Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Scholarly Milton . Edited by Thomas Festa and Kevin J. Donovan. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press, 2019. Pp. vii+295.

2020; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 118; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/709620

1545-6951

Elizabeth Sauer,

Historical and Literary Studies

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewScholarly Milton. Edited by Thomas Festa and Kevin J. Donovan. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press, 2019. Pp. vii+295.Elizabeth SauerElizabeth SauerBrock University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreScholarly Milton examines classical, philological, philosophical, and theological scholarship and approaches that informed Milton’s writings in his day and ours. In this volume, the subject of “scholarly Milton,” which includes scholarship currently generated by the Milton industry, is very broadly construed, and ranges from the making of the scholar-author to epistemology; the ancient liberal arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric; characters as readers; reception practices; library consultation; interpretative models; reading habits; notation and editorial apparatuses; and the reparation of ruins and physical blindness. The editors deserve credit for their organizational feat in producing, primarily from the wealth of topics discussed at the 2015 Conference on John Milton in Murfreesboro, TN, a largely coherent and creatively structured volume of eleven essays. Arguably the book might have been even more unified: rather than rehearsing a series of predictable quotations from Of Education and Areopagitica—which lend themselves to an array of topics in the field of Milton Studies—the introduction might have analyzed and connected the different kinds of scholarship, pedagogy, and epistemologies so expertly examined in the chapters, of which the introduction offers descriptive summaries.While Scholarly Milton is advertised as an investigation of the nature of Milton’s own formidable scholarship and its implications for reading his prose and verse, most of the chapters concentrate on Paradise Lost, so the coverage of Milton’s oeuvre, and notably of the prose, is limited. Only Sharon Achinstein and Edward Jones, whose exemplary contributions serve as the volume’s bookends, deal with prose works, though Scholarly Milton features perceptive observations on the Art of Logic and on AccedenceCommenc’t Grammar (whose title is variously spelled in the volume) in relation to Paradise Lost. Also, a passage from Of Education serves as the volume’s touchstone and refrain: “The end … of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright.”The valuation of “scholarly Milton” as student and writer must be tempered with knowledge of historical and theoretical contexts, the editors acknowledge, thus marking a departure from the 2012 volume To Repair the Ruins—a collection of essays drawn from the 2009 Conference on John Milton in Murfreesboro—which sought to resist the popularity of the historical and contextual in Milton scholarship. In Scholarly Milton, the background moves in accordance with and in opposition to the author’s development as a scholar. Among the many features of the present volume that also markedly distinguish it from the 2012 collection are the discussions of the circumstances and material conditions for book production.In Festa and Donovan’s edited collection, the lead chapter addresses the subject of “scholarly Milton” head-on. Beginning with an overview of the Continental and English communities of the book and the library visits that informed Milton’s early life as a scholar, Sharon Achinstein studies the making of the humanist, the scriptural scholar, the philologist, and the author of the divorce tracts. Engaged with an ever-expanding body of secondary sources, including those mired in theological controversies of the day, the tracts became exercises in scholarly self-refashioning, as well as in the practice of doctrine and discipline. The theory of pedagogy marking Paradise Lost is the subject of the two following essays. Sam Hushagen’s “Typology and Milton’s Masterplot” takes a lesson from Thomas Festa’s The End of Learning: Milton and Education (2006; New York: Routledge, 2013), which maintains that “discursive figuration” not “sensual data or mystical vision” (103) distinguishes Milton’s theory of pedagogy in Paradise Lost. Hushagen makes a case for the pedagogical aim of typology in Paradise Lost, which supports Milton’s restoration of reason to its dominant legislative role. One might note, however, that Eve, not privy to same kind education received by Adam, teaches Michael and Adam in Paradise Lost that “dreams advise” (12.611). The subsequent Scholarly Milton chapter, James Ross Macdonald’s “The Devil as Teacher in Paradise Lost,” argues for Milton’s sustained engagement with fundamental questions of epistemology and the deficiencies of formal education and ungodly pedagogues.J. Antonio Templanza’s investigation of Paradise Regained highlights the Son’s modeling of teaching practices, which synthesize epistemology and ethics, to offer a method of philosophical inquiry for the spiritual and intellectual edification of the brief epic’s readers. Probing Paradise Lost through the lens of the cultural anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s double bind theory, Gardner Campbell, in the final essay of the book’s first section, advances a unique approach to the conundrum of free will in the context of Christian theology: Campbell exposes readerly engagement as a voluntary service from which enlarged freedom paradoxically results.The most focused of the volume’s three sections largely applies historicism, textual criticism, and rhetorical analysis to studies of the ethical ends of learning evidenced in Milton’s educational curriculum and his commitment to the pillars of critical thought: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Emma Annette Wilson’s essay invokes Milton’s own evaluative writing methods from his Artis plenior logicae (1672) to construe the goodness of the character of God in terms of the divine art of logic—the ars artium. Three years before the appearance of the Art of Logic, Milton published Accedence Commenc’t Grammar, which, along with William Lily’s authoritative Short Introduction of Grammar, inspires Russell Hugh McConnell’s parsing of the grammatical manipulations in Paradise Lost that distinguish the account of God’s divine nature. Rhetoric, the third element of the trivium, is the focus of Joshua R. Held’s analysis of the peroration recited by Milton’s skilled rhetor, Raphael, whose enthusiastic conclusion to his classical speech encapsulates and directs its classical and biblical themes.Dealing with the means of knowledge dissemination and acquisition, Emily E. Stelzer’s tremendously insightful chapter probes the predictable and surprising significances of euphrasy and rue, which Michael applies to Adam’s eyes in book 11 of Paradise Lost. More germane to the third section’s theme of Milton’s reception and the critical apparatus surrounding his texts is Nicholas Allred’s review of the early verbal indices and concordances to Paradise Lost, including in the sixth and eighth editions printed by Jacob Tonson, and in Alexander Cruden’s 1741 Verbal Index to Milton’s Paradise Lost, which illuminate some of the reading habits and the assumptions of eighteenth-century readers. The results of another key find were published in William Poole’s Milton and the Making of “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), a “Biographia Literaria” of sorts, that uncovers valuable information about the scholarly Milton’s 1667 edition of Paradise Lost: thanks to its printer, line numbers appeared in 10s down the epic’s side, a phenomenon otherwise reserved for schoolbook and scholarly editions of the Greek and Latin classics (10).Scholarly Milton’s fitting bookend, Edward Jones’s exposition of the sad tasks and hard labor confronting the editors of the letters of state for the Oxford Complete Works, judges the state papers to be products of composite authorship and editorship. The composition and reception history of each state paper is the work of the scholarly community that extends beyond literary critics to archival scholars and textual editors. Indeed, scholarship doesn’t exist in vacuums, as Stephen B. Dobranski admirably demonstrated in his extensive research on authorship produced in networks and communities of books and readers, and as Thomas Festa in The End of Learning argued in relation to the subject of education; it is the result of the intersection of many minds, a collective endeavor. Correspondingly, for readers of Milton’s writings from the early modern to the modern era, “scholarly Milton” remains an ongoing, transformative, intellectual, and bookish industry, showcasing the expansiveness of his learning and that of Miltonists who reap and contribute to the pages and rewards thereof. And here, the exercise of converting presentations, specifically those delivered at the final Conference on John Milton at Murfreesboro, into fully developed essays has paid off substantially in the communal production of Scholarly Milton. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 118, Number 1August 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/709620 Views: 301 HistoryPublished online June 15, 2020 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.