The Royalist reader

Abstract

This chapter pursues the textual strategies deployed by Royalists in their attempts to control the actualization of a text, having already controlled through censorship the composition of it. Analysis of the effects of censorship and reading practices is notoriously difficult, and this chapter presents a necessarily generalized account. In the same way that identity is multiple and complex, reading is something that is equally difficult to conceive of at a distance. We run the risk of imposing paradigms that simply obfuscate. However, the idea that specific types of reading were possible, and that the text was something that fundamentally contributed to religious, educational and social identity formation was a contemporary issue. Recent studies, particularly using the work of Jurgen Habermas, have considered the fundamental importance of texts and the ‘uses of books’ to the conflict.¹ The dissemination and interpretation of information is fundamental to the approaches of Parliamentary thinkers like John Hall, John Milton and Samuel Hartlib.² In particular, the educational writings of these thinkers insisted upon the influence of reading upon the formation of the reasoning mind, and thence the improvement of the state. Reading was to be interrogative and constructive, leading to a highly developed mind and a closer affinity to God.