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LICENSING, CENSORSHIP, AND RELIGIOUS ORTHODOXY IN EARLY STUART ENGLAND

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 1998

ANTHONY MILTON
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield

Abstract

This article engages with recent work on the nature of religious censorship in the early Stuart period that has emphasized that the government possessed neither the power nor the will to control systematically what was written. It is argued here, instead, that there is evidence of attempts to control the presses' output of religious materials during the Laudian period and earlier, by all parties within the Church of England. Nevertheless, the intention here is not to revive a simplistic view of government ‘control’, but rather to study the means by which licensers could exert an influence over what would be printed with an aura of mainstream legitimacy. Texts were often interfered with by official licensers with a variety of motives. Interference might sometimes be essentially ‘benign’, conferring legitimacy on marginal works by massaging their contents, or texts might be modified in order to make their authors appear to endorse the views of their opponents. The issue of whether it was practically possible to publish work clandestinely is here seen to be something of a red herring, since by publishing in this illicit fashion authors were effectively resigning their right to be considered as spokesmen of the orthodox mainstream. It is the control and manipulation of the licensing process which emerges as one important means by which the religious middle ground was defined and controlled in the early Stuart period.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 1998 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this paper was first delivered at the Tudor–Stuart seminar at the Institute of Historical Research in June 1992, and it has had subsequent outings at early modern research seminars at the Universities of Manchester and Sheffield, as well as at the Anglo-American Conference of Historians in July 1996. I am grateful to those present on each of these occasions for their comments, and especially to Peter Lake and Julia Merritt for subsequent discussions.