposed since the Council of Trent.
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