Milton & the English Revolution

2013

John Milton argued that customs are antithetical to rational judgment. My dissertation, Freedom Under the Law, investigates the conception of rationality that underlies the divorce of tradition and reason in the writings of the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (1642-1660). In this period, republican authors strive to turn English subjects into citizens whose active virtue and rational judgment is unclouded by tradition and habits. This dissertation argues that these writers build their arguments on a paradoxical depiction of the people as both rationally capable of consenting to political association and irrationally bound by custom. In conversation with Alasdair MacIntyre's analysis of the Aristotelian tradition, Freedom Under the Law exposes the tensions that arise in the writings of both canonical and non-canonical seventeenth-century authors as they attempt to re-imagine and represent the individual, the family, and the commonwealth. As this project demonstrates, writers ranging from John Milton to the millenarian John Rogers to the Parliamentarian Henry Parker reveal a residual understanding of political and social community that owes its vocabulary to medieval and classical modes of thinking. However, while Aristotelian models of political association closely link reason, habit, and justice, the authors considered in my project present an understanding of individuals as capable of rational action independent of tradition and custom. v This dissertation traces how this revolutionary account of the individual in political association is expressed through a range of often-conflicting formulations of the English nation. Freedom Under the Law begins with Milton's representation of education in the virtues in his early theatrical piece, Comus (1634). This first chapter establishes the guiding question of the project: how is the relationship between individual and community reconfigured in the literature of the seventeenth-century? In chapters two and three, I situate Milton's domestic and political prose of 1643-49 in the context of Puritan marriage manuals and Parliamentarian and royalist tracts. Through these comparisons, I show that Milton's distrust of customary laws produces a representation of the virtuous individual and the ideal nation as independent of their own history and, ironically, driven to constant iconoclastic self-reformation. Chapter four demonstrates how impoverished accounts of natural law lead to a devaluing of the people's legislative authority in Edward Sexby's call for the killing of Oliver Cromwell in Killing No Murder (1657), apologias of the Cromwellian dissolution of the Parliament in 1653, and the Putney Debates in 1647. Chapter five considers Milton's Readie and Easie Way (1660) alongside Fifth Monarchist pamphlets. This chapter questions J.G.A. Pocock's distinction between a medieval custom-based juristic tradition and a republican understanding of rational political life, a distinction adopted widely in Milton studies. I argue that comparison with Aquinas's Aristotelian account of custom and law brings into relief tensions in Milton's model of rational political participation. Throughout the vi dissertation, I argue that the conception of virtue and reason adopted by Milton and his contemporaries allows them to dismiss historically-bound embodiments of justice and reason as enslaving accretions.

Renaissance Studies, 2011

Milton among the Puritans is a work of iconoclasm. The image that Catherine Gimelli Martin aims to dislodge from its revered place in literary studies and to dismantle in a variety of ways and intellectual contexts is that of Milton the Puritan, and indeed of Milton as an archetype of 'heroic Puritanism' (xii) celebrated by proponents of Whig history from Carlyle onwards. This is, then, a book determined from the outset to upset received ideas about Milton. To this end, Martin's title is quite misleading, for the aim here is not to locate 'Milton among the Puritans', or to assess how Milton engaged with specific individuals who might be termed 'Puritan', but to distinguish him from Puritanism altogether: theologically and politically, intellectually and aesthetically. 'Milton was not a Puritan', Martin boldly announces (xi), and in making this pronouncement her intention is to reconceive Milton in the light of the 'more satisfying' historiography of 'revisionism' which, she claims, 'contributors' to 'Milton studies' have 'ignored' (xiii). Given the scale of this challenge, Milton among the Puritans is, as we would expect, a wide-ranging study. Part I presents an 'Historical Overview and Analysis of Milton's Early Works', summarising in Chapters 1 and 2 Milton's engagement with the 'Puritan Revolution' and reviewing Milton's relationship with seventeenth-century Puritan beliefs, while Chapters 3-5 focus on Milton's early poems-including Lycidas and the Masque-alongside his Revolutionary prose works, examining them in the context of issues and debates ranging from anti-trinitarianism to Spenserian poetics. The Milton that emerges from these chapters is stridently other than whatever the term Puritan might mean. On almost every issue, whether Calvinist soteriology or the ordination of ministers, church government or education, Martin is intent upon demonstrating not just that 'Milton never was a moral, ecclesiastical, or religious Puritan' (66), but that his attitudes and motivations were always more 'secular and rationalist' than anything else (80). For Martin, then, Milton's championing of 'reason' and of free will distinguishes his religious position from the more inspired and interior dynamics of a Puritanism defined largely here by Calvinist predestinarianism, while his politics likewise are driven by intellectual ideals that transcend the allegedly narrow scope of Puritan religious zeal. Milton attacked the prelacy in the early 1640s, Martin argues, not out of a Puritanical desire to cleanse the Church of England of hierarchy and corruption but due to his commitment to resisting 'arbitrary government' as a 'neo-Roman' republican (49, 63). Similarly, Milton's defence of the traditionally recognized 'Puritan' virtues of temperance and chastity is understood here as an adherence to a humanist rather than a Puritan programme of 'civic heroism' (71). Milton is thus read by Martin as 'more secular and political than spiritual or theological' (85). It is, however, as a Baconian that Martin aims to redefine Milton most comprehensively and indeed systematically. Milton's 'reformism was far more indebted to Bacon', Martin asserts, 'than to any Puritan school of thought' (xiii), and it is Milton the Baconian who trumps Milton the Puritan in almost every respect. While 'most Puritans looked forward to a literal Kingdom of God', Martin informs us, Milton had

Renaissance Quarterly, 2020

agency "only by renouncing his intractable autonomy, and situating his agency within that of God rather than vice versa; for him, this surrender means not defeat but peace and action" (141). At the midpoint of the book, we shift from playwrights to poets. The matters of genre and mode need more theorization-tragedy being a different vehicle for exploring the metaphysics of agency than lyric or epic-but chapter 3's account of the turmoil in Donne's devotional poems is fresh and intriguing. While I am not finally persuaded by Rosendale's reading of "Good Friday, 1613," which contends that the poem is a selfconscious "devotional failure" (176), his portrait of Donne as a man whose desire for autonomy makes him resist the grace for which he simultaneously longs is compelling, and an initial contrast with Herbert, who so often works through his doubt to reach the peaceful acceptance denied to Donne, is apt. The last chapter takes us down well-trodden paths in Paradise Lost. Milton, Rosendale writes, resolves the problem of evil by affirming "agential human freedom and choice" (188); he claims that the poem's index of moral responsibility is found in Milton's assignment of blame. Rosendale is aware that many others have seen creaturely freedom as the key to Milton's theodicy (Milton himself being frank enough on that score), and so not much really new ground is broken here. Nevertheless, Rosendale performs a tightly argued and thorough close reading of the poem that those interested in Milton's soteriology and defense of divine goodness should take seriously. Rosendale has read the critics closely. He is also a pugilist who deals sharply with sloppy or tendentious analyses. On the whole, his forthrightness is refreshing, and counterbalanced by a willingness to spell out what is estimable in scholarship otherwise taken to task. His book is admirable for several reasons: comprehension of the soteriological tradition; skilled and sustained close readings of major texts; and, perhaps most importantly, a thoroughgoing effort to understand the early modern preoccupation with this issue on early moderns' own terms.

2010

Lobby XI.2.69) is designed to make widely available a manuscript that has never been produced in facsimile. This omission is all the more lamentable given that the manuscript in its original formshort and highly readable-provides a vital example of the complexity of scribal production in early modern England. Many questions still remain about Milton's manuscript, and it is hoped that the accessibility of an online facsimile will enable further research. The "Digression" was designed to be inserted into a section of the third book of Milton's History of Britain, where the text pauses to compare the present state of England to the historical Britain of around 440 CE, when Roman political structures had collapsed, leaving the British people to create a government for themselves. Milton composed the History of Britain over a long period, from the unstable years of the civil wars in the late 1640s, through the rule of Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s, until it was finally published in 1670, three years after Paradise Lost. The History ends with the Norman Conquest and thus falls short of Milton's stated intention, in 1654, to complete "the history of my country, from the earliest origins even to the present day." 1 Although Milton's projected history never reached the seventeenth century, an inquiry into the past's relation to the present is embedded in the text, so that the third book of the printed History opens with the hope that "by comparing seriously . . . that confused Anarchy" with the present state of England, these "two such remarkable turns of State" will "raise a knowledg of ourselves great and weighty." 2 Without the excised "Digression," the printed History would not provide this specific comparative analysis to yield such self-knowledge. The "Digression" thus preserves a vital part of the author's original intentions for the whole, even though it remains to us only in a single manuscript that would (even if multiplied) have reached only a fraction of Milton's print readership. Many questions remain about just why the "weighty" digressive passage was excised from the final printed version. It has proved important not only to the author of the History, but to posterity: one twentieth-century historian called it "the frankest reflections of the greatest poet of his age on the greatest upheaval of seventeenth-century England." 3 These reflections are preserved in one extant manuscript; a pirated and incomplete version, deriving from another lost manuscript, was printed in 1681 as Mr John Miltons Character of the Long Parliament and the Assembly of Divines in MDCXLI.

International Milton Symposium Bangor, 1995

International Milton Symposium, Bangor, 1995 (1): Synopsis of plenary paper, I will look at Milton's political and social radicalism in Paradise Lost. The issues examined include those of of how radical was Milton to write in English rather than in Latin; the thematic sub-text of England as spoiled Paradise; the rebellions of Satan and Nimrod from which a hierarchical, monarchical order was established; the rejection of ruling class definitions of radicalism as re-active, and Milton's redefinition of ruling class values as rebellions against the divine; Paradise as communist and free from commodity production and materialism; Paradise as vegetarian; Hellish technology as environmentally unsound; Satan and the drugs for arms trade; the rejection of militarism. (2): The paper It is often said that Milton took a radical step in writing Paradise Lost in English rather than in Latin. But the vernacular epic was well established by the seventeenth century and to have published a Latin epic would have been absurd.. One of the major projects of the English revolution had been to complete the access to major texts begun with the introduction of the English language Bible into churches. The publishing explosion consequent upon the breakdown of censorship in the 1640s resulted in the large scale availability in English translation of works previously restricted to the privileged elite educated in Latin. The radical aspect of Paradise Lost resides in the choice of theme and in the redefinition of epic values. The epic characteristically celebrated the tribal group or nation. A narrow, local patriotism informs the Iliad and Aeneid. Milton rejects that tradition, rejects divisive nationalism, and chooses the theme of the Fall. It is a foundation myth but what is founded is the human race, not a particular nation. And the focus is on the loss of Paradise rather than on the establishment of a dynasty. Milton had once considered writing an epic on King Arthur; but the collapse of the English republic and the restoration of the monarchy, the failure of the English revolution, made Milton disinclined to celebrate his native land. But as always with Milton, it is dangerous to make too dogmatic or simplistic an assertion. It is tempting to say that his choice of the theme of Paradise represents a refusal to write about Britain. At the same time, however, to write of Paradise was indeed to write of

1986

The prologue studies the Tory publication of Milton's Character of the Long Parliament (1681). It argues that the provenance of this tract is best explained if Milton did in fact attempt to include the Digression in his History of Britain. Further ambiguities in Milton's early reputation are discussed in a review of the History's reception. Chapter I surveys Milton's response to the long­ standing demand for a national history and briefly reconsiders his ideas on history and historiography. Chapter II proposes that his political sympathies led Milton to look to the British legends for his historical subject. The strong Protestant and Tudor associations of such native myth have been largely overlooked, and yet they bear strongly on Milton's proposals for a British historical poem. His reappraisal of the myths in the History indicates his disillusionment with his original historical project: and reflects his changing opinion of the national character. Chapter III ...

Philological Quarterly, 2015

My objective in this article is to explore the parable of the talents contextually in relation to the prelacy controversy of the 1640s and rhetorically as Milton’s device for describing the labor of reformation. I emphasize the parable’s significance as an allegory of ultimate judgment at a time when Milton and others believed themselves to be living at the end of history. The idea of reckoning in the parable evoked belief in the Last Judgment as a historical event that was soon to burst into the saeculum of human experience. Milton’s early works present a pattern in which he employs the parable to navigate crises and to remind himself and others of imminent judgment. This eschatological expectation is evident in Elegy III in obitum Præsulis Wintoniensis (composed 1626), in Milton’s “Letter to a friend” (composed ca. 1633), in The Reason of Church-Government (1642), and in Sonnet 19 “When I consider how my light is spent.” I suggest a political and nonbiographical reading of the sonnet, in which readers are compelled to identify with the poetic speaker and reflect upon their own labors of reformation in the final days before judgment.

Milton's position regarding the Cromwellian Protectorate has been a focus of controversy among critics and historians. Since the 1990s, on the one hand, the voices of Blair Worden, David Armitage and Martin Dzelzainis have been influential, and now their picture of Milton as a republican critic of the Protectorate stands firm. On the other hand, there are still some, Barbara Lewalski and Robert Fallon among others, who support the opposite view of Milton as Cromwell's ally. 1 What follows is my contribution to this controversy, in which I will examine A Second Defence of the English People (1654) and its historical context, considering precisely where in the political spectrum Milton stood at the crucial juncture of the English Republic, when the Protectorate was hastily established in the constitutional vacuum left by the expulsion of the Rump Parliament and the dubious dissolution of the Nominated Assembly.

The Reformation of Rights

The seventeenth-century English Revolution was pulsing with new democratic ideas of civil rights, marital freedom, freedom of speech and press, religious liberty, separation of church-state, and disestablishment of religion. The English philosopher and poet, John Milton was among the most radical and articulate advocate of these ideas, which he set out in hundreds of pages of brilliant and trenchant prose. This Article offers a full account of Milton's reformist agenda and uncovers some of the genesis and genius of his ideas in earlier Christian and classical traditions. It also documents the enduring significance of Milton's ideas for later Anglo-American writers like John Locke, and later common law and constitutional reforms on both sides of the Atlantic.