SOURCE: Kelen, Sarah A. “‘It Is Dangerous (Gentle Reader)’: Censorship, Holinshed's Chronicle, and the Politics of Control.” Sixteenth Century Journal 27, No. 3 (Fall 1996): 705-20.

In the essay below, Kelen explores the dynamics of censorship surrounding the Chronicles, analyzing Holinshed's self-enforced censorship as well as types of external control employed by readers and by the Tudor government.

Paradoxically, censorship gets a lot of press. Libraries set up displays of banned books, and for those of us who would claim affiliation with any political group to the left of fascism and to the right of Maoism, that a given book has been banned stands somehow as a mark of its “truth” and virtue (and, of course, of our own for being outraged at the very fact of censorship). Indeed, censorship is so popular as a topic (if not a practice) that the January 1994 number of PMLA was dedicated to a cluster...