The Age of Milton and the Scientific Revolution

NOTES

NOTES Notes to “Introduction: Knowledge Regained” 1. John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 3. Rogers’s use of the terms “science” and “Age of Milton” seems to have distressed a few literary scholars. Despite being cautious, using “New Science” and “Modern Science” rather than “science” alone for his chapter titles, Douglas Bush, Science and English Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), did cause Kester Svendsen, Milton and Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), great distress and dissent. 2. “Introduction to Paradise Lost,” in The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 332. All poetry, quotes from Of Education, and editorial remarks are from The Riverside Milton and will be noted subsequently as RM. 3. Barbara Lewalski, Life of Milton: A Critical Biography (Malden: Blackwell, 2000), 458; William Poole, “Two Readers of Milton: John Beale and Abraham Hill,” Milton Quarterly 38, no. 2 (2004): 76, comes to the conclusion that, “despite an understandable desire to accommodate the early natural philosophers and Milton, such an approach is wrong-headed, and fails to appreciate the post-Restoration social gulf between the epistolary networks of the Royal Society administrators and the disgraced poet” (77). Indeed, I embarked on this line of research with the hypothesis that I could lend more credence to Kester Svendsen’s assessment. But the poetic evidence, and to a lesser degree historical and biographical facts, resulted in my assessments articulated herein, which though not opposite to is distinct from Poole’s. Increased attention has been given to Barrow’s poem, including A. L. Wyman’s “Samuel Barrow, M.D., Physician to Charles II and Admirer of John Milton,” Medical History 18, no. 4 (1974): 335–51; discussion in Lewalski’s Life of Milton; the English translation Roy Flannagan provides 303 304 Notes to Pages 2–6 in RM; and Nicholas von Maltzahn’s “‘I admird Thee’: Samuel Barrow, Doctor and Poet,” Milton Quarterly 29, no. 1 (1995): 25–28. These aids were unavailable to Kester Svendsen when he mistakenly traced the first association of Milton and science to the early eighteenth century: “we must challenge again the impression encouraged from Addison on down that Milton showed vast or profound scientific learning” and that “Addison and Johnson lived in what was in effect another country” (3, 238). Nicholas von Maltzhan, “Laureate, Republican, Calvinist: An Early Response to Paradise Lost,” in Milton Studies, vol. 29, ed. Albert C. Labriola (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993), 181–98, discusses how importantly Beale’s interest in soliciting Milton “indicates some basic concerns for the first readers of the epic,” specifically his “ambitions for poetry . . ., the usefulness of laureates in connections with institutes such as the Royal Society” (181, 183). 4. William Hog, Paraphrasis poetica in tria Johannis Miltoni, viri clarissimi , poemata, viz. Paradisum amissum, Paradisum recuperaturm, et Samsonem Agonisten (Londini: Typis Johannis Darby, 1690), v. 5. Svendsen, Milton and Science, 3. 6. This sentence consciously echoes the words of Richard Strier, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 83, and the critical perspective of Paul Alpers, What Is Pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 7. Difficulty with the tools and technologies of the English Scientific Revolution were endemic. William Gilbert, On the Loadstone, ed. Derek J. Price (New York: Basic Books, 1958), cautioned, “Let whosoever would make the same experiments, handle the bodies carefully, skillfully and deftly, not heedlessly and bunglingly; when an experiment fails, let him not in his ignorance condemn our discoveries, for there is naught in these Books that has not been investigated and again and again done and repeated under our eyes” (xlix). 8. John Casti, Paradigms Lost: Images of Man in the Mirror of Science (New York: Morrow, 1989), offers the following distillation of “the term science”: “Science = a set of facts and a set of theories that explain the facts, a particular approach, the scientific method, whatever’s being done by institutions carrying on ‘scientific’ activity” (11). 9. Rogers, The Matter of Revolution, discusses the manner in which the discovery of the circulation of blood helped shape “the establishment of the new liberal theory of agency and organization” in the 1640s through 1660s (27). 10. Gale E. Christianson, In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton and His Times (New York: Free Press, 1984), 574. 11. Albert Einstein, foreword to Isaac Newton...