ABSTRACT
Torquato Tasso was both theoretician and practitioner of the art of epic poetry. He lived and worked in an era of Italian cultural history dominated, in the intellectual sphere, by treatises and commentaries on all aspects of composition. Tasso wrote his first major treatise on poetica, the Discorsi dell'arte poetica, during his fanciullezza in 1561–2, prior to the most severe phase of the Counter-Reformation. An ever-present consideration for Tasso was the Church censorship of writing that was not considered to uphold the status quo. Censorship became progressively more efficient and severe as the printing industry expanded, it did not reach its zenith until the final decades of the sixteenth century. Prohibition affected not only religious, political and scientific writings, but later also literary works, with Boccaccio, Ariosto and Bembo among the authors to be censored. Studies of the period emphasize the negative effects of censorship on Italian secular cultural production.
