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This paper studies a corpus of documents linked to book censorship at the end of the Old Regime, entrusted by the Council of Castile to the Academy of Fine Arts. The documentation collected tells us about the administrative process, the agents involved (authors, editors, translators) and the specific assessments of the academics who made the reports. This documentation enables us the identification of the formal and content criteria applied to this series of works, following the specifications imposed by a controlling State, prior to its dissemination both to the academic public and to amateurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to publish their works, the monks from the Cistercian Congregation of Castile had to follow the standard procedure, having first obtained a licence from their superior. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the printing process of the Médula cisterciense and the Biblioteca (1781-1793) of Fray Roberto Muñiz, the most relevant works written by the Castilian Bernards in the second half of the seventeenth century. Muñiz had the support of his superiors, but his titles were partially affected by the objections of the secular reformist censorship. We will attend to the dual process of censorship, ecclesiastical and governmental. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious freedom has always been considered to be a central issue in liberal and enlightened thought. Thus, attention has often been drawn to the shortage of observations on tolerance in the works of Spanish enlightened reformers, as also to the uncompromising prohibition of non-Catholic religions contained in the Cadiz Constitution of 1812. In recent years, some scholars have argued that, because of the absence of religious minorities in Spain, the dominating influence on Spanish society of the Catholic Church and Spain's insufficient openness to European culture, Spanish liberals did not really begin to appreciate and discuss religious freedom as an ideal until the periods of exile following from 1814 and 1823. This paper aims to show, however, through analysis of one of the most relevant Spanish journals of the eighteenth century, that the matter of freedom of religious belief was indeed debated in Spain during the reigns of Carlos III and Carlos IV and that, in spite of the threat of censorship, some Spaniards did dare to write and publish work in favour of religious tolerance during that period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]