Ep. 277: Ada Palmer on the history of censorship from the Renaissance to AI

Thanks. I've been looking forward to this.

Well, it began much as FIRE began, in the classroom of Alan Kors at Penn, who is, of course, one of the co-founders of FIRE, who first introduced me, as I was studying French Enlightenment philosophies, the impact of censorship structures on the way philosophers distributed their work. One of the fascinating things that that launched me on is thinking about how all censored material tends to travel through the same channels. When you want to understand how it's moving and how it's working, you need to often examine topics that seem to have nothing to do with each other, side by side. If I wanted, as I did, to look at the history of radical thought and atheism and the origins of the scientific method in the 17th and 18th centuries, radical treatises about science were circulating in the same underground bookshops and from the same forbidden presses as pornography and books about magic and conjuration and alchemy and criticisms of the king and satires. And you couldn't study radical philosophy and atheism and science without also studying pornography at the same time, even though they seem so unrelated.

And this is how my students are always sort of baffled why I have so much deep expertise in the history of sodomy law and pornography and radical sexuality, when I'm primarily looking at history of science. If they're traveling through the same channels and often being written by the same people, then you need to study all these things side by side. Whether it's witchcraft or belief in the existence of atoms in vacuum, it's being policed by the same structures, and the society that is trying to police it uses the same methods, so they travel together.

The Renaissance is, of course, a long period, starting somewhere around the 1300s and going all the way, usually up to 1600 as people count it. And there's no answer to how the mechanism worked, because the mechanism transforms radically in the middle. The Renaissance is the point at which the printing press arrives. Therefore the production of books vastly accelerates. And therefore the whole culture turns over upside down to say, "Whoops, we have to figure out how to censor this new medium." And there's an incredible transformation. We think, for example, of the Inquisition as something that does a lot of book censorship. And we think of it as a medieval institution, but it isn't until it's reacting to the printing press in the 15-teens through 1540s, that it starts making book censorship be a large and organized part of what it's doing. The Renaissance is the moment at which medieval structures of censorship transform and are replaced by the first modern structures of censorship, in response to the arrival of a new information technology.

And zooming out from that, it helps remind us that every time a new information technology arrives, the society in question does not yet know how to censor it and then figures out a way. Every new information technology triggers a new wave and innovations of how censorship work. We're seeing that with the computer and the Internet as well, which are new information technologies. And our society is very concerned with and developing new ways to try to police those new media. Every information revolution, therefore, is also a censorship revolution.

It took time. And it's useful to remember that the printing press, like any technology, spread exponentially, and that exponential spread is at first slow. Think of the puzzle where you put a penny on the first square of a chess board and then double it. Two, four, eight, 16. You're going to have a billion dollars by the end, but you still only have a tiny amount of money when you're halfway down the second row. There's one printing press. Gutenberg has it. He goes bankrupt. Some of his apprentices try making some. They go bankrupt. His bank reproduces the press. They try printing. They all go bankrupt. Gutenberg has it. Then his apprentices have it. Then they flee their debts. They teach a couple people. Sort of third generation learning it, you've doubled it twice. Now you have eight, effectively, printing presses. That's already taken more than a decade, so the dissemination of it is slow and the impact is slow.

Another reason people didn't quite realize how impactful it was going to be is that the printing press was a continuation of a phenomenon that had already begun. There was a boom in book production and library building as a result of cultural and political forces already going before 1450 that got going around 1400 and just before. Gutenberg, we often talk about as if a genius out of nowhere invents a thing. Whereas we need to think of it as a big market was building. There was a spike in demand for books, and entrepreneurs sat down and said, "Okay, can I develop a technology that will produce these books faster?" Based on the woodblock printing that was already circulating a couple of decades earlier.

Those are two different questions, actually, because, of course, the books that are always most in demand and the books that were the motive for this library building boom are different. What books are always most in demand? Breaking news, scandal rags, pornography, spelling textbooks for schools, and simple religious texts like a pocket prayer book or something that a priest would refer to when developing a sermon. Those are the top -

Those are the actual things that get printed en masse and make money. The motive for the library building project was indeed the ancient texts, the let's collect together all of the classics and reconstruct the libraries of antiquity. Which was a political and scholarly project characteristic of the very beginning of the 1400s, spiking just before the year 1400, in which a set of intellectuals, among them Petrarch, conceived the idea that in an unstable and chaotic world, in which Italy's vulnerable city-states were constantly in danger of being overthrown and conquered, what they needed was the arts of the ancients. And we associate the Renaissance revival of antiquity with art and linear perspective and realistic drawings of anatomy and aqueducts and diagrams; but they're thinking of the political science technologies. How did the Romans organize their government? How did they educate their ruling elites? The Romans were very successful in having a long and stable government. And books like Livy's "Histories" describe Romans who were incredibly loyal and willing to give their lives for Rome. The original Roman Brutus, one of the first consuls, who when his sons conspired to take over the city and make him king, executed his own sons for treason against the state. And Italy at the time is living in the plot of "Romeo and Juliet." Can you imagine Lord Montague executing Romeo for anything? No. He's like, "Romeo should get away with murder." They want to reconstruct the educational system and political methods that enabled the stability of ancient Rome.

And they believe that the secrets to this lie in the library that educated Brutus and educated Caesar and educated Cicero; and that if every king and duke and merchant prince and high status leader figure educates his sons and daughters with this ancient new method, they will create a generation of competent rulers who will bring peace, prosperity, stability, and success to these city-states. That creates the library boom. And it's a very elite project, as books are heck expensive. Before the printing press, a book cost as much as a house in the manuscript production period.

In order to have a library, you have to be someone who has tens and hundreds of millions, so that you can invest in a library in which each book costs $300,000. And when the printing press comes in, he's trying to meet the fact that lots of people want libraries and there is a market for it; but he's so effective at reducing the cost that between 1450 and 1490, the price of a book drops from the cost of a house - let's say $300,000, $600,000, depending on the size of the book - to costing about a school teacher's salary for one month. Which is still a lot more than we pay for a book today; but boy, is it a lot less than the mega-elite spending that was necessary. By the time you hit the early 1500s, any mediumly affluent person can afford to own a dozen books. And any somewhat rich person can afford to have a large library. And importantly, every town has someone who can afford to have a library, to which then the youth of that town who want to be educated can knock on the door and beg to visit. The accessibility of having a library increases by an order of magnitude within a century.

Yes. That book is magnificent.

Super-not, because Poggio was writing super-satirical pornographic condemnations of the clergy, which they run around with their dicks out, and publishing that, which did get censored. And he knows that the classics is the non-controversial, non-dirty, non-problematic half of what he's doing.

There are later letters of major founders of the inquisitional book structure, Ghislieri. Anyway, who was writing back and forth between a couple of different inquisitors. I remember reading these letters, and they talk about Poggio's own personal work as an example of the kind of stuff that needs to be censored. And Lucretius, which Poggio famously rediscovered and has these radical denial of the immortality of the soul, and atoms and vacuum and all of this very modern-sounding science as an example of, according to the founder of Inquisition book hunting, something that doesn't need to be censored. And that's one of the really interesting subtleties. The more I look at censorship, whether medieval or ancient or Renaissance or enlightenment, the more, putting on my science fiction writer hat, I'm like, "If we had a time machine and could go talk to these people, we would tell them they are censoring the wrong stuff." Poggio's random porn is a threat to nobody. Lucretius is going to overturn the entire world order as we know it. Censors are always after the wrong thing, which is really fascinating from a historian point of view.

Whenever we look at an era and we're saying, "Okay, it's the Enlightenment. Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, they're brewing the French Revolution, they're questioning the rationality of man. They're turning everything upside down." And what is the Inquisition worried about? The Inquisition is worried about Jansenism. Yeah, that's like the number one thing that the Renaissance - sorry, that the Enlightenment Inquisition is after. And Jansenism? Jansenism is Calvinism for Catholics. Do you want to have a cruel, arbitrary, distant God who holds you in his hand like a worthless spider before hurling you into the fire and no free will, but also have to obey the asshole in Rome? Then Jansenism is for you. It gives you both of the worst sides of the Catholic-Protestant divide. And there was this big anxiety that Jansenism was going to appeal to the most pious of Catholics and suck them into error in the devil-quoting scripture way. And man, the Inquisition is just turning itself inside out and upside down, worrying about Jansenism and letting works by the Marquis de Sade just happily go around. And like, "What are you doing?"

By happily go around, of course, I mean they're still banned, but this is one of these subtleties where you can be banned a little and you can be banned a lot. Because all censorship structures are porous. All censorship structures have, well, we restrict A and we restrict B, and we're focusing on A and we don't have enough energy for both. Because an important characteristic of all censoring bodies ever in human history is that they always feel like they don't have enough manpower and they don't have enough resources, and they're being overwhelmed and they can't police everything.

That's one of the things that's so deceptive about the model of censorship raised for us by Orwell's "1984," which dominates the way we imagine censorship operating and has given us very valuable tools for thinking about and being vigilant against surveillance and totalitarianism; but Orwellian censorship is actually radically unlike any real censorship that has ever existed, and often makes us vigilant, I think, against some of the wrong things. And one of the things he depicts is that the Ministries of Information and Truth and Love have infinite resources. And when they go to, say, censor something, when Winston goes in to delete a person from a newspaper in his job at the Ministry of Truth, all copies are deleted. Everything is affected. When his colleagues are working on bowdlerizing Shakespeare, they're bowdlerizing all Shakespeare they can get at, all the versions of Shakespeare. And they have so many people, they can have an entire team just to surveil Winston personally, at a ratio of five or six surveillers to every citizen. Which is, of course, mathematically impossible, and practically impossible. When you look at the real censorious systems that even Orwell is modeling this on, like the USSR or the Inquisition, and you look at their letters, they're always like, "Oh, my God, we don't have enough people. There are so many of them. We will never catch up with anything."

They choose their battles. And in the French Enlightenment, many, many books are banned, but they focus on policing the ones that they're afraid of. Anton Matitsyn has this brilliant book. I hope you've had him on. He's great. On radical doubt and radical skepticism in the 17th century. And he's found these documents from actually directly documenting a raid by the authorities on a clandestine bookshop. Here's one of these underground bookshops that's printing forbidden books. And what do they have? They have Voltaire and Rousseau and everything you would want. Or no, it's a little early for that. Maybe they have - I've forgotten the exact date, but they have all the Enlightenment figures that are happening at that time. They've also got porn. They've also got criticisms of the king. And there's this long inventory of all of the stuff that they have. And they're like, "This is fine. This is fine. Radical, whatever. We're just gonna chide them and wave a finger at them and be like, 'Don't do it again.' Oh, my God! They have a Jansenist treatise against the nature of the Trinity. Throw the book at them. This is the worst and most dangerous thing."

Even when the Encyclopedie, Diderot's Encyclopedie, when it is finally condemned, this is a really telling moment. 'Cause they didn't want to condemn the Encyclopedie. The French authorities liked it. The French authorities let it circulate. The king liked it. The queen is on record praising how it taught her how to understand the way her silk stockings were made. It had some radical political ideas, but it was very careful. It was a meticulous act of cautious self-censorship, which Diderot and others organized, saying, "All right, we really want this project to be available to citizens. This is the book that's supposed to create a universally educated populace so that everyone can be a participating citizen. We want everybody to have it, so we're going to be on our best behavior and write the sort of most moderate versions of all of our radical ideas." And this is successful with the French king, who's like, "This is fine." And with the French censors, who are like, "Mmm, yeah, this is fundamentally fine." 'Cause they're sympathetic to it, which I'll come back to in a second.

But eventually Rome catches up with it. And theoretically, all of the Catholic nations' local censoring bodies are under Rome. When Rome catches up with them, it's like, "Wait. You're letting them publish what? No, this is not okay, France. I command you to condemn the Encyclopedie." And they condemn the Encyclopedie. As of Volume H. And when Rome commands you to condemn something, you're supposed to then, in Paris, have a symbolic burning of a copy. And there's a very grave day and they announce that they're happy and take the copy of the Encyclopedie and they parade it over to the fire and set it carefully aside and burn a pile of Jansenist treatises about the nature of the soul and its place. Because they like the Encyclopedie. They don't want to burn it. They would rather burn Jansenism.

Which just shows you how things can be complexly both condemned and not condemned at the same time. And these levels of porousness had always been intentional, to the degree that when they're printing the forbidden later volumes of the Encyclopedie in Geneva and in Switzerland, and smuggling them across into France. The Encyclopedie, of course, faithfully stops, but this unrelated encyclopedia, in exactly the same font and size, starts coming across the border from Switzerland, conveniently beginning just at the place that the old one ended; but it has nothing to do with the original editors, of course. When they're smuggling that in, the censors are so sympathetic to it that they just let it cross the border. And if they pull up somebody's hidden compartment that's filled the Encyclopedie, they're like, "Okay, just pay me a small bribe, whatever." They start printing title pages of the Encyclopedie and wrapping it around more forbidden books, and things like De Sade come into France wrapped in the Encyclopedie, disguising a banned book as a different banned book. Because the two had a different level of how much enforcement there was of the ban, even though under the law, technically, they were the same.

And I said I would come back to the sympathy of it, but one of the things we always forget is that historically speaking, a censor is a member of the educated literati. You have to be an educated person familiar with all sorts of ideas in order to recognize what you're looking at. You have to be fluent in literary languages. All the way through the Enlightenment, working as a censor in 18th century France is like a normal first job out of college for a lit major. And a lot of these people are themselves pretty radical and are themselves also authors. We have letters that Robert Darnton chronicled of censors writing to each other, "Oh, Jacques, my dear college roommate, I got your book to censor. Don't worry, I'll do a really good job." While they're writing their own books, hoping to debut, and then be able to get a better job than working at a censor later on. In a weird way, censors tended liberal, or at least tended educated and were sympathetic to new ideas. The people who are doing the censoring are themselves often moments of permeability.

And there's this great case, and I always forget his name, but there's a leader of the Portuguese Enlightenment who wrote a really important treatise in favor of more liberal education against sort of traditional Jesuit-led education. And it was printed in Naples, in Portuguese, to be brought across into Lisbon. And this is one of these rare cases where the Inquisition had a shot at actually eradicating this book. Because once a print edition actually disseminates and a thousand copies of it are all over, you're doomed. There's no way to ever track those down. Not even in modern cases can the CIA track down every single printed copy of a book once they exist. In this case, they're warned. The books are on a boat, it's coming into Lisbon, it's arriving at this time. They intercept it in the harbor. And they get and they destroy the entire edition. And nonetheless, the second edition is printed within a month, about eight miles away. And we say, "How did that happen?" And the answer was the Inquisitors kept copies for their own reference, because you have to keep reference copies of the bad books so that you can look up whether other things are the same book circulating under a different title. One of the Inquisitors kept it, read it, liked it, smuggled it out, and had it printed.

Those are two very different questions. I'll do them in order. The first one focuses on the fact that so often censorship is actually hybridly achieved by a combination of government and culture. And that when a government wants to censor something, it'll often use the culture to do it, or when a culture wants to censor something, it'll use the government.

Right? To use a very clear modern example, let's look at how film censorship works in America versus New Zealand. Now, New Zealand is the wonderland for studying censorship, especially if you want to study the First Amendment, New Zealand and Australia both. Because fundamentally, America and Australia and New Zealand started with the same original legal system and original structure of government. America has the First Amendment and they don't. When these cultures want to censor something - these cultures are very similar, they have a lot in common. They usually want to censor the same thing at the same time, because the same thing will hit the Anglosphere all at once. "Oh, no, talkies." Now people can say words in movies, which means they can say bad words in movies, so we must now figure out how to censor that. That hits all these cultures at the same time across the Anglosphere. "Oh, no, it's World War II, we have to censor sedition." That hits everything. "Oh, no, it's 1954, we're panicking about comic books causing juvenile delinquency." This hits all these cultures at the same time. And every time it hits America, Congress shall make no law. If America wants to pick on something, whether it's comic books or communism, America cannot do it by Congress making a law and it has to use a workaround.

When America wants to censor movies, America has the civilian Movie Ratings Board. And there are a lot of cultural pressures, including some from government. A congressman will call you up to make everybody comply with this supposedly voluntary and civilian process. In New Zealand, they just have a state office that censors movies, and it's done by the government. And it has exactly the same function and it gives movies ratings. And in one of them it's the state, and the other one it's sort of technically not the state, but they're censoring the same stuff for the same motives at the same time. And they're entangled with government in both ways. And there are good and bad facets to both of them.

Because in America, for example, film ratings are done by the civilian organization, which means it has no accountability and it's incredibly corrupt and it's run by Hollywood insiders. And they have no obligations to have criteria publicly or to justify their ratings. You just get your answer, and they probably give better ratings to their own studio's work and harsher ones to outsiders, to try to make it harder for outsiders to break in. And there's no appeals process. But they can't ban your film. They can bankrupt you, because your film will not be able to be shown if it gets 18-Plus, etc., but you can project your film on the side of a barn. It's legal. You have the right to express yourself. A film that goes bankrupt means you really can't express yourself, even if you technically have the right.

You can't make your next film. Because you've lost all of your money and you don't have any money and nobody will fund your next film, so this is your last gasp.

Right, but that's not what they're targeting. They're targeting the things that are trying to hit a large and mainstream audience and they can effectively mean this is going to be your last film. Meanwhile, in New Zealand, the censoring is done by the state and it's done by civil servants who have no connection with this industry whatsoever. They're basically the same thing as postal workers. They have a very transparent process. They have very specific, clearly defined, "These are the five things we're allowed to censor. We're not allowed to censor anything else." They're required to explain publicly their motives and decision process.

There is an official appeals process where you can appeal to a judge. Their website, if you haven't been there, is amazing. They have a blog where they post about things. They're always having "Deadpool" in little icons with little talk bubbles commenting on the censorship. They have, believe it or not, an actual mascot, the cute, sad bunny of having watched age-inappropriate material. It's the weirdest cute mascot I think I've ever seen. And they have a Twitter account, or they did. I don't know if they still do. And a blog covered with stock photos of happy teenagers on laptops, presumably reading censored material. I don't know what they're supposed to be doing, but there they are. They can ban your film, and they can jail you for it.

The government version has more transparency, more accountability, more appeals process, but teeth on the other end, the civilian one, is much more likely to give you an arbitrary, unfair, and unjust initial experience. Then there's nothing you can do about it, but they can't ban your film. Notice how these are definitely the same society achieving the same thing two different ways. And it isn't -

And with the guidelines for what we recommend that you do, etc. Notice how all of this is entanglement of government and civilian factors, including things like the movie companies wanting to be able to have national distribution instead of local distribution. And things like the Hays Code, which is not force of law but recommended. And you're gonna have a harder time getting other things you want from the government if you don't follow it. Government outsources censorship to society. Society outsources censorship sometimes to government, when there's a company that really realizes that they can make a lot of profit by controlling some sort of expression. They will lobby the government to do a thing, not because the government wanted to, but because the corporation wanted them to. It's deceptive to draw a stark line between the two. These things are always very entangled with each other.

And when having this discussion of, "Is censorship always the state, are these strictly separate?" for me the killer answer is, "The Inquisition wasn't the state." The Inquisition was a separate organization organized by the church that goes into and collaborates with governments. It operated like Doctors Without Borders operates. It's not the state. If the Inquisition doesn't fall under our labels of definitely censorship, then our definitions have gone way wrong. We need to acknowledge that the vast majority of censorship is a blurry collaboration in which state is one of several factors, money another, profit-seeking another, cultural taboos and preferences another; that all turn together with each other to make a variety of apparatuses that often mix legal and non-legal and paralegal and simply cultural tools, and corporate tools, to censor something in a much messier way than a strict binary between state and not-state.

Right. Or it's the private incentives that are pushing the state. And so you really have to look at these as entangled factors when you zoom in. You had asked a second half of that question.

Ah, yeah. I'll state the thesis, then I'll give an example. The majority of real censorship is self-censorship. The majority of self-censorship is deliberately cultivated by an outside power, and in fact the cultivation of self-censorship is often the primary goal of censorious action, and especially censorious government regimes. I had a brilliant student who asked a great question in the classroom once, which was, "Did the trial of Galileo succeed or fail?" And if we think the goal of the Galileo trial is to silence Galileo, then it's an abject failure, because it made him much more famous even than he already was. If we think of the goal of the Galileo trial as to scare Descartes into withdrawing the freshly written treatise he had just delivered to his publishers and telling them, "Wait, wait, wait, wait, don't publish it. I'm going to revise this over the next two years to be way more Catholic and way more Orthodox, because I am scared." And 1,000 other intellectuals in that same moment as Descartes, who also carefully revised their work to be much more cautious after hearing about the Galileo trial, that's the success. Could they silence Galileo? No. Could they get the self-silencing of 1,000 other intellectuals who are frightened by the Galileo trial? Yes.

And when we look at the practices of censorious bodies, we so often see them even in their notes saying, "We can't police all of these things, so we will police one or two things prominently so that people see it, notice it, hear about it, pay attention to it, and that will get people to self-censor," right? They choose their battles. And when we look at China right now and the sort of influencer blogosphere, all across China people are using VPNs and bypassing censorship all the time. Humans want information and humans are smart. Censorship cannot make an absolute curtain. People do this all over the place. Who does the state actually arrest? They wait until people have a certain level of fame and then they enforce a almost arbitrary and random grabbing of a person, because that's scarier than there being a specific cause. It's, "This person who's doing the same thing everyone else is doing, therefore I'm scared and I'm going to be extra careful." Random enforcement is more effective at sowing fear than going after specific works.

And like the Portuguese example that I gave, censorious bodies know perfectly well it is impossible to track down and destroy every copy of a piece of information once it's already disseminated in our digital age. Certainly even in the printing press age, but it's possible to destroy every copy of a book that never exists in the first place by scaring people into self-censoring. The Inquisition in its earlier days does a lot of a treatise goes out, you visit that intellectual, you interview him, you make sure that all of his friends know that this happened. He promises not to do it again. You say, "Okay, good, go home." And you get much more cautious work out of that guy and all of his friends for a long time. This type of encouraging the culture of fear.

It's sort of the case that they don't want it to be known. It's often the case that some of the involved do want it to be known. For example, when it's a case of a school librarian - there is a parent challenging the school library - the school does not want to make news. The school wants this to quietly go away so that they can do the 100,000 things that a school exhaustedly is desperately trying to do without enough money. The group that urged the parent to do that, though - the strategic Facebook group that is trying to make waves with this -

Right. They want that to get attention. And there then will be a lawsuit and then the ACLU and others, and maybe you, will help. And the book will be restored to that school library, but it is definitely and provably the case that dozens of other school libraries around that region will not buy that book or will not buy similar books,

Because they don't want to go through this. And we know the Streisand effect makes a great success and boom of the sales of the book in question. And every year when the American Library Association Office of Intellectual Freedom releases its 'What were the top banned and challenged books of the year?' people literally try to steal the list in advance so that they can know in advance which books are about to have a big sales boom. Because it'll help those, but the same publishers that are like, 'Great, we get to reprint hundreds of copies of this, and we're going to actually buy and put out fewer similar books by other authors.' One book will sell 100,000 copies and 20 books will never be published in the first place, because the publisher decides to be a little more careful. And no sunlight is shone on that. That's a quiet decision made in the closed doors of publishers, but it does happen.

And then fewer books with that theme. Whether it's transgender or whatever it is, fewer books with that theme get published the next year.

And that's the goal.

You're looking for one case?

The example my mind goes to, which is not what you want, but I think is an important example. I work a lot on Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, this famous Renaissance genius who by the time he was 14 knew seven languages and worked on this great project of 900 theses to unite all world religions into one and thought he was going to revolutionize and merge Islam and Zoroastrianism and Platonism with Christianity. And was so confident that he was persuasive and right that he wrote letters to invite all the crowned heads of Europe to come see him defend this thesis publicly in Rome in front of the Pope; and never imagined that anybody would, despite the Inquisition existing, never imagined that anybody would condemn it. Then also in the middle of traveling to go to his defense of it, tried to elope with a married noblewoman, imprudently. When he's arrested and the trial is happening, and the question is, is he going to get in big trouble or not happens, his allies and his patronage network, and his great protector, Lorenzo de' Medici kicks in. A lot of money moves hands and a lot of leverage is exerted. What's really going on is the larger political tensions between Florence and Rome. Florence, which is protecting him; Rome, which is in major tension with Florence at the time, which is not. Another thing that's happening at the time is the tension between Guelph power structures and Ghibelline power structures, because at that time these two great factions that hate each other, like the Montagues and Capulets, both Pico and Florence are part of one set of political military allies, and the papacy at this time is in the domination and control of Ghibellines, who are their political and military adversaries. When you zoom in, what you see in the arrest of Pico della Mirandola is here is the most amazing intellectual possibly of this entire century. And here he is being arrested and jailed, and then having first 13 clauses out of his theses condemned, and then eventually the whole thing condemned. And it feels like it's about the ideas, and it feels like it's about the censoring of stuff. And then you zoom out, and you're like, 'Wait a minute. No, these inquisitors are being sent there because their boss hates his friend and is trying to use this as leverage in a long, complicated military coup in which the Papal states are trying to annex Tuscany. And this is entangled with three different wars, and an old enmity and the Pazzi conspiracy, and all of that. And the degree to which you can say it was motivated by ideas is a tiny drop, because all of the higher level decisions of are we going after the scholar, are we not, are in fact 90% about the political entanglement, and only 10% about the ideas.' And it so constantly, even something like the trial of Giordano Bruno, you zoom in, it looks like it's about ideas. You zoom out and look at the people connected, and you realize how much that's about Rome's tensions with Venice, just as much as it is about any intellectual material that's going on. All of our showstopper cases that feel like they're really about ideas, when we then zoom out, we see how entangled they are with politics.

Right, the degree to which this can be a pawn in a larger battle. And in the case of Pico, he is not condemned. His book is condemned, but he is released sort of into house arrest in the custody of Lorenzo de' Medici, and a lot of money and political capital and favor trading is used on the leverage necessary to rescue Pico; which is a victory for Rome, which has weakened Florence and wants to weaken Florence and the Medici and make them spend their political capital on this, so they don't have that political capital to spend on other things.