The first six weeks

Week 1: Introduction—censorship in Greece and Rome
Required reading: Frederick H. Cramer, ‘Bookburning and Censorship in Ancient Rome’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 6, no.2 (April 1945), 157-196;
Christianity and censorship—the Nicene Creed

Weeks 2 and 3: Inquisitions—Giordano Bruno and Galileo—Vatican and the Index Librorum Prohibitorum
Required reading: Bertold Brecht, Galileo

Week 4: Censorship and the Elizabethan stage
Suggested reading: Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988)
Janet Clare, Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999)

Week 5: Print censorship in 16th and 17th century England—Stationers’ Company—licensing acts—Miltons’ Areopagitica—Roger L’Estrange
Required reading: John Milton, Areopagitica

Week 6: Censorship in the 18th Century—Jeremy Collier—Stage Licensing Acts—Curll’s Venus in Cloister—Stamp Acts—Thomas Bowdler and Bowdlerization
Required reading: Jeremy Collier, Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage (1696)
Alexander Pettit, ‘Rex v. Curll: Pornography and punishment in court and on the page’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, Spring 2001
Suggested reading: Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1982