ABSTRACT
During the eighteenth century, the Inquisition and Index actually experienced a crisis and were less and less able to stop the furious spreading of reading all over Europe, which seemed to involve (according to the clergy) even women and the Italian lower classes, well-know to be illiterate. Nevertheless, the crisis of the Inquisition system did not imply a general decline in the role played by the Church in controlling the press and maintaining the cultural hegemony. In the eighteenth century, rather than being effective instruments of repression, the Inquisition and the Index seem to have cooperated in creating an ideological apparatus to resist the new and to direct public opinion, broadly inspired by anti-Enlightenment principles, which was to prove useful in guiding the Church’s action well beyond the beginning of the nineteenth century.
