Familial Forms: Politics and Genealogy in Seventeenth-Century English Literature by Erin Murphy (review)

When does an heir become monarch? Is lineage all, or does public opinion matter? If there can be, as philosopher-poet Mary Astell asserts, a rational (and for the era radical) moment before marriage to reconsider its viability and ponder alternatives, then does this imply there should be a similar moment before monarchy? Ms. Murphy charts how literary and political discourse lurched toward such a conclusion in the seventeenth and very early eighteenth centuries. She studies Milton, Hutchinson, Dryden, and Astell, along with assorted important women and men who consider the family-state analogy and genealogy. Laboring on respective sides of three bright historical lines—the execution of Charles I, the Exclusion Crisis, and the exile of James II—her study curates genealogical and typological disputes that characterize the era and alter our understanding of certain passages in Paradise Lost, Absalom and Achitophel, and other major works. Abutting family as a model of the state against the more genealogically literal principle of strict hereditary rule, she claims the two cannot be separated, while still gamely (if somewhat knottily) teasing out interdependent differences. Deliberately blurring overly neat categories of Renaissance and Restoration, she considers how various public intellectuals attempted to stabilize their nation by exploring “both the promise and the dangers of marriage and reproduction” in an unsettled era when genealogies flourished with other textual representations of descent.

The games begin with a public quarrel about genealogy, wherein formerly rigid Jacobean forms expand beyond mere patriarchal torch passing. Historian John Speed argues genealogy as destiny in 1592, while Jesuit priest Robert Parsons, whose work put him permanently on the outs with James I, challenges such claims in 1595. Ms. Murphy’s focus on Parsons is apt, and her analysis trenchant. However, Jesuits have often been characterized as intellectually adventurous and even iconoclastic compared to other Catholic priests, and I did want more about what his religious perspective, and later (perhaps by nuanced contrast) Dryden’s, may have meant in respect to genealogical assumptions. This book rewards patience, however, for her study will eventually weave together strands from these early conflicts, even if both pattern and payoff may initially be unclear.

“A father and a king are very different things,” writes antiroyalist Milton in A Defence of the English People (1652), and Ms. Murphy uses Milton’s radical undermining of patriarchal and lineal arguments for monarchy as an opportunity to reconsider the “much-lamented flatness” of Books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost. Besides enlivening tepid bits in a masterpiece, Ms. Murphy’s text serves as a thoughtful prelude to a study of Comus, one of Milton’s “densest and most challenging works.” Her complex section on Milton bolsters a larger understanding that much of society’s genealogical wrangling was literary, grammatical, and verbal: a high-stakes conflict in print that presaged early eighteenth century pamphlet wars to come.

Although Ms. Murphy considers poet Aemilia Lanyer’s pivotal introduction of mother and daughter to the “broad genealogical project,” her study becomes most fully gender-dimensional when turning to Lucy Hutchinson. This biographer and translator of Lucretius is also the attributed author of an anonymous 1679 devotional epic inspired by the Exclusion Crisis, Order and Disorder. Read with Paradise Lost in its background, and taken as a forerunner to Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, Order and Disorder highlights how the succession problem pointed to a much deeper societal rift. Hutchinson rethinks Genesis and Adam and Eve quite differently from Milton. She is torn between lineage, with the arbor as her preferred symbol of family, and her admiration of individual achievement. Her work honors marrying up, for as Ms. Murphy notes, “in a world where nobility is debauched and blood is spilled, [she] imagines marriage and God as parallel models of redemption.” Women become much more important to society as reproduction becomes a means to unify a nation, and not just spawn a lockstep line of kings.

Ms. Murphy’s tour de force...