This collection offers bold reappraisals of the history of freedom of speech in the pre-modern Anglophone world. It addresses the aims and effectiveness of official policies, the thorny issues with which contemporaries grappled and the claims that were and were not made about freedom of expression.

Robert G. Ingram is Professor of History at Ohio University
Jason Peacey is Professor of Early Modern British History at University College London
Alex W. Barber is Assistant Professor of Early Modern British History at Durham University

1 Freedom of speech in England and the Anglophone world, 1500-1850 - Jason Peacey, Robert G. Ingram and Alex W. Barber
2 Thomas Elyot on counsel, kairos and freeing speech in Tudor England - Joanne Paul
3 Pearls before swine: limiting godly speech in early seventeenth-century England - Karl Gunther
4 'Free speech' in Elizabethan and early Stuart England - Peter Lake
5 The origins of the concept of freedom of the press - David Como
6 Swift and free speech - David Womersley
7 Defending the truth: arguments for free speech and their limits in early eighteenth-century Britain and France - Ann Thomson
8 'The warr... against heaven by blasphemors and infidels': prosecuting heresy in Enlightenment England - Robert G. Ingram and Alex W. Barber
9 David Hume and 'Of the Liberty of the Press' (1741) in its original contexts - Max Skjönsberg
10 The argument for the freedom of speech and press during the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, 1787-8 - Patrick Peel
11 Before - and beyond - On Liberty: Samuel Bailey and the nineteenth-century theory of free speech - Greg Conti
12 Unfree, unequal, unempirical: press freedom, British India and Mill's theory of the public - Christopher Barker
Index