Milton Among the Puritans: The Case for Historical Revisionism

Abstract

Reviewed by: Milton Among the Puritans: The Case for Historical Revisionism Katherine Romack (bio) Catherine Gimelli Martin . Milton Among the Puritans: The Case for Historical Revisionism. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010. 360 + xvi pages. $99.95. Catherine Gimelli Martin opens her Milton Among the Puritans: The Case for Historical Revisionism with an offensive against the Whiggish tendencies of contemporary Milton studies, a subfield she characterizes as "exceptional" in its ignorance of the now "mainstream" revisionism informing early modern historiography (xiii). Framing her study as a corrective, Martin pointedly asserts, "contrary to long-standing assumptions still held widely in the academic community, Milton was not a puritan" (xi). Distancing Milton from his puritan [End Page 146] contemporaries, Martin situates him in the liberal theological tradition that gave rise to religious rationalism and modern Unitarianism and argues that Milton's art and philosophy, especially later in life, are better compared to the comprehensive, ecumenical, and rationalist thinking of the Anglican Latitudinarians than to the puritans (12). The book is divided into two parts. The first half of the book surveys revisionist contributions to seventeenth-century historiography and situates Milton in contexts that question the easy association of Milton with puritanism. Her introduction, "Carlyle's Ghost," deftly covers revisionist accounts of the "multiple causes and effects of the 'Great Rebellion'" (26) from Conrad Russell to Patrick Collinson. Martin moves on, in subsequent chapters, to examine the "non-puritanical" and Baconian aspects of Milton's early poetry and prose writing. She pits the puritans against rationalist and secular approaches to "law, education, science, rhetoric and the ministry" (26), anchoring Milton firmly to the latter. Part II "traces the effects of these mainly secular-rationalist influences (including classical republicanism) on Milton's major poems" (26). Her afterword explores Milton's "posthumous contribution" to modern "secular theories of toleration" (27). Despite her affirmation of the relevance and indispensability of the term "puritan" for Milton studies, Martin's somewhat murky and selective deployment of the term detracts greatly from the book (32-33). Her merging of a wide array of religious dissenters under the broad label of "puritan," a term that she not so subtly equates with anti-intellectual Calvinist zealotry, does more to obscure than to clarify Milton's place "among" but not "of " the puritans (21). Dissenters as disparate as Baptists, Fifth Monarchists, Levellers, and Quakers are yoked together and reduced to a "godly" common denominator throughout much of the book. Also, the privileged place of the Socinians in Martin's account is accomplished only by downplaying the radical piety and congregational impulses of Socinians like John Biddle, whose 1655 imprisonment for blasphemy, for example, was opposed most strongly by Henry Vane, a figure who is consistently identified with "the godly" by Martin (153; 284). The understanding of puritans advanced by her book is inferior to that of other revisionist scholars such as Nicholas Tyacke who, following the work of Christina Garrett, has carefully traced the genealogy of puritanism back to the Marian exiles. Contra Martin, Tyacke, recognizing the diversity of puritan thought, documents a progressive broadening of the field of their thought and action over time and has recently asserted that Milton's arguments [End Page 147] for liberty, in fact, "exemplify . . . the puritan paradigm of English politics" (550). Tyacke documents a long history of puritan engagements with secular politics and rejects "misleadingly narrow" religious definitions that "ignore the existence of a much more all-embracing puritan political vision" (527). The chapters in Part II are very strong for what they are: a close reading of the Baconian and secular aspects of the cosmology and anthropology of Paradise Lost, an interpretation of Paradise Regained that provocatively and persuasively critiques scholarship that "isolates" Milton from the dominant neoclassical aesthetics of the day, and an argument for classifying Samson Agonistes as a "classical republican" tragedy (279). These chapters offer a more nuanced survey of Milton's writings and to some extent qualify the strident anti-puritan polemic that structures the first two hundred pages of the book. The opening chapter of Part II offers a survey of "secular resources" that illuminate the "philosophical, cosmological and anthropological framework" (215) of Paradise Lost. Martin clearly states that her chapter is...