Freedom of speech was conceptualized in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and grew into common acceptance, primarily through Puritan belief in parrhesia in the Bible and through Puritans’ religion-based discourse asserting freedom of speech in books and sermons and speeches. This is, of course, contrary to the other authors, ancient and modern, who have discussed freedom of speech from a secular perspective based on parrhesia as it appeared in classical literature and other sources. However, those other authors generally underestimated the important role of freedom of speech in Puritan writing and thought and its influence on later English and American assertions of freedom of speech. The Puritan advocates of freedom of speech in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England were quite aware of the classical uses of parrhesia – most had received a classical education, a significant portion at Oxford or Cambridge – but they deliberately chose instead to rely on the biblical basis for parrhesia. Their frequent assertions of freedom of speech call into question the contention that "[f]ree speech as we understand the term ... remained nearly unknown to legal or constitutional history and to libertarian thought on either side of the Atlantic before 1776," as Leonard Levy claimed.

This chapter introduces the concept of parrhesia (licentia in Latin) and, in particular, its hitherto unexplored relationship to the idea of poetic license (also licentia in Latin). It further establishes the pivotal, galvanizing role played by Ovid, the boldest poet of the Augustan age, in passing down to early modern English writers the model and theory of poetic indecorum as a form of political resistance. It finally considers the role played by Augustus’s banishment of the poet, Ovid, in the history of early modern English poetry and political thought.