Censorship is the suppression of speech that not everyone considers harmful. Public discourse is regulated through a multitude of mechanisms, from conventions of syntax and address, codes of civility, and professional protocols to laws against defamation, fraud, and theft of intellectual property. Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu have likewise alerted us to how orthodoxies of thought may become so entrenched that they go unrecognized as controls on speech.1 For these theorists, such tacit acceptance that some speech has already been silenced represents the most insidious form of censorship. Yet their arguments neglect the most important qualitative dimension in how censorship is usually perceived, which is precisely that censorship is experienced as a prohibition. Whether it is an author stymied by state licensers or too afraid to speak plainly, a reader precluded by the church from obtaining heretical or erotic material, or a publisher threatened with violence over the dissemination of satires and caricatures, all confront censorship as a constraint on their liberty.