This collection offers bold reappraisals of the history of freedom of speech in the pre-modern Anglophone world. It addresses the aims and effectiveness of official policies, the thorny issues with which contemporaries grappled and the claims that were and were not made about freedom of expression.

This collection brings together historians, political theorists and literary scholars to provide historical perspectives on the modern debate over freedom of speech, particularly the question of whether limitations might be necessary given religious pluralism and concerns about hate speech. It integrates religion into the history of free speech and rethinks what is sometimes regarded as a coherent tradition of more or less absolutist justifications for free expression. Contributors examine the aims and effectiveness of government policies, the sometimes contingent ways in which freedom of speech became a reality and a wide range of canonical and non-canonical texts in which contemporaries outlined their ideas and ideals. Overall, the book argues that while the period from 1500 to 1850 witnessed considerable change in terms of both ideas and practices, these were more or less distinct from those that characterise modern debates.

1 Freedom of speech in England and the Anglophone world, 1500–1850 – Jason Peacey, Robert G. Ingram and Alex W. Barber2 Thomas Elyot on counsel, kairos and freeing speech in Tudor England – Joanne Paul3 Pearls before swine: limiting godly speech in early seventeenth-century England – Karl Gunther4 ‘Free speech’ in Elizabethan and early Stuart England – Peter Lake5 The origins of the concept of freedom of the press – David Como6 Swift and free speech – David Womersley7 Defending the truth: arguments for free speech and their limits in early eighteenth-century Britain and France – Ann Thomson8 ‘The warr… against heaven by blasphemors and infidels’: prosecuting heresy in Enlightenment England – Robert G. Ingram and Alex W. Barber9 David Hume and ‘Of the Liberty of the Press’ (1741) in its original contexts – Max Skjönsberg10 The argument for the freedom of speech and press during the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, 1787–8 – Patrick Peel11 Before – and beyond – On Liberty: Samuel Bailey and the nineteenth-century theory of free speech – Greg Conti12 Unfree, unequal, unempirical: press freedom, British India and Mill’s theory of the public – Christopher BarkerIndex

This collection brings together historians, political theorists and literary scholars to provide historical perspectives on the modern debate over freedom of speech, particularly the question of whether limitations might be necessary given religious pluralism and concerns about hate speech. It integrates religion into the history of free speech and rethinks what is sometimes regarded as a coherent tradition of more or less absolutist justifications for free expression. Contributors examine the aims and effectiveness of government policies, the sometimes contingent ways in which freedom of speech became a reality and a wide range of canonical and non-canonical texts in which contemporaries outlined their ideas and ideals. Overall, the book argues that while the period from 1500 to 1850 witnessed considerable change in terms of both ideas and practices, these were more or less distinct from those that characterise modern debates.