John Milton: Life, Writing, Reputation – Edited by Paul Hammond and Blair Worden

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REVIEWS

Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Milton.Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2009. xxii + 715pp. ISBN 13: 978-0-19-921088-6. $150.00 (cloth).

Louis Schwartz

This is a very impressive and useful collection of essays that deserves all of thepraise it has gotten so far in reviews and the award it received from the MiltonSociety of America (the Irene Samuel Award for best collection of essays on Miltonpublished in 2009). It is in some ways, however, an odd volume, or at least in someways awkward to use as a “handbook” per se—at least for readers new to Milton orin the context of an undergraduate classroom. If the term “handbook” suggests aguide for readers new to Milton looking for brief introductory essays on basic con-textual or thematic issues, then the title of this collection is a little misleading.Several of the essays in the volume do provide that sort of introductory guidance,but most of them are aimed at more advanced students and scholars, and many ofthem have their own scholarly or critical points to make against the backdrop ofearlier debates (in fact, the whole volume has a point to make). These points are allmade forcefully, however, and the volume will be very useful to advanced readers,especially for students and scholars looking for a detailed introduction to recenttrends in the scholarship and especially for those interested in exploring Milton’scareer as a political writer and thinker.

The collection is rich in discussions of issues central to Milton’s political andother controversial writings: matters of national identity, the relationship betweenpolitical and religious institutions, the nature and value of “liberty” in politics, reli-gion, and domestic life, and gender relations, especially in the context of contempo-rary debates on the subject. Many of the essays in the collection also pay keenattention to new developments in the history of the book, especially to theoriesabout the editing of early modern texts and the historical study of reading practices.

As the editors note in their introduction, the collection is meant as a kind ofcompanion to Oxford’s new multi-volume edition of the Complete Works of JohnMilton (several of the contributors to the collection either have edited or are in theprocess of editing volumes for the Oxford Works). Like that project, the collectiontries to take into account the “huge expansion” that Milton studies has undergonein the past forty years and the trends that have come to dominate the field in the lasttwenty. The result is a snapshot or cross-section of recent developments with a par-ticular emphasis on the “rise of critical interest in Milton’s political and religiousprose,” which the editors rightly call the “most striking aspect of Milton studies inrecent times.” The volume, as pointed out in the introduction, gives an “unusual. . . amount of space” to the prose and seeks to integrate study of these works morefully with study of the poetry than has been done before in this sort of volume (v).The collection implicitly and convincingly argues that Milton cannot be fully

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understood, and his importance fully appreciated, unless he is approached with abalanced sense of his full engagement with the political and religious controversiesof his day, not just as a poet, but as an active and brilliant controversialist and as apublic servant.

The volume begins with two detailed biographical essays that divide the lifeat 1640-41, and it ends with two essays on Milton’s influence in the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries. Between these two framing sections are six more, three on theprose and three on the poetry. This more or less even division by itself sets thevolume apart from other similar collections that have appeared over the past severalyears. For example, only some six or so of the twenty nine essays that compriseThomas N. Corns’s A Companion to Milton (Blackwell, 2001), are specifically con-cerned with Milton as the author of prose treatises (some sixteen essays deal entirelyor primarily with Milton the poet). Only one essay in Angelica Duran’s A ConciseCompanion to Milton (Blackwell, 2007) deals specifically and exclusively with theprose. Dennis Danielson’s Cambridge Companion (second edition, Cambridge UP,1999) is similarly weighted toward the poetry. In the Handbook, however, there are afull sixteen essays specifically concerned with Milton’s prose and eighteen about thepoetry. The essays and their concerns are also arranged in roughly chronologicalorder, and many of the essays in the volume, no matter what their immediateconcerns, range widely through Milton’s life and works as well as through the widerliterary, religious, and political cultures of the time, fulfilling the editors’ promise thatthe volume will “place both the poetry and the prose in a . . . continuous, unfoldingbiographical and historical context” (v).

Of the essays on the poetry, five cover the “Shorter Poems” (Part 2). Anotherfive (Part 7) cover Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (one covers the 1671volume itself, one essay discusses the brief epic, and three more cover the tragedy—more about the significance of that later). There are also, as of course makes sense, afull eight essays on Paradise Lost, comprising the longest section in the book (Part 6).But the collection also provides a five-essay section on the “Civil War Prose, 1641-1645” (Part 3) that includes a detailed account of the anti-episcopal tracts by NigelSmith (one of the volume’s editors), two essays on the divorce tracts, one by SharonAchinstein and another by Diane Purkiss, and two more, by Ann Hughes and BlairHoxby, on Areopagitica. The essays on Milton and divorce go far beyond the usualdiscussions of Milton’s own argument, its relation to his disappointment with hisfirst marriage, and to the later depiction of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost. Achin-stein and Purkiss, each in different ways, place the tracts in relation to Milton’srapidly changing political and religious commitments, his later political writings, andto the responses that the tracts themselves engendered at the time. Achinstein’s dis-cussion of the four tracts against the backdrop of discussions of marriage within theWestminister Assembly is particularly compelling. Hughes and Hoxby concentrateon the wider political dimensions of Areopagitica, its rejection of what Hughes calls“Presbyterian certainty” (216) and its relation to Milton’s later political arguments.Hoxby is particularly good on the relationship between personal self-mastery andthe political liberty possible in a commonwealth, and he includes a thoughtfuldiscussion of how the tract’s rhetorical style “demonstrates the virtues” it asks itsreaders “to embrace” (234).

Another four essays (Part 5) cover Milton’s Commonplace Book, Of Education,The History of Britain, and De Doctrina Christiana. The first of these, by WilliamPoole, is a particularly useful account of a text not usually covered at all in this sort

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of collection outside of a series of scattered references. The piece on Of Educationby Timothy Raylor convincingly claims that Milton meant the tract as a genuinelypractical proposal for educational reform, part of a wider effort to bring a reformedversion of the French noble academy to England. The essay also establishes somestriking lines of continuity between the Milton of the 1640s concerned with theeducation of an English gentry and the Milton who in the 1630s wrote A Maske andArcades—both of them overtly didactic aristocratic entertainments. Raylor also dem-onstrates the influence that Milton’s reformed conception of the noble academy hadon the Hartlib Circle. Martin Dzelzainis’s essay on The History of Britain provides auseful account of the political continuities between what is a too often marginalizedtext and the mainstream of Milton’s later political writings, and Thomas N. Cornsand Gordon Campbell provide a detailed introduction to De Doctrina Christiana,taking in everything from the nature and provenance of the manuscript to its Latinstyle, and helpfully placing its theological propositions in the generic context ofother continental Latin works of systematic theology. Their comments on what thephysical condition of the manuscript tells us about the blind Milton’s workingmethods and their treatment of the text’s heterodoxies in the context of the conven-tions that governed Latin theological debate are particularly illuminating.

Finally, the second longest section in the volume (Part 4), and the heart of whatit uniquely has to offer, is the seven-essay section on the political and religious tractsof Milton’s final twenty or so years. These comprise his central statements aboutregicide, republicanism, and religious toleration, and the collection examines theircontent and the contexts out of which they arose in great detail. Four essays coverthe regicide tracts and “defenses,” providing a particularly rich account of the textsfor which Milton was most famous (or infamous) in his lifetime. Stephen Fallon’sdiscussion of the contradictory strains of argument in The Tenure of Kings and Magis-trates and Joad Raymond’s careful examination of the rhetoric and occasions ofthe three defenses are particularly strong. Nicholas McDowell (the other editorof the volume) contributes a fascinating essay—one of two he wrote for the collec-tion (the other concerns Lycidas)—on Milton’s allusions to Shakespeare in the regi-cide tracts. The section also provides two essays on the later religious and republicantracts, and one by Paul Stevens that examines Milton’s struggle to re-imagine “Whatit meant to be an Englishman” over the course of his whole career (346).

No other volume of this kind offers so much consideration of Milton as apolitical thinker dynamically engaged in the turbulent debates and upheavals of hisday, and the quality of the attention these essays pay to this aspect of Milton’s careeralone makes the volume’s case for the interest and the validity of thinking aboutMilton this way. The chronological arrangement also allows the pattern of Milton’scareer, with its sometimes alternating and sometimes overlapping periods of poeticand prosaic activity, to unfold before the reader in ways that are not only “continu-ous” in the editor’s sense, but that produce the effect of an unfolding intellectualbiography, a guide to both what changed and did not change in Milton’s thought inthe course of the tumultuous mid-seventeenth century.

The success of the arrangement also, however, reveals one of the collection’sminor flaws or failings. While more essays are offered on Paradise Lost than on anyother text in the canon, the rest of the poetry, with the significant exception ofSamson Agonistes, gets less attention than perhaps it should have (or at least than Iwould have liked, given my own present interests or for a collection I might assignto undergraduates in a Milton course). The essays on the “shorter poems” are all

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very strong. Lycidas and A Maske get substantial consideration. Anne Baynes Coiro’sessay on A Maske, which also includes some very useful discussion of Arcades andplaces Milton’s work in the context of contemporary courtly representations offemale chastity (as represented on stage by elite women themselves), is indeed one ofthe highlights of the whole collection. Gordon Teskey’s discussions of the NativityOde and “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” are first rate and lead seamlessly into Coiro’spiece. There is also a useful essay on the Latin poetry by Estelle Haan, the editor ofMilton’s Latin poetry for the Oxford Complete Works (Haan also provides an essay inPart 4 on the importance of classical Latin poetry to the first defense—she is one offour contributors, along with the two editors and Martin Dzelzainis, who appear inthe volume twice). John Leonard’s essay on the endings of Milton’s sonnets paysuseful attention to some of the sonnets that are often ignored (and there are someshorter comments on a few other often neglected sonnets later in the volume, mostnotably on those to Skinner andVane in Dzelzainis’s essay on the politics of ParadiseLost). Leonard and others offer some exacting and new close readings of the poemsthey cover, but a reader will search the Handbook in vain for fresh, extended accountsof important works like the great late sonnets on the massacre in Piedmont, Milton’sblindness, or the deaths of his wives. It is perhaps to be expected in a volume withthe emphases and concerns of this one that there would be little discussion of “Onthe Death of a Fair Infant,” the Italian poems,“At a Solemn Music,” or “On the Cir-cumcision,” but even “On the New Forcers of Conscience” gets only passing atten-tion, mostly in the context of discussions of the political tracts. The omission of anyextended discussion of the sonnet on the massacre in Piedmont is, in particular, sur-prising. The major late sonnets and Milton’s developmental years as a poet deservenew and fresh attention. Coiro’s essay sheds some tantalizing light, for example, onMilton’s complex engagement with the representation of women in his early work(an understudied thread of preoccupation that runs from “On the Death of a FairInfant” through the sonnets of the 1640s and 1650s in praise of virtuous ladies), butexcept for some of the contextual information provided by Edward Jones’s essay onthe first half of Milton’s life (see below) there is little follow-up on the subject inthe volume.

It needs to be repeated, however, that these are minor complaints given whatthe volume does cover in fresh and abundant detail. There are always trade-offs toany set of editorial or authorial decisions, and McDowell and Smith have madesome very interesting, ambitious, and even risky choices, and mostly their risks havepaid off.

The opening section is a good example of the major advantages and onlyminor disadvantages that come with some of their more ambitious moves. The twobiographical essays that open the collection are both very strong and useful pieces.Nicholas von Maltzahn’s survey of the latter half of the career is an exemplarysketch of Milton’s activities as a poet and polemicist. It covers the turbulent yearsthat preoccupy most of the collection’s authors, and makes a perfect introduction forstudents or for anyone interested in Parts 3-7 of this collection. Edward Jones’ssurvey of the earlier years, however, is more directly concerned with biographicalscholarship itself than with providing a biographical narrative. In fact, it is not somuch a survey of the first thirty or so years of the life as it is a short, but verydetailed, account of what we know and what we do not know about those years.This makes Jones’s essay, on the one hand, too concerned with what the study of thelife entails to be useful for giving first time undergraduate readers an account of that

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life. On the other hand, it will be of tremendous use to advanced undergraduates,graduate students, and scholars looking to begin serious research on aspects of theearly years of Milton’s life. I have already found it extraordinarily useful in framinginquiries into the matter of Milton’s sister Anne, around whom, as Jones notes, anumber of intriguing mysteries continue to hover. So, even though the decision toinclude an essay like this risked making the volume less useful for basic teaching,I would not want to be without Jones’s careful account. It was a risk worth taking.

Other highlights of the collection include Sharon Achinstein’s splendid essayon the divorce tracts, which deserves note for something it has in common withseveral other essays in the collection, especially with Joad Raymond’s piece on therhetoric of Milton’s Latin defenses and N. H. Keeble’s on the later vernacularrepublican tracts. Each of these essays offers a blow-by-blow account of the contextsout of which Milton’s treatises arose, immersing the reader in what is at timesan almost suspenseful account of Milton’s actions and reactions as he played thecomplicated game of public debate and polemic. They allow us to witness thedrama of Milton’s personal investment in these debates, his concern for his ownreputation, and the very human and self-interested anger that sometimes uneasilycoexisted with his deep concern for principle. Essays like these are likely to becomeclassic places for advanced students and scholars to begin projects for furtherinvestigation.

The section on Paradise Lost is, in addition to being the longest in the book,one of its strongest sets of essays. Space considerations disallow detailed commentson all seven, but there are several items or moments worth singling out, among themStuart Curran’s observations in his essay on God about the centrality of self-sacrificein the epic. He identifies willed loss and loving self-sacrifice as the sources of the“kinetic energy” that drives the “ceaseless creativity” of Milton’s universe, a universethat Curran correctly notes would not exist according to the poem had Milton’sGod not decided that only a universe that risked loss and then ultimately required aself-sacrificial restoration could be a “good” universe, better than some state ofthe divine prior to the messy, but by logical necessity better, state that comes withthe creation of separate and free, although not entirely independent, creatures. AsCurran notes,“it is easy . . . to be so alienated by God’s hectoring tone in Book 3 asto overlook the structural schema by which the book develops, which increasinglycenters on the necessity and nature of [an] atonement” that entails a radical separa-tion of God from the Son, the one creature who intimately shares his nature(530-31). Such separation, Curran suggests, is a willed self-loss that is inscribed inboth the act of creation by which the Son was made and all of the subsequent cre-ations enacted through him.

Other essays worth mentioning are Karen L. Edwards’s beautiful discussion ofthe poem’s “vast cosmography” (496), Susan Wiseman’s detailed historical contextu-alization of the poem’s discourses about gender (a fitting companion to the earlieressays on the divorce tracts), and Martin Dzelzainis’s masterly account of therelationship between Milton’s political commitments and the poem’s complicatedpolitical implications. This last essay provides a striking reminder of just how deeplypolitical experience affected Milton’s poetic imagination—especially in his portrayalof Satan. As Dzelzainis trenchantly observes,

much of what Satan says and does is simply unintelligible without anunderstanding of what went on at the heart of the regime to which

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Milton devoted a decade of his life. This is not at all to suggest, asBlake did, that Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it.But it is to call to mind the truism that it takes one to know one.

(568)

Above all, special mention should be made of John Creaser’s essay on the verse.Creaser’s contribution gives a concise and lively account of the propositions hemade about the verse style of Paradise Lost in an important essay published in Reviewof English Studies in 2007. He brings Derek Attridge’s approach to English verserhythm to bear on a comprehensive survey of Milton’s practice in the epic, showinghow pervasively attentive he was to meaningful variation. The essay is rich inexamples and provides a good basic introduction to Attridge’s method, which hassince the early 1980s slowly come to dominate discussions of English prosody.Creaser’s close readings are particularly useful for the way they reveal the thematicimport of Milton’s chosen style as well as the striking effects of which it was capable.As he puts it several times, Milton’s practice with pentameter combines “austeritywith license” embodying a kind of pervasive rhythmic allegory of one of the poem’scentral themes: the dynamic and mutually reinforcing relationship between freedomand obedience. In this way even this most aesthetically concerned of essays still par-ticipates in the rest of the volume’s ongoing examination of Milton’s understandingof “the terms of liberty.” In addition to his observations about stress, Creaser alsooffers a set of acute observations about Milton’s practice with elision and enjamb-ment. Especially helpful is his brief discussion of what he calls “virtual” or “hypo-thetical” elisions, places where syllables slide together in an almost notional way thatpreserves a sense of metical regularity while also allowing lines to expand outwardtoward the line-break for a variety of semantic effects. The extended account ofthe interaction of syntactic and metrical structure in the opening invocation isexemplary.

Another important contribution to discussions of the poetry is provided by thethree essays on Samson Agonistes (actually three and a half, given Laura Knoppers’sattention to the 1671 volume as a whole). It makes sense, of course, that a collectionwith the interest this one displays in Milton’s political writings should provide suchextensive consideration of the tragedy, and this set of discussions fits beautifully withthe set of four essays on the regicide tracts provided in Part 4. Although all ofthe essays recognize the disagreements critics have had about Samson (it remainsfor modern critics Milton’s most controversial work), they all come down in favorof the proposition that Milton saw Samson’s violence as legitimate, the proper,if tragically incomplete and self-destructive, actions of a man with the right to act ina public cause and with divine sanction (and again the cause is “liberty”). LauraKnoppers’s essay about the 1671 volume offers some fascinating observations aboutits immediate reception, sketching for us some of the historical events that wouldhave been on the mind of the volume’s first readers and tracing the implications oftwo indexes that a contemporary reader entered into a particular copy, one for eachof the two poems. Knoppers in the end suggests that the relationship between thefinal catastrophe of Samson Agonistes and the political and religious events of the dayis deliberately ambiguous (587), but she shows that at least one contemporary readerseems to have seen the poem as clearly opposed to the political trends of the Resto-ration period. She sees in both poems in the volume an “oppositional discourse,fostering hope and fortifying resistance in dissenters and political radicals” (587),

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rather than as some other scholars have claimed, a palinode to a failed revolu-tion and a rejection of worldly political action. R.W. Serjeantson takes a strongposition in favor of the proposition that Milton saw Samson’s exercise of violenceas legitimate, and argues that Milton’s portrayal of Samson was in line with the con-sensus among reformed commentators on the Book of Judges—and with Milton’sown reflections on political violence in the regicide tracts and in his CommonplaceBook. Although he does acknowledge the importance of typology, Serjeantson doesnot examine it in detail, nor does he deal with the importance of antinomianism toMilton’s conception of Samson’s violence and his regeneration. The essay is,however, richly annotated and provides a detailed introduction to the reformedcommentary tradition that was clearly just as important. Regina Schwartz’s essayapproaches Samson in a similar way, but concentrates on Milton’s engagement withdiscourses about the sin of idolatry, ranging from the Hebrew Scriptures throughthe Church Fathers and beyond, while considering “idolatry” in its widest ethical,political, and theological senses. Again, the political dimensions of the poem are pri-mary, presented as expressions of the equation Milton famously drew in the Tenurebetween the “double tyranny,” of “Custom from without, and blind affectionswithin” and the tendency of people to “favor and uphold the Tyrant of a Nation”(646-47). The essay has particular resonances with Blair Hoxby’s piece onAreopagitica and Dzelzainis’s on the politics of Paradise Lost. Schwartz ends with somecompellingly dark reflections on the implications of Samson for the more difficultchoices that face us in modern political life.

Finally, Elizabeth D. Harvey’s essay on Samson, goes even deeper into the inte-rior space at its heart, and fulfills perhaps more fully than any other essay in thecollection, the editors’ promise that the political Milton and the poetic Milton needto be understood together. Harvey, with illuminating attention to early modern andclassical ideas about the passions, shows how the poem invites us compellingly, ifuncomfortably, into Samson’s inner world in order to help us map “the interstitialspace between individual subjectivity and the ethical and political obligations of thenation . . .” (650). The essay is particularly striking in the way it draws lines of con-nection between the work’s political and ethical dimensions and the ways in whichit depicts sensory experience, the experience of living in a suffering body, drawingrichly on seventeenth-century physiology and classical treatments of the passions oremotions, including a careful new account of the way Milton uses medical languageto describe the effects of tragedy in his note on the genre. In a sense, although shedoes not explicitly say so, Harvey’s essay bridges the gap that often opens in analysesof the poem between the claustrophobic and painful aesthetic/sensual experiencethat its verse elicits (immuring us on the one hand in Samson’s suffering body andthen forcing us to imagine his infliction of worse suffering on others) and its moreexternal, social, and at times abstract political implications. All of the essays onSamson Agonistes presented in the Handbook bring its political abstractions to groundin the concrete historical events of Milton’s day, but Harvey’s also unites theseimplications with a powerful sense of what it feels like to imagine inhabiting theworld of the poem (a way, really, of imagining in particular terms what it means toinhabit the same terrifying and violent world that Milton inhabited and we stillinhabit). Especially satisfying are her observations about the effect of Samson’saccount of his own blindness at the outset of the work, her comments regardingMilton’s use of the word “importune,” and the way in which her account of Dalila’sblandishments unites the political dimensions of the poem with both its sense of

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Samson’s ethical failures and the piercing way its verse overwhelms us with sensoryimages designed to correct and rebalance our passions rather than simply toexcite them in order to seduce. Whether or not Milton’s poem goes so far in thedirection of exciting passions that it cannot ultimately quell remains a more openquestion for some readers than it does for Harvey, but the fact that so much vehe-ment argument still surrounds the work is clearly evidence that the “new acquist/ Of true experience” the Chorus claims to have at the end actually excites moreongoing passion than it calmly spends. In any case, the essay is an important con-tribution to ongoing debates about Samson. It, like the volume as a whole, hasnew things to say about both the political and the aesthetic dimensions of Mil-ton’s achievement.

University of Richmond

Stephen B. Dobranski, ed. Milton in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,2010. xxvi + 523pp. ISBN 13: 978-0-521-51898-7. $95.00 (cloth).

Michael Bryson

Milton in Context, a multi-author volume edited by Stephen Dobranski,is a usefully-organized and in-depth introduction to Milton that will benefitadvanced undergraduates, graduate students, and even first- (or second-) timeinstructors who are taking on the task of reading and/or teaching Milton, either in asurvey or single-author course. Divided into three sections (the first on Milton’s Lifeand Works, the second on the Critical Legacy, and the third on his Historical andCultural Contexts), this volume provides a wealth of information on the poethimself (the chapters by Annabel Patterson, Edward Jones, and Stephen Fallonwill be especially useful to readers getting to know Milton for the first time), andthe critical reaction to his work (see especially the chapters by John Rumrich,P. J. Klemp, and J. Martin Evans). Rumrich’s quotation of William Winstanley’s1687 politically-motivated attack on Milton’s status as a poet is both hilarious andinstructive:

John Milton was one, whose natural parts might deservedly give him aplace amongst the principal of our English poets. . . . But his Fame isgone out like a Candle in a Snuff, and his Memory will always stink,which might have ever lived in honorable Repute, had he not been anotorious Traytor, and most impiously and villainously bely’d thatblessed Martyr King Charles the First. (124)

I must, however, register a minor objection to Klemp’s use of the term “anti-Miltonists” (131-33) to describe such critics and scholars as A. J. A Waldock andWilliam Empson (it seems that William Winstanley is more deserving of such a labelthan eitherWaldock or Empson).

The longest and richest portion of the volume, however, is dedicated tovarious aspects of the world within which Milton lived, moved, and had his poetic

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(and political) being (chapters by Stephen Dobranski on “The Book Trade,” NeilForsyth on “The English Church,” and William Poole on “Theology” were espe-cially interesting to this reviewer). Many of these latter chapters have great poten-tial to be useful to both students and instructors who are taking on specificworks. For example, Shigeo Suzuki’s chapter on “Marriage and Divorce” wouldserve as an excellent starting point for reading and/or teaching The Doctrine andDiscipline of Divorce as well as other divorce tracts, and possibly contemporaryreactions to Milton’s tracts as well—Suzuki, through William Riley Parker, providesthe amusing detail that Milton became known as “a ringleader of what would becalled the ‘Divorcers’ or ‘Miltonists,’ a group who would supposedly loosen thebonds of marriage in the service of inordinate lust” (383), a sense, I trust, that thelabel “Miltonist” no longer carries in today’s somewhat more polite academic dis-cussions (though perhaps here, the term “anti-Miltonist” might be fruitful). A con-sideration of Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikon Basilike would beenriched by being paired with David Loewenstein’s chapter on “The Interregnum”(though I might have preferred to see the chapter titled “The Republic andProtectorate”—it seems we are once again living in royalist times). Additionally, areading of Paradise Lost (especially Books 3 and 7—the decrees of heaven and thecreation, respectively) might well be enhanced by reviewing William Poole’s chapteron “Theology.” Poole is quite clear, for example, about Milton’s view of the doctrineof theTrinity:

For Milton the Trinity was a late and unscriptural notion, and so sen-sible was he of the importance of this discussion that he equipped itwith its own preface, and the resultant chapter on the Son is easily thelongest in the De Doctrina. Milton’s Arianism was consistently regis-tered by the earliest readers of Paradise Lost, although necessarily itspresence in the public poem is “implicit, not effaced.” (478)

Though each of the aforementioned scholars has a distinct point of view, onething I think is an especially noteworthy strength of this volume is its relative non-directiveness. These chapters are not “readings” per se, of Milton and his works, somuch as they are detailed and well-researched introductions to and explications ofthe issues and experiences with which Milton dealt in his life and work, and theways in which these issues and experiences can be seen at work in the poetry andprose. As such, I think that general readers, students, and instructors who come toMilton and his seventeenth-century context from differing points of view can allfind something valuable in this volume, without necessarily being pressed to adopt acertain reading of either Milton or his works.

That said, I must note one final (and not at all minor) objection: the price. Asopposed to the more popularly priced (and thus more widely available) CambridgeCompanion series (a quick search for which on the web shows prices generallybetween 20 and 30 dollars). Milton in Context is clearly being priced for libraries andinstitutional budgets at around a hundred dollars. Given the extremely useful organi-zation scheme, the wide-range of non-directive scholarship, and the relatively shortchapters (something I should have listed as among the volume’s assets in the firstplace), I can see Milton in Context being very useful in a classroom setting (whether

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undergraduate or graduate). But the prohibitive pricing will likely imprison thisbook behind library walls—and in the reference section, at that. I fear that, as aresult, a very strong and potentially useful collection of essays will remain largelyunread by the very readers who could (and would) most benefit from the fine workcontained therein.

California State University at Northridge

Paul Hammond and Blair Worden, eds. John Milton: Life, Writing, Reputa-tion. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. xi + 212pp. ISBN 13: 978-0-19-726470-6.$35.00 (paper).

AnthonyWelch

The four-hundredth anniversary of Milton’s birth was marked around theglobe in 2008, with readings, exhibitions, and conferences celebrating his achieve-ment and legacy. The occasion also prompted questions about the state of Miltonstudies today. Why, many asked, does Milton matter? How is our Milton differ-ent from those of our predecessors? Where does he now stand in literaryand cultural history? The essays collected in John Milton: Life, Writing, Reputation,drawn from a one-day conference at the British Academy in December 2008,are more modest in their stated ambitions. Offering “a perspective on [Milton’s]work and reputation as they appeared to scholars on the occasion of the quatercen-tenary,” they propose a mixture of old and new. The contributors provide “a seriesof fresh explorations” of familiar topics such as Milton’s politics, his engagementswith classical literature, his views of gender and marriage, and his reception by laterpoets, editors, and critics (vii-viii). Despite the editors’ unassuming claims, these tenessays yield timely insights about how and why we study Milton. They are wide-ranging in their critical methods, and they are shrewd in identifying the questionsthat have been asked about Milton in the past and those that we should be askingnow.

In many ways John Milton: Life, Writing, Reputation captures the outlook andpriorities of today’s leading British Milton scholarship. Most of its essays have a his-toricist flavor and some involve deep archival spadework. There are several treat-ments of Paradise Lost, but Milton’s epic shares the spotlight here with his proseworks, which are explored with subtlety and imagination. (The rest of his poetry israrely mentioned.) Politics, religion, and intellectual history are major concerns.These studies are also thoroughly informed by the long history of Milton criticism,both in the UK and elsewhere. The contributors often seek to challenge or reframeolder assumptions about Milton’s beliefs, his influences and allegiances, and hisreception history. An occasional straw man can be spotted here, but disagreementswith specific critics are gracefully handled.

The volume opens with two essays that place Milton’s writings in their politi-cal and literary-historical contexts. Blair Worden supplies a lucid overview of Mil-ton’s career in the 1640s and 1650s that showcases his prose writings. Looming large

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in Worden’s account of the major themes and engagements of Milton’s political lifeare his work for the Council of State and his complicated views of Oliver Crom-well. Perhaps Worden’s most daring claim is that, in the late 1640s, Milton may have“turned not only away from poetry but against it; and that for a time his high poeticambitions were not so much forgotten as renounced” (5). Whether or not this wasthe case, Milton’s ambitions also obliged him to come to terms with his literary pre-decessors. David Hopkins’s “Milton and the Classics” confronts the familiar problemof Milton’s attitude toward the cultural legacy of Greece and Rome. Hopkins rejectsthe view (probably no longer a widely held one) that Milton’s classical allusions inthe late poems should be read as a relentless polemic against Greco-Roman culture,a programmatic contrast between pagan error and Christian truth. Instead, Hopkinsexamines a series of allusions to Homer, Horace, and Ovid in Paradise Lost to showhow classical values and beliefs are “incorporated within, rather than being merelytrumped by or degraded in favor of,” Milton’s Christian argument (41). In makinghis case, Hopkins breaks new ground by showing how Dryden and Pope highlightMilton’s debts to the ancients when they deploy Miltonic echoes in their own clas-sical translations.

Moving deeper into Paradise Lost, two essays offer philosophical and rhetoricalaccounts of Milton’s treatment of the Fall. In “Milton on Knowing Good fromEvil,” Christopher Tilmouth contends that Milton’s voluntarist theology, hinging onthe rational exercise of choice, depends on a knowledge of good and evil that Adamand Eve do not sufficiently possess before the Fall. Critics have long puzzled overthe conditions of knowledge in paradise; for Tilmouth, what Adam and Eve fatallylack is “a capacity to comprehend their own emotions” (49). Their unruly passions,repeatedly neglected or misunderstood, cloud their moral judgment and make themsusceptible to sin. By highlighting their ignorance of self, Milton “privileges postlap-sarian consciousness” in ways that complicate his portrayal of unfallen perfection(56). Tilmouth’s outline of this dilemma sets up a nuanced account of Milton’swritings on the struggle for self-knowledge in a fallen world. Some related con-cerns can be found in Paul Hammond’s essay, “Milton and the Poetry of the Fall.”Hammond notes that Milton’s perspective on the Fall and its aftermath in ParadiseLost is “explored and tested poetically,” in the intricate patterning of his poeticlanguage (67). Guiding us through the reader’s experience of the Fall in Book 9,Hammond offers a sensitive, rhetorically informed close reading that dwells on Mil-ton’s strategic use of pronouns and of such recurring keywords as “infinite” and“perhaps.”

Essays by Martin Dzelzainis, N. H. Keeble, and Rosanna Cox look outwardagain to Milton’s political and social milieu. Dzelzainis opens his study,“Milton andthe Regicide,” with the startling claim that “John Milton did not advocate regicide”(91). Observing that the word itself never appears in Milton’s writing—indeed, thatit was used mainly by royalists as a term of abuse—Dzelzainis deftly explores thelegal status of King Charles I in Milton’s regicide tracts. An established body ofpolitical theory held that a ruler who acted tyrannically was no longer a legitimateking and could be treated as a private person under the law. Drawing on a murkierlegal tradition, Dzelzainis shows, Milton instead defined the tyrant as hostis humanigeneris, an “enemy of humanity,” who, as such, was to be regarded not even as aprivate citizen but as an outlaw with no legal personhood whatsoever.

In “Milton’s Christian Temper,” N. H. Keeble addresses Milton’s religiousthought mostly in terms of “the nature and extent of the obedience owed by a

42 AnthonyWelch


Christian believer to conscience, to Church, and to State” (110). Keeble traces Mil-ton’s ecclesiological views as they evolved toward an ever more thoroughgoingrejection of any church polity in the name of individual conscience. Yet Keeble alsoshows how Milton’s “apparently democratic confidence in the intellectual capacityof individual (Protestant) believers to make up their own minds” strains against hishabit of casting scorn on the “vulgar” English people, who are so often portrayed inhis later writings as an ignorant rabble in need of elite guidance or as a hostile moboppressing God’s chosen remnant (117). Similar tensions over authority and self-determination shape Rosanna Cox’s essay on the politics of gender in the latepoems and the divorce tracts. Surveying the long, thorny critical debate over Mil-ton’s view of women, Cox takes that debate in an intriguing direction by askingwhat Milton’s writings on marriage and gender relations—writings shot throughwith “ideas of manliness and effeminacy, liberty and slavery, and independence anddependence” (137)—have to say about the nature of masculinity and its role in bothdomestic and civic life.

The volume’s last three essays canvass historical responses to Milton’s life andwork. Pondering Milton’s influence on the Romantics, David Fairer finds that thecritical tradition has been too liable to fall into a paradoxical binary, viewingthe Romantic Milton as both a fiery rebel and a symbol of oppressive authority:“itis as if the poet of Paradise Lost . . . is simultaneously a voice of heroic resistanceand an inhibiting father-figure” for his eighteenth- and nineteenth-century heirs(151). Fairer moves past those models of struggle and resistance by showing howRomantic writers drew on the angelic visitation scenes in Paradise Lost—and espe-cially on Raphael’s imagery of “organic connectedness” in Book 5—to shape theirown tropes of benign natural growth and development. From a different perspective,Tom Lockwood pursues the Nachleben of Milton’s epic into the twentieth century.A brief review of Milton’s fortunes in England, primarily in the era of F. R. Leavisand T. S. Eliot, clears a path for a new and stimulating approach to Milton’sreception, as Lockwood traces the publication history of the poetry in popularprint and in school editions over the first half of the twentieth century—amongthem, the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Milton that was read by both Leavisand Eliot.

Finally, Gordon Campbell and Thomas Corns survey a dozen Milton biogra-phies, from the earliest accounts by Edward Phillips and Cyriack Skinner to BarbaraLewalski’s Life of John Milton (2000). Sketching each biographer’s approach, theygive close attention to the early lives, which, they note, reflect the “essentiallydefensive and responsive character” of Milton’s own self-representation in theprose tracts (189). There are also acute remarks on the monumental Life of JohnMilton by David Masson, whose Scottish origins, Corns and Campbell suspect, lurkbehind his desire to overstate Milton’s allegiance to the Presbyterians in the early1640s.

The editors of John Milton: Life, Writing, Reputation note that the book isintended to speak to general readers as well as to specialists. This summary shouldmake clear that the contributors interpreted that mandate in varying ways. As withany such collection, some readers will find little here that is wholly new to them,while others may feel lost when the conversation delves into “studious thoughtsabstruse.” Nonetheless, all of these essays are lucidly written and set a very highscholarly standard. Most of them not only rehearse the current doxa but also nudgeMilton studies in promising new directions. Even the most seasoned scholars should

Milton Quarterly 43


be grateful for a volume that lays out so clearly where the field stands as Miltonenters his fifth century and where scholars can profitably go from here.

University of Tennessee at Knoxville

Peter E. Medine, John T. Shawcross, and David V. Urban, eds. VisionaryMilton: Essays on Prophecy and Violence. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UP, 2010.xxv + 346pp. IBSN 13: 978-0-8207-0429-6. $60.00 (cloth).

Sara van den Berg

This collection of essays, dedicated to Michael Lieb, features eleven essays bynoted Milton scholars who revisit the themes of prophecy and violence studiedearlier in Lieb’s own major works. The volume is a worthy celebration of MichaelLieb, and the book makes its own important contribution to Milton studies, espe-cially to the interpretation of Paradise Regained, which is the topic of four essays andsignificantly discussed in two others.

The book begins with magisterial essays by the late John Shawcross andBarbara Lewalski. Shawcross traces the establishment of the visionary propheticmode in Milton’s early poetry and its consistent prominence throughout his career.The essay is most notable for its detailed and persuasive reading of “The Passion.”Barbara Lewalski sees Milton’s prophetic poetry and prose as a call to freedom andvirtuous citizenship, applicable to the social conflicts of our own time as well asthose of the seventeenth century. She reads the 1645 Poems as a deliberate refutationof Cavalier poetry, genre by genre, theme by theme, and argues that Paradise Lost isdesigned to resist Restoration culture by its original ten-book form, its lack ofrhyme, and its thematic concerns with monarchy and republicanism, the ethics ofpolitical rhetoric, the definition of heroism, and the ideal of “the paradise within.”The modes of prophetic voice and violence are juxtaposed in the joint publicationof Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, each poem dramatizing in its own way theproblematics of interpretation.

The third essay showcases one way “the matter of Milton” was used during the1950s, the era of McCarthyism and the cold war. Sharon Achinstein begins withWalter Benjamin’s distinction between state action and divine action in “Critiqueof Violence” (1921), and gestures to our own post-9/11 era of terror as a threat tofreedom—not only from external attacks but, even more dangerously, from internalrepressive “protective” laws. Achinstein shows how a surge of allusions to Miltonduring the 1950s culminated in a 1955 episode of Walter Cronkite’s You Are There,“TheTragedy of John Milton,” which portrayed Milton as the victim of Restorationrepression and violence. Abraham Polonsky, the author of the program who hadbeen black-listed in Hollywood, found in Milton’s Areopagitica a banner cry forfreedom: “The great issue of our time is liberty, of conscience, of thought, ofworship, of action.”

Stanley Fish returns to the seventeenth century, contrasting the ways Miltonand Hobbes seek to counter violence. For Milton,“the arch-antinomian champion

44 Sara van den Berg


of the inside,” virtue lay within the individual self. For Hobbes, “the arch-formalistchampion of the outside,” it was the violence within each person that govern-ment was designed to restrain. Fish follows his customary practice of arguing byexplication, drilling down into specific passages in order to locate the essence ofHobbes’s philosophy in the twists and turns of rhetoric—both Hobbes’s and hisown.

In an essay that draws together, for the first time, the many references to pain inParadise Lost, DianaTreviño Benet argues that it is Milton’s task to justify divine vio-lence. She follows Michael Lieb in arguing that Milton tempers otium Dei, theimplacable wrath of the Father, with the compassion of the Son, whose chariot ofwar emblazons the power both to punish and to redeem. Benet explores pain in hell,and during the War in Heaven, to show that Satan can escape eternal torments butnot internal anguish. She regards this as a “loophole” in the poem, but it is congru-ent with the large pattern of Milton’s epic, which relocates everything—whetherparadise or hell, even evil itself—from an external figuration to interiority. Milton’sjustification of this divinely ordained pattern, she argues, must confront inconsisten-cies, incongruities, and the limits of language itself.

The remaining essays in this volume emphasize Samson Agonistes and ParadiseRegained, and bring together the major themes of violence, vision, uncertainty, andthe ultimate emphasis on interiority in Milton’s works. Wendy Furman-Adams andVirginiaTufte discern a comparable shift from exterior to interior in the interpretiveillustrations of Samson Agonistes from the seventeenth century to the present. Therepresentations of Samson, they argue, emphasize a “profound interiority” absent inthe Bible and in medieval metaphorical images. In the seventeenth century, theproblem became how to unite the human Samson to divine reality. The case ofSamson became one more instance of the major issue in early modern Europeanculture: how—or if—material and spiritual reality could be united. This moderngap is foundational to the violence that is at the core of Samson Agonistes, as MichaelLieb argued in several essays, to Samson’s entirely human vulnerability, and to theunavoidable uncertainty of interpretation.

Joseph Wittreich also begins his essay by emphasizing the powerful presence ofinconsistencies and contradictions in Milton’s work. Wittreich argues that there is adeliberate intellectual violence in Milton’s work, setting systems of thought andinterpretation in conflict. In the case of Paradise Regained, Milton sets competingversions of the wilderness story against each other. One reads the story as a meta-phorical temptation, when Jesus “into himself descended,” while the other acceptsthe narrative as the literal record of an empowered Satan transporting Jesus to thepinnacle. In either reading, contemplation precedes action, and prophecy is the newmode of heroism, until the Son is finally ready to “subdue . . . Brute violence.”

As a figure of the antithesis to violence in Paradise Regained, Mary the motherof Jesus is the focus of the essay by Mary Beth Rose. Unlike Samson Agonistes, whicherases Samson’s mother in favor of his father, Manoa (a strategy Rose regards as anexample of “the dead mother plot” in masculinist works), Paradise Regained elevatesMary to the status of a major figure. She provides an intimate narrative of Jesus’sbiography, tracing the development of his new heroic mode:“Private, unactive, calm,contemplative” (PR 2.81). When Jesus goes about his Father’s business, refutingSatan, it is his mother’s contemplative calm that prevails over Satan. At the end ofthe poem, moreover, her humanity prevails when he returns home “to his mother’shouse.”

Milton Quarterly 45


In contrast to the private focus of Rose’s reading, Stella Revard emphasizes thepolitical meaning of Paradise Regained, setting the temptation of kingship in its Res-toration context of millenarian thought and royalist ideology. Charles II, she notes,had from infancy been compared to Christ by his followers. Milton could only haveviewed that strategy, and the Restoration, with dismay. Unlike Dryden’s celebrationof Charles II as warrior-king, Milton’s Christ voices contempt for the “luggage ofwar” as an “argument of weakness rather than of strength” (PR 3.402). If KingCharles did not reject his role as an earthly Christ, the Christ of Paradise Regainedrejects the role of earthly king. The nature of Christ’s kingship is probed and testedby Satan throughout the poem, until he is finally vanquished.

Following Michael Lieb, Michael Bryson’s essay on Paradise Regained returns tothe visionary mode of Ezekiel. Instead of simply appropriating Ezekiel, Bryson con-tends, Milton contests that tradition. The poet questions its categories, images, andassumptions even as he uses them, thereby at once relying upon and underminingthe visionary mode. In Bryson’s reading, the movement from external to internalvalues is reformulated as a movement from “last things to first things,” a poetics ofreturn and recovery. Paradise Regained reclaims the paradise within, through a processof rejecting food, wealth, power, and knowledge as ends in themselves (“lastthings”), in favor of ascent to origin and truth. Bryson reads each of the temptationsas part of this ascent, which operates as a movement inward as well: toward the onlyrule that matters, government over oneself. Bryson is at his best reading the tempta-tion of knowledge, which he links to Il Penseroso, Ad Patrem, and Sonnet 19. Thistemptation was Milton’s own addition to the Gospel accounts, and it is appropriatethat Bryson links it to Milton’s most personal poetry. In rejecting human knowl-edge, Jesus demonstrates that knowledge within must, after all, be seen as divinesimilitude, but not as divinity itself. The ultimate problem for the poet may be torepresent God, but the problem for Jesus is to understand himself as human anddivine in a single being. Bryson reads the Son’s final statement,“Tempt not the Lordthy God,” as words that both unite him to God and maintain his human identity.The ultimate temptation of selfhood, of being, is refuted by reliance on God. Thatapparent external turn is, profoundly, the Son’s deepest descent into himself and, atthe same time, a subordination of self, a rejection of the temptation to claim priorityfor self.

This collection culminates in David Loewenstein’s reading of Samson Agonistesand Paradise Regained, with some preliminary gestures toward Paradise Lost. Loe-wenstein rejects any monolithic reading of Milton’s three great poems as radicalquietism or as stubborn political engagement. Most of this essay centers on thepublication of Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained in a single volume. Betweenthese poems, and within each of them, Loewenstein hears multiple, divergent voices.The poet’s turbulent feelings lead to a rich, uncomfortable art. If he is visionary, hisvision is complex and agonized. Loewenstein therefore rejects both the traditionalreading of Samson’s recovered heroism and the new negative view of Samson as aman of violence and terror. Loewenstein cites the intricacies of Milton’s text tomake his case: the exclusion of biblical motives, the choice of words (e.g.,“subdue”)that were used by militant Puritans, and the placement of Paradise Regained beforeSamson Agonistes without any interpretive apparatus. If, as most critics argue, ParadiseRegained offers a corrective to Samson Agonistes, then one might expect the Hebrewtext to precede the Gospel text. For Loewenstein, the placement Milton chose givesthe reader freedom to respond, to see unexpected relationships. Placing Samson Ago-

46 Sara van den Berg


nistes second, moreover, retains deep sympathy for the suffering Samson. If Christhas an inner calm, Samson shows an inner torment that is entirely human. The twopoems are dissonant as well as complementary, their meaning made open-ended bytheir juxtaposition. Milton had written companion poems before (L’Allegro and IlPenseroso), but here his voice is all the more powerful because his vision is so large.Complexity is not uncertainty, however, and Loewenstein rightly argues that com-plexity is a better word to express Milton’s fully developed vision of human experi-ence as his life drew to a close.

The essays in this volume pay tribute to the remarkable scholarship and criticaldepth of Michael Lieb and of each contributor. The essays can be fruitfully readtogether, not so much in the groupings chosen by the editors but through cross-references and reiterated themes. This book is the kind of rich conversation thatMichael Lieb has always valued and has so often led. Both he and Milton are well-served by this collection.

Saint Louis University

Joanna Picciotto. Labors of Innocence in Early-Modern England. Cambridge,MA and London: Harvard UP, 2010. x + 863pp. ISBN 13: 978-0-674-04906-2. $49.95 (cloth).

James Dougal Fleming

Labors of Innocence in Early-Modern England joins a number of recent seven-teenth-century studies that align period literary figures, notably Milton, with theepistemological and cultural agendas of Baconian natural science. Joanna Picciotto’sbook, however, outweighs its shelfmates—literally and figuratively. It is 863 pageslong (591 of them text); it is sumptuously published by one of the most distin-guished university presses in the world; and it boasts three laudatory blurbs by veryeminent scholars. Labors of Innocence, in short, presents itself as an authoritative entryin a growing area of the field.

Professor Picciotto begins with a suggestion, and a question. The suggestion isthat the modern concept of scientific objectivity canonizes “the perspective of theinnocent eye.” The question is how it came to do so. After all, as Picciotto brieflynotes, innocence was “traditionally understood to be a state of ignorance” (inWestern culture). How, then, did it come to be “associated with epistemologicalprivilege”? Picciotto’s answer focuses on “the original subject of innocence,” Adam,as theorized—exegetically, epistemologically, and politically—in the context of theEnglish Reformation (1).

Medieval iconography, Picciotto notes in her first chapter, had seen the Gardenof Eden as a transcendent hortus conclusus. In the Renaissance, however, the gardencame to be imagined as open to worldly re-entry. Since Adam in paradise had been amanual laborer, the first family of Eden was “revived as a working collective” (38).Meanwhile,“as the original reader of God’s first book, Adam was constructed as thefirst Protestant, applying the principle of sola scriptura to nature itself ” (4). The stagewas thus set for a decisive synthesis of objective exegesis, labor, and empiricism. This

Milton Quarterly 47


is what Picciotto calls “experimentalism,” and associates with the Baconianism of theRoyal Society. But very non-exclusively: the Diggers, Winstanley, Locke, Evelyn,Wren, and many others were all experimentalist, insofar as they were committed tothe “incessantly demanding” and necessarily collective work of “truth production”(88). To be an early-modern experimentalist was to inhabit, and project,“a purgato-rial paradise of pains” (111).

Picciotto’s second chapter turns to the elite organization of this alleged para-dise: the Royal Society. She notes that its members’ empirical interests entailed anew respect for craft and trade knowledge. Picciotto treats this familiar point ofintellectual history vis à vis pastoral literature. Her generalizations about the latterare based on Virgil’s Eclogue 4; her theory, on William Empson. Pastoral, she writes,“made the working man an ironic representative of the gentleman’s contemplativeease” (131). Since the new science, as Picciotto has already argued, entailed thesacralization of work, it also entailed “a union of high and low utterly alien to thepastoral mode” (133). Picciotto gives a brief history of Gresham College, and ofthe origins of the Royal Society, in which she is at pains to emphasize royaldisinterest. At the same time, she argues that the Society enacted a kind of ongoingsymbolic revolution in intellectual life, precisely by appropriating monarchic pres-tige. Cultural resistance to the Society, for that matter, was “the same” as thatencountered in the Civil War period by the Levellers (150). Indeed, the scientific“effort to restore creation as a common field of knowledge production” was “likeWinstanley’s effort to found paradise on the soil of the commons” (186). The RoyalSociety’s aims “could only be realized within an economy organized around collec-tive ownership” (186). Picciotto concedes this to be an “ideal” account of thematter.

Chapter 3 turns to the period’s scientific prostheses, especially lenses. These“linked,” Picciotto writes, “the productive labor of innocent observation to theproject of incorporation, which began with putting off the old man and puttingon the new” (189). Here Picciotto cites Joseph Glanvill’s whimsical idea that theunfallen Adam would naturally have perceived the motion of the earth, themechanisms of occult phenomena such as magnetism, etc. To be sure, there is anevident contradiction between an Adam who does not need lenses, and a scientistwho does. Nonetheless, the real point is that the experimentalist Adam was “a sys-tematically ambiguous figure, one identified with both the complacent possession ofknowledge and the dynamic and humbling process of obtaining and applying it”(205). Scientific curiosity, far from being a sinful attempt to penetrate God’s secrets,became a pious attempt to glorify them. Granted to the liberty of the device, more-over, technological discoveries were public, rather than private, property. Politicallyas well as morally, the prosthetic virtuoso “guaranteed the innocence of the knowl-edge he produced” (213).

Of course, the members of the early Royal Society went about their work in aRestoration culture that was decidedly less than innocent. Nonetheless, in Chapter4, Picciotto argues for the period emergence of a public that was “curious” in theapproved, moral, progressive sense. Indeed, she proposes that “the culture of curiosityensured that the restoration of monarchy did not result in the restoration of MerryEngland” (258)—a very large claim. Most of the chapter is taken up with Locke,Shaftesbury, Hooke, and Boyle. As throughout, Picciotto places great emphasis onthe group nature of Royal Society endeavors, from which she infers a strong politi-cal value. Members who witnessed a demonstration, she notes, signed off to that

48 James Dougal Fleming


effect in a log. This signified, “like Winstanley’s commons, a species of ownershipgained through the investment of labor” (262). Even the reflexive meditations ofBoyle and Shaftesbury constituted “a sort of sanitized fantasy version of experi-mentalist labor” (271). The Society’s Repository redeemed the essentially privatecabinet of curiosities by reconstituting it publicly. The curious space of the RoyalSociety had its retail version in the Restoration coffee house, its virtual one in theperiodical.

Beginning in Chapter 5, Picciotto turns to period literature that merits, in herview, the label “experimentalist.” Her central idea here is the “textacle” (323): thetruth-productive, rather than fictional, text, which offers “escape from the falseimages produced by fallen perception, custom, and idols of the mind” (323). Herfirst major example is Marvell’s Last Instructions to a Painter. This “begins with themicroscope and ends with the telescope”; in between, it “enacts a whole experimen-talist politico-poetics” (344). Marvell’s epilogue, in which Charles II is urged toamend his court much as the sun seemed (to challengers of Galileo) to haveamended its erstwhile spotty face, is not just an instance of constructive criticism inthe English constitutional tradition. Rather, it means that “the metaphysical necessityof kingship . . . is annulled” (353). This is consistent, allegedly, with the modern aes-thetic experimentalism theorized in Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesie. But notinevitably so: Picciotto closes the chapter by reading Davenant’s Gondibert as a “mal-functioning textacle” (329). Getting the new philosophy cavalierly (so to speak)wrong, Davenant attempts, but fails, to write a Baconian epic.

Milton, for Picciotto, writes a successful one. Milton’s “experimentalistaims” (405), she contends, are sketched in his 1640 tract Of Education. In its light,Milton’s early poems and pamphlets take on “an unexpectedly Baconian dimen-sion” (411). The speaker of Il Penseroso, for example, “exists in the future tense,as the embodiment of an as-yet-unrealized human potential” (411). “As in theBaconian experiment, it is experience itself that speaks” (412). In Comus, haemonyis a simple found by a shepherd lad—thus it is both epistemologically empiricaland socially mechanical—that constitutes “a synecdoche of an ongoing sacrament ofknowledge production” (414). In Lycidas, the blind mouths are guilty of refusingintellectual labor (415). In Areopagitica, print is per se experimentalist (422, 424, 429),Galileo is extremely important though mentioned only in passing (421-22), andthe Italian literary academies are proleptic partial analogues of the Royal Society(422-23).

Paradise Lost, then, is a hypertrophic “textacle.” Formally, Milton’s enjambedlines and periodic syntax constitute a “manifestation of experimentalist progress”(439). Narratively, each of the poem’s imagined spaces is “the site of anexperiment—a contrived experience of the created world demanding diagnosis”(438). Milton’s blindness, necessitating inspiration by the Holy Spirit, is a literaryanalogue of “Galileo’s technologically assisted eye” (445). Indeed, for Picciotto,Milton’s allusions to the “Tuscan artist” with his “optic Glass” (PL 1.288) are pro-grammatic. True, the astronomer’s glass is represented as being trained on the decep-tive and changeable moon—a decidedly non-traditional, and new-philosophical,ekphrasis for Satan’s shield. Later, his observations are dubious (3.590), and later still(when the astronomer is actually named) he is “less assured” (5.262), his lunar land-scapes “imagind” (5.263). Notwithstanding, for Picciotto,“the interposition of Gali-leo’s glass estranges us from the perspective of the damned” (450). Milton enacts theastronomer’s labors through language” and is “Galileo’s literary equivalent” (436).

Milton Quarterly 49


Chaos is “the infinite interstellar space described by the new science,” as wellas being a “laboratory” for reforming Hobbes’s mechanistic materialism (453)—though some version of the latter was shared by Hobbes, surely, with Hooke, Boyle,and other of Picciotto’s approved experimentalists. This is an “enormous techno-logical advance,” in some sense, illuminated by a “diagnostic” contrast with old-fashioned allegory in the forms of Sin and Death (457). True, Milton declines torender his imagined universe clearly Copernican, but this simply heightens his“experimentalism.” For his “demonstrations of intellectual forbearance” are “proudassertions of his commitment to an innocent investigative style” (462). Adam’sparadisal naming, inspired by God with a “sudden apprehension” of animal essences,may suggest an old-fashionedly and non-experimentalistically “emblematic” attitudeto nature (463). However, Milton only allows this, Picciotto says, because “in thisfield of natural knowledge, the stakes are sufficiently high.” She does not reallyexplain what she means by that. In any case, Adam must be understood to perceivethe “material causes beneath the sensuous surfaces of his ‘apprehension’” (463). I willreturn to this point below.

The unfallen garden, for Picciotto, is “wanton” and “wild” neither as a matter ofdramatic irony, nor of paradisal paradox. Rather, it is in “urgent need of reform” viathe “linear logic of improvement” (465). True, Milton makes “concessions to para-dise and Golden Age lore,” as when he refers to Adam and Eve’s gardening tools as“Guiltless of fire.” But “such concessions,” Picciotto says in a parenthesis, “areironized by their context” (467). She doesn’t explain how that works. She doesexplain that when Raphael assures Adam and Eve that they may be “improv’d bytract of time,” he is actually prophesying the “prosthetic technologies” (telescopes,etc.) of seventeenth-century experimentalists (468). Eve’s succumbing to the ser-pent’s report of an interesting demonstration, and her fallen paean to “experi-ence . . . best guide” (9.807-08), do not critique empiricism; rather, they critiquepeople (such as Eve) who give empiricism a bad name. Eve’s desire to work moreeffectively, in pursuit of which she separates from Adam, is not (as it may appear tobe) consistent with Picciotto’s view of the garden as standing in desperate need ofimprovement. Rather, Eve’s is, in a special way,“a refusal of innocent employment,which sacralizes corporate productivity rather than its individual products” (476).

Labors of Innocence extends to a seventh chapter, on the eighteenth century’s“literature of professional observation” (507). This is presented in a continuitywith Milton’s Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, which “cast their readers intothe world, toward . . . open spaces and real things” (506). Looking into spaces andthings, we are told, defined a worthy group of commentators, post-Restoration.Medical writers urged upon an idle public the benefits of physical exertion. Thetravel writer Celia Fiennes “pursued a fitness program in the spirit of public service”(527). Defoe offered his own travel writing to the public as a Boylean relation.Addison and Steele adapted scientific objectivism “to the scrutiny of the humanworld” (561). All of this was consistent with the “experimentalist” era. What finallybrought it to an end, oddly, was Isaac Newton. The decidedly individualistic, evenantisocial physicist wrecked the old experimentalist model of collectivity, etc. Hisquasi-occult theory of gravity, which “he alone seemed to understand” (590), restored“priestly miracle” to “the sacrament of knowledge production” (591). Through itsimmense cultural influence, which produced a literary analogue in the emergent cultof genius, Newtonian physics rendered recovery of paradise “beside the point” (591).And so the labors of innocence ended with a whimper, rather than a bang.



Picciotto’s book lacks an overall conclusion. Nonetheless, her main contentionsare:

(1) Seventeenth-century English culture was at least one major site of a historicalshift in knowledge practices toward inductive empiricism (science).

(2) The shift was, in significant part, a function of Protestantism, following a literalexegesis of Genesis 1-3.

(3) Emergent science had radically democratic leveling as one of its own corefunctions.

(4) Some major period literary authors supported and reflected each of thesepoints.

All are very extensively explored and interrelated, through many fine and copiousreadings. However:

(4) is almost tautological–while the devil lurks in the details.(3) is not really demonstrated by the evidence Picciotto provides.(2) has been argued, in many ways, many times (e.g., by Peter Harrison, Charles

Webster, and R. K. Merton); it is not clear that Picciotto is contributing signifi-cantly to the debate around this thesis.

(1) does not need to be argued.

Thus if the book lacks a conclusion, that may be because it lacks an overall argumentrequiring one.

Picciotto does contribute her notion of “experimentalism.” But this is a sti-pulative, and therefore uninformative, term. One understands, for example, that aBaconian practice of empirical investigation is an experimentalism. One under-stands, too, a tendency among some early-modern English Protestants to speak of an“experimental” religion, emphasizing the experience of understanding rather thanrevelation. One does not understand, however, what significant common ground isrevealed among these activities, or among the other extraordinarily diverse areas andfigures under Picciotto’s heading, on just the basis of “openness to experience” or“collectivity” or “productive labor.” But these are the very general criteria Picciottoadvances. To be sure, she also finds period experiencers who are not “experimental-ist.” But that is the other side of the coin: her obliteration of differences without dis-tinction is supported by distinctions in which there appears to be no difference. Weare repeatedly told, for example, that an experimentalist per se had a “sensitive” body;but mere experiencers were “sons of sense.” Non-experimentalist “gazing,” with orwithout the help of lenses, is distinguished from being experimentalistically “specta-torial.” Even a life and work of experiment can be reckoned non-experimentalist,as in the case of Newton. This is bewildering. Picciotto’s key term, in the end,seems to mean just what she wants it to mean. That is the way for it not to meananything.

Meanwhile, the book is caught in an interdisciplinary bind. Picciotto wants todo literary and cultural criticism via history of science; but her commitment to theformer impedes her command of the latter. Picciotto has nothing but guffaws, forexample, for both Paracelsianism and Scholasticism as antecedents to Royal Societyempiricism. Most contemporary scholars of early-modern natural philosophy, Ithink, would take a far more nuanced view. Picciotto seems not to recall, for that

Milton Quarterly 51


matter, that Bacon himself is oriented favorably toward “the Schoolmen” in TheAdvancement of Learning, dating the decay of knowledge from their displacement byhumanists! Elsewhere, Picciotto asks us to accept, without guffaws, her very strongclaims about the democratic, even collectivist, implications of Royal Society practiceand membership. The problem with these claims is not necessarily that they are false(though I suspect they are), but that they would require far more sustained treatmentthan Picciotto gives them, if they were to be made good. In particular, as claims inthe history of science, Picciotto’s would need sustained argumentative engagementwith relevant scholarship in that discipline. But she does very little of this, and whatlittle she does is, far too often, confined to endnotes.

The Marxist element of Picciotto’s position is perhaps the most problematicaspect of her attempt to engage with history of science. For it entails a partisancommitment to labor, collectivity, and political modernization. Now, inductiveempiricism, she is arguing, meant labor, collectivity, and political modernization.Therefore, her argument entails a partisan commitment to inductive empiricism—science. That is not exactly the same as gaining analytic perspective. ThroughoutLabors of Innocence, Picciotto constructs her approved experimentalists as heroicallygrappling with “things themselves” or “real things,” while shucking off the baggageof prejudice and preconception. (This is reflected in her incessant rhetoric of ipse—“nature itself,”“paradise itself,“intellectual labor itself,” etc.) It is the whole Enlight-enment narrative of rational teleology. One is accustomed to reading this sort ofthing in naïve history of science. But an account of the interaction between Genesisand natural philosophy in the early-modern period offered an opportunity for muchgreater insight.

It remains to consider the literary side of Picciotto’s discussion. I will limitmy remarks here to what she says about Milton. Picciotto bases her readings ofMilton’s poetry, as I have noted, on Of Education. Her main evidence—apart fromthe usual observations about exercise, improvement, and the like—for the tract’salleged Baconianism is that the students of Milton’s ideal academy will benefitfrom “roving apprenticeships with working-class practitioners, and field trips”(408). Let us grant this idea, although pretty non-specific, to be not inconsistentwith Baconianism. It is still only a passing suggestion of a treatise that fails tomention Bacon, or any of his works, or signature ideas, or those of any other relativelymodish period theorist—except for Hartlib’s master Comenius, whose “Januasand Didactics” are mentioned only in order to be rejected–but is entirely devoted toan ideal humanist education based on the rhetorical and ethical imitation ofancient authors. I do not understand how Picciotto can find, on this basis, thata “Baconian vision of paradisal restoration organizes the entire treatise” (409).Paradisal restoration, yes. Baconian, no. It is begging the question to suppose thatthe former entails the latter.

Of course, Of Education wouldn’t matter if Picciotto’s readings of Milton’spoetry were valid, in and of themselves. But, as indicated above, I do not think thatthey are. I do not think the companion poems are Baconian just because they areproleptic. I do not think the presence in Comus of a quasi-Homeric simple makesthat text experimentalist. I do not think there is much reason to posit Galileo as thesecret hero of the early books of Paradise Lost. And so on. All too often, Picciotto’sliterary-critical arguments are characterized by unfalsifiability, logical over-reaching,and selective treatment of evidence. It is as if she has decided, in dissertation-likefashion, to tie everything she reads back to her thesis, come hell or high water. Only



a reader who is predisposed favorably toward the thesis can find this sort of opera-tion satisfactory.

For a final example, let us return to the question of Adam’s naming of theanimals. Picciotto argues, as I have noted, that Adam sees through this apparentlyemblematic scenario to its material substrate. The proof of this, she claims, is thatwhen Adam “grills” Raphael,“it is the causal relation of all the life forms he sees totheir temporally and ontologically prior ‘embryon Atoms’ that he longs to under-stand. . . . He cannot see how natural kinds relate to the ‘one first matter’” (463-64).This is quite a misleading account. The phrase “one first matter” is Raphael’s, notAdam’s (as Picciotto’s syntax implies). What Adam “longs to understand,” prompt-ing the angel’s material disquisition at 5.467-505, is how his guest enjoyed his lunch(5.466). Most of the subsequent discussion, shall we say, is otherwise oriented. InMilton’s account of the creation (in Book 7), natural kinds, emblematically sugges-tive, abound. Adam uses the word “Atom” only at 8.18, as a trope for the smallnessof the earth, in his question about heavenly motions. He never asks the question ingeneral ontology that Picciotto tries to put in his mouth. The phrase “embryonAtoms,” finally, is from the description of Chaos at 2.900. It would appear totallyirrelevant—unless we accept the argument that Picciotto is trying to make on justthis basis—to the naming of the animals as described at 8.352-54.

As Picciotto scrupulously recognizes, her Baconian Milton has been sketchedbefore, by Karen Edwards and Catherine Gimelli Martin, among others. It is difficultto see Picciotto’s version as an improvement on theirs. On the other hand, some ofthe main problems of Picciotto’s literary-critical argument will tend to be shared,willy-nilly, with its analogues. Perhaps the present review can serve as an occasion toinvite Professor Picciotto, and colleagues who share her views, to submit the “Baco-nian Milton” thesis to renewed diagnostic scrutiny.

Simon Fraser University

William Poole. The World Makers: Scientists of the Restoration and the Search forthe Origins of the Earth. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010. xvii + 234pp. ISBN 13:978-1-906165-08-6. £30.00; $51.95 (cloth).

William Poole. John Aubrey and the Advancement of Learning. Oxford: BodleianLibrary, 2010. 111pp. ISBN 13: 978-1-85124-319-8. £25; $45.00 (paper).

Sarah Hutton

In her utopian fantasy-cum-scientific satire, A Description of a New World Calledthe BlazingWorld, Margaret Cavendish describes how her two female protagonists setthemselves to make imaginary worlds on various philosophical models (Pythago-rian, Platonic, Cartesian, Hobbesian). But the imaginary experiment is not a success,so each turns instead to fashion a world of her own as she pleases. The world makersof William Poole’s fascinating survey of the globus intellectualis of the late seven-teenth century had more success in modeling worlds in line with the latest theoriesin natural philosophy, even if the shelf-life of their credibility was limited. Unlike

Milton Quarterly 53


Margaret Cavendish, however, they had no compunction about constructing cos-mologies to fit the biblical account of creation, the flood, chronology, etc. as theysought to ally natural philosophy with biblical criticism. Working within an inter-pretive tradition that far antedates the new philosophies of the seventeenth century(and persists to this day), they sought to confirm and embellish the biblical accountof the physical universe through the findings of contemporary natural philosophy.The results can seem every bit as extraordinary as Cavendish’s fiction. Theirstrangeness is captured by William Nicolson of Carlisle when in 1698 he likened thecosmogonies ofThomas Burnet, JohnWoodward, andWilliamWhiston, respectively,as “a roasted egg,”“a hasty pudding,” and “snuff of a comet” (70). Poole is more mea-sured in his assessments, it being his purpose to show how their speculations werenot untypical for their time. Wearing his learning lightly he surveys the state ofseventeenth-century knowledge through the books and scientific activities of thevirtuosi of the period, focusing particularly, but not exclusively, on the forty yearsafter the founding of the Royal Society in 1660. Rather than the familiar story ofthe triumph of experimental science as practised by the godly scientists of the RoyalSociety, his narrative is shaped around the topics where biblical studies gave scope toscientific embellishment: notably the creation, flood, conflagration, and biblicalchronology. But he also examines areas where developments in established subjects(e.g., meteorology and language theory) or the emerging new disciplines of theperiod (archaeology and geomorphology) were providing a growing body of datathrough new methods of observational analysis. As he explains, new kinds of evi-dence, such as fossils and historical remains, put the world-makers’ accommodationof science and religion under strain, and resulted in questions as to their theologicalorthodoxy. This study is testimony to the extraordinary polymathy which character-izes not just natural philosophers, but churchmen of the time, who after all, shared abackground in the humanistic studies of their university training. Poole conveysvividly their sense of the interconnectedness of the various branches of knowledgewhich they explored. This is an intellectual world where John Milton is not out ofplace. In many ways, by supplying an account of the cosmos and geological historywithin the parameters of the biblical account, the scientific imagination of Poole’sworld-makers complements John Milton’s poetic descriptions of the prelapsarianuniverse in Paradise Lost, Milton’s cosmological conservatism notwithstanding. OneMiltonic imitator, William Catherall, even tried to meld Milton’s style with ThomasBurnet’s cosmological theories in his unmemorable blank-verse Essay on the Confla-gration (1720).

World Makers is intended as a general survey and makes no claims to beingcomprehensive in its coverage. The majority of the examples are figures whoseintellectual world revolved around the Oxford-Royal Society axis. But the criteriaof selection are relaxed enough to include Cambridge men, like John Ray, and evenforeigners (e.g., Giovanni Borelli and Nils Stensen), whose theories were discussedin England. There are bound to be figures whom individual readers think should begiven fuller coverage. I for one regret that there is not at least mention of HenryMore’s account of cosmological origins based on a natural philosophical reading ofGenesis (his Philosophical Cabbala with its important 1662 supplements) and thatBurnet’s debt to Cudworth and More is regarded as a retrogressive (“backwards”)feature of his Sacred Theory of the Earth. Another important figure present in littlemore than name is theWelsh scholar and natural philosopher, Edward Lhuyd, whosepublished work on antiquities, geology, and languages represents only part of his

54 Sarah Hutton


polymathy, his manuscript remains having been dispersed, and largely lost after hispremature death.

John Aubrey is another whose published output is unrepresentative of his poly-mathic endeavors. By contrast with Lhuyd, his posthumous fortunes have prosperedthanks to the preservation and concentration of his papers in the Bodleian Library,which celebrated their author with an exhibition in 2010. John Aubrey and theAdvancement of Learning was designed to accompany that exhibition, but stands aloneas an introduction to Aubrey. Where World Makers provides a broad picture acrossthe work of many individuals, John Aubrey gives us a chance to see in detail poly-mathy epitomized in one man. John Aubrey is most famous as an antiquary for hiswork on megaliths (notably his recognition and survey of the Avebury Circle) andfor his engaging, but not altogether reliable, Brief Lives. Poole presents a morerounded picture of Aubrey, highlighting his interests in mathematics, languagetheory, and archaeology, although the portrait is not so rounded that it includesAubrey’s investigations of folklore and astrology. Aubrey is presented as in manyways representative of the community of scholars and natural philosophers withwhom he was associated through the “experimental philosophical club” of inter-regnum Oxford (it was from him that the name derives) and the Royal Society.Embellished with illustrations, this study makes an excellent introduction to Aubreythe man in his intellectual milieu for the general reader, but much of the detailtogether with the useful critical apparatus gives it appeal to specialists as well.

Both books handle the expansive learning of their subjects with ease and com-municate the nub of complex theories engagingly. Both are rich in informativedetail. John Aubrey is more successful than World Makers in demonstrating Poole’sthesis that institutions are crucial to the intellectual formation of his subjects. Thereis the odd moment when World Makers snags on its own fluency—or maybe Pooleis deliberately controversial in dubbing Jeremy Taylor and Thomas Burnet as“maverick” (6, 168) and referring to Milton’s “sci fi imagination” (59). However, tocall Isaac Newton “the most influential student of alchemy” (13) is misleading—influential he certainly was, but not for his alchemy. AndThomas Aikenhead was notburned but hanged for denying the Trinity (8). But these are specks on a broadcanvas. Miltonists have much to learn from this confident account of the inter-permeation of seventeenth-century science and religion.

Aberystwyth University

Milton Quarterly 55


Documents

John Milton: Life, Writing, Reputation – Edited by Paul Hammond and Blair Worden