Educating and disciplining readers. Books, publishing and libraries in Italy at the time of the Enquiry of the Congregation of the Index

ABSTRACT: The aim of this work is to trace an initial profile of the transformations that, between the XVI and XVII centuries, affected the processes of the formation and the disciplining of both the good Christian and the exemplary citizen through “good reading”, “good publishing” as well as “good libraries”. In the age of the Catholic Renewal, the book became a crucial means of education and ideological control and in order to better respond to the new confessionalisation strategies, a sort of real “cultural infrastructures” for the controlled production and diffusion of knowledge begun to emerge in the Catholic world: in these organic systems the library, the printing house and the educational institution operated in synergy in view of a common objective, therefore becoming the pulsating heart of the culture transmitted by the new typographical means. (L'articolo è stato segnalato nella sezione bibliografica della "Rivista di storia della Chiesa in Italia", n. 2, 2011, Rif. n. 591).