Abstrakt
The study published in the monographic volume "The Enlightenment in Bohemia: religion, morality and multiculturalism" (eds. Cerman, I.; Krueger, R.; Reynolds, S.) investigates the practice of censorship and the traditionally assumed shift towards its more restrictive exercise in the Bohemian lands during the 1780s and 1790s.
This shift is described not only on the basis of legislation but as a defensive reaction to the evolution of reading, here considered as ''a social practice and a market''. The statistical analysis of two registers of censored books (1790 and 1799) reveals a dramatically increasing proportion of banned or barely tolerated novels, newspapers and journals, and also a re-centralisation of censorship.
Furthermore, a comparative analysis of Prague booksellers'' catalogues shows that censorship did not eradicate any kinds of books but had an impact on access to information about books, a type of control that mainly affected the least privileged readers.