Press Censorship in Jacobean England

This 2001 book examines the ways in which books were produced, read and received during the reign of King James I. It challenges prevailing attitudes that press censorship in Jacobean England differed little from either the 'whole machinery of control' enacted by the Court of Star Chamber under Elizabeth or the draconian campaign implemented by Archbishop Laud, during the reign of Charles I. Cyndia Clegg, building on her earlier study Press Censorship in Elizabethan England, contends that although the principal mechanisms for controlling the press altered little between 1558 and 1603, the actual practice of censorship under King James I varied significantly from Elizabethan practice. The book combines historical analysis of documents with literary reading of censored texts and exposes the kinds of tensions that really mattered in Jacobean culture. It will be an invaluable resource for literary scholars and historians alike.

Acknowledgments; List of abbreviations; Introduction: Jacobean press censorship and the 'unsatisfying impasse' in the historiography of Stuart England; 1. Authority, license and law: the theory and practice of censorship; 2. Burning books as propaganda; 3. The personal use of censorship in 'the wincy age'; 4. Censorship and the confrontation between prerogative and privilege; 5. The press and foreign policy, 1619–24: 'all eies are directed upon Bohemia'; 6. Ecclesiastical faction, censorship and the rhetoric of silence; Afterword; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Cyndia Susan Clegg is Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Pepperdine University. She is the author of Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and The Peaceable and Prosperous Reign of our Blessed Queene Elizabeth (2001).