Erasmus’ Cyprian with Red Block Censorship, 1547
This extremely rare edition (3 other copies: Milan, London, Wales) of the Church Father Cyprian by the Renaissance arch-humanist Desiderius Erasmus has been familiarly described at Johns Hopkins as the “Red Cyprian” owing to its extremely unusual red-pigment censorship by Roman Catholic authorities. The interest in the text emerges less from its rarity than from the extreme methods applied in its physical expurgation—that is, how religious opinions that were deemed heretical or erroneous by ecclesiastical authorities were canceled from this otherwise acceptable and canonical patristic text. An especially zealous censor applied regular blocks of thick red pigment over the offending pages, not just to cancel, but literally to obliterate the text for all time. Much like the obliteration of preceding pharaohs’ names inscribed on ancient Egyptian monuments—so-called damnatio memoriae— the printed text underlying the pigment is almost completely illegible. This marks a significant departure from the custom of simply crossing out heterodox passages with black ink, which often left them both visible and clearly marked for condemnation.
The ancient text was originally composed by the third-century bishop of Carthage, St. Cyprian, and edited with commentary by Erasmus. Therein lies the rub, for Erasmus’s front matter in this edition is what drew the exclusive ire of ecclesiastical authorities. As he was considered, retrospectively, to have been a proto-Protestant reformer, Erasmus’s posthumous entry in the earliest printed editions of the Tridentine Index of Prohibited Books (1559) constituted a blanket ban of all his publications, alongside those of Luther and Calvin. However, in subsequent editions (1565 on) the Index was augmented and also modified such that certain of Erasmus’s works were permitted to be included so long as certain prescribed expurgations much like those seen here, were made.
These block-censored pages are restricted to Erasmus’s dedication of his Cyprian to Cardinal Lorenzo Pucci, who had aided Erasmus in obtaining Pope Leo X’s brief in support of his revised Greek New Testament published in 1520—a work that would go on fundamentally to challenge the foundational Catholic biblical translation of St. Jerome. To hold up to the light Pucci’s good offices on his behalf, Erasmus praised the cardinal and the pope in the same breath. JHU’s Red Cyprian can be profitably compared to several earlier editions of the saint’s works, including Froben’s handsome 4th edition (1530) and the Lyon edition of 1544. which bears contemporary manuscript notes and a hand-colored version of Gryphius’s name-punning griffin printers’ device. Both are held by Johns Hopkins; the Froben forms part of the Bibliotheca Fictiva collection of literary forgeries, as that imprint includes the first appearance of Erasmus’s sole patristic imposture, De duplici martyri. Interested to promote his personal vision of early Christian witness that did not strictly elevate martyrdom above all other forms of pious sacrifice, Erasmus foisted this tract on Cyprian, though it is preserved in no known manuscripts or historic libraries.
Owing to its rarity, an image from JHU’s Red Cyprian was used to illustrate the dust jacket of Hannah Marcus’s book on the subject, Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy (2020). Few other examples of this particular form of red-block censorship are known in the published scholarship on early modern censorship; the closest analogue may be a similarly expurgated edition of St. Ambrose (Basel, 1538) held by the Fisher Library in Toronto.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
Gigliola Fragnito, Church, Censorship, and Culture in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (London: Collins & Brown, 1990), 44–45; Paul Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540–1605 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); Hannah Marcus, Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2020)
