Areopagitica | Page 5

present work be
contained aught that may withstand the printing.
VINCENT RABBATTA, Vicar of Florence.
I have seen this present work, and find nothing athwart the Catholic
faith and good manners: in witness whereof I have given, etc.
NICOLO GINI, Chancellor of Florence.
Attending the precedent relation, it is allowed that this present work of
Davanzati may be printed.
VINCENT RABBATTA, etc.

It may be printed, July 15.
FRIAR SIMON MOMPEI D'AMELIA, Chancellor of the Holy Office
in Florence.
Sure they have a conceit, if he of the bottomless pit had not long since
broke prison, that this quadruple exorcism would bar him down. I fear
their next design will be to get into their custody the licensing of that
which they say Claudius intended, but went not through with.
Vouchsafe to see another of their forms, the Roman stamp:
Imprimatur, If it seem good to the reverend Master of the Holy Palace.
BELCASTRO, Vicegerent.
Imprimatur, Friar Nicolo Rodolphi, Master of the Holy Palace.
Sometimes five Imprimaturs are seen together dialogue-wise in the
piazza of one title-page, complimenting and ducking each to other with
their shaven reverences, whether the author, who stands by in
perplexity at the foot of his epistle, shall to the press or to the sponge.
These are the pretty responsories, these are the dear antiphonies, that so
bewitched of late our prelates and their chaplains with the goodly echo
they made; and besotted us to the gay imitation of a lordly Imprimatur,
one from Lambeth House, another from the west end of Paul's; so
apishly Romanizing, that the word of command still was set down in
Latin; as if the learned grammatical pen that wrote it would cast no ink
without Latin; or perhaps, as they thought, because no vulgar tongue
was worthy to express the pure conceit of an Imprimatur, but rather, as
I hope, for that our English, the language of men ever famous and
foremost in the achievements of liberty, will not easily find servile
letters enow to spell such a dictatory presumption English.
And thus ye have the inventors and the original of book-licensing
ripped up and drawn as lineally as any pedigree. 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

anti-christian council and the most tyrannous inquisition that ever
inquired. 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? But that a book, in worse
condition than a peccant soul, should be to stand before a jury ere it be
born to the world, and undergo yet in darkness the judgment of
Radamanth and his colleagues, ere it can pass the ferry backward into
light, was never heard before, till that mysterious iniquity, provoked
and troubled at the first entrance of Reformation, sought out new
limbos and new hells wherein they might include our books also within
the number of their damned. And this was the rare morsel so
officiously snatched up, and so ill-favouredly imitated by our
inquisiturient bishops, and the attendant minorites their chaplains. That
ye like not now these most certain authors of this licensing order, and
that all sinister intention was far distant from your thoughts, when ye
were importuned the passing it, all men who know the integrity of your
actions, and how ye honour truth, will clear ye readily.
But some will say, what though the inventors were bad, the thing for all
that may be good? It may so; yet if that thing be no such deep invention,
but obvious, and easy for any man to light on, and yet best and wisest
commonwealths through all ages and occasions have forborne to use it,
and falsest seducers and oppressors of men were the first who took it up,
and to no other purpose but to obstruct and hinder the first approach of
Reformation; I am of those who believe it will be a harder alchemy
than Lullius ever knew, to sublimate any good use out of such an
invention. Yet this only is what I request to gain from this reason, that
it may be held a dangerous and suspicious fruit, as certainly it deserves,
for the tree that bore it, until I can dissect one by one the properties it
has. But I have first to finish, as was propounded, what is to be thought