Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1 Censorship and the law: the Caroline inheritance
- Chapter 2 Print in the time of Parliament: 1625–1629
- Chapter 3 Transformational literalism: the reactionary redefinition of the courts of High Commission and Star Chamber
- Chapter 4 Censorship and the Puritan press
- Chapter 5 The printers and press control in the 1630s
- Chapter 6 The end of censorship
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 2 - Print in the time of Parliament: 1625–1629
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1 Censorship and the law: the Caroline inheritance
- Chapter 2 Print in the time of Parliament: 1625–1629
- Chapter 3 Transformational literalism: the reactionary redefinition of the courts of High Commission and Star Chamber
- Chapter 4 Censorship and the Puritan press
- Chapter 5 The printers and press control in the 1630s
- Chapter 6 The end of censorship
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In 1628 Henry Burton, the godly rector of St. Matthew's Church in Friday Street, London, noted a changing climate for preachers and religious writers that had begun, he said, seven years past:
Yea, what a Metamorphosis have wee seene already in these our daies? How unlike is the present time to the former which we have seene? For, as I told the L. Bp. of London, it was a pitifull thing to see the strange alteration of these times within this 7 yeares, from those former. For formerly, not a Popish, nor Arminian booke durst peepe out; but now, such onely are countenanced and published, & Orthodox bookes suppressed. It was not wont to be so, my Lord, quoth I. And … [some] hath dared of late dayes to encroach even upon the liberty of Preaching itselfe, that [sic] in the most publicke place of the Kingdome. Preachers have been beene forced sometime before, to show their Sermons before they were preached, and some were not suffred to preach for their very texts sake … Therefore you see the case is altered.
As a conforming Calvinist, which he indeed was in 1628, Burton here expresses concern not only with the changing conditions of print culture that were occurring in the 1620s but also with the increasingly divisive climate within the Church of England as two rival factions struggled with what precisely it meant to be “Orthodox.”
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- Information
- Press Censorship in Caroline England , pp. 44 - 98Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008