Blasphemy : verbal offense against the sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie
Traces the varied meanings of blasphemy throughout Western law. Leonard Levy argues that while past sanctions against the crime have inhibited all manner of cultural, political, scientific, and literary expression, we also pay a price for our extraordinary expansion of the scope of permissible speech. We have become, he charges, not only a free society but one that is “numb” to outrage.
Print Book, English, 1995
University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1995
History
xi, 688 pages ; 24 cm
9780807845158, 0807845159
31045017
Origins of the offense
The Jewish trial of Jesus
Christianity transforms blasphemy
Compelling heretics
Protestantism rediscovers blasphemy
The fires of Smithfield
Socinian anti-Trinitarians
The ranters: antinomianism run amok
The early English Quakers
Christianity becomes the law of the land
Early colonial America: Gorton and the Quakers
American from 1660 to 1800
England's Augustan age of toleration
Blasphemy and obscenity
The "age of reason"
Eaton to Carlile: deism for the people
Carlile's shopmen and free expression
Early American state cases
England reconsiders the law of blasphemy
English prosecutions of the 1840s
Bible burning and a debate revived
Bradlaugh, Foote, and Coleridge's decency test
The age of John W. Gott
The American middle period: 1880-1940
Modern America
The gay news case
The Rushdie affair: should all religions be protected or none?
Originally published: 1st ed. New York : Knopf, 1993
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