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Milton's Legacy
By Kristin A. Pruitt and Charles W. Durham
Susquehanna University Press, Price $49.50. ISBN: 1-57591-086-1
Founded in 1991, The Conference on John Milton, sponsored by Middle Tennessee State University at Murfreesboro, has become a major gathering place for North American Miltonists at all stages of their careers. Beginning in 1994, Susquehanna University Press has periodically published collections of essays based on papers delivered at the conference. Milton's Legacy is the sixth of these volumes. The collection features contributions deriving fro the 2001 conference and represents scholars from assistant professors to distinguished emeriti. The result, for better or worse, is a representative cross-section of the state of Milton studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Milton's Legacy includes fifteen essays arranged by principal focus. There are three on Paradise Lost; two on Paradise Regained; six on the Poems of 1645, including A Masque.at Ludlow Castle; one on Milton's readers; one on prose works; and two on Miltonic biography. Because the conference was held in October 2001, the volume does not reflect the controversy over the question of terrorism in Samson Agonistes, which erupted after the events of September 11. Even so, essays on Milton's politics, a topic that dominated much of Milton studies in the 1990s, are significantly underrepresented. Instead, these essays represent four other broad, continuing ways of approaching Milton that cannot be readily assigned to an "Old Guard" or "New Wave."
The first approach is actually a continuation of what most Milton scholars over the age of forty will find familiar: interpretations of Miltonic poetry supported by examinations of scripture and scriptural traditions, literary genre, or historical contexts. Roughly half of the essay in Milton's Legacy fall into this general category. Albert C. Labriola and Kent R. Lehnhof focus on the representation of particular characters in Paradise Lost . Labriola studies Milton's depiction of the Son as theangelos, or god-angel, by means of a comparison to the treatment of the idea in the medieval Genesis B from the Junius manuscript, which Milton may have seen or learned about. Through critical readings of Areopagitica and previous scholarship, Lehnhof finds "uncertainty" in both the character and mission of Raphael, arguing that his "message is potentially evil (42) but necessary to provide Adam and Eve with the essential grounds for truly free choice.
Joan Blythe, David V. Urban, and Leland Ryken read Milton's works from the perspective of biblical texts and seventeenth-century religious practice. In her essay on Paradise Regained, Blythe reveals how the Cain and Abel story provides a political "subtext" for the poem by showing how Milton's contemporaries used the figure of Cain to illustrate the opposing evils of rebellion (Anglicans and Presbyterians) or authoritarianism (republicans and religious radicals). Urban analyzed how Milton uses the parable of the householder (Matt. 13.52) in Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and De Doctrina Christiana to characterize himself "as one who fits the New Testament model of an ideal biblical interpreter" (209). In a study that is both ingenious and highly persuasive, Ryken reads early seventeenth-century Puritan funeral sermons for women as constituting a distinct religious-literary genre, the features of which, he argues, form the hermeneutical context for Milton's Sonnet 14 ("On the Religious Memory of Ms. Catharine Thomason, my Christian friend, deceased December, 1646").
The practice of historical/contextual readings is well represented by the contributions of Robert L. Entzminger and Hugh Jenkins. Entzminger interprets Satan's temptations of the Son in Paradise Regained in terms of the Toleration Controversy of the 1660s. As Entzminger shows, Milton and other like-minded Protestants rightly perceived royal moves toward toleration of Nonconformists as a stalking-horse for toleration of Roman Catholics, ad thus, long before the publication of Of True Religion. Milton joined efforts to unify Protestants against a perceived common enemy. Through Satan's exchanges with the Son, Milton echoes contemporary writings that attempt to establish shared, Protestant grounds on such matters as communion, fasting and the Son's-not the pope's-authority as head of the church. Jenkins explores the rhetorical significance for Milton of the Welsh and other Celtic peoples in the British Isles. In a stimulating examination of A Masque, Areopagitica, the Defenses, The History of Britain, and other works, Jenkins finds that "[h]is shifting representations of the Welsh in fact tell us much about Milton's political doubts about his own nation, and much about the creative tensions these doubts created: (104).
The second approach represented in Milton's Legacy also has a long and distinguished pedigree in Milton studies-biography. Sarah R. Morrison considers the biographical project itself in her essay on Samuel Johnson's Life of Milton, finding that the famous "irritation" in the work stems from the difficulties that Milton's life presented for Johnson, who was caught between his disagreement with his subject's politics and religious belies and "his own didactic theory and is sense of responsibility to a popular audience" (230). Edward Jones proves the enduring importance of hardcore archival spadework in his study of the Loyalty and Subsidy Return of 1641 and 1642. These records reveal a number of inaccuracies about the poet and his family given in Edward Phillips's Life of Milton, and offer correctives to several statements by nineteenth-century and modern biographers.
While it includes no example of 1980s-style high theory, the collection nevertheless offers two significant departures from the mainstream methods of Milton studies: W. Gardner Campbell's application of French philosopher Francis Jacques's ideas on hierarchy and alterity to a reading of Paradise Lost and William Shullenberger's Nietzchean analysis of A Masque. As Campbell explains, Jacques sees "the relation of persons [as] essentially creative" (51), and personhood as the result of being able "to enter into what [Jacques] calls an "interlocutive relation" (53). Compbell argues that this perspective is evident throught Paradise Lost, most importantly in the relationship of God to his creation. The result is a view of hierarchy much more nuanced than modern scholars have perceived. Following Nietzche's The Birth of Tragedy , Shullengerger sees A Masque as a displaced tragedy. Comus's temptation of the Lady offers a Dionysian "release form the tense fiction of individual identity" (119), while the Lady's rescue is accomplished by means of the "Apollonian imagination" (129). Both essays are highly engaging and convincingly show that philosophical approaches continue to yield valuable readings of Miltonic texts.
The final approach to Milton's works is relatively the newest-a focus on readers, authorship, and collaboration. In one of the strongest essays in the collection, Stephen B. Dobranski demonstrates how Milton shared with many of his contemporaries the perception that readers could not be counted upon to read in ways desired by authors. Dobranski studies several hundred seventeenth-century prefaces by authors and publishers to readers to argue that Milton's effort to shape his readers into a fit audience was an unusually sophisticated and extensive version of a common anxiety about the act of reading itself, an anxiety that in its turn calls into question the nature of authorship. Erin M. Henriksen, Amy D. Stackhouse, and James Dougal Fleming offer variations on the themes of authorship and collaboration in their work on the Poems of 1645. Henriksen sees "The Passion" not as unsuccessful, but rather as an ingenious example of the "Reformation of the poetics of the Passion" (167) in the wake of iconoclasm-a poem that "in the place of a description of Christ [.] substitutes a narrative of poetic composition and an investigation of authorship" (169) that recurs in fragmentary variations throughout the volume. Stackhouse raises questions about authorship and framing in the Poems by examining internal evidence of Milton's anxiety over the presentation and reception of his own image in the volume, and of printer Humphrey Moseley's efforts to separate Milton's identity of poet from his reputation as a polemicist. Fleming's essay on the Nativity Ode provides both a complement to Stackhouses's work an a valuable caveat to all historically inclined interpreter of Milton. Fleming effectively argues that too many readings of the Nativity Ode have been overdetermined by the headnote "Compos'd 1629," which cannot with any certainty be attributed to Milton. The problem is that, by 1645, Christmas poems had emerged as a significant subgenre of explicitly royalist poetry, and the ascription of a date of composition of 1629 intensifies the association. It is that date, more than the poem itself, that makes the Nativity Ode an "ideological problem" (160) for the volume and for its modern students.
Milton's Legacy illustrates one of the more pleasant paradoxes of Milton studies while it is dominated by essentially conservative methodological practice, it is nevertheless welcoming to a considerable variety of approaches to Miltonic texts. And, as in this collection, everyone is a competent reader. All the essays are accessibly written. As such, they should prove attractive not only to scholars, but also to advanced undergraduate and graduate student as well as adventuresome general readers.
Milton's Legacy includes fifteen essays arranged by principal focus. There are three on Paradise Lost; two on Paradise Regained; six on the Poems of 1645, including A Masque.at Ludlow Castle; one on Milton's readers; one on prose works; and two on Miltonic biography. Because the conference was held in October 2001, the volume does not reflect the controversy over the question of terrorism in Samson Agonistes, which erupted after the events of September 11. Even so, essays on Milton's politics, a topic that dominated much of Milton studies in the 1990s, are significantly underrepresented. Instead, these essays represent four other broad, continuing ways of approaching Milton that cannot be readily assigned to an "Old Guard" or "New Wave."
The first approach is actually a continuation of what most Milton scholars over the age of forty will find familiar: interpretations of Miltonic poetry supported by examinations of scripture and scriptural traditions, literary genre, or historical contexts. Roughly half of the essay in Milton's Legacy fall into this general category. Albert C. Labriola and Kent R. Lehnhof focus on the representation of particular characters in Paradise Lost . Labriola studies Milton's depiction of the Son as theangelos, or god-angel, by means of a comparison to the treatment of the idea in the medieval Genesis B from the Junius manuscript, which Milton may have seen or learned about. Through critical readings of Areopagitica and previous scholarship, Lehnhof finds "uncertainty" in both the character and mission of Raphael, arguing that his "message is potentially evil (42) but necessary to provide Adam and Eve with the essential grounds for truly free choice.
Joan Blythe, David V. Urban, and Leland Ryken read Milton's works from the perspective of biblical texts and seventeenth-century religious practice. In her essay on Paradise Regained, Blythe reveals how the Cain and Abel story provides a political "subtext" for the poem by showing how Milton's contemporaries used the figure of Cain to illustrate the opposing evils of rebellion (Anglicans and Presbyterians) or authoritarianism (republicans and religious radicals). Urban analyzed how Milton uses the parable of the householder (Matt. 13.52) in Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and De Doctrina Christiana to characterize himself "as one who fits the New Testament model of an ideal biblical interpreter" (209). In a study that is both ingenious and highly persuasive, Ryken reads early seventeenth-century Puritan funeral sermons for women as constituting a distinct religious-literary genre, the features of which, he argues, form the hermeneutical context for Milton's Sonnet 14 ("On the Religious Memory of Ms. Catharine Thomason, my Christian friend, deceased December, 1646").
The practice of historical/contextual readings is well represented by the contributions of Robert L. Entzminger and Hugh Jenkins. Entzminger interprets Satan's temptations of the Son in Paradise Regained in terms of the Toleration Controversy of the 1660s. As Entzminger shows, Milton and other like-minded Protestants rightly perceived royal moves toward toleration of Nonconformists as a stalking-horse for toleration of Roman Catholics, ad thus, long before the publication of Of True Religion. Milton joined efforts to unify Protestants against a perceived common enemy. Through Satan's exchanges with the Son, Milton echoes contemporary writings that attempt to establish shared, Protestant grounds on such matters as communion, fasting and the Son's-not the pope's-authority as head of the church. Jenkins explores the rhetorical significance for Milton of the Welsh and other Celtic peoples in the British Isles. In a stimulating examination of A Masque, Areopagitica, the Defenses, The History of Britain, and other works, Jenkins finds that "[h]is shifting representations of the Welsh in fact tell us much about Milton's political doubts about his own nation, and much about the creative tensions these doubts created: (104).
The second approach represented in Milton's Legacy also has a long and distinguished pedigree in Milton studies-biography. Sarah R. Morrison considers the biographical project itself in her essay on Samuel Johnson's Life of Milton, finding that the famous "irritation" in the work stems from the difficulties that Milton's life presented for Johnson, who was caught between his disagreement with his subject's politics and religious belies and "his own didactic theory and is sense of responsibility to a popular audience" (230). Edward Jones proves the enduring importance of hardcore archival spadework in his study of the Loyalty and Subsidy Return of 1641 and 1642. These records reveal a number of inaccuracies about the poet and his family given in Edward Phillips's Life of Milton, and offer correctives to several statements by nineteenth-century and modern biographers.
While it includes no example of 1980s-style high theory, the collection nevertheless offers two significant departures from the mainstream methods of Milton studies: W. Gardner Campbell's application of French philosopher Francis Jacques's ideas on hierarchy and alterity to a reading of Paradise Lost and William Shullenberger's Nietzchean analysis of A Masque. As Campbell explains, Jacques sees "the relation of persons [as] essentially creative" (51), and personhood as the result of being able "to enter into what [Jacques] calls an "interlocutive relation" (53). Compbell argues that this perspective is evident throught Paradise Lost, most importantly in the relationship of God to his creation. The result is a view of hierarchy much more nuanced than modern scholars have perceived. Following Nietzche's The Birth of Tragedy , Shullengerger sees A Masque as a displaced tragedy. Comus's temptation of the Lady offers a Dionysian "release form the tense fiction of individual identity" (119), while the Lady's rescue is accomplished by means of the "Apollonian imagination" (129). Both essays are highly engaging and convincingly show that philosophical approaches continue to yield valuable readings of Miltonic texts.
The final approach to Milton's works is relatively the newest-a focus on readers, authorship, and collaboration. In one of the strongest essays in the collection, Stephen B. Dobranski demonstrates how Milton shared with many of his contemporaries the perception that readers could not be counted upon to read in ways desired by authors. Dobranski studies several hundred seventeenth-century prefaces by authors and publishers to readers to argue that Milton's effort to shape his readers into a fit audience was an unusually sophisticated and extensive version of a common anxiety about the act of reading itself, an anxiety that in its turn calls into question the nature of authorship. Erin M. Henriksen, Amy D. Stackhouse, and James Dougal Fleming offer variations on the themes of authorship and collaboration in their work on the Poems of 1645. Henriksen sees "The Passion" not as unsuccessful, but rather as an ingenious example of the "Reformation of the poetics of the Passion" (167) in the wake of iconoclasm-a poem that "in the place of a description of Christ [.] substitutes a narrative of poetic composition and an investigation of authorship" (169) that recurs in fragmentary variations throughout the volume. Stackhouse raises questions about authorship and framing in the Poems by examining internal evidence of Milton's anxiety over the presentation and reception of his own image in the volume, and of printer Humphrey Moseley's efforts to separate Milton's identity of poet from his reputation as a polemicist. Fleming's essay on the Nativity Ode provides both a complement to Stackhouses's work an a valuable caveat to all historically inclined interpreter of Milton. Fleming effectively argues that too many readings of the Nativity Ode have been overdetermined by the headnote "Compos'd 1629," which cannot with any certainty be attributed to Milton. The problem is that, by 1645, Christmas poems had emerged as a significant subgenre of explicitly royalist poetry, and the ascription of a date of composition of 1629 intensifies the association. It is that date, more than the poem itself, that makes the Nativity Ode an "ideological problem" (160) for the volume and for its modern students.
Milton's Legacy illustrates one of the more pleasant paradoxes of Milton studies while it is dominated by essentially conservative methodological practice, it is nevertheless welcoming to a considerable variety of approaches to Miltonic texts. And, as in this collection, everyone is a competent reader. All the essays are accessibly written. As such, they should prove attractive not only to scholars, but also to advanced undergraduate and graduate student as well as adventuresome general readers.
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