“Dealt with at his owne weapon”: Anti-Antiquarianism in Milton’s Prelacy Tracts

In his first published prose work, Of Reformation (1641), John Milton accuses “antiquarians,” along with “libertines” and “politicians,” of being the main “hinderers of reformation.”¹ Whereas “politicians” support prelacy because of “reason of state” (573) or the “trimme paradox” of “no bishop, no king” (582) and “libertines” do so out of “licentiousness” (570), the hinderers to whom the first half of Of Reformation is largely addressed “over-affect Antiquity,” in particular the church fathers. In “thus calling for Antiquity, they fear the plain field of Scriptures,” preferring “muddy waters, where no plummet can reach the bottome” and “the dark, the bushie, the tangled forest” to the “transparent streams of divine Truth” (569). Milton, however, also distinguishes “antiquarians” from “antiquaries,” whose “labours are usefull and laudable” (541). By “antiquaries” he presumably means those scholars and collectors who were known for their use of documents, old coins, stone inscriptions and other fragmentary evidence to piece together the pasts of institutions, places, and peoples.² Such scholarship was not averse to legends and fables either, collecting them along with other historical remains; yet by the seventeenth century it was often associated with the discrediting of fictitious history, most notably, that of Geoffrey of Monmouth.³ As Milton himself asserts at the outset of his The History of Britain (published in 1671), “We find, that of British affairs, from the first peopling of the Hand to the coming of Julius Caesar, nothing certain ... hath hitherto bin left us. That which we have of oldest seeming, hath by the greater part of judicious Antiquaries bin long rejected for a modern fable.”⁴ Here, however, the doubtfulness (“nothing certain”) that seems to accompany the endeavors of antiquaries recalls the metaphors used to characterize antiquarians in Of Reformation, thus raising the question of how far apart Milton really viewed the two groups as being.

I want to argue that in Of Reformation as well as his other prelacy tracts Milton in fact quarrels not only with “antiquarians” but also with some “antiquaries” and that the broader issue of this quarrel is that of the ways in which—and in particular the texts by means of which—the past might best lend itself to the cause of religious reformation. In these early tracts, Milton’s sense of the history of the English Reformation is, as David Loewenstein has argued, one of “thwarted progress.”⁵ England was, as Of Reformation asserts, the first country to “set up a standard” for the “recovery of lost truth” and to blow the “Evangelick trumpet to the nations” (525). But it now lags behind those it inspired. Milton emphasizes that if England is to regain its primacy in the onward movement of reformation, it must seek the lost truth of an earlier and not yet corrupted Christianity in the one place in which it was to be found, i.e., its “evangelick,” or scriptural source. Thus, on the whole he has little patience for those who, by choosing to follow the streams of truth amidst a welter of confusing and conflicting evidence about the past, had the effect of demonstrating that these streams, whether divine or otherwise, rarely ran clear.

With its predilection for a “tangled forest” or what Milton elsewhere terms the “labyrinth of controversial antiquity,”⁶ antiquarianism often figures in the prelacy tracts as an impediment to reformation. Indeed, Milton does not even maintain his initial distinction between “antiquary” and “antiquarian” throughout Of Reformation, where he later seems to slip when he notes that the “antiquary” must be “dealt with at his owne weapon,” that is, answered with other patristic citations, if he relies on the church fathers to justify prelacy (560). But patristic writings are not the only weapon that Milton turns against antiquarianism in the prelacy tracts, which also emphasize antiquarian credulity rather than its role in the debunking of the fables and legends out of which fictitious history is composed. In these tracts Milton even goes so far as to equate a certain kind of antiquarianism with an undiscriminating acceptance of all legacies, whether true...