Between 1625 and 1640, a distinctive cultural awareness of
censorship emerged, which ultimately led the Long Parliament to
impose drastic changes in press control. The culture of censorship
addressed in this study helps to explain the divergent historical
interpretations of Caroline censorship as either draconian or
benign. Such contradictions transpire because the Caroline regime
and its critics employed similar rhetorical strategies that
depended on the language of orthodoxy, order, tradition, and law,
but to achieve different ends. Building on her two previous studies
on press censorship in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, Cyndia
Clegg scrutinizes all aspects of Caroline print culture: book
production in London, the universities, and on the Continent;
licensing and authorization practices in both the Stationers''
Company and among the ecclesiastical licensers; cases before the
courts of High Commission and Star Chamber and the Stationers''
Company''s Court of Assistants; and trade regulation.
目錄:
1. Censorship and the law: the Caroline inheritance
2. Print in the time of parliament: 1625–1629
3. Transformational literalism: the reactionary redefinition of the
Courts of High Commission and Star Chamber
4. Censorship and the puritan press
6. The end of censorship