Licensing libel in seventeenth-century England: John White’s First Century of Scandalous, Malignant Priests in context/s

This article explores the polemical history of John White’s First Century of Scandalous, Malignant Priests (1643) to argue that the revolutionary public culture of England’s mid-century civil wars transformed seventeenth-century libellous politics by rendering ad hominem defamation into a routine element of formal partisan print culture for the first time in English history. The article concludes by demonstrating that when the Century reappeared in print eighty years later to excoriate a new generation of clergymen, public defamation had become a mundane, although still controversial, element of English political culture.