Did you know that the Catholic Church's Index of Banned Books continued to include titles until its 1948 edition and was not abolished until 1966? First drawn up by the Inquisition in 1559, this catalog contained the books whose reading and proliferation were forbidden, because of their contents considered immoral and pernicious. The fact that it was in force for more than four centuries shows that censorship and fear of books have been with us since the invention of the printing press. Cursed Books is a fascinating journey through some of these infamous, mysterious and forbidden works, from the dark pages of the Malleus Maleficarum, the medieval manual par excellence for the detection and condemnation of witches, the apocryphal gospels, the enigmatic Voynich manuscript, the famous Codex Gigas -the so-called "Devil's Bible"-, the sacred Mayan book Popol Vuh, to Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, which laid the ideological foundations for the genocide committed by the Nazis. This collaborative volume, written by historians and experts, analyzes the historical context surrounding these works and many more, the censorship they have suffered in different eras and their important impact on culture, demonstrating that the pen is often more dangerous than the sword.