Press Censorship in Caroline England

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.

• Attends closely to matters of the material production of books, which receive much attention from scholars of the history of the book • Builds on the author’s two previous books on press censorship in Elizabethan and Jacobean England • Provides the reader with ready visual access to complex statistical evidence

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.