Fabian Alfie studies Italian and Medieval Italian literature at the University of Arizona, and he’s particularly interested in censorship.
The notion of powerful institutions suppressing works they deem threatening can sometimes feel like a modern phenomenon, but it goes back centuries. Alfie has a particular interest in Dante’s "Divine Comedy," Petrarch’s poetry and Bocaccio’s "The Decameron." These works from the 1300s were often critical of Italy’s Catholic power structure — and they found new and unexpected relevance in the 1500s, around the time of the Protestant Reformation.
Alfie joined The Show to discuss how the writings of these authors were already classics by then — but, the way they were being interpreted would’ve probably surprised them.
Full conversation
FABIAN ALFIE: Those three writers, Dante, Bocaccio and Petrarch, are being employed by the new Protestants to criticize the church, and that's what changes. You find people actually saying, “they were proto-Protestant. See these great intellectuals from Italian literature, they’re on our side.” And suddenly this is when the Catholic Church suddenly sits up and takes notice and says these passages or, you know, these poems need to be suppressed.
SAM DINGMAN: That's so interesting. It's making me think – tell me if you think this is a fair comparison, but it's almost making me think of this phenomenon that we see in every presidential cycle, where some candidate starts using a particular musician's music to kick off or close out their rallies or in their campaign ads, and then periodically, that musician feels compelled to weigh in and say, “no, no, excuse me, I don't want to be associated with that.”
ALFIE: That's a great analogy, actually, because, yeah, they lived at a time they wouldn't have known anything. But in this case, Catholicism and probably wouldn't, I mean, certainly would have balked at the idea of reforming offshoots from Catholicism, trying to establish itself intellectually by going back and saying, “yeah, they were like us.”
DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, I'm going to guess that most of our listeners are probably familiar with Dante. But can you tell us a little bit about Petrarch's writing? What was it about Petrarch that felt so threatening to the Catholic order?
ALFIE: Okay, so most people if they're familiar with Petrarch in the English language, they're familiar with his poetry. Most of them are sonnets and most of them are about love. He has three sonnets where he's critical of the papacy. Throughout the 1300s, the papacy had been moved from Rome to Avignon, for various political reasons. And, he works there, and he saw the corruption firsthand. So he writes these three sonnets that are critical of the corruption there.
And, those are the ones that they pointed to to say, “you see, he was like us.” And so similarly, these works end up on the index of prohibited books. And they started telling everybody, you need to “x” out these three sonnets. In later publications, later printings of his work, they simply didn't allow them to be printed. But it's interesting, about a third of all printed editions of this collection of poetry, that were printed in the 1500s, have these sonnets x’d out. Various owners trying to comply with this order.
DINGMAN: That's so fascinating and weirdly quaint to think of what censorship used to look like, which was a physical person having to go through line by line with a pen and try to scribble over this stuff. Is that what it really looks like visually? I mean, can you see Petrarch's original text underneath the ink?
ALFIE: You absolutely can. Yes, and that's exactly what, so, for instance, I got interested in this topic a few years ago. I was visiting my family in Lawrence, Kansas, which is where the University of Kansas is, and I was visiting their library and at their special collections, they have a copy of “The Divine Comedy.” It was published in 1512, but somebody owned it in Spain, and the Spanish Inquisition was even more strict and had a guideline for how you censored “The Divine Comedy.” And they either x’d out passages with ink, or they took slips of paper and glued them over the offending passages.
DINGMAN: Wow. So it seems like, if I'm not mistaken, encoded in the idea that the Catholic establishment would want to censor these works is the idea that, I guess, because of the kind of propagandization of them by the Reformation movement, they were finding a substantial audience. Is that fair to say? I mean, were these works newly resonant?
ALFIE: If we go back to the Middle Ages, the time where the three authors actually wrote their works, somebody had to sit down and write each copy by hand. You had scribes with manuscripts. Now you could have a print run that produces hundreds of copies and flood an area. People were already reading these works because they were considered canonical. But with this new interpretation on them, suddenly they're very suspicious, they’re suspect.
DINGMAN: So if I'm hearing you right, there's this combination, sort of a triangle effect of the message, meeting the medium, meeting the moment.
ALFIE: Exactly yeah. Perfect.
DINGMAN: OK, so what happened, as a result of this censorship? I mean, did it have the effect that it often has now where it just made them more popular and more in demand?
ALFIE: It worked for a time. Definitely for decades and maybe possibly centuries. It was hard to find uncensored copies of these works. Especially “The Decameron” and for the Petrarch sonnets, about a third of the works that were printed in the 1500s have that censoring. That means about two thirds don't. So a lot of people were just like, you know, we assume they were like, “oh, yes, yes, I did it.”
But they were, you know, with their fingers crossed behind their back. I think most people saw the sonnets in particular for what they were, which was a criticism of a specific time and place. I think that's why people were like, “yeah, I'm not going to cross these out.”
DINGMAN: Right. It would be sort of like the current administration wanting to censor “four dead in Ohio" or, I don't know, some Vietnam-era protest song.
ALFIE: That's perfect. Because again, you would go, “‘well four Dead in Ohio.’ You're talking about the Kent State massacre. You're not talking about 2025.”
DINGMAN: That said, of course there are some strong parallels to the modern era in terms of the way that these works were censored and what some are calling censorship that's taking place now. What parallels do you see?
ALFIE: Well, whenever authorities, you know, whether political or religious, become paranoid, for lack of a better word, you see, this tendency to have what I like to think of as an expansive interpretation. In other words, the writers aren't simply talking about what they're talking about. But there's more here than meets the eye, and that becomes very problematic.
What we're seeing a lot of these days, books being removed from libraries that are, say, written by LGBTQ authors or about LGBTQ topics. And, the example I like to think of is a very expansive interpreted version, where sometimes people will say these need to be removed, say, from high school libraries, because it's as if they are grooming these young people. Well, grooming is a very specific set of behaviors for people who are doing child sexual abuse, that is not a book that's sitting on some library shelf somewhere.
You see what I'm saying? But you see the same thing, on the left with, cancellations. You know, something is deemed inappropriate and you go, well, wait a minute, they're just expounding an idea, however offensive it is. Do you see what I mean? People are, let's say, over-interpreting certain works. We still want people with challenging but valid ideas to get their ideas out.
