ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the formation of the theoretical discourse about the relations between historiography and censure and censorship in Spanish treatises on the ars historica in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This discourse considered historiography as a victim of the control of political power, but also sanctioned the position of the historian as the moral and ideological censor of the major figures and events in history and used criticism and censure of the errors and vices of the profession as an instrument for indoctrination and the surveillance of orthodoxy. The chapter stresses the disciplining effects of the theoretical regulation of the complex and varied relations between historiography and censure and censorship.
