El ensayo fundacional de la libertad de prensa en la tradición constitucional euroatlántica: la Areopagitica de John Milton. Repercusión e influencia en la Inglaterra de su tiempo, 1644-1674

The text that the republican poet John Milton wrote with the suggestive title of Areopagitica, A speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing to the Parlament of England to demand the extinction of the censorship system in force in England in 1644 is considered the foundational essay of press freedom in the Euro-Atlantic constitutional tradition. Nevertheless, most of Miltonists have maintained that the Areopagitica happened completely unnoticed in the revolutionary England of the XVIIth century. In this study, however, is analyzed to what extent the Areopagitica is present in the tolerationist literature of the Puritan period and, especially, in the writings of the Leveller movement against the strengthening of the control of the press in 1649, surfacing even during the Restoration, in the religious controversy of 1672-1673, spreading this way the influence of the Areopagitica for three decades, from its appearance in 1644 until Milton’s death in 1674.