Idologographies: versions of Miltonic iconoclasm

In the Eikonoklastes, Milton famously attacks the King’s piety by exposing one of his prayers as plagia-rized from the New Arcadia:

And sure it was the hand of God to let them fal & be tak’n in such a foolish trapp, as hath exposd them to all derision; if for nothing else, to throw contempt and disgrace in the sight of all men upon this his Idoliz’d Book, and the whole rosarie of his Prayers; thereby testifying how little he accepted them from those who thought no better of God then of a buzzard Idol, fitt to be so servd and worshipt in reversion, with the polluted orts and refuse of Arcadia’s and Romances, without being able to discern the affront rather then the worship of such an ethnic Prayer.¹

Milton tries to raze the idolatrous object of the Eikon Basilike by showing that its author performed idolatry in making use of classicizing Renaissance fiction for religious devotion. The immediate irony of Milton’s invective against the King’s “Idoliz’d Book” is that his own epic has come to be, as Achsah Guibbory puts it, “an object of reverence, canonized as a monument of English culture” (195). In recent years, as the implications of specifically Protestant art have taken hold as a scholarly genre, critics have also asked whether Milton’s poetry is not itself caught in a similar trap, the one set by the intersection between literary images and invention on the one hand, and Puritan literalism and iconophobia on the other. The outlines articulated by Ernest Gilman in his Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation (and, for Spenser ians, by Kenneth Gross’s Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic) have since received a series of elaborations that shift and redefine the boundaries of the field, frequently in contradictory ways. ²

The books discussed in this essay span the last seven years of publication, which ordinarily exceeds the pull date for academic reviews. In the composite, however, they illustrate what studies of idolatry have looked like in the 1990s. Writing about Milton’s idolatry and iconoclasm proves to be both harder and easier than writing about other Reformation authors, because the topic recurs so frequently and vehemently in both his poetry and prose. In reading a work like Eikonklastes, for example, a critic writes not so much about how Milton uses the idea of idolatry as about Milton’s extended analysis of idolatry (my excuse for the redundancy in the title of this article: writing about writing about idols). This doubled focus in Milton scholarship particularly highlights the elusiveness of idolatry as an object of study, as well as the insights into both Milton’s culture and his literary expression that such a study yields.

In Civil Idolatry: Desacralization and Monarchy in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (Newark: University of Delaware, 1992; 267 pp., $39.50), Richard F. Hardin argues that Milton’s opposition to tyranny on religious grounds is the culmination of a long (or even dominant) English tradition that protested against the prince’s claim to divinity. Despite the title, a full half of the book traces the consistent signs of this protest through mystery plays and Erasmian humanism, giving in the second half one chapter each to the major works of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. Civil Idolatry is essentially an answer to Ernest Kantorowicz’s influential description of the king’s mystical body, finding evidence of Renaissance secularism in medieval literature in much the same way that Kantorowicz finds medieval mysticism in sixteenth-century writing. At the same time, Hardin emphasizes the idea of a progressive (in both senses) reliance on rationalism in English political thought in the sixteenth...