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The Protestant Reformation
A tribunal of the Roman Catholic Church that was part of the greater Catholic Inquisition, which also included the Roman Inquisition and the Portuguese Inquisition. The purpose of the tribunal was to maintain Catholicism in the Holy Roman Empire and meet the growing resistance of the Protestant Reformation. The Catholic Inquisition was particularly concerned with identifying heretics, and it was particularly violent and oppressive. Milton claims in Areopagitica that pre-publication censorship was “invented” by the Catholics during the inquisition for the expressed purpose of thwarting the spread of Protestantism, and he refers to Parliament’s Licensing Order of 1643 as an authentically “Spanish policy of licensing books.”
The Spanish Inquisition Quotes in Areopagitica
The Areopagitica quotes below are all either spoken by The Spanish Inquisition or refer to The Spanish Inquisition. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Areopagitica
Quotes
We have it not, that can be heard of, from any ancient state, or polity, or church, nor by any statute left us by our ancestors elder or later; nor from the modern custom of any reformed city or church abroad; but from the most antichristian council, and the most tyrannous inquisition that ever enquired. Till then books were ever as freely admitted into the world as any other birth: the issue of the brain was no more stifled than the issue of the womb: no envious Juno sat cross-legged over the nativity of any man’s intellectual offspring; but if it proved a monster, who denies, but that it was justly burnt, or sunk into the sea
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Get LitCharts A+And in their name I shall for neither friend nor foe conceal what the general murmur is; that if it come to inquisitioning again, and licensing, and that we are so timorous of ourselves, and so suspicious of all men, as to fear each book, and the shaking of every leaf, before we know what the contents are, if some who but of late were little better than silenced from preaching, shall come now to silence us from reading, except what they please, it cannot be guessed what is intended by some but a second tyranny over learning: and will soon put it out of controversy that bishops and presbyters are the same to us both name and thing.
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The Spanish Inquisition Term Timeline in Areopagitica
The timeline below shows where the term The Spanish Inquisition appears in Areopagitica. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Areopagitica
...right up to “the very time that this project of licensing crept out of the Inquisition,” catching even “some of our presbyters,” Milton writes. In Athens, Greece, “the magistrate” cared only...
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...to a stricter policy of prohibiting.” This continued, and the Council of Trent and the Spanish Inquisition “together brought forth or perfected those catalogues and expurging indexes that rake through the...
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...church.” Licensing can be found only in “the most antichristian council, and the most tyrannous inquisition that ever enquired.” Up to that point, books were “freely admitted into the world as...
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...to be “deficient, ye must reform it perfectly according to the model of Trent and Seville, which I know ye abhor to do,” Milton says.
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Milton claims to have visited other countries “where this kind of inquisition tyrannizes.” He has sat with “learned men” who considered him lucky to have been “born...
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This “authentic Spanish policy of licensing books,” Milton claims, “will prove the most unlicensed book itself within a...
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