11 - Censorship

Summary

Histories of the book often seem to assume that there could be no censorship before print – or that only print culture's technologies of rapid reproduction made censorship necessary. Yet this has not stopped scholars who focus on manuscript culture from claiming that the century or so before print was an era of ‘draconian censorship’. This chapter aims to survey the evidence for censorship in the century or so before print and suggest what larger questions it may pose to us. Even if the regulation of book-copying and ownership were more difficult before printing, still books before print and stories about these books do seem to show the effects of aspirations towards censorship. These aspirations were articulated in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries through secular and ecclesiastical legislation that proposes to regulate speech and writing in order to combat the twin, and sometimes overlapping, fears of heresy and treason. That these are aspirations, rather than accomplishments, is worth emphasizing, for legislation often tells us more about what was desired than what happened. Whatever effects censorship had were more complex and subtle than a simple shutting-down – or even an overall atmosphere of severe repression. This was an era in which book production burgeoned and diversified – in which printed books were at first a feature of this diversification, developing alongside continued manuscript production and not strictly separable from it.