Samson's Cords: Imposing Oaths in Milton, Marvell, and Butler by Alex Garganigo (review)

Alex Garganigo is correct in declaring the original nature of this scholarship. Samson's Cords: Imposing Oaths in Milton, Marvell, and Butler is the only book-length work that I know dedicated to Restoration oath making (one of the most fraught periods of oath making in English history). It is the only book-length work to engage gender in the manner in which it does, and it is the only book-length work to treat the idea of oath holistically (across disciplinary fields). It manages this feat by taking on the oath, theoretically as a speech act, by examining its diametric possibilities as both a promise and a curse and, literarily, by thinking through the formal and aesthetic permutations of promissory language in poetics. Samson's Cords moves with ease from classical sources to biblical, from historical analyses to theoretical, from literary studies to polemical, from past to present, and from one discipline to another. Almost as impressive as all of the above, it is also a great read.

Garganigo opens with a wide-ranging theoretical overview of oaths and swearing that moves from early pre-modern contexts all the way to the present and incorporates social and biological categories in its ken. Drawing on the one hand on political, economic, and religious notions of the oath and on the other on cognitive, physiological, and behavioural categories, the introduction is richly suggestive and widely informative. In this introductory chapter, Garganigo moves from the usual suspects of field and discipline, history and literary theory, to discuss the oath, more provocatively, as seen through the lens of language theorists on cursing and social scientists and philosophers engaged in the study of embodied cognition. These additional and perspectively rich shifts in understanding offer readers an exceptional base from which to begin to interrogate the peculiar circumstances of seventeenth-century England.

After providing readers with the above overview of oath work in its many forms, Garganigo focuses in on a single decade of the seventeenth century (1662–72) and the work of three authors, Samuel Butler, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton. All three poets, he explains, bridle against oaths as a function of state or church control, resenting their punitive force as mandated legislative requirements. They also embrace, in different contexts, oaths as emblematic of godly promise – as relationships and productive acts in and of themselves – critically revising their responses in and across a highly fraught moment in the history of the oath.

For Garganigo, oath making creates identity rather than fracturing it; it enables and produces communal and conflicting definitions of self instead of restricting and/or delimiting subjectivity. Samson's Cords extends this argument by recognizing that the oath is first and foremost a boundary crossing towards otherness. "Swearing distinguishes itself from other verbal/bodily rituals," the author insists, "by its capacity to invoke otherness and raise issues of boundaries." This formative vocality not only names obligation to others in society but also models the self who is its speaker. Eventually, as Garganigo so powerfully illustrates in this very persuasive book, the oath-bound speaker accrues sufficient sense of identity (an "independent, inquisitive, anxiously self-questioning citizen – female or male") to challenge the strictures imposed by formal loyalty oaths, valuing instead action, freely chosen.

The dialogic nature of Samson's Cords (speaking across fields and disciplines) will make it the go-to book for people interested in any and all issues surrounding the oath – perjury, censorship, cursing, equivocation, casuistry, office, loyalty, promise, and ethics. There is much here as well for early modernists working on Butler, Marvell, and Milton, as Garganigo provides new, innovative, and restorative readings of all three, reminding readers how important literary poetics continues to be within the ethically focused historical scholarship of the last several years.