<P>This article is a historical treatment of censorship focusing on the impact of Christianity on censorship and copyright regulation in English-speaking countries.</P>
<P>As the winds of reaction rise once more off some mythic sea to buffet the coast line of the arts, it is appropriate to step back and consider the origins of an ongoing threat to artistic freedom: censorship. This article begins the trace with the twin roots of Western civilization: (1) the classical world of ancient Greece and Rome where censorship of the spoken and written world began and (2) the Judeo-Christian-Islamic world from which censorship of the visual image evolved.<BR><BR>From these twin roots, I trace censorship through the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Shifting attention to Tudor England, I outline the use and abuse of art for political and religious purposes; I explore the triangular tension between Roman Catholicism , the Church of England, and Protestantism. I show that it was from these tensions that the Puritans fled to America to escape art and how, later, these same tensions caused dissenters from the Church of England, unable to attend university because of their faith, to initiate the industrial revolution, and demonstrate that it was from Protestant values that modern economics, emerging in the late eighteenth century, adopted its hostile attitude to the arts.</P>
<P>I reveal that the common law origins of a unique English concept of artists' rights called copyright were founded in this period of English history.<BR><BR>CONTENTS<BR>Tainted Roots. <BR>English Heritage. <BR>Copyright and Censorship.</P>