In recent years scholars have called attention to the seeming discrepancy between John Milton's memorable arguments against licensing in Areopagitica and the fact that he was himself employed as a censor. “That in 1649 the newly formed Council of State enlisted Milton's aid in regulating the book trade has troubled modern readers,” observes Stephen Dobranski; “we presume that the author of the Areopagitica would have refused on principle to work as a government censor.” Nevertheless, most of us would agree that the principles set down in the Areopagitica, and the contributions they have made to the development of modern civil liberties, cannot be ignored. Here I would like to make a similar claim about the writings of another early-modern censor, the Italian Jesuit Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621).

Perhaps because of his involvement in the censuring of Galileo in 1616, the portrait of Bellarmine passed down often depicts him as a villain, an opponent of free thinking, a Counter-Reformation zealot eager to destroy anyone who veered from the beliefs of the Roman church. However, in the wake of the 1998 decision of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI) to give scholars free access to the archives of both the Congregation of the Inquisition and the Congregation of the Index, a new understanding of Bellarmine, at least with respect to his involvement with Galileo, has begun to emerge.