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  • Letter
  • Randy Robertson

To the Editors:

Cyndia Clegg’s review of Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Autumn 2011, 84–86), begins fairly enough, offering an extensive and balanced resumé of the monograph’s chapters.

Clegg proffers questions and criticisms, along with praise. Some of the questions are pertinent. She cogently asks what percentage of the censored works that I turned up in my archival research are literary, as literature is, after all, the book’s main focus. Clearly the vast majority of works censored in the early modern period were not poems, but political or religious polemics. In fairness, Censorship and Conflict is not exclusively devoted to works of imaginative literature, and in any event, the boundaries among genres were less pronounced in early modern England than they are now—histories, dialogues, and other genres deployed what we tend to think of as “literary” techniques—but her question entails a salutary reminder that literature did not cut a wide swath across the seventeenth-century book trade.

Clegg’s discussion of the licensing machinery in civil war and Restoration England is less compelling. Her observation, for example, that the suppression of works lacking only the Stationers’ license “had little to do with ideological censorship” is beside the point. It is of course true that some of the Stationers’ Company’s raids on printing houses and booksellers’ shops related merely to the infringement of a Stationer’s copyright or the Company’s stock and, therefore, had nothing to do with the ideological content of the works in question, but I carefully excluded these instances from my tally of “suspect” works (see p. 8: “By my count, the number of works intended for print publication that the government deemed ‘suspect’ was at least 2,600 titles and editions of them, excluding serials and periodicals”). Moreover, such cases of copyright and stock infringement represent a relatively modest portion of the works suppressed from 1641–1695, as the government’s raids far outnumbered those of the Stationers. From the civil wars forward, the overwhelming majority of works that were seized and suppressed provoked ideological conflict.

On the issue of unlicensed publications more generally, as Michael Treadwell points out, and as I note in my book, the authorities often used the lack of a government license—which is distinct, as I make clear, from the Stationers’ “license” (see, inter alia, pp. 8–9, 31)—to suppress a work that they deemed objectionable, as it was easier to prove that a book was unlicensed than that it was “seditious.” What is more, in many warrants and examinations dealing with “scandalous” or “seditious libels,” the government highlighted the publications’ unlicensed status. Thus, when Clegg maintains that “[t]he real issues in ideological censorship, especially, after the Civil Wars, were treason and sedition as defined by the statutes and the courts,” she is only half right, as, contrary to what she seems to suggest, the laws on sedition and treason usually worked in concert with the licensing laws.

I included more material on the intimidation and punishment of authors, printers, and booksellers than Ms. Clegg implies (see, aside from the Prynne chapter, 10–11, 74–75, 106, 130–31, 151, 153, 198, 212n., etc.), but more remains to be said. I am currently writing a book on the ways in which censorship threaded its way through early modern discourse. Many of the questions that Clegg poses, however, can be answered by examining the Index that I published online as a companion piece to the book, an annotated list of all books and pamphlets censored in the British Isles and British North America 1641–1700 (http://susqu.academia.edu/RandyRobertson). [End Page 144]

Randy Robertson
Susquehanna University
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