‘The censor’s ellipsis’ in printed books of the time of religious reform in 15th–16th century England: Linguistic and historical aspects

In this study devoted to book censorship in the time of Henry VIII the author tries to supplement general knowledge about political censorship by analyzing its forms, methods, and aims characteristic of a specific historical period and situation. A combination of linguistic (syntactic, grammatical), contextual and bibliographical approaches is used to show the interrelation between political agenda, text semantics, language and text structure, and the forms of medialitypresent in a certain epoch, as manifested by post-factum censorship (that is, applied to texts made public long before). As source material, a valuable copy of Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon, published by Wynkyn de Worde in 1495, now kept in the incunabula collection of the Russian State Library in Moscow, is presented and examined. It offers ample evidence of 16thcentury postfactum censorship carried out in an early printed book. The dating of marginal notes and questions of provenance are discussed in connection with the validity of the copy as a witness of 16thcentury England. The method of ‘blotting out’, introduced by Henry VIII to support his Protestant reforms (cf.: ‘cutte or blotte ‹…› in such wise, as they cannot be perceiued nor red’) concerned certain unwanted words (in the present case this was the lexeme ‘Pope’). Through linguistic and textological analysis the method of post-factum censorship by ‘blotting out’ is theoretically confronted with the concept of linguistic ellipsis. On this basis the blotting outtechnique is analyzed and its effectivity evaluated. It is shown that post-factum censorship by blotting out does not achieve efficient suppression of Catholic ideas in the historical memory; an alternative explanation for its employment would therefore be, that its aim is to enforce obedience and compliance with the current agenda.

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