From Pilgrimage to History: The Renaissance and Global Historicism (review)

As the author of Milton and the Masque Tradition (1968), and Milton's Theatrical Epic (1980), it is not surprising that John G. Demaray continues his thoughtful explorations into masques, Milton, and seventeenth-century literature. In his latest book, Demaray has extended his work backward into the tradition of pilgrimage writing and forward into the historiography of Hegel and Marx. The book seeks to investigate "how Renaissance writers and artists struggled to make historical sense of conflicting iconographic and naturalist outlooks" by examining changes in the writing of history from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries (4). As his approach to the question is interdisciplinary, his selection of writers is eclectic, including Sir Walter Ralegh, Richard Hakluyt, Francis Bacon, Abraham Ortelius, Samuel Purchas, and John Milton. For Demaray these writers' "massive publications serve collectively as a bridge between medieval biblical, pilgrimage, and iconographic outlooks, and a new empirical naturalism that radically altered historiography" (4).

The book's first three chapters focus on the geographical conflict that arose between the sacred, Jerusalem-centric geography as assumed by medieval writers and the geographical revisions brought on by voyages of exploration. Ralegh's History of the World (1614) is transitional. Firmly grounded in early historiography, it relies upon biblical precedent and classical knowledge, while at the same time deploying rational cause-and-effect analyses. Hakluyt's Principall Navigations (1589 and 1598–1600) is another mixture of old and new historicism that places medieval pilgrimage narratives alongside accounts of New World voyages.

Bacon's theories and Ortelius's maps mark a breakthrough. They do not entirely reject biblical and pilgrimage-based ideas, but acknowledge the advancements in historical knowledge and methodology generated by navigational innovations, inductive analysis, and critical self-awareness. Chapters 5 and 6 trace the development of Purchas's thought through his revisions of Purchas his pilgrimage (1613, 1614, 1617, 1626) and his massive anthology Haklvytvs posthumus (1625). Demaray sees Purchas absorbing the contributions of Ralegh, Hakluyt, and Bacon to find an empirical, humanist method for writing global history. Not abandoning his religious beliefs, Purchas does not blindly commit solely to reason either. In Haklvytvs posthumus he uses his faith to work through the contradictions and inaccuracies produced by an empirical approach to global history, and in Purchas his pilgrimage he uses rational thought to organize his sense of biblical history. Purchas's works are a turning point. "Only in the publications of Purchas, ranging from pilgrimage tracts to accounts of the circumnavigation of the earth, and nowhere else in Renaissance historical publication is there a fuller revelation of the dislocating wrench from the medieval to the Early Modern" (102).

Chapters 7 and 8 examine Milton's use of the eyewitness trope, beginning in A Brief History of Muscovy (1648?) and ultimately in Paradise Lost (1667, 1674), as well as his mixture of empirical observation and "the prophetic revelation of universal historical design" (105). Milton uses Purchas's methodology and writing literally in the Brief History, but changes the structure from empirical chronicle to poetic epic in Paradise Lost. Milton's epic is the final text in this study because it embodies the changes initiated by Ralegh and others and uses varied points of view to do so, capturing the contradictory elements of historiography without neglecting one in favor of another. The final chapter reaches into the twentieth century to find traces of this empirical, humanist approach to global historiography in the works of Hegel, Marx and Engels, and Francis Fukuyama. The analysis, more general here, works toward a conclusion that critiques much of this thought and suggests that the writing of global history will inevitably be incomplete, simply because of the scope of the project.

The chapters on Milton are the book's strongest, reading Paradise Lost as a global history and finding stylistic and methodological relationships with A Brief History as well...