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.