Courts, Jurisdictions, and Law in John Milton and His Contemporaries by Alison A. Chapman (review)

Alison Chapman's thoughtful and probing new book, Courts, Jurisdictions, and Law in John Milton and His Contemporaries, builds on her earlier work on Milton's legal thinking by adding more detail and nuance to his understanding of how seventeenth-century England's patchwork of legal systems worked. Where her Legal Epic (2017) deploys the law to explore Milton's theodicy in Paradise Lost, this new work turns its critical eye toward some of Milton's prose to explore the way in which scholars have often overlooked English legal jurisdictions in their attempt to piece together Milton's sometimes paradoxical thinking. Over and again, Chapman's book highlights how the slow march of history compresses complex topics into two-dimensional constructs, commonly occluding the strangely imperfect but interconnected webs contemporary writers often felt them to be. Seventeenth-century England's legal system represents a conceptual labyrinth for modern readers and, as Chapman argues in the first chapter, Milton presents an unusually helpful case study because "more than any other major figure of the seventeenth century, he thought a lot about questions of jurisdiction, about the boundary lines that divided different spheres of influence and collections of legal norms" (4). In this, Chapman presents Milton's polemical prose as a sophisticated Rosetta stone or conceptual lodestar for scholars attempting to parse the complexities of seventeenth-century England's legal system, a system in transition from a functional but profoundly confusing patchwork into today's more obviously coherent system.

To clarify these concepts, the preface provides thorough definitions for some of the key terms found throughout the book. Chapman outlines the nuanced distinctions between Roman law, canon law, and civil law. A notion that the book returns to repeatedly is that modern readers tend to view the law as a monolithic and unified construction and read that backward into the writings of Milton and his contemporaries. What Chapman proves is that reading seventeenth-century English literature without a clear sense of how the many presiding legal systems interacted needs to be reassessed, particularly with writers of the era who were deeply ensconced in the legal world, as Milton was. The finest example of Chapman's approach is demonstrated in the third chapter, which covers Areopagitica and its seemingly paradoxical defense of free speech, where in one breath Milton is the champion for unlicensed printing and in the next is saying some texts should be burned and thrown into the sea. The crucial insight Chapman unearths is that Milton's curious circumlocutions are not due to any ideological inconsistency but instead to a concern about the impact of libel, particularly as printed polemics became more common. The concern Milton demonstrates is moral, where a descent into libelous treatises circumvents the very purpose of this public discourse, which is to focus on ideas, concepts, and the betterment of England. The stability of Milton's ideal where everyone is arguing and learning through public discourse is obviously undermined by the specter of petty libel, which helps round out the contours of Chapman's argument. As she claims, "if we think of libels only as forms of political critique, we are not in a position to understand Areopagitica" (54).

Milton's typical conceptual dexterity is met in kind by Chapman in the book's fourth chapter that explores the divorce tracts, civil law, and the notion of equity, which the preface clarifies has two specific meanings in England's seventeenth-century contexts. One definition "could mean the specific approaches and remedies available only to judges in courts of equitable jurisdiction" and the other definition "could also refer to those broad ideas of fairness and justice that were shared by all legal systems" (xvi). The distinction may seem minor at first, but the fourth chapter highlights how Milton's capacious sensibilities help distinguish the subtle differences between the two forms of equity, especially in relation to Roman or civil law. This reasoning comes to the...