CATHERINE GIMELLI MARTIN, Milton among the Puritans: The Case for Historical Revisionism.

Abstract

THIS book is based on a simple claim. Contrary to ‘long-standing assumptions still widely held in the academic community, Milton was not a Puritan’. These assumption are maintained because literary critics rely on the now discredited historical thesis of the ‘Puritan Revolution’ (xi), unaware of the revisionist historiography that is ‘largely neglected in Milton studies’ (5). Catherine Gimelli Martin’s first chapter rectifies this, and challenges the ways in which Puritanism has been simplified and liberalized by historians and critics. Martin, whilst accepting that ‘Milton certainly sustained a career among the Puritans’, argues ‘he was probably never of them’. More radical figures may have admired him, but he did not admire them: ‘in the end, he was alienated from a Puritan regime whose “insanities” and other “crimes” he found “worthier of silence than of publication” ’ (quoting the Complete Prose Works 7: 515). So, Milton was not a Puritan. In the view of Martin, this seems a rather good thing, because Puritans are characterized as despairing, fanatical, and intolerant (or ‘negative, anxiety-producing, repressed’ in the words of revisionist John Morrill, 15). Instead, Martin’s Milton is progressive and secular, one of the ‘religious rationalists’ (25). His century is one of contingency rather than ideology, reluctant reformers rather than radical revolutionaries, a view shared by W. K. Jordan in 1942, whom Martin quotes admiringly: ‘The trend of constitutional development in England was determined by compulsive historical events which theorists influenced only very slightly’ (26, from W. K. Jordan, Men of Substance: A Study of the Thought of Two English Revolutionaries, Henry Parker and Henry Robinson (Chicago, 1942, p.141).