In an editorial in a previous issue of the Journal of Markets & Morality, “Printed Source and Digital Resource in Economics and Theology” (PDF), I examined developments in research methodology, particularly with an eye toward digital research tools. One of the tools I highlighted was a project that I had some involvement with, the Post-Reformation Digital Library (PRDL). The PRDL has launched a new version today at it’s own website, and includes a substantive move from bibliography to database, as well as expansive coverage of over 1,900 authors.

I participated in a roundtable discussion yesterday at the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, where we talked about some of the trends and challenges involved with digital tools. The PRDL was very useful to me recently as I was working on editing a new publication of a translation of a text by Juan de Mariana(1536-1624), A Treatise on the Alteration of Money. The original translation was undertaken some years ago by Fr. Brannan, and I did not have a copy of the treatise by Mariana easily at hand to do parison. So naturally I went over to PRDL to see if the original was listed among the site’s contents.

Mariana’s treatise, De Monetae mutatione, was one of seven treatises (treatise #4, actually) published together in 1609 in Cologne. Via the PRDL I quickly found a version available from Google Books and downloaded it. As I opened the document, however, I found that the pages of the fourth treatise seemed to be missing from the PDF. When I looked at the title page, I found that the contents listing for De Monetae mutatione was crossed out, and there was in fact a signature affixed to the document noting that the treatise had been expurgated.

As Stephen Grabill observes in his annotations to the new translation, Murray Rothbard recounts the “fascinating saga surrounding Mariana’s De monetae mutatione” in his Economic Thought Before Adam Smith. As Grabill writes,

Mariana’s tract, which attacks King Philip II’s debasement of the currency, led the monarch to haul the aged (seventy-three-year-old) scholar-priest into prison, charging him with the high crime of treason against the king. He was convicted of thecrime, but the pope refused to punish him. He was released from prison after four months on the condition that he would remove the offensive passages in the work, and would promise to be more careful in the future.

King Philip, however, was not satisfied with the pope’s punishment. So the king ordered his officials to buy up every copy they could find and to destroy them. After Mariana’s death, the Spanish Inquisition expurgated the remaining copies, deleting many sentences and smearing entire pages with ink. All non-expurgated copies were put on the Spanish Index, and these in turn were expurgated during the course of the seventeenth century. As a result of Philip’s censorship, the existence of the Latin text remained unknown for 250 years, and was rediscovered only because the Spanish edition, which Mariana himself had translated into Spanish, was incorporated into a nineteenth-century collection of classical Spanish essays.

Unfortunately for me, the censorship would have lasting effects, as the copy first available to me from Google Books was one of those that had been expurgated. I was relieved when PRDL alerted me to another copy digitized by Google. I went to the site and found the listing on the table of contents intact. So again I downloaded the file, assured that my efforts had met with success. But as I examined the file, I found the same set of pages to be missing again. As I looked back at the front matter, I found that a similar note was appended on the verso side of the contents page, noting that the treatise De Monetae mutatione had been expurgated in 1632. The text was expurgated and I was exasperated.

But fortunately I did know that Google Books has some quirks, and so I went to the book’s “About” page and located yet another digitized copy under “other editions.” While the other two originals were from Spanish libraries, this third file was held by the Austrian National Library. Lo and behold, this third time was the charm, as the Austrian library’s copy had not been mutilated.

This is just one instance of the promise that digital research tools and methods allows us, in many cases recovering long-lost texts, or undoing the machinations of long-defunct political regimes. The fruits of this labor can be found in the current and future generations of scholarship, which have the task to make full and responsible use of these possibilities. To do your part to make sure that Philip II doesn’t get the last say in mutilating both money and Mariana’s text, purchase a copy of A Treatise on the Alteration of Money, the first installment of our new Sources in Early Modern Economics, Ethics, and Law series, today.