[Footnote 150:  In the Treatise on the Inquisition, Opere, vol. iv. p. 53.  Sarpi, in a passage of his Letters (vol. ii. p. 163), points out why the secular authorities were ill fitted to retaliate in kind, upon these Papal proscriptions.]

Sarpi protested, not without good reason, that Rome was doing her best to extinguish sound learning in Italy.  But how did she deal with that rank growth of licentious literature which had sprung up during the Renaissance period?  This is the question which should next engage us.  We have seen that the Council of Trent provided amply for the extirpation of lewd and obscene publications.  Accordingly, as though to satisfy the sense of decency, some of the most flagrantly immoral books, including the Decameron, the Priapeia, the collected works of Aretino, and certain mediaeval romances, were placed upon the Index.  Berni was proscribed in 1559; but the interdict lasted only a short time, probably because it was discovered that his poems, though licentious, were free from the heresies which Pier Paolo Vergerio had sought to fix upon him.  Meanwhile no notice was taken of the Orlando Furioso, and a multitude of novelists, of Beccadelli’s and Pontano’s verses, of Molza and Firenzuola, of the whole mass of mundane writers in short, who had done so much to reveal the corruption of Italian manners.  It seemed as though the Church cared less to ban obscenity than to burke those authors who had spoken freely of her vices.  When we come to examine the expurgated editions of notorious authors, we shall see that this was literally the case.  A castrated version of Bandello, revised by Ascanio Centorio degli Ortensi, was published in 1560.[151] It omitted the dedications and preambles, suppressed some disquisitions which palliated vicious conduct, expunged the novels that brought monks or priests into ridicule, but left the impurities of the rest untouched.  A reformed version of Folengo’s Baldus appeared in 1561.  The satires on religious orders had been erased.  Zambellus was cuckolded by a layman instead of a priest.  Otherwise the filth of the original received no cleansing treatment.  When Cosimo de’Medici requested that a revised edition of the Decameron might be licensed, Pius V. entrusted the affair to Thomas Manrique, Master of the Sacred Palace.  It was published by the Giunti in 1573 under the auspices of Gregory XIII., with the approval of the Holy Office and the Florentine Inquisition, fortified by privileges from Spanish and French kings, dukes of Tuscany, Ferrara, and so forth.  The changes which Boccaccio’s masterpiece had undergone were these:  passages savoring of doubtful dogma, sarcasms on monks and clergy, the names of saints, allusions to the devil and hell, had disappeared.  Ecclesiastical sinners were transformed into students and professors, nuns and abbesses into citizens’ wives.  Immorality in short was secularized.  But the book still offered the same allurements to