ABSTRACT
The title of this book, Print and Power in France and England 1500-1800, broadly engages two important strands in contemporary literary studies: the history of the book and a New Historicism infl ected by Foucault’s focus on how individuals are shaped by institutions. On one reading, then, the phrase ‘print media and social control’ might imply that print is enlisted in a grand project of enforcing limits and ensuring stability. In this reading, print media operates as something like, say, the prison in Foucault’s work, repressing and constituting simultaneously. Much has been claimed for print’s constitutive and exclusionary role, from a new form of psychological self-awareness to new, contractual forms of political arrangements. But it is not at all clear that print, printed text at least, actually does increase social control. The evidence from the 1640s in England, after the relaxing of the Star Chamber’s control over print, suggests the opposite in fact. Then, a newly-accessible press produced an extraordinary number of titles – more in 1642 than would be printed in any year until 1695, according to Thomas Corns’ Uncloistered Virtue.1 During the same period, of course, England also experienced Civil Wars and the execution of its monarch, Charles I. In this case, print media seems to have profoundly undermined social control; contemporaries certainly thought that it had. Thus, read another way, the topic of the current book raises instead the question of whether the spread of print invites a corresponding interest in social control and attempts at using print media to achieve it.
