The Roman, Portuguese, and Spanish Inquisitions famously printed Indexes of Prohibited Books, ostensibly to protect Catholics from heretical books and authors. But what about the practice of censorship? How did it take place? Was it effective?

In this colloquium, Hannah Marcus of Harvard University and Francisco Malta Romeiras of the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies explore the material evidence of censorship's mechanisms in order to highlight the differences between what the Inquisitors wrote in the Indexes and what others put into practice.