ABSTRACT
The premise that the emergence of print culture in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries disturbed the epistemic foundations of patriarchal culture rests upon the idea that the printing press's issue - prolific, profligate, and remote from the author's pen - stirred anxieties about the issue of the pen's phallic twin. One particular instance of censorship in the early seventeenth century testifies to the degree to which anxious efforts to control both literary and natural paternity so destabilized a text that it confounded the authority that sought its control. In 1621 the Court of High Commission called upon a Calvinist minister, William Whately, to correct the text of a popular marriage manual, A bride-bush, for allowing divorce. This looks like an anxious effort by patriarchal church authorities to control a printed text that loosened the bond matrimony imposed on female sexuality.
