Dr Thomas Keymer, University Professor, Chancellor Jackman, Professor, University of Toronto on “Authorship, Print, and Sedition in Eighteenth-Century England.”

On the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, wrote the great nineteenth-century historian Thomas Macaulay, “English literature was emancipated, and emancipated for ever, from the control of the government.” Not quite. Pre-publication censorship was at an end; post-publication retribution took over. This lecture considers the consequences for print culture of seditious libel prosecution and the sanction of the pillory, and draws conclusions from exemplary cases involving authors and other book-trade professionals between 1630 and 1820.

Dr Thomas Keymer is University Professor and Chancellor Jackman Professor, University of Toronto.

Lectures will be presented live and online this fall, with audience participation at the end of each presentation.

Note: This lecture will be broadcast on Zoom. To register, please e-mail Anna Maria Romano (annamaria.romano@utoronto.ca) by Friday 18 September

Start times for lectures to be determined.

Since the 2010-11 Friends of Fisher season, most of the lectures have been recorded and been made freely available online. To see the entire list of lectures that have been recorded, along with other audio podcasts, please visit our Fisher Audio page.