In his famously provocative essay on the licensing of books in Tudor-Stuart England, Christopher Hill noted that Milton’s Areopagitica, first published in 1644, was among the “many principled defenses of freedom of the press from pre-publication censorship.”¹ One’s instinctive response is that Hill must be right: that the reams and reams of material opposing the ecclesio-political status quo written during the first half of the seventeenth century must have included “many” works besides Areopagitica defending and demanding a free press. Since most critiques of the early Stuart regime circulated in open defiance of the licensing laws, and since only a...

In 1641 the licensing system that had been set up under the Tudors collapsed, and despite intermittent efforts to reimpose some sort of controls, the press remained effectively unregulated for the next two decades. In his noblest and most influential prose work, Milton celebrated this new freedom, and to later generations his defense seemed to voice the aspirations and ideals of emergent modernity. Yet, whatever Areopagitica’s subsequent significance, it did not speak for its own historical moment. Very few other contemporary responses to the collapse of censorship resemble Milton’s or construe it in remotely the same terms. Almost all those...

Perhaps the single most significant fact about Tudor-Stuart censorship is how different it was from the ecclesiastical censorship system of Counter-Reformation Europe—from the Index librorum prohibitorum.

That is not quite accurate. The earliest lists of forbidden books, anticipating the first papal index by four decades, were all Tudor products. F. H. Reusch’s invaluable collection of sixteenth-century indexes includes ten English lists—some issued by the church, some by the crown—beginning in 1526. The last English list is the Marian index of 1555. The first papal index came out in 1559, followed by the Tridentine index of 1564, which...

The hallmark of the Roman law model of language regulation is the treatment of verbal transgression, oral and written, as the counterpart to physical assault. The Corpus iuris civilis classifies verbal transgression as a species of iniuria, a category that includes poking out someone’s eye, beating him up, entering his house with a disorderly mob, outraging the corpse of his ancestor, making lewd advances to his wife, and, in general, anything “done to bring a person into hatred, ridicule or contempt [infamandi causa].”² One injures another by harming his body, his dignity, or his good name; by wounding him physically...

For modern legal historians, “Roman law” calls up images of Mommsen’s nineteenth-century Corpus iuris civilis with its three unglossed volumes of double-column fine print. Similar editions, equally user-hostile, were certainly available during the early modern period, but what so deeply imprinted English law and English culture was not Justinian’s text alone but rather both the Roman-law-based European ius commune¹ (the unum ius embracing both civil and canon law used throughout most of Western Christendom from the late Middle Ages to the Enlightenment) and, equally important, the Roman law taken up by the Church into its moral and penitential theology. The...

The Tudor-Stuart understanding of verbal transgression construed language as ethical activity, rather than as personal expression, whether aesthetic or ideological, but also, it should be added, rather than as propositional statement. Thus while Thomas views words as signs, he thinks of them not as referential but as ethical ones: signs that by “conveying something to the knowledge of others . . . may do many kinds of harm,” or, for that matter, of good.² The propositional content of an utterance—Thomas’s dismissive “something”—is largely beside the point; what matters is what the words do to people, what they are...

To this point my focus has been on the moral norms that forbade certain sorts of communication regarding another person, even if true. These norms upheld rights to privacy and respect, rights that Tudor-Stuart persons generally construed as rules of charity. Yet if such rules imposed limits on the truths one might disclose, truth had its own prerogatives that, in turn, limited the duty of charitable concealment. From the Middle Ages on, all extended treatments of verbal transgression, among both theologians and jurists, dealt with the circumstances under which one might reveal private or dishonorable information about another. The answers...

From the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century English defamation law operated with the hermeneutic rule known as mitior sensus (literally, the milder sense). The rule stipulated that if a statement can be construed in both a defamatory and an innocent sense, the latter should be considered the true meaning, for, Coke explains, “where the words are general or ambiguous, the more favorable reading should take precedence.”¹ Thus, to take a standard textbook case, to accuse someone of having the French pox (syphilis) was actionable, but since “pox,” taken alone, could refer either to the French pox or smallpox, if a...

The charitable hermeneutic outlined in the first half of the previous chapter seems to disallow speculation, particularly ungenerous speculation, about people’s mental states. The mitior sensus rule implies that the law accepts this restriction as binding on its own judgments: the courts will not pretend to make windows into men’s souls but simply assume that the words were meant in the sense most favorable to their speaker. Yet key provisions in the Tudor-Stuart laws regulating language would appear to be incompatible with any such restriction. As we have seen, verbal iniuria required, as part of its definition, the presence of...

This final chapter was to turn from the iniuria model, which provided the dominant but not the only basis of Tudor-Stuart language regulation, to examine the role of ideological censorship—by which I mean, as before, disallowing the publication of doctrines, theories, or non-defamatory information, no matter how temperately phrased—and so it eventually will. The discussion got postponed because when I began looking at specific instances of what I had thought would fall within this category, the material repeatedly turned out to be Prynne-style spiritual bullying, going back to the puritan tracts of the early 1570s, with their thundering...