Censorship Footprints

Prof. Javier del Barco shares an example of the discoveries he made in Marsh’s.Our colleagues in the Footprints project write:

Javier del Barco, a Senior Research Fellow at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) in Madrid, has just completed three months of work on Footprints in the collection in  Marsh’s Library in Dublin. 

Hebrew books were subjected to censorship in Italy during the 16^th and the 17^thcenturies. Censors’ signatures can be found in many books—both manuscript and printed—that circulated there, especially during the second half of the 16^th century and the beginning of the 17^th. Interestingly, these censors’ footprints enable us to follow the itineraries of the books by indirectly providing clues of the places where they were censored. One good example is Marsh’s Library’s copy of Levi ben Gershom’s (1288-1344) Milḥamot ha-Shem printed in Riva di Trento in 1560, shown here.

Read more on the Footprints blog.