Censorship and Self-censorship in Late Sixteenth-century English Book Illustration

Although an extensive and expanding scholarly literature has been devoted to censorship of the press in early modern England, this has almost comprehensively overlooked or ignored the issue of printed illustrations. This chapter will seek to position printed pictures within the systems of control that governed the production of legitimate Protestant books published under licence during the second half of the sixteenth century.1 By concentrating in particular on the doctoring of controversial religious illustrations in two titles produced by the Elizabethan printer John Day, it will be argued that book illustration can serve as a valuable index of the individual accommodations and adaptations that constituted the ongoing cultural impact of the Reformation.