Catherine Gimelli Martin, Milton among the Puritans: The Case for Historical Revisionism.Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. xvii+360 pp. £55. ISBN: 987-1-4049-0856-7 (hb).

Milton among the Puritans is a work of iconoclasm. The image that Catherine GimelliMartin aims to dislodge from its revered place in literary studies and to dismantle in avariety of ways and intellectual contexts is that of Milton the Puritan, and indeed ofMilton as an archetype of ‘heroic Puritanism’ (xii) celebrated by proponents of Whighistory from Carlyle onwards. This is, then, a book determined from the outset to upsetreceived ideas about Milton. To this end, Martin’s title is quite misleading, for the aimhere is not to locate ‘Milton among the Puritans’, or to assess how Milton engaged withspecific individuals who might be termed ‘Puritan’, but to distinguish him fromPuritanism altogether: theologically and politically, intellectually and aesthetically.‘Milton was not a Puritan’, Martin boldly announces (xi), and in making this pro-nouncement 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’sEarly Works’, summarising in Chapters 1 and 2 Milton’s engagement with the‘Puritan Revolution’ and reviewing Milton’s relationship with seventeenth-centuryPuritan beliefs, while Chapters 3–5 focus on Milton’s early poems – including Lycidasand the Masque – alongside his Revolutionary prose works, examining them in thecontext of issues and debates ranging from anti-trinitarianism to Spenserian poetics.The Milton that emerges from these chapters is stridently other than whateverthe term Puritan might mean. On almost every issue, whether Calvinist soteriology orthe ordination of ministers, church government or education, Martin is intent upondemonstrating not just that ‘Milton never was a moral, ecclesiastical, or religiousPuritan’ (66), but that his attitudes and motivations were always more ‘secularand rationalist’ than anything else (80). For Martin, then, Milton’s championing of‘reason’ and of free will distinguishes his religious position from the more inspiredand interior dynamics of a Puritanism defined largely here by Calvinist predestinari-anism, while his politics likewise are driven by intellectual ideals that transcend theallegedly narrow scope of Puritan religious zeal. Milton attacked the prelacy in theearly 1640s, Martin argues, not out of a Puritanical desire to cleanse the Churchof England of hierarchy and corruption but due to his commitment to resisting‘arbitrary government’ as a ‘neo-Roman’ republican (49, 63). Similarly, Milton’sdefence of the traditionally recognized ‘Puritan’ virtues of temperance and chastityis understood here as an adherence to a humanist rather than a Puritan programmeof ‘civic heroism’ (71).

Milton is thus read by Martin as ‘more secular and political than spiritual or theo-logical’ (85). It is, however, as a Baconian that Martin aims to redefine Milton mostcomprehensively and indeed systematically. Milton’s ‘reformism was far more indebtedto Bacon’, Martin asserts, ‘than to any Puritan school of thought’ (xiii), and it is Miltonthe Baconian who trumps Milton the Puritan in almost every respect. While ‘mostPuritans looked forward to a literal Kingdom of God’, Martin informs us, Milton had

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in mind a more ‘Baconian progress’ (48), having been influenced by Bacon since hisundergraduate days at Cambridge (77–8, 85, 105, 127). It is through a Baconianvision of church reform that Martin can solve the riddle of the Galilean pilot’s‘prophetic outburst’ in Lycidas, which ‘only Bacon could have influenced’ (136–40), weare told, and it is Bacon’s ‘fable of Proserpina’ that unlocks for Martin the significanceof Sabrina’s ‘haemony’ in Milton’s Masque, among other of its ‘arcane questions’(163–6).

Part II of Milton among the Puritans, the three chapters of which address Milton’smajor poetic works in the context of the religious, political, scientific, and literarycultures of the Restoration, continues to reassess Milton in these rationalist and secularterms. Paradise Lost is read in Chapter 6 through a survey of its ‘many secular sources’,with Martin arguing that the poem both utilizes and demands ‘a secular philosophical,cosmological, and anthropological framework’ to achieve ‘its stated goal of justifyingGod’s ways to man’ (215). Seeing this methodology as subverting the ‘high Calvinist’(216) basis of Puritanism in general, nevertheless it is an ‘enthusiasm for the advance-ment of learning’ (218) that Martin perceives as persisting in Paradise Lost through asustained engagement with Baconian science. By contrast, Chapters 7 and 8 pursuequite different routes into and around Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. ParadiseRegained is approached through and against Restoration neoclassical literary culturewith which Martin convincingly shows that Milton was engaged, while the tragedy ofSamson Agonistes is read firmly against the grain as building a ‘neo-Roman view ofhistorical transformation through suffering gleaned from Machiavelli, Cicero, and thegreat Roman historians’, in a way ‘utterly different’ from the Puritan or Dissentingstance that saw persecution ‘as a testimony of the saint’s eternal faith, righteousness,and communal ability to endure’ (279–80).

Milton among the Puritans, then, returns us to some familiar aspects of Milton’s lifeand intellectual composition – his republicanism, his rationalism, his interest inscience and his commitment to humanist learning – and it does so in a way thatreminds us of the unique power of Milton’s mind and art in secular, political, andBaconian terms. This book also bring us back to questions that naturally invite us toprod and probe Milton’s complex and sometimes heterodox relationship toseventeenth-century English Puritanism: why he never entered the church or laterbelonged to one, for instance, or why he was uninterested in conversion, and whyhe continued to write and to think through forms famously denounced by EnglishPuritans, such as drama.

While Martin’s response to such questions is to point to what she considers anobvious fact – that Milton was not a Puritan – how convinced we might be that this isthe case and how convincingly Martin has made that case is a different matter alto-gether, particularly given the largely negative ways in which Puritanism and its culturallegacy are defined and appraised throughout this book: that is, as little more thanCalvinist, predestinarian, introspective, and reactionary. Has Puritanism, we mightwonder, nothing more to offer either Milton or indeed us as readers than a ‘Calvinistteleology’ the ‘cultural retreat’ from which Martin regards as offering ‘immeasurablebenefits’ (64)? And could Milton really have been more sympathetic, finally, to theaims of those allegedly ‘charitable’ Restoration Latitudinarians, such as Edward

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Fowler, than to Fowler’s persecuted opponent in controversy, John Bunyan, a Non-conformist who seems to epitomize for Martin all that Milton surpasses when it comesto a Puritan literary culture tightly circumscribed, in her terms, by ‘prescriptive moral-ity’, intolerance, and Philistinism (103–4, 153–4; 172–3, 305–16)? Could we reallyagree, moreover, that there is ‘little if any common ground between Miltonic andPuritan aesthetics’, as Martin proposes (173)? To say ‘yes’ to this question would surelybe to dismiss or to deny all that is rich and imaginative, sophisticated and visionary,radical and energizing about seventeenth-century ‘Puritan’ writing and thinking. Yetsuch is the thesis that Milton among the Puritans invites its readers to consider, debate,and ultimately, perhaps, to refute.

Michael DaviesUniversity of Liverpool

Michael Schoenfeldt, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poetry. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2010. vii + 164 pp. £11.99. ISBN: 978-0521705073 (pb).

With the exception of the Sonnets, which have long generated attention, though oftenof the wrong sort, Shakespeare’s poems have largely been treated as poor relations bythe academic world. Over the past few years, however, there has been a new interest inthem, at least amongst publishers, reflected in a spate of monographs and collectionsof essays covering the whole body of Shakespeare’s non-dramatic poetry that aredirected primarily at the student market. The latest of these is Michael Schoenfeldt’svolume in the Cambridge Introductions series. It would be gratifying to believe thatthis publishing phenomenon is both cause and result of an actual shift of attention tothe poems in undergraduate and postgraduate courses, that an increasing number ofstudents are interested to know the answer to Schoenfeldt’s question, ‘why should westill read this stuff?’ (18). That is, perhaps, wishful thinking.

Schoenfeldt’s answer to his own question suggests that we should read the stuffbecause on the one hand it has a kind of universal relevance to anyone who hasexperienced the range of emotions and states associated with erotic desire, and on theother hand it has a specific relevance to issues central to our own time, ‘ideas of raceand color, the relation between same-sex and opposite-sex desire, connectionsbetween sex and death, and the sexual power of women’ (18). This is by no means abad justification, and Schoenfeldt develops it in lively and alert readings of the poems.He also treats the poems as a coherent body of work, finding correspondences andlinks through all of them.

He presents his discussion in eight chapters, beginning with an introduction thatlocates Shakespeare in the fuller context of English poetry, followed by a chapter eachon Venus and Adonis and Lucrece. He quite properly dedicates three chapters to theSonnets, which are the most rewarding and difficult of the poems. The first of theseexamines the various ‘Mysteries’ related to their publication in 1609: dedication andauthorization, the structure of the sequence, and the question of potential autobio-graphical content and the identities of characters who figure in the Sonnets. The

724 Reviews of books