The Early Modern Press: Fake News, Rumour and Freedom of Speech

Week 4

Tutor: Mark Knights

This seminar...

Required preparation

Seminar questions

Key texts

Primary sources

Further reading

Helen Berry, Gender, Society and Print Culture in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural World of the Athenian Mercury (2003).

David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (2005).

Conal Condren, Satire, Lies and Politics: The Case of Dr Arbuthnot (1997).

Faramerz Dabhoiwala, What is Free Speech: The History of a Dangerous Idea (2025).

Clare Egan, ‘Libel in the Provinces: Disinformation and ‘Disreputation’ in Early Modern England’, Past & Present , 257..Suppl. 16 (2022) 75-110.

James Holstun, Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolution (1992).

Kate Loveman, Reading Fictions, 1660-1740: Deception in English Literary and Political Culture (Ashgate Publishing, 2008).

J. Louise McCray, ""Peril in the means of its diffusion": William Godwin on Truth and Social Media."

Journal of the History of Ideas 81, no. 1 (2020): 67-84

Mark Knights, The Devil in Disguise: Deception, Delusion and Fanaticism in the Early English Enlightenment (2011).

Douglas Patey, Probability and Literary Form: Philosophic Theory and Literary Practice in the Augustan Age (1984).

Jordan E. Taylor, Misinformation nation: Foreign news and the politics of truth in revolutionary America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022).

Ann Thomson, “Defending the truth : arguments for free speech and their limits in early eighteenth-century Britain and France” in Freedom of speech, 1500-1850, edited by Robert G. Ingram, Jason Peacey and Alex W. Barber (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).

Beyond Britain:

Jordan Taylor, Misinformation Nation: Foreign News and the Politics of Truth in Revolutionary America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022)