Milton and Questions of History: Essays by Canadians Past and Present ed. by Feisal G. Mohamed and Mary Nyquist (review)

Feisal Mohamed and Mary Nyquist’s essay collection is unusual in several respects, most significantly in reprinting a selection of older, classic essays by scholars residing in Canada and adding historical retrospectives by current scholars. These commentaries are followed by new essays that, while quite worthwhile in themselves, are at best loosely related to the preceding material. The end result is eighteen essays and a valuable afterword by Paul Stevens, “Milton in the Far North.” Prospective readers will profit from reading this afterward alongside Mohamed’s and Nyquist’s introduction, which explains how, from the early twentieth century onward, Canadian scholars remained dedicated to historicist approaches to Milton long after they had suffered New Critical eclipse in the United States. Neither summation completely overcomes Balachandra Rajan’s stated skepticism about the existence of a true Canadian “school” of literary criticism, and both tend to under-represent the influence of British critical traditions learned by most of these Canadians at Cambridge and Oxford, but, certainly, something like what Stevens calls a “Toronto renaissance” led by A.S.P. Woodhouse justifies considering their combined achievements, including Northrop Frye’s formalist variation on historicism. As Hugh McCallum details, this renaissance had as much to do with the force of Woodhouse’s personality as his scholarship, which, while stimulating and in many ways empirically sound, helped create a seventeenth-century “Puritan revolution” marred by anachronism and overstatement. Elizabeth Sauer’s essay on Woodhouse concedes as much without really stating the obvious: that he was partly responsible for the subsequent reaction against exclusively religious explanations of the English civil wars and the current Cambridge school’s rediscovery of classical republicanism, to which many of the commentators included here ironically belong.

Other essays, by John Leonard, Peter Herman, and Annabel Patterson, variously illustrate the other side of the story, Leonard and Herman by reassessing the ongoing value as well as the missed potential of contemporaneous work by Frye and Douglas Bush, and Patterson by including a wholly secular, highly stimulating reading of Milton’s final prose tract, The Readie and Easie Way. Nicholas von Maltzahn provides a glowing, well-deserved tribute to Ernest Sirluck’s meticulous empiricism, although, like Herman’s, his essay digresses into extraneous issues. Herman unconvincingly maintains that Frye was marginalized by the American establishment, while von Maltzahn maintains that Milton’s views strongly differ from both deism and radical Whiggism. He may be right – although John Dennis needs to be examined more thoroughly in this context – but such broad claims are difficult to prove in such a short space. Another problem with the volume has to do with the editors’ decision not to ask any current critic to re-evaluate Rajan, McCallum, or Arthur Barker, who seem either to diverge from Woodhouse as much as Sirluck or, in McCallum’s case, to apply his “grand narrative” to Milton’s theology in ways that by now seem more questionable than they once did. Nevertheless, this elision is partly corrected by the editors’ thorough treatment of all the above in their introduction.

As already noted, the new essays that follow take interesting but largely idiosyncratic directions. Elizabeth Hodgson carefully assesses positive Catholic images in Milton’s prose, although she should have included a broader sample or at least provided a tentative explanation for their presence. Mohamed’s attempt to link Fielding’s and Jonson’s satires to Milton’s critique of high mimesis is more promising in outline than in detail, but Phillip Donnelly fills important gaps by showing that Milton’s tactics in Arepagitica are at once more like and more different from Machiavelli than they seem. Muhammad Sid-Ahmad’s discussion of a possible Arabic source for the self-discovery of Milton’s Adam is also stimulating but in the end difficult to prove definitively, while Rajan’s concluding essay on ecocriticism in Milton’s...