RANDY ROBERTSON, Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England: The Subtle Art of Division. * JAN FERGUS, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England.

Abstract

BOTH of these studies represent new thinking into the history of the early modern book. One offers new evaluations of censorship instruments and cases in Stuart England, while the other offers new hard evidence regarding the actual readership of the later eighteenth-century. Each topic is carefully researched and clearly presented. Both are likely to impact our current speculations about early modern British culture. To begin with Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England, Robertson scrutinizes the official mechanisms of press restriction during the century as well as the strategies employed by authors, publishers, and printers to manoeuvre around them. Far from agreeing with recent scholars that censorship conflict in this period was more apparent than real, Robertson inverts that finding, asserting that ‘apparent consensus in seventeenth-century Britain often disguised deeper conflict, and sometimes the world did turn upside down’ (197). Before the Civil War, censorship was primarily in the hands of the Crown, the Church, and the Stationers’ Company, a scheme that, in practice, afforded the government a several-tiered method of supervision. After the Restoration, Charles II collaborated with Parliament to reestablish printing regulations that had lapsed during the Interregnum. Soon after 1660, Charles signed into law several acts designed to prevent untoward petitioning and treasonous speaking, to include the important Licensing Act of 1662. Charles also created the office of Surveyor of the Imprimery, to which he appointed the tireless monarchist Roger L’Estrange. L’Estrange quickly earned his reputation as an uncompromising enemy to sedition and nonconformity. Thus, Robertson points out that the successive Stuart governments maintained a battery of legal instruments with which to censor printed matter; moreover, they avidly exercised them.