Print, Censorship, and Ideological Escalation in the English Civil War

Como, David R.

doi:10.1086/666848

Cited by 16 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 25 publications

(5 reference statements)

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“…On February 9, four days after the raid of Dexter's premises, the bookseller and collector George Thomason acquired a tract by Roger Williams evidently made with Dexter's type. 48 It may be that this tract had been printed several days earlier. But if Thomason's copy was fresh off the press, like many of the other texts that he collected, it would suggest that at least some of Dexter's type had not been seized.…”

Section: Gregory Dextermentioning

confidence: 99%

Damaged Type and Areopagitica's Clandestine Printers

Warren¹,

Wiliams²,

Rijhwani³

et al. 2020

Milton Studies

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Milton's Areopagitica (1644) is one of the most significant texts in the history of the freedom of the press, and yet the pamphlet's clandestine printers have successfully eluded identification for over 375 years. By examining distinctive and damaged type pieces from 100 pamphlets from the 1640s, this article attributes the printing of Milton's Areopagitica to the London printers Matthew Simmons and Thomas Paine, with the possible involvement of Gregory Dexter. It further reveals a sophisticated ideological program of clandestine printing executed collaboratively by Paine and Simmons throughout 1644 and 1645 that includes not only Milton's Areopagitica but also Roger Williams's The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, William Walwyn's The Compassionate Samaritane, Henry Robinson's Liberty of Conscience, Robinson's John the Baptist, and Milton's Of Education, Tetrachordon, and Colasterion.

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Section: Gregory Dextermentioning

confidence: 99%

Damaged Type and Areopagitica's Clandestine Printers

Warren¹,

Wiliams²,

Rijhwani³

et al. 2020

Milton Studies

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show abstract

“…Essentially, once a metallic type piece is damaged, whether by being dropped on the ground, warped under pressure, or some other means, the type-imprints produced by the type piece become unique like a fingerprint as illustrated in Figure 2 and the top of Figure 3. Manual forensic analyses of these most distinctive aberration patterns-bends and fractures, as well as other tell-tale cues identified by bibliographers, have produced evidence connecting anonymously printed works with known printers (Weiss 1992;van den Berg and Howard 2004;Achinstein and Burton 2013;Garrett 2014;Bricker 2016;Lavin 1972;Adams 2010;Como 2012). For example, Charlton Hinman's pioneering work in the 1960s exhaustively compared all letterforms across 55 copies of Shakespeare's First Folio using careful notetaking methods to uncover the collation process (Turner 1966;Hinman 1963).…”

Section: Early Modern Print and Damaged Type Piecesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contrastive Attention Networks for Attribution of Early Modern Print

Vogler

Goyal

Reddy

et al. 2023

AAAI

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In this paper, we develop machine learning techniques to identify unknown printers in early modern (c.~1500--1800) English printed books. Specifically, we focus on matching uniquely damaged character type-imprints in anonymously printed books to works with known printers in order to provide evidence of their origins. Until now, this work has been limited to manual investigations by analytical bibliographers. We present a Contrastive Attention-based Metric Learning approach to identify similar damage across character image pairs, which is sensitive to very subtle differences in glyph shapes, yet robust to various confounding sources of noise associated with digitized historical books. To overcome the scarce amount of supervised data, we design a random data synthesis procedure that aims to simulate bends, fractures, and inking variations induced by the early printing process. Our method successfully improves downstream damaged type-imprint matching among printed works from this period, as validated by in-domain human experts. The results of our approach on two important philosophical works from the Early Modern period demonstrate potential to extend the extant historical research about the origins and content of these books.

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“…Scholar David Cosmo commented that the Cromwellian period was characterized by "parallel processes of radicalization, ultimately allowing for bloody regicidal denouement and a constitutional upheaval that would have been unthinkable for most English subjects in 1640." 17 The Interregnum flagrantly rejected established rule of law and resorted to violence as a political tool, especially evident when the Protectorate took aim at moderate Parliamentary Anglicans who disagreed with the regicide of Charles I. 18 While the Instrument of Government, which formally established constitutional rule of the Protectorate in 1653, may have intended to balance liberty of conscience with the framework of a national religion, what resulted was only an equally stringent grip on the religious life of the nation.…”

Section: The Anglican Church During the Seventeenth Centurymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Latitudinarian Influence on Early English Liberalism

2020

JoUR

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This paper takes the unexpected position that early liberal thought developed in transformative events within the Anglican Church during the second half of the seventeenth century. The historical evolution of religion laid the foundation of English political and intellectual philosophy, as supported by works written by the branch of Anglican churchmen known as the Latitudinarians. I will argue that these ministers were foremost in advancing the argument for religious toleration because their religious writings held political consequence. Toleration was the principle value of liberalism in the late seventeenth century because the problem of Dissenters was so pertinent to English religious life. In contrast to the official Anglican Church policy of intolerance of anything that did not conform to the official catechism of the Church, the Latitudinarian minsters-turned-bishops encouraged toleration and accommodation of religious thought in their sermons, ideals they based on their novel understanding of individuality, rationality, and theology. While not Dissenters themselves, the sympathy of these clergymen for Dissenters was evident in their pamphlets, books, and sermons.

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Print, Censorship, and Ideological Escalation in the English Civil War

Cited by 16 publications

References 25 publications

Damaged Type and Areopagitica's Clandestine Printers

Damaged Type and Areopagitica's Clandestine Printers

Contrastive Attention Networks for Attribution of Early Modern Print

The Latitudinarian Influence on Early English Liberalism

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