Bujanda, J. M. de (1984) Index des livres interdits, Volume 1. Geneva: Droz.

Bujanda, J. M. de (1995) Index des livres interdits, Volume 4. Sherbrooke, Québec: Centre d’études de la Renaissance.

Duncan, D. (2021) Index, a history of the. London: Allen Lane.

Vose, R. (2022) The Index of Prohibited Books: four centuries of struggle over word and image for the greater glory of God. London: Reaktion Books.

I took something of a synthetic approach in writing this article. Having read widely on the history of the Index of Forbidden Books, I let the material percolate for some time before turning to the writing. What emerged was an article that drew upon my notes and reflections as well as my background as a professor of medieval history (that knowledge greatly informed my understanding of the material and shaped my writing, though I have not attempted to ferret out from my brain which books all the relevant background comes from). What I have compiled below is a list of those books and articles that I think would prove most useful and interesting for readers wanting to pursue this topic themselves. The list is not exhaustive, nor is it meant to be. Should someone wish to get a sense of the Indexes themselves, I recommend beginning with Bujanda. McCabe and Vose are excellent starting points for looking at the Index as a holistic, historical phenomenon; though nearly 100 years separate them, both are very readable and informative. The other books on my list are more tailored to specific people (such as the censor Robert Bellarmine) and topics (e.g. censoring the Talmud).

Baldini, U. and Spruit, L. (eds.) (2009) Catholic Church and modern science: documents from the archives of the Roman Congregations of the Holy Office and the Index. Rome: Libreria editrice vaticana.

Baron, S. A., Lindquist, E. N. and Shevlin, E. F. (eds) (2007) Agent of change: print culture studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. Amherst and Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

Bujanda, J. M. de (1984–2016) Index des Livres Interdits. 12 vols. Sherbrooke, Québec, Geneva, and Madrid: Centre d’études de la Renaissance, Droz, and Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos.

Cadegan, U. (2013) All good books are Catholic books: print culture, censorship, and modernity in twentiethcentury America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Durston, A. (2007) Pastoral Quechua: the history of Christian translation in colonial Peru, 1550–1650. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Eisenstein, E. L. (1979) The printing press as an agent of change: communications and cultural transformations in early-modern Europe, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Godman, P. (2000) The saint as censor: Robert Bellarmine between Inquisition and Index. Leiden: Brill.

McCabe, J. (1931) History and meaning of the Catholic Index of Forbidden Books. Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius Company.

McGrath, C. (2018) ‘Manipulated, misrepresented, and maligned: the censorship and Rassettatura of the Decameron’, Heliotropia 15, 189–203.

Marcus, H. (2020) Forbidden knowledge: medicine, science, and censorship in early modern Italy. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Messbarger, R. M. Johns, C., and Gavitt, P. (eds) (2016) Benedict XIV and the Enlightenment: art, science, and spirituality. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Minnich, N. H. (2010) ‘The Fifth Lateran Council and preventive censorship of printed books’, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa 2(1), 67–104.

O’Malley, J. W. (2013) Trent: what happened at the Council. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Parente, F. (2001) ‘The Index, the Holy Office, and the condemnation of the Talmud and publication of Clement VIII’s Index’, in Gigliola Fragnito (ed.), Church, censorship, and culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 63–93.

Tavárez, D. (2013) ‘A banned sixteenth-century biblical text in Nahuatl: the Proverbs of Solomon’, Ethnohistory 60(4), 759–62.

Vose, R. (2022) The Index of Prohibited Books: four centuries of struggle over word and image for the greater glory of God. London: Reaktion Books.

Walsh, F. (1996) Sin and censorship: the Catholic Church and the motion picture industry. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Wickersham, J. K. (2012) Rituals of prosecution: the Roman Inquisition and the prosecution of Philo-Protestants in sixteenth-century Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.