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198 Conclusion Historical Politics and the Instability of Print Culture The revolution in modern bibliographical studies has in large measure been effected through a willingness to notice what had been unnoticeable, to find evidence in the hitherto irrelevant. Stephen Orgel In the course of the period covered in this book, Milton moves from being a polemicist whose chief purported audience is the Parliament, to a polemicist justifying the overthrow of this Parliament, to a counterpropagandist —perhaps even a propagandist—for the newly constructed Rump Parliament. Soon after composing his greatest effort at addressing the Long Parliament in the early 1640s, Areopagitica, Milton retreated from his first parliamentary audience and from the public altogether. From “within private walls,” he devoted himself in the late 1640s to several projects, including The History of Britain, a manuscript containing the trenchant “Digression ” among other lost passages. When he reemerged four years later as a polemicist, with the hurriedly written but thunderous Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, many of the rhetorical strategies developed in the prior stage of his polemical career still inhered in his work, although in this case he was no longer trying to reform the policies of a now defunct Parliament, in a sense forcibly “reformed” by Pride’s Purge. He sought rather to justify the Purge and the impending execution of the king. His position as author, as a private man writing to the public, also remained unchanged from the earlier polemic of the 1640s. Unlike the earlier polemic, however, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates was inflected by the historical work he had undertaken in the interim, as well as by his (often cynical) sense of the constitutional potential of the British people. This powerful argument for popular sovereignty deeply utilized the historical research of the previous ten years. The two manuscripts remaining from this period of political prose—the Commonplace Book and the “Digression”—are essentially bits of preserved Historical Politics and the Instability of Print Culture 199 refuse left over from the compositional and publication processes. They were, of course, both preserved and valued for a time by Milton’s near contemporaries ; the “Digression” in particular seems to have been shared by a limited circle of readers, and somehow managed, as its copyist had evidently hoped, to survive the ravages of time. Readers may now add the “Digression” to the History where it is instructed for insertion, on page 110, after “from one misery to another.” For us, of course, these shreds of nearly discarded evidence are of immeasurable value, not just as museum pieces, but for the glimpse they give us, however tantalizing at times, of what happened behind the scenes of textual production. We can and should dream of finding additional shards of evidence to fill in the story—another example of the distinctive scribal hand that produced the “Digression,” for instance, or a match for the other Machiavelli Scribe, or a copy of The History of Britain with marginal marks on page 110, or even the lost Theological Index(es?)—but for the time being, we must work with what we have. In different ways these two manuscripts suggest a great deal about the process of composition and publication, and about the public work that was the result of this process. Fundamentally, the manuscripts allow us to see a highly developed historical component in Milton’s political thought. Our reconstruction of Milton’s research agenda began as he articulated it in 1637 to Diodati, when he wrote of being “occupied for a long time by the obscure history ” of European constitutions, and studying such subjects as the “time when liberty was granted” the Germans “by Rudolph, King of Germany.” Milton stated here that his interest thereafter would be “to read separately about what each State did by its own Effort” (CPW 1:327). This he did, voluminously over the course of many years, often recording notes on constitutional history in his Commonplace Book. Milton’s historical note-taking was quite different from that practiced by most of his contemporaries, as it was concerned more with facts and deeds than with sententiae and aphorisms. These preferences suggest that the lack of “brief sententious precepts” in his commonplacing habits has a much deeper influence—even on his prosody— than has been explored. His practices of reading can be seen in useful contrast to the methods of others, a contrast that further suggests that the models we have to describe early...

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