Mary C. Fenton, Milton's Places of Hope: Spiritual and Political Connections of Hope with Land.

Abstract

IT is difficult to see what the argument of this book is beyond what the title indicates: the association of hope with land in Milton's works. Thoroughly researched and heavily annotated, it is largely descriptive and soulless. The amount of scholarship that has gone into it should perhaps impress; instead, you may find yourself wondering whether we need all this gathering of material in a monograph. An index of actual and alleged references to hope and land in Milton's works, or of his comments on Ireland abstracted from his prose, might be more useful, that is, less time-consuming. Fenton opens her study with a depiction of Giotto's Allegories of the Virtues and Vices, which she assumes, or hopes (aware of the lack of evidence) that Milton must have seen, or more precisely, gained access to, for Padua is only 30 miles away from Venice where he stayed. On this parallel she constructs her concept of Miltonic hope as a dynamic force aspiring to heaven, yet being connected to a definite physical space. Milton, she argues, locates hope, the most material of the three theological virtues, in places the palpable value of which is also spiritual. Relying heavily on Pauline and Augustinian spirituality, she sees hope in Milton as grounded in faith and stewardship of real and sacred places, and as underlying his ideas about liberty and reform.