After the Hannibalic war, the leading military role of consulars diminished, though it did not disappear. A significant number of consuls kept their imperium as proconsuls, but only a very small minority held the consulship again. A number of them held intermediate positions as military tribunes or military legates under the command of magistrates with imperium. Consulars played a leading role in international diplomacy and the organisation of newly conquered territories as members of senatorial embassies, especially in the Greek world. Ex-consuls were also common as heads of commissions in charge of implementing the agrarian policy promoted by the Senate during the second century BCE, both for the foundation of Roman and Latin colonies and for the individual distribution of land. The censorship became the coveted culmination of a political career for many consulars. The Senate was the arena in which consulars assumed a leading role in political debate. In contrast, their intervention in popular assemblies was rare. As in previous periods, many consulars were members of priestly colleges. While most of them entered the colleges (long) before they became consuls, others did so at an advanced age after their consulship.

During the crisis that the Hannibalic war provoked, the ‘old guard’ of consulars who had been consuls for the first time in the 230s assumed the leadership role in the military field and in politics. A number of ex-consuls once again held offices with imperium and were placed at the head of the army as consuls, praetors, or promagistrates. The state of emergency in Rome also led to the appointment of dictators, all of them ex-consuls. The military contribution of consulars also took place in intermediate positions, as legates under consuls or consulars, but also under imperatores who had not attained that rank, always with tasks of high responsibility. In 209, we find the last two censors who had not been consuls: from that year onwards, all censors were former consuls, and censorship became the potential culmination of a consular’s political career. From 209, the censors always designated as princeps senatus the man they considered to be the princeps civitatis. As before, the princeps senatus had to be a patrician consular and censorian, but the position was left open to competition. It was very unusual that consulars were co-opted for a priestly college. Two consulars were named triumviri mensarii to face up the economic crisis.

Pepys’s diary has always been regarded as a very strange text. From its first publication, the reasons why Pepys wrote about his life in such detail – and in such embarrassing detail – have puzzled readers, as has why he then preserved his diary for posterity. This introduction outlines Pepys’s life, the episodes from his diary that are the most famous, and the changing estimations of its importance as history and literature. It argues that one of the strangest things about this text is that, despite its fame, very few people have read the original, for Pepys wrote in shorthand with all printed texts being transcriptions into longhand. Answering some of the puzzles of Pepys’s diary means getting to grips with the shorthand, the censored versions in which the diary has circulated, and the strange things that readers have done with it.

Pepys’s diary was first published in 1825, in a highly selective version edited by Lord Braybrooke. This was a starkly different journal from the versions read today, cutting most of Pepys’s personal life, his details of everyday London and (with the exception of some court scandal) all the sex. This chapter investigates how the diary came to be published, including the shrewd tactics of the diary’s shorthand transcriber John Smith and its publisher Henry Colburn. On release, the diary drew influential admirers such as the novelist Walter Scott and the historian Thomas Macaulay. Early responses focused on the diary’s value as entertainment, on censorship, and on the questions that it raised about historical value. The chapter considers how the diary changed – or did not change – ideas of the Restoration period, the diary’s influence on the writing of social history, and the extent to which its publication followed Pepys’s plans for his library.

The afterword draws together arguments made in previous chapters about the creation, publication, and reception of Pepys’s diary. It briefly surveys the reputation and uses of the diary in the early twenty-first century and considers what the future of the diary might hold.

This chapter tells the story of how the uncensored text of Pepys’s diary was finally published in the late twentieth century, before turning to the diary’s online presence in the twenty-first century. The complete text, edited by Latham and Matthews, appeared between 1970 and 1983. However, the decision to publish the diary in full was made much earlier, at the time of the controversial Lady Chatterley trial (1960). Getting all the diary into print required navigating the new law against obscene publications, with implications for how the diary is read today. International collaboration – and behind-the-scenes controversy – also shaped this edition. Collaboration is likewise a feature of the site pepysdiary.com (2003-present), which attracts an international community of readers. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, this site became a record of how readers worldwide used Pepys’s history to interpret a contemporary plague.

This chapter examines both the regulatory and judicial aspects of artistic expression in the Islamic Republic of Iran, in an attempt to illustrate the fragility of the rule of law pertaining to art and culture in theory and practice. The chapter provides a brief historic overview of censorship since the 1979 Revolution, capturing the relative fluctuations in the application of the law over time, depending on the approach of the individuals in charge. In order to demonstrate the nature of the judiciary’s verdicts in light of the defendants’ artistic expression, the chapter also introduces examples of the cases of artists and writers prosecuted for their work both offline and online. Overall, the chapter highlights the multifaceted nature of the regulatory limitations on cultural and artistic expression and creativity.

The relationship of Catholic hierarchies with the medium of printing has always been multifarious, and even in early modern times it was far more complex than most current studies maintain. This chapter attempts to draw a concise and unbiased picture of the papacy’s publishing and censoring practices from the 1460s to the 1630s. It starts with the arrival of the first printers in Italy on the outskirts of Rome and ends with the Galileo Galilei affair, analyzing all intervening attempts to use moveable type in support of papal policy and the development of the Index of Forbidden Books. Highlighting the interconnections between prohibition and promotion, it proposes a unified interpretation of these two lines of action rather than present them in opposition, as is often the case.

This chapter suggests that the papacy dealt with Protestantism in various ways. It condemned the forty-one propositions of Martin Luther and then waited for the Council of Trent to condemn others. It used the institutions of preventive press censorship and of various inquisitions to check heresy. It sought the support of Christian rulers to prevent its spread, sending nuncios and legates to the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, France, England, Scotland, Sweden, Denmark, and Poland–Lithuania to urge them to suppress heresy and to secure their loyalty by negotiating agreements on Church appointments and shared revenues and by offering military aid, efforts that had mixed success, or failed. Religious orders such as the Jesuits and Capuchins were also enlisted in the struggle. Leading Protestant reformers came to see the papacy as the Antichrist or foreign usurper.

This chapter reviews the regulation of disinformation from an African human rights’ law perspective, focusing on the right to freedom of expression and the right to vote. It provides an overview of the African regional law framework, specifically the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights of 1981 (the African Charter) and corresponding jurisprudence. The chapter also analyses the way in which freedom of expression and disinformation laws have been applied in African countries, the aim being to contextualize and illustrate how African regional law plays out at the domestic level, but with an emphasis on the position in South Africa.

This article explores the reception of American popular visual culture in Ireland. The role Irish Americans played in the development of blackface is discussed, highlighting how blackface was used by the Irish to distance themselves from African Americans, thus helping their integration into (white) American society. Reception of blackface in Ireland is also explored. Consideration is then given to various technological visual media, notably large-scale panorama paintings, which offered American scenes of interest to Irish emigrants, and the cinema, which became so pervasive by the Great War that American cinema, especially, had eclipsed all other entertainments. The article then outlines the contributions made to Irish film by reverse migrants, who produced the first realist representations on film of Irish history and culture during 1910–14. The last section focuses on the ideological resistance by Catholics and nationalists alike to American cinema, which was deemed immoral and undermined the Catholic-nationalist project. This led in 1923 to the introduction of the first piece of media legislation in independent Ireland that severely restricted what could be shown in Irish cinemas. Notwithstanding this cultural protectionist measure, American cinema remained hugely popular in Ireland.

The seventh and final chapter presents a new interpretation of Richard Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678). Having set out the course of his early career (and especially his study of Hebrew manuscripts in the library of the Oratory), it outlines how Simon presented a novel account of the practice and purpose of Catholic biblical scholarship. Its conclusion reflects on why this was found challenging by his contemporaries, and discusses how the reception of his work differed so extensively from that of Louis Cappel’s Critica sacra.