Search and Seize: Partisan Publishers and Press Controls in Thomason’s London
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eBLJ_2023-article5_Como_DR_VoR_BY.pdf
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Resource type
Journal article
Creator (person)
Como, David R.
Date published
January 29, 2024
Abstract
The Thomason collection is recognised as being vital for exploring the dramatic developments in print culture that accompanied the English Revolution, not least those that were made possible by the collapse of press censorship in 1641. Less widely appreciated is that it also sheds valuable light upon the attempts that were subsequently made to reimpose some kind of press oversight. This essay explores a range of unique items that Thomason preserved, which reveal his fascination with, and intimate knowledge of, developments in the print trade, not least as recorded by his annotations on specific items. What emerges is a picture of the complex political machinations that surrounded cheap print during the revolutionary decades, and deeper understanding of the kinds of engagement and activism with which stationers became involved. As such, it highlights the possibilities that exist for integrating the history of print culture into the wider political history of the age.
Journal title
Electronic British Library Journal
Volume
2023
Article number
5
Publisher
British Library
Place of publication
London, UK
eISSN
1478-0259
Date accepted
March 3, 2023
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In Copyright
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Additional information
Author note: David R. Como is Professor of History at Stanford University. He is the author of Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in pre-Civil War England (2004), and Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War (2018), which won the 2019 Samuel Pepys Award. His many articles include: ‘Puritans, Antinomians and Laudians in Caroline London, (Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 1999); ‘Orthodoxy and its discontents: dispute settlement and the production of ‘consensus’ in the London (Puritan) underground’ (Journal of British Studies, 2000); ‘Predestination and political conflict in Laud’s London’ (Historical Journal, 2003); ‘Secret printing, the crisis of 1640, and the origins of Civil War radicalism’ (Past and Present, 2007); ‘Print, censorship and ideological escalation in the English Civil War’ (Journal of British Studies, 2012); ‘Making ‘the Heads of the Proposals’: the king, the Army, the Levellers and the roads to Putney’ (English Historical Review, 2020); and ‘Printing the Levellers: clandestine print, radical propaganda, and the New Model Army’ (The Library, 2021).
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