Milton's Words by Annabel Patterson

Abstract

1140 Reviews Milton, warts and all. Thus, while the book remains a hero's life' (p. 4), itdoes not stint in exposing him as 'flawed, self-contradictory, self-serving, arrogant [...] and cunning (p. 3). Such even-handedness permeates an impressively comprehensive re-examination ofMilton's prose works. For instance, while his alignment in the 1640s with the influential credo of Protestant tolerationism is fulsomely extolled, his expressed perspective on Catholicism remained inimical and vengeful' (p. 172); and though TheDoctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643) marks him as a 'heterodox thinker of growing confidence', whose 'exegetical skills [are] both subtle and bold' (pp. 161,164), by contrast his ideas for a radical overhaul of the nation's education system, set out in Of Education (1644), are 'Repressive, prescriptive, elitist, masculinist, militaristic, dustily pedantic, class-ridden, and affectionless' (p. 181). The explicitly chronological structure of the book?Milton's shifting age range is printed at the top of each page?might, in other biographies, have seemed unnecessarily rigid. Here, however, it complements one of the overriding objectives of the authors: to trace the specific trajectory ofMilton's radicalization. The governing paradigm of a Milton who was somehow always predisposed towards the revolutionary ideas on Church and state thatwould ultimately lead to the Civil War is persuasively challenged. Drawing with profit on the records relating to his upbringing and to his student years at Christ's College, Cambridge, Campbell and Corns command assent to the notion thatMilton's early decades were, in fact, ideologically conformist. The catalyst for his political volte-face, they postulate, were national and local events of 1637, when the twenty-eight-year-old Milton was living with his parents in the small Buckinghamshire village ofHorton. The public mutilation ofWilliam Prynne, Henry Burton, and John Bastwick for sedition against the Laudian Church 'demonstrated that the lives of the middling sort were [. . .] as fragile as those of the unpropertied' (p. 95); while the episcopal visitation ofHorton in thatyear directly impinged onMilton's family: its report reprovingly noting that some of the parish church seats, including his father's,were too high, and that the tombstone of his recently buried mother, Sara, was wrongly oriented. These seminal events give fascinating context to the sense of injustice and mission which sustained Milton through to and beyond his poetic magnum opus, Paradise Lost (1667), bywhen he was 'speaking for theGod whose conduit he had become' (p? 346). This is an assiduously researched and delicately calibrated studywhich, in vividly fleshing out its subject and his changing modes of thought and argument, both questions and affirmshis iconic status. Birkbeck, University of London Philip Major Milton's Words. By Annabel Patterson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2009. viii+212 pp. ?18.99. ISBN 978-0-19-957346-2. Few Miltonists can claim to be as committed, experienced, or productive as Annabel Patterson. For this reason alone it comes as no surprise that this disarmingly brief and ostensibly unprepossessing book carries the unmistakable MLR, 105.4, 2010 1141 stamp of scholarly heft. Cohering the work around close analyses of individual words employed by Milton, the author's stated aim, consonant with the recent academic trend (as exemplified in Gordon Campbell and Thomas Corns's John Milton: Life,Work, and Thought from the same publisher (2008), reviewed above), is threefold: to rehabilitate her subject's neglected prose works; to encourage, confident in its canonical status, a less deferential attitude towards theMilton corpus in general; and relatedly, to emphasize its contingency, the 'series of changes of direction, impulsive gestures, apologies, revisions, and thoughts worked out in the very process ofwriting them down' (p. 14). An engaging chapter on the divorce pamphlets argues plausibly thatMilton presents a logical case for reform of the divorce law, superimposed on a subtext of emotional chaos' (p. 48), the latter evidenced by the copious deployment of metaphor and euphemism in the Doctrine and Discipline ofDivorce (1643) which underscores his apparent physical and intellectual difficulties with sexual intercourse at this time. The most diverting?and important?chapter, however, concerns the still under-studied Paradise Regained (1671). In it,Patterson argues for, among other things, the significant influence on Milton's epic of JohnBale's Temptacyon of Christ...