Censorship and cultural sensibility : the regulation of language in Tudor-Stuart England
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Censorship and cultural sensibility : the regulation of language in Tudor-Stuart England
University of Pennsylvania Press, c2006
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Censorship & cultural sensibility
Available at 7 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [277]-316) and index
"Bibliography": p. [317]-335
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In this study of the reciprocities binding religion, politics, law, and literature, Debora Shuger offers a profoundly new history of early modern English censorship, one that bears centrally on issues still current: the rhetoric of ideological extremism, the use of defamation to ruin political opponents, the grounding of law in theological ethics, and the terrible fragility of public spheres. Starting from the question of why no one prior to the mid-1640s argued for free speech or a free press per se, Censorship and Cultural Sensibility surveys the texts against which Tudor-Stuart censorship aimed its biggest guns, which turned out not to be principled dissent but libels, conspiracy fantasies, and hate speech. The book explores the laws that attempted to suppress such material, the cultural values that underwrote this regulation, and, finally, the very different framework of assumptions whose gradual adoption rendered censorship illegitimate.
Virtually all substantive law on language concerned defamation, regulating what one could say about other people. Hence Tudor-Stuart laws extended protection only to the person hurt by another's words, never to their speaker. In treating transgressive language as akin to battery, English law differed fundamentally from papal censorship, which construed its target as heresy. There were thus two models of censorship operative in the early modern period, both premised on religious norms, but one concerned primarily with false accusation and libel, the other with false belief and immorality. Shuger investigates the first of these models-the dominant English one-tracing its complex origins in the Roman law of iniuria through medieval theological ethics and Continental jurisprudence to its continuities and discontinuities with current U.S. law. In so doing, she enables her reader to grasp how in certain contexts censorship could be understood as safeguarding both charitable community and personal dignitary rights.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. "That Great and Immoderate Liberty of Lying"
Chapter 2. The Index and the English: Two Traditions of Early Modern Censorship
Chapter 3. Roman Law
Chapter 4. The Christian Transmission of Roman Law Iniuria
Chapter 5. The Law of All Civility
Chapter 6. Defendants' Rights and Poetic Justice
Chapter 7. Hermeneutics, History, and the Delegitimation of Censorship
Chapter 8. Intent
Chapter 9. Ideological Censorship
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
by "Nielsen BookData"