Milton Among the Puritans: The Case for Historical Revisionism (review)

This is an impressively researched and persuasive call for a significant rethink of not only Milton’s religious identity, but also the religious culture of seventeenth-century England. Catherine Gimelli Martin’s detailed Introduction sets out the complexity of locating Milton and his poetic and prose works within recognizably Puritan patterns of thought or theological outlook. While in the later seventeenth century Milton was primarily remembered for his anti-monarchical and ‘seditious’ writings, within his own lifetime, Martin says, his religious beliefs and the political views concomitant with them were often at odds with a Puritan outlook. Anti-prelatical but Arminian in terms of his soteriology, Milton was also less inclined to look for signs of election than were many of his Puritan contemporaries, and was confident of the expansive scope of God’s Grace.

In drawing out these points, Martin aligns her revisionist thinking with the recent revisionist accounts of the Civil Wars, especially those of Richard Cust, which have had limited impact on the study of Milton. Most of all, Martin seeks to liberate Milton scholarship from aged, but still influential Whig interpretations of Milton and his context, and from Christopher Hill’s argument that Milton, as both a poet and a heretic, was informed by his association with a radical Puritan underground movement. In fact Martin’s book is a sustained attack upon the well-established ‘Puritan Revolution’ thesis concerning Milton and his period that Hill especially developed and expounded over many books.

Martin takes particular issue with Hill’s writings, finding in them inaccurate readings of the poetry and a fundamental unwillingness to acknowledge the ‘darkness’ of seventeenth-century Puritan eschatological despair, while promoting ideas of the social progression inherent in Puritanism. Martin concurs with recent reassessments of the entire religious culture of the mid-seventeenth century, particularly ideas offered by Blair Worden, Nicholas Tyacke, and Anthony Milton. These have comprehensively dismantled a general picture of the socially progressive aspect of Puritanism and in particular the association between Milton and Puritan movements.

Against these traditional accounts of a Puritan-minded Milton, Martin calls to mind his high degree of aesthetic sensitivity and the almost total absence of dominating Puritan views in his family, which contained a mixture of Catholic and moderate Protestant relatives, while Milton’s father was a composer of worldly madrigals.

One achievement of this book is to reveal Milton’s dynamic intellectual progression. An implication of the Whig interpretation and Hill’s later imaginings of a proto-Marxist radical movement in the seventeenth century has been to freeze Milton’s intellectual development, forever fixing him as being of the Puritans. Instead Martin places him within a milieu in which dynamic intellectual journeys were possible, often towards religious rationalism. Milton was not fixed in intellectual stasis but capable of intellectual movement and the reassessment of ideas.

Most significant to Martin’s historical revisionism is the context within which she reads Milton’s major poetic and prose works. The ‘Puritan Revolution’ thesis tends to regard Milton as a product of the revolutionary period of the 1640s and 1650s. Yet, as Martin points out, Milton’s works are a product of the Restoration period after 1660, and a major achievement of this study is to reorient the scholarly approach to these writings in this direction. Her analysis of Paradise Lost is especially central to this intention. Throughout this analysis, she summons up the vision of Milton the humanist rather than Milton the Puritan, drawing especial attention to the multiple secular resources he drew on in writing Paradise Lost, resources which Martin locates within the intellectual milieu of Restoration England.

Similarly, Martin builds a case for dismantling the traditional association between Samson Agonistes and the plight of post-Restoration dissenters. Concurring with Barbara Lewalski that Milton lacked the apocalyptic ‘temper’ that would have meant his poem was a fruit of ‘Bible republicanism’ (p. 280), Martin argues against any tendency to view...