Ariosto censurato

This essay aims to reconstruct the censorial vicissitudes of the works of Lodovico Ariosto. Arguably, only overt clemency was applied to them, and, with the exception of the Satire, which were accompanied by the provision donec expurgantur, they did not appear in the Indexes of forbidden books. Nevertheless, the imperfections in the system meant that all the poet's works, sooner or later, ended up facing censorship. Revision was felt to be necessary especially in passages where Ariosto criticised the corruption of the clergy and the papacy, in various lascivious episodes, and where he argued the superiority of marriage over celibacy; despite this, other octaves, such as octave 72 of Canto XIV of the Furioso, where Ariosto explicitly adheres to the doctrine of justification through faith alone, escaped the Inquisitorial lens. [Publisher's text]

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