Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020 IX

Milton and Poetry, 1603–1660

GARTH BOND, JAMES DOELMAN, GREGORY KNEIDEL AND MITCHELL M. HARRIS

This chapter has four sections: 1. General; 2. Herbert; 3. Donne; 4. Milton. Section 1 is by Garth Bond; section 2 is by James Doelman; section 3 is by Gregory Kneidel; section 4 is by Mitchell M. Harris.

1. General

This year saw the publication of two important and long-overdue biographies of major poets. Margaret P. Hannay’s Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth will be covered in next year’s volume of YWES; the other is Nigel Smith’s highly acclaimed Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon, the first scholarly biography of Marvell since 1928. Smith takes full advantage of the significant textual and documentary work produced in the past decade, including his own edition of Marvell’s poetry, seeking to reintegrate the politician with the poet. As a subject of biography Marvell poses numerous difficulties. His lyrics are frequently difficult to date, and even attribution is problematic for the satirical poetry associated with him. Despite a largely public career, Marvell’s own views and values often remain frustratingly elusive. Smith faces these difficulties head on. He presents the evidence and offers interpretations where he deems them warranted, but is also willing to leave obscure matters unresolved, respecting the privacy so clearly valued by Marvell. Smith traces the literary and political connections Marvell made in grammar school at Hull and, more fully, as a scholarship student at Cambridge. The unexpected death of Marvell’s father precluded what Smith judges a likely career in the church and set the poet instead on a path of dependence and service. Marvell toured the Continent from 1642 to 1647, and Smith traces references in his poetry and prose to influences likely encountered on these travels. He also confronts the difficulty of Marvell’s early political commitments, leaving the reader to square the poet’s involvement with a group of royalist poets and his anti-republican satire of Tom May with the subtle and variously interpreted ‘An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’. Marvell was clearly moving towards Commonwealth patrons, however, serving as a tutor

The Year’s Work in English Studies, Volume 91 (2012) ß The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the English Association. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] doi:10.1093/ywes/mas009 MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 555 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020 first for Sir Thomas Fairfax’s daughter and then for Cromwell’s ward, William Dutton. Smith dates ‘To His Coy Mistress’ to the break between employments and ‘Bermudas’ to Marvell’s time with Dutton; but ‘The Garden’ and ‘The Mower Against Gardens’ are separated from the other pastoral poetry associated with the Fairfax’s Nun Appleton Estate and redated to a 1668 lull in parliamentary service. In fact, the key shift in Smith’s biography (no doubt, too, in Marvell’s life) occurs in the move from private to public service, first as an assistant to Milton and in intelligence services in the final year of Cromwell’s Protectorate, and then in the House of Commons, representing Hull. Smith is at pains to emphasize the continuity of these positions, arguing against ‘the commonplace idea that Marvell decided to change career by becoming an MP’ (p. 154). For the reader, the key impact of this shift is the dramatic increase in documentary evidence of Marvell’s daily business, and the resulting emphasis on his political activities. Smith does not shy away from the inglorious, such as Marvell’s endless wrangling to secure for Hull Corporation rights to build a potentially lucrative lighthouse. But the details of parliamentary politics under Charles II also provide a necessary backdrop for understanding the Painter poems in which Marvell played a key if not fully determined role, and also for the satirical prose that would secure his greatest fame amongst his contempor- aries. Even when discussing Marvell as an MP, Smith demonstrates the difficulties of teasing out his private political convictions. The one point of certainty for Smith is Marvell’s unwavering commitment to religious tolerance, leading Marvell at times to support Charles II against the less tolerant parliament. In this light, Smith’s reading of ‘Scaevola Scoto- Brittannus’, a Latin poem portraying a Scottish dissenter, tortured and executed for an attempted assassination of a bishop, as a victim of religious persecution deserves attention (pp. 296–300). The bulk of the biography’s final third, however, rightly concentrates on Marvell’s prose, detailing both his satirical tactics and the arguments of the pamphlets to which he responds and those which responded, in turn, to him. Smith’s final chapter details the posthumous legal proceedings surrounding Marvell’s estate and his possible marriage. Smith offers no final judgement, though he is clearly more sympathetic to the possibility than some critics, albeit a marriage likely of convenience, designed to ensure that Marvell’s housekeeper could not be compelled to testify against him regarding his controversial but theoretically anonymous writings. Smith also considers the evidence for Marvell’s sexuality without committing to a determined view. In addition to his biography, Smith also contributed the book chapter, ‘ ‘‘Mirrored Doubles’’: Andrew Marvell, the Remaking of Poetry and the Poet’s Career’ (in Hardie and Moore, eds., Classical Literary Careers and Their Reception, pp. 226–40), in which he focuses more exclusively on Marvell’s literary career. This focus emphasizes Smith’s notion of Marvell as an imitative poet whose talent lay more in creatively mirroring others than in egoistically distinguishing his own voice, a view present in the biography but less directly argued for. Two of Marvell’s poems, ‘A Poem upon the Death of His Late Highness the Lord Protector’ and ‘Upon Appleton House’, received additional attention 556 MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020 in articles and book chapters. Anthony Mortimer, in ‘Domesticating the Devil: Cromwell and His Elegists’ (in Stirling and Dutheil de la Roche` re, eds., After Satan: Essays in Honour of Neil Forsyth, pp. 46–67), considers Marvell’s neglected elegy alongside three related elegies in order to explore the difficulties that Cromwell posed for his eulogizers. While Edmund Waller’s poem was handicapped by ‘his own record as a turncoat’ (p. 50), Thomas Sprat’s youth left him less attuned to the scars of the Civil War and thus more willing than the others to commemorate the whole of the Cromwell’s career. John Dryden’s poem is more circumspect than Sprat’s, but its similes often place Cromwell’s achievements in a questionable light. All three poems reveal the main difficulty, in Mortimer’s view: that Cromwell’s uncrowned status disrupts traditional monarchical panegyric. Marvell’s poem differs from the other elegies in its mixing genuine grief with its praise, and by taking a more than passing interest in Cromwell’s private virtues. Mortimer closes by noting the movement from Marvell’s majestic but ultimately dehumanized portrayal in the ‘Horatian Ode’ to the domestic intimacy of this final poem on Cromwell. William M. Russell, in ‘Love, Chaos, and Marvell’s Elegy for Cromwell’ (ELR 40:ii[2010] 272–97), traces the elegy’s use of chaos, an ambivalent but politically charged word in the period. He argues that, in this last poem on Cromwell, Marvell seeks to depoliticize the Protector by replacing a purely destructive chaos with a more mythologically rich image, capable of creation as well as destruction. Marvell does so by linking chaos and love in a cycle of dissolution and rebirth, the sort of dialectical concordia discors common in Marvell’s finest poetry. Though called to death by his love for his recently deceased daughter, Eliza, the resulting chaos prepares for the redemptive instalment of Cromwell’s son Richard as new Lord Protector. Still, Russell acknowledges that Marvell’s effort at depoliticizing Cromwell is only partially successful. Turning to ‘Upon Appleton House’, Lynn Staley, in ‘Enclosed Spaces’ (in Cummings and Simpson, eds., Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, pp. 113–33), places Marvell’s poem at the end of a tradition, reaching back to Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, of using gardens or other enclosed parcels of land as a metaphor for exploring the boundaries of England and its relationship to the church. Much of her chapter examines this tradition through medieval Britain, covering Bede, Monmouth and the Brut, the Wilton Diptych, Langland, Chaucer, and Mum and Sothsegger, before turning briefly to John Gaunt’s encomium of England in Shakespeare’s Richard II. Though agnostic as to whether Marvell was familiar with this tradition, Staley does argue that he had access to the necessary libraries. She also points to more immediate precedents of pastoral politics: Ben Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’, where the garden is both a sign of privilege and of the bonds of hierarchical ordering; and John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill, where the use of landscape and river reinforces royalist themes. Staley argues that, for Marvell, the nunnery’s bounded and isolating Catholic past is reconstituted by the virginal Maria Fairfax and her rejuvenation of the estate’s natural beauty. In ‘ ‘‘[A]n inn to entertain / Its Lord a while, but not remain’’: Home and Dislocations in Andrew Marvell’s ‘‘Upon Appleton House’’ ’ (CS 22:iii[2010] 21–36), Vassiliki Markidou argues that a series of factors—the MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 557 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020 property’s inheritance through a female line, the Catholic background of Fairfax’s forebears, the poem’s depiction of Fairfax’s daughter Mary as a ‘militant female’ (p. 31)—create a sense of dislocation for Fairfax at his Nunappleton estate that undermine Marvell’s efforts to present it as a home rather than merely as a house. Rounding off Marvell scholarship for this year, Ian C. Parker, in ‘Marvell, Nathaniel Whiting, and Cowley’ (N&Q 57[2010] 59–66), traces the echoes of a satirical narrative by Whiting, possibly an older contemporary of Marvell and Cowley at Cambridge, in a number of Marvell’s poems: ‘Upon Appleton House’ (and glancingly in other garden poems), ‘Upon the Death of Lord Hastings’, ‘The Gallery’, ‘Young Love’, and ‘A Dialogue, between the Resolved Soul, and Created Pleasure’. Parker also demonstrates that Cowley’s ‘The Soul’, to which the last of these Marvell poems responds, independently alludes to the same Whiting passages. Ben Jonson was also the subject of a major monograph, Victoria Moul’s Jonson, Horace and the Classical Tradition. An early modern Latinist, Moul brings a thorough knowledge of the classical canon to her task of defining Jonson’s generally recognized but under-studied Horatianism. Her method is an intertextual exploration of Jonson’s echoes not only of Horace but also of other classical authors to which both Jonson and, in many cases, Horace were responding. The result, though more narrowly focused on classical texts, is not unlike Nigel Smith’s treatment of Marvell’s writings. Moul justifies this approach both on the basis of Renaissance pedagogy, encouraging students to know intimately a limited classical canon, and by reference to the intertextual commentary of Renaissance editions of the classics, where possible those specifically owned by Jonson. She also notes that Jonson’s Horace is not ours; his favourite passages are drawn from the Epistles and Satires, the Ars Poetica, and from the most straightforwardly panegyric odes, especially those which unironically emphasize the poet’s power to immortalize. The first three chapters emphasize the interaction—really, the rivalry— between Horace and various other classical authors within Jonson’s poetry. Moul opens by considering the dialogue between Jonson, Horace, and Pindar in Jonson’s odes. She argues that, just as Horace shifts the weight of Pindaric glory evenly shared by victorious athlete and immortalizing poet towards the latter, Jonson adopts and even seeks to surpass Horace’s most mature and confident poetic voice from the start of his own career. The second chapter shows how Jonson’s notion of liberty within a group of socially stratified friends, taken from Horace’s Epistles, makes his epigrams sound so different from the Martial poems they emulate. Starting with ‘Inviting a Friend to Supper’, moving through a series of epigrams to the Roe family, and eventually turning to several verse epistles, Moul shows how Jonson uses Horatian libertas as a means of negotiating the indebtedness of authors to their patrons while maintaining moral authority. The third chapter turns to the satirical voice in Jonson’s poetry, arguing that he adopts a Juvenalian satirical pose as a ‘creative counterpart to the Horatian tenor he seeks to restore’ (p. 97). In his satirical drama and in many verse epistles, Juvenalian blame is answered and redeemed by Horatian praise. Yet Moul also sees satirical 558 MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020 allusions in the opening poems of The Forest collection that unsettle these apparently panegyric poems, most intriguingly in ‘To Penshurst’, where Jonson alludes to classical passages noted by Jonson as models not of praise but of flattery. Moul’s final two chapters shift from interaction to stricter modes of translation. The fourth chapter focuses on translation in Jonson’s play Poetaster, which Moul argues reveals the centrality of Horace in the play. Translations of Horace not only provide the basis for scenes in the play and shape the nature of the very poetasters who accuse Horace of plagiarism, but also provide both Virgil and Caesar (whose authority is elsewhere undermined by his allusive association with both Jonson’s Ovid and Marlowe’s Dido) with their most authoritative aesthetic judgements. The fifth chapter considers a series of other acts of translation linking Jonson and Horace. Moul argues that Jonson’s nearly literal translation of the Ars Poetica nonetheless constitutes a Jonsonian interpretation of Horace. She further points to contemporary translations of Horace by Jonson’s friends and admirers and to three translations into Latin of a Jonson ode to demonstrate that his Horatianism was understood and recognized by contemporaries. In ‘ ‘‘Rare poemes aske rare friends’’: Ben Jonson, Coterie Poet’ (MP 107:iii[2010] 380–99), Garth Bond argues that Jonson’s representations of manuscript circulation provide insight into his understanding of both manuscript and print. While Jonson consistently links his poetry to coterie distribution, as in epigrams to Donne and the countess of Bedford and a sonnet to Lady Mary Wroth, these poems downplay the material details of scribal circulation emphasized by other manuscript poets. Jonson’s worries over the typical audience for printed works in several dedicatory poems suggest that his representations of a rare manuscript coterie are shaped as much by his print aspirations as by his actual participation in manuscript circulation. In ‘Possible Sources for Ben Jonson’s ‘‘My Picture Left in Scotland’’ ’ (N&Q 57[2010] 43–8), Boris Borukhov accounts for a crux in the poem by suggesting that Jonson refers to the Raphael fresco Parnassus, located at the Vatican. He further speculates that Jonson’s revision of these lines resulted from his first encountering the fresco through a popular engraving, later corrected by more accurate knowledge of the original— through what channel is unclear, as Borukhov acknowledges that both Jonson’s history and the fresco’s make clear he could not have seen the original. Finally, in ‘Women, Genealogy and Composite Monarchy in Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion’(ELR 40:ii[2010] 238–71), Raphael Falco studies the role of the mythical female figures who populate Drayton’s chorographical poem. He argues that far from being effaced from the poem’s genealogies, these maternal figures of rivers and forests exert, alongside their male counterparts (usually mountains), their own separate charismatic authority. Without displacing patriarchal figures of masculine authority in poem’s mythological genealogy of Britain, these female figures participate in shaping the nation’s geography, playing a part in what Falco, borrowing J.H. Elliot’s term, describes as a composite monarchy. MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 559 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020

2. Herbert

The most noteworthy publication of 2010 was George Herbert’s Pastoral: New Essays on the Poet and Priest of Bemerton, edited and introduced by Christopher Hodgkins, which emerged from a 2007 conference of the same name held at Salisbury, not far from Herbert’s parish of Bemerton. The papers consider both Herbert’s response to the pastoral literary tradition and his pastoral work as parish priest in Bemerton. Hodgkins’s introduction neatly frames the essays to come, noting the tensions over pastoral within Herbert’s work, and suggesting that ultimately he seeks a ‘reformed pastoral’ (p. 18). The poet recognized both the limits of artful language and the power of ‘prayerful poetry’ as ‘something understood’. Hodgkins, like a number of the contributors, focuses especially on The Country Parson and Herbert’s clerical role in both the local community and the nation. As is often the case with papers emerging from a conference, the bounds of the focus become rather stretched (ranging from the Earl of Pembroke’s gardener to the postmodernist philosopher Gianni Vattimo), but the essays here are generally strong and the opening essays cohere in their exploration of Herbert’s sense of pastoral vocation. Gene Edward Veith’s ‘ ‘‘Brittle Crazy Glass’’: George Herbert, Vocation, and the Theology of Presence’ carefully places Herbert within the history of Protestantism, arguing that he was ‘caught between the old Reformation and the new’, and that his sacramentalism should be read as a continuation of the sixteenth-century conservative Reformation rather than as an anticipation of later Anglo-Catholicism. Within this framework he examines Herbert’s experience of vocation, which was not a ‘calling’ away from the world, but to be the instrument of God serving the world, and continues Luther’s sense of vocation as what ‘God performs through the Christian’. He first examines the sense of vocation in The Country Parson, not just of the parson but of those he served. While Herbert’s general understanding of work reflects a theology of presence, in describing the parson’s vocation it begins to sound more like an ascetic ‘secular monasticism’. Herbert’s poems show him struggling to fulfil his understanding of vocation, but these struggles are repeatedly resolved through an awareness of Christ’s presence (‘Aaron’, ‘The Collar’). Being ‘busy’ is not a fulfilling of vocation: God works in the Christian even while he is at rest. There are few neighbours to serve in Herbert’s poetry (in contrast to The Country Parson), but Veith concludes by arguing that the reader is the neighbour served in The Temple. Like Veith, Kenneth Graham (‘Herbert’s Holy Practice’) explores the poet’s understanding of the Christian’s work(s) in relation to faith. Graham approaches the discussion with an understanding of the ‘rhetorical nature of holy practice’: the parson’s deeds must join with his words to move others to faith and holy living. ‘Constancie’ offers a poetic parallel to this: the parson is constant in purpose but adjusts his rhetoric to the audience. With regard to God and the self, Graham sees Herbert as within the Protestant mainstream in affirming justification solely through faith but presenting a place for human will and works in sanctification. He compares the interaction between human will and divine grace in such Herbert poems as ‘Lent’ and ‘Discipline’ to the 560 MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020 contemporary work The Christians Theorico-Practicon [1633] by Herbert’s fellow Wiltshire clergyman, Robert Dyer. Helen Wilcox’s ‘ ‘‘Hallowed Fire’’; or, When is a Poet Not a Priest’ also probes Herbert’s sense of vocation, arguing that in Herbert the roles of priest and poet are never separable. Her focus is not on the life of Herbert but The Temple itself, where she sees manifestations of the priestly role. The structure of the volume reflects that of a priest leading a congregation through a ‘sequence of priestly acts’ (p. 102), engaging in prayers, sacraments, reading and preaching the Word. Like Graham, she stresses Herbert’s sense of the flawed frailty of the poet-priest, a humble vessel through which word and sacrament are offered. The second section of George Herbert’s Pastoral focuses on the local role of Herbert at Bemerton. Cristina Malcolmson’s ‘William Herbert’s Gardener: Adrian Gilbert’ provides an overview of the intriguing and varied life and career of Gilbert, who, through William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, was loosely connected to Herbert. She demonstrates the interconnectedness of Gilbert’s interests in navigation, alchemy, and gardening, and argues that while Herbert was opposed to the emphasis on human power and perfection- ism inherent in alchemy, his attitudes towards navigation and empire were more ambivalent. The material on Gilbert probably could stand on its own merits, and the connection to Herbert is limited, but this essay does offer insight into the culture in which the poet lived. Clayton D. Lein (‘At the Porch to the Temple: Herbert’s Progress to Bemerton’) argues forcefully for a narrative of Herbert’s progression to a sacred career that affirms the general tenor of Walton’s picture of these years, and he rejects Amy Charles’s competing account as ‘patently unconvincing’ (p. 134). Lein probes Herbert’s lack of advancement in the second half of the 1620s, as he was passed over by his kinsman the earl of Pembroke, the king, and various churchmen who knew him and had the power of appointment. By convincing comparison to similar figures in the period, Lein shows the lack of preferment enjoyed by Herbert. Was he not seeking patronage? Was he doubtful about a career as churchman? Lein reminds us of the lowliness of the Bemerton appointment for one of Herbert’s background, and, again, comparison to the rectors before and after Herbert is telling. Bemerton was not a likely first step in a successful clerical career, and Lein concludes that ‘Herbert knowingly sold himself short’ (p. 148). In addition, Lein argues (with Walton and Aubrey) that it was the fourth (not the third) earl of Pembroke, Philip, who presented him to Bemerton, and he raises the possibility that Herbert had alienated the third earl by his lack of support in the 1624 parliament. In ‘The Country Parson’s Flock: George Herbert’s Wiltshire Parish’ John Chandler offers the very different perspective of a local historian. He recreates through close examination of archival records the parish where Herbert practised as a ‘country parson’. In the process he shows how Herbert’s work of that title was grounded in the reality of country life, and corrects the frequent misconception that Fugglestone with Bemerton was an isolated country parish. In another essay concerning The Country Parson, ‘George Herbert and the Widow Bagges: Poverty, Charity, and the Law’, Chauncey Wood explores MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 561 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020

Herbert’s ‘double aime’ in regard to the poor: he offers limited praise of the Poor Law Act (1601) as he embraces a higher good of church-based charity. Unlike the Poor Law (and the additional statutes introduced by Salisbury), Herbert is not primarily concerned with civil order, but with leading his flock to obedient holiness. Anthony Martin (‘ ‘‘To Do a Piece of Right’’: Edmund Duncon and the Publication of George Herbert’) sets out to rectify the relative scholarly neglect of Edmund Duncon and his role in the publishing of Herbert (and Ferrar). Like Lein, he leans towards trusting Walton’s account more than many previous scholars—in this case on the transmission of the manuscript of The Temple. He challenges the frequent assertion that Duncon was a Puritan, and by tracing his church career through the Civil War, Interregnum, and Restoration, imagines how ‘hypothetically Herbert himself might have fared had he lived’ through the succeeding decades (p. 181). Paul Dyck’s engaging essay, ‘George Herbert and the Liturgical Experience of Scripture’, explores the relationship of Herbert’s Temple to the Prayer Book, which he sees not as a rival text to the Bible, but as one which shaped the latter for liturgical use. Drawing on the Lutheran idea of the Bible as alieno verbo, Dyck shows how the liturgy uses scripture to interrupt worshippers’ paradoxical dilemmas of approaching God. These same elements are found in such poems as ‘Conscience’, ‘The Collar’, and, most significantly, ‘Love’ (III). In ‘Herbert and Early Stuart Psalm Culture: Beyond Translation and Meditation’, Kate Narveson perceptively shows how Herbert went beyond his contemporaries who wrote devotional works based upon the psalms. While, like them, Herbert was both affective and didactic, he models his poems upon the psalms as poetic structures as well. Narveson gives an overview of devotional material on the psalms of the period, and shows how the verse-by-verse approach to devotions on the psalms erased their psalmic structure. While the content of The Temple is like that of a typical devotional work such as Phineas Fletcher’s Joy in Tribulation, his poetic approach dramatizes and expresses the struggles of the soul in a way that is more like the psalms themselves. The shared devotional purpose is made more effective by the poetic artistry applied by Herbert. Curtis Whitaker’s ‘Herbert’s Pastor as Herbalist’ offers a broad-ranging discussion of the overlapping fields of divinity and herbalism in the early Stuart period, a time in which an expanding range of plants was being used medicinally. Whitaker notes the competing claims and jurisdictions of physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, and empirics. However, such interests were not confined to medical professionals, as widespread emblematic thinking and commentary about plants is reflected in the herbals of the period. The Country Parson advises the use of home-grown, native, single-plant cures, as these are both cheap and familiar to the English body. Overall, Whitaker shows that there was a comfort with mingling ‘scientific’ and theological or moral readings of individual plants; this is explored through a focus on roses in Herbert’s verse as a poetic and ‘medicinal test-case’ (p. 235). Turning to very different texts, Sidney Gottlieb introduces (for most readers, at least) Emma Marshall’s novels Under Salisbury Spire [1889] and A Haunt of Ancient Peace [1896], which take Herbert, especially in his later years, 562 MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020 as their subject. Focusing primarily on the first of these, Gottlieb notes how Marshall shows Herbert as a working country parson, labouring in a ‘world of strife’, and functioning ‘as a meliorating influence’ (p. 260) in a troubled environment. Most unexpected is the depiction of ‘Herbert as a lover, broadly defined’ (p. 262), as the novel traces his courtship of and marriage to Jane Danvers (a fictional relative of hers serves as narrator). Quotations from The Temple serve as epigraphs to the chapters, and the ‘Affliction’ poems are heavily drawn upon in the plot. The article ably presents the novel as a manifestation of Herbert’s reputation in the late nineteenth century, which was more complex than we might imagine. In his conclusion Gottlieb notes that Marshall presents Herbert as ‘a complex and dynamic figure rather than an unimaginative embodiment of a via media and a vehicle for knee-jerk nostalgia and dull hagiography’ (p. 270). He points to the second novel as an area for further work. To close the volume, David Jasper (‘ ‘‘Something Understood’’: From Poetry to Theology in the Writings of George Herbert’) explores Herbert’s theology in relation to a number of later figures. He begins with the conclusion to Herbert’s ‘Prayer’ (I), as he explores how Herbert’s poetry so often ends in silence in the face of sacred truth that is beyond language. This, however, does not negate the poetic, which Jasper argues, is the most intense experiencing of that truth. He uses the biblical term kenosis (emptying) to describe how words are emptied of meaning only to be recharged. Jasper points to the paradox of Herbert’s verse ‘as a truly aesthetic asceticism’ (p. 278) and its sacramental emphasis on embodying the sacred. In the latter part of the essay he draws upon Heidegger’s concept of ‘poetic dwelling’ to present Herbert’s poetry as ‘the embodiment, not the reflection or statement, of theological possibilities’ (p. 281). Then, in his most radical move, he finds similarities (but not more than that) between Herbert’s seeking of Christian truth and that of the postmodernist philosopher Gianni Vattimo. The other major collection of Herbert papers was volume 32 of The George Herbert Journal (dated 2008–9, but published in 2010), largely dedicated to the reception of Herbert’s work, both in his own time and well beyond. It begins with ‘A Footnote to ‘‘The Sacrifice’’: The Empson–Tuve Correspondence’ (GHJ 32[2008–9] 1–7), in which Thomas P. Roche, Jr. revisits the Empson– Tuve debate over critical versus scholarly readings. Roche came to know Tuve in the last part of her career, and edited her final publication after her death. Partly based upon personal recollections, the article offers insight into Tuve’s life and career. Its heart, however, is publication of the private correspondence between Empson and Tuve that followed their disagreement in the pages of The Kenyon Review. Empson’s letters have been published previously, but those of Tuve appear here for the first time. James Doelman’s ‘Herbert’s Lucus and Pope Urban VIII’ (GHJ 32[2008–9] 43–53) considers the roots of the poet’s Latin satirical verses on the anagram of ROMA/AMOR and argues that the poem ‘Urbani VIII Pont. Respons.’ that follows it in Lucus is in fact a response by the poet-Pope. Herbert’s continuing effect upon fellow churchmen is manifest in an article with a most unlikely title: ‘If You Meet George Herbert on the Road ...Kill Him! Herbertism and Contemporary Parish Ministry’ (GHJ MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 563 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020

32[2008–9] 31–43). Here, Justin Lewis-Anthony describes, from the perspective of a current parish priest, the barriers that a distorted image of Herbert (and in particular his Country Parson) have created for those who follow him in ministry. Drawing on the church history of Diarmaid MacCullough, Lewis-Anthony suggests that this ‘Herbertism’, as he calls it, is part of a larger selective reshaping of the Church of England’s identity, which took place during the Restoration and the Oxford Movement of the nineteenth century. The domesticated, and limited, roles of the rural parish priest now call on him to be ‘omni-present, omni-competent, and omni-affirming’, and thus constrained from his calling based upon ‘theological, moral, and soteriological claims of Christian ministry’. The article is part of a book-length study, which has appeared under a similar title. A series of articles in this issue trace Herbert’s poetic influence upon specific individual poets. In ‘ ‘‘Upon the Rack’’: George Herbert, William Cowper, and the Hermeneutic of Dis/ability’ (GHJ 32[2008–9] 54–67), Holly Faith Nelson and Laura E Ralph offer the first extended study of the influence of Herbert on Cowper. While there is little direct imitation (of the sort that Henry Vaughan engaged in), the ‘voiceprint’ (a term borrowed from recent discussion of Donne’s influence) of the earlier poet is upon him. Although Cowper is best known for having describing Herbert’s poems as ‘gothic and uncouth’, he elsewhere shows a strong sense of the spiritually therapeutic aspect of The Temple. While Herbert was among those religious texts avoided by Cowper at certain points of instability in his life (partly through the suggestion of friends and family), Nelson and Ralph argue that Cowper’s ‘disabled’ situation was an important dimension of his perceptive appreciation of Herbert. (More precise discussion of the stages in Cowper’s varied life when Herbert played these roles would be welcome.) They suggest that Herbert’s ‘Affliction’ poems were particularly significant for Cowper, who was so often trapped in what seemed to be an unending and hopeless state of affliction and anxiety. Like Herbert he often poetically presents the voice of God intervening in the poem. Like Nelson and Ralph, Sean H. McDowell, ‘The Depth of Herbert’s Voiceprint: Intentional and Unintentional Traces in the Poetry of Alfred Corn’ (GHJ 32[2008–9] 68–82), uses the term ‘voiceprint’ to describe the twentieth-century American poet Alfred Corn’s reception of Herbert. He specifically points to the effect of Herbert as poetry (apart from a particular religious perspective) on such poets as Corn. The article explores not just deliberate imitation and response, but unconscious ‘seepage’ of the original into the later poet’s work, and in regard to tracing these unconscious echoes McDowell offers a helpful methodology: ‘close attention to the grammar, the proximity, and the order of repeated significant words’ (p. 75), which I would note are among the tools used by scholars of Renaissance ascription studies. He also shows Corn absorbing and using the typical Renaissance rhetorical techniques (such as anaphora, epizeuxis, ploce) favoured by Herbert. Matt McNees, ‘George Herbert and Mark Strand’ (GHJ 32[2008–9] 83–97), traces the connections between Herbert’s poetry and that of the American poet Mark Strand since The Late Hour [1978], which he sees as a turning point in Strand’s career. He finds in it structural similarities to The Temple (for example, in the consistently used metaphors of light through the first part of the volume), and 564 MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020 the ordering of the individual lyric poems. In particular, he argues that ‘Pot Roast’ [1978] is a poem in dialogue with Herbert’s ‘Love’ (III): a simple but ritual-like meal becomes charged with transcendent significance. Strand has expressed admiration of not only Herbert himself, but of the Herbert-like qualities of Elizabeth Bishop’s verse. This year saw few close readings of individual Herbert poems. However, in ‘Paradox and Imping in Herbert’s ‘‘Easter-wings’’ ’ (GHJ 32[2008–9] 98–102), Chauncey Wood offers a persuasive reading of the final lines: ‘For, if I imp my wing on thine, / Affliction shall advance the flight in me’. Commentators have often found these lines odd and suggested that the direction of the preposition ought to be reversed, that Christ’s perfection is ‘imped’ into the damaged wing of the speaker. However, Wood notes that the paradoxical reversal is consistent with Herbert’s general approach, and that the passage is relying upon the language of the Geneva translation of Romans 6: 4–5, where Christians are said to be ‘grafted’ onto Christ. In ‘The Perennial Herbert’ (JDJ 29[2010] 175–9), Richard L. Peterson offers a similarly careful close reading of ‘The Flower’. Anne M. Myers’s ‘Restoring ‘‘The Church-Porch’’: George Herbert’s Architectural Style’ (ELR 40:iii[2010] 427–57) is a substantial and significant reassessment of the often ignored or dismissed opening poem to The Temple. She offers an important corrective to such earlier critics of the poem as Joseph Summer and Richard Strier, arguing that it is not merely aversion to didacticism that has kept critics away from ‘The Church-Porch’, but that it is also not amenable to those inclined to read references to church architecture within the framework of ecclesiastical controversy. Part of her aim is ‘to restore the history of the parish church porch’ (p. 430) and show how its role as a place where the common and the sacred meet is significant for the opening poem of The Temple. She challenges those who have read the poem as only an entrance-way, ‘pre-Christian’ and ‘preparatory’ to the spiritual experience of the Church. After all, the church porch is also where the Christian goes back out into the world, and Herbert’s poem offers a guide to life outside the church sanctuary. Her argument draws on historical ecclesiology to show the wide variety of uses to which this part of the church was traditionally put. In the Middle Ages, the first parts of the marriage and baptism ceremonies took place in the porch, and while some of its functions disappeared with the Reformation, others continued. Most significantly, she shows that in the seventeenth-century parish, the church porch was not merely a passageway but served as a place where contracts were enacted, alms dispersed, and young children educated. In its upper chamber public valuables and documents might be kept. In this way the poem is also concerned with the role of the priest in the community—Lewis-Anthony (noted above) reminds us that up until the nineteenth century, parish priests also served a variety of non-ecclesiastical public roles. While ‘The Church-Porch’ dwells on the ordinary details of life, often these are presented by Herbert as having vast eternal, spiritual significance. Through some fine close readings of passages (especially regarding money) Myers counters those who read the poem as encouraging a self-serving attitude. 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Daniel Doerksen, in ‘George Herbert, Calvinism, and Reading ‘‘Mattens’’ ’ (C&L 59:iii[2010] 236–58), again argues for a moderate, conforming Calvinist Herbert (a case he made more fully in Conforming to the Word: Herbert, Donne, and the English Church before Laud [1997], and in last year’s ‘ ‘‘Generous Ambiguity’’ Revisited: A Herbert for All Seasons’ [GHJ 30[2006–7] 19–41]). Here he turns his understanding of Herbert’s theology to argue that ‘Mattens’, despite what earlier scholars like R.V. Young have claimed, does reflect a Calvinist understanding of the natural world. In particular he draws on Calvin’s Commentary on the Psalms to show how both the reformer and the poet look upon Nature as a second book showing God’s love. However, the human beholder needs divine teaching (through the Word) to fully read the book of Nature. In ‘George Herbert’s Sweet Devotion’ (SP 107:ii[2010] 236–58) Christopher A. Hill argues that ‘sweetness’ is the defining aesthetic concept in Herbert’s verse, which he sees as combining ‘grandeur and humility’, and working in both private and public aspects of devotion. ‘Sweetness’ is that in which ‘delight becomes a sacrifice’, where pleasure (physical or mental) is made holy, or the sweet pleasures of earthly existence give way to, or become the means to, greater divine pleasures. A significant part of Hill’s argument is that physical or sensory delight is never dismissed in the poetry of Herbert, but understood as an instrument that God uses to draw people to himself. Christ’s sacrifice is ‘sweet’ (‘The Agonie’, ‘The Sacrifice’), and beauty in worship (the Church is ‘sweet and bright’) functions as part of this. Gary Kuchar offers a careful and astute enquiry into the dynamics of prayer in Herbert’s poetry in ‘Prayer Terminable and Interminable: George Herbert and the Art of Estrangement’ (R&L 42:iii[2010] 132–40). He shows that many of the poems reflect a traditional understanding (going back to St Paul and St Augustine) in which prayer is dialogic. Although in a state of uncertainty or fear, the speaker’s words unknowingly manifest the presence of the Holy Spirit within the prayer, sometimes within a poem, in others between successive poems. Thus, Kuchar notes, prayer in Herbert’s verse is ‘more a mode of discovery than a form of expression’ (p. 133). Finally, a slight addition to the Herbert canon is suggested by James Doelman, under the misleading title, ‘Herbert’s Couplet?’ (TLS [19 Feb. 2010] 15). This twelve-line epitaph on Margaret and John Barker (Herbert’s aunt and uncle) appears in a number of manuscripts, including BL Harley MS 6038, where it is followed by the initials ‘G.H.’ (as is Herbert’s ‘Roma’ anagram a few leaves off). Ironically, a couplet from the poem—‘She first deceased, He for a little try’d / To live without her, likt it not & dy’de.’— circulated widely in manuscript, and has since been included in anthologies, often attributed to Henry Wotton or John Hoskins.

3. Donne

Two monographs on Donne were published in 2010, and together they attest not only to the range of Donne’s writings but also to the range of critical approaches to it. Each monograph has a strong central theme but each is quite 566 MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020 different in scope and methodology. Chanita Goodblatt’s The Christian Hebraism of John Donne aims to ‘authenticate Donne as a Christian Hebraist by elucidating the exegetical strategies that make him a participant in this intellectual and religious movement’ (p. 2). In the book’s four main chapters, Goodblatt focuses on just a handful of Donne’s sermons (primarily those on the penitential psalms and prebendal psalms) and other sermon passages that mention notorious biblical cruces (for example the meaning of yevam in Deut. 25: 5, a passage on Levirate marriage made famous during Henry VIII’s divorce controversy; the grammatical switch from singular to plural verbs in Gen. 1: 26 about the creation of man). Some three dozen tables compare passages in Donne’s writings with the commentaries of medieval Jewish scriptural exegetes (especially Abraham Ibn Ezra and Solomon ben Isaac) and the medieval and early modern scriptural scholars (for example John Udall and John Minsheu) who adapted their insights on Hebrew texts to Christian moral and doctrinal ends. Goodblatt shows that, although Donne had only a basic reading knowledge of Hebrew and accessed scriptural scholarship by Jewish exegetes only in Latin and vernacular translations, he was skilled at adapting this scholarship to ‘distinct theological, cultural and political purposes and circumstances’ (p. 167). As the tradition of Christian Hebraism is central to Goodblatt’s book, the concept of performativity is to Margaret Fetzer’s John Donne’s Performances. And where Goodblatt analyses in detail only a handful of sermons and sermon passages, Fetzer takes up a larger and more representative portion of Donne’s whole corpus, poetry and prose alike. Fetzer borrows the idea of performativity, of course, from J.L. Austin’s famous 1955 lecture series How To Do Things with Words and from contemporary speech-act theory. But she extends its meaning considerably to embrace a number of cultural influences and generic conventions: post-Reformation ideas of ritual, conversion, and exemplarity; the idea of the poet as a Promethean maker and Protean lover whose poems communicate both internally (speaker and addressee) and externally (writer and coterie audience); the passionate theatricality and role-playing of the religiously erotic poet and the erotically religious poet; the mutuality implied by Renaissance epistolary theory and systems of patronage; the devotional and sacramental association of communication as communion with others and with the divine. Fetzer devotes individual chapters to Donne’s sermons, to his ‘worldly poems’ (mostly Songs and Sonets, satires, and verse epistles), to his ‘erotic and divine’ poems, to his prose letters, and finally to his Devotions. Performativity is such a versatile concept for Fetzer that she is able to draw unexpected connections between these genres, though at times it becomes so all-pervasive that one wonders about its value as a term of critical analysis (if everything is performative, nothing is). Challenging post- Enlightenment notions of the self, Fetzer insists that in Donne’s writings ‘personal and religious identity develop through processes in which ‘‘saying’’ and ‘‘playing’’ ‘‘make it so’’ ’ (p. 272). Fetzer has also published a related book chapter, ‘Plays of Self: Theatrical Performativity in Donne’ (in Berns, ed., Solo Performances: Staging the Early Modern Self in England, pp. 189–205), which combines material primarily on The Songs and Sonets and The Holy Sonnets. MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 567 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020

Of the thirty-odd journal essays and book chapters published about Donne in 2010, only about a fifth take his love poetry as their sole or even primary object of enquiry. Dr Donne still dominates the run of play against Jack. Three essays focus on Donne’s attitude towards sex and procreation. Of these, the most compelling is Ilona Bell’s ‘Oral Sex and Verbal Tricks—John Donne and Renaissance Sexual Practice’ (JDJ 29[2010] 45–76). In it, she argues that Donne’s patently obscene and much-dispraised elegy ‘Love’s Progress’ is actually a brief for ‘non-reproductive sexual pleasure, for women as well as for men, with or without marriage’ (p. 47) and a veritable field manual on the practice of cunnilingus (‘No wonder the poem is so oblique’ (p. 63)). As such, Donne’s elegy is a satire directed not against women but against ‘male writers [especially physicians and anatomists] who were threatened by the idea that women could experience sexual pleasure without having intercourse with men, or getting pregnant, or sacrificing their long preserved virginity’ (p. 67). In a chapter entitled ‘John Donne’s Rhetorical Contraception’ (in MacFaul, pp. 160–87), Tom MacFaul contrasts Donne’s and Edmund Spenser’s divergent attitudes towards biological and poetic procreation. Citing lyrics, elegies, epithalamia, and The Anniversaries, MacFaul shows that Donne repeatedly favours conceits of non-reproductivity, bareness, and oblivion because ‘it allows sex to be perpetual and valuable for itself rather than its products’ while also proving that sex can be ‘rarefied to the point of being angelic’ (p. 166). And in ‘Post-Coital Tristesse, Prolactin, and Donne’s ‘‘Farewell to Love’’ ’ (JDJ 29[2010] 77–95), Michael A. Winkelman argues that Donne’s ‘downbeat and unsentimental’ (p. 94) post-coital moodiness is not so much a psychopathology as a credible approximation of ‘the effects of prolactin on the sex drive’ (p. 78). Thomas P. Roche, Jr., best known as an expert on Spenser and Renaissance sonnet sequences, uses that expertise to weigh in ‘On Donne’s ‘‘The Canonization’’ ’ (JDJ 29[2010] 115–33). Especially when contrasting Donne’s conceits with parallel moments from Spenser’s Amoretti, Roche sees Donne ‘being ironic’ in his poem (p. 119) and undercutting the speaker’s position with ‘incendiary and spunky blasphemy’ (p. 123). In ‘The Poem as Performance: Self-Definition and Self-Exhibition in John Donne’s Songs and Sonets’ (in Berns, ed., pp. 173–88), Wolfgang G. Mu¨ller identifies the precise poetic features (for example deictic pronouns and adverbs, direct address) that lead critics to label several of Donne’s poems dramatic, theatrical, or performative, and Mu¨ller argues that, at least in some of these poems, performance is more important than rhetoric. Finally, in a challenging and learned essay entitled ‘Transposing World Harmony: Donne’s Creation Poetics in the Context of a Medieval Tradition’ (SP 107[2010] 212–35), Sarah Powrie finds that in his Songs and Sonets Donne ‘playfully test[s], distort[s], and reconfigure[s]’ several key concepts and images from medieval Neoplatonic cosmologies. In those cosmologies, ‘the proportions, geometric figures, and analogies structuring the world’s dulcet harmonies testify to an absolute universal order’, while Donne’s love poetry ‘retunes’ such cosmic harmonies ‘to express the dynamic quality of his lovers’ interanimated universe’ (p. 235). Donne scholars continue to be fascinated by his complicated, perhaps even heterodox, views about the fate of the body and the soul at the time of death 568 MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020 and before the general resurrection. Teasing out some of the erotic implica- tions of these views, Theresa M. DiPasquale, in ‘Donne’s Naked Time’ (JDJ 29[2010] 33–44), notes that ‘Donne often links the transcendence of time with the removal of garments, associating liberating atemporality with the process of undressing’ (p. 33); this association is indebted, she argues, to the Thomistic notion of the aevum, ‘the age of unending bliss in which dwell the angels and disembodied human souls’ (p. 34). Blaine Greteman, ‘ ‘‘All this seed pearl’’: John Donne and Bodily Presence’ (CollL 37:iii[2010] 26–42), surveys Donne’s flirtations with mortalism (i.e. the belief that the soul dies with the body) and with the implied subordination of the soul to the body. Donne postponed the full valuation of the body and soul until they are reunited in heaven, according to Greteman, in order to ‘overcome’ his ‘chronic’ feelings of professional ‘undervaluation’ (p. 40). Matthew Horn, in ‘John Donne, Godly Inscription, and Permanency of Self in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions’(RS 24:iii[2010] 365–80), argues that Donne’s Devotions betray his fear of ‘the space between the physical death of the body and the physical resurrection of the same [body]’, a fear of ‘temporary annihilation’ that Donne tries to allay by achieving ‘permanence’ through writing (p. 367). And, tracking ‘the respective plights of the inmate and the active’ souls in Donne’s Anniversaries, Suzanne Smith, in ‘The Enfranchisement of the ‘‘In-Mate Soule’’: Self-Knowledge and Death in Donne’s Anniversaries’(L&T 24:iv[2010] 313– 30), argues that Donne ‘fashions a model of transitional self-knowledge between the ignorance suffered by the ‘‘oppress’d’’...denizen of earth and the knowledge afforded the enfranchised citizen of heaven’ (pp. 322, 315). Taking advantage of the new Variorum edition of Donne’s Holy Sonnets, Robert W. Reeder, ‘(True) Grief: Filial and Penitent Mourning in ‘‘If faithful souls’’ ’ (JDJ 29[2010] 97–113), argues that HSSoul, addressed to Donne’s father, ‘pinpoints a complicating factor in filial mourning: the tendency to deify the departed parent’; he further asserts that Donne’s revision of the sonnet ‘clarifies the logic’—which Reeder calls ‘forced’—‘by which Donne moves from idolizing his invisible father to repentance before God’ (p. 100). In ‘The Sacred Pain of Penitence: The Theology of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets’ (in Nelson et al., eds., Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Theory, pp. 87–95), David Anonby argues that ‘Donne’s theology of repentance ...is eclectic, drawing from Roman Catholic, Calvinist, and Arminian wells’ and that ‘it is the broad expanse of Christian orthodoxy, rather than the narrow groove of denominational conformity, that furnishes a rich language for the life of the soul’ (p. 94). And Lora Geriguis, in ‘John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 10’ (Expl 68:iii[2010] 155–8), briefly argues that the sonnet HSBatter, through ‘grammatical gymnastics and paradoxical logic’, ‘asserts that celestial divinity can be made visible through the illumination it graciously casts around the benighted souls of earth-bound humanity when their orbits miraculously align in the course of salvation’ (p. 158). In ‘Perilous Stuff: Poems of Religious Meditation’ (Renascence 62:ii[2010] 89–115), John Baxter argues that HSRound may ‘lead to a ground that is noticeably not holy, to a ground that is outside the Holy Sonnets and, in a sense, outside of any church’ (p. 95), while Donne’s poem ‘Good Friday’ ends with a ‘graceful prayer’ that ‘takes the form of a kind of plea-bargain’ (p. 100). MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 569 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020

Two important essays about Donne as a preacher appeared in 2010. In ‘Upstairs, Downstairs: Doctrine and Decorum in Two Sermons by John Donne’ (HLQ 73:ii[2010] 163–91), David Colclough compares two sermons Donne preached in April 1626, when he was arguably at the height of his career in the Church. Both sermons were delivered at court, but Colclough shows that the first (on John 14: 2) was tailored to the ‘above-stairs’ ‘Chamber’ (i.e. the newly crowned King Charles and his chief officers), while the second (on Phil. 3: 20) to the ‘below-stairs’ ‘Household’ (i.e. the rest of the servants and staff). In the first, Donne, like the king himself, stressed order, decorum, and sobriety; in the second, he warned against the sins of the flesh, especially gossiping and backbiting. Thus ‘Donne identified the pastoral needs of his two related congregations, and adroitly provided for each: acknowledging current [doctrinal] controversies in order to diminish them, he urged members of the Chamber to look beyond themselves, and those of the Household to look to themselves’ (p. 191). Colclough views Donne’s willingness to accommodate his sermon audience not as evidence of time-serving or doctrinal inconsistency, but rather as proper pastoral solicitude. In ‘ ‘‘[T]he office of a man and wife’’ in John Donne’s Marriage Sermons’ (JDJ 29[2010] 17–32), Erica Longfellow similarly argues that occasion is essential for understanding the three sermons that Donne preached at the weddings of significant patrons. Two of the three ‘have little to say about ‘‘the office of a man and wife,’’ ’ and the other ‘presents a model of marital duties that is more concerned about a man’s insatiable desire than it is about the usual balance of men loving their wives and women submitting to their husbands’ (p. 32). Thus, the sermons ‘work against the norm’ of the time (and against hostile feminist readings in our time), in part because Donne used ‘humor to mitigate or negotiate the seemingly strict gender roles of the period’ (p. 32). Several essays trace Donne’s influence on later poets. Of these, the most sustained is Lara Dodd’s ‘ ‘‘[P]oore Donne was out’’: Reading and Writing Donne in the Works of Margaret Cavendish’ (JDJ 29[2010] 133–74). On the basis of the evidence of two manuscript poetry collections, Dodd argues that ‘Donne’s persona became a model’ for William Cavendish’s courtship of Margaret and ‘Donne’s characteristic conceits’ were ‘an important influence on his style’ (pp. 139–40). By printing her own poetry, Margaret cleared ‘for herself a space to explore the philosophical consequence of Donne’s ‘‘metaphysics’’‘and her ‘A World in an Eare-Ring’, which Dodd reads as a companion piece to Donne’s First Anniversary, is ‘a compelling and thoroughly modern response to the epochal transformations of world-view in the seventeenth century’ (p. 172). In his essay on Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Definition of Love’, ‘Andrew Marvell’s Use of John Donne: ‘The Definition of Love’ (Appositions 3[2010] 1–14), George Klawitter find allusions to several Donne poems and concludes that the ‘Donnean flavor ...that reverberates through’ the poem ‘is a Donnean sense that has been Marvellized, filtered through the later poet’s own frustration in love and carried as the only definition of love, not as a suggested single definition of love’ (p. 14). Thomas Dilworth finds a reference to ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’ in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in ‘Donne’s Compass at the Death Scene in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby’(Expl 68:i[2010] 55–7). Kevin Flynn, in ‘Strange 570 MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020

Bedfellows: Sacred and Profane Love in the Poetry of John Donne and Leonard Cohen’ (CanPo 65[2010] 43–64), finds in the poems of the Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen a shared ‘vision of ideal love that transgresses boundaries between the sacred and the profane’ (p. 43). And Joanna Luft, in ‘Roberts’s ‘‘To John Donne’’ and Donne’s ‘‘Elegy 19’’ ’ (Expl 68:ii[2010] 144–7), argues that ‘To John Donne’ [2004], by the British poet Michael Symmons Roberts, ‘reduce[s] and render[s] less metaphorical’ the metaphors of Donne’s ElBed in order to replicate ‘a co-opting of scientific knowledge by private industry [viz. DNA laboratories] as well as the subordination of the mandate of science, which is to increase human understanding, to that of private industry, which is to make money’ (p. 144). A handful of essays focus on how we teach Donne. In the most pragmatic of these, ‘ ‘‘Amorous Metaphors’’: John Donne’s Prose’ (in Monta and Ferguson, eds., Teaching Early Modern English Prose, pp. 224–35), Elizabeth Hodgson discusses strategies for presenting Donne as a ‘self-consciously social wooer of souls’ (p. 224). Citing especially Donne’s Devotions and some of his more accessible sermons (for example ‘Death’s Duel’ and the Virginia Company sermon), Hodgson explains that Donne’s prose, ‘with its self-consciousness about occasion, about patronage, and about social form, can give us a much clearer sense of his deep concern with how to be a social, a communal, individual’ (p. 226). Dennis L. Samson, in ‘Ethics and the Experience of Death: Some Lessons from Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Donne’ (Journal of Aesthetic Education 44:iv[2010] 18–32), extracts a similar lesson from the famous ‘No man is an island’ meditation in the Devotions: ‘For Donne, in the experience of death, we learn a profound lesson about humanity; we share the fates of all toward death’ and ‘we see in the connectedness with others God’s grace ‘translating’ our lives into an eternal purpose’ (p. 27). And a trio of essays from the John Donne Society’s annual colloquium on teaching Donne take up ‘Resurrection. Imperfect’. In ‘A Text of ‘‘Resurrection. Imperfect’’ ’ (JDJ 29[2010] 185–98), Lara M. Crowley notes that only one of the eight seventeenth-century manuscript copies of the poem contains the much-debated tag ‘Desunt Cætera’ (‘The rest is missing’; this tag appears in all seventeenth-century print versions of the poem). She selects this manuscript as her copy-text but speculates that the tag was a scribal or non-authorial addition. In ‘Donne’s Suns and the Condition of More’ (JDJ 29[2010] 199– 206), Raymond-Jean Frontain puzzles over the poem’s title and tag and links it to other Donne poems that share its governing tropes (wholeness (p. 203); the sun (p. 203); and witnessing (p. 205)) and that are powerful because of their ‘ability to defer the very moment of closure that, simultaneously, [they] so eagerly anticipate’ (p. 201). And in ‘Absence and Presence in ‘‘Resurrection, imperfect’’ ’ (JDJ 29[2010] 207–17), Kirsten Stirling brilliantly places Donne’s poem within a medieval iconographic tradition that likewise struggled to ‘represent the actual moment of Christ’s Resurrection which is not—cannot be—narrated in the Gospels’ (pp. 209–10). Stirling shows that by setting Donne’s poem next to Resurrection paintings by Memling and Fra Angelico, students can better appreciate that ‘Donne does not try to fill in the empty space [of the sepulchre] with a picture of the resurrected Christ; rather he MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 571 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020 acknowledges that it is a space, which can only be filled with ways of imagining the resurrected Christ’ (p. 217). Two finals essays are personal accounts of lessons learned from Donne. William Giraldi, in ‘The Art of Reading John Donne’ (Poets and Writers 38:ii[2010] 31–4), recounts how, as a college student reeling from the death of his 47-year-old father in a motorcycle accident, he turned to Donne’s poetry and especially the emotionally volatile and father-centred Holy Sonnets. And in ‘ ‘‘Bedded and Bedrid’’: Severall Steps in Our Sicknes’ (JDJ 29[2010] 1–16), the late Kate Gartner Frost explains how Donne’s Devotions ‘intertwined itself within and about [her] own response to a catastrophic personal illness’ (p. 1). With both technical precision and grim humour, Frost vividly describes Donne’s harrowing illness in 1623 and the frequently harrowing medical treatment he received. With the impetus of her own ‘emergent occasion’ (Hepatitis C and later liver cancer), Frost then contrasts her ‘personal progress’ (p. 10) through The Devotions with her previous scholarly analysis of and critical attitude towards that text (she was the author of Holy Delight: Typology, Numerology, and Autobiography in Donne’s ‘Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions’ [1990]). She concludes: ‘My perception of Donne’s Devotions as a medievally rooted and numerologically ordered spiritual autobiography has expanded. I have been given a discursive invitation to contemplate our flawed nature struck by disease as well as a structural warning, that time is short in which to seek the key to health which lies in the Communion of Saints’ (p. 16).

4. Milton

In Johnson’s Milton, Christine Rees complicates our understanding of the complex and often agonistic relationship between Samuel Johnson and one of his most influential literary predecessors. Rees’s work is divided into three distinct units. The first tackles the issue of Johnson as a reader of Milton. In particular, Rees devotes an extensive amount of time to investigating Miltonic allusions in Johnson’s writings, suggesting that an ‘increased awareness’ of such allusions ‘contributes to an understanding of how Johnson reads, interprets, and recreates Milton’s poetry—even, occasionally, his prose—in different contexts’ (p. 2). The work in this section is meticulous, bringing to light many hitherto unrecognized allusions and exposing Rees’s readers to a complex dialogical (and often dialectical) intertextual relationship between Johnson and Milton. As Rees demonstrates, Miltonic allusion in Johnson’s work is complicated. At times, the allusions are apt and work in concert with the original intent of Milton’s writings. More often than not, however, the allusions are decontextualized and appropriated in such a manner as to suit Johnson’s own political and aesthetic ends. This is not to say, however, that Johnson was a poor reader of Milton’s works, but rather that Johnson saw how Milton’s words could be reshaped through the process of inventio, which often produced a deliberate irony. Johnson thus emerges as a reader who is able to hold Milton at arm’s length while fully embracing the rhetorical power of his words. Nowhere is this more readily displayed than in Rees’s chapter, 572 MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020

‘ ‘‘Licence they mean when they cry liberty’’: The 1770s Tracts’. Here, she points out the strange circumstances of the 1770s, in which Johnson had ‘become more conservative and right-wing, more unequivocally supportive of the reigning monarch and more actively opposed to dissemination of Milton’s ‘‘democratical works’’—that is, the prose’ (p. 83). In Johnson’s political tracts, Rees argues, it is not the prose of Milton that ‘furnishes him with a rhetorical resource’; rather, ‘it is allusion to Milton’s poetry that threads through the rhetoric to add glitter to the polemical argument’ (p. 83). The second part of Rees’s monograph is devoted to Johnson’s explicit criticism of Milton’s works in both the Rambler essays and the ‘Life of Milton’. The chapters in this section argue, as Rees puts it, that ‘Milton is essential to Johnson’s critical thinking, putting his theory and practice to the most rigorous of tests’ and that ‘Johnson’s assessments [of Milton’s poetry] have profoundly influenced the subsequent critical history of Milton’s poetry, even or especially when they have provoked violent contradiction (or incredulity)’ (p. 3). One couldn’t agree more. Johnson’s Augustan criticism of Milton’s poetry has long rubbed Miltonists the wrong way, making it hard to deny the lasting impact he has had on Milton criticism. Nonetheless, Rees also attempts to demonstrate how the social forces of Johnson’s own day played a crucial role in shaping his criticism of Milton. While it is nice to read a historically nuanced account of Johnson’s criticism of Milton, Rees’s examination of Johnson’s criticism never puts him squarely in Milton’s corner (nor does it ever intend to do so). The third and final part of Johnson’s Milton examines his ‘biographical construction’ of Milton. Here, Rees believes that ‘Johnson’s well-documented political divergence from his subject complicates but also intensifies his effort to comprehend both the genius and the fallible human being’ (p. 4). Rees devotes one chapter to Johnson’s treatment of Milton’s political life and another to his treatment of Milton’s private life. In doing so, she asks us to reassess our own comprehension of the political divide between Milton and Johnson—helping us envision places where we can see Johnson as being empathetic to both the ‘genius’ and the ‘fallible human being’ who Milton was. The success of Johnson’s Milton is also its greatest liability. Rees tackles a relationship that carries immense historical baggage, and only individual readers will be able to assess whether they find her nuanced reading of Johnson helpful in terms of how they rethink his relationship with Milton. This year also saw the publication of another impressive comparative assessment of Milton’s influence on a later writer: Sanford Budick’s Kant and Milton. In some ways, this monograph is notably more ambitious than Rees’s, because it tackles not only two distinct fields of study (English and philosophy), but also two distinct national icons (England’s Milton and Germany’s Kant). Moreover, it argues that only by means of fully understanding the aesthetic nature of a poetic endeavour was Kant able to articulate the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, suggesting that a proper understanding of the latter can emerge only after a proper under- standing of the former. Budick argues this thesis by turning in particular to Kant’s ‘most intense and creative years of writing moral philosophy, 1785–90’ (p. 2). As Budick contends, ‘his engagements with the experience of the MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 573 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020 sublime [during these years], especially in Milton’s poetry, repeatedly made possible—for Kant himself—what he regarded as the highest achievement of ‘‘practical reason’’: ‘‘the grand disclosure’’ of freedom and moral feeling’ (pp. 2–3). Of course, for Kant, the sublime could only be the product of the originality (Originalita¨t) of the poetic genius freed from the particular bondage of imitation, which, in his mind, was tied to all forms of learning and knowledge (see Kant’s Critique of Judgment, §47). In the course of his monograph, Budick points out that Kant’s particular contribution to both the fields of aesthetics and of ethics was to suggest that ‘the poet who engages in the procedure of succession is freed from the relation of dependency that is entailed by imitation’ (p. 3). Here, Budick is quick to quote Kant: ‘Succession which has reference to a precedent, and not imitation, is the proper expression for all influence which the products of an exemplary author [originator] may exert upon others. ...[They] serve as a model, not for imitation, but for succession. The possibility of this is difficult to explain’ (quoted in Budick, p. 3). Most academics would flee from examining a procedure that Kant himself willingly admitted was ‘difficult to explain’, but Budick does not. Rather, the very difficulty of ascertaining the meaning of Kant’s ‘procedure of succession [Nachfolge]’ and the role it plays in his philosophy is the motivating source for the entire monograph, or as Budick candidly confesses, his ‘ultimate concern is the disclosure of freedom and moral feeling, both in Kant and Milton, which becomes apparent in that procedure of succession’ (p. 7). To achieve this end, however, Budick feels compelled to back up a bit. In the first chapter, he examines how Milton’s influence on Kant’s philosophy was lost to modern scholars in large part by the nationalist sentiments of early twentieth-century German scholars, in particular Alfred Ba¨umler and Ernst Bergmann (pp. 50–2). Their work, he maintains, largely effaced how important Milton was to German philosophy in the eighteenth century, so much so, in fact, that Budick’s second chapter attempts to contextualize Kant’s reading of Milton within the nexus of what Budick terms ‘German Miltonism’. Milton, he claims, not only occupied the thoughts of Kant, but also his predecessors and contemporaries, such as G.F. Meier, Alexander Baumgarten, Jacob Bodner, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Johann Wilhelm von Goethe, Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Schiller, and numerous others. The central point here is that ‘German Miltonism’ fully embraced—whether consciously or unconsciously—Joseph Addison’s famous comments in his Spectator 338 that Milton’s representation of Creation in Paradise Lost could be seen ‘as an ‘‘Instance’’ of ‘‘the Talent of writing in the great and sublime Manner’’ described by Longinus’ (p. 68). As Budick is quick to point out, for Kant (as for Addison and his followers), Longinian imitation ‘provides the opening for his own larger theorizing of the sublime and of a sublime succession procedure that creates the condition of exemplary originality’ (p. 69). The rest of Budick’s monograph, then, is devoted to following the development of Kant’s thought in relation to the role the ‘succession procedure’ plays in the creation of sublimity and how this development of thought is chiefly seen through Kant’s reading of Milton. Chapter 3 turns to the role of Milton’s sonnet, ‘When I consider how my light is spent’, in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals [1785], chapters 4 and 5 turn to the 574 MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020 role of Samson Agonistes in the Critique of Practical Reason [1788], and chapter 6 turns to the role of Paradise Lost in the Critique of Judgment [1790]. Budick acknowledges that this chapter is the apex of his monograph—the end point of a cumulative argument: ‘My argument in this chapter is that all the features of Kant’s Miltonic theory of the procedure of succession finally crystallized for him in composing §49 of the Critique of Judgment’ (p. 253). From the perspective of a Miltonist, it is hard to argue against Budick’s final claim. For some time now, Milton’s poetry has seemed to embody the sublime, and his poetry has always seemed singular in nature—‘Miltonic’ being the only apt adjective to describe it. Nevertheless, I am not (as most Milton scholars are not) a scholar of Kant in sensu stricto. Thus, I wonder if my appreciation of Kant’s reading of Milton (or, rather, Kant’s reading of Milton vis-a` -vis Budick’s reading of Kant) is not somewhat clouded. It is not hard to imagine that there is, somewhere out there, a Kant scholar wringing his or her hands after reading Budick’s monograph. Likewise, I am sure that a solid group of Miltonists will take exception to the chapters on Samson Agonistes, which endorse the regenerationist reading of the tragedy that runs counter to many of the pre- and post-9/11 revisionist readings of the tragedy. But such possibilities should not detract from what is a challenging and thought-provoking monograph and a remarkable work of scholarship in its own right. Alongside these two remarkable comparative assessments of Milton’s work, 2010 also saw two works dedicated to the contextualization of Milton’s poetry and prose. Sara J. van den Berg and W. Scott Howard edited The Divorce Tracts of John Milton: Texts and Contexts. For many scholars this is a much-welcomed volume because of its accessibility and the greater good it can do within the classroom—both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Here, one will find The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce in both its 1643 and greatly revised 1644 editions. Both the editors and Duquesne University Press are to be applauded for the decision to move forward with both editions of DDC. Such a move serves as a strong corrective to Lowell W. Coolidge’s decision to hybridize DDC as a single text for the Yale Prose Works. Indeed, as van den Berg and Howard note, while Coolidge carefully shows which passages were added or omitted in 1644, the conflated text ‘is difficult to decipher, especially for readers not already familiar with the complexities of Milton’s prose tracts’ (p. 2). As one can see from the end results of their labours, van den Berg and Howard are sufficiently attentive to the needs of readers ‘in a variety of fields within and beyond seventeenth century literary studies’ (p. 2). Readers will also find Milton’s other divorce tracts: The Judgement of Martin Bucer, Tetrachordon, and Colasterion. More importantly, readers of these tracts will have access to contemporaneous tracts which further baited Milton to articulate his radical positions on divorce. For example, the anonymous An Answer to a book, intituled, The doctrine and discipline of divorce, or, A plea for ladies and gentlewomen, and all other married women against divorce [1644] elicited Milton’s Colasterion. Thus, both scholars and students have direct access to the dialogic relationship between Milton’s earlier tracts, a contemporary’s reaction to those tracts, and Milton’s direct reply to his anonymous opponent. MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 575 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020

The editors arrange the transcriptions of the contemporaneous tracts in strict chronological order to help their readers see the development of Milton’s arguments in relation to the external pressures he faced: William Prynne’s Twelve Considerable Serious Questions [16 September 1644]; Herbert Palmer’s The Glasse of Gods Providence [7 November 1644]; the anonymous, An Answer [14 November 1644]; and Daniel Featley’s The Dippers Dipt [7 February 1645]. If there is one complaint to make about the volume, however, it would be about the chosen responsive tracts. Certainly the editors are correct to point out that these five tracts are the ones to which Milton replied most directly; however, aside from their selections from An Answer, the size of the passages they select from these tracts is relatively small, making one wonder why they did not choose to also include select passages from other contemporary pamphlets that were equally responsive to Milton’s divorce tracts. Certainly, one can go to Early English Books Online to read through these suggested tracts (see pp. 451–2), but it seems as if this collection is targeted precisely at institutions and individuals without direct access to such a resource. Nonetheless, this volume should be seen as a welcome asset to a great variety of people: those who study any number of things like Milton or radical politics, radical religion, or gender in seventeenth-century England. The second work devoted to the contextualization of Milton’s poetry and prose, the aptly entitled Milton in Context, was edited by Stephen B. Dobranski. This collection features a remarkable cast of Miltonists, and while its forty chapters are too numerous to receive adequate treatment here, Dobranski’s reasons for generating the collection can. In the preface to the collection Dobranski articulates what has largely frustrated Milton scholars’ classroom, and even scholarly, practices: ‘Born at the end of the English Renaissance but publishing his greatest poetic works after the Restoration’, he writes, ‘Milton defies easy categorization and is most often studied in a single-author course, best suited to reading all twelve books of Paradise Lost’ (p. xxi). ‘The problem with this perspective’, he continues, ‘is that it obscures the rich historical and cultural conditions that helped to shape Milton’s life and writings’ (p. xxii). Milton in Context, pursuing ‘such contextual details in order to remedy the myth of authorial autonomy that Milton himself sometimes encouraged’ and that the single-author classroom at both the undergraduate and graduate levels continues to promulgate (despite one’s best efforts), thus investigates Milton’s ‘life and works within his changing cultural and historical circumstances’ (p. xxii). Part I, ‘Life and Works’, is composed of ten chapters: ‘Biography’, ‘Composition Process’, ‘Early Lives’, ‘Letters, Verse Letters, and Gift-Texts’, ‘Milton on Himself’, ‘Poetic Tradition, Dramatic’, ‘Poetic Tradition, Epic’, ‘Poetic Tradition, Pastoral’, ‘Prose Style’, and ‘Verse and Rhyme’. The section effectively operates as a coherent whole, because even those chapters which focus on Milton’s ‘works’ demonstrate an acute awareness of how Milton’s ‘life’ plays an essential role in their composition. The second section, ‘Critical Legacy’, is the shortest, but also perhaps the most helpful section for teacher-scholars who seek to help their students readily grasp the reception of Milton’s work from the time of publication to the present. John Rumrich’s ‘Critical Responses, Early’, sets the tone for this section, highlighting how, even in his own time, Milton both fascinated and 576 MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020 frustrated his readers. Like van den Berg and Howard, Rumrich demonstrates how Milton’s own works were responsive to contemporary readers critical of his political, religious, and even aesthetic sensibilities. As Rumrich concludes, Milton’s early reception ‘reflects the strategies of ‘‘interpretive communities’’ and in each case strategies that grew up in a recently war-torn monarchy returned to peaceful times as a way of coping with the political enormity of a poet-regicide. What he wrote was real enough to scare as well as astonish them’ (p. 128). The following two chapters, ‘Critical Responses, 1825–1970’ and ‘Critical Responses, Recent’, demonstrate what time and distance have done for Milton’s critical reception. The final three chapters in this section, the late John Shawcross’s ‘Later Publishing History’, Christopher Tournu’s ‘Translations’, and Wendy Furman-Adams’s ‘Visual Arts’, add breadth to the section, demonstrating how, in Dobranski’s words, ‘subsequent generations of readers have paid homage to Milton’s poetry and prose while re-interpreting his works in new forms’ (p. xxiii). The final section, ‘Historical and Cultural Contexts’, is comprised of twenty-four original essays. While many of the topics of these essays touch upon topics familiar to Milton scholars—for example, ‘Astronomy’, ‘The Caroline Court’, ‘The Civil Wars’, etc.—readers will be pleased with the originality of these essays. Each offers a fresh perspective on existing contexts in Milton studies, challenging readers to re-examine the critical tradition that brought such contextual topics to the fore of Milton studies in the first place. Other topics, such as ‘Catholicism’, ‘The Natural World’, and ‘Reading Practices’, seem genuinely fresh, engaging what Dobranski terms ‘emergent contexts in Milton studies’ (p. xxiii). Nonetheless, all of the essays in this section offer us original readings of the contexts of Milton’s life and writings, whether they be ‘existing’ or ‘emergent’ in Milton studies. As Dobranski puts it, ‘The writers of these twenty-four essays discuss the ways in which an understanding of seventeenth-century issues and institutions sheds new light on Milton’s works and helps today’s readers re-assess traditional interpret- ations’ (p. xxiii). One could not agree more. Indeed, while I have suggested that this book can serve admirably for a general reading audience within the confines of the undergraduate and graduate classroom, even seasoned Milton scholars have much to gain from it. Each essay—even those dedicated to topics well known to Miltonists—has something original to contribute to the critical conversation, whether it be by means of new theoretical, historical, or topical insight. Thus this collection should not only find its way into institutional libraries, but also into the personal libraries of studious Milton scholars. The title of Catherine Gimelli Martin’s Milton among the Puritans: The Case for Historical Revisionism is, at face value, misleading. Presumably, the title suggests that Gimelli Martin sets out to place Milton amongst the radical Puritan community of early modern England; however, her goal is the exact opposite: to separate him from that community altogether. For those who have been deeply interested in and committed to the study of Milton’s theological and ecclesiastical thought for the past quarter-century, that such a goal would be novel, let alone necessary, seems untenable. After all, the last quarter-century has seen a quick rise in the nuanced treatment of Milton’s MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 577 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020 theology and ecclesiology. We now know so much more about Milton’s Arianism, Arminianism, and Socinianism, as well as his ties to early Quakers and his nonconformity, that the label of ‘Puritan’ has long been considered historically inaccurate. The strength of Gimelli Martin’s book, then, is that she reminds us that for all that has been done on such fronts, the overarching, or ‘teleological’ or ‘Whig’, political historical narrative, especially as it is received in literary studies, is still deeply indebted to Christopher Hill’s Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution and Conrad Russell’s Causes of the English Civil Wars. She traces these works back to what she calls Thomas Carlyle’s ‘ ‘‘heroic’’ concept of Puritanism’ (p. xii), a concept, she argues, which largely influenced David Masson as he set out to write his magisterial biography of Milton. Gimelli Martin’s major contention is that a once catch-all term, ‘Puritan’, is now much narrower in reach thanks to the recent efforts of ‘revisionist’ historians. For Gimelli Martin, then, Puritanism should be properly understood as Calvinist, reactionary, predestinarian, and introspect- ive in nature. Such qualities, she asserts, stand in opposition to Milton’s commitment to reason (which she sees as a secular enterprise), humanism, classical (or neoclassical) republicanism, and science. To this end, she follows David Sedley’s argument that Milton’s ‘suspension of certitude’ should be traced back ‘to the skeptical methods advocated by Francis Bacon’ (p. 3). ‘In science as in religion’, she claims, ‘Baconianism defers absolute knowledge in favor of experimentation and reevaluation’ (p. 3). Moreover, the ‘revolution- ary outlook pioneered by Bacon and embraced by Milton also balances skepticism with a new optimism about nature, matter, and (with qualifica- tions) human progress not found in mainline Puritanism’ (p. 3). Milton, like Bacon, then, is figured as a ‘religious rationalist’. To achieve her ends, Gimelli Martin divides her text into two parts. The first, ‘The Revolutionary Era: Historical Overview and Analysis of Milton’s Early Works’ (chapters 1–5), sets out to define Puritanism, the Puritan Revolution, and the causes and effects of the ‘Great Rebellion’. It then proceeds to detail how Milton and his early works differentiate themselves from the much-abused adjective, Puritan. For example, Gimelli Martin stresses that while ‘Milton has long been identified with the godly due to his anti-formalism, anti-episcopalism, iconoclasm, and ‘‘low church’’ ecclesiology’ (p. 65), such identifications should be called into question. Moreover, even when such identifications are appropriate, she contends that Milton defended his positions ‘from a perspective significantly different from the broad spectrum of English Puritans’ (p. 65). This section is concluded by an impressive chapter, ‘Mid-Century Debates on Law, Religion, Rhetoric, Education, and Science’. As the chapter’s title indicates, here Gimelli Martin distinguishes between the approaches taken by Puritans and religious rationalists on issues such as the law, religion, rhetoric, education, and science. This chapter thus prepares her readers for the second part of her book: ‘Restoration Culture and Milton’s Major Works’ (chapters 6–8). In this section, Gimelli Martin traces the effects ‘secular-rationalist influences (including classical republicanism) [had] on Milton’s major poems’ (p. 26). Chapter 6 argues that Paradise Lost’s ‘stated goal of justifying God’s ways to man additionally requires a secular philosophical, cosmological, and 578 MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020 anthropological framework’ (p. 215). Chapter 7 contends that Paradise Regained embodies a neoclassical poetics, albeit one quite different from the typical neoclassicism of Restoration England. As Gimelli Martin wryly posits, ‘Rising to the challenge of the new mode, he [Milton] had at last achieved the lofty goal that Dryden proposed but never attained: to compose a dramatic ‘‘imitation, in little, of a heroic poem’’ that redefined both valor and desire in thoroughly modern terms’ (pp. 252–3). Chapter 8 is dedicated to exploring the ‘tragic republicanism’ of Samson Agonistes. The section, then, is concluded by an afterword on ‘Milton’s posthumous contribution to the secular theories of toleration advanced by the liberal Latitudinarians, radical Whigs, and Deists who later supported or advanced his cause’ (p. 27). Certainly, Milton among the Puritans is a tour de force. Gimelli Martin lays out the case against Milton as a Puritan in exacting detail, and makes a valuable argument that Miltonists must begin to realize how conventional ‘secular’ enterprises (the law, education, rhetoric, and science) played an instrumental role in shaping his religious beliefs. She further suggests that scholars have long been uncomfortable labelling Milton a religious rationalist, because such a label could anachronistically place him amongst post- Restoration religious rationalists who are altogether different from Milton in kind. These are valid points of argument—ones which, I hope, will welcome other scholars to continue to flesh out how the secular arena, especially his relationship with Baconianism, influenced Milton’s religious beliefs and attitudes. That said, I also believe that there is much to be taken to task here in the religious arena. I walk away from this text without a clear sense that English Puritanism has been clearly and even-handedly defined. Moreover, I find some claims regarding Calvinism to be wholly inaccurate. For example, in asserting that Paradise Lost needed to turn to secular means to support its posture as a theodicy, Gimelli Martin asserts that Milton’s ‘most obvious and drastic departure from Christian convention is including sexual passion in Eden’ (p. 238). ‘Doubly departing from Augustine and his Puritan heirs’, she writes, ‘for Milton paradisal marriage is no longer solely for procreation but also for physical pleasure as well as for a form of intellectual companionship formerly reserved for males’ (p. 238). Here, one can see that Gimelli Martin never carefully parses Augustine from his ‘Puritan heirs’. After all, it was Augustine who mediated the polemical positions held by Jerome and Jovinian by arguing that, indeed, sex was present in prelapsarian Eden and thus used for a physical pleasure that glorified God. So while Gimelli Martin points scholars to new ‘secular’ ways of perceiving Milton’s religious rationalism, one never gets a clear sense that she has also thoroughly considered the non-secular ways of perceiving that same religious rationalism. Nonetheless, these sorts of criticisms should not detract from the greater issue at hand: the Milton-as-Puritan thesis has now been systematically rejected, and I do not believe that I am dwelling in hyperbole when I suggest that this book is sure to elicit a wide cast of differing responses in the decades to come. In Visionary Milton: Essays on Prophecy and Violence, editors Peter E. Medine, the late John T. Shawcross, and David Urban create an admirable Festschrift in honour of Michael Lieb. In the recent past, Festschrifts have had little place in academic publishing, especially at university presses. Such a MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 579 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020 move has been driven, in part, by the inconsistency of the essays they elicit. In attempting to honour scholars whose careers move in diverse directions across a range of time, Festschrifts tend to miss a clear sense of focus and purpose. This, however, is not the case with Visionary Milton. The editors have a clear sense of the focus of Michael Lieb’s career. As they assert in the introduction, ‘Michael Lieb has long studied the visionary mode and the culture of violence, paying special attention to matters of vision and violence in Milton, subjects that form the theme of this collection and to which Lieb has made such a significant contribution’ (p. xii). The volume is divided into four sections, each carefully devoted to a major aspect of Lieb’s scholarship and each nicely communicative with the other sections. The first, ‘Milton’s Visionary Mode: Prophecy and Violence’, is composed of three essays. Shawcross’s ‘Milton and the Visionary Mode: The Early Poems’ asserts that in the opening moments of Paradise Lost Milton assumed and ‘put on the mantle of vates’ (p. 4). He is quick to point out, however, that the seeds of vatic rhetoric are also present in Milton’s early poetry, and that such rhetoric in the early poetry has received relatively little attention to date. In typical (and pardon the neologism) ‘Shawcrossian’ fashion, Shawcross carefully reads many of Milton’s early works, from his translation of some of the psalms to his ‘Elegia quarta’. The chapter culminates with a wonderful reading of ‘The Passion’, allowing Shawcross to leave us with another memorable argument: ‘A poem is not a theological document. While Milton may have experienced various philosophical stumbling blocks in pursuing the completion of his poem [‘The Passion’], the main emphasis in his note appended to it is his inability to achieve in writing what he wanted: a worthy poem on the prophecy of salvation and one fully imbued with the vision that Ezekiel saw in emulation of David’ (p. 20). Barbara K. Lewalski’s ‘Milton and the Culture Wars’ follows Shawcross’s essay. Here, Lewalski posits that Milton envisioned his participation in the multiple ‘cultural controversies’ of his time ‘as a kind of warfare’, and this vision is made ‘evident from the martial imagery he employs in text after text’ (p. 24). Lewalski’s aim is to demonstrate how Milton saw his literary career in a ‘less militant but no less zealous’ light—as a way to promote and create poetry ‘that helps produce a national culture able to nurture free citizens as opposed to slavish subjects of a king or bishop’ (p. 25). Sharon Achinstein’s ‘Red Milton: Abraham Polonsky and You Are There (January 30, 1955)’ completes this section of the collection by examining the work of Polonsky during the McCarthy era. Polonsky’s teleplay The Tragedy of John Milton, in his You Are There series ‘was not history’, argues Achinstein. Rather, ‘it was writing for the present’ (p. 54), refracting ‘several different aspects of the political repression of the McCarthyite present through the Miltonic past’ (p. 56). Part II, ‘Milton’s Visionary Mode: Contemporary and Later Contexts’, examines the contexts and reception of Milton’s writing. Stanley Fish’s ‘How Hobbes Works’ contrasts Milton’s commitment to the ‘hero of faith’—the ‘one who marches not only to a different but also to an inaudible drummer and refuses to measure himself or herself ‘‘by other mens measures’’ (YP 1:904– 5)’—against Hobbes’s commitment to a shared and communal vision. As Fish suggests, ‘For Hobbes, the private man who follows the inner promptings of 580 MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020 his faith and prefers them always to public procedures and decorum is a figure not of heroism but of danger’ (p. 67). In the following chapter, Diana Trevin˜o Benet looks to contemporaneous medical and religious texts and their treatment of pain and suffering, recognizing that the ‘medical treatment of pain, its spiritual significance, and the thinking on Christian warfare are contemporary matters that threaten to subvert Milton’s stated objective of justifying God’s ways to men’ (p. 91). Joseph A. Wittreich’s ‘A World with a Tomorrow: Paradise Regain’d and Its Hermeneutic of Discovery’ contends that ‘Milton’s writings are sites of contestation where uncertainties repeatedly destabilize a text’ (p. 110). Here, then, Wittreich sees his criticism as being akin to Lieb’s, which ‘thoroughly’ embraced Milton’s contradictions. Paradise Regain’d, in his view, seeks not to bring an end to contradictions, but rather to ‘formulate competing interpretations and then to let them collide with one another’ (p. 112). Thus when Milton ‘dramatizes the desert experience’ he ‘also creates a mindscape of it’ (p. 113). Wendy Furman-Adams and Virginia James Tufte’s ‘ ‘‘Shifting Contexts’’: Artists’ Agon with the Biblical and Miltonic Samson’ concludes the second part of the collection by examining how both the biblical and Miltonic Samson have been treated by visual artists from late antiquity through the twentieth century. The authors argue that many of the recent critical readings of Milton’s Samson Agonistes ‘have been anticipated by these illustrators and by the literally hundreds of artists who have represented the biblical account of Samson (Judg. 13–16) in paintings and engravings’ (p. 139). The third section, ‘Milton’s Visionary Mode and Paradise Regain’d’, exhibits three tightly focused essays that address the collection’s interest in prophecy and violence: Mary Beth Rose’s ‘Why Is the Virgin Mary in Paradise Regain’d?’, Stella P. Revard’s ‘Charles, Christ, and Icon of Kingship in Paradise Regain’d’, and Michael Bryson’s ‘From Last Things to First: The Apophatic Vision of Paradise Regain’d’. Noting Milton’s relative discomfort with Marian representation in his earlier poetry, Rose connects ‘the lack of narrative suspense, the unusual static quality of Paradise Regain’d, both to the Son’s female heroism and, in particular, to Milton’s representation of motherhood’ (p. 200). Revard cogently argues that ‘Milton describes the Son’s trials in the wilderness as a Mosaic journey that prepares him for leadership’ (p. 216). ‘In so doing’, she continues, ‘he is also subtly contrasting the Son’s trials with those of another much celebrated Moses figure, Charles II, who allegedly in the wilderness of exile in the 1650s was preparing himself for his role as king’ (p. 216). By shattering the false idol of kingship through the Son’s replies to Satan, Milton reaffirms his ‘political positions of the 1640s and 1650s’ (p. 239). In his essay Bryson extends the controversial reading of Paradise Lost from his monograph The Tyranny of Heaven [2004] to Paradise Regain’d. According to Bryson, in the short epic, ‘The Father and Satan, as so often in Paradise Lost, seem to speak the same language ...while the Son speaks in a dialect that is almost unintelligible to the two ancient combatants’ (p. 252). In turning to the inward divine source that helps him define his spiritual authority in the desert, the Son, according to Bryson, turns to a source that ‘is not the Father’ (Bryson’s italics; p. 262). MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 581 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020

Part IV is solely comprised of David Loewenstein’s essay, ‘From Politics to Faith in the Great Poems?’ Loewenstein argues for ‘a more nuanced account of the later poet’s divergent political responses’ to ‘challenge the schematic ways we often describe them’ (p. 271). These schematic descriptions, because, in Loewenstein’s opinion, they tend to be ‘too neat, predictable, and probably reductive’, ‘do not fully account for the divergent and, indeed, sometimes agonized political responses we find expressed in the last poems’ (p. 271). Loewenstein thus leaves us with a powerful reading of Milton’s late works that stresses that these poems, as responses to ‘the trauma of the Restoration’, are ‘more conflicted and—imaginatively and emotionally—more varied than we often acknowledge’ (p. 272). In all, this collection of essays is a fitting tribute to the career of Michael Lieb. If the most common trend of the monographs and edited collections of 2010 was the contextualization and critical reception of Milton’s work, the same cannot particularly be said of the quite extensive range of scholarship that appeared in peer-reviewed journals and other edited collections. Certainly some essays continue the common trend of contextualization and critical reception. For example, in terms of contextualizing Milton’s work within his contemporary milieu, Judith H. Anderson’s ‘Body of Death: The Pauline Inheritance in Donne’s Sermons, Spenser’s Maleger, and Milton’s Sin and Death’ (in Vaught, ed., Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England, pp. 171–91) focuses on Paul’s lament in Romans 7: 24: ‘O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’ Like Donne and Spenser, Milton is seen embracing the figurative tradition— and Anderson carefully articulates her definition of figurae vis-a` -vis Auerbach, Elaine Scarry, Ricoeur, and Lyotard—created by Paul. In ‘Eliding Absence and Regaining Presence: The Materialist Allegory of Good and Evil in Bacon’s Fables and Milton’s Epic’ (in Machosky, ed., Thinking Allegory Otherwise, pp. 208–34), Catherine Gimelli Martin further examines Milton’s Baconianism, adding another nuanced reading of Milton’s secular influences alongside her Milton among the Puritans. Matthew W. Binney’s ‘Milton, Locke, and the Early Modern Framework of Cosmopolitan Right’ (MLR 105[2010] 31–52), when compared to, say, Fish’s ‘How Hobbes Works’, argues for a much more nuanced appreciation of the inherent tension between particularist and universalist sentiments in Milton’s work. And Emma Annette Wilson ushers Milton scholars into comfortable territory in her essay, ‘The Art of Reasoning Well: Ramist Logic at Work in Paradise Lost’(RES 61[2010] 55–71). For the reception of Milton’s work, one could turn to Joseph Crawford’s ‘Milton’s Heirs: Epic Poetry in the 1790s’ (SiR 49[2010] 427–43), which examines how Milton’s decision to write a cosmic epic, not a national epic, left a void that subsequent poets attempted to fill. There is also Greg M. Colo´n Semenza’s ‘Milton’s ‘‘Mangl’d Body’’: Fetishism, Idolatry, and the Critical Heritage since 1652’ (MiltonS 51[2010] 165–203). Here, Semenza sets out to ‘demonstrate the crucial role of Milton’s body—the actual stuff of flesh and blood, and its ghostly metaphorical presences—in his biographical and critical heritage’ (p. 168). What is interesting about this essay is that it begins with a concise examination of Keats’s fascination with Milton’s hair and the hair of 582 MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020 his most human characters: Adam, Eve, and Samson. This very topic also receives treatment from Stephen B. Dobranski in his ‘Clustering and Curling Locks: The Matter of Hair in Paradise Lost’(PMLA 125[2010] 337–53)— albeit to different purposes. Dobranski historically contextualizes the meaning and fashion of hair in Milton’s own time, suggesting that ‘Milton’s description of Adam and Eve’s hair in Paradise Lost in the context of hair’s cultural and spiritual value in early modern England’ (p. 338) expresses ‘their prelapsarian love, both conveying an amorous reciprocity and signifying the paradoxical strength and fragility of their Edenic marriage’ (p. 339). One also sees a generous offering of essays on Milton’s classicism, three of which appear in Milton Quarterly. Rosanna Cox’s ‘Neo-Roman Terms of Slavery in Samson Agonistes’(MiltonQ 44[2010] 1–22) argues that ‘to the conundrum of Samson’s identity and actions—whether as Christian or Hebraic hero or religious fundamentalist, whether active or passive—must be added the classical and neo-Roman understanding of what constitutes liberty and citizenship’ (p. 1). In ‘The Latin Words for ‘‘Marriage’’ in De Doctrina Christiana Book 1, Chapter 10’ (MiltonQ 44[2010] 23–37), J. Donald Cullington turns to the authorship issue. By examining the use of the words marriage and matrimony in the liturgy and doctrine of the Church of England, the dictionary definitions (both Latin and English) of these terms, and individual occurrences of the Latin variants of marriage in De Doctrina Christiana, Cullington concludes that ‘the variation and alternation between the two main Latin words for marriage in De Doctrina Christiana 1.10 could well be due to a single author’s fluctuating preference rather than to the difference between two authors’ (p. 23). In ‘Vergil’s Nisus and the Language of Self-Sacrifice in Paradise Lost’(MP 107[2010] 588–606), Leah Whittington attempts to make sense of how Milton’s Son’s self-referential moment in Book III of Paradise Lost, when offering himself as the one who will shoulder the punishment of humankind, finds its source not in Christian antiquity, but Roman epic. ‘This moment of internal self-reference has often been identified as part of Milton’s didactic strategy to confront the reader with proof of his own fallenness’, she argues, ‘but it is less often recognized that the Son’s speech to the angelic host makes use of an allusion that gives it a central place in the story of Milton’s engagement with classical epic’ (p. 588). Whittington, however, never reads the allusion antagonistically. ‘Of all the possible prefigurations of Christ that Milton could have seen in classical or biblical literature’, she writes, ‘he chose to take Nisus as the model for the Son’s self-sacrifice, and this fact in and of itself is a powerful statement of his confidence in Vergil’s ethical exemplarity’ (p. 600). Rob Browning’s ‘ ‘‘Immota Triumphans’’: Paradise Lost and Caroline Corruptions of the Roman Triumph’ (MiltonS 51[2010] 101–35) contends that the ‘conceptual and generic center’ of Paradise Lost’s ‘various procession forms is the Roman triumph, the most magnificent of all ancient Rome’s rituals, which served as the occasion for an honored general, the senate, and the city’s people to negotiate the material circumstances and political tenor of the triumphator’s new status after a successful military campaign’ (p. 102). To this end, Milton is figured as being critical of the pageantry of the triumph, supporting ‘the republican view that triumphs must be framed by a critically responsive public MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 583 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020 lest the rituals be used corruptly for deifying political leaders’ (p. 103). Elsewhere, Holly M. Sypniewski and Anne MacMaster turn, in their essay, ‘Double Motivation and the Ambiguity of ‘‘Ungodly Deeds’’: Euripides’s Medea and Milton’s Samson Agonistes’(MiltonQ 44[2010] 145–67), not to Roman antiquity but Greek antiquity, suggesting that Milton ‘learned from Euripides how to bring tragedy to its fullest potential for cultural critique—to use the genre as a tool with which to interrogate the religious and nationalist imperatives even of his own deepest commitments’ (p. 145). The year also saw a continued commitment to the exploration of Milton’s political leanings. Ben Labreche’s ‘Espousing Liberty: The Gender of Liberalism and the Politics of Miltonic Divorce’ (ELH 77[2010] 969–99) notes that after the 1643 publication of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Herbert Palmer’s quick response which questioned ‘Milton’s very right to participate actively in the debates of the commonwealth, to address parliament directly under his own name, and to circulate his ideas ‘‘abroad and uncensured’’ ’ elicited a new argumentative strategy on Milton’s behalf (p. 969). Milton responded in kind with the publication of Areopagitica, and he changed his rhetorical strategies in the subsequent divorce tracts. As Labreche notes, ‘all the divorce tracts subsequent to the first edition of Doctrine and Discipline began with an address to Parliament that specifically argued for the right of a broad swath of citizens ...to speak publicly on issues of governmental policy’ (p. 970). Thus, ‘Far from merely seeking to influence specific policies on marriage ...the divorce tracts intervened in the broader question of how the Parliamentary regime would make policy at all’ (p. 970). In ‘ ‘‘The mountains are in labour, only mice are born’’: Milton and Republican Diplomacy’ (RS 24[2010] 420–36), Rosanna Cox considers the ‘often fraught relationship between Milton’s political ideology and his political activity in the context of a regime attempting to forge and marry aspiration, expectation and expediency’ (p. 422). Other topics of interest were the editing of Milton’s works—John K. Hale’s ‘The Problems and Opportunities of Editing De Doctrina Christiana’(MiltonQ 44[2010] 38–51) and John Creaser’s ‘Editing Lycidas: The Authority of Minutiae’ (MiltonQ 44[2010] 73–121)—and Milton’s increasingly discursive relationship with the ‘New World’. The second topic appears genuinely fresh, and brought forth two challenging essays that exhibit a Milton who was deeply conscious of the ‘New World’ and the myriad political, religious, and cultural issues that came along with its extensive presence in the ‘Old World’. Rosanna Cox, in ‘ ‘‘Atlantick and Eutopian Polities’’: Utopianism, Republicanism and Constitutional Design in the Interregnum’ (in Houston, ed., New Worlds Reflected: Travel and Utopia in the Early Modern Period, pp. 179–202), argues that Milton, a writer who was not ‘always comfortable with the utopian form’ was ‘nevertheless fascinated by its possibilities’ (p. 181), especially as his thinking on the utility of utopianism was refined throughout the course of the interregnum. Thus, Cox aptly points out that while ‘in his Areopagitica, Milton had dismissed ‘‘Atlantick and Eutopian polities’’, claiming that they could never be ‘‘drawn into use’’ ’, by the mid- to late 1650s, ‘Milton and his republican contemporaries were using and adapting utopias in increasingly radical ways’ (p. 183). Eric Song’s ‘The Country Estate and the Indies 584 MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020

(East and West): The Shifting Scene of Eden in Paradise Lost’(MP 108[2010] 199–223) notes the inherent tension between the East and the West as shifting scenes for the seat of Eden. For example, he points out that in describing Eden, Milton often uses the topoi of the country house poem, and the ‘country house poem strives to conceal such consequences of Eastern and Western expansionism’ (p. 201). Nonetheless, Milton’s Eden also ‘uses the hospitality topos to display the goods of a global economy’ (p. 201). By engaging both issues, Song believes that ‘Paradise Lost’s description of Eden suggests that expansionist efforts to enlarge dominion merely reveal an internally unstable polity’ (pp. 202–3). Thus, the great epic ‘articulates a double-edged critique of domestic and expansionist politics’ (p. 203). While not yoked by a common thread, there are two more essays that I would like to mention, because they promote genuinely fresh readings of Milton’s theology in relation to his poetry. In ‘Milton u¨ber Alles: The School of Divinity of Paradise Lost 3.183–202’ (SP 107:iii[2010] 401–15), Debora Shuger complicates our understanding of Milton’s supposed Arminianism, especially as it is articulated by the Father in Book III of Paradise Lost. Shuger’s chief contention is that lines 185–202 present ‘fallen humankind with three options [on the possibility of salvation] whereas Calvinism and Arminianism alike acknowledge only two: for Calvin, a person is either elect or reprobate; for Arminius, each person, having received grace sufficient to respond to the divine call, either accepts or spurns it’ (p. 403). While Milton’s ‘tripartite schema is certainly unusual’, Shuger writes, it is not ‘an incoherent conflation of incompatible positions. Nor is it unprecedented’ (p. 403). This tripartite plan, she suggests, ‘corresponds to that laid out by an important English divine of Shakespeare’s generation: John Overall (1559–1619), Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge from 1595 to 1607’ (p. 403). Shuger certainly goes on to point out the discrepancies between Overall and Milton’s positions. Nonetheless, she presents a convincing analysis that asks readers to see beyond the conventional terms of ‘Calvinist’ and ‘Arminian’ in attempting to describe Milton’s soteriology. Gregory Chaplin’s ‘Beyond Sacrifice: Milton and the Atonement’ (PMLA 125[2010] 354–69) is, in some senses, a more conventional argument. It reiterates a position long held by numerous Milton scholars: Milton was an Arian. Chaplin’s unique contribution to Milton studies, then, rests not on this assertion, but rather on how he ties Milton’s Arianism to his de-emphasis of ‘the spectacle of the Crucifixion in his theory of salvation, or soteriology’ (p. 354). Thus Chaplin suggests that the two heresies (Arianism and a soteriology not tied directly to the crucifixion) ‘constitute the theological underpinnings of his radical republicanism, which upholds an idea of human dignity and agency antithetical to the tyrannical politics of torture and blood sacrifice’ (p. 354). Milton scholarship continues to be timely, engaging, and above all highly sophisticated. It is only fitting that the author of the great English epic, the provocative republican polemicist, the rationalist humanist, and the religious nonconformist should receive such deep and insightful analysis—analysis that demonstrates his keen eye for and reception of the past, his unflagging impact on his own time, and his lasting influence on succeeding generations, including our own and the scholarship it produces. MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 585 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020

Books Reviewed

Berns, Ute, ed. Solo Performances: Staging the Early Modern Self in England. Rodopi. [2010] pp. 272. E54 ISBN 9 7890 4202 9521. Budick, Sanford. Kant and Milton. HarvardUP. [2010] pp. 352. $49.95 ISBN 9 7806 7405 0051. Cummings, Brian, and James Simpson, eds. Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History. OUP. [2010] pp. xii þ 691. $160 ISBN 9 7801 9921 2484. Dobranski, Stephen B., ed. Milton in Context. CUP. [2010] pp. xxv. þ550. $104.00 ISBN 9 7805 2151 8987. Fetzer, Margaret. John Donne’s Performances. ManUP. [2010] pp. 320. £60 ISBN 9 7807 1908 3440. Goodblatt, Chanita. The Christian Hebraism of John Donne. Duquesne. [2010] pp. 275. $58 ISBN 9 7808 2070 4319. Hardie, Philip, and Helen Moore, eds. Classical Literary Careers and Their Reception. CUP. [2010] pp. xii þ 330. $104 ISBN 9 7805 2176 2977. Hodgkins, Christopher, ed. George Herbert’s Pastoral: New Essays on the Poet and Priest of Bemerton. UDelP. [2010] pp. 311. $69.50 ISBN 9 7816 1149 0886. Houston, Chloe¨, ed. New Worlds Reflected: Travel and Utopia in the Early Modern Period. Ashgate. [2010] pp. 274. £65 ISBN 9 7807 5466 6479. MacFaul, Tom. Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England. CUP. [2010] pp. ix. þ275. $100 ISBN 9 7805 2119 1104. Machosky, Brenda, ed. Thinking Allegory Otherwise. StanfordUP. [2010] pp. 288. $50 ISBN 9 7808 0476 3806. Martin, Catherine Gimelli. Milton among the Puritans: The Case for Historical Revisionism. Ashgate. [2010] pp. 300. $99.95 ISBN 9 7814 0940 8567. Medine, Peter E., John T. Shawcross, and David V. Urban, eds. Visionary Milton: Essays on Prophecy and Violence. Duquesne. [2010] pp. 320. $60 ISBN 9 7808 2070 4296. Monta, Susannah Brietz, and Margaret W. Ferguson, eds. Teaching Early Modern English Prose. MLA. [2010] pp. x þ 386. $40 ISBN 9 7816 0329 0524. Moul, Victoria. Jonson, Horace and the Classical Tradition. CUP. [2010] pp. x þ 248. $100 ISBN 9 7805 2111 7425. Nelson, Holly Faith, Lynn R. Szabo, and Jens Zimmermann, eds. Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Theory. WLUP. [2010] pp. 480. $85 ISBN 9 7815 5458 1849. Rees, Christine. Johnson’s Milton. CUP. [2010] pp. xiv þ 296. $99. ISBN 9 7805 2119 2798. Smith, Nigel. Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon. YaleUP. [2010] pp. xiv þ 400. $45 ISBN 9 7803 0011 2214. Stirling, Kirsten, and Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Roche` re, eds. After Satan: Essays in Honour of Neil Forsyth. CambridgeSP. [2010] pp. viii þ 199. $59.99 ISBN 9 7814 4382 3388. 586 MILTON AND POETRY: 1603–1660 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ywes/article/91/1/554/1644421 by Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais user on 09 August 2020 van den Berg, Sara J., and W. Scott Howard, eds. The Divorce Tracts of John Milton: Texts and Contexts. Duquesne. [2010] pp. 528. $75 ISBN 9 7808 2070 4401. Vaught, Jennifer C., ed. Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England. Ashgate. [2010] pp. 260. £55 ISBN 9 7807 5466 9487.