For more than thirty years, historians of the Holy Roman Empire have registered little discernible interest in imperial censorship during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As historical scholarship has evolved in its understanding of the Holy Roman Empire during this period, it has lagged behind in its appreciation for how imperial authorities controlled expression and regulated the book trade. Old assumptions about imperial censorship have been slow to wither and decay even though assumptions about the Empire have been reexamined and revised. Where a growing appreciation for the Empire's complexities spurred interest in territorial and civic censorship, a corresponding interest in imperial censorship has not developed. Interestingly, the two–old assumptions and modern revisionist histories–have conspired to moot studies of the imperial government, its policies, and its procedures, which has meant that the significance of imperial censorship in the Empire has been largely overlooked. Moreover, historians' attention to local controls and regulations has inspired a more nuanced approach to censorship than had previously prevailed, leading to a general reassessment of how censorship influenced the circulation and reception of ideas in both positive and negative ways. Imperial censorship has failed to register its mark in this regard as well. Using a combination of imperial censorship legislation, archival documents, and printed primary sources, this dissertation charts imperial censorship during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as both a concept and a practice. Unable to enforce religious uniformity in the Empire after the Reformation's successful establishment in the 1520s, imperial legislation came to rely on libel, rather than heresy, as the formal basis for its censorship policies. Libel was an ambiguous category of illicit expression, the interpretation of which depended a great deal on the contingencies of context and the subjective preferences of enforcers. This affected how imperial and local authorities, respectively, interacted on matters of censorship, requiring more negotiation and cooperation than has heretofore been appreciated.

This thesis has three objectives. Its primary objective is to examine, and critically evaluate, the theoretical accounts offered by Hans Kelsen and Joseph Raz to explain the temporal continuity and discontinuity of legal systems. In particular, it evaluates the explanatory power of those accounts by combining an abstract analysis of the accounts in principle and an evaluation based on systematically applying them to one concrete, historically circumstanced instance: the legal systems of British derivation in Australia between 1788 and 2001. The thesis thus tests each account’s factual fit: how adequately it corresponds to, accords with, and persuasively makes sense of, the facts – including complex social facts, attitudes and normative standards – for which it purports to offer an account. Second, the thesis aims to demonstrate, more generally, the utility of applying theoretical accounts to a particular historical instance to complement abstract analysis. Third, the thesis aims to advance the understanding of the evolution of Australian legal systems between 1788 and 2001. These three objectives are achieved through the critical exposition and reconstruction of the accounts, their development and enrichment where refinement is appropriate, their application to the specific context of Australia and their evaluation, individually and in comparison.