Politics in Printing: Protestantism, Catholicism, Capitalism, and Censorship

Author: Fiona McMurray

Field of Study: Arts and Humanities

Program Affiliation: Source Project Research Program

Faculty Mentors: Bridget Whearty, Jeremy Dibbell

Easel: 38

Timeslot: Morning

Abstract: Imagine a world in which every piece of media ever written must be approved by the government before being publicly distributed. Despite sounding like part of a dystopian novel, this is instead a process known in Latin as “Imprimatur”- or in English, “let it be printed”. This process was first used by the Catholic Church in the mid-1500s but was later adopted by others. A set of books that were Imprimatured in England in the 1700s is a collection of Latin poems held by Binghamton University’s Special collection entitled Musarum Anglicanarum Analecta. The research process into these books studied the Imprimatur process and its relationship to censorship over a period of time, especially since the third volume is an “unauthorized continuation” of the first two. The broader implications of this research could tell us whether Imprimaturing was strictly censorship, or if it was more politically and socially nuanced.