MDCCLXI.] [Footnote 109: This edict is dated August 24, 1596.] [Footnote 110: This will be apparent when I come to treat of Marino and Tassoni.] In Italy at large, the forces of the Inquisition were directed, not as in Spain against heretics in masses, but against the leaders of heretical opinion; and less against personalities than against ideas.
Italy during the Renaissance had been the workshop of ideas for Europe.
It was the business of the Counter-Reformation to check the industry of that _officina scientiarum_, to numb the nervous centers which had previously emitted thought of pregnant import for the modern world, and to prevent the reflux of ideas, elaborated by the northern races in fresh forms, upon the intelligence which had evolved them.

To do so now was comparatively easy.

It only needed to put the engine of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum into working order in concert with the Inquisition.
Throughout the Middle Ages it had been customary to burn heretical writings.

The bishops, the universities, and the Dominican Inquisitors exercised this privilege; and by their means, in the age of manuscripts, the life of a book was soon extinguished.

Whole libraries were sometimes sacrificed at one fell swoop, as in the case of the 6000 volumes destroyed at Salamanca in 1490 by Torquemada, on a charge of sorcery.[111] After the invention of printing it became more difficult to carry on this warfare against literature, while the rapid diffusion of Protestant opinions through the press rendered the need for their extermination urgent.