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Concept
Expurgation
Summary
An expurgation of a work, also known as a bowdlerization or fig-leaf edition, is a form of censorship that involves purging anything deemed noxious or offensive from an artistic work or other type of writing or media.
The term bowdlerization is a pejorative term for the practice, particularly the expurgation of lewd material from books. The term derives from Thomas Bowdler's 1818 edition of William Shakespeare's plays, which he reworked in ways that he felt were more suitable for women and children. He similarly edited Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
A fig-leaf edition is a more satirical term for a bowdlerized text, deriving from the practice of covering the genitals of nudes in classical and Renaissance statues and paintings with fig leaves.
In 1264, Pope Clement IV ordered the Jews of Aragon to submit their books to Dominican censors for expurgation.
"The Crabfish" (known also as "The Sea Crabb"), an English folk song dating back to the mid-1800s about a man who places a crab into a chamber pot, unbeknownst to his wife, who later uses the pot without looking, and is attacked by the crab. Over the years, sanitized versions of the song were released in which a lobster or crab grabs the wife by the nose instead of by the genitals or that imply the location of the wounds by censoring the rhyming word in the second couplet. For instance, "Children, children, bring the looking glass / Come and see the crayfish that bit your mother's a-face" (arse).
The 1925 Harvard Press edition of Montaigne's essays (translated by George Burnham Ives) was published without the essays pertaining to sex.
A Boston-area ban on Upton Sinclair's novel Oil! owing to a short motel sex scene prompted the author to assemble a 150-copy fig-leaf edition with the nine offending pages blacked out as a publicity stunt.
In 1938, a jazz song "Flat Foot Floogie (with a Floy Floy)" peaked at number two on US charts. The original lyrics were sung with the word "floozie", meaning a sexually promiscuous woman, or a prostitute, but record company Vocalion objected.
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