Abstract
From the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, overlapping phenomena—humanism, the Italian Renaissance, the Black Death, the invention of the moveable-type printing press and the Protestant Reformation—began to upend the obligation-based system of property relations. When the plague swept through Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century, killing one-third of the population, it rattled every institution of the medieval world, setting many peasants free from feudal obligations. Traumatized survivors saw that high birth, social status or spiritual rank did not protect a person from the undiscriminating hand of death.
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Notes
- 1.
Clark (1972) at p. 145.
- 2.
The Stationers were members of a guild consisting of allied trades recognized by the City of London in 1403. Their name recognized the dominant role of the booksellers, who contracted the services of other trades in the production of a book. Booksellers, the forerunners of modern publishers, played an integral part in the political and legal dramas that established the boundaries of statutory copyright in the eighteenth century.
- 3.
By the mid-1530s, the royal coffers were depleted by earlier wasteful wars with France, and court expenditure. Henry needed money, and influenced by his Lord Chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, a Protestant who wanted to demolish the apparatus of the Catholic Church, he decided to dissolve all monasteries in England.
- 4.
Some of the wealthy beneficiaries of Henry’s policy, like a considerable number of gentry of more modest means, embraced religious non-conformism and their descendants contributed to the ranks of the parliamentary party that, a 100 years later, fought the Civil War against King Charles.
- 5.
He drafted a proclamation that, among other things, required the destruction of proscribed texts, and prohibited the importation, without royal licence, of books in English printed abroad.
- 6.
The Long Parliament, convened in 1640 by the financially desperate King Charles I, abolished the Star Chamber and its licensing decree of 1637, which had reduced the number of licensed printers to 23 and increased the severity of penalties. Political and religious controversy now flourished. In 2 years the number of pamphlets printed grew from about 22 to nearly 2,000. Civil war broke out in 1642 and in 1643, parliament, fearful of criticism, reinstated licensing. In 1644, the poet John Milton published The Areopagitica, a tract notable for its bigotry towards the Catholic faith but also famous for its argument that censorship degrades rather than protects society. Dr Samuel Johnson, who wrote an unflattering biography of the poet, expressed scepticism about Milton’s enthusiasm for liberty: ‘they who clamour most loudly for liberty do not most liberally grant it’.
- 7.
King Charles II reinstituted licensing of literature in 1662, and though the practice lapsed, his successor James II passed a new licensing Act in 1685. Parliament renewed the Act in 1692 for 2 years, then refused to do so again in 1694. The monopoly over printing vanished and the Stationers contended, often successfully, with competitors.
Reference
Clark K (1972) Civilisation. BBC/John Murray, London
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Atkinson, B., Fitzgerald, B. (2014). Printing, Reformation and Information Control. In: A Short History of Copyright. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02075-4_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02075-4_3
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