Records of Banned Books in Austria 1780-1848

The difficulties writers like Grillparzer or Nestroy encountered when they tried to publish their works or to produce them on stage are quite well known; much less known is the fact that in the period between 1750 and 1848 almost 50.000 titles of books and periodicals from all over Europe have been banned in Austria. The right to utter opinions on political questions was severely cut, catholic religion was defended against printed attacks, furthermore, censors tried to guarantee the morality of literature distributed on the Austrian book market. The proposed project brings to light this sunken continent of prohibited and suppressed ideas by compiling the entries on the records of banned books in the period of the transition to modernity. In Austria, modernization was considerably slowed down by restrictive legislation concerning book production and distribution including the ban of books. The project will have a literary studies perspective, but it will be of interest to all kinds of scientific fields. The lists of banned books cover a wide range of disciplines: political science, history, economy, geography, medicine, philosophy, pedagogy, jurisdiction, and theology. Therefore, the records of banned books are not only relevant for the history of literature, but they open up new approaches for cultural and social history as well as for the history of science. The proposed project is the follow up of an earlier project (FWF project no. 13220) which has provided the `raw` data of book bans in the years 1795 to 1848. The gaps within the lists available in Vienna were filled, the titles were transcribed and entered into the software program ProCite and classified according to subject area, language, type of publication (book, periodical, article in a periodical etc.), and censorship grade. However, these raw data were not ready to be entered into a database, they still needed a careful revision. Recently, Mag. Syrovy, who is suggested as collaborator in the proposed project, has screened the records of the years 1833 to 1848 (approx. 20.000 entries) and prepared them for online-publication. They can now be viewed on http://www.univie.ac.at/censorship; in addition, the database has been adapted and tested. Within the proposed project the remaining entries (1795 to 1832) will be revised and entered into the database, at the same time the bans of the period 1750 to 1795 (ca. 5000 titles) will be added (work load of the first year). Statistical evaluation and qualitative analyses will follow (work load of the second year): The number of bans per year will be identified as well as the frequency of certain types and grades of bans, which give an impression of the intellectual "climate" at a certain point in time, the numbers of prohibited books in foreign languages and the proportion of the various languages, the proportion of the various scientific disciplines and types of publication (books, periodicals, ), of certain publishing houses like Wigand, Campe or Reclam which appear frequently on the records, to mention only a few of the intended analyses. A sample of the prohibited works will be studied in detail with regard to their "offensiveness" and the reason for their ban. All these statistics and analyses will finally be presented in a monograph.

During the twenty-four-month period from October 1, 2010 to September 30, 2012, the project of a database on Austrian book censorship, which started in 1999 with funding by the FWF (P13220; March 1999 February 2002) was finally brought to a conclusion, and can now be viewed at http://univie.ac.at/censorship, totalling just over 52,000 titles. The general idea was to make available to researchers a complete list of the banned books in the Habsburg Monarchy from the establishment of state censorship in the early 1750s until its formal abolishment in 1848. The titles are collected from various sources and presented in a searchable form with classifications and further information on the publications based on research in international library catalogues. Apart from the database the aim of the project was to gain insight into the processes behind the bans, analyzing documents and other data available in various archives in Vienna and elsewhere. The results of this research will be published in a monograph that is presently in the stage of redaction and will be finished by the end of 2013 approximately. Specific results of the project are both related to the quality of the data, which have been completed and double-checked, including newly discovered sources and documents relating to the early phases of Austrian censorship, since the earlier projects were concerned with the period starting in 1795. However, the more than 40 years before that period offer a plethora of additional material that shows clear changes in censorship methods and in the attitude of the different governments and rulers (i.e. Maria Theresa, Joseph II, Leopold II, Francis I, Ferdinand I). Some of those aspects were already known to researchers, but others are the result of research in archives of Vienna, Innsbruck, Graz and Milan.