Thoughts on Censorship and the Freedom of Thinking in Early Modernism. An Example from the History of Ideas: John Milton’s Areopagitica

The purpose of this article is to map the possibilities of free individual thinking (and hence the freedom of reading) in what the author calls a typographic society; that is, a society in which every reader has the right to produce and interpret texts, and the power over the minds and interpretation is taken over by censoring instances. This investigation is achieved by the analysis of a 17th century text, John Milton’s Areopagitica. The author reveals Milton’s ideas about the freedom of reading, connected to the concept of Christian freedom, and related to it, his thoughts on censorship, which he perceives, according to his Protestant tradition, as coming from the Papacy. The results and also the failures of Milton’s line of argumentation are both presented, and the article ends with the actualization of Milton’s ideas for contemporary freedom of thinking.

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