The Communion of the Book: Milton and the Humanist Revolution in Reading 9780228015857

Table of contents :
Cover
Copyright
Contents
Prolegomenon to a History of Reading
Acknowledgments
A Note on Archival Sources
Introduction: The State as a Work of Art
1 A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution?
2 Bread, Blood, and Paper: The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis
3 Philological Reading: The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech
4 Sacramental Reading: Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel
5 Juridical Reading: John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law
6 Historiographical Reading: The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow
7 Classical Reading: Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy
8 The Communion of the Book: A Dialectic of Presence and Absence
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

T H E C O M M U N I O N OF T HE BOOK

33093_Williams.indd 1

2022-09-01 16:54

M cGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Ideas Series Editor: Philip J. Cercone 68 Network Democracy: Conservative Politics and the Violence of the Liberal Age Jared Giesbrecht 69 A Singular Case: Debating China’s Political Economy in the European Enlightenment Ashley Eva Millar 70 Not Even a God Can Save Us Now: Reading Machiavelli after Heidegger Brian Harding 71 Before Copernicus: The Cultures and Contexts of Scientific Learning in the Fifteenth Century Edited by Rivka Feldhay and F. Jamil Ragep 72 The Culturalist Challenge to Liberal Republicanism Michael Lusztig 73 God and Government: Martin Luther’s Political Thought Jarrett A. Carty 74 The Age of Secularization Augusto Del Noce Edited and Translated by Carlo  Lancellotti 75 Emancipatory Thinking: Simone de Beauvoir and Contemporary Political Thought Elaine Stavro 76 Life Embodied: The Promise of Vital Force in Spanish Modernity Nicolás Fernández-Medina

33093_Williams.indd 2

77 The Aesthetics of Fear in German Romanticism Paola Mayer 78 Objectively Engaged Journalism: An Ethic Stephen J.A. Ward 79 Progress, Pluralism, and Politics: Liberalism and Colonialism, Past and Present David Williams 80 Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace: Politics and International Relations in the Thought of Friedrich Nietzsche Jean-François Drolet 81 Inequality in Canada: The History and Politics of an Idea Eric W. Sager 82 Attending: An Ethical Art Warren Heiti 83 Imperial Paradoxes: Training the Senses and Tasting the Eighteenth Century

Robert James Merrett 84 The Problem of Atheism Augusto Del Noce Edited and Translated by Carlo Lancellotti 85 The Etruscans in the Modern Imagination Sam Solecki 86 The Communion of the Book: Milton and the Humanist Revolution in Reading David Williams

2022-09-01 16:54

The Communion of the Book Milton and the Humanist Revolution in Reading

David Williams

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

33093_Williams.indd 3

2022-09-01 16:54

©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2022 ISBN 978-0-2280-1469-0 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-2280-1585-7 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-2280-1586-4 (ePUB) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2022 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: The communion of the book: Milton and the humanist revolution in reading / David Williams. Names: Williams, David, 1945- author. Series: McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of ideas; 86. Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of ideas; 86 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220266255 | Canadiana (ebook) 2022026645X | ISBN 9780228014690 (cloth) | ISBN 9780228015857 (ePDF) | ISBN 9780228015864 (ePUB) Subjects: LCSH: Reading—History. | LCSH: Literacy—History. | LCSH: Books and reading—History. | LCSH: Humanism—History. | LCSH: Renaissance. | LCSH: Civilization, Modern. Classification: LCC LB1050 .W55 2022 | DDC 306.4/8809—dc23

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5 /13 New Baskerville.

33093_Williams.indd 4

2022-09-01 16:54

Contents

Prolegomenon to a History of Reading  vii Acknowledgments xxiii A Note on Archival Sources xxv Introduction: The State as a Work of Art  3 1

A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution?   24

2

Bread, Blood, and Paper: The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis   70

3

Philological Reading: The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech 112

4

Sacramental Reading: Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 157

5

Juridical Reading: John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 229

6

Historiographical Reading: The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 297

7

Classical Reading: Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy  364

8

The Communion of the Book: A Dialectic of Presence and Absence 427 Works Cited  443 Index 473

33093_Williams.indd 5

2022-09-01 16:54

33093_Williams.indd 6

2022-09-01 16:54

Prolegomenon to a History of Reading

One of the more promising approaches in recent years to the origins of early modernity in Europe’s late Middle Ages comes not from ­history or art or literary history, but from cold, hard science. The ­evolutionary biologist and cultural anthropologist Joseph Henrich has recently made a statistically significant case for “Lutheran” bible ­reading as the motive force of modernization. More precisely, Henrich claims that the rise of literacy in regions closest to Luther’s Saxon university town of Wittenberg1 in the sixteenth century rewired the human brain, producing ­psychological changes that made us, as his title announces, The weirdest People in the World – the acronym weird signifying “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic” (21). If “a team of alien anthropologists had surveyed humanity from orbit in 1000 ce, or even 1200 ce” (the old joke about his discipline is somehow still disarming), what they “would have missed from their orbital perch was the quiet fermentation of a new psychology during the Middle Ages in some European communities.” It was that fresh psychology that “laid the groundwork for the rise of impersonal markets, urbanization, ­constitutional ­governments, democratic politics, individualistic ­religions, scientific societies, and relentless innovation” (23–4). Yet even after all this, the full flowering of modernity had to await the seminal effects of literacy. Drawing on the groundbreaking findings of French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, Henrich builds squarely on “The New Science of How We Read” to show how “deep literacy” rewired the human brain

1 Henrich, weirdest, 9–13.

33093_Williams.indd 7

2022-09-01 16:54

viii

Prolegomenon

by thickening the “corpus callosum, which is the information highway that connects the left and right hemispheres” of the brain, thereby repurposing its “default tendency toward holistic visual processing in favor of more analytical processing” (3, 4). The historical result was the birth of early modern culture. And the agent was this biologically reconfigured human brain. Enabled by recent advances in brain-imaging technology, Dehaene made a pioneering discovery that our “primate brain” contains an area in “the left occipito-temporal region” that plays “a central and specific role in reading” (Dehaene, Reading, 5, 68). This “visual word form area” (62), which he helpfully translates as the “brain’s letterbox,” is “[l]ocated in the same brain area in readers the world over” (53). As much as this letterbox region recognizes and “responds automatically to ­written words,” it also “serves as an essential switchboard for the reading circuit” (102) by forwarding information to specialized “lexical areas” of “the middle temporal lobe” (116). From the perspective of anthropology, Henrich adds an important reminder that “highly literate ­societies are relatively new, and quite distinct from most societies that have ever existed. This means that modern populations are neurologically and psychologically different from those found in societies throughout history and back into our evolutionary past” (Henrich, 6). Just how different these two populations really are turns into one of the overarching themes of his work, which adds a significant array of ­cultural and historical implications to the biological evidence. Dehaene’s later research on pre-literate brains would confirm his initial “‘neuronal recycling’ hypothesis,” which had proposed that “part of this neuronal hierarchy” in the literate brain “converts to the new task of recognizing letters and words” (Reading, 121). By contrast, the “­letterbox” area in the brains of illiterates preserves its original function of “face recognition” that is repurposed in the literate brain for word recognition and visual word processing. In a review of the scientific literature, Deheane notes that “Literacy studies suggest that the righthemispheric lateralization of the ffa [fusiform face area] may be caused in large part by the acquisition of words and symbols in the left hemisphere” (“Illiterate,” 238). But it is Henrich who fleshes out the cultural import of this modification, given that “deep literacy” has now “[s]hifted your facial recognition processing to the right hemisphere. Normal humans (not you [the reader]) process faces almost equally on the left and right sides of their brains, but those with your peculiar skill are

33093_Williams.indd 8

2022-09-01 16:54



Prolegomenon ix

biased toward the right hemisphere” (Henrich, 4). The implications of this finding are momentous, since the brain’s “holistic” parallel processing for facial recognition among non-literates has been split in the brains of literates into discrete functions: visual word recognition on the left, facial recognition on the right. The world-shattering character of this functional shift emerges from the fact that it has not only “[d]iminished your ability to identify faces,” but, more significantly, has “[r]educed your default tendency toward holistic visual processing in favor of more analytical processing” (4). The consequence is a cultural revolution that has not slowed after six centuries but continues to accelerate. The reason is simple: analytical brains mark an evolutionary leap. Equally, however, they are an evolutionary risk, since the ability to instantaneously distinguish friend from foe is vital to any society organized along the bloodlines of “kin-based institutions.” Social networks made up of “clans, lineages, houses, or tribes” (Henrich, 27) have been the norm of every society from at least the dawn of agriculture twelve ­thousand years ago, if not from two million years of human evolution. The perspective of anthropology is useful here, since Henrich views the rise of the West as the result of social changes introduced into Western Europe in the Middle Ages by the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, these changes “inadvertently altered people’s psychology by promoting a peculiar set of prohibitions and prescriptions about marriage and the family that dissolved the densely interconnected clans and kindreds in western Europe into small, weak, and disparate nuclear families” (57). Whatever the Church’s intentions fifteen hundred years ago, the unintended consequences of its policies regarding sexuality, family, property ownership, and inheritance laws exploded into full view at the time of the “Lutheran” revolt. And newly literate brains effectively sealed the dissolution of kinship networks begun by Church policies during the previous millennium. Exchanging facial recognition for word recognition and analytical thinking literally precipitated the early modern world. Whatever their differences, the neuroscientist and the cultural evolutionist share another key premise about the human brain: it is shaped at its deepest level by culture, if always and necessarily within the constraints of biology. As Dehaene explains, “the letterbox area is not merely determined by visual stimuli, but also by the cultural history of the reader’s brain” (95). That is, the brains of monolingual Chinese or English readers are not activated by word forms of the other language any more than they are by Hebrew letters. Or, as Henrich puts the

33093_Williams.indd 9

2022-09-01 16:54

x

Prolegomenon

matter, “culture physically rewires our brains and thereby shapes how we think” (17). This is not to say that “genetically evolved learning abilities [are] simply downloading a cultural software package into our innate neurological hard-ware. Instead, culture rewires our brains and alters our biology – it renovates the firm-ware” (65) or “read-only memory.” Thus, the brain rewrites its own processing program. Something else on the page of Henrich’s sweeping argument catches my eye and refuses to let me go. “You can’t help reading what you see,” the cultural biologist insists. Indeed, this odd compulsion of literates derives from “our inability to switch off our reading circuitry and the fact that we don’t even know it when we are in fact reading and processing what we read” (5). Is that why I so often find myself reading the crawler at the bottom of a television screen as I listen to the host and a panel of experts discuss the state of the union on cnn? Or why I often feel a compulsion to pull disparate texts together in the joint actions of reading and writing? Due to the covid-19 pandemic, I have been watching on FaceTime as my five-year-old granddaughter showcases her literacy and numeracy skills by inserting plastic letters and numbers in the blanks of an iPad game that we gave her for Christmas. And I wonder if our tiny digital native will continue to cherish the storybooks that we have read to her ever since she was an infant. Watching her excitement as she liberates a fish from a numbered bubble in a digital sky to stock an ocean below, then lays out beneath the tablet camera the letters of her growing literacy, I wonder if she is also being primed to click on YouTube links and respond to Twitter or Instagram alerts in her digital future? And I am saddened a little – my own brain having been rewired in a completely different world to locate authority in the printed word – to preside in this manner over our grandchild’s evolving neurocircuitry. In this respect, I begin to understand why, as an avid reader at the end of a long career, I share a number of the predilections of Michael Ondaatje’s desert explorer in his novel The English Patient (1992).2 In the Villa San Girolamo, in a nameless hilltown north of Florence, a nurse picks up the bulky “copy of The Histories by Herodotus” that her patient Almásy “has added to, cutting and gluing in pages from other books or writing in his own observations – so they are all cradled within the text 2 See Williams, Imagined Nations, 202–44. Here, I beg the reader’s indulgence for rehearsing a personal history of reading. It is meant to orient readers to medium theory.

33093_Williams.indd 10

2022-09-01 16:54



Prolegomenon xi

of Herodotus” (Ondaatje, 16). The authority he vests in the written word passes in review before my eyes on this page I am now writing, “gluing in” passages from other books that I find authoritative even as I add my own observations between the lines or in the margins of the page. In reading his strange book, which is impossible to visualize as a form, “almost twice its original thickness” (94), I realize that my own brain was also reconfigured three decades ago by this mysterious book I had begun to read not long before Netscape Navigator landed on my desktop as a browser offering endless links to hypertext. More and more, my digital explorer began to seem like Almásy murmuring in my ear, “I have always had information like a sea in me” (18). Indeed, the bound boards of his mysteriously expanding book had come to feel almost like a tidal force tugging at me to combine literary with media studies, to write an impossible history of the future. Even today, that inconceivable book bears more than the burden of Almásy’s memory. It points like a magnetic needle to epochal changes taking place between its bulging boards.3 In short, it was his mysterious book that turned me into a student of media. As the eponymous “English Patient” proclaims, “We are communal histories, communal books” (261). Inspired by the shifting beauty of the Sahara and the changing shape of a book that erases old borders, the patient had come to embody for me many of the portentous changes taking place in book culture, from a familiar page made of paper to a semblance of a page floating on a sea of electrons. In concert with the shifting sands of the vast desert he traverses and the shifting shape of that expanding “book” he carries with him, he protests, “Erase the f­ amily name! Erase nations! I was taught such things by the desert” (138–9). In some sense, Almásy has already become a “digital” citizen without borders, a “communal history” that can be understood only by s­ earching out the hidden connections between community and the mode of communication. Indeed, this fictional character had been telling me each time that I dipped into his narrative how I needed to reteach myself how to read. 3 In certain respects, Ondaatje’s Almásy in 1945 anticipates the world of Amber Case, cyberanthropologist and ceo of Geoloqui, who remarks in a 2012 response to a Pew Research survey on the future of the internet that “memories are becoming hyperlinks to information triggered by keywords and urls.” Because our memories are now stored on cellphones in our pockets, “we are becoming ‘persistent paleontologists’ of our own external memories, as our brains are storing the keywords to get back to those memories and not the full memories themselves” (Anderson and Rainie, “Millennials,” 9).

33093_Williams.indd 11

2022-09-01 16:54

xii

Prolegomenon

A few years later, an advance copy of Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief gave me a glimpse of another book I felt it necessary to write about Imagined Nations (2003), and the ways that nations were seemingly shaped by the media environments of their birth. At the very least, MacLeod’s book soon persuaded me that the oral culture of his Highland clan could survive in a digital world, maybe even thrive on the printed page. Indeed, No Great Mischief (1999) carries us back to the world of MacLeod’s childhood in Cape Breton, and to the kinship networks, social obligations, and oral storytelling of his remnant of Scots Highlanders on the western shore of the Atlantic. The framing narrative, which mediates the inwardness of a narrator deeply shaped by print, is no less able to recreate the speech rhythms, mental habits, and structures of feeling of the olden-days senaichies, those oral storytellers of his blood kinsmen and clansmen. And yet the incorrigibly literate narrator neither scruples nor hesitates to map the demography and ethnography of Canada as a modern “print nation” by means of which his own clan is being absorbed, even as we read, into the print “nation of the book” (Imagined, 82–102). In fact, No Great Mischief gains in strength by being read alongside Henrich’s argument about cultural evolution over the last millennium from traditional, kin-based cultures to that unprecedented culture of “the weirdest people in the world.” The Clann Chalum Ruaidh, named after the patriarch of the MacDonald family that has for two centuries inhabited a remote Highland fastness on the eastern edge of North America, does indeed embody a form of social organization that has been the global norm for most of human history. Since the dawn of agriculture, Henrich maintains, clans have been the standard model, held together with the mortar of consanguinity – the blood ties of ­family. Such intensive “kin-based institutions” (75) have long maintained their patrilineal power by means of “cousin marriage,” clan loyalties, and corporate ownership of territory. Clans based on blood ties are very distinct from modern families, both in terms of their psychology and their personal and social identities.4 4 The strangeness of kin-based institutions took up residence of late in the White House, normally a symbol of American democracy and meritocracy, but latterly threatened by vestiges of traditional clan culture marked by intense personal loyalties, unhesitating ­obedience to the patriarch, shameless nepotism in government appointments, and political gerrymandering for patrilineal succession. Voters most amenable to this atavistic culture are themselves often descendants of traditional clans from rural and sectionalist areas.

33093_Williams.indd 12

2022-09-01 16:54



Prolegomenon xiii

Individual clan members tend to be more conformist and obedient (as  opposed to independent and individualistic); more given to shame (or loss of honour among other members of the clan) than to interior, private guilt; more comfortable with personal and particular relations of trust and fairness (as opposed to impersonal and “universal” moral judgments); and more xenophobic or mistrustful of strangers, and so less trusting of “out-groups,” or social and racial “others.” Those whose lifelong personal and social identities have depended entirely on blood ties, and whose thoughtways and moral codes are founded on “­in-group” loyalty, tend to be less analytical, more holistic, or “relational” in their morality and relations to the natural world, and more deeply inclined to be governed in their social relations by face-to-face ­communications (Henrich, 222–42, 132–3). This fits to a tee the patriarchal world of Clann Chalum Ruaidh as late as 1968 on the eastern coast of Canada. But it also provides a necessary counterpoint to Almásy’s fevered a­ mbition in The English Patient to “Erase the family name!” The tension between the psychological worlds of these two novels is superbly ­illuminated by Henrich’s case for these divergent vectors in cultural evolution. My own explorations in this area are also informed by the culture and literature of a country that – given its vast geography – has always been preoccupied by problems of communication at a distance.5 I am predisposed to ask how the mode of communication fits with our sense of the nature of things.6 I am fascinated, for instance, by the manner in which the Homeric poet, long before Herodotus came to write down his Histories, had performed his oral stories of the Trojan War and the Greek nostoi (homecomings). As a traditional singer, the oral poet was professionally dependent on live performance, or face-to-face communications, to foster and maintain group identities. So, it is perhaps natural that, after a pilgrimage to the ruins of the Greek colony of Paestum in Campania, and the following day to the tomb of Virgil (19 bce) and the shrine of Apollo (ca 700 bce) near the old colony of Neapolis (Naples), I would have a sudden vision, gazing down the coast 5 At the heart of the North American continent where I live, Jean-Baptiste Lagimodière famously walked 1,800 miles on snowshoes in the winter of 1815–16 from Red River to Montreal to warn Lord Selkirk of tensions between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Nor’West Company that endangered the young Selkirk Colony in present-day Manitoba. 6 In gesturing toward a popular show on cbc–tv, I do not mean to devalue the writing of Lucretius’s De rerum natura.

33093_Williams.indd 13

2022-09-01 16:54

xiv

Prolegomenon

of the Tyrrhenian Sea, of why the ancient Homeric songs had to be written down around 650 bce.7 I saw the papyri as tiny “paper” boats crossing what, for the ancients, was this sun-glittering immensity, tying Greek settlers on the Italian boot to Greeks on the Aegean shores and plains of the Pelopponese – to Magna Graecia. From the purview of cultural anthropology, Henrich insists that such scattered groups could only ever “scale up” larger, kin-based patriarchal societies able to “sustain complex chiefdoms and states” (133) across vast reaches of time and space, by replacing village or ancestral gods with universal deities. Cultural evolution, says Henrich, required tribal people “to somehow fashion imagined communities – broad networks of strangers connected by shared beliefs in supernatural beings” beyond their own natural and social horizons.8 But, because they were out of sight, gods and “imagined communities” could just as easily vanish over those same horizons. Yet, despite “the solidarity-building powers” of oral and “communal rituals” (132), writing was still essential to ­preserve oral culture.9 Homer’s Achilles is a crucial instance of this process, given his doubts about social justice in relation to the oral poet’s medium. After the Mycenean king Agamemnon dishonoured him, he sat sulking in his tent, composing his own heroic elegy, his actions ­querying the singer’s ability to hold him in the culture’s memory. And yet the oral poet deployed his resources in such a way that he managed to redeem the cultural system from the felt threat of writing that lurks in Iliad 6 in the fable of “Bellerophontes’ Tablet.”10 Whereas the oral poet sang of vanished worlds from the heroic past, the scribal poet of Aeneid, standing in the Sybil’s Cave of Apollo’s shrine at Cumae, now stood in a new relation to time. His god Jupiter literally unscrolls the future of Aeneas and the destiny of Rome in the first book of Aeneid as if reading from the roll of papyrus on which Virgil wrote.11 Virgil also writes history in the future tense, since Rome’s legendary

 7 The fact that I had been reading Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato no doubt contributed to the suddenness of this vision.  8 Although Henrich uses the phrase “imagined communities,” he appears to be unaware of the original sense of the phrase used by Anderson in Imagined Communities.  9 While Henrich mentions the part that writing occupies in terms of the anthropological record and its value for anthropologists (143–8), he ignores the key moment in this history of the Homeric poet’s act of “translating” an oral song into writing. 10 See Williams, Media, Memory, 59–60, 65–71. 11 For Jupiter and Aeneas, see ibid., 72–8.

33093_Williams.indd 14

2022-09-01 16:54



Prolegomenon xv

founder, Aeneas, likewise points in Elysium to Virgil’s contemporary, Augustus.12 It is a story and a history that I had taught for many decades to students on our way into Paradise Lost. Other stories about wars of empire tell us even more about the effects of media change. As I taught other students in the last decade of my career, the print classics of the Great War were likely canonized less for their “truth” about that war than for their cinematic style of seeing.13 That style had created a new verb tense in the grammar of existence: the past-progressive-present tense of film.14 And cultural memory has been further restructured by each medium in which that war is now remembered, given that memory itself is a medium shaped by changes in our technologies of memory.15 Even the topical past-progressivepresent tense of filmic memory has been threatened of late by the staccato “present-mindedness” of Twitter.16 More than we realize, our brains are being rewired by digital media in ways that grow remote from printed forms of knowledge.17 Are today’s “imagined nations” of digital media truly the same as yesterday’s “nations of the book”?18 “Or is the culture of the book – even in digital forms – fated to disappear in the face of more nimble forms 12 Virgil writes “history in the future tense” (Media, Memory, 75–6) in another sense, his poem serving as an important model for Leonardo Bruni’s History of the Florentine People (1442) as well as Machiavelli’s Istorie fiorentine (1532), both of which shaped Milton’s History of Britain (1670). See 301–18. 13 For the variable cultural consequences of this shift in medium from printed word to moving image, see my paired essays: “Spectres of Time” and “Film and Mechanization.” 14 See Williams, Media, Memory, 5–6, 7–8, 30, 41, 44, 109, 150. 15 See ibid., 11–14. 16 Harold Innis, the “father” of the Toronto School of Communication, warned as early as 1950 that “the balance between time and space has been seriously disturbed” by the expansion of electronic communications, “with disastrous consequences to Western civilization” (Bias, 76). See my “On Reading Darwin,” 28–30, for discussion of the growing social and political consequences of media-generated “present-mindedness.” 17 As David Durant and Tony Horava explain, “print books and e-books facilitate two very different types of reading. The print codex facilitates what [Christopher] Rowe calls linear reading and what has also been described as deep reading, the ability to read an extended linear narrative and reflect upon its meaning,” whereas “screen reading fosters what Rowe calls tabular reading, because it tends to be nonlinear in nature, develops rapid pattern recognition and quick decision making, and is interactive instead of solitary.” In consequence, “The more we read from screens in tabular fashion, the more our brains rewire themselves to facilitate this activity, and the harder it becomes to engage in deep print reading. The digital environment has thus greatly increased our ability to access information at the likely expense of our ability to convert it into conceptual knowledge” (9–10). 18 See Williams, Imagined Nations, 42–73, 202–60.

33093_Williams.indd 15

2022-09-01 16:54

xvi

Prolegomenon

of information,”19 rendering the question moot? In his study of “Books Transformed” in the digital age, Jeffrey Schnapp responds firmly in the negative: “Despite the transformative impact of digital tools, media, networks, and knowledge forms on nearly every aspect of contemporary society, what [Nicholas] Negroponte and [Muriel] Cooper wrote in 1978 remains plausible today; that ‘in many regards the old fashioned book remains the best random access information resource we have’” (389). Even so, Schnapp is quick to point out that a variety of digital attempts “to emulate the precise attributes of physical books: the ­whiteness of paper; rapid page-turning speeds; paper-like contrast ratios; features like easy-bookmarking, highlighting, and note-taking,” are all designed to create a measure of epistemological continuity for ­readers moving between the paper and the digital book. But more and  more, it is also the nature of that represented reality that is ­becoming contested. “Beneath the surface,” Schnapp candidly admits, “the book’s ontology has shifted” (389). And it is in that ontological shift that we are likely to experience further attrition, if not a partial collapse, of many shared forms of a social reality that had been based on the physical book. Add to that the relentless competition from social, let alone antisocial, media for readerly attention, and even the most thoughtfully designed ­facsimiles of the paper book are likely to become once again the preserve of a few litterati, as was the case in the scribal age of parchment manuscripts. At that point, we will face a far more urgent question of whether we are losing, or have already lost, many of the values that we didn’t even know had come from print – such as those supposedly “Enlightenment” values of democracy and political self-determination; of freedom of speech and human rights; of scientific method and so on.20 And where in the Metaverse will we then find ourselves? Three examples (or is it one?) must suffice. Compared with the editorial practices of print publishers, digital “platforms”21 like Facebook and Twitter have been agonizingly slow to censor conspiracy theories and hate speech, claiming to be neither publishers nor broadcasters, but 19 Williams, “On Reading Darwin,” 15, 29–30. 20 The extent of literacy in Roman antiquity, for example, seems to have had a noticeable effect on its political culture. One historian of reading reports that, during the ­republican era in Pompeii, “electoral posters shouted from public walls. (In the subsequent Middle Ages, conversely, such public writing was nearly non-existent)” (Fischer, History, 78). 21 “Platforms,” says Madrigal, enable one “to run code in someone else’s system.”

33093_Williams.indd 16

2022-09-01 16:54



Prolegomenon xvii

conduits for content providers.22 Particularly over the last decade or so, we have heard much about living in a “post-truth” world, somewhere beyond the digital horizon. In the absence of truth, will disinformation then come to rule the information age, sowing mistrust among the masses, and enabling autocrats to govern as they please? Or is knowledge still to be found by winnowing grain from digital chaff? In July 2020, Pew Research published a study claiming that “Americans who rely on social media as their pathway to news are more ignorant and more misinformed than those who come to news through print, a news app on their phones, or network tv.”23 A study from mit further shows that false news spreads six times faster than truth on social media, and political falsehoods diffuse three times faster than other forms of falsehood.24 And lies will always be more profitable than truth on social media because of algorithms that monetize the users’ attention. If seventeenthcentury newsbooks and print pamphlets eroded the power of ancient monarchy, based on hereditary prerogative, social hierarchy, and personal patronage,25 why would social media not be just as corrosive of democratic

22 Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which exempted ­internet publishers from US laws governing print publication, came under threat of amendment by the Trump administration at the end of 2020. The incoming Biden administration is more likely to revoke it. See Casey Newton, “Everything.” 23 Sullivan, “This was … war on misinformation.” 24 Vosoughi et al. More specifically, the authors conclude that “false political news traveled deeper and more broadly, reached more people, and was more viral than any other category of false information. False political news also diffused deeper more quickly and reached more than 20,000 people nearly three times faster than all other types of false news reached 10,000 people” (1148). 25 This was in large part the subject of the third volume of my media quartet, Milton’s Leveller God. Publication bans on home news and matters of royal prerogative were ­effectively abolished in England by an Act for the abolition of the Court of Star Chamber on 5 July 1641. Hitherto, it was a punishable offence to print the monarch’s spoken or written word. But the capture of Charles I’s personal letters at the Battle of Naseby on 14 June 1645 and their publication by “Special Order of Parliament” in July, under title of The King’s Cabinet Opened, with a further promise to reveal “secrets” and “mysteries of state,” exposed the king’s duplicity in his treaty negotiations with Westminster and his secret ­alliances with foreign powers. “W.C. Abbott wrote of the King and Naseby, that ‘the defeat of his army, if not glorious was decisive: the publication of his papers was disastrous to his cause.” See Maddison, “King’s Cabinet,” 5–6. Another letter of 3 July 1645 from Charles I to his nephew Rupert about the royalist cause is treated with devastating irony by Marchamont Nedham, editor of Parliament’s newsbook Mercurius Britanicus. For discussion of this letter as a subtext to Satan’s speeches in Paradise Lost Book 1, see Williams, Milton’s Leveller God, 117–20.

33093_Williams.indd 17

2022-09-01 16:54

xviii

Prolegomenon

societies?26 The ability of a bilious president to communicate directly with his followers through digital media like Twitter and YouTube has reduced the oversight of responsible intermediaries such as newspaper editors and tv producers, enabling a ­demagogue in Stalinist or Maoist fashion to dismiss traditional media as “the enemy of the people.”27 Yet, as cellphones tweet their news alerts, Twitter’s algorithms ensure that users see only those stories that match their preferences. And, given “the indifference towards truth evidenced by the computational algorithms” (Rowe, 4), smart phones per se won’t make their users smarter. Information still needs to be translated into experiential knowledge. Nothing better illustrates the major changes taking place in post-print minds than the events of 6 January 2021 in Washington, dc.28 In a review article that appeared eighteen months before the Capitol

26 One obvious sign of social media’s erosion of democratic legitimacy is the frank admission of a female demonstrator in Washington, dc, in support of Donald Trump’s fraudulent claims of a stolen election: “We don’t get our information from y’all any more; we get our information directly from the people online from their accounts” (Sara Sidner reporting, cnn Newsroom, 14 November 2020). There are two assumptions here: that populist communication without intermediaries is more reliable; and that new (digital) media are superior, more truthful, more reliable sources of information than older, outmoded paper communications. A third assumption lurks offstage in the wings of this scene – that “information” is in fact the same thing as “knowledge.” See notes 29 and 31 to this chapter. 27 A sitting US president at the time tweeted from Finland, “The Summit with Russia was a great success, except with the real enemy of the people, the Fake News Media.” (See Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump, 9:24 AM – 19 July 2018.) But then consider the source; before he was elected president in November 2016, Trump claimed to have 10.3 million followers on Twitter, although 79 per cent of these were either digital robots he had paid for himself or were paid for by people who had never logged on to Twitter. “According to the site Status People, which tracks how many Twitter accounts are bots, inactive, or real, only 21 per cent of Trump’s Twitter followers are real, active users on the platform. The rest are either bots, dead bots, or real people who no longer log into Twitter,” reports Nick Bilton in “Trump’s Biggest Lie?” 28 The assault of 6 January 2021 on the US Capitol by a mob infected by the Trump virus succeeded for one afternoon in terrorizing Capitol police (one of whom was killed), and members of Congress and the media. Lawmakers were prevented for five hours from certifying the results of the presidential election, before emerging from under desks and seats and other hiding places to fulfill their responsibility mandated by the Constitution. The majority of Republicans in the House and a small minority of seven senators continued to carry out a figurative assault on the Constitution by refusing to certify the president-elect. The virus of anti-social media may yet trigger an immune response to direct-media governance and the declining authority of the printed word (including written Constitutions), at least for a few more decades; but prospects for old-style media gatekeeping are not bright over the longer term, despite the decision of Twitter and other social media platforms to suspend the loser’s account for inciting an insurrection.

33093_Williams.indd 18

2022-09-01 16:54



Prolegomenon xix

insurrection, neuroscientist Joseph Firth and his colleagues surveyed a broad range of scientific studies on the adverse effects of the internet on “attention capacities,” “memory processes,” and “social cognition.”29 The fervent belief of rioters in political conspiracy theories posted on platforms ranging from Facebook and Twitter to Gab and Parler in advance of the insurrection is at least somewhat explicable in terms of this scientific literature, given “how quickly individuals internalized the Internet’s external knowledge as their own” (123). Since “the distinction between self and Internet’s [sic] abilities” among persons on their digital devices is becoming alarmingly and “increasingly elusive,” it could be “creating a constant illusion of ‘greater than actual knowledge’ among large portions of the population.”30 Many of the rioters opposing a “stolen election” seem to have assumed that they were more deeply informed and so knew better than the rest of us. In effect, a technoillusion of secret knowledge conferred on the faithful through a highly advanced medium from an infallible source appears to have made religious believers (think of QAnon) out of alienated individuals. As the chaos unleashed by the cult leader and his followers continues to unsettle various factions within the nation,31 the US Constitution

29 The abstract of this “state-of-the-art review” by neuroscientists Joseph Firth et al., “Online Brain,” proposes to “explore how unique features of the online world may be influencing: a) attentional capacities, as the constantly evolving stream of online information encourages our divided attention across multiple media sources, at the expense of sustained concentration; b) memory processes, as this vast and ubiquitous source of online information begins to shift the way we retrieve, store, and even value knowledge; and c)  social cognition, as the ability for online social settings to resemble and evoke ­real-­world  social processes creates a new interplay between the Internet and our social lives, including our self-concepts and self-esteem. Overall, the available evidence indicates that the Internet can produce both acute and sustained alterations in each of these areas of cognition, which may be reflected in changes in the brain” (119). 30 The full sentence containing these phrases reads: “As individuals become more and more connected with their personal digital devices (which are also always accessible), it seems inevitable that the distinction between self and Internet’s abilities will become increasingly elusive, potentially creating a constant illusion of ‘greater than actual knowledge’ among large portions of the population” (Firth et al., 123). The problem is that untrained users of digital information possess more “knowledge” than understanding. Google grants “omniscience” to individuals who may not know the meaning of the word. 31 An “online social world paralleling ‘real world’ cognitive processes, and becoming meshed with our offline sociality,” has clearly demonstrated possibilities “for the special properties of social media to impact on ‘real life’ in unforeseen ways” (Firth et al., 126), making social cognition highly unpredictable in real-world situations. Unpredictability can also lead to chaos, making authoritarian rule seem efficient and perhaps welcome.

33093_Williams.indd 19

2022-09-01 16:54

xx

Prolegomenon

could soon be worth less than the paper it is written on.32 Now, the connections between community and the mode of communication no longer look as promising as they did only three decades ago in a postmodern novel about a desert explorer. For, according to media ecologist Janet L. McMullen, our digital ecosystem of hypertext and its “digital ways of knowing” are the very reverse of typographical media’s “linear and sequential” ways of understanding reality. Indeed, they more often impede users from a coherent understanding of causes and consequences. For, “[i]n the hypertext world of digital media, the reader is not required to process thoughts in a specific order” (333).33 And, “[b]ecause the user is in control” of the sequencing of content, there is neither logical necessity nor a requisite conclusion to what is read. Therefore, given how the link-clicking reader of hypertext remains “in control, consequences can be trivialized or ignored” (331). While brain-mapping studies of the activation of neural circuitry have suggested that “computerized technologies designed to improve cognitive abilities and brain function may have physiological effects and potential benefits for middle-aged and older adults” (Small et al., “Your Brain on Google,” 125), this latter study also makes key distinctions about the effects of digital technology on aging brains and on developing ones.34 But, as neuroscientist Gary Small cautions elsewhere, c­ onstant exposure to digital technologies has already produced a “revolutionary change in the wiring of today’s younger minds – a change in neural circuitry that is fundamentally different from that of their parents and grandparents” (iBrain, 24). Video games in particular and computer usage in general are stunting measurable development of “the prefrontal 32 The differential structures of memory between those who search the internet and those who search encyclopedias for facts suggest “that online information gathering, while faster, may fail to sufficiently recruit brain regions for storing information on a long-term basis” (Firth et al., 122). In other words, paper information is more easily remembered, although it tends to be scorned by folks scrolling down the screen of their smart phones, since keeping one’s memory in one’s pocket fundamentally alters the value of memory. 33 McMullen adds that “each new screen offers multiple distractions from the linearity of its own text, distractions in the form of hyperlinks, banners, advertising, photographs, and sound. As a result, scientists have learned that individuals read screens differently than they read words on a printed page” (333). 34 In “Your Brain on Google” (2009), Small et al. remark that “particular concern has been expressed about the vulnerability of a developing brain to such chronic exposure, which has led the American Academy of Pediatrics to recommend that parents limit the amount of screen time for children younger than 2 years of age when the brain is particularly malleable” (125).

33093_Williams.indd 20

2022-09-01 16:54



Prolegomenon xxi

cortex – a region that processes how our decisions affect other people” (31). Until early adolescence, children use “a brain network in their temporal lobes” to make and judge how their decisions affect others. But as they “get older they are more able to put themselves in another person’s shoes by using the neural circuitry in their frontal lobes.” More and more, however, “Digital Natives” supply evidence of having “underdeveloped frontal lobes,” a condition that “impair[s] their everyday judgment.” In consequence, they lack an apparent “capacity to delay gratification, consider other people’s feelings, put things into perspective, and understand the danger that certain situations may hold” (32). As neuroscientist Small concludes, it is also “possible that they could remain locked into a neural circuitry that stays at an immature and self-absorbed emotional level, right through adulthood.” Interpreting these and other findings of neurologists about brain development, Janet McMullen concludes that “the brains of Digital Natives” may “have a higher ability to multi-task,” but they also lack “the higher-level cognitive activity required for empathy and application of moral principles” (335). From these facts, McMullen rightly concludes, I think, that digital media are “unlikely to promote a level of moral maturity grounded in selflessness and principle. Rather, it reflects the postmodern view of the primacy of self and personal ­construction of truth and reality” (332). Indeed, once the self becomes the only reality, “truth” is whatever you decide it is,35 an outlook that seems to have been the animating principle of those engaged in the events of 6 January 2021.36 With digital media continuing to increase their reach, democracies worldwide are going to be increasingly hard pressed to survive a further decline in printed news, much less a possible disappearance of paper books.37 The legal battle of one recent Facebook user to reclaim 35 This danger is closely related to book historian Jeffrey Schnapp’s claim that “the book’s ontology has shifted” (see xiii) by virtue of its digital generation. The digital book now originates as it were, “ex nihilo,” not as a material, but as an ideal creation. 36 But, as Paul Gardner-Stephen, a telecommunications fellow at Flinders University, also remarks in his response to the Anderson-Rainie survey, the “centralised powers that can control access to the internet” are most likely to follow the playbook of “Orwell’s 1984, where control was achieved by using language to shape and limit thought; so future regimes may use control of the internet to shape and limit thought” (“Millennials,” 18). 37 The implications for a world without hard-copy books and longer attention spans look dismal in recent studies “showing that even short-term engagement with an extensively hyperlinked online environment (i.e., online shopping for fifteen minutes) reduces

33093_Williams.indd 21

2022-09-01 16:54

xxii

Prolegomenon

ownership of his personal data, which – like that of millions of others – had been sold to and mined by a data analytics firm, also offers a warning that the recent war on social and moral intelligence, as well as on democracy, is in danger of being lost to authoritarians who are using our data against us to prevent free and fair elections.38 Indeed, these new political practices of data harvesting and micro-targeting of voters have undermined two of the most fundamental principles of a culture historically shaped by print: the right of private persons to make informed choices for their own good, that is, choices relating to their own persons; and the collective right of individuals to choose a government to make laws for the public good, that is, for their collective security.39 We now seem to have reached a major inflection point that bears more than a passing resemblance to the world a century or two after Gutenberg, raising similar questions about what was once assumed to be the nature of things in the rise of printed communications half a millennium ago. Because of digital media, are we likely to enter a new age of Enlightenment? or a new “Dark Age”?

attentional scope for a sustained duration after coming offline, whereas reading a m ­ agazine does not produce these deficits” (Firth, 121). The level of sustained thought in reading books vs magazines vs websites points to several magnitudes of difference between each type of reading. 38 The Great Hack. Dir. by Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim. Produced by The Othrs; distributed by Netflix (2019). The suit was brought by American David Carroll in 2017 in a UK court. For more on the data firm Cambridge Analytica and its role in manipulating voters in the 2016 US presidential election, see my “On Reading Darwin,” 29. 39 The “Truckers” convoy that occupied Ottawa, the Canadian capital, as well as various border crossings to the US in January–February 2022, to protest government mandates restricting their “freedoms” during the Covid-19 pandemic, militated for the first, but not the second of these two fundamental principles.

33093_Williams.indd 22

2022-09-01 16:54

Acknowledgments

Throughout the process of researching and writing this story of a long and multiform revolution in reading, I have found myself increasingly in debt to the anonymous team of scholars associated with the John Foxe project at the University of Sheffield for their generous gift to the reading public of The Actes and Monuments Online. “Originally conceived by Professor David Loades and accepted by the British Academy in 1992, the John Foxe project represents nearly 20 years of painstaking work from a team involving the University of Sheffield’s Department of History, the University of Bangor and the University of Sheffield’s Humanities Research Institute (hri)” (Medievalists.net). I am likewise indebted to my friend and editor-in-chief at McGillQueen’s University Press, Jonathan Crago, for unwavering support stretching back over many years. Most of all, I am grateful for the privilege and benefit of helpful ­comments from Dr Reinhold Kramer, Brandon University, on the worklong-in-progress, along with advice on any number of points. I am greatly indebted to this good friend whose exacting sense of style and clarity, and penchant for challenging received ideas faithfully reflects our shared humanist heritage. These qualities are immediately apparent in his many books and articles on Canadian literature, another area where we have made common cause. Above all, I am in his debt for making me believe that the subject mattered and has the potential to reshape our thinking about the broader significance of our everyday business of reading. Gratefully, I dedicate this book to him.

33093_Williams.indd 23

2022-09-01 16:54

33093_Williams.indd 24

2022-09-01 16:54

A Note on Archival Sources

Quotations from the Latin text of Petrarch’s Africa come from Nicola Festa’s edition of 1926, which is available online from the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text? doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2011.01.0603. Quotations from the English translation of Petrarch are gratefully acknowledged by permission from Erik Z.D. Ellis, “Petrarch’s Africa I–IV: A Translation and Commentary” (ma thesis, Baylor University, 2007, http://hdl.handle.net/2104/5144). Quotations from the original editions of The Book of Martyrs are identified by the year of the edition, and come from: John Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (tamo), hri Online Publication, Sheffield, 2011, https://www.johnfoxe.org. Quotations from the pamphlets of John Lilburne and those of his Leveller associates, except where otherwise noted, were downloaded between 2009 and 2016 from originals in the British Library posted on eebo (the urls for which are now dead). Citations from Leveller pamphlets downloaded since 2020 come from Proquest (a subscription site). The Yale edition of The Complete Prose Works of John Milton (abbreviated cpw and volume number) remains the definitive edition, at least until completion of the Oxford edition, under the general editorship of Laura Lunger Knoppers. The definitive edition of Milton’s “Poems of 1671” is The Complete Works of John Milton, volume 2: The 1671 Poems: Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers (Oxford University Press, 2008). Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English spellings in all their variant forms have been retained in quotations from those centuries. All italics within quotations are in the originals, except where specifically noted in the quoted passage.

33093_Williams.indd 25

2022-09-01 16:54

33093_Williams.indd 26

2022-09-01 16:54

T H E C O M M U N I O N OF T HE BOOK

for Reinhold Kramer best of readers “Writing created the conditions for a proper ‘cultural revolution’ by radically extending our cognitive abilities.” Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain “By driving up literacy, [Protestant] culture induced more analytic thinking and longer memories while spurring formal schooling, book production, and knowledge dissemination. Thus, sola scriptura likely energized innovation and laid the groundwork for ­standardizing laws, broadening the voting franchise, and ­establishing constitutional governments.” Joseph Henrich, The weirdest People in the World “I wish I could find a good book to live in.” Melanie Safka

33093_Williams.indd 1

2022-09-01 16:54

33093_Williams.indd 2

2022-09-01 16:54

Introduction: The State as a Work of Art

It has always been chauvinistic to claim that the early modern world emerged from the “Dark Ages”1 after Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374) discovered a “Middle Age”2 standing between his own era and the world of Virgil and Homer.3 There is no doubt, however, that Petrarch did regard his own epoch, in the words of historian Theodor Mommsen, as “an age of decadence” (“Petrarch’s,” 239), or even of “exhaustion,”4 as our era may one day come to be characterized by future historians.

1 Petrarch refers in a letter of 1359 to an age of “darkness,” where he scorns any history after “the time of ‘Romulus to Titus’” Flavian (Mommsen, 234), that glorious era of the Roman Republic and early Empire he had portrayed in De viris illustribus (1337, 1343). But the present epoch, a thousand years long, “was to him an era of ‘tenebrae,’” of cultural and political “darkness,” unworthy of the “imperial idea, according to which the Empire had been transferred from the Romans to the Byzantines, the Franks and eventually the Germans” (235). 2 Flavio Biondo (1392–1463) is often credited with popularizing the term “Middle Age,” although it was Petrarch, as Mommsen shows, who first used the term “‘medium tempus’ (Epistule Metrice III.33.5),” according to M.L. McLaughlin, “Humanist Concepts,” and was “the first to adumbrate the concept of a Dark Age (Familiares xx.8), lasting the thousand years from 312 ad to Petrarch’s own time (Familiares VI.2), and that he also was aware of standing on the borderline between an epoch of darkness and one of enlightenment (Rerum Memorandarum Libri I.19, Africa IX.446–77).” McLaughlin adds that, by 1382, Filippo Villani was “listing the names that have been given to the various islands in ‘ancient, medieval, and modern times’” (132, 135; my emphasis). 3 In more nuanced fashion, Margaret King, “A Return,” remarks that Renaissance humanists tried to “restore antiquity to their contemporary culture, interweaving it with enduring Christian and medieval traditions, and so lay the foundations of modern thought” (26). 4 Regn and Huss, “Petrarch’s Rome,” maintain that the crowning of Petrarch with a laurel wreath in Rome on Easter Sunday 1341 was meant, both in his public campaign for and personal view of the event, “to signal the impending reformation of an exhausted culture by means of a return to the spirit of the ancients” (86). His coronation thus “acquainted the public with the idea of a renaissance as an epoch-making event” (93).

33093_Williams.indd 3

2022-09-01 16:54

4

The Communion of the Book

Be that as it may, Mommsen holds that, “It is precisely this notion of a ‘new time’ which distinguishes the Italian Renaissance from all the ­so-called earlier ‘Renaissances’ in the Carolingian and Ottonian times or in the twelfth century. These times may have experienced a certain revival of classical studies, but the people living in them did not conceive of or wish for a complete break with the traditions of the times immediately preceding” (242). So why did Petrarch’s followers believe that a new age or a different world could, or even would come into being through the recovery of ancient pagan literature?5 And how was it ­possible to surmount a “dark age” by means of “poetry,” or even by new modes of reading and writing?6 The unflinching response of Jacob Burckhardt, the great nineteenthcentury Swiss historian, would govern the field for more than a century. As he wrote in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), the “literary bequests of antiquity … were held in the most absolute sense to be the springs of all knowledge” (114). What this belletristic premise implied, on the one hand, was a broad devaluation of Christian culture, a mostly oral culture based on scripture and the traditional teachings of the Roman Church; on the other, it invited a fast embrace of the written culture of Roman antiquity in fourteenth-century Italy, after the papacy had left town for Avignon. Rather than speak as Petrarch did,7 however, of the “Babylonian captivity” of the Church, Burckhardt chose to emphasize the “common ground” that all Italians had “in Latin and Italian literature,” not least of which were “the Roman authors, who were now zealously studied,” given “that their subject itself – the universal empire of Rome – stood as a permanent ideal before the minds of Italians” (Burckhardt, 87). Here, Burckhardt is adamant: “We must insist upon it, as one of the chief propositions of this book, that it was 5 M.L. King, “Return,” says that “Renaissance humanism was most certainly not secular – nor was any other cultural movement in the era of the Renaissance – but rather saturated with Christian thought and sensibility” (4). I would add that Renaissance humanists taught Christians how to read scripture through the lens of pagan rhetoric. 6 M.L. King, “Return,” sees cultural syncretism as the motor of such transformation: “In probing, digesting, and imitating the work of the ancients, mostly Latin, but also Greek, Renaissance humanists transformed European civilization, completing the synthesis of ­Greco-Roman and Christian culture begun by the Church fathers in the last centuries of the ancient world, and invigorating nearly every dimension of culture, including politics, philosophy, religion, and the arts” (5). Indeed, humanism taught adherents to read rather more like classical Romans. 7 See Robinson, Readings, 502–3.

33093_Williams.indd 4

2022-09-01 16:54



Introduction 5

not the revival of antiquity alone, but its union with the genius of the Italian people, which achieved the conquest of the western world” (104). And yet, by the end of the sentence, the “genius” of the Italian people has been subtly dissolved into the genius of ancient Romans in a second major “conquest of the western world.” For Burckhardt, the civilization of the Renaissance in Italy had made itself sole heir to “the universal empire of Rome” in a literary version of nineteenthcentury nationalism. For such reasons, the Swiss historian equates the “poet” to the modern “individual” in Italy, as distinct from the medieval culture of ­fourteenth-century Europe, where “Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation” (81). Indeed, “the early development of the Italian” by virtue of his Roman heritage made him “the firstborn among the sons of modern Europe” in a world where “the state” itself was “a work of art” (1), as Burckhardt’s chapter title affirms. Why poets loom so large in his history is that, compared with medieval Europeans who remained “under the spell of race,” Italians boasted “the august poet” who, “through the wealth of individuality which he set forth, was the most national herald of his time” (82). Petrarch made himself an avatar of this “new race of poetscholars” (88) whose “impulse to the highest individual development was combined with a powerful and varied nature, which had mastered all the elements of the culture of the age,” and gained a uniquely modern identity as “the ‘all-sided man’ – ‘l’uomo universale’ – who belonged to Italy alone” (84). The “state as a work of art” was then embodied in “Petrarch, who lives in the memory of most people nowadays chiefly as a great Italian poet,” but who owed his fame among his contemporaries far rather to the fact that he was a kind of living representative of antiquity, that he imitated all styles of Latin poetry, endeavoured by his voluminous historical and philosophical writings not to supplant but to make known the works of the ancients, and wrote ­letters that, as treatises on matters of antiquarian interest, obtained a reputation which to us is unintelligible, but which was natural enough in an age without handbooks. (122).

Burckhardt’s vision of the poet as a “national herald” exalts not just the virtues of an ancient, glorious past, but the “spirit of the people” in an era “now awakened to self-consciousness,” who “sought for some new

33093_Williams.indd 5

2022-09-01 16:54

6

The Communion of the Book

and stable ideal on which to rest. And thus the vision of the world-wide empire of Italy and Rome so possessed the popular mind that” it offered “no slight support to the national sentiment. Armed afresh with its ­culture, the Italian soon felt himself in truth citizen of the most advanced nation in the world” (107; emphasis added). While much of this may sound like the eighteenth-century philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) musing on the German volk, Italians effectively had no common language before the twentieth century, and so could not share what Benedict Anderson calls a “conception of nation-ness as linked to a private-property language” (68). What they did share, according to Burckhardt, was the culture of ancient Rome by which the poet as a self-fashioned artwork became a template for “the state as a work of art.” Culture remained the sole “private property” that Italians shared in the year that Garibaldi’s Red Shirts set off to unite a divided Italy.8 While the Swiss Burckhardt had little sympathy for Herder’s linguistic nationalism, he believed in the poet and the nation as cultural forces that would free the people from their bondage to the Church and its corrupt Latin, let alone its “corrupt” Scholastic doctrines. Indeed, his secular humanists, all of whom were highly developed “individ­ uals,” seemed to have shared a view of the Church as being “corrupt in doctrine and tyrannous in practice” (304). Most are said to have abandoned an institution that “set up as absolute truth, and by the most violent means, a doctrine which she had distorted to serve her own aggrandizement,” thus driving “multitudes of the noblest spirits, whom she had inwardly estranged, into the arms of unbelief and despair” (280). Rather than remaining lost in despair, however, those “noble spirits,” with “their powerful individuality” (303), turned instead to Roman antiquity for a broader, more liberal conception of existence in the “state as a work of art” (1), where the nation as cultural artifact is assumed to have been created by design through the genius of its poets.9 “And when classical antiquity with its men and institutions 8 At the time when Burckhardt’s book was published, Garibaldi’s I Mille were already embarked on their Sicilian campaign, on a northward march toward Italian unification. 9 As sociologist Roberta Garner sums up Burckhardt’s conception of the state in the wake of the Renaissance discovery of the lack of any “natural” order: “The state is an attempted work of art; the individual is a discovery; the ‘self-made man’ scrambles up to wealth, fame and power; social institutions become the result of rational calculation” (53), where instability is necessarily a “natural” result of modern political life.

33093_Williams.indd 6

2022-09-01 16:54



Introduction 7

became an ideal of life, as well as the greatest of historical memories” (303) to these great talents, then a powerful “worldliness, through which the Renaissance seems to offer so striking a contrast to the Middle Ages,” filled the minds of such “intellectual giants” as Petrarch, Boccaccio, Poggio, and others caught up in the “flood of new thoughts, purposes, and views, which transformed the mediaeval conception of nature and man” (303, 304). Indeed, “The men, and in some respects the institutions, of antiquity were preferred to those of the Middle Ages, and in the eager attempt to imitate and reproduce them, religion was left to take care of itself. All was absorbed in the admiration for historical greatness” (312) that Roman antiquity had inspired in its Italian heirs. To return to classical Rome and its written thought was to return to the source of ancient civilization from which to erect “the state as a work of art” and a potent cultural force that would unite modern Italians. The civic and the cultural potency of such artistic talents depends first on a “keen eye for individuality [that] belongs only to those who have emerged from the half-conscious life of the race and become themselves individuals” (200). But the poetic character of Burckhardt’s “highly developed individual” is also defined by “the inward life” of a self that has just “taken a mighty step towards the consciousness of its own secret life” (188). As Burckhardt sums up the modernizing effects of what he hails as a nation of self-made individuals, free of the pull of clan or race, “If unbelief in this respect made such progress among the more highly cultivated natures” of its adherents, “the reason lay partly in the fact that the great earthly task of discovering the world and ­representing it in word and form, absorbed most of the highest spiritual faculties” (337). These were the authors of the modern nation. What is just as remarkable in this paean to the state as a work of art, however, is the omission of Petrarch’s greatest heirs in succeeding generations, men such as Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406) and Leonardo Bruni ­(1370–1444), each the leading spirit of his era in Florence. Bruni, whom others have “rightly called the first modern historian,”10 gets no more than a half-sentence in this soaring account of “highly developed i­ ndividuals,” and that merely in his administrative role as the city’s chancellor. By contrast, in the opinion of his modern

10 Hankins, “Introduction,” xvii.

33093_Williams.indd 7

2022-09-01 16:54

8

The Communion of the Book

editor James Hankins, “[W]hat places Bruni in the class of Gibbon as an historical thinker, is his powerful recasting of the broad outlines of Etruscan, Roman, and medieval history” (xiv). Hankins sums up Bruni’s revolutionary historiography as follows: “Insofar as the modern period is still today defined by the emergence of national states from the shadowy universal authorities of the High Middle Ages, the Empire and the Papacy, Leonardo Bruni may be said to be the inventor of the earliest political conception of the Modern. And though it was doubtless not Bruni’s conscious intention to secularize history, his conception of the modern is, nevertheless, inescapably secular” (xviii). Bruni could, and perhaps ought to, figure as the epitome of Burckhardt’s secular humanist, the sum of what it meant to be a cultural “­nationalist” in ­fifteenth-century Florence. But he barely rates a mention in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. So why is the great historian of medieval Florence excluded from the Swiss historian’s pantheon of national poet-heroes? Ignorance of Bruni and his History was impossible: given the months and years he spent in the archives of Florence, Burckhardt could not have failed to hear that, “in his own time, Bruni’s History of the Florentine People was regarded as his greatest monument” (Hankins, x). Nor was he likely to miss the sight of Bruni’s marble monument in the church of Santa Croce in Florence. “At Bruni’s state funeral” in 1444, “he was laid out on his bier holding a copy of the History, a pose that was preserved in stone in the elegant funeral monument later carved for him by Bernardo Rossellino” (x). In short, there was no escaping Bruni, either in marble or on paper. The exclusion was deliberate. But why? Because Bruni was not a poet but an historian? Or by dint of an ecclesiastical embrace that at his death had reclaimed the humanist and his History for itself? But Petrarch lived and died a member of a minor Order, while Bruni wasn’t even a cleric. Yet the former finds “grace” in a pagan cult of fame, whereas the latter finds none: “To the cult of the birthplace of famous men must be added that of their graves,” Burckhardt intones, “and, in the case of Petrarch, of the spot where he died” (89).11 Then was Bruni’s “fame” compromised in Burckhardt’s eyes by its place of honour inside a church, instead of a pagan shrine? 11 Burckhardt leaves much unsaid concerning Petrarch’s place in this cult of fame. The poet was buried in the parish church at Arquà (a village now named Arquà Petrarca in  his honour), in Padua province. Six years after his death, however, his son-in-law

33093_Williams.indd 8

2022-09-01 16:54



Introduction 9

More problematic still, Burckhardt skirts the issue of how all those “noble spirits,” who had cast “off the authority of a State which, as a fact, is in most cases tyrannical and illegitimate” (279), and that of a visibly “decaying Church” that imposes its “truth … by the most violent means” (280) to assert the “sovereignty” of “an unbridled individuality” (310), had not been as free as he made them out to be. “Among those who were more emancipated, it testifies to the strength of youthful impressions, and to the magical force of traditional symbols” (287), that almost all of them failed at the end of their lives to escape the pull of the ­sacramental system of the Church. Indeed, “The universal desire of dying men for priestly absolution shows that the last remnants of the dread of hell had not … been altogether extinguished.” But does this “­universal desire” not contradict Burckhardt’s claim for a “humanism” that “was in fact pagan,” and that “became more and more so as its sphere ­widened in the fifteenth century” (309), particularly after the invention of the printing press had vastly enlarged the empire of humanist t­extuality? Does the power of Christian sacramentalism not prove the failure of Burckhardt’s poet-humanists to affirm the sovereignty of their souls, and to value this world – a world still in the making – above any world to come? Under conditions of scribal transmission, the approaching death of “immortal” minds appears to have kept even the worldliest of these heroes of the Italian Renaissance thrall to a “tyrannous” Church that held the keys to eternal life. While Bruni, like many humanists of Tuscan origin, remained a devout Christian, he had moved from Arezzo to Florence in the late Trecento in search of better things in this life. More precisely, he was drawn to the republican city-state by the reputation of the great Coluccio Salutati, disciple and correspondent of Petrarch, chancellor of Florence, and leading humanist of the era in Tuscany. Salutati “had the best library in Tuscany, an invaluable asset in the age of the manuscript book,” remarks Hankins, “including an extraordinary collection of historical writings” (xii). In fact, “[i]t was Salutati who turned Bruni into a brilliant student of Roman history and literature.” These were the years when Salutati was also bent on transforming the design of medieval ­codices, best known to many for “swamping ancient texts with modern

Francescuolo di Brossano had his remains transferred to a memorial marble tomb located in the parvis just outside the church (Zanchin and Panetto, “Recognition of Remains”).

33093_Williams.indd 9

2022-09-01 16:54

10

The Communion of the Book

commentary.”12 Instead, Salutati conceived the idea of a new type of codex “in a rounded, open script, with broad, clean margins and little or no commentary” (Grafton, “Texts,” 159), a book designed to restore the individuality of the author by reclaiming titles that still existed under institutional names like “Aristotle” or “Galen” or “Ptolemy.” Perhaps Salutati’s greatest innovation, however, was the introduction of Greek language studies to Florence in the late Trecento (160). Two of his most promising students, Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini, learned their Greek from Manuel Chrysoloras, a native of Constantinople. After two decades in his adopted city, Bruni, the Aretine native,13 was recommended by Salutati to serve as apostolic secretary (1405–14) to a succession of popes in the last years of the Papal Schism, as various rivals jostled on the throne of St Peter in Rome and Avignon (and, briefly, Pisa).14 As Hankins sums up this period, “Bruni’s lifetime was an age of wars, of political unrest, of imperial expansion in the Florentine state, and of revolution and ideological collapse in the Church. And he had a front-row seat” (1:xiii). After the Council of Constance (1414–18) had persuaded Bruni’s Roman pope to step down and had deposed an Avignon “antipope” to elect a compromise candidate, Bruni returned to Florence, where his “direct experience of the impure motives of the popes”15 honed his political judgment and his skill as chancellor of the Florentine republic (1410; 1427–44). Hankins remarks that, “It was not an edifying time to be in papal service and there is evidence that Bruni’s later secularism was in part a response to the rampant ­corruption and lack of principle he observed first-hand 12 Witt, Two Latin Cultures, reports that already, in 12th-century Francia, “the multiplication of copies of works by ancient authors was paralleled by the copying of commentaries. Some of the commentaries were ancient and early medieval, but many more were of recent composition” (322). Commentaries ancient or modern were meant to keep authority in the hands of the Church, to render it institutional rather than individual. 13 But shortly before he entered papal service in Rome, Bruni composed an undelivered panegyric (1404) on the Florentine republic whose citizens “governed themselves by electing officials who managed all matters well, delivering equal justice to rich and poor, so that ‘nowhere else does freedom grow so vigorously, and nowhere else are rich and poor alike treated with such equality’” (quoted by M.L. King, “Return,” 17). 14 It is hardly fanciful to remark similar cultural conditions in widely separate eras, whether defeated rivals jostle for the throne of St Peter or for a desk in the Oval Office. 15 Excoriating “the cupidity of those in power” in 1307, Bruni’s Latin text reads “experti pontificum voluntates insinceras plane” (4:448–9), an acid characterization of the experience of many Florentines in their dealings with Pope Clement V (1305–15). That characterization remained equally true of Bruni’s “direct experience” a century later.

33093_Williams.indd 10

2022-09-01 16:54



Introduction 11

in the papal curia, before leaving John XXIII’s service late in 1414” (xii). But direct observation helped to make Bruni the first “modern” historian in what is justly termed a “secular” account of the city from its founding in the late Roman republic to its republican recovery after 1250 ce. He, too, was an author of the state as a work of art.16 As was the case for his protégé Lorenzo Valla (1406–1457), Bruni’s humanism was fuelled by a sense of moral rot at the heart of Christendom. By digging up ancient sources, however, Bruni, Valla, and others were recovering “lost” texts and forgotten ideas from antiquity; and they uncovered something deeply false at the heart of manuscript culture.17 Today’s world of social media, in fact, bears an odd resemblance to that decadent culture of ersatz miracles and absolutist theology of the late Middle Ages that forced Valla and his tribe of scribes to resort to the methods of ancient scholiasts in order to correct misreadings and brazen forgeries of major texts in the Western tradition, not least the Hebrew and Greek scriptures, Roman and native law, Roman and Holy Roman history, and ancient Greek literature.18 In correcting cultural falsehoods, however, humanists like Petrarch, Bruni, Valla, Poggio Bracciolini19 (1380–1459), and the Hebraist-Graecist Giannozzo Manetti 20 ­(1396–1459), managed to change history, first by hunting down copies of lost texts from antiquity, by translating older, more authoritative copies of existing works, by emending corrupted texts and annotating variants, and by using philological methods to resituate these texts in

16 See my related discussion in chapter 6: 304–11. In his “Preface” (1442), Bruni sets out as follows his “modern” historiographical principles: “History … requires at once a long and connected narrative, causal explanation of each particular event, and the public expression of one’s judgment about every issue” (1:5). Hankins insists that “though it was d ­ oubtless not Bruni’s conscious intention to secularize history, his conception of the modern is, ­nevertheless, inescapably secular  … Divine providence is no longer, visibly at least, the prime mover in human affairs. Human beings themselves make their own history” (xviii). 17 See related discussion in this work on 105, 124–6. 18 McLaughlin, “Humanist,” characterizes Valla as “a figure of supreme importance in disseminating a programme of cultural rebirth” that includes “not only letters and the fine arts but also the major disciplines of law, philosophy and theology” (139). 19 For Poggio, see further references in this work on 27, 33, 53n69, 59n84, 107, 150n92. Poggio bitterly attacked Valla for undercutting the authority of St Jerome. 20 Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459) mastered the Hebrew language, if in part to engage in anti-Semitic polemics. Today, he is mostly remembered for De dignitate et ­excellentia hominis (1453), his contribution to what Margaret King aptly describes as a new “­humanist anthropology” (14) that affirms the inherent dignity of human life.

33093_Williams.indd 11

2022-09-01 16:54

12

The Communion of the Book

the historical context where they were produced;21 and second, by recreating and affirming these values in a statecraft of their own imagining. In so doing, these humanists literally authored the beginnings of a different world. And after the advent of the printing press (ca 1450), the rate of change was exponential. Much as the quarrel between twentieth-century historians Elizabeth Eisenstein and Adrian Johns22 says more, as we shall see, than meets the eye about print and its role in shaping new mentalités out of new ways of reading,23 the sceptical philology of Erasmus opened eyes to a very different Bible from the Vulgate text.24 And the intellectual and spiritual energy that Erasmus inadvertently let out of the forme in his Greek Testament and new Latin translation of 1516 further opened eyes, no matter how unintentionally or innocently, to the “Real Presence” of the Word on the printed page, rather than in the pyx of the Mass.25 In so doing, he provided an unexpected solution to the conundrum that secular humanists who sought to restore the ancient Roman world, and rejected a Church that was “corrupt in doctrine and tyrannous in practice” (Burckhardt, 304), still felt drawn at their approaching deaths to the rites of the Church and its communion of the Blessed Sacrament. But if reading the gospels became its own form of sacrament, then a secular humanist becomes a contradiction in terms. A resolution of this contradiction, however, was unlikely to be found in a scribal age if the text was still subject (like the Church) to the temporal forces of corruption. Only in the age of print did Erasmus stumble onto a new type of communion that he would begin to celebrate in the humanist religion of the book: reading itself as direct encounter with the presence of divinity, a new form of Real Presence that he sensed in the Word.26 In this version of cultural history, 21 Den Haan, “Valla,” claims that Giannozzo Manetti’s “translation decisions” in a Psalter and translation meant to “replac[e]” the Vulgate New Testament “are based directly on Valla’s notes,” “the only case in which, as far as we know, Valla’s work on the New Testament influenced another Biblical scholar before the sixteenth century” (35, 34). 22 See related discussion in this work: 24–42. 23 This was my premise before I came upon Henrich’s evidence for neurological changes. 24 As Hamilton, “Humanists,” suggests, one of Erasmus’s major contributions to biblical hermeneutics, besides the bracing tonic of his skeptical philology, was his effort to read scripture “as an ancient work of literature to be studied in its historical context” (113). 25 See related discussion in this work: 65–6, 141. 26 See related discussion in this work: 141–3, 146–7.

33093_Williams.indd 12

2022-09-01 16:54



Introduction 13

Burckhardt’s secular humanist turns into an individual reader of scripture. However inadvertently, this historic cultural turn in individual acts of reading would shift the foundations of religion from an outward and public ritual to a more inward and private experience of reading.27 (The reasons for and implications of this novel “Real Presence” are explored in chapter 2; the cultural “fit” and psychology of individual readers in this shift are explored in chapter 3.) But the anthropological evidence suggests that “cultural evolution” had also “favored new ritual forms – termed ‘­doctrinal’ rituals – because they more effectively transmitted both the content of religious beliefs and deep commitments to those beliefs.” What anthropologist Joseph Henrich calls “creds,” or “Credibility-Enhancing Displays” such as martyrdom, are surely the key to persuading others “to acquire the martyr’s expressed beliefs,” as well as a new “kind of immune system” protecting “against charlatans and purveyors of snake oil” (weirdest, 149). Henrich’s compelling argument for a causal link between popular literacy and the growing dominance of weird28 psychology lacks two important elements, however: evidence drawn from specific acts of reading; and evidence from a much broader literary culture than “Lutheran” Bible reading. In ignoring classical readers from “­democratic” Athens and republican Rome, let alone Florentine ­republicans of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; in failing to explore the classical revival at the end of the Middle Ages; in overlooking the humanist assault on Church Latin and its philological turn to biblical Greek and Hebrew and vernacular languages; and in sidestepping momentous questions of the social effects of printing, the cultural anthropologist misses a far deeper truth about reading in the era of “Lutheran revolt” (7–16).29 It was so much more than what Henrich calls the hunger of individuals “to read and interpret the sacred 27 Burckhardt sums up the contradictions of outward and inward religion among secular humanists: “The feeling of the upper and middle classes in Italy with regard to the Church at the time when the Renaissance culminated, was compounded of deep and contemptuous aversion, of acquiescence in the outward ecclesiastical customs which ­ entered into daily life, and of a sense of dependence on sacraments and ceremonies” (281). 28 Henrich’s acronym refers to Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic peoples. See my “Prolegomenon” above, vii. 29 To be fair, Henrich’s revision of Max Weber’s influential thesis concerning The Protestant Ethic – while conceding “that Weber was on the right track” – rightly and significantly concludes that Weber “seems to have underemphasized the importance of literacy and social networks while overemphasizing the ‘work ethic’” (Henrich, 511n26).

33093_Williams.indd 13

2022-09-01 16:54

14

The Communion of the Book

scriptures – the Bible – for themselves, and not rely primarily on the authority of supposed experts, priests, or institutional authorities like the Church” (9), although it was certainly all of these things. Insofar as this new culture of Bible reading was unprecedented, it was also unlikely to flourish without another viable form of sacrament30 or “holy” communion (see chapters 2 and 3), that could offer an effective replacement for the ritual performance of an older, sacerdotal culture, and that could better challenge the time-honoured, patriarchal institutions of Church and State (see ­chapters 4 and 5). But how does Bible reading end in the nation-state? The primary agent of change, which historians have largely ignored, was this unprecedented mode of sacramental reading. Yet such historiographical neglect of readers and their role in cultural transformation continues to be justified by the fact that objective evidence about the effects of reading appears nebulous, if not impossible to find. Compared with documented systems of power in political, diplomatic, and military history, or social, legal, and economic systems, the reader of books is both subjective, and something of an unknown quantity, a shadowy figure seated in a study rather than acting on the public stage of history. Even book historians who build their narratives from printshop records, material studies of print technology, shop processes, print runs, distribution networks, investment and marketing records, book catalogues, book fairs, auction catlaogues, and early library catalogues – even these historians remain deeply cautious in their estimate of the role of readers in book history. As much as James Raven, the editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book (2020), and his co-author Goran Proot acknowledge in “Renaissance and Reformation” that “no meaning is given to a text until it is read,” they still maintain that “[t]he evidential basis of the effect of reading, of ascertaining how and why reading was done, is hugely problematic” (163). For one of the thorniest problems in any “history of reading practice also requires an understanding of motivation” (164). Why and how do various readers arrive at divergent readings of the same text, and how do they reconcile their differences? Some material studies, such as the essay collection edited by Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer entitled Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies (2002), or John N. King’s Foxe’s Book of Martyrs 30 Even Burckhardt, that true apostle of secular humanism, cannot deny “the need felt for the Sacraments as something indispensable” (296) in the civilization of Renaissance Italy.

33093_Williams.indd 14

2022-09-01 16:54



Introduction 15

and Early Modern Print Culture (2006), have taken the trouble to consider the readerly marginalia that grace a number, if not always a representative minority, of surviving copies of important works in cultural history. But for the most part, readers, like their comments, remain on the margins of mainstream history. Another reason equally fundamental to the omission of the reader is that, compared with individual actors on the national or international stage, readers tend to be viewed as little more than receivers of preformed meanings, more acted upon than acting to remake the texts they read into instruments of cultural power. But, as New Zealand ­historian Steven Roger Fischer points out, it was when “Western Europe first began printing books,” that “a growing body of shared facts f­ ashioned new ways to think and analyse from diverse read sources, at which historic juncture passive compliant reading became active creative reading” (7). The practice of public readings in Greek and Roman antiquity, for example, had signified that it was “the author-reader who incarnated the text, who thought for his passive audience” (63). But a late-medieval scribe like Petrarch refused to be a passive receiver of messages from authorities with names like Virgil or Cicero that arrived in bottles washed up on the shores of time. What Petrarch’s career as a poet, letter writer, and biographer best demonstrates is his compulsive need to write back to his ancient correspondents, having done them first the honour of searching for their lost texts in far-off libraries, and then of collating, correcting, and emending their works to the best of his ability. Petrarch’s hand as a reader is just as visible in the text as it is in the margins of his page. His method of reading would restore the methods of textual philology first devised in the ancient Library of Alexandria. And the theme of his reading was the vision of a restored republic. By returning to the methods of the founding librarian Zenodotus of Ephesus (fl. 300–270 bce), which were further developed by Aristophanes of Byzantium (ca 257–180) and Aristarchus of Samothrace (ca 216–144 bce), Petrarch did for the mutilated text of Livy’s Roman history what the Alexandrians had been the first to do for Homer in collating, emending, and publishing a standard edition of his work out of a welter of variant manuscripts. Indeed, Petrarch’s task was more daunting than theirs, since no complete, let alone standard, edition of Livy even existed. “But his knowledge of the text of Livy, and of how much, in fact, had been lost is meaningful,” remarks Renaissance ­historian Christoper Celenza. “Livy had indeed written his history,

33093_Williams.indd 15

2022-09-01 16:54

16

The Communion of the Book

called Ab urbe condita – ‘From the Founding of the City’ – in 142 ‘books,’ which are more or less the size of novellas, about seventy to eighty pages each in a normal modern edition” (Petrarch, 46). Each of these books existed as a separate text, none of which was necessarily housed in the same library with its fellows in groups of ten (the decade.) And since they circulated separately as individual decades, most were ­eventually lost. The foremost task of a knowledgeable reader like Petrarch, then, was to locate, in libraries up and down the spine of Italy, as well as in France and the Swiss cantons, the scattered copies of such “decades” (or ­gatherings of ten books) as might have survived. Without benefit of more than the most primitive book lists, Petrarch spent years hunting in random libraries of far-flung cathedral cities and rural monasteries to compile a source text for Livy, whose history he needed for the poem he hoped to write on Scipio Africanus, the Roman conqueror of Hannibal and the Carthaginian empire. The precise text that Petrarch needed to begin his epic Africa belonged to the third decade of Livy’s Founding. But, as Celenza remarks, the only available text of that third decade “was missing much of its final section.” So, Petrarch copied “into the text as much of the missing version that he could find” (47) and reconstructed from other fragments the closest thing possible to a complete text. He then set about, as his Alexandrian predecessors had done, to make conjectural emendations, or highly educated guesses, from the grammatical logic of a sentence and from the syntax and style of similar passages elsewhere in Livy’s History. As cultural historian James Turner points out, Petrarch’s “ample knowledge of Roman ­history fed antiquarian studies – of coins, inscriptions, monuments. When he died, he owned more Roman literature than any other private person, some of it his own discoveries.” More generally, Turner remarks that “Petrarch personified comprehensive study of Latin classical antiquity, grounded in philology and antiquarianism” (34). But Petrarch’s ­scholarship was also trained on recreating and, even more so, on ­completing that antique world in an updated, more modern form. So, what specific examples do we have of Petrarch’s method of ­reading? Celenza points to the “hundreds” of corrections he made “by comparing this one manuscript of Livy with others that he was able to find” (51). Then pointing to one of the illustrations of an annotated page in Petrarch’s manuscript reproduced in his text, Celenza explains:

33093_Williams.indd 16

2022-09-01 16:54



Introduction 17

The marks you see in the illustration’s third line are quite typical: dots are placed under the faulty words, alerting a reader that these are words in need of correction. Looking at the manuscript also helps us see precisely how ­errors in copies were transmitted. Recall that the phrase in question ran: haud scio an, qui tum animi. Note in the illustration that, in the original, instead of haud (‘not’), the manuscript read aut (‘either’). Petrarch simply squeezes in the initial ‘h’ and subtly changes the final ‘t’ into a ‘d.’ Note too that he changes the word socio (‘ally’) to scio (‘know’ as part of the phrase ‘I do not know’) simply by putting a dot under the first ‘o.’ And one can see how small was the difference between the words animalibus (‘with the a­ nimals,’ the ­incorrect reading of the manuscript) and animi (‘spirits,’ the correct reading to which Petrarch restores the text). (512)

This substantial quotation shows better than paragraphs of discussion could ever do how Petrarch’s textual reconstruction required him to “think” with Livy, to make himself a co-author with the Roman historian well over thirteen centuries after the fact. And as we shall see in c­ hapter 1, thinking grammatically, stylistically, and thematically with Livy to restore the Founding to a state of proper history was the precondition of writing a modern epic of the saviour of the Roman Republic – and the founder of a modern nation. Good readers, it would seem, become good writers. And their creative agency as ­readers is still legible in their own hand. When we turn to Erasmus of Rotterdam, Petrarch’s heir who somehow outdid him as a textual philologist, we find the print man still hunting manuscripts and reading them in much the same manner, using the same tools to carry out similar objectives. Much like Petrarch, Erasmus was also driven by a desire to return to the source. Ad fontes! became his battle cry.31 Only now, the texts that Erasmus hunted down and worked to collate, correct, and emend were as often scriptural or patristic texts as they were pagan writings from antiquity. But the methods he learned from Petrarch – and so from the philological librarians of ancient Alexandria – have a similar scope. Just as the ancient Greeks had “looked on the Iliad and Odyssey with unique reverence,”32 and had regarded

31 Erasmus, De ratione studii (1511), trans. McGregor, cwe (24): 673. Also see below, 129, 133. 32 As Plutarch says of Alexander the Great in Parallel Lives, “Wherever he journeyed,” he “carried with him the scrolls of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and when he died at Babylon in 323 bc he was clutching one of his scrolls of the Iliad” (Fischer, History 62).

33093_Williams.indd 17

2022-09-01 16:54

18

The Communion of the Book

the Homeric epics as “storehouses of divine wisdom, masked in allegory” (Turner, 7), so, too, Christians looked on the Bible as the source of all knowledge, not only in religious matters, but in history, natural history, cosmology, philosophy, law, and the arts. But, much as Greek philologists had once quoted Homer as their supreme authority, yet were increasingly troubled by “varying interpretations” and a lack of “an authoritative version,” so, too, Erasmus discovered from his reading of the Greek gospels and apostolic letters that the Latin Vulgate translation was nearly as corrupt (or variable, ambiguous, indeterminate) as competing versions of Homer had been in ancient Greece. From his notes and annotations in four editions of the New Testament, we can also read (though now in printed form, not his own hand) the methods Erasmus used to collate and emend the Latin text from the original Greek. And we realize that his methods are derived from the same ancient sources that Petrarch had used to correct the text of Livy – ­classical philology – these methods requiring a reader to share the mental processes of his author. The tools of the classical philologist, in so far as they can be codified, are based in the first instance on collation or textual comparison. Obviously, the earliest texts are closest to the source; hence the maxim, “the more copies of a work, the more mistakes” (Turner, 8). So, too, “a writer’s own words provide the best guide to his meaning. Scholars should resolve linguistic puzzles in a text by checking the same author’s usage elsewhere” (Turner, 11). Moreover, “the critic must understand a text in relation to the customs of the period that produced it.” These are the very same principles, as we shall see, enunciated in virtually the same language used by Erasmus to explain his method of reading scripture in the Ratio verae theologiae (Vessey, 121–2). Like the Alexandrians, Erasmus stressed those two “key principles” in his edition and translation of the New Testament: “the same philological rules apply to the Bible as to other ancient texts”; and “a text in its original language overrules any translation” (Turner, 43). But his implied ­critique of the “inspired” translation of Jerome’s Vulgate Bible outraged easily offended Dominicans, let alone a tribe of Scholastic philosophers at the University of Paris. More than two decades after Erasmus’s death in 1536, his world-changing annotations on scripture and the Church Fathers would be added to the Index of Prohibited Books ­simultaneously with its official creation in 1559, a casualty of the Counter-Reformation.

33093_Williams.indd 18

2022-09-01 16:54



Introduction 19

The irony of this outcome grows darker still once we see that Erasmus’s Ratio (or Method of True Theology) was a practical handbook for ­reading scripture. In chapter 3, we shall see how Erasmus establishes his principles of reading scripture and illustrates that method by c­ opious example. Moreover, his Paraclesis (or “Philosophy of Christ,” as editor Robert Sider calls it in Erasmus on the New Testament) says far more about that philosophy in the gospels than most churchgoers of the era would learn in a month of Sundays. Finally, the Ratio offers a sophisticated theory of reading, and a revolutionary concept of metaphor as transformation that puts to rest the fiction that evidence is lacking to understand ­readers as co-creators of the texts they read, let alone as active agents of cultural transformation. The preponderance of the evidence also suggests that it was reading paper books that progressively transformed Western psychology by ­revolutionizing religion in the sixteenth century and sparking a political revolution in the following century. Given that the first political revolution in Europe took place in England in the 1640s, it is equally telling that it was the humanist John Foxe, a direct heir of Erasmus, whose work would underwrite both revolutions. For it is the Foxean reader, as we shall see in chapter 4, who adopted those implicit forms of sacramental reading first modelled by Erasmus in his Enchiridion (1503), and then in the Paraclesis (1516). By the 1530s and 1540s, it seems that  many English readers had also absorbed Erasmian methods, and that the doctors of the Church who confronted them in their heresy trials were not equal to the challenge of readers who not only displayed more hermeneutical skill and knowledge, but more of “Christ’s Philosophy” than many of their inquisitors. So, the “Credibility-Enhancing Displays,” as the anthropologist Henrich terms them, of Foxean martyrs who died at the stake are designed to be off the chart. But what these “displays” further suggest is something closer to a metaphysics of reading that reshaped the brains and psychology of these readers. In four massive (and massively ­influential) editions from 1563 to 1583, Foxe’s Actes and Monuments dramatizes the historicizing and readerly impetus of Erasmian philology. Recent history becomes the substance, as well as the theme, of Foxe’s great book about the trials and tribulations of the Marian martyrs (1553–58). Offering high drama, the Actes and Monuments also anticipates many developments on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. Perhaps the greatest marvel of these courtroom dramas, however, is

33093_Williams.indd 19

2022-09-01 16:54

20

The Communion of the Book

the way in which they manage to dramatize the power of ordinary readers to bring the scriptures to life in mortal combat. Each defendant comes to embody – very literally at times – a new, and world-altering, metaphor of the flesh made Word. The joy of a plough girl like Alice Driver, able to read and quote scriptures with more expertise than Doctors of the Church, or a weaver who chants the gospel all day long at his shuttle, repays a thousand-fold the abiding faith of Erasmus in ordinary people to understand the scriptures for themselves, and to be transformed into what they read.33 In the case of the poet Anne Askew, we witness a young noblewoman, in defiance of her husband, speaking in comparisons, metaphors, and parables of a type that Erasmus had identified with sermo, the Word speaking in the gospels in an intimate manner.34 At one point, Askew even draws ­attention to the fact that she speaks in riddles, very much in the manner of Christ. She proves to be as adept as the Dutch philologist in collating texts and comparing figures and passages from widely separate scriptures. Hers is one of the more moving examples of readers, as Erasmus expresses it, “being transformed into what” they “are learning”35 by reading the gospels. And the final marvel of each of these courtroom dramas is the way that the genre comes to inform the trials of Milton’s Jesus in the wilderness, almost, at times, as if by chapter and verse. And yet Milton’s marvellous poem has rarely been read for what it is: the necessary prequel to that story of sixteenth-century English martyrs who then follow Milton’s very human Son of God in becoming, much as he became, the flesh made Word. Within decades, Foxe’s English book was to transform what had begun as a textual revolution among Latin litterati by now upending Church and State alike. The second edition (1570) brought with it not just the winds of religious change in England, but a political whirlwind in its wake. For, in less than the Psalmist’s span of a human life, a draper’s apprentice named John Lilburne stepped into the pages of Foxe’s work and turned the story of religious martyrdom into an act of political 33 It is on the level of individual readers, perhaps more than of institutions, that book historians James Raven and Goran Proot are most disposed to consider the revolutionary effects of print: “The most obvious perspective in the history of printing is that of transformation, of the revolutions brought to individual mental worlds as much as to collective politics, commerce, or devotion” (158). 34 Erasmus, “The Ratio,” 197; also see chapter 3: 140–2. 35 Erasmus, “The Ratio,” 117; also see 138; 148–51.

33093_Williams.indd 20

2022-09-01 16:54



Introduction 21

revolution. Lilburne’s career as a pamphleteer instantiates not only Foxe’s sacramental mode of reading, but a mode of juridical reading on the Continent that enabled the historian Sir Henry Spelman to undercut English legal myths, thus opening a door to the idea of political revolution.36 It was French humanist jurists such as Jacques Cujas and François Hotman who inspired Henry Spelman’s Treatise on Feuds and Tenures (1639), a historical jurisprudence that undercut Justice Coke’s myth of the immemorial origins of English common law, opening the way for legal theories justifying the English Revolution. Lilburne, an alumnus of a humanist grammar school and a polemical firebrand, eventually laid bare, if not always coherently or even consciously, the false continuity of English common law from “time immemorial,” and the crippling contradictions of prerogative and common law, much as Erasmus had also exposed the contradictions of received religion. But events would ultimately force Lilburne, the Foxean “martyr” and litigious reader of law, into a tragic conflict with himself as an English Samson. So, it was John Milton, the greatest poet of the age who, in his last two “poems of 1671,” fulfilled the humanist revolution in England by making the hero of Paradise Regain’d a perfect, and perfectly human, reader, the humanist embodiment of Erasmus’s sacramental mode of reading, and the poem as a vital prequel to the martyr stories of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments. At the same time – in virtually the same month – the great defender of the English Revolution published his History of Britain, which bears many signs in its pages of a humanist revolution in historiography.37 Building on the comparative and secular methods of Florentine historians like Bruni, Milton’s humanist historiography s­ imilarly interrogates its sources, exposes a chasm between Roman and native cultural forms, and sidesteps the providentialism of the medieval chroniclers to insist on human beings and their societies as the authors of their fates. In Milton’s hands, The History of Britain is conceived as history in the future tense, where we find reflected the historic tragedy of “the Good Old Cause.” And the closest historical model for his remarkable tragedy of Samson is Lilburne’s own history following the Leveller defeat and his final imprisonment on the Isle of Jersey and in Dover Castle.38 36 See related discussion in this work: 257–8. 37 See related discussion in this work: 301–18. 38 See related discussion in this work: 334–55.

33093_Williams.indd 21

2022-09-01 16:54

22

The Communion of the Book

In Samson Agonistes, the second of the “paired” poems of 1671, Milton once again writes history in the future tense, although the tragedy of Lilburne and the English Revolution now takes the form of a Euripidean tragedy. In his “dramatic poem,” Milton’s classical mode of reading fulfills the hope of a “Greek” revival in his rewriting of the biblical story as a Hebrew version of the tragedy of Thebes, replete with fate’s biting ironies and its dire warnings for democratic Athens. And once again, it is humanist scholarship – the prefaces and arguments (1562) of Gasparus Stiblinus concerning the tragedies of Euripides – that becomes a key index of Milton’s reading of the Euripidean corpus.39 The commentary of Stiblinus (1526–1562) on The Bacchae is particularly valuable since Samson Agonistes is likely the most ironic classical tragedy since the death of Pentheus and the fall of the House of Cadmus in the last drama of Euripides’s long and brilliant career. Once again, Milton’s tragedy, like the one in The History of Britain, dramatizes the responsibility of its actors who are the true authors of their own and their nations’ fates. Interpretation of this tragedy, however, is left to readers who may or may not be informed by Euripides’s ironic methods and dramatic forms which undercut the Chorus’s translation of Samson’s tragedy into epic – readers, that is, who may or may not respect the poem’s cultural norms of impersonal justice and democratic governance. And more largely still, readers are left to explain how the absence of God in Samson Agonistes functions in dialectical tension with the “Real Presence” of the Word in Paradise Regain’d, as if to suggest that reading necessarily and intrinsically creates an absent presence.40 For our purposes, Milton’s tragedy serves to dramatize the central roles of reading and of highly skilled readers in this process of creating

39 Milton owned a copy of the extant tragedies of Euripides in Greek which reprinted the first full humanist commentaries on the plays by the German humanist Gasparus Stiblinus (Basel: Johannes Oporinus, 1562). See further discussion in this work: 371, 371nn19–20, 371nn22–3, 373n30, 375n40, 376n42, 379, 379n48, 379n50, 380, 384n56, 396, 418nn107–9. 40 This point is central to any final estimate of the work of Jacques Derrida in both philosophy and l’écriture. As Fischer, History of Reading, remarks of inscribed monuments in the ancient world, they “were more a show than a practice of reading. The ruler’s act of having left a written statement sufficed; it was unnecessary to hear his voice. Power and prestige lay in presence” (44). So, the inscribed monument became that most contradictory creature, an absent presence. Kathy Eden identifies a similar dynamic in Petrarch’s letters, where “the reader is held to the epistolary standard of overcoming absence, of being with the writer through the act of reading” (68).

33093_Williams.indd 22

2022-09-01 16:54



Introduction 23

an enlightened public and preventing a lapse into a new dark age of cultural blindness. This slender volume arrives near the close of a long and complicated epoch to expose the lasting tensions of a Renaissance that had in fact enabled – simultaneously – secular and religious forms of humanism in the same authors. In Paradise Regain’d to which is added Samson Agonistes, the history of that conflicted Renaissance is finally summed up in one slender, but immensely brilliant, book. For it is ultimately in Milton’s “poems of 1671” that the key lessons of the humanist revolution in reading are starkly dramatized. And it is in these dramatic poems that readers face the same choices confronted by their protagonists – Jesus in whether to trust his own or another’s reading of the Bible; Samson in whether to trust the written Law or the affective domain of his own “rouzing motions” – decisions that would leave their mark on a new world in the making. It is also in the dialectic of presence and absence in these final poems of Milton’s career – the immanence of the “Real Presence” in the wilderness trials of Jesus; the absence of the Word in the distancing ironies of Samson’s tragedy – that we encounter, however redefined and refigured, new Renaissance notions of communion and community that, for centuries to come, will seem to be the true nature of things, at least until the authority of the printed word begins to dim under the cinema’s and television’s differing beams of moving light, followed by the ever-streaming video of the internet.41 But as the title of the next chapter implies, a prior – because fundamental – question demands a more closely considered and detailed answer. Does the authority of the word ultimately reside in the stabilizing and preservative powers of print, or in the psychology of readers who are inclined to think along with, or even write back to, the “Word” that is read, thereby laying a foundation for “the state as a work of art”?

41 While Burckhardt singles out Machiavelli as the chief Renaissance architect of this idea of “the state as a work of art” (54–5), it is not a pan-Italian or “national” polity that he finds elaborated by Machiavelli’s “powerful imagination” (55). “Dante and Petrarch, in their day, proclaimed loudly a common Italy, the object of the highest efforts of all her children” (79). And yet, “By the side of rulers” like the brutish tyrants of Burckhardt’s opening chapter, the firebrand populist Cola di Rienzi, who declared himself the Tribune of Rome in 1348 and tried to use the mob to unify all Italy, “seems no better than a poor deluded fool” (9).

33093_Williams.indd 23

2022-09-01 16:54

1

A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution?

In an era when Fake News travels at the speed of light to girdle the globe, it is tempting to think of books and newspapers as inherently reliable sources of information. But are “printed texts” in fact “identical and reliable because that is simply what printing is,” asks Adrian Johns at the outset of his social history of print, The Nature of the Book? Or does the authority and veracity of printed texts depend on social practices that are independent of “a technological order of reality” – i.e., ­technological properties supposedly intrinsic to print? (Johns, 2). This query goes to the heart of a decades-old dispute among historians of “print culture” about whether “the conditions of knowledge itself” (6) are shaped by technological forces (e.g., the printing press), or created by specific human agents acting at different times in distinct locales “for their own ends” (5)? Johns has no doubt that, from its founding practices in the mid-fifteenth to the eighteenth century, “early modern printing was not joined by any obvious or necessary bond to enhanced fidelity, reliability, and truth. That bond had to be forged” (5). Hence, the “relation between print and knowledge” (6) is invoked in his subtitle, Print and Knowledge in the Making, a phrase adapted from John Milton’s Areopagitica1 to suggest that knowledge, or the authority2 of printed texts, is invariably a social construct independent of technology. 1 Milton had used this phrase in Areopagitica to identify the process by which “much arguing, much writing, many opinions” end in “Truth”: “for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.” See cpw 2:554. 2 Book historians James Raven and Goran Proot, Oxford Illustrated, remind us, however, that “the interaction of the scribal with the printed word and image is a critical feature of early modern Europe. Greater authority is often associated with the coming of print.” But, “in many cases actual authority was not given to a printed document until its blank parts

33093_Williams.indd 24

2022-09-01 16:54



A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution? 25

Johns is challenging a view of printing that was first advanced by Elizabeth Eisenstein in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, a boldly original study that Johns’s critique would leave her attempting to defend on grounds of its impact in “fields ranging from the study of nationalism to that of art history … Especially in literary studies, intriguing variations have been played on some of my themes.”3 One of those themes ­concerns the problem of how to characterize a “revolution” that began with scribes a century before the invention of the printing press.4 Here is a quirk of chronology that cannot be ignored. If the Petrarchan revival “antedated printing” by one hundred years, then print cannot be the “cause” of cultural revolution. Eisenstein counters, however, that “[t]he field of Renaissance studies is not well designed to accommodate the consequences of printing … Scholars engaged in tracing a sequence which unfolds in a single region from the trecento to the cinquecento have no good reason to make much of the difference between printer and scribe. On the contrary, they are likely to be impressed by the unity and continuity of the cultural movement Petrarch launched” (Printing Press, 26). Eisenstein’s account of an “Unacknowledged Revolution” is thus strained from the outset. Given more than a century of scribal h ­ umanism, she must now reclassify revolution as evolution, affirming “that printing produced a mutation of the classical revival itself,” particularly as the Quattrocento classical revival began to spread north of the Alps, and mutated “to encompass the very occupational groups who had been the special enemies of early humanists” (170, 174). On this view, it was the “many physicians, theologians and jurists, who” began to collaborate “with scholar printers, becoming advocates of the humanistic disciplines themselves” who, in their own adoption of the textual practices of scribal humanists, would ultimately transform the social conditions of ­knowledge by questioning, authenticating, and editing ancient texts

were filled in by pen or it was signed and otherwise validated by written marks or words” (153). In other words, printing did not confer greater authority; that still had to come in many cases by writing from a human hand. 3 Eisenstein, “An Unacknowledged Revolution,” 88. 4 As MacMillan remarks in War, historians also speak “of a ‘military revolution,’” or a “gunpowder revolution in warfare” during these same three centuries (74–5). But she adds: “Thanks to the introduction of printing, illustrated drill manuals spread the new practices across Europe” (76). Revolutions in military culture have thus been dependent on some form of prior, or broader, technological revolution in the general culture.

33093_Williams.indd 25

2022-09-01 16:54

26

The Communion of the Book

in their own areas of expertise. And in the process, they broadened and deepened the humanist assault on received ideas. Eisenstein does find a way to turn her cultural mutation back into a “revolution” – the crucial historical alliance of print with Christianity, as opposed to Burckhardt’s secular Renaissance in Italy. Ironically, one of Gutenberg’s first press jobs was a papal order for printed indulgences in the last medieval crusade “against the Turks” (178). Moreover, “Bibles, sermons, breviaries, indulgences, calendars and almanacks were among the main staples of early Rhineland trade.” Even a cursory “mental ­voyage from Mainz and the Gutenberg Bible to Strasbourg and the Mentelin Bible, to Wittenberg and the Lutheran Bible suggests how forces propelling the new industry were rooted more in the Christian than in the classical tradition, even while also stemming from early capitalist, profit-seeking drives” (179). Yet, if a classical revival that preceded the printing press had simply mutated into a Christian form, where was the revolution? Precisely in the shift, Eisenstein responds, from the monastery and university to the print shop as the site of knowledge production: “Divisions maintained in old lecture halls were not sustained in the workshops. Humanists and Bible printers became close allies even while humanists and schoolmen often remained at odds” (180). (Inexplicably, the major social practice that Eisenstein ignores is reading, or ways of using books that differed, as we shall see, from existing Scholastic methods.) Still, her conclusion is worth restating: a new system of textual reproduction helped to create new social ­conditions of knowledge. A corollary of Eisenstein’s thesis about media revolution is the idea that print rendered impassable a widening gulf between scribal and print conditions of knowledge, in part because “the preservative powers of print” (Printing, 115) rendered permanent the recovery of knowledge lost from antiquity.5 Although medievalists have long insisted that the Italian Renaissance was not unique, and that Europe had witnessed similar rebirths of classical studies between the eighth and the twelfth centuries, she writes, “Let me turn … to the question of how the advent of printing may be related to the emergence of a so-called permanent 5 As Eisenstein puts it, “If ‘Renaissance humanism extended its knowledge’ almost to present limits, this is surely because ancient texts recovered by the humanists were not again ‘lost’ i.e., actually destroyed, progressively corrupted, transplanted or mislaid” (Printing Press, 209).

33093_Williams.indd 26

2022-09-01 16:54



A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution? 27

Renaissance ... ‘To put it briefly, the two medieval renascences were limited and transitory; the Renaissance was total and permanent’” (181). And it remained so because of the stable presence of printed classics from antiquity. In one of many telling examples, she cites the discovery in 1414 by the Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini, in an unnamed German monastery, of the sole surviving manuscript of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, which “also got lost. Fortunately, he had had one more copy made … But surely the future of the text was still uncertain until 1473 when it reached a printer’s workshop in Brescia. Possibly it still remained uncertain thereafter – but not for long. By the end of the sixteenth century, thirty whole editions had been issued” (Printing, 209).6 More controversially, Eisenstein attributed transformative effects to the mechanical reproduction of the written word – revolutionary social and psychological effects such as uniformity, standardization, and ­synchronization – which came as byproducts of a new technology.7 Uniform pagination, which was quite impossible in manuscript culture, now made it possible “to locate textual errors with precision and to transmit this information simultaneously to scattered readers” (80) through printed lists of errata. Books were also “sufficiently uniform for scholars in different regions to correspond” simultaneously “with each other about the same citation and for the same emendations and errors to be spotted by many eyes” (81). Furthermore, “distinctions between the fresh and original as against the repeatable and copied were likely to have become sharper after the advent of printing. The process of standardization also brought out more clearly all deviations from classical canons reflected in diverse buildings, statues, paintings, and objets d’art” (83). Even the practice of placing “words (and letters) in piles” in the printshop, “according to alphabetical order” (100), helped to n ­ aturalize page indexing, a feature of printed books that differed from limited indexing of manuscripts by chapter numbers, a scribal practice not

6 Poggio is equally notable for his discovery at the abbey of Sankt Gallen in 1416 of a complete manuscript of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, “oeuvre jusqu’alors uniquement connue à l’état de fragments” [a work until then known only in part]. See Rundle, 124–5. 7 Accepting an oft-repeated characterization of Eisenstein’s work as “the ‘technological determinist’ thesis,” Raven and Proot argue that she focuses on the properties and effects of the medium at the expense of its human users (163).

33093_Williams.indd 27

2022-09-01 16:54

28

The Communion of the Book

introduced until the late thirteenth century.8 By contrast, reports Ann Blair, “printed books of all kinds contained alphabetical indexes, even from the first decades of printing” (180). And the “preparation of each index,” adds Eisentstein, was an “exercise in textual analysis – one which was applied to many works which had never been indexed before” (100). But fragmentation of a page into metallic heaps of material ­letters did not determine the outcome. That was shaped by the new mode of indexical reading, a choice allowed by alphabetical ­fragmentation, that also helped to interrupt the continuity of providential ­historiography, the dominant cultural ideology for at least a millennium.9 Eisenstein offers the example of the Florentine printer N. Laurentii, who hired Bernardo Machiavelli in 1475 “to index Livy’s Decades as a spare-time job.” Over the course of months at the workshop, “the elder Machiavelli” spent his time “listing the cities, provinces, islands, mountains, and rivers mentioned in the text” (100). In doing so, he “was approaching Livy’s text in a somewhat different way than had been employed by earlier generations of copyists.” The reorganization of the text in a non-linear fashion, together with a “new, more business-like approach to copy-editing may be related to the more neutral, amoral treatment of politics and history that is often associated with the writings of Bernardo’s son, Niccolò Machiavelli.” On his trips to the printer, the boy “would have seen his father working over Livy,” and in all likelihood he “recalled Bernardo’s marked-up copy when he wrote his ‘Discourses’ on Livy later on” (101). In another historical inference about the subliminal effects of the process of print transmission, Eisenstein explains that the “new forms of authorship and literary property-rights” that were endemic in print culture “undermined older concepts of collective authority in a manner that encompassed not only biblical composition but also texts relating to philosophy, science, and law” (122). Until the age of printing, an author’s name had normally signified the entire historic community of copyists, glossators, and commentators who had brought the work safely down the ages, keeping its meaning intact, its significance unchanging. But the shift from traditional knowledge keepers under 8 Blair, “Managing,” 179. 9 For discussion of “Orosian” historiography in the Middle Ages, see further references in this work: 304, 304n19.

33093_Williams.indd 28

2022-09-01 16:54



A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution? 29

a collective name to a unique author in the age of printing, created a new type of authority.10 Even the name of Erasmus or Luther on a title page (a major innovation of print culture) guaranteed that the work would become a bestseller (another concept that had no place in scribal culture). As Eisenstein explains, a “cult of personality,” which had been quite rare under “conditions of scribal culture,” was “powerfully reinforced after the advent of printing” (232). Although Petrarch had been unique in creating a late medieval cult of personality for readers of his manuscripts – particularly after he arranged his own coronation with a laurel wreath in Rome on Easter Sunday 1341, making him a rival to the greatest Latin poets of antiquity11 – that crown was no guarantee that his fame or his individuality would survive him. As Eisenstein notes, all the “early humanists, from Petrarch to Valla, owe their still vital reputation as culture-heroes to the prosaic print-made knowledge industry” (301). Under the compositor’s stick, there was a broader assault on the idea of traditional authority. An individual author was now held responsible for any of his words that had challenged or displaced received ideas. “Veneration for the wisdom of the ages was probably modified as ancient sages were retrospectively cast in the role of individual authors – prone to human error and possibly plagiarists as well” (122). And mechanical “transmission of written records” “no longer reinforced the sense that corruption was an inevitable consequence of any sequence over time” (Eisenstein, 112). Indeed, the written word now achieved a real degree of stability under the conditions of print culture. Johns argues, however, that the historical category of print’s “preservative powers” morphs in Eisenstein’s usage into a metaphysical concept of “certain traits that print is taken to endow on texts. Books produced in [her] environment” of “print culture” are “subject to conditions of standardization, dissemination, and fixity. The last of these is perhaps the most important” (Nature, 10), because it raises the text out of the realm of change, thus rendering it “timeless.” By contrast, 10 Even the “concept of what a book should look like and contain also changed,” explains Steven Fischer. “No longer favouring the mediaeval custom of marginal commentaries and interlineal glosses to steer the reader towards the one ‘correct’ reading of a work,” humanist printers left “external reading aids, like dictionaries and encyclopaedias” to do this work, leaving a reader “to make the most of a text for herself or himself. For the reader, no longer the text, was the fulcrum of knowledge” (History, 244). 11 See discussion in this work at 3n4.

33093_Williams.indd 29

2022-09-01 16:54

30

The Communion of the Book

printed works of natural philosophy by Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) remained subject to acts of piracy, abridgement, and epitome over which the authors and printers had no control. Despite Tycho’s attempt, in his walled enclave of Uraniborg on the Danish island of Hven, where he set up his own press and paper mill to produce singularly authoritative texts, he ultimately failed to establish, as Eisenstein and followers such as Bruno Latour would claim, an effective primacy of print in “the collection and deployment of durable paper entities as the foundation of science’s success” (Johns, Nature, 11, 13). The “distribution” methods of Tycho, a feudal noble, for example, included presentations “not just” of “printed books, but hybrids – handcolored, individualized tributes” at court and in foreign embassies – that were clearly “enmeshed in conventions of status recognition, reciprocation, and reward. This could not fail to affect the way in which that reader regarded the book” (14, 15). Nor was Tycho able to find, much less to found, type that allowed him to print “his prized star catalogue … He was reduced to circulating hand-copied versions, and the catalogue remained unprinted on his death,” after which his works “began to fall out of court circles” and “into the hands of the book trade,” where they were subject to “printers’ frauds” (18). Galileo, who was more dependent for social status on the patronage of the Medici court in Florence to bolster the authority of “natural knowledge,” also had to endure pirated editions of Sidereus Nuncia – published in Venice in 1610 and reprinted illicitly in Frankfurt in the same year (24, 25) – a deplorable situation that began the steady degradation of his illustrations, such as the famous image he produced of a cratered lunar surface. Johns reprints the lunar illustration from both the authorized and unauthorized editions of 1610, plus two more images from 1653 and 1683, each worse than the last. Fixity was not the essential property of early modern printing that Eisenstein ­supposedly had claimed. And yet “in her work,” Johns insists, “printing itself stands outside history. The press is something ‘sui generis,’ we are told, lying beyond the reach of conventional historical analysis. Its ‘­culture’ is correspondingly placeless and timeless” (19). In effect, he levies a charge of “technological determinism” against her work or, more precisely, of reducing historical actors to a mechanical reflex of the medium itself. In opposing her “metaphysics” of print, Johns maintains that “Tycho’s labors deserve better. To put it brutally,

33093_Williams.indd 30

2022-09-01 16:54



A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution? 31

what those labors really tell us is that Eisenstein’s print culture does not exist.”12 More brutally still, in a print forum convened by The American Historical Review to moderate their bitter dispute, Johns accuses Eisenstein of citing only secondary sources and, worse, of repeating “commonplaces,” or what he sees as received knowledge, which “was the standard reading practice of Renaissance scholars” (“How,” 114). As Johns describes this Renaissance practice, commonplaces may be “good for identifying piecemeal omissions but less good for confronting arguments, which they tended to reduce to fragments.” He even identifies a ­methodological import in this practice: “What is striking is how uncannily Eisenstein’s procedures mirror all these traits. Her readings display the stand-alone character of commonplaces, and like commonplaces they seem to be immune from elimination on grounds of inconsistency” (114). This rancorous dispute between two leading historians of printing thus turns on opposed methods of reading: for “not only does Eisenstein’s [forum] article illustrate the vulnerability of printed books to readers’ skills in general,” Johns claims; “it shows their vulnerability to a reader whose habits reflect those most prevalent in the early modern period itself.”13 Because she reads as a Renaissance commonplacer, she remains hostage to the mental world of her ­subjects, merely repeating the traditional “wisdom” of the era, unlike Johns, the “cultural historian of print,” who literally digs up archival evidence of real “knowledge in the making.” The problem is that, by mistaking commonplacing for “the standard reading practice of Renaissance scholars,” Johns renders himself ­hostage to a commonplace. Although it is true that Erasmus’s Adages (1500; 2nd ed. 1508) was the most famous of all Renaissance c­ ommonplace books, it challenged authority as much as it reproduced traditional wisdom. “Under the heading ‘Frons occipitio prior’ (‘Front before back,’), for example, Erasmus took aim at church dignitaries who

12 For Johns’s admittedly “brutal” attack on Eisenstein, see Nature, 37–8, 373–4. 13 Since I later treat Milton’s absorption of the humanist revolution in his reading ­practices (see further discussion in this work, 43–58), it is worth noting here what Fulton, Historical, observes of Milton’s own view of the dicing habits of Renaissance ­commonplacers: “Milton worked against this tradition, which he clearly found trivializing. He criticized one writer for cutting Tacitus, as Lipsius had done, ‘into slivers and steaks,’ and he wrote s­ cornfully of the ‘super-politick Aphorisme,’ and ‘all the Tribe of Aphorismers, and Politicasters’” (58).

33093_Williams.indd 31

2022-09-01 16:54

32

The Communion of the Book

looked after their private interests rather than those of their flock.”14 Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of London, praised the historical discoveries of Erasmus in a letter of 1517 to the French humanist historian Guillaume Budé: “Working through authors of every kind, Erasmus has collected the proverbs of antiquity which gave the impression that there were almost as many riddles as there were adages and plunged the reader in darkness; and these he has expounded for those who wish to learn, like a modern Oedipus of amazing energy” (cited in Rummel, “Reception,” 21). Biographer Johan Huizinga further remarks that, by virtue of Erasmus’s learning, “Humanism ceased to be the exclusive privilege of a few.” Although he was “reproached by some humanists, when about to publish the Adagia, for divulging the ­mysteries of their craft,” Erasmus insisted “that the book of antiquity should be open to all” (39–40). Biographer Léon-Ernest Halkin adds that Erasmus’s demystifying approach to ­traditional sententiae, which are not “accessible … to the modern reader,” was still one “read and re-read a hundred times by Renaissance ­schoolboys, who discovered in it ancient culture represented by proverbs and quotations, both given in full and set in the context of the history of thought, language, and institutions” (46). Restoring the historical contexts of commonplaces ought to satisfy even Johns’s demand that the full “chain of reasoning in which” the idea “participated” be s­ upplied (“How,” 114). The adage was less an appeal to tradition than another prime instance of the philological practice of critical source study.15 Printing likewise made the philology of northern Renaissance humanists more consequential than the scribal humanism of a Petrarch, a Bruni, or a Valla had been in the century, and even decades, before print – Valla died in 1457, soon after the publication of the Gutenberg Bible – in large part because the critical humanism of Erasmus reached a pan-European audience and created a public sensation. His biblical scholarship further threatened the ritual foundations and sacramental life of Christianity, as we shall see, by its privileging of the original Greek codices and its discovery of troubling variants in ancient manuscripts

14 Rummel, “Reception of Erasmus’ Adages,” 22. 15 Dobranski, Readers and Authorship, maintains that early modern habits of “commonplacing transformed readers into authors, for it required a process of selecting, ­transcribing, and organizing that resulted in a ‘personal construction of meaning’” (55–6).

33093_Williams.indd 32

2022-09-01 16:54



A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution? 33

of the New Testament. The printing of his New Testament of 1516 in Greek and Latin introduced European readers to a practice reminiscent of Petrarch’s goal of identifying historical differences16 in the text from the accretions of tradition. While Poggio and Valla had identified ­interpolations and even forgeries in medieval texts, and Valla17 had demonstrated beyond all doubt the principle of linguistic change over the centuries,18 the sixteenth-century Erasmus read and wrote in a world where print made the preservation of such findings more available and numerous, as well as cumulative.19 Moreover, Erasmus was the first humanist to arrive at maturity in the new social space of the printshop. Johan Huizinga offers an unforgettable image of him in Venice in 1508, at work “[a]mid the noise of the press-room” of Aldus Manutius where, “to the surprise of his publisher,” he “sat and wrote, usually from memory, so busily occupied that, as he picturesquely expressed it, he had no time to scratch his ears. He was lord and master of the printing-office. A special corrector had been assigned to him; he made his textual changes in the last impression. Aldus also read the proofs. ‘Why?’ asked Erasmus. ‘Because I am s­ tudying at the same time,’ was the reply” (64) of the scholar-printer. Aldus’s response points to another vital distinction between early sixteenth- and late seventeenth-century printing. Most printers ­associated with the vast output of Erasmus, both in his classical editions and reprints of his own writings, were themselves humanist scholars, like the master printer Johann Froben in Basel who, in 1514, printed some of Erasmus’s “translations of the lesser works of Plutarch,” as well as a third, corrected and expanded, edition of Adagia, before bringing out in 1516 a ­nine-volume edition of the complete works of

16 We must remember, however, that this “difference” applied only to an intervening “dark age” between the present and antiquity. Crucially, Eisenstein observes, “This sense of a past that can never be recaptured, however many artifacts are dug up, is the hallmark of our modern consciousness. It presents a striking contrast to the sense of a past on the verge of being reborn” (Printing Press, 195). 17 Hyma, Life, reports “that Erasmus in composing the Book Against the Barbarians had expressed his profound admiration for Valla” (89). 18 See further discussion in this work: 127, 127n45. 19 As Eisenstein concludes, “Findings related to lost texts and dead languages began to accumulate in an unprecedented fashion not because of some distinctive ethos shaped in quattrocento Italy but because a new technology had been placed at the disposal of a far-flung community of scholars” (Printing Press, 225).

33093_Williams.indd 33

2022-09-01 16:54

34

The Communion of the Book

the Church Father Jerome, followed almost at once by the world’s first New Testament printed in Greek with a new Latin translation.20 Froben also printed editions of Erasmus’s letters, his Colloquies, his Paraphrases of the Gospels and Pauline Epistles, and translations of Euripides, Plautus, Cicero,21 Terence, and Seneca (Halkin, 48, 130). He also published In Praise of Marriage (1518) and reprinted The Praise of Folly. Those who published Erasmus could not help but be humanist scholars themselves. Indeed, most of the great printers of the early modern era were humanist scholars, like Froben’s successor in Basel, Johannes Oporinus, who published Vesalius’s humanist anatomy De humani corporis fabrica (1543), not to mention a Latin edition of John Foxe’s Martyrs (1559); Jean Crespin, who fled Picardy to Geneva, where he published Histoire des Martyrs (1554) and Greek editions of Iliad and Odyssey (1560–67);22 Henri Estienne (1528–1598), who followed his father Robert from Paris to Geneva, where he published “the landmark text for Homer”;23 and Louis Elsevier fils (1604–1670), who, “[s]hortly after publishing Galileo and Descartes in Leiden … moved to Amsterdam to set up ­business there and to publish works by Hobbes, Bacon, Gassendi, and Milton, among others.”24 The “cultural historian of print,” as Johns differentiates himself from Eisenstein, whom he labels a historian of a non-existent “print culture,” thus disregards the first principle of humanist scholarship by repeating a “commonplace” about methods. Johns’s reduction of humanist reading practices to “received ideas” likewise bolsters Eisenstein’s point about “periodization” and the danger of limited time scales, although Johns provides an otherwise valuable

20 “Answering Some Crabby and Ignorant Critics” of his Latin translation from his collation of Greek manuscripts in the Novum instrumentum, Erasmus wrote that “I do not change Holy Scripture the slightest bit; I am dealing with translators and corrupters. And I do not remove the simplicity of Scripture; I restore it” (Erasmus, ed. Sider, 303). 21 J.C. Scaliger (1484–1558), whom the French later made a model of neoclassical taste, restraint(!), and reason, (in)famously attacked Erasmus in his Oratio pro M. Tullio Cicerone contra Des. Erasmus (1531), wherein the yet unknown village physician labelled Erasmus a “slanderer,” a “drunk,” and “barbarian” of the “Teutons,” with “no appreciation” of “Italian eloquence,” and little understanding of Cicero’s polished classical Latin (256). See Conley, “No Way,” 255–65. 22 Ford, “Homer,” 26. 23 Ibid., 5. Titles and dates for Crespin and Estienne appear in Ford’s bibliography (26). 24 Eisenstein, “Unacknowledged,” 99n76.

33093_Williams.indd 34

2022-09-01 16:54



A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution? 35

study of Restoration and early eighteenth-century printing practices in a single locale. But there is another major difference between Johns’s “little England” approach and Eisenstein’s trans-European one: the temporal positioning of each historian. “On the most general level,” she insists in her concluding “Reply” to his forum article, “we differ because we approach early modern printing from the opposite ends of a time scale. I start with medieval texts and the incapacity of hand ­copying to achieve certain goals long valued by Latin reading elites. Johns starts with the modern book and the incapacity of the handpress to achieve the degree of standardization and uniformity that is now taken for granted” (126). Here, she refrains from noting major ­differences in their scholarship, since her knowledge of humanism was already on display in the third chapter of The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, “A Classical Revival Reoriented” (163–302). Still, she does offer a caustic reminder that “Johns apparently does not share my curiosity about the processes that led to the discrediting of long-held ancient theories (such as Aristotelian physics, Ptolemaic astronomy, or Galenic anatomy)” (“Unacknowledged,” 91). While Eisenstein may be guilty of “commonplacing” on occasion, I get a better sense of historical change from her macro-analysis than from Johns’s micro-analysis. Even his choice of a period – from the founding of the Royal Society in 1662 to the creation of the Copyright Act in 1710, the first phase of the scientific revolution – is much too brief to support his claim to have written a social history of the book, let alone offer evidence of anything more than a consolidation of the scientific revolution through contingent social practices. While Johns does make occasional references outside this period, such as to the  parallel experiences of Tycho and Galileo,25 or to the creation of the Stationers’ Company in 1557, or even to the Republican printer John Streater, who, in the 1650s, challenged the Stationers’ monopoly, Eisenstein is well within her right to claim that he reduces vastly ­different regulatory regimes to an undifferentiated “authority.” In four

25 Johns typically ignores humanist contributions to the “natural philosophy” of a number of giants of the scientific revolution who, as Margaret King suggests, “benefited from the humanist project of providing to their contemporaries correct ancient philosophical texts. Among these were Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543), proponent of the heliocentric theory of the planetary system, and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), who defended and proved it” (“Return,” 23).

33093_Williams.indd 35

2022-09-01 16:54

36

The Communion of the Book

or five passing references to Foxe, for example, Johns fails to mention that the Stationers’ Company was created in the reign of Mary Tudor,26 specifically to police booksellers for printing English Bibles or Protestant polemics, and to prosecute readers, hundreds of whom were burned at the stake for professing “truths” from scripture contrary to a State–Church monopoly on “Truth.” What Eisenstein calls Johns’s “insular outlook” (97) refers primarily to his limited focus on English publishing practices; but it is also indicative of a related “scientific” insularity, since he ignores the prior two hundred years of humanist printing,27 much less the printing press’s role in decentering knowledge in the making. In challenging Johns’s scornful dismissal, for example, of John Foxe’s celebration of the printing press as “a gift from an apocalyptic God” (“How,” 128) – something that no modern historian, Johns says, could take seriously – Eisenstein exposes Johns’s double standard in ­presenting as evidence the fact that early moderns did not see themselves in the midst of a print revolution.28 He is at least as guilty as he takes her to be of failing to transcend the perspective of her subjects. He also uses Condorcet’s Esquisse (1793) – which “declared the pivotal role of ­printing in hurling Western Europe from monkish barbarity into Enlightenment, progress, and, by now, outright revolution” – to reduce the “print ­revolution” to a “modern” invention designed to render the French revolution itself “both permanent and universal.”29 As Eisenstein ­counters, Foxe’s “providential gift” of printing follows the same arc as

26 Johns refers to Queen Mary twice, both times in connection with the founding of the Stationers’ Company. This identification is likely intended to naturalize the transfer of the medieval Church’s monopoly on knowledge to the national Church-State. Such, at least, is the impression left by Johns’s comment on the Royal Society, that it was not instituted “to serve any one political interest  … The attributes it endorsed distinguished its ­participants from the ‘enthusiasts’ and ‘dogmatists’ associated with the defeated Interregnum sects and with militant Catholicism. These twin threats legitimated conforming ‘episcopalianism’ as a  ‘middle way,’ and most fellows endorsed this stance” (Nature, 468). Johns’s “middle way” signals the apparent parochialism of his approach. 27 One might as well write a history of the Roman Empire and omit all republican history from Scipio’s victory at Zama (202 bce) to Augustus’s victory at Actium (31 bce). 28 Either Johns has not read the entirety of Foxe’s long excursus on “The benefite and inuention of Printyng” in Book 6 of The Actes and Monuments (1570), or else he is guilty of turning this early modern celebration of a communications revolution into a late modern commonplace about an “apocalyptic God.” See discussion in this work: 206–7. 29 Johns, Nature, 373–4; Eisenstein, “Unacknowledged,” 101.

33093_Williams.indd 36

2022-09-01 16:54



A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution? 37

Condorcet’s political “discovery” of a “print revolution.” Their equi­ valency inheres “in the idea” of each “that the press served as a weapon that undercut despotic rule, of popes (in Foxe’s case), of kings and priests (for Condorcet).”30 Foxe’s “revolution” is in fact a genuine harbinger of the English Revolution, not some merely retrospective “invention” of a French revolutionary. What Johns can and does provide is a detailed account of the ­practices of Restoration monopolists in “normalizing” and regulating the “­civilities” of London booksellers. But not even his depth of detail, or “thickness” of his account, in the parlance of historians, equips him to account for a political revolution in England, much less to recognize a reading revolution – so distant from his concerns in time and space – that is my enabling premise. On his chosen ground, Johns offers the best analysis I have seen of the scientific revolution and its relation to printing in the half-century from 1660 to 1710. On the other hand, Eisenstein gestures toward, but fails to specify, a major weakness in Johns’s punning notion of the “nature” of the “book.” As she puts it, “Although he devotes a chapter to reading practices, he ignores the enlargement of libraries, the burgeoning of book fairs, and all the other developments that enabled individuals to gain access to more paper tools and visual aids” (91). What she ought to have remarked is his spectacularly reductive account of readers, even when that account is used to argue that her theory inclines toward technological determinism, not towards social and cultural practices. Not even her clear focus on the social differences between printing and scribal practices, whatever “commonplaces” she uses to explain humanism, equips her to see the larger truth about the revolution she describes; it was chiefly a revolution in reading. To make this revolution a result of reading practices would also avoid the anachronism of turning scribes into the authors of a print revolution. While Erasmus was certainly a humanist child of scribes like Petrarch and Valla, his readings never had to ­circulate in manuscript. Conversely, Johns’s characteristic concern with the human (not the humanist) side of printing, bookselling, regulating, and “authorizing” products of print, is expressed from the perspective of authorities, not that of readers reading, with the sole exception of his sixth chapter,

30 Eisenstein, “Reply,” 128n1.

33093_Williams.indd 37

2022-09-01 16:54

38

The Communion of the Book

where Johns is, for once, explicitly concerned with reading practices. Here, he describes, but never admits, let alone considers, any alternative to what he sees as a reasonable reaction against seventeenth-century religious “enthusiasts” by Anglicans like Ralph Cudworth and Meric Casaubon, in ways that are congenial to the “scientific” views of founders of the Royal Society such as Robert Boyle and his long-time assistant Robert Hooke, the Society’s first Curator of Experiments. Of a typical experiment on reading chirographic letters, Johns relates, Hooke put “some much-vaunted tiny writing” under the microscope to show that it was “barely readable without ‘a good fantsy well preposest to help one through,’ and in fact a good fancy was needed for all reading” (431), given the indeterminate character of writing itself. Ralph Cudworth, like Casaubon or the Jesuit Henry More, “used accounts of the effects of reading – accounts based in knowledge of the passions – to characterize and attack false claims to knowledge under the label of enthusiasm. Enthusiasts, they charged, were those who did not properly habituate their reading and their passions” (427). Casaubon even “concentrated on what he called ‘the strange, but natural effects’ produced by words. Metaphors, for example, worked by the ‘representation of shapes and images’ to the imagination – that is, they worked ‘by a kind of Enthusiasme’” (422; emphasis in the original). And enthusiasm was dangerous, ­according to Sir Thomas Browne, since it denied the authority of the “rational soul,” leaving religious fanatics hostage to “[f]alse visions” that “relied on corporeal mediation and therefore always arose in the body. They could never engage directly and exclusively with the rational soul” (416). The damaging effects on the body politic were the English Civil Wars of the 1640s and the religious slaughter of the Thirty Years War in Europe (1618–48). As Johns sees it, civil broils were a predictable consequence of “a problem of knowledge” among unschooled readers who were not “habituated” to governing the “passions” aroused by print and who thus remained vulnerable to an eclipse of reason by “fantsy” or imagination (428, 406, 431). Within the purview of Restoration authorities, “[t]he conflicts wracking seventeenth-century Europe were so violent, it was argued, because central to the human condition itself was a constant civil war. Human beings contained two distinct ‘faculties of Knowing’: the understanding, which was seated in the rational soul, and the imagination, which was seated in the sensitive [soul] … All reasoning was thus liable to be subjugated to a strife between the two candidates for

33093_Williams.indd 38

2022-09-01 16:54



A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution? 39

knowledge” (403).31 But this is to repeat a commonplace of Scholastic philosophers in the Middle Ages, including Aquinas,32 that “warring” faculties in the human mind required the “rational” soul’s sovereignty over the “sensitive” soul.33 In that sense, civil war was rooted in the “nature” of things, that is, in the very nature of perception itself. In historical fact, this type of deductive reasoning of medieval philosophy was still being used throughout the seventeenth century to discredit religious “enthusiasm” among Anabaptists, Ranters, Quakers, and other “heretical” readers of scripture. While Johns’s survey of such reading practices presents a thick gathering of instances, it treats atypical, usually morbid, reading experiences as the “nature”34 of readers in general, differing little from those who suffered the effects of civil war, regicide, and regime change. Morbid readers, according to Johns, and vicious writers competing for authority clearly call into question the 31 For Johns, the “natural” model of “passion” warring with “reason” is manifest in the “civil” war of the royal astronomer John Flamsteed with his rivals Edmond Halley and Sir Isaac Newton, or between members of the Royal Society competing for “priority” in the invention of the “spring watch” in 1675–76, when Robert Hooke, the plaintiff, charged Henry Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society, with “treachery,” or “interest” in giving “priority” to another “inventor,” and thus of being “governed by ‘passions,’” thereby causing “the council to intervene on his side” by imposing its own civilities and procedures (Johns, Nature, 514–31). 32 See Miguel García-Valdecasas, “Psychology and Mind,” for discussion of the medieval origins of faculty psychology in the Thomistic hierarchy of “three kinds of soul which correspond to the kinds of life we observe in the universe: the anima vegetativa, sensitiva, and rationalis” (292), wherein the rational soul is the constitutive “form and the body is matter” (295). Ironically, this commonplace version of the medieval “Aristotle’s” formalist psychology favours a “philosophical explanation” over a “scientific one” (293), making s­cience, or “materialistic philosophy,” the poor cousin of philosophical truth. 33 See Brett, History. For a discussion of Milton’s ironic treatment of a Neoplatonic version of faculty psychology in Paradise Lost 5, see my Milton’s Leveller God, 191–7. 34 In Johns’s usage, the non-scientific character of religious reading is the contrary of “nature.” He uses the term to signify natural philosophy as well as the “nature” of the period-bound Restoration book as it was produced by licence to the Stationers’ Company and the Royal Society, though not to pirated books. This is most evident in his 180-page second chapter on tensions between the practices of “good Stationers” and those of illicit practitioners, or in his 80-page third chapter on the regulation of the book trade by the Stationers’ Company in “Augustan London” (187–8), following the Press Act of 1662. This nomenclature resurfaces in chapter 7 on measures taken by the Royal Society against piracy, and on its conventions for establishing “priority” and “civility” through registration and publication. But, in fairness to Johns, his subject is neither the politically “radical,” nor the dissenting “religious” book, but rather the printing and circulation of “natural knowledge” (6), and the social creation of authority or “authorship” (usually attributed in that era to the Stationer or bookseller). His remits are authority and property.

33093_Williams.indd 39

2022-09-01 16:54

40

The Communion of the Book

reassuring social model of “print fixities,” which Eisenstein said had freed scholars, in Johns’s words, “from spending their lives eradicating scribal mistakes.” For Eisenstein, he argued, “[i]t was fixity that liberated them from such labor and thus made possible the progressive improvement of knowledge” (Nature, 10). But what Johns calls the “nature” of the book is more like a Hobbesian account of human nature now used to underwrite a Restoration politics of the book in a world where selfinterest, deceit, and treachery typically lead to piracy and falsity; where “copy” and “authority” are unstable and radically uncertain; where common readers are subject to irrational religious ­enthusiasms; and where the entire commonwealth of knowledge is forced in consequence to create a “Leviathan” for the preservation of “propriety”: i.e., property, civility, and properly regulated social behaviour. The Nature of the Book offers a deeply conservative account of reading by adopting Hobbes’s political defence of institutional authority.35 For all the space that Johns gives to the commercial and epistemological problems of pirated editions in his critique of Eisenstein’s technological “determinism,” he does not seem to realize that “[t]he Middle Ages were a forger’s paradise” (Nauert, 38). Indeed, printing had initially served to buttress humanist scepticism about forged documents,36 encouraging the practice of critical source study and addressing the very concerns that Johns raises about “unauthorized” editions. Just as problematic, he ignores the epochal project of the editing and printing of Greek and Hebrew books by humanist scholars like Erasmus and Johannes Reuchlin, to recover historical truth. Even worse, Johns seems unaware of the fact that Aldus’s humanist printing of compact editions of a high quality had preceded those Stationers’ editions of the late seventeenth century by almost two hundred years. In Venice, during the last decade of the fifteenth century, Aldus Manutius had begun “to produce a series of books that would be ‘scholarly, compact, handy and cheap’” (Fischer, History, 236). His subject matter consisted mostly of “the Greek classics of Aristotle, Plato, Sophocles, and Thucydides,” at least at first, until he started “including

35 As Johns tellingly admits, “The passions played a central part in Hobbes’s work. Since they stimulated all human actions, and no polity could ever reach such a state of perfection that their disruptive consequences could be eradicated, the passions lay at the root of both social order and disorder” (Nature, 418). 36 For humanist exposures of forgery, see examples in this work: 107, 127–31.

33093_Williams.indd 40

2022-09-01 16:54



A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution? 41

Latin classics” like Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. But the Aristotle published by his Aldine Press was no longer the medieval Aristotle, translated from Arabic editions in turn translated from the Greek; the Latin Aristotle was now published in the original Greek, without a theological filter. In fact, the humanist preoccupation with authenticating these ancient texts and documents in their original languages, historical contexts, and cultural meanings completely transformed the social conditions of knowledge in Western Europe, resulting in a broader humanist c­ hallenge to the authority of traditional theology and its twin, the “metaphysical certitude exalted by medieval Aristotelian philosophy” (Nauert, 15), a promising avenue to follow for anyone looking to explain the origins of modern science en route to the Newtonian revolution. Historian Charles Nauert offers a succinct portrait of the medieval imperative of “metaphysical certitude,” based on the authority of “Aristotle,” which underwrote the Schoolmen’s method of anthologizing sententiae (a prior culture of “commonplacing”) in order to extract “eternal” Truth from an “authoritative” text, as compared, say, with trying to explain its meaning in terms of its linguistic, social, and cultural usages.37 Medieval readers thus tended to see written texts as timeless “authorities,” even as they reduced them to logical axioms that could “be quoted and understood without the slightest attention to the context in which it had originally stood, still less with any attention to the ­historical circumstances or the original intention of the author” (Nauert, 17). By the same token, “mediaeval book production … had been determined from the top down” (Fischer, History, 240), ­inculcating at every level a respect for hierarchical authority. By contrast, humanism encouraged a more sceptical view of “authority,” acting “as an intellectual solvent, striking down traditional beliefs of all kinds” (Nauert, 205). In his Aldine editions “Aldus insisted,” in fact, “that these classical authors” be “read ‘without intermediaries’: that is, printed in their original ­languages almost wholly free of intrusive glosses or annotations by intervening authorities” (Fischer, 236). In that sense, Aldine editions required readers to adopt empirical habits of mind – direct observation of the object; and recorded evidence based on “experiment,” or ­experience. And this type of reading was a precursor to the laboratory, ­requiring that evidence be weighed in writing.

37 If the fixities of print were an illusion, so were those of the medieval Schoolmen.

33093_Williams.indd 41

2022-09-01 16:54

42

The Communion of the Book

Humanism thus laid the ground for the scientific revolution that is the beating heart of Johns’s history of the book. But Johns remains dismissive of humanist “commonplacers” and sets the “passionate” reading practices of sectarian “fanatics” against the rational reading practices of natural philosophers, thereby condemning to oblivion three full centuries of humanist reading that are the precondition, as Eisenstein maintains, of the scientific revolution. Ignoring these ­reading practices of humanists, Johns limits himself to studying the making of an English “Leviathan” that authorized the scientific revolution and buttressed the authority of a restored monarch.38 To achieve these goals, the Stationers’ Company and Royal Society had first to civilize neurotic readers of print whose lives would otherwise be poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

The Humanist Reading Practices of John Milton (ca 1618–1670) The best tonic for Johns’s condescending view of Restoration readers will be found in later parts of this study of humanist reading practices, not least in the Restoration poetry of Milton, who, more than anyone, refracts the humanist light of Erasmus in ways that reveal the full ­spectrum of this humanist revolution in reading. But before he became a poet or a prose controversialist, Milton was a reader. He was skilled in various modes of reading, beginning as a schoolboy reader of classical poetry and humanist prose,39 and continuing as an adult with reading 38 Bishop Brian Walton, the editor and author of Prolegomena to the six-volume London Polyglot Bible of 1653–57, shared Hobbes’s view of the dangers of unbridled human passions, and the need for institutional restraints on “idiosyncratic interpretations of individuals” (the Church of England and its Polyglot Bible thus a bulwark against “ignorance”). The humanist revolution in reading, which had long expressed a liberal impulse to expose false authorities, then drew toward a conservative close, as Bishop Walton erected his own biblical “Leviathan” against “the sectaries who had ruined his life and that of many of his friends.” For, as he insisted, “the word of God is not in texts, whether manuscript or printed, but properly resides in the true sense of the word which no man can express better than the true Church” (Prolegomena V.3, 34). Cited in P. Miller, “Antiquarianization,” 471–2. 39 As Cummings notes, Erasmus’s Colloquies had been taught at St Paul’s School, where Milton was a pupil, from at least 1534. In fact, one of these colloquies, Confabulatio pia (“The Whole Duty of Youth”), featured a boy taught “at the very school in which the dialogue is set” (50). Erasmus’s De copia, which “was reprinted at least 150 times in the sixteenth century,” was almost certainly being taught in Milton’s day (ca 1618–1625), since it had been “the foundation for pedagogical practices on composition and style for generations” (51).

33093_Williams.indd 42

2022-09-01 16:54



A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution? 43

strategies acquired through writing history, theology, and revolutionary polemics. It is fair to say that his revolutionary prose and his History of Britain are descended as well from Petrarch’s vision of historical discontinuity that he had famously labelled a “dark age” and tragic rupture in the “continuity” of civilization.40 In religion as well as history, Milton was also a theorist of reading, particularly in theology and the practice of biblical hermeneutics, that provided defensible methods of interpreting scripture.41 Too often, he was disillusioned by responses to his own writings by readers who were more conventional, or else less informed than he, as he displayed in two mocking sonnets about the illitterati who deemed his divorce tracts a social scandal and a heretical break with the authority of scripture. “I did but prompt the age to quit their cloggs / By the known rules of antient libertie,” he groused in Sonnet 12, “When strait a barbarous noise environs me / Of Owles and Cuckoes, Asses, Apes and Doggs” (ll. 1–4).42 What he objected to most was the practice among orthodox readers of scripture of commonplacing (or citing “proof” texts) – a medieval habit of mind that failed to seek out, much less to understand, the social and historical contexts of quoted scriptures.43 Of continuing comfort to many intellectuals, Milton’s scorn for the “miscellaneous rabble” has become legendary. As he remarked in Sonnet 11 of the title of another of his divorce tracts, “A Book was writ of late call’d Tetrachordon”: but, “Cries the stall-reader, bless us! what M.L. King adds that Juan Luis Vives (1493–1540), like Erasmus, wrote “scores of brief colloquies for the instruction of the young, which modelled correct Latin.” The Colloquia of these two giants of humanism “prodd[ed] their pupils to challenge religious, social, and political orthodoxies. These colloquies, used as textbooks long after their authors’ demise, shaped the mentality of generations of students” (13). 40 For discussion of Petrarch’s discovery of historical discontinuity, see discussion in this work: 59n85, 124, 127, 283. For a reminder that humanist notions of discontinuity (as opposed to modern views) aspired to a “recovery” or revival, and not a “fixed distance,” see Eisenstein, Printing Press, 184–90. 41 Here, too, Erasmus was central to his hermeneutical principles. For a survey of Erasmus’s biblical hermeneutics, see my chapter 3, 149–55. 42 Flanagan, Riverside Milton, 251. 43 Erasmus, who always sought the social and historical contexts of biblical admonitions, offered extensive annotations on Christ’s pronouncements on divorce in Matthew 19, as well as on Paul’s attitude to divorce in I Corinthians 7. The burden of the philologist’s annotations is the human (and social) consequences of forcing couples who “are entirely incompatible” to stay together, instead of considering “the welfare of those who are not well joined together” (Erasmus on New, ed. Sider, 275, 273). Milton eschewed his personal interest in divorce to focus on issues of “right reading” and “domestic liberty.”

33093_Williams.indd 43

2022-09-01 16:54

44

The Communion of the Book

a word on / A title page is this! and some in file / Stand spelling fals” (ll. 1, 5–6).44 The comedy is satirically developed in terms of comparative naming – those Celtic or Pict family names like “Colkitto, or Macdonnel, or Galasp,” such “rugged names” “that would have made Quintilian [the first-century ce Roman teacher of classical rhetoric] stare and gasp” (ll. 9–11). The truth is that Milton was himself a child of privilege; not every English schoolboy had studied classical languages in the country’s foremost grammar school at St Paul’s, much less had enjoyed time and means to follow in the footsteps of the humanist scholar “Sir John Cheek” who, in the middle of the sixteenth century, “taught’st Cambridge, and King Edward Greek” (ll. 12, 14).45 But the future poet and political revolutionary was also clearly ­committed to teaching his fellow citizens sound principles of biblical hermeneutics, if stooping on occasion to ridicule when they failed to heed his teaching, or to follow his own reading practices. At the beginning of the Second Book of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (2nd ed.  1644), he wrote more charitably, as well as more instructively: “First therfore let us remember as a thing not to be deny’d, that all places of Scripture wherin just reason of doubt arises from the letter, are to be expounded by considering upon what occasion every thing is set down: and by comparing other Texts” (cpw 2:282). These are the same principles of biblical hermeneutics proposed by Erasmus in his revised preface to the 1519 edition of Novum testamentum, the Ratio verae theologiae or “Method of True Theology,” where he urges readers to “consider not only what is said, but also the words used, by whom and to whom they are spoken, the time, the occasion, what precedes and what follows” (Vessey, 133). Of the occasion, for example, Erasmus says, “One sort of reply is given to those who interrogate with an insidious design, another to those who inquire with sincere intent” (133). Of the words used, he notes that, “in almost all his discourse Christ speaks obliquely through figures and tropes” (133). For “Scripture generally speaks indirectly and under the cover of tropes and allegories, and of comparisons 44 Flannagan, 250. 45 Cheke was partial to Erasmus’s proposal of 1528 to establish “a new way of pronouncing Greek” “as a return to ancient pronunciation.” Cheke belonged to the so-called “Athenian tribe” in sixteenth-century Cambridge whose members “were drawn not only to Erasmian pronunciation of Greek but also to a more clearly Protestant theology, especially in the reign of Edward VI” (Nauert, 195–6). The allusion is resonant of that Reforming era immediately preceding the Marian martyrs and the martyrology of Foxe.

33093_Williams.indd 44

2022-09-01 16:54



A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution? 45

or parallels, sometimes to the point of obscurity in a riddle” (197). Some system of interpretation is then required, starting from a simple “­comparison of passages” to unravel “the knot of a problem” (133), to comparing “the difference of times” (135), as well as comparing how “Christ imitated the” figurative “speech of the prophets” (200) to refer “everything from its normal meaning to its inner meaning” (203). Recognizing the Bible’s literary qualities, in fact, Erasmus offered “a model of theology based on a theory of literary interpretation” (Cummings, “Erasmus,” 54). In similar fashion, Milton supplies the occasion of his biblical text along with close attention to tropes, and distinctions between literal and figurative46 forms of meaning: “The occasion which induc’t our Saviour to speak of divorce, was either to convince the extravagance of the Pharises [sic] in that point, or to give a sharp and vehement answer to a tempting question. And in such cases that we are not to repose all upon the literall terms of so many words, many instances will teach us: Wherin we may plainly discover how Christ meant not to be tak’n word for word, but like a wise Physician, administring one excesse against another to reduce us to a perfect mean” (cpw 2:282–3).47 The phrase “plainly discover” situates Milton, at this moment and despite his unorthodox views on divorce, in the mainstream of both a humanist and a Protestant hermeneutics.

46 In his personal “Investigations into Christian Doctrine Drawn from the Sacred Scriptures Alone,” likely dictated in the late 1650s, Milton may adopt Luther’s principle of sola scriptura as the ground of Christian belief, but he relies more in his theology on Erasmian method to demonstrate the need to distinguish figurative from literal meanings, as in his systematic negation of Trinitarian theology, for example, in the fifth chapter of Book 1 of De Doctrina Christiana, “Of the Son of God,” where he declares: “In scripture there are two senses in which the Father is said to have begotten the Son: one literal, with reference to production; the other metaphorical, with reference to exaltation.” From this basic literary distinction, the rigorous logic of his argument proceeds to show the absence of a triune God in the Holy Bible, as, for example, in his survey of the word begotten and its linguistic uses in scripture, where he concludes, “since nowhere in the scriptures is the Son said to be begotten except as above, in a metaphorical sense, it is probable that he is called only begotten chiefly because he is the only mediator between God and man.” (cpw 6:205). 47 In a segment on “The Figurative Character of the Language of ‘Sacred Literature’” in the Ratio, Erasmus explains Christ’s words on divorce as an example of hyperbole, which was far too often misread as literal statement: “For when Christ took completely away from his people the right of divorce, he is expressing with vehemence his intent that they should not divorce without just cause” (Vessey, 207). Milton appears in this passage of Doctrine and Discipline to be directly paraphrasing Erasmus.

33093_Williams.indd 45

2022-09-01 16:54

46

The Communion of the Book

Whereas Christian writers from Augustine to Dante had emphasized the textual “effects” of scripture on readers who absorbed these effects in essential “passivity,” Stephen Dobranski remarks that the development in the High Middle Ages of a “four-fold” scheme of scriptural allegory had required “ordained” readers, at least, to search for the “literal, typological, moral, and mystical” meanings of scripture within a doctrinally fixed scheme of meaning (23–4). While Aquinas and Duns Scotus clearly “accepted the authority of the church’s teachings,” they “still insisted on the material sufficiency of Scripture – that is, readers could find everything necessary for their salvation in the divine text” (27). Protestant divines went beyond “material sufficiciency,” however, to urge “the complementary notion of Scripture’s formal sufficiency: readers could find in Scripture its correct interpretation, or, in Luther’s famous phrase, ‘Scriptures are their own interpreters’ (sacra scriptura sui ipsius interpres)” (27–8). Such a move weakened, and eventually sidelined, institutional authority.48 For if scriptures were the Christian’s only guide, what need of guidance by a universal Church? The sole prerequisite of Protestant hermeneutics was a discerning reader who could read scripture “aright.”49 Milton even borrowed a figure from “Demetrius the Rhetorician” to emphasize the labour required to read scripture with discernment.50 48 Fischer reports that “the Roman theologian Silvester Prieria” was still insisting in 1519 “that the book on which the Holy Church was founded had to remain a ‘mystery,’ to be explained only through the mediation of the power and authority of His Holiness the Pope in Rome” (252–3). Luther claimed, however, that all people had a “‘divine right’ to read God’s Word for themselves, without intermediary, and in their own language” (253). 49 As Dobranski proceeds to demonstrate, Protestant hermeneutics was not the sole driver of a participatory readership in the early modern era. He inventories a number of social practices and sites in which “[r]eaders were conditioned to participate in their books – whether through conventions of decoding [from emblem books to political allegories], studying [urged on by authors’ prefaces to the reader], lecturing [advised by John Evelyn to digest the ‘material they perused with lectures and discussions’], or socializing [already laid out in the interior ‘design of collegiate libraries’ that ‘offered readers opportunity to exchange ideas and experiences’]  – so that interpretation required, above all, readers’ active engagement in determining an unfixed meaning.” While “All these practices and circumstances suggest the active labour that constituted reading during the seventeenth century” (48), Dobranski does not slight the resulting “tension between the emerging cult of the author and the collaborative practices of early modern reading” (19). 50 In this, he differs little from a conservative Anglican like Meric Casaubon, who “insisted,” as Adrian Johns reports, that reading must not be “a passive imprinting on the mind – the writing of a supposedly divine spirit [on the minds of religious enthusiasts] – but an active and critical labor” (Nature, 424).

33093_Williams.indd 46

2022-09-01 16:54



A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution? 47

As he puts it, “Christ gives no full comments or continu’d discourses, but … speaks oft in Monosyllables, like a maister, scattering the ­heavenly grain of his doctrin like pearle heer and there, which requires a skilfull and laborious51 gatherer; who must compare the words he finds, with other precepts, with the end of every ordinance, and with the general analogy of Evangelick doctrine; otherwise many particular ­sayings would be but strange repugnant riddles” (cpw 2:338). Peter Stallybrass offers the plausible observation that such a “laborious gathering” in readerly “acts of collation” was nearly impossible52 before the invention of the codex, the Microsoft Word of the ancients that created a style of “­discontinuous” (71, 47) reading in flipping between pages instead of unscrolling a continuous roll.53 Milton’s training in Aristotelian logic at Cambridge, however, did not emphasize the reader’s participation or practice of collating widely separate texts. The deductive form of logic on which his university education was based was notoriously linear. Moreover, as Marshall McLuhan has shown, “Scholastic philosophy was deeply oral in its procedures and organization.”54 Books printed in classical Latin remained marginal at Cambridge, and Greek books were largely foreign to the curriculum of Milton’s era, which favoured oral disputation according

51 Dobranski silently adopts this trope of “labour” from Milton’s Divorce to represent the wider practice of reading in early modern England: “When I describe readers ­during the seventeenth century as ‘active’ or ‘collaborative,’ I mean that the act of reading was literally a co-laboring: writers invoked readers who had to participate in various ways to determine a text’s meaning” (17). Later, he will add Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning to Milton’s Areopagitica to preface his discussion of how “[o]ther contemporary texts similarly cast the pursuit of truth as a laborious searching and gathering” (44). 52 What this observation occludes is the first known instance of textual collation by Zenodotus, the founding libararian (ca 300–270 ce) of the Ptolemaic library at Alexandria, renowned for its policy of attempting “to amass all Greek texts, from tragedies to cookbooks,” every one of which was written on papyrus scrolls. “With multiple manuscripts of Homer at hand in the library, Zenodotus put together the earliest ‘standard editions’ of the Iliad and Odyssey – or of any book. He seemingly based his versions on the crucial principle of comparing manuscripts” (Turner, Philology, 9, 10). 53 Since Greek writing was horizontal to, and Roman writing “perpendicular to the length” of the scroll (Fischer, History, 75), it was easier, at least in theory, to collate the texts of Roman scrolls as compared with those of the Greeks. Remarkably, however, it was the Alexandrian Greeks who pioneered the practice of systematic collation of texts in the third century bce (see my “Introduction” above, 17–18, and chapter 3 below, 124n30). 54 McLuhan, Gutenburg, 144; see also chapter 3: 71n6, 76n20. McLuhan had also crowed a few years earlier that “print has been knocked off its pedestal by other media” (“New Media as Political Forms,” Explorations, 3 [1954]:123).

33093_Williams.indd 47

2022-09-01 16:54

48

The Communion of the Book

to the rules of Scholastic, or deductive, logic.55 Milton had to spend six years after Cambridge reading Greek literature and philosophy, and history both ancient and modern,56 to obtain the sort of education he had longed for in university. Encouraged by the example of Erasmus, he made himself “a skilfull and laborious gatherer” of widely separated scriptures in his own pamphlet quarrels with the bishops and, increasingly, with his former Presbyterian allies, once he began to publish what the Bible had really said about divorce at diverse times in widely different circumstances, as well as in texts written by different authors in various genres. What his work teaches readers more particularly is how to make themselves skilful “gatherers.”57 It is worth adding that Milton read widely in ten languages, including Greek and Hebrew,58 and, like the Graecist humanist Erasmus and the Hebraist Johannes Reuchlin, would “return to the sources” of biblical language, as when he refers in Tetrachordon (1645) to the meaning of the translated phrase “Meet for him,” in the Hebrew account of Eve’s creation in Genesis 2.18, as being “more expressive then other languages word for word can render it,” suggesting that “God as it were not satisfy’d with the meaning of a help, goes on describing another self, a second self, a very self it self” (cpw 2:600). At the same time, Milton wrote as a schoolmaster and public-spirited citizen during the English Civil Wars about “what is to be thought in generall of reading Books, what ever sort they be, and whether be more the benefit, or the harm that thence proceeds?” (cpw 2:507). These are only the first of many searching questions he raises in what is still one

55 Scholastic methods tended towards what structural linguist Roman Jakobson describes as “the metonymic pole” of discursive practices. See further discussion in this work: 151–5, 152n95, 169n26, 188n50, 188n52, 188n54, 215n90, 217n92. 56 See chapter 7, the subsection “Reading Milton Reading Euripides,” 370–5. 57 In the introduction to their essay anthology, Acts of Reading, Anderson and Netzley single out Dobranski’s Readers and Authorship for its account of “how incomplete, fragmented texts produce an active, participatory readership and cede substantial power to readers in the process. John King’s work on Foxe, both in his recent book and in his contribution to this anthology, comes to similar conclusions about reading practice, depicting the book as open to a variety of appropriations” (18). Milton’s “skilfull and laborious gatherer” is not the only example for Dobranski of “active readers” (Readers, 12, 62), although Milton is surely unique in the amount of power he cedes to readers. 58 Leo Miller, “Some Inferences,” 41–6, finds substantial evidence in the prose polemics, as well as in De Doctrina Christiana, that “for us, demonstrates Milton’s grasp of the subtleties to be found in the language of the Hebrew Scriptures” (42; italics in original).

33093_Williams.indd 48

2022-09-01 16:54



A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution? 49

of the great humanist arguments for freedom of speech and unrestricted reading in the formation of an eloquent citizenry, trained to defend their intellectual, political, and social liberty. A current reader like Sabrina Baron rightly focuses on what Milton argues for, rather than against, in Areopagitica (1644): “Milton is better understood not as the enemy of licensing, but rather as the proponent of the freedom to read, the advocate of the reader with a book ‘to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience’ (cpw 2:521)” (Baron, “Licensing,” 237). Indeed, the entire argument of Milton’s humanist tract is founded on the notion of testing and winnowing, of flushing out falsehood, as the ethical basis for permitting “reading [of] all manner of tractats, and hearing all matter of reason”:59 Good and evill we know in the field of this World grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involv’d and interwoven with the knowledge of evill, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discern’d, that those confused seeds which were impos’d on Psyche as an ­incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixt. It was from out of the rinde of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evill as two twins cleaving together leapt forth into the World. And ­perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evill, that is to say of knowing good by evill. As therefore the state of man now is. (cpw 2:514–15)

It is one of the relatively rare biblical arguments made in Areopagitica, all the more remarkable for its variance from contemporaneous ­arguments about the acquisition of knowledge. For, as literary historian Thomas Fulton recognizes, “In claiming that moral knowledge as well as judicature is the province of the sovereign,” even “Hobbes [had] reverted to a biblical argument: ‘Cognisance or Judicature of Good and Evill’ is ‘forbidden by the name of the fruit of the tree of 59 Baron supplies newly discovered evidence in the papers of Samuel Hartlib at Sheffield Library of Milton’s views of his own role as a state licenser from 1649 to 1652: “Sometime between May and October 1650, Milton discussed the latest regulations ­governing printing with Samuel Hartlib. Milton’s interpretation was that since no licensers were named in the most recent act regulating printing, ‘everybody may enter his book ­without license. Provided the printer’s or author’s name be entered, that they may be forthcoming if required’ … This precluded any necessity for authors’ manuscripts to be vetted for content by an official of the state or the church prior to printing” (234).

33093_Williams.indd 49

2022-09-01 16:54

50

The Communion of the Book

Knowledge’” (110). Obedience, in other words, was more important in received interpretations of the Fall of humankind than reasoned moral choices. By contrast, what “a volume” represented to Scholastic readers of the High Middle Ages was, “above all, authority” (Fischer, History, 203). On this view, “teachers principally indoctrinated their students to consider a text only in the light of inherited dogmatic ­criteria.” But those dogmatic criteria had to be derived from “two opposing domains – religious faith and human reason: the concordia discordantium or ‘harmony of different viewpoints’” (202). These differing points of view were aimed solely at reconciling the magisterium of Church teachings with the secular authority of Aristotle. Conversely, Milton held to the signal humanist principle60 that, “God uses not to captivat under a perpetuall childhood of prescription, but trusts him with the gift of reason to be his own chooser” (cpw 2:513–14). In consequence, Fulton concludes, “For Milton, individuals must be left free to come to moral knowledge themselves” (110). Indeed, “Milton’s idea is of reason itself, that it is but choosing, where the act, or process of making knowledge is far more important than its static or closed representation” (109). What Milton [and Adrian Johns in a very different sense] calls “knowledge in the making” (2:554) refers solely to those moral and intellectual choices about truth and ­falsehood made in the act of reading (and writing). In observing this principle, Milton also embraces the epistemological heritage of humanism, which held that the “human intellect … is suited only to making response to specific problems – generally, problems of moral choice – that arise in the ongoing process of living; it is not suited,” as Scholasticism taught, “to the elaboration of broad, abstract ­philosophical doctrines.”61 Despite that image of aloof superiority with which I began this sketch, Milton’s eight-page pamphlet “Of Education” (June 1644), published five months before Areopagitica, demonstrates his abiding faith in

60 Nauert points out that the Renaissance “studia humanitatis” emphasized “the making of wise moral choices” as the true end of learning (12, 15). 61 Nauert, 204. In many respects, all three of Milton’s long poems turn on this ­humanist trope of “moral choice”: Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost on whether to trust or to question God’s command; Jesus in Paradise Regain’d on whether to trust his own or Satan’s authority in reading scripture; and Samson in Milton’s “dramatic poem” on whether to trust the written Law or his own “rouzing motions.”

33093_Williams.indd 50

2022-09-01 16:54



A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution? 51

people’s desire for “things usefull to be known.”62 Here, what he most scorns is the “wretched barbarizing against the Latin and Greek idiom” in received methods of teaching, and even more so, “the usuall method of teaching Arts,” which he calls “an old errour of universities not yet well recover’d from the Scholastick grosnesse of barbarous ages,63 that in stead of beginning with Arts most easie, and those be such as are most obvious to the sence, they present their young unmatriculated novices at first comming [sic] with the most intellective abstractions of Logic & metaphysicks” (cpw 2:373–4).64 Some of his additions to the curriculum, like music and mathematics, lead Roy Flannagan to conclude that he modelled his proposed “academies on those of Plato’s Republic and Castiglione’s The Courtier” (977), the former instanced by Marsilio Ficino, 65 who became head of the Platonic Academy of Florence in 1462, and the latter by Baldassare Castiglione, another Florentine humanist, in his Book of the Courtier (1528). Like Petrarch (1304–1374), whose “attacks on traditional education seem directed mostly at the universities” (Nauert, 44), the youthful Milton had, as late as 1627,66 scoffed, in front of all the faculty at Cambridge University, in his Third Prolusion – An Attack on the Scholastic Philosophy, the basis of the university curriculum – at “this dull and feeble subject matter” whose “style itself is dry and lifeless, so exactly suited to the barrenness of the subject that it might well have been composed 62 “Of Education” (1644), cpw 2:369. Here, if Milton echoes Francis Bacon, he also sounds like Pier Paolo Vergerio. Although Margaret King does not refer to Milton’s treatise, she quotes the Paduan schoolmaster’s treatise (1403) in which studia humanitatis is defined as the ability “to summon forth our books, in which are found all things either most pleasant to know or most useful for living a good and worthy life” (trans. King, 12). 63 M.L. King offers a useful reminder, however, that scholasticism itself was a product of the twelfth-century Renaissance that came from a “renewed interest in classical texts,” particularly “the books of Roman civil law” and “most of the works of Aristotle” that were translated during that century “into Latin from Greek and Arabic versions” (5). 64 Here, Milton also resembles Valla, who “was critical of scholastic philosophy” for its neglect of the art of rhetoric,” his “main objection” being, as Annet den Haan phrases it so very well, that scholastic theologians “had invented a new technical jargon that was alien to the classical sources and that obscured the pure and natural thinking of the ancients and the early Church” (29). 65 Before Ficino, all but three of Plato’s lengthy dialogues were “unknown in Western Europe. A skilled Hellenist, Ficino undertook the translation project with Medici support, completing it in 1468: a total of thirty-six dialogues in the version that remained standard into the nineteenth century” (M.L. King, 22). 66 Leo Miller, “Milton’s Quarrel,” 77–87, makes a persuasive case for Winter Term 1627 as the likely date of the public delivery of Prolusion 3, “Against Scholastic Philosophy.”

33093_Williams.indd 51

2022-09-01 16:54

52

The Communion of the Book

in the reign of the gloomy king Saturn” (cpw 1:240). Milton was literally repeating the gesture of Petrarch in his Invective on His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others (1367; rev. 1371), following an attack on him by a group of Venetian students for his rejection of Aristotle’s authority. Stung by insults from his false friends for expressing opinions that “ran counter to their sect and its ancestral laws” (Celenza, Petrarch, 190), he publicly chides his so-called friends for their intellectual conformity (using “hairesis,” meaning choice, for sect), and uncritical obeisance to authority (using “paternae leges” for ancestral laws). Yet “Petrarch’s real objection,” as Christopher Celenza sees it, “is not against Aristotle but rather against Aristotelians” (199). Almost five decades after he had abandoned his studies in law, first at the University of Montpellier (1316–20) and then at Bologna (1320–26), Petrarch now justified that decision in a legal brief of sorts. “Symbolically, Aristotle stands for a curriculum” as the sole philosopher, Celenza explains, “and, more, for institutions and the way they can, consciously or not, replicate themselves in an uncritical way. Petrarch forcefully took the deliberate position of an outsider to existing institutions” (199–200). Very publicly, Milton also claimed with similar force to be “an outsider to existing institutions.” For his troubles, he was rusticated, sent home for some weeks, until the institution agreed to transfer him to another tutor. Milton’s Attack on Scholastic Philosophy sounds much like Erasmus as well at the Sorbonne in 1496, chafing at this medieval philosophy: “Those studies,” Erasmus wrote, “can make a man opinionated and contentious; can they make him wise? They exhaust the mind by a certain jejune and barren subtlety, without fertilizing or inspiring it. By their stammering and by the stains of their impure style they disfigure theology which had been enriched and adorned by the eloquence of the ancients.”67 Milton pits the “petty disputations of sour old men, which reek, if not of the cave of Trophonius, at any rate of the monkish cells in which they were written,” against the power of “divine poetry,” which “raises aloft the soul smothered by the dust of earth and sets it among the mansions of heaven.” Like Erasmus, he too pits “Rhetoric,”68 67 Qtd. by Huizinga, Erasmus, 22–3. See further discussion in this work: 106n106, 125, 149–50. 68 Sloane, Donne, Milton, 209–78, views Milton’s rhetorical practices as opposite to those of Erasmus, Donne, and others, not least in his refusal to present the side of the “other,” even when that “otherness” is in the self. Commenting on Milton’s epic voice in “The Disintegration of Humanist Rhetoric,” Sloane remarks that “Otherness is no longer”

33093_Williams.indd 52

2022-09-01 16:54



A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution? 53

which “so captivates the minds of men … that it has the power now of moving them to pity, now of inciting them to hatred, now of arousing them to warlike valor, now of inspiring them beyond the fear of death,” against the deadness of Scholastic philosophy. Indeed, Milton’s stated preferences remind us that this humanist revolt in reading was more like a long overdue insurrection of the rhetor and of ancient classical rhetoric69 against medieval Scholastic logic. Or, as historian Margaret L. King defines the issue, classical rhetoric was “deliberately openended – truths are raised for consideration, not proved; diverse positions are entertained, none embraced – where dialectic is closed, seeking only to prove that a proposition has been demonstrated” (“Return,” 13). Although historian James Turner refers specifically to the disdain expressed by Erasmus for Scholastic method, his characterization is also true for Milton: “Scholastic and humanist stood at odds not in ­valuing ancient Greek writings but in how to approach them: the one philosophical, the other philological; the one dialectical, the other rhetorical; the one logical, the other historical” (Philology, 40). Like Erasmus, Milton attributes efficacy to “History, skilfully narrated,” which “now calms and soothes the restless and troubled mind, now fills it with delight, and now brings tears to the eyes” (cpw 1:241, 243). The teenaged ­student could not declare more clearly or publicly that he is not

even “a rhetorical principle” (149) in Paradise Lost. Rather, Sloane reads the poem in terms of Ramistic logic “as an embodiment of truth rather than as an action, as a form to be contemplated rather than as a dispositio” (147). While “embodiment” may be the goal of Milton’s rhetoric, the reader, not the author, is the primary actor. Otherness inheres in the act of reading itself, which becomes the “embodiment of truth” by the interiorization of the word. It is then not the formal disposition of the poet’s art, but rather the reader’s inward ordering or possession of that word that underlies Milton’s humanist rhetoric of choice. For more on “inwardness” in Erasmus, see chapter 3: 134–40. For a wider examination of early modern reading practices in John Foxe, see Acts of Reading, ed. Anderson and Netzley, with their reminder that such “an examination is not aided, we think, by shoehorning broader notions culled from reception or reader response theory  – whether that practiced by Stanley Fish or by Wolfgang Iser – into history of the book scholarship, but rather by showing how the Actes and Monuments thematizes its own reading and interpretation, as well as directing, inciting, and impeding it” (17). I follow their lead in reading the works of Erasmus and Milton, as well as those of Foxe, as very deliberately thematizing their own reading and interpretation. 69 To the extent that Poggio Bracciolini’s discovery of the lost text of the Roman rhetorician Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (ca 95 ce) led to the recovery of this lost art, Poggio had as great an influence on the reading revolution as any Renaissance humanist.

33093_Williams.indd 53

2022-09-01 16:54

54

The Communion of the Book

of “Aristotle’s” school of “lifeless” Scholastic logic, but rather of Petrarch70 and Erasmus’s school of poetic “eloquence” and revivifying humanist history.71 By adding education to his remit, Milton both rounds out the humanist curriculum and anticipates his later contributions to a humanist jurisprudence, historiography, and literary classicism.72 As one of “Paul’s pigeons,” Milton was raised in the traditions of the very grammar school that Erasmus had helped his friend John Colet to found (ca 1510), even “writing textbooks for its use” (Nauert, 161). Colet was torn between wanting his pupils to acquire “the old Latin speech and the very Roman tongue which in the time of Tully and Sallust and Virgil and Terence was used,” if still wishing to restrict its content to ancient Roman Christians such as “Saint Jerome and Saint Ambrose and Saint Austen and many learned holy doctors learned in their times.”73 But Colet was unique among English educators of the time in strongly encouraging the teaching of Greek – despite having no Greek himself (Huizinga, 30) – if only to equip students to read the epistles of St Paul rather than to read Homer’s epics or Menander’s comedies in the original. But despite his contradictions, Colet would appoint William Lily (1468–1522) as his first headmaster in July 1510;74 and Lily took the curriculum in a direction more congenial to Erasmus.75

70 Eden, The Renaissance Rediscovery, notes that Petrarch’s rediscovery of Cicero’s ­ rivate letters led thereafter to reforms in education whereby “Cicero’s Letters to Friends” p (Epistolae ad Familiares) became “a standard school text” early in the sixteenth century, “providing models of good Latin for young boys to follow. Both the choice of text – an ancient letter collection – and the use to which it was put – teaching rhetorical imitation – helped to define humanist education, which in turn defined the movement as a whole in opposition to scholasticism, and especially to the scholastic curriculum” (72). 71 Erasmus recalls his own introduction “into the world of Parisian humanists” in an encomium he contributed to “the first specimen of humanistic historiography in France” (Huizinga, 24–5), Robert Gaguin’s De origine et gestis Francorum Compendium (1495). 72 See chapters 5, 6, and 7 below. 73 Quoted in Adams, Teaching Classics, 27. 74 William Lily was more “Petrarchan” than Colet in his curricular reforms, creating a classical “cultural programme” by collapsing “the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic)” and the “four mathematical arts of the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music),” as Margaret King sees them reclassified, into five subjects of a new humanist ­curriculum: “grammar and rhetoric … plus poetry, history, and moral philosophy” (6–7). 75 Adams notes that Colet’s statutes for his school “required the children to learn firstly the Catechism in English, then his own Latin Accidence (or another’s grammar book, he declares, if it is better), ‘to induce children more speedily to Latin speech and

33093_Williams.indd 54

2022-09-01 16:54



A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution? 55

As Matthew Adams remarks, “The rebirth of learning demanded Latin scholarship of the purest kind, and humanism, ‘the first and last great intellectual movement to touch the schools until the nineteenth century, revolutionized both the means and ends of education’ as it had been understood in the Middle Ages” (20). In effect, the founding of St Paul’s School, and the dozens of other secular grammar schools founded in coming decades in England on the model of St Paul’s statutes (23), ended a clerical “monopoly on teaching” (9).76 Indeed, Adams concludes, “As the classical influence took hold in England at the end of the fifteenth century, it was the humanists who turned education and began to study classical texts for their style and content, just as much for their grammar and rhetoric” (16). A century later, “Paul’s pigeons,” including young John Milton, were still reading the classics in Latin and Greek and imitating them in their own compositions, much as young Erasmus had been taught to do in the 1480s as a pupil of Alexander Hegius77 at St Lebwin’s school in Deventer in the Netherlands (Nauert, 105). Much of Milton’s career as a reader and writer, like that of Petrarch or Erasmus, was given to challenging received ideas in order to recover the liberty of lost “Truth.” During a great crisis (1644) in the Parliamentary cause, when Essex’s army had just been lost to the royalists down in Cornwall, and the liberties of the “nation” were in deep peril before Parliament would pass the Self-Denying Ordinance, aiming to promote the best military officers and open up careers to the t­alents, Milton penned a remarkably confident, even ebullient portrait of readers and writers still engaged in pitched battle against intractable traditionalists for political and religious “Truth” in the cause of intellectual independence:

then the Institutum Christiani Hominis ... and the Copia’” of Erasmus (26). William Lily, the first headmaster, was evidently more inclined to adopt classical Roman and Greek authors in a curriculum that also included Erasmus, as well as the Church Fathers. 76 Witt, Two Latin Cultures, argues that the “overall effect of the educational policies” of the German emperor Otto I much earlier, in the tenth century, “was to promote the tendency initiated under the Carolingians of making both administrative office in government and the culture of the book itself into clerical monopolies” (75). 77 Hegius, one of the great humanist educators of his era, was also a correspondent and perhaps a student of the Dutch “Hellenist, Hebraist, and dialectician, Rudolf Agricola” (M. King, 9). Agricola is mostly known today for his early Life of Petrarch (1477).

33093_Williams.indd 55

2022-09-01 16:54

56

The Communion of the Book

Behold now this vast City: a City of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, ­encompast and surrounded with [God’s] protection; the shop of warre hath not there more anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed Justice in defence of beleaguer’d Truth, then there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, ­revolving new notions and idea’s [sic] wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty the approaching Reformation: others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement. What could a man require more from a Nation so pliant and so prone to seek after knowledge. What wants there to such a towardly and pregnant soile, but wise and faithfull labourers, to make a knowing people, a Nation of Prophets, of Sages, and of Worthies. (cpw 2:553–4)

It is an extraordinary portrait of the energy, passion, and industry of a people newly liberated from the constraints of religious dogma and “single Person” rule, and a ringing vote of confidence in a commonwealth of readers where knowledge in the making would circulate among “a knowing people” entitled to be called “a Nation of … Worthies.” These humanist images of an imagined “Nation” of readers offer a useful signpost for this larger study of early modern reading, which only in part is about Milton’s last poems, and which aims to show how each author refracts the “light” of early modern humanism in various ways in response to changing social conditions. Ultimately, as Charles Nauert explains the decline of the “Renaissance Dream” in the seventeenth century, humanism itself had now changed. Late humanism had only “survived by dissolving into a number of separate though interrelated strands” (202). These interrelated strands – or refractions of humanist “light,” as I prefer to see them – reach their full manifestation in Milton, who did more than any of his contemporaries to display the full range of reading strategies that had always been nascent in humanist practice. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer remark in their introduction to the essays collected in Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies (2002) how, “as print culture spreads and literacy increases, modes of reading become more various and distinct” (4). But early “print culture,” as we shall see, needs to be understood as “humanist culture”; this culture of humanist reading had always ­contained “various and distinct,” if unrealized “modes of reading” that, in the long decline of humanism (which largely spanned Milton’s lifetime), were refracted through various lenses of changing religious, social, and political forces.

33093_Williams.indd 56

2022-09-01 16:54



A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution? 57

Thomas Fulton has already explored Milton’s use of a mode of reading that originated with Erasmus’s contemporary Niccolò Machiavelli, that appears in Milton’s commonplace book, containing a record of his extensive research program of reading in the 1630s in response to the crisis of “single” rule of the King without Parliament – that of political and constitutional history. Fulton remarks that Milton’s autograph commonplaces, for example, are rarely drawn from “the classics and the Bible,” as were the majority of such by his contemporaries. Rather, “it suggests that he was in fact immersing himself in a surprisingly ­different corpus of reading than preconceived notions about early modern reading might have suggested” (200), although its basis is recognizably humanist. Fulton then reads Milton’s commonplace manuscript as a prescript of his early political prose to flesh out a concealed bibliography of Milton’s extraordinarily broad reading of political and constitutional history, as well as to explain how that historical reading informs his revolutionary prose from Areopagitica to Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (1651), after which the commonplace book of a man who was now blind fell into complete disuse. In this book, I investigate multiple authors and methods of “reading” which do not appear in the commonplace book of its blind author, but which may still be legible, for example, in the reading methods of Jesus and Satan in Paradise Regain’d, where Jesus literally becomes the Word through his humanist reading of Hebrew scripture, or in the Euripidean Chorus of Samson Agonistes, where a classical type of ironic reading could reveal the critical folly of misreading Milton’s tragedy as heroic “epic.” While I certainly share Fulton’s judgment that Milton’s commonplace book shows him “rejecting in practice Erasmus’s emphasis on the phrase,” or aphorisms “recorded from classical and vernacular literature” (200), I find him in other respects to be closer to Erasmus than he is to any other humanist, including Petrarch. Why that is so is at the core of this study.

Crossing the Alps: The Historical Evolution of the Renaissance One aspect of the Northern Renaissance that quickly became revolutionary was its decisive turn from “Petrarchan” philology – the emending and reconstruction of classical Latin texts – to biblical philology. The choice of northern humanists like Erasmus and Reuchlin to make

33093_Williams.indd 57

2022-09-01 16:54

58

The Communion of the Book

ancient Greek and Hebrew their arbiters of religious “truth” tilled the soil for early modernization. As Elizabeth Eisenstein insists, “The very idea of going back to Greek and Hebrew texts was ‘revolutionary’ in the sixteenth century, even though it had been advocated intermittently by biblical scholars ever since Jerome” (Printing, 339). And the fruit of that scholarly husbandry ripened quickly under increasing pressure from the printing press, another northern innovation. While Lorenzo Valla’s Vulgate philology had been read in monasteries and at the court of Pope Nicholas V,78 the Greek and Hebrew philology of Erasmus and Reuchlin was now available down in the street. For that reason, a misleading, yet stubbornly persistent, view of the Renaissance as a largely secular development can be dismissed out of hand.79 Eighty years ago, Theodor Mommsen, the medieval historian and grandson (by marriage) of sociologist Max Weber, was still touting Jacob Burckhardt’s thesis80 (and finding broad acceptance for the idea) that Italian humanism was mainly a secular challenge to medieval religion. In the language of Petrarchan metaphor, Mommsen insisted that “[w]ith this change of emphasis from things religious to things secular, the significance of the old metaphor [of Christian light vs pagan darkness] became reversed: Antiquity, so long considered as the ‘Dark Age,’ now became the time of ‘light’ which had to be ‘restored’; the era ­following Antiquity, on the other hand, was submerged in obscurity” (228). Mommsen avoided the troubling details, like the fact that Petrarch took minor orders as a cleric, or that this true father of Italian 78 Den Haan points out that, “[i]n the early sixteenth century, it was Valla’s rejection of scholastic theology, together with his belief that the grammarian was authorized to ­engage in Biblical criticism, that made him popular among Northern humanists and ­reformers, especially by way of his reception by Erasmus” (37). 79 Nothing indicates this more clearly than the invocation to Petrarch’s Latin epic Africa, where he appeals to Christ for inspiration to celebrate his pagan Roman hero Scipio: “And You, Highest Parent, the world’s most certain hope and highest glory, Whom our age celebrates as Victor over the ancient gods and over Hell, Whom we see revealing fivefold wounds profuse on His innocent body, bring succor” (i:7; trans. Ellis, 7). 80 Jacob Burckhardt, Civilization, resolutely turned his back on Basel (where he taught history) and the later culture of the Northern Renaissance, to make Petrarch and his humanist heirs the sole founders of a completely secular culture composed of highly developed individuals. Particularly in the Tuscan city states where the ancients continued to be read, and where “[t]he spectacle of ancient Rome and a familiarity with its leading writers were not without influence,” “The most elevated political thought and the most varied forms of human development are found united in the history of Florence, which in this sense deserves the name of the first modern State in the world” (48).

33093_Williams.indd 58

2022-09-01 16:54



A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution? 59

humanism once signed a letter he wrote to Cicero, his favourite author from antiquity, dated “the sixteenth of June, in the thirteen hundred and forty-fifth year since the birth of that God whom you never knew.”81 While Petrarch chose to make a note of gentle reproof and cultural limitation82 the last word in his Epistolae Familiares (1359; 1366) – the twenty-fourth and final book of which contained his imagined correspondence with a series of classical authors – it was not the whole of the story, and requires a more complex and nuanced account of ancient thought that Petrarch himself framed with Christian “truth,” even as he wrote back to his Greek and Roman models. The Italian Renaissance, which seeded the Northern Renaissance, remained none the less distinct from the flowering of the later culture of the printed book. Francesco Petrarch, Leonardo Bruni, and Lorenzo Valla all wrote before the advent of printing. Each was a scribal humanist whose hope of classical revival was shaped by his sense of Latin birthright as an heir to the Roman Empire.83 Each was Italocentric not just in terms of his peninsular outlook or local allegiance, but in his deeper sense of Roman identity.84 This is nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in Petrarch’s epic poem Africa (left incomplete at his death but published posthumously in 1396–97).85 A native Tuscan, born in Arezzo

81 Trans. and qtd. by Margaret L. King, 11. 82 Celenza, “Petrarch, Latin,” maintains that Petrarch “does not wish,” even in his imagined correspondence with Cicero, “to retire into an arid classicism because he knows it would be a meaningless escape from history. And with that same historical viewpoint, he looks at ancient pagan texts as fixed in time, realizing that the ancients did not know the true faith, even if one could and should learn from their wisdom” (512). 83 Such sentiments were not confined to humanist poets and scholars. Pope Sixtus IV, sponsor of the Sistine Chapel, shared them, as did others. As Burckhardt reports, “Under Paul II, Sixtus IV, and Alexander VI, [the first two being contemporaries of Bruni and Valla], magnificent processions formed part of the Carnival, representing the scene most attractive to the imagination of the time – the triumph of the Roman Imperator” (111). 84 “In Poggio’s [Bracciolini’s] walks through Rome the study of the remains themselves is for the first time more intimately combined with that of the ancient authors and inscriptions – the latter he sought out from among all the vegetation in which they were embedded – the writer’s imagination is severely restrained, and the memories of Christian Rome carefully excluded” (Burckhardt, 109). In fact, Poggio would strenuously object to Valla’s unorthodox Vulgate philology; but then that Biblical philology was also “carefully excluded” by Burckhardt, who needed Valla to be a secular humanist. 85 Burckhardt maintains that, while “the poem is unreadable,” Italians of the “fourteenth century recognized with sound historical sense that the time of the second Punic war had been the noonday of Roman greatness; and Petrarch could not resist writing of this time” (154, 153). He seems unaware of Petrarch’s notice of historical discontinuity in Africa.

33093_Williams.indd 59

2022-09-01 16:54

60

The Communion of the Book

but raised in Provence,86 where his father was a notary at the papal court at Avignon,87 Petrarch was stirred by the rise of the Roman Republic in its conquest of Carthage. Renaissance scholars Gerhard Regn and Bernhard Huss note that “Petrarch is not simply a descendant of the classical poets. It is only through him that the project begun by the ancients fully comes into its own. Ennius, Scipio’s poet and companion, brought the Muses to Latium. Centuries later, Petrarch, ‘Ennius alter’ [another Ennius]88 (Afr. 2:443), will recall them in his epic on Scipio – with this rebirth of poetry clearly conceived of as surpassing what went before” (“Petrarch’s Rome,” 89). Petrarch’s crusade to ­correct and improve classical poetry is also rooted, however, in his blistering scorn for the political fiction of Rome’s Christian rebirth in the Holy Roman Empire. The crowning of Charlemagne by Pope Leo III in Rome on Christmas Day, 800 ce had established a myth of political continuity that, for more than half a millennium, supported a bizarre conceit of the Roman Empire being “born again” as the “Holy” Roman Empire. It was a foreign appropriation and cultural delusion that Petrarch held in contempt. In its place, he would write a poem about “Rome” reborn. In the dream of Scipio Africanus, conqueror of Carthage as Rome’s chief rival to dominion – a vision comprising the first two books of Petrarch’s Africa – the spirit of Scipio’s father appears to him like the ghost of Aeneas’s father in Virgil’s Aeneid,89 to instruct him about Rome’s 86 Celenza, Petrarch: Everywhere, claims that the poet’s strong sense of exile from his Tuscan homeland during his childhood “helped create a sense of ‘Italian-ness’ that had a long afterlife. Petrarch routinely signed himself and was addressed as ‘from Florence’ … Francisco Petracchi de Florentia, or ‘Francis, son of Petracco, of Florence’” (17). 87 “The first medieval library in Western Europe to exceed a paltry 2,000 volumes was the papal library at Avignon” (Fischer, History, 224). But little of it was classical writing. It is most unlikely that Petrarch found much in this intellectual desert to interest him. 88 Marchesi, “Petrarch’s Philological Epic,” points to the line of poetic succession that Petrarch establishes in the ninth and final book of Africa through Homer’s appearance “to his successor Ennius, the first bard to recount Scipio’s heroic actions,” before “Ennius is in turn afforded a vision of his successor Petrarch, the ultimate singer of the general’s glory” (117). Petrarch thus outdoes Dante in superseding both Homer and Virgil; or rather, as Marchesi sees it, his Africa “moves from Homer to Ennius to Petrarch, strategically bypassing Virgil and his immediate successors” (126). 89 Regn and Huss maintain that it was “its conception of history that made the Aeneid so attractive to the Middle Ages,” with its “patterns of promise and fulfillment” that fit “the kind of thinking which could not conceive of history as anything other than the history of salvation” (100). It is precisely this notion of history that Dante “unfolds in his Divine Comedy,” where “the divine plan foresees that Dante will surpass Virgil and accomplish what the pagan poet could only begin” (101).

33093_Williams.indd 60

2022-09-01 16:54



A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution? 61

historic destiny90 in his approaching conquest of Hannibal at the Battle of Zama (202 bce), and Rome’s rise to “queen of the world.”91 But he is also scathing in his vision of Rome’s latter destiny, once it has been taken over by “foreigners of Hispanic and African stock” and of “effeminate Syria,” followed by “loquacious Greece” and “hard Gaul” who are going to assume the mantle of “Roman” empire.92 The final indignity for the elder Scipio is that, long after the “barbarians” have grasped “the scepters and the glory of empire, won by us with such great labor, the power will rest at last with Boreas,” the Germanic successor to Byzantine and Frankish pretenders. “Who can bear,” he remonstrates, “that these dregs of humanity, these disgraced leavings of our sword, attain to the height of affairs?”93 It is a damning indictment of contending powers in Petrarch’s day, where two rival emperors (Louis IV, 1328–1347; and Charles IV, 1346–1378) claimed from their competing thrones north of the Alps to preserve the ancient Roman Empire in the guise of a Holy Roman Empire. Just as ­hypocritical if more unforgivably immoral, are the clergy of the “Babylonian” papacy at Avignon,94 whom Petrarch excoriates in three sonnets of the Canzoniere 90 Virgil’s Anchises had established both the formal and the thematic precedent by teaching his son Aeneas on his arrival in the Underworld, “Romane, memento / (hae tibi erunt artes), pacisque imponere morem, / parcere subiectis, et debellare superbos” (Roman, remember, these are your arts, to impose the habit of peace by sparing the humble and ­battling down the proud) [my translation]. From Virgil, Loeb Classical Library, vi:851–53. 91 Marchesi, “Petrarch’s,” makes a case, on the other hand, for Petrarch having taken up the cause of “the philological party,” a cause célèbre dating back to “Augustine’s Confessions and Macrobius’s Saturnalia,” which required him to defend Queen Dido’s reputation. In so doing, he could claim to surpass Virgil as a poet-historian (120–1). 92 In some respects, Petrarch identifies himself in Africa not only as “another Ennius” but as another Scipio, wresting away the mantle of Roman cultural empire from the “­barbarians” (including Dante allegoria) who had seized it for their so-called Holy Roman Empire. See Celenza, Petrarch (2017), for similar comments on the omission of Virgil and Dante from the line of poetic succession in the ninth book of Africa, suggesting that Petrarch “believed there was a lacuna in modern culture having to do with serious cultivation of poetry and that he was the person to fill that lacuna” (133). 93 Erik Ellis, 7. Petrarch’s full text in these excerpted lines reads: “nam sceptra decusque / Imperii tanto nobis fundata labore / Externi rapient Hispane stirpis et Afre. / Quis ferat has hominum sordes nostrique pudendas / Relliquias gladii fastigia prendere rerum?’ (2.274–8); followed by “quin Siria mollis / Porriget ipsa manum, mox Gallia dura, loquaxque / Grecia, et Illiricum: tandem cadet ista potestas / In Boream” (2.290–3). 94 The French king Phillipe IV’s capture of the papacy under Clement V and its removal to Avignon during the period 1309–76 – almost the whole of Petrarch’s life – left Petrarch cynical about a “Babylon of the West” on the banks of the Rhône, which he ­likened in a letter to “the hellish streams of Cocytus and Acheron” in Hades. “Here reign

33093_Williams.indd 61

2022-09-01 16:54

62

The Communion of the Book

(136–8).95 Addressing the Holy Father directly, he calls him “you crook” and “you slave of wine, of soft beds, of good foods, / who try the limits of debauchery” in scenes composed of self-regarding sybarites, where “Young girls and old men wildly romp around / your chambers, and then through their middle flits / Beelzebub with bellows, fire, and mirrors.”96 Recoiling from such a shamefully “dark age,” the poet turns away toward a virtuous Roman republic in Africa – a nation of his own devising. Petrarch’s political vision of Rome comes primarily from his reading of the republican historian Titus Livius (59 bce – 17 ce), whose Ab urbe condita (From the Founding of the City) was begun soon after Augustus had defeated his rivals in the Triumvirate and made himself emperor under cover of republican forms.97 Virgil highlights this central event in Aeneid 8, as Aeneas stares in wonder at the future history of Rome forged on the resplendent shield fashioned for him by the god Vulcan, husband to Aeneas’s mother Venus. At the centre of the shield – and of Virgilian history – he sees “Augustus Caesar leading into battle / Italians, with both senators and people, / Household gods and great gods” in his swift rout of “the power of the East, of Egypt, / Even of distant Bactra of the steppes” in the naval battle at Actium. “And in his wake the Egyptian consort [Cleopatra] came / So shamefully.”98 It is a vision of Augustus’s imperial triumph over the “barbaric” east (31 bce), imposing the rule of Roman law and the “habit of peace”99 on all others. But the vision of Scipio in Petrarch’s epic offers a contrary republican

the successors of the poor fishermen of Galilee,” he rails, who are governed by “a criminal host” given to “licentious banquets” and “slavish luxury,” so that “we seem to be among the kings of the Persians or Parthians, before whom we must fall down and worship, and who cannot be approached except presents be offered” (Robinson, 502–3). 95 Coogan, “Petrarch’s,” identifies three sonnets “printed with some of the Liber sine nomine,” notably in the Reformer Antonio Brucióli’s edition of the Canzoniere (1551), “for these poems capture the spirit of the letters” most critical “of clerical conduct” (4). 96 Essential Petrarch, trans. Peter Hainsworth, 60. 97 Marchesi indicates that the plot of Africa “is based on Petrarch’s close and imaginative reading of the third deca (decade) of Livy’s Ab urbe condita libri (History of Rome), starting with Hasdrubal’s retreat across the Strait of Gibraltar in 21.61 and culminating with the account of Scipio’s triumph that rounds off book 30” (113). 98 Aeneid: Virgil, trans. Fitzgerald, 254. The Latin verse begins: “hinc Augustus agens Italos in proelia Caesar / cum patribus populoque, penatibus et magnis dis,” and ­concludes, “hinc ope barbarica variisque Antonius armis, / victor ab Aurorae populis et litore rubro, / Aegyptum viresque Orientis et ultima secum / Bactra vehit, sequiturque (nefas) Aegyptia coniunx” (Loeb Library, viii:678–9, 685–8). 99 See my discussion of this scene in Media, Memory, 97–9.

33093_Williams.indd 62

2022-09-01 16:54



A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution? 63

history prior to the establishment of empire under Augustus. As Regn and Huss cogently argue, Petrarch’s “break with Christian historiographical traditions is nowhere more apparent than in the almost casual insertion of Augustan world supremacy between the horrors of the Roman civil war and the decadence of the emperors … [H]uman actions in history are no longer indicative of the divine plan according to which God governs historical events” (102). Petrarch, “another Ennius” (ms. 1396–7), did not presume, however, in his classicizing history, to alter the sacred texts or traditions of Christianity. Rather, his was a political reaction against Frankish and Germanic imperial rule. This resistance was later elaborated in Bruni’s History of the Florentine People (1442), and Valla’s De elegantiae linguae Latinae (ms. 1441; print 1471),100 each of which added to Petrarch’s personal project of rivalling or even surpassing the cultural a­ chievements of ancient Rome. What is equally apparent in these works, however, is the implicit rejection by each writer of transalpine “Roman” rule. Whether in the republican heroism of Petrarch’s epic, or in Bruni’s Livian history of Florence or the Ciceronian republicanism of Valla’s Latin grammar, each work either models or advocates for a form of Italian civic humanism – each one an expression of national desire.101 Each of these authors was a Christian cleric (Petrarch, Valla), or else a papal secretary (Bruni, Valla) who, while concerned with political and social regeneration in the Church and state, could still take the literary and cultural primacy of Rome for granted. Assiduously, each followed the ancients in producing his own renovations of those cultural forms he most valued and admired in Roman antiquity. Aside from Virgil or Cicero, Petrarch’s favourite ancient author was Augustine of Hippo. But in his Secretum (The Secret),102 he made it his right to address the 100 For Valla’s De elegantiae, see chapter 3 of this work: 126, 65n107; for Bruni’s Historiarum, see my “Introduction,” 10–11; and chapter 6: 302–12. 101 Margaret King observes that “[h]umanism arose in most densely urbanized ­regions of Europe” (16), particularly in “the political and social world of northern Italian cities” of “the Lombard League” (7), where there was greater wealth and more economic disparity. She reports how the quattrocento Florentine “humanist Alamanno Rinuccini (1426–99)” maintained in his dialogue “De libertate (‘On Liberty’)” (1479) that “when ­liberty truly prevailed in Florence,” the comune itself ensured “that the wealthy not oppress the poor, or equally that the poor not assault the rich, but that each may preserve what is his safe from the aggression of others” (17). Urban civic humanism left Church doctrine alone. 102 Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi, Petrarch: A Complete Guide, give 1347 as a probable start date for Secretum, and 1349 as the likely date of a first revision (xviii–xix).

33093_Williams.indd 63

2022-09-01 16:54

64

The Communion of the Book

Church Father. At one point in his imaginary dialogue with the past, Petrarch confesses to being captivated by his reading. “But ‘as soon as the book leaves my hands, all my feeling for it vanishes.’” To which the saint responds: “When you come to any passages that seem to you u ­ seful, make a firm mark against them, which may serve as lime in your memory, lest otherwise they might fly away” (cited by Fischer, History, 210). It is good advice, even if it is put in the mouth of the imagined other to give him good counsel. “Here, a reader,” Fischer rightly concludes, “becomes author.” In De viris illustribus (Of Illustrious Men), Petrarch further makes himself the author of “a collation of discrete rare texts” of biography to create comparisons through juxtapositions that alter his models. While every text in Petrarch’s era was “monumental and thus indivisible,” Petrarch, “the prototypical auctorial reader, refused to play the objective and passive recipient,” and instead “became the subjective, active interpreter,” thus freeing his “reading from its monolithic medieval pedestal” (Fischer, 210–11) on which the author’s authority rested. “After Petrarch,” says Alberto Manguel, “the ‘collating form of reading would become the common method of scholarship throughout Europe.’”103 Two generations later, Lorenzo Valla would even use this “collating form of reading” to correct the Vulgate Bible. Although Jerome, as Valla indicated in one of two prefaces (den Haan, 25) to his Annotations to the New Testament (ca 1449), had done his best to translate the “Greek truth” of the New Testament into Latin, his method was deeply flawed.104 Jerome’s word-for-word rendering of the Greek original in Latin obscured the scripture’s true meaning in too many places.105 The problem was less his fidelity to Greek terminology than his blurred Latin. And for Valla, clear, elegant Latin was the foundation of the cultural order.106 Indeed, as Celenza maintains, “Valla believes that human culture, Christianity, and Latin are coterminous” (“Valla,” 373). The

103 Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading; cited by Fischer (History), 211. 104 Following Bruni, Giannozzo Manetti likewise “rejected word-for-word translation” of the New Testament with its obscure “Græcisms,” and basically shared Valla’s “belief that the Bible should be read in good classical Latin” (den Haan, 36). 105 Celenza, “Lorenzo Valla’s Radical Philology,” 369, 374. 106 Celenza, “Petrarch, Latin,” argues that “Latin’s very existence as a language of craft [or ars] implied an order that [Petrarch] and many others saw lacking in the world around them” (511). “As Petrarch put it in a 1368 letter to Urban V, the Latin language seemed ‘the root of our arts and the foundation of every branch of knowledge’” (509).

33093_Williams.indd 64

2022-09-01 16:54



A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution? 65

truth of Christianity for Valla may have depended on the purity of its Latin style but so did the truth of his political identity.107 By contrast, the German Johann Reuchlin (1455–1522) – born almost simultaneously with the first printed Bible (in Latin) – published Europe’s first printed Hebrew grammar and lexicon (1506) and taught others to understand the “Hebrew Truth”108 of scripture. He also translated rabbinical scholarship and published his own Kabbalistic studies in De arte cabbalistica (1517). Meanwhile, Erasmus of Rotterdam109 (ca 1466–1536), born more than a decade after Reuchlin, printed the first Greek New Testament (1516), along with a new Latin translation in facing columns. Each of these northern humanists was a product of the printing press whether in his own output, his knowledge of the printed word, or his social presence in the printer’s workshop. Each was also more likely to be concerned about the state of the holy Book than about “Holy” Roman rule. But the long-term result of the work of both these biblical humanists was the elevation of Hebrew and Greek above Latin as sacred languages and, in consequence, the displacement of Rome by a visionary “Judaea” or “Athens” as the cultural capital of an evolving humanist imagination. It was as if Valla or Petrarch had been left to grieve with Augustus the loss of his legions in Germania as these northern humanist warriors once again halted the further advance of imperial Roman troops.110 For now, the nation was a distant dream. More tellingly, the “philosophy of Christ” that Erasmus found in the gospels turned the reading of scripture  – however unintended the result – into a species of sacrament. Indeed, the “Real Presence” of Christ could now be found on the printed page as well as in the pyx 107 Celenza maintains that “Valla’s sense of the Latin language’s importance can be seen in the preface to the Elegantiae, where he writes that ‘the Latin language is a great sacrament’ because of its power to unify; indeed, he goes on, ‘wherever the Roman language [Latin] dominates, there, too, is Roman empire (imperium)” (“Petrarch,” 521). For Valla, a pure Latinity is the one true basis of religion, social unity, and political order. 108 See further discussion in this work: 73–5, 97n85, 99, 107, 125, 160–1. 109 See my chapter 3: 112–13, 128–55. 110 An alliance of Germanic tribes had annihilated three legions of the Roman army in 9 ce in an ambush deep in the Teutoburg Forest. They were led by Arminius, a Germanic soldier and former officer in the auxilia (of the Roman general Publius Quinctilius Varus) who used his Roman military training to halt further Roman expansion in Germania. The elderly Augustus “was so greatly affected,” Suetonius relates in De vita Caesarum (Lives of the Caesars, ca 122 ce), “that for several months in succession he cut neither his beard nor his hair, and sometimes he would dash his head against a door, crying, “Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!” Suetonius 1, 23.

33093_Williams.indd 65

2022-09-01 16:54

66

The Communion of the Book

of the Mass.111 As Erasmus writes in his Paraclesis (or Summons to ­readers of his New Testament), “these books restore Christ to us so completely and so vividly that you would see him less clearly should you behold him standing before your very eyes” (ed. Sider, 37). The result could not be further from the usual medieval “emphasis in ­reading on prayer,” whether “collectively in the church’s liturgy” or “individually at home with a Book of Hours” (Clanchy, 13).112 For the reader’s personal encounter with the numinous presence of the divine lessened the need for hierarchical mediation,113 and substituted for set prayers familiar, spontaneous communication with the deity, much as Petrarch had written back as a friend to Cicero. Erasmus’s fervent “wish that the farmer at his plough would chant some passage from these” gospels in his own language, or “that the weaver at his shuttles would sing something from them; that the traveller would relieve the tedium of his journey with stories of this kind” (ed. Sider, 29) is the very antithesis of the secular humanist of Burckhardt’s imagining. And yet this Erasmian vision of the spiritual inwardness of ordinary individuals also profoundly qualifies the medievalist’s objection “that humanist propagandists” were “deliberately elitist and backward-looking” in their perverse “need to distance themselves from the dark Middle Ages” (Clanchy, 15). Erasmian humanism was humanism for the masses here and now; and individual readers, not citizens, were its norm. This vision of individual access to the godhead through reading nonetheless made the northern Renaissance different in kind from previous classical revivals such as the Carolingian revival of the eighth and ninth centuries or the French renaissance of the twelfth century.114 The result resembled a tectonic shift in the culture of Christianity; in place of the dead body of the Son of God in the Mass, readers 111 See my chapter 3: 135–7, 140–9, 155. 112 David Rundle, “Medieval,” offers material evidence of such differences in reading styles from surviving copies of the Book of Hours where “the face of a saint or the sign of the Cross” are “so rubbed that they are now indistinct,” although it is “a ritual rubbing with fingers or kissing with lips” that has led to this “defacement by devotion” (132). 113 Fischer argues that the medieval Book of Hours “linked the reader immediately to the divine without the mediation of the Church” (History, 189). But this ignores the need of episcopal approval for possession of a work that was largely liturgical in its expression. 114 Witt, Two Latin Cultures, 17–70, 317–47. After 1200 ce, a sharp intellectual turn in France from Roman literature to Greek philosophy, particularly that of Aristotle’s logic (318), ushered in the age of Scholasticism against which Petrarch, Valla, Erasmus, and Milton all felt constrained, each in his own century, to oppose.

33093_Williams.indd 66

2022-09-01 16:54



A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution? 67

encountered Christ himself speaking directly from the book. The result, by virtue of the mass reproduction of printed works and their mass distribution through growing networks of booksellers and capitalist investors, was the first “mass communication”115 in history, itself a ­cultural phenomenon without precedent. Other unintended consequences followed from the new and restless culture of print capitalism that would lead over several centuries to a more secular, more political outlook. Novel ways of reading law, history, and classical literature would also lead to political revolution as new forms of civic communion gave rise in thought and deed to ancient forms of republicanism and democracy and, finally, to modern nationalism. But, contrary to an apologetic modern notion that “early modern writers show signs of anxiety or unease about moving from oral to printed communication,116 and hence even their printed texts bear a distinctive relation of dependence on the validation of direct speech and the fiction of a speaking presence behind the text” (Andersen and Sauer, 6), the cultural phenomenon of sacramental reading suggests that “the fiction of a speaking presence behind the text” was much more than a literary fiction. John Foxe, the English Eusebius of the Elizabethan age, collected an enormous number of martyr stories in four editions of The Actes and Monuments (1563–83) – the second edition reaching a length of 2,314 pages – where each story dramatizes the idea of Christ’s speaking presence in the gospels, followed by the answering voices of his martyrs to the Word, before their bodily assumption into that Word. For the reading practices of Foxe’s “heretics” make a radical departure from the form of sacramental worship demanded by their inquisitors.117 In the gathered testimony of the scriptures they cited to confute their inquisitors, and in their resulting fiery deaths, these martyrs became the “flesh made Word” (see chapter 4), stepping into the “Book” of a radical new gospel and a new “Book of Actes.”

115 Mead, Mass Communication, 2015. 116 In a letter of 7 January 1518, Erasmus writes to “The Right Reverend Erard of Aremberg, Bishop of Liège,” temporizing about accepting Érard’s invitation to meet, and then reveals something very characteristic of his nature: “There is nothing in me worth seeing; and if there were, it is all expressed in my published work. That is the best part of me, and what remains would be dear at a farthing.” Correspondence, Vol. 5, 271. 117 Even Erasmus, had he lived so long, was unlikely to regard Foxe as his “disciple”; nor was he likely to envision sacramental dimensions in his mode of reading scripture.

33093_Williams.indd 67

2022-09-01 16:54

68

The Communion of the Book

In Foxe’s hands, it is a decidedly English book in which the Word is also heard to speak the same language as the martyrs who confute their social “betters” in the local idiom. And this “communion” of subjects and individual readers with the English Word also begins to redefine their sense of English community. In this way, Foxe’s work can serve as a reliable index of many of the cultural tensions leading up to the English Civil Wars (1642–51), helping to establish a radical tradition of martyrdom. For example, The Actes and Monuments would have a decisive effect on Milton’s conception of the Son of God in his lifeand-death debate with the Adversary in Paradise Regain’d, a work that has far too often been misread and misrepresented since its first ­publication, given that it asks to be read rather as a dramatic prequel to Foxe’s book about reading as the “real” sacrament.118 Much as Foxe had written a new, and very English, “Book of Actes,” so, too, Milton would write a new, and very English, “Fifth Gospel.” But Foxe’s humanist extension of the Book of Acts was to have its most decisive effect on the career of the seventeenth-century Leveller John Lilburne, both in his radical writings and in the long shadow he would cast over the tragedy of the “Good Old Cause” in Samson Agonistes. For readers not familiar with my previous work on media change, my larger goal is to portray Milton as the last, but also broadest, embodiment in the language of a wide range of humanist practices that are characteristic of early “print culture.” Like Reuchlin, Erasmus, Foxe, and Lilburne, Milton’s career instantiates much of what Eisenstein has claimed for the printing press as an “agent,” or cultural instrument, “of change.” But this instantiation comes into sharper focus not in any supposedly determining properties of print, but rather in the use of various reading strategies – a range of modes spanning the full spectrum of humanist practices – that both challenge the “fixities” of print, and yet transcend jejune assumptions about “religious” reading by showing how a humanist poet and prose writer like Milton encompassed an entire commonwealth of humanist reading strategies. As these modes of reading are dispersed into other modes – “separate though ­interrelated strands,” or refractions of humanist practice – a late-Renaissance, earlymodern reader like Milton can also be read as a written testament, as well as the cultural testator, of a wide variety of reading modes that are

118 For typical critical approaches to this poem, see Milton’s Leveller God, 350–5.

33093_Williams.indd 68

2022-09-01 16:54



A Printing Revolution or a Reading Revolution? 69

explored in later chapters of this book as sometimes northern, and sometimes Italian humanist norms – sacramental, juridical, historiographical, and classical modes – of reading, each serving to illustrate the variable cultural effects of an “unacknowledged revolution” in early modern reading. And the cultural outcome is best understood as the birth of early modernity and the rise of the modern state. Consideration of Milton’s multiform modes of reading also makes the phenomenon of mass communication more manageable, given the volume of printed books as compared with the relative scarcity of codices in the Middle Ages. Here, too, the sudden proliferation of thousands of titles acts as an agent of change in early modern Europe.119 Quantitative expansion can even be called the figurative watermark of the second great revolution in communications history – four of them now over the last three millennia: the first one from oral to scribal culture; the second from oral-manuscript to print culture; a third from print to motion-picture culture; and a fourth from cinema to electronic or digital culture,120 each with its own distinctive modes of reception. Moreover, the latter two have taken place with unprecedented speed, in barely more than a century. And the most recent of these – the digital revolution – promises to be even more disruptive than the printing press, both in its liberal promise and its criminal dangers. But the only way to foresee the possible consequences of any new technology is to understand what we have failed so often to recognize in previous ­communications revolutions, such as the humanist turn from the oralmanuscript culture of the Middle Ages to that of early modern print culture. In this instance as well, the technology of printing on paper was inadvertently leading, via the novel avenue of sacramental reading, to a cultural crisis that was less irrational and more predictable than it might seem.

119 Then as now, information overload appears to have concerned many scholars, not least Erasmus, who, as Ann Blair reports, complained “about the ‘swarms of new books’ being printed which enticed readers with the promise of novelty away from true learning formed from reading ancient authors” (“Managing Information,” 172). 120 For a different view of “three” main epochal changes in the mode of communication, see Meyrowitz, “Media Evolution.” In contrast, I classify cinema (based on ­photography) as part of a distinct communications epoch, differing from electronic media, which digitize “light writing,” and thus overwrite material traces of the viewed subject. Digital simulations, by contrast, are created ex nihilo, that is, by mathematical codes.

33093_Williams.indd 69

2022-09-01 16:54

2

Bread, Blood, and Paper: The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis

The Anglo-Irish satirist and dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, Jonathan Swift, took a mordantly comic view in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) of “the civil commotions” that had shaken Lilliput during the bitter controversies of “Big-Enders” and “Little-Enders” over the proper way to eat a boiled egg. Indeed, “The people so highly resented this law,” recalls Gulliver’s tiny informant, “that our histories tell us there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor [the English king Charles I] lost his life, and another [James II] his crown” (39). Swift’s bitter satire brilliantly cuts down to size the frequent, bloody controversies over the Lord’s Supper that shook the foundations of early modern Europe in the sixteenth century and fed into the English Revolution of the 1640s. Modern readers, gazing with Swift through the wrong end of a telescope, are at a loss to understand such pre-Enlightenment folly.1 Whether letter or figure, or myth or symbol, what could it matter whether bread was, or was not, transformed into Christ’s body in the Mass, or whether a single grain of cereal was left over, somehow detracting from the “Real

1 In many respects, this “folly” was a result of an earlier sixteenth-century “enlightenment” initiated by Erasmus, which, as Huizinga remarks, made him “a precursor and preparer of the modern mind: of Rousseau, Herder, Pestalozzi and of the English and American thinkers … To a number of its developments Erasmus was wholly a stranger, to the evolution of natural science, of the newer philosophy, of political economy. But in so far as people still believe in the ideal that moral education and general tolerance may make humanity happier, humanity owes much to Erasmus” (192).

33093_Williams.indd 70

2022-09-01 16:54



The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis 71

Presence” of divinity?2 And yet Swift’s reductio ad absurdum of how to eat the sacramental “egg” is also a grave misreading of one of the crucial turning points in early modern history – the transition from an oralmanuscript culture3 to a culture of the paper book, when rising literacy began to change the world. For one of the chief reasons why the English Revolution preceded other European revolutions was the probability that “30 percent4 of adult males in England in 1642 could read; in London, the figure was closer to 60 percent. These were extremely high numbers compared to the rest of Europe.”5 Throughout this book, I ask what reading meant to various individuals and their communities at different points in the great crisis of early modern Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The rise of printing,6 as numerous studies have shown, had many unintended results in a culture where reading had for centuries been the

2 Arcadi, “Recent Philosophical Work,” identifies four key tenets in the “Roman ­manner” of defining the Real Presence: “(i) Christ’s body is substantially present; (ii) The sensible qualities of Christ’s body are not present; (iii) The bread is no longer substantially present; (iv) The sensible qualities of the bread are present.” In response to lingering Eucharistic controversies of the ninth and tenth centuries, the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 affirmed the doctrine of transubstantiation, concluding that “[t]he substance of the bread is converted into the substance of Christ’s body” (403). Later distinctions like those between substance and accidents in the doctrine of the Eucharist “hearken back to the explication of the ­doctrine by St. Thomas Aquinas” (404), and more largely reflect the Aristotelian character of Scholastic theology in the High Middle Ages. 3 See Havelock, Preface to Plato (1965); Ong, S.J., Orality (1982); and Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record (1993). For discussion of Havelock, see my Media, Memory, 54–58, 62–64; for discussion of Ong, see my Imagined Nations, 77–82, 93–9. 4 Fischer puts the number higher: “In 1642 around 60 per cent of those in English towns could write their names, but only 38 per cent in rural parishes, declining to 20 per cent in the far north and west” (A History of Reading, 272). 5 Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, 31. 6 For a critique of print and print culture as the tyranny of the visual sense over full sensory immersion in electronic communication (and that of oral-mansucript culture in the Middle Ages), see McLuhan, Gutenberg (1962); and McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964). For a medial approach to “print culture” based on trans-European history, see Eisenstein, Printing Press (1979). For a cultural history of London printers and printing that rejects essentialist notions like “standardization, dissemination, and fixity” and other properties supposedly intrinsic to print and makes “authority” and “credibility” solely a result of “social processes,” see Johns, Nature of the Book (1998), 10, 19, 384. For a challenge to the idea that “the most important aspect of media staples was how they affected human senses and consciousness by virtue of their material properties,” see Buxton, “Rise of McLuhanism” (2012). “If anything,” Buxton says, “Innis suggested that the essential features of the newspapers were derived primarily from social and cultural processes rather than from media staples per se” (583).

33093_Williams.indd 71

2022-09-01 16:54

72

The Communion of the Book

prerogative of a few.7 The manuscript culture of Western Europe on the eve of print (ca 1450) functioned tolerably well on average literacy rates of 5–10 per cent.8 As historian M.T. Clanchy shows, a marked increase after 1200 ce9 in bureaucratic documents, including “writs” and charters, points to an increasing reliance on written forms of ­memory, and thus an expansion of the litterati – those who could read Latin – beyond the clergy.10 “Because literacy had been identified with Latin for a thousand years,” Clanchy says, “it had first to be learned by the laity in this clerical and alien form” (251). But the residual problem of bilingualism – of native speakers needing to learn Latin to be able to read the vernacular – was just one of many obstacles to ­literacy, such as a family’s need of child labour, and a natural limit on Church vocations. The expansion of a lay bureaucracy and universities in the ­thirteenth century created incentives for literacy, as did a doubling of per capita production of manuscript books after the twelfth century.11 Manuscripts were now copied in commercial scriptoria as well as in monasteries. But Bible stories for the masses continued to be written in light in the great cathedral windows of medieval Europe; and parish priests still read local news in the church along with the gospels.12

 7 Codex historian Overty, “Cost,” argues that recurrent waves of the Black Death in the late fourteenth century led to labour shortages that increased wages by up to 80 per cent, enabling “a larger portion of the population to send their children to school” (11), thereby creating “a new market for vernacular writing,” including poetry and other prestige works such as “Flemish books of hours,” as well as “Do-it-yourself” books on “such subjects as personal health and veterinary medicine.” Increased demand for manuscript works also led to “more efficient modes of production” and distribution, “creating a ­climate ripe for the introduction of the printing press” (12).  8 Buringh and van Zanden, “Charting,” estimate rates of literacy in Western Europe on the eve of printing as follows, based on a quantitative analysis of manuscript and book production over thirteen centuries: Great Britian 5 per cent; France 6 per cent; Belgium 10 per cent; Netherlands 17 per cent; Germany 9 per cent; Italy 15 per cent; Spain 3 per cent; Sweden 1 per cent; Poland 0 per cent (434).  9 Clanchy, From Memory, remarks: “The last decade of the twelfth century was a realistic date from which to expect written titles, as tenure by charter among the tenants-in-chief at least was beginning to be normal by then” (42). 10 Clanchy assumes “that the permanent growth of literacy is related to the growth of documents” (28), which mirrors the assumptions underlying Buringh and van Zanden’s estimates of literacy rates based on book production. 11 Buringh and van Zanden, 420. 12 Fischer justly maintains that “[w]ith certain exceptions, medieval reading was mostly still a collective experience” (History of Reading, 159).

33093_Williams.indd 72

2022-09-01 16:54



The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis 73

After Gutenberg printed his Latin Vulgate Bible in 1455, the first complete German Bible appeared in Strasbourg in 1466; but it did little to increase lay readership.13 The condemnation of Luther by Pope Leo X in June 1520, however, and the banning of his books burned at the Sorbonne in 1521, made his German New Testament of 1522 one of the first print bestsellers in a vernacular language. Religious controversy was a financial windfall for early print capitalists; people wanted to read for themselves what the Bible really said, thus creating demand for more translation and accelerating the desire of some to reform religion. As literary critic James Kearney maintains, “The Reformation was famously and self-consciously a return to the book within a religion of the book” (2). But what, exactly, is a religion of the book? Most ancient religions are founded on sacred texts, like the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, the Pali Canon of ancient Buddhism, and the Latin Vulgate Bible, all of which codified forms of worship and created rituals by which believers performed their religion. But Judaism, with its Torah scrolls, its Tanakh, and its written prayers, was nothing if not a religion of the book. In describing the origins of Jewish scriptures, historian Steven Roger Fischer observes that the Jewish people of the Levant, unlike their archaic Greek ­contemporaries who also put a premium on “cultural reading,” actually “came to enshrine the very act as something sacred” (History, 67). In fact, “the sanctification of writing and its physical material” in the era of the Babylonian Exile (597/586–538 bce) made the written word “fundamental to the Jewish identity.” For such reasons, the attempted pogrom of Jewish books in the Holy Roman Empire in the years 1509–20 ce posed an existential threat to German Jewry. As it was presented to the Emperor Maximilian I, the goal of this pogrom was the eradication of German Jewry, an “expulsion” by means other than those used by Spain in 1492, or forced conversions employed in Portugal in 1497. “Faced with the loss of their books, especially their prayer books and the Talmud, the ‘people of the book,’” as historian David Price claims, “would succumb more easily to ­conversion or, as the Jews themselves soon protested, simply would be unable to observe their religion” (Johannes Reuchlin, 4). For such reasons the council of the free imperial city of Frankfurt on behalf of Jews

13 The reference is to the Mentelin Bible. See Eisenstein, Printing Press, 374n247.

33093_Williams.indd 73

2022-09-01 16:54

74

The Communion of the Book

petitioned the ecclesiastical court that heard the matter in Augsburg in 1510: As the petition stated: “[T]he Jews keep their books in their synagogues in great honor, from which in their holy days and festivals, according to their customs and splendor, they worship God the Almighty, which they would not be able to accomplish without those very books.”14 Compared, say, to medieval Catholic religion, Judaism was wholly a religion of the Book. In chapter 4, we shall revisit this controversy over the confiscation of Jewish books in early modern Germany. The battle, waged between Scholastics in the universities and humanist opponents outside of it, almost certainly “guaranteed a serious and attentive audience for Luther’s radical protest” in 1517 (Price, 178), coming as it did just months after the “Reuchlin Affair” seemed to have been conclusively decided in the Roman curia. Johannes Reuchlin, the German humanist and pioneering Hebraist and biblical philologist, had been forced repeatedly to defend himself against Dominican charges of heresy. Reuchlin was a brilliant legal scholar as well as a diplomat with a large network of humanist friends reaching from Rome to Rotterdam and from Basel to the Baltic; so, his apparent triumph before the curia in 1516 was welcomed by many as the crowning victory for humanist reformers of the Church. But the apparent victory was short-lived. The rise of biblical philology,15 both in Greek and Hebrew, challenged the validity of Scholastic theology, and threatened to undermine the ritual basis of the Christian religion and the sacramental life of the Church, just as traditionalists had feared. Erasmus, for example, seemed unaware “of the fact that his conceptions of the Church, the sacraments and the dogmas were no longer purely Catholic, because they had become subordinated to his philological insight.”16 As Renaissance historian Charles Nauert concisely sums up the threat of philological

14 Trans. by David Price, 121, based on his archival research in Frankfurt (272n53). 15 Hamilton, “Humanists,” remarks: “The swift diffusion of Erasmus’s New Testament together with the annotations meant that no theologian could afford to overlook the new philological methods” (112). 16 Huizinga, 136. As Huizinga quotes and paraphrases a letter of Erasmus to a German friend in 1519, “‘the barbarians on all sides have conspired to leave no stone unturned till they have suppressed bonae literae’; ‘Here we are still fighting with the protectors of the old ignorance’; cannot Wolsey persuade the Pope to stop it here [Louvain]? All that appertains to ancient and cultured literature is called ‘poetry’ by those narrow-minded fellows” (137).

33093_Williams.indd 74

2022-09-01 16:54



The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis 75

“truth” to Catholic traditions, “The truth was in the text, and the expert humanist critic controlled the text” (202). But where Reuchlin’s ­reading of the Hebrew Torah and Tanakh revealed hundreds of errors in Jerome’s Latin Old Testament, Erasmus’s Greek Testament of 1516, “with its implicit rejection of the Vulgate,” was of greater concern to those who realized it “would wreck the foundations of Christianity as they knew it.”17 At the same time, the existence of Greek and Hebrew scriptures in print naturalized the idea of vernacular Bibles throughout Europe.18 This vernacularization, as Benedict Anderson maintained, denatured “a trans-European Latin-writing clerisy, and a conception of the world, shared by virtually everyone, that the bilingual intelligentsia, by mediating between vernacular and Latin, mediated between earth and heaven” (15–16). It wasn’t only this “mystery” language of Latin, however, that ensured a place for priestly intercessors. A mediatory role was built into the very character of reading in the Middle Ages. “Up until the end of the ­fifteenth century,” Steven Roger Fischer explains, “the hierarchy ‘author > commentator > bishop > teacher > pupil’ prevailed nearly everywhere, with each passive reader hearing, from the top down, not only what to read but also how to interpret each text in keeping with prescribed orthodoxy. Yet the second half of the fifteenth century saw readers becoming increasingly responsible for what they were reading: they were becoming active readers. … Soon discarding dogma, European readers advanced society through their own innate intellect, the ‘humanistic’ creed that indeed broke the Church’s monopoly on learning” (229, 231). The most obvious result was the Reformation and its ­proliferation of “heresy” (from Gk. hairesis, choice): the heretic was the one who was able to choose (or read actively) for herself or himself. Where fourteenth-century English Lollards and fifteenth-century Bohemian Hussites19 had failed in their own attempts at reform, these

17 Price, Johannes Reuchlin, 61, 175. 18 Hankins, “Renaissance Humanism,” points out that “[h]umanists popularized the study of Greek and Hebrew which opened western eyes to Orthodox and Jewish traditions and threw received interpretations of authoritative texts into doubt” (90), helping to break the hold of Latin as the one true and sacred language. 19 King, “Foxe’s Book,” comments: “The invention of printing” represented to John Foxe a providential “sequel to the persecution of the Lollards and the executions of the fifteenth-century Bohemian heretics, Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague, whose martyrologies occupy a place of honor in the Book of Martyrs” (71).

33093_Williams.indd 75

2022-09-01 16:54

76

The Communion of the Book

sixteenth-century Reformers succeeded for two reasons: the relative speed and ease of printed communications; and rising literacy rates, thanks to printed aids to education. Before the age of print, “Rome easily won every war against heresy in Western Europe because it always had better internal lines of communication” (Anderson, 39). And yet the new technology of printing, joined to print capitalism, succeeded in challenging the Church’s monopoly on knowledge.20 Protestantism was “fundamentally on the offensive, precisely because it knew how to make use of the expanding vernacular print-market being created by capitalism, while the Counter-Reformation defended the citadel of Latin” (Anderson, 40). And in the age of Luther, a “coalition between Protestantism and print-capitalism” created “large new reading ­publics – not least among merchants and women, who typically knew little or no Latin – and simultaneously mobilized them for politicoreligious purposes.”21 A concentration of presses and scholar-printers in Strasbourg between 1480 and 1510 had already made printshops key “gathering places for erudite laymen” and “focal points for opinion-forming groups.”22 After 1520, Lutheran educators in Strasbourg were able to establish “a new system of municipal education that markedly contrasted with medieval precedents,” since the availability of “abc books, Latin grammars,” and other “printed materials geared to a sequence of learning stages” freed educators from dependence on the Church and its catechetical literature, as well as the primers it loaned out or withheld. Henceforth, the “social penetration of literacy” would be strongly “linked

20 The phrase is central to the thinking of Harold Innis, the Canadian economic historian and “father” of the Toronto School of Communication (Buxton, 583). Innis’s untimely death in November 1952 left his colleague McLuhan to put a misleading stamp on Innis’s Empire and Communications and The Bias of Communication. While McLuhan affirmed the “strength of the oral tradition” which Innis had celebrated in ancient Greece, he ignored Innis’s corollary that “the relative simplicity of the alphabet” served to check “the possible development of a highly specialized profession of scribes and the growth of a monopoly of the priesthood over education” (Empire, 79). For a good overview of Innis’s war on “monopolies of knowledge,” see Heyer and Crowley’s “Introduction,” Bias, xxxiii– xxxv. The usual view of McLuhan as a progressive champion of new media and a prophet of the internet occludes a figure-ground view of him as being socially and politically regressive, such as in his expressed regret for “the levelling of castles, classes, and feudal distinctions” (Gutenberg, 148) brought about by printing. Also see note 68 below. 21 Benedict Anderson’s constituency of new readers reveals his eighteenth-century bias. 22 Eisenstein, The Printing Press, 371.

33093_Williams.indd 76

2022-09-01 16:54



The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis 77

with Bible-reading.”23 New ideas in religion spread from the city to towns and villages and farms, where literacy might be limited to one or two in twenty,24 but where literates read aloud to illiterates to satisfy a longing both spiritual and intellectual.25 In his History of Reading (2019), Fischer reports that “[i]n larger villages” of the High Middle Ages, “books often made the rounds from house to house, read aloud to assembled families and neighbours” (216). Printed books were likely to make the same rounds in the Age of Incunabula. Given the centrifugal forces unleashed by this new mode of communication, the Hydra heads of heresy sprang up everywhere. And Hydra heads, as the Greek hero Heracles quickly discovered, are difficult to eradicate, another springing up in place of the one just lopped off. Distances from Rome were also a factor since many of the “heretical” writings were produced on the margins of Europe. To the north, closer to the Baltic Sea, Martin Luther taught and wrote at the University of Wittenberg,26 the seat of the elector of Saxony, where he enjoyed the protection of Frederick III until the latter’s death in 1525. When Frederick’s brother John succeeded him as elector, John inherited his role as Luther’s protector. And to the south, in the mountain fastness of the Swiss cantons, it was Ülrich Zwingli who became a leading Reformer in Zurich and a thorn in the backside of the French monarchy. Even after his untimely death in 1531, his writings continued to trouble the body politic of France, not least in the “Affair of the Placards.” In October 1534, Zwinglian broadsides printed in Switzerland appeared overnight in Paris and throughout the provinces to ridicule 23 Ibid., 422. Eisenstein identifies a further incentive to reading in the Calvinist assumption that “‘Masters in their houses ought to be as preachers to their families that from the highest to the lowest they may obey the will of God,’ [as] ran a marginal note in the Geneva Bible” (424) that accompanied the Marian exiles on their return to England in 1560. 24 Fischer (History) estimates literacy rates in the High Middle Ages as being “perhaps as high as 5 per cent” in the cities, and 2 or 3 per cent in “small towns and villages” (190). 25 David Rundle offers several examples from the late Middle Ages where “a book was often the centrepiece of an evening’s proceedings, being read aloud to the prince and their court,” or to the household of a noble family. He shows that communities could still “be literate without requiring all its members to be so. Cultures of literacy embraced the unlettered, who could respect the skills without mastering them” (134). 26 The cultural anthropologist Henrich, weirdest, argues that “we can take proximity to ground zero of the Reformation – Wittenberg – as a cause of Protestantism in Prussia,” not least because, “For every 100 km (62 mi) traveled from Wittenberg, the percentage of Protestants dropped by 10 percent” (11). Wittenberg of that era was a small town.

33093_Williams.indd 77

2022-09-01 16:54

78

The Communion of the Book

the doctrine of the Real Presence in the Mass. Finding one of these placards on the door of the regal bedchamber at Amboise, the French king François I “panicked” and issued a “ban on the printing of any books in his realm – on pain of death by hanging” (Anderson, 40). John Calvin, who had fled Paris earlier that year to take refuge in the south, fled again to Basel, where he published the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536, within weeks of the death in that city of Erasmus, the leading humanist scholar (whom he never met). Moving soon after that to Strasbourg where the German reformer Martin Bucer taught and preached, Calvin wrote his widely read “Brief Treatise on the Lord’s Supper” (1541), before accepting an invitation from Geneva in that year to lead the Reformation in the Alpine citystate. The upshot was “the democratizing process in church government which Calvin” first established “in the congregation at Geneva and set forth in his Institutes.”27 In the interim, François I’s commitment to humanist learning – including an invitation to Erasmus to create a royal Trilingual College28 – and to toleration of religious reform, turned to suppression. In 1540, the Parlement of Paris received royal assent to examine and punish heretics; and in 1542, the Sorbonne created the first index of prohibited books. Scores of printers packed up their hand presses and fled with cases of movable type to Basel, then on to Geneva, travelling upstream of a flood of Calvinist books in French and Latin pouring out of the “Protestant Rome.” The result was a new and wealthy ­publishing industry: “Forty-two titles were produced at Geneva between 1533 and 1540, but the influx of 130 Protestant refugee printers into the city in the 1550s raised that number to 527 editions 1550–64.”29 And the city, still adjusting to its sudden wealth, was further transformed by the influx of some 5,000 French refugees.30 Geneva’s advantages of a shared language and proximity to the French frontier made the book ban of François I difficult to enforce, 27 Wolfe, “Introduction,” cpw 1:81. 28 François I tried, through his intermediary Guillaume Budé, a humanist legal scholar, historian, and Homerist in Paris, to make Erasmus the presiding spirit of a new royal college aiming to complete “the renovation of theology through the study of the three sacred languages,” like the new “Trilingual College at Louvain,” created to challenge the dominance of Scholastic theologians in the Faculty of Theology. See Halkin, 114–15. 29 Houston, Literacy, 157. 30 Knecht, French Wars, 9.

33093_Williams.indd 78

2022-09-01 16:54



The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis 79

even after banning relaxed into licensing. While R.A. Houston’s examples of “the clandestine book trade between Switzerland and France” (171) are drawn mostly from the eighteenth century, Swiss smugglers in the years before the French Revolution continued to follow the routes and ­distribution points established in the era of François I. Furthermore, Calvin and his “Venerable Company” of pastors in Geneva were actively recruiting and training missionaries to serve the growing Huguenot conventicles in France. Jacques L’Anglois, the first of these Calvinist “soldiers” of Christ, was posted to Poitiers in 1555 at the request of a local congregation (Knecht, 11). Another eighty-seven Calvinist proselytizers followed in his footsteps over the next seven years (10). Each was “usually accompanied by a representative of the local church acting as his guide. Some pastors came into France by littleknown mountain tracks; others followed the principal trade routes, disguised as merchants” (11). After the death of François I in 1547, the first three years of the reign of Henri II saw more than 500 heretics burned by “the Chambre ardente, a special court set up within the Parlement of Paris” (Knecht, 5). Until the accidental death of Henri II in 1559, the persecution of Huguenots continued without remission. Two months before the king’s fatal injury in a knightly tournament, the Huguenots banded together in the Synod of Paris, inviting deputies from across France to help organize their church and formalize their worship. Calvin, who sent his personal ­representative to the Synod, “was mainly responsible for the Confession of Faith and Ecclesiastical Discipline drafted by that synod” (Knecht, 11). Fifteen churches were represented; two years later, in 1561, the number31 was now reported to be 2,150, although that figure was likely inflated by Catholic agents stressing the urgency of dealing with the “contagion.” A Huguenot conspiracy against the throne in 1560 only amplified that concern. By 1572, the Wars of Religion in France had descended into the massacre of hundreds of Huguenots  in Paris  on  St Bartholomew’s Day, and the massacre of ­thousands more in the provinces. Before the bloodshed, Calvinist Geneva had been the Huguenots’ chief support. It is said that Theodore Bèza’s “rhyming translation of the Psalms,” about “27,400 copies” of which “came off the Genevan

31 Encyclopedia Britannica. 4 June 2019. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Huguenot.

33093_Williams.indd 79

2022-09-01 16:54

80

The Communion of the Book

hand presses towards the end of 1561 and early in 1562,” was sung “so lustilty” in French conventicles that “more than one secret worship location was discovered as a result” (Knecht, 13). And Calvin, who forbade armed resistance to the civil powers, continued to contribute to the sacramental life of the Huguenot churches through his “Short Treatise on the Lord’s Supper” (1541). Here he was adamant that the Church had blasphemously “transferred” to the Mass “what was proper to the death of Christ, viz., to satisfy God for our sins … Moreover, the office of Christ has been transferred to those whom they name priests, viz., persons to sacrifice to God.”32 In Calvin’s view, the Church had appropriated the office of the divine intercessor, “to obtain for us grace, and the pardon of our offences,” whereas God had “ordained his word as the instrument by which Jesus Christ, with all his graces, is dispensed to us” (166). More specifically, Calvin denied the Church’s doctrine of transubstantiation, offering a scriptural demonstration of how “Jesus Christ” becomes “the only food by which our souls are nourished; but as it is distributed to us by the word of the Lord, which he has appointed an instrument for that purpose, that word is also called bread and wine.” For Calvin, it was solely “the word of the Lord” that produced the “­spiritual mystery” which is “figured to us by visible signs [the bread and wine], according as our weakness requires, in such manner, nevertheless, that it is not a bare figure but is combined with the reality and substance” (171). Indeed, “The word of God, in Calvin’s thinking, assumes the function,” remarks B.A. Gerrish, “that medieval theology ascribed to the sacraments. In this sense it is the sacramental word” (76). Conversely, Calvin said that the medieval Mass is what “men have out of their own head invented,” since they claim it to be “a sacrifice by which we obtain the forgiveness of our sins before God.”33 The Saxon Luther was no less scathing about the Church’s sacerdotal functions. He did not militate, like others before him, “merely for the reform of the Roman Catholic hierarchy,” but rather, as legal historian Harold Berman describes it, “for its abolition” (40). Luther’s implied

32 Calvin, “Short Treatise,” 184. 33 Ibid., 182.

33093_Williams.indd 80

2022-09-01 16:54



The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis 81

doctrine of the priesthood of all believers34 effectively rendered obsolete the office of priestly intercessors. In this doctrine, the “true church” meant “the invisible community of believers, in which all are priests, serving one another, and each is a ‘private person’ in his relation to God. Each responds directly to the Bible as the word of God” (Berman, 40). Although Berman ignores the substitution of one medium for another – the printed Word for a sacerdotal priesthood – it was the availability of the Book to numberless readers that was both the efficient and final cause of “a total revolution, a total transformation in which the whole German people was involved” (53). For, as cultural anthropologist Joseph Henrich further argues, Luther’s other fundmental “principle, known as sola scriptura, meant that everyone needed to learn to read” (9). At the same time, Luther never quite freed himself from the notion of a “sacramental union”35 of the bread with the body of Christ, leaving Calvin to scoff that Luther “was willing to leave the generally received opinion untouched.”36 The German Reformer, in other words, was still taken in by the “magical trick” of “the Papists” (Calvin, 193). To Calvin, on the other hand, the Mass was no more than a “species of sorcery,” where “the whole mystery is considered spoiled if every thing [sic] be not said and done in whispers, so that nothing is understood” (191). Then again, the “mystery” was spoiled at its source by the “­absurdities which follow from it,” since the doctrine “that Jesus Christ is contained under these signs” requires “either that the [human] body of Christ is without limit, or that it may be in different places” at the same time (186, 187). Even more troubling was a custom in the Church, as Calvin says, “to prostrate ourselves before the bread of the Supper, and worship Jesus Christ as if he were contained in it,” which “is to make an idol of it rather than a sacrament” (188). Doubtless, Calvin’s critique of the Holy Mass sold books, but it also created sharp divisions among

34 The concept is implicit, but never developed beyond Luther’s written address To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520): “But that a pope or a bishop anoints, confers tonsures, ordains, consecrates, or prescribes dress unlike that of the laity – this may make hypocrites and graven images, but it never makes a Christian or ‘spiritual’ man. Through baptism all of us are consecrated to the priesthood, as St. Peter says in I Peter 2, ‘Ye are a royal priesthood, a priestly kingdom,’ and the book of Revelation says, ‘Thou hast made us by thy blood to be priests and kings.’” Luther, Three Treatises, 14. 35 Luther’s Works, Vol. 37, 300. 36 Calvin, “Short Treatise,” 195.

33093_Williams.indd 81

2022-09-01 16:54

82

The Communion of the Book

anti-monopolist Reformers, transforming the Reformed states of Europe into a frenzied mass of self-dividing cells. A generation earlier, Erasmus had insisted in his Ratio verae theologiae (Method of True Theology) of 1518–19 that the Christ of the gospels was the sole unifying source of theology, philosophy, and religion. In the first glow of the success of his Greek New Testament, he had affirmed: “You will perhaps find in the books of Plato or Seneca principles that are not inconsistent with the tenets of Christ. You will find in the life of Socrates things that in some way accord with the life of Christ. But in Christ alone will you find this circle and harmony of all things c­ ongruent with each other.”37 Nonetheless, increasing acrimony between Reformers and traditionalists, and growing factionalism in the universal Church made Erasmus reluctant to take sides. Like Luther, he was inclined to reject “ceremonies, observances, fasting, etc., or, though more moderately than Luther, he had his doubts about them,” particularly about “the sacraments or the primacy of St. Peter” (Huizinga, 162). Finally, in September 1524, Erasmus published his De libero arbitrio voluntatis (On the Freedom of the Will) in which he argued: “Without acknowledgement of free will the terms of God’s justice and God’s mercy remain without meaning. What would be the sense of the teachings, reproofs, admonitions of Scripture (Timothy iii.) if all happened according to mere and inevitable necessity?” (Huizinga, 163). The case of Erasmus for freedom of the will did not, however, stray into the escalating ­controversy over the Eucharist.38 Rather, it left Luther free, in De servo arbitrio (On the Will Not Free), to mount a bitter defence of the outraged majesty of God over the shameful disobedience of humankind. “In him

37 “Ratio,” ed. Mark Vessey, 148. 38 The Eucharist’s largely memorial character seems clear from Erasmus’s Paraphrase on Matthew (1522), selections from which are reprinted in Sider. Of Matt. 26 he comments: “Jesus … instituted that most holy symbol of his death, so that there would be continually renewed among them an everlasting memorial of his immense love by which he did not hesitate to expend his life to redeem the race of mortals. In this way the memory of his divine sacrifice could not at some time slip from our minds” (112). A decade later, h ­ owever, he spoke more orthodoxly of the Eurcharist in On Mending the Peace of the Church (1533): “As far as the Mass is concerned, whether there is superstition or corruption it should be reasonably corrected. I see no reason why the Mass itself should be suppressed.” Reviewing every step in the celebration of the Eucharist, he comes to an irenic conclusion: “What is there in this that is not pious and does not arouse reverence?” (cited by Halkin, 251). In the last months of his life in 1536, when he had become too ill to write, he “apparently celebrated Mass at Easter, 16 April, in his room” (Halkin, 265).

33093_Williams.indd 82

2022-09-01 16:54



The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis 83

all conceptions, like dry straw,” remarks Johan Huizinga, “were ­consumed in the glow of God’s majesty, for him each human co-operation to attain to salvation was a profanation of God’s glory” (163–4). At the Marburg Colloquy – convened in 1529 by Philip I of Hessen in the hope of creating political unity among German-speaking Protestants – even Ülrich Zwingli (d. 1531), the German-Swiss Reformer, broke reluctantly with Luther on the issue of the Real Presence, insisting that the sacrament had to be understood in a symbolic, rather than a literal sense. To do otherwise was to make an idol of the bread, and to give further pain to Christ who was consequently forced to sacrifice his body time and time again. For Zwingli, the bread could not be more than a sign; the eating of it was at most the public sign of a ­communicant’s personal faith. To make it literally the “body of Christ” was blasphemy. But a merely figurative sort of sacrament gave pause even to the irenic Calvin, caught in the middle between the theological positions of Luther and Zwingli. Although Zwingli found it “an execrable idolatry” to teach “that Jesus Christ was worshipped as enclosed in bread,” he obviously “forgot,” Calvin reminded his readers, “to show what presence of Jesus Christ ought to be believed in the Supper” (195). For his part, the former Augustinian monk Luther brutally mocked Zwingli’s “­symbolic” Supper. Even after the Züricher’s death at the Battle of Kappel against a Catholic army in 1531, Luther continued to revile Zwingli and his doctrine. Years later, he still recited a crude parody of the first Psalm: “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the sacramentarians, nor stands in the way of the Zwinglians, nor sits in the seat of the Zürichers.”39

Blood Ties and Blood Sacrifice Despite the reciprocity between Luther’s doctrines of sola scriptura and the priesthood of every reader, his deep attachment to sacramental theology reveals much more than cultural psychologist Joseph Henrich has claimed in his wide-ranging account of the role of the medieval Church in transforming the psychology of Western Europeans during the millennium following the sack of Rome in 476 ce. Henrich’s

39 Partee, Theology of John Calvin, 282.

33093_Williams.indd 83

2022-09-01 16:54

84

The Communion of the Book

method is statistical, but also firmly historical in its portrait of cultural organization among the Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Franks, Burgundians, and Huns, as compared with Roman culture. If Henrich ignores classical history to link Germanic culture directly to the global norms of ancient agricultural societies during the ten millennia prior to Roman Empire (thereby also side-stepping five centuries of ­republican history), he leaves no doubt that the imposition of Germanic hegemony in Italy under Flavius Odoacer at Ravenna from 476 to 493 was mutually transformative of both Germanic Arian and Roman (orthodox) Christianity. Where Henrich’s version of Western history is most original is in its use of standard psychological measures of variance in the psychology of present-day peoples around the globe to correlate them to ancient attitudes. What the data reveal is a strong persistence, through most of human history, of a clan- or kin-based psychology extending from ­pre-Christian Europe to the Near East to Chile to China and Micronesia, past and present. The values of the latter continue to be antithetical to those of weird40 people, that is, present-day Western Europeans, by virtue of the medieval Church’s “Marriage and Family Program” (Henrich, 164–76), first used to curtail the political power of kin-based institutions among the ancient Germanic tribes of Western Europe. The promulgation of increasingly restrictive marriage laws over nine centuries, from 305 ce to 1200 ce (Henrich, 168–71), steadily expanded incest taboos to include ever more remote degrees of “cousin marriage.” Church policies outlawed both polygyny and arranged marriages, ­making voluntary marriage the norm, and rewriting inheritance laws to proscribe the offspring of illegal unions as legal heirs. By “nearly annihilat[ing] Europe’s clans, kindreds, cousin marriage, polygamy, and inheritance norms,” “the Western Church had inadvertently ­introduced a series of social and psychological shifts” (251, 253) that Henrich outlines over succeeding chapters. By the tenth century ce, Henrich claims, “[c]lans, lineages, and tribes had been demolished or at least dramatically weakened.41 Freed from the constraints and 40 See Henrich, 21; for further discussion, see my “Prolegomenon,” vii, xii–xiii. 41 Celenza, Petrarch: Everywhere, offers a telling reminder, however, of the material ­reality “of pre-modern life in Petrarch’s Italy” during his first pilgrimage to Rome in 1337: “Clan rivalries, kin-based social groups in competition with each other and the frequent recourse to violence and vendetta” (66) meant that even Cardinal Giovanni Calonna, in  whose entourage Petrarch was travelling, had to wait many days in the port city of

33093_Williams.indd 84

2022-09-01 16:54



The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis 85

securities of kin-based institutions, people were seeking new voluntary relationships, associations, and communities” (333) in new medieval institutions like monasteries, craft and merchant guilds, charter towns, and universities. By means of its revolutionary policy of making marriage voluntary, the Church had installed a culture of individual choice in place of a culture of intensive clan loyalties.42 And from this culture of choice flowed a novel array of psychological effects, such as the burgeoning values of “individualism, independence, nonrelational morality, impersonal prosociality (equality of strangers), nonconformity, resistance to tradition, guilt over shame, hard work, self-regulation, the centrality of mental states in moral judgments, and the molding of one’s disposition to a chosen occupation” (416). It also created a mindset of analytical thinking that challenged traditional norms of deference to elders and sages (excepting Church “fathers”). A dense network of relational ties was gradually replaced by nuclear families and self-determining ­individuals who were far less likely “to conform to peers, defer to their seniors, and follow enduring traditions” (397). Socially mobile ­individuals sought out like-minded individuals for mutual support and ­association. In short order, monastic life for both men and women in the new monasteries and convents of Western Europe became the model for voluntary associations from the fourth century onwards. In the newly formed Cistercian Order, “abbots were democratically elected” in 1098 “by their brethren from within their houses” (351), setting the West on the path towards Henrich’s weird psychology.43 Finally, in the effective religious revolt in 1517 of Martin Luther, “an Augustinian Civitavecchia northwest of Rome for two hundred horsemen to protect them from mercenaries in the pay of “the Orsini family, long-time rivals who would take any opportunity to harass the Colonna” (64). 42 Margaret King, “Return,” argues, however, that “[i]n European society, marriage” still “lay at the heart of dynastic strategy. Princes, nobles, and wealthy burghers alike chose wives to advance familial interests, seeking to acquire material and social advantage from marriage alliances.” It was the Venetian nobleman and humanist Francesco Barbaro (1390–1454) who challenged this “common marriage practice in his treatise De re uxoria (‘On Marriage,’ 1415)” (18) by setting “a different standard for the choice of a wife: she was to possess an innate nobility, understood as moral character, so that she could bear and rear children who were themselves noble” (19). 43 What Henrich’s case for the influence of eleventh-century Cistercian “democracy” on the West ignores, however, is the model of elective bishops in the early Church (from the first through fifth centuries), as John Milton argues in his first polemic against Laudian bishops in his Of Reformation (1641). See cpw 1:541–7.

33093_Williams.indd 85

2022-09-01 16:54

86

The Communion of the Book

monk employed at a university in the charter town of Wittenberg” (Henrich, 416), the implications of this new psychology became starkly apparent. In sum, by breaking the stranglehold of intensive kinship loyalties that had been been the global norm for eleven thousand years, the Church had, over the course of just one millennium, accidentally normalized a “Protestant” mindset. Despite his dazzling array of statistics and charts from several social science disciplines, including his results from modern control groups around the globe with little or no exposure to this marriage and family program, Henrich’s account of the origins of modernity still has two huge difficulties to overcome (apart from his silence on Antiquity, and a strong Renaissance veneration for Athenian democracy and Roman republicanism). As Henrich admits (if nearer to the end than the beginning of his 500-page argument), In contrast to many Protestant sects, the Church itself was – perhaps ­ironically – built on a patriarchal (Roman) family model. Authority is vertical and strict, as in a patrilineage. Religious elders, who came to be called “­father” or “papa” (pope), possessed privileged access to divine truth and special powers, including the power to grant (channel) God’s forgiveness. Endowed with wisdom and holiness, Church leaders should be revered and obeyed. Only through the Church, and its specialized rites and elite practitioners, can an average person find a path to God and the afterlife. There are no unmediated p ­ ersonal relationships with God. (417)

The Church, it seems, had mostly taken over and adapted the psychology of the system it had replaced, a patently patriarchal culture founded on blood sacrifice44 and blood ties.45 44 Davidson, Lost, notes that “sacrificial feasts” among the Northern peoples took place at major “turning-points in the year” (8) to link “the human and divine worlds” (20), and to propitiate the appropriate god. “[E]ssential for the feast was an animal to be sacrificed” for “a commensal meal shared with the gods” (90, 89). But “Icelanders,” who by 1000 ce had converted to Christianity, mocked “the pagan Swedes for licking their sacrificial bowls … in their eagerness to consume the last vestiges of the blood of the sacrifice” (92). 45 Davidson stresses the sky god “Thor’s link with the home” and the blood ties of family, “indicated by the use of his image on carved pillars in the hall on either side of the central seat” (101) reserved for the patriarch. Thor (or Donar) was also “associated with law and was patron of the Assembly” (84), and thus a divine counterpart of the tribal chieftain. Since the Germanic tribes had no priests, “it was the king or chieftain who usually made contact with the gods on behalf of the people at the sacrificial feasts” (88).

33093_Williams.indd 86

2022-09-01 16:54



The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis 87

The second weakness in an argument with so much potential explanatory power is its failure to explain how the Church managed a hostile takeover of a bloody warrior culture. Tacitus, for instance, offers chilling evidence of formal blood sacrifices in the Teutoburg Forest46 where the Roman general Germanicus, surveying the battleground years later, found “human heads fastened to tree-trunks” and “outlandish altars” in nearby groves “at which the Germans had massacred the Roman colonels” (39).47 “In forging Christendom, the Church tapped people’s tribal psychology,”48 Henrich begins promisingly, “to create a unified Christian supra-identity that linked people from distant parts of Europe” (307). But he ignores such seminal moments49 as when the English monk Boniface took an axe50 (ca 723 ce) to the gigantic trunk of Donar’s Oak51 among pagan Saxons east of the Rhine and brought the World Tree (and its entire cosmology with it) crashing to the ground. Boniface then had a Christian chapel built from its wood (Hacken, 2).52 But how was this “sacrifice” of Donar53 (Thor in Scandinavian lore), whose symbol was the axe or hammer, related to unspecified, if still “specialized rites” (417) of the Church? And how does the sacrifice of

46 See further discussion in this work: 65n110, 87n47. 47 Cultural historian Richard Hacken, “Worship of the German Forest,” regards the Teutoburg disaster as “a major turning point in history,” one that enshrined “a major ­cultural (not to mention linguistic) divide between northern, Germanic Europe and the Romanized south that would continue to appear throughout European history” (1). 48 Burckhardt, Civilization, offers a clue as to how the Church “tapped into a tribal psychology.” As late as the nineteenth century in Italy, Burckhardt could “find instances in which the affiliation of the new faith to the old seems consciously recognized. So, for example, the custom of setting out food for the dead four days before the feast of the Chair of St. Peter, that is to say on February 18, the date of the ancient Feralia” (297). 49 The seed of this account of Boniface and Donar’s Oak was sown on a visit to the crypt of St Boniface in the Hessian city of Fulda in July 2002 with my good friends Professor Martin Kuester and his wife Hildegard of Marburg. 50 The “ancient thunder-god” Donar was “constantly threatened by the forces of chaos” and used “his great hammer-axe to defend gods and men from attack” (Davidson, 65). 51 Davidson thinks “It is possible roughly to equate Jupiter,” the father of the Roman gods, “with the Germanic thunder god Donar (later known as Thunor and Thor)” (47). The oak that Boniface cut down was known as “the Oak of Jupiter in Hesse” (101). 52 Hacken adds: “Incipient forms of Christian worship in the first millennium are heavily dependent on ‘heathen’ remnants of tree symbolism,” from “the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life” to “the crucifixion, the most important sacrifice on a tree in human history” (2). Early Christian missionaries clearly found a “natural” fit here. 53 Often “absent from Asgard,” home of the gods, and “busy killing giants” (Davidson, 80), Donar-Thor, the giant-slayer, was himself now slain by the Christian giant-slayer.

33093_Williams.indd 87

2022-09-01 16:54

88

The Communion of the Book

this one god for another explain the apparent fit between the psychology of this pagan religion and the Christian Church?54 The wonderful observation of sociologist Émile Durkheim in his conclusion to Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912) – that “the former gods are growing old or dying, and others have not been born”55 – recalls the significance that Durkheim had attached to “the fundamentally different roles of two universal elements of ritual sacrifice, ‘consecration and execration,’ one involving the acquisition of a ‘religious character,’ the other its stripping away” (Ptacek, 80). In the most direct way possible, Boniface accomplished the function of execration in toppling Donar’s Tree and then of consecrating the space to the “true” God who had preserved his axeman from destruction. But why would his immunity satisfy the “blood psychology” of the Germanic tribes? The most obvious point of contact is the sacrifice of the Mass, and its ritual creation of the “Real Presence.” Here is a rite very well suited to creating a “natural” fit between the tribal psychology of blood sacrifice and the psychology of a divine sacrifice required to appease divine justice. In Durkheim’s “universal” terms applicable to this tribal people, we might say that the “consecrative” function, which “was ‘the maintenance and perpetual renewal of life in all its forms’” (78), was instantly depleted. The “former gods” were “growing older or dying,” and Boniface had clinched that demise by bringing their world to an end and “consecrating” a new world, with a new God, in its sacred place. As for the execrative function of this unchurched “rite,” the sacrifice of one god for another demonstrated that “penal sacrifice” was still associated with “maintaining life, although ‘negatively, and not in adding useful forces, but in removing harmful ones’” (Ptacek, 79). The death of the god thus ended propitiously in the “birth” of a more powerful, more productive universal deity to embody and maintain the life of this kin-based community. The idea of needing to appease the outrage of a righteous and ­powerful god is also implicit in Boniface’s totem book, a cult object

54 The death of Odin’s (or Wodan’s) son Baldr as a prelude to Ragnarok and the fall of the gods (Davidson, 74–5) is one of several contrasting figures in the two cosmologies, not least of which were Odin’s hanging on the World Tree, and Ragnarok/Armageddon. 55 Durkheim, Les formes, 90. Cited in Ptacek, “Durkheim’s,” 75–96.

33093_Williams.indd 88

2022-09-01 16:54



The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis 89

created from the skins of animals.56 In fact, his book begins most auspiciously with the Abrahamic story of the sacrifice of Isaac, which is later elaborated in the New Testament epistles of Paul and James. So, it is not surprising that a people with a tribal psychology based on blood sacrifice and blood ties, who are accustomed to paying “blood money” to rival clans – as corporate responsibility for the killing of one of “theirs” by one of “ours” – would be so swiftly assimilated to a religious culture that echoed some of the central practices of their own culture. The blood psychology of ancient tribal rites persists to this day in Church teachings where “Christ perpetuates in an unbloody manner [of the Eurcharist] the sacrifice offered on the cross, offering Himself to the Father for the world’s salvation through the ministry of priests.”57 Beyond its expiatory function, the Eucharist also consecrates participants in its rite as a corpus mysticum, or mystical body of the Church. More precisely, as Henri Cardinal de Lubac, S.J., first suggested in 1944, a reformed rite could restore to its participants what had already been prejudicially transferred to the institution by the mid-thirteenth century. We read in Eucharisticum Mysterium, published by the Sacred Congregation of Rites (25 May 1967), for example, that “[t]he Church, the spouse and minister of Christ, performs together with Him the role of priest and ­victim, offers Him to the Father and at the same time makes a total offering of herself together with Him.”58 Only latterly, the “Church” has once again come to mean every participant, not the corporate institution itself.59 And this union of communicants with God through a ritual re-membering of the holy sacrifice regains its communitarian purpose in the ritual renewal of the Church as a unified social body. Such was the original purpose, at least, that de Lubac recognized in the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians (10.17–18): “The ‘communion of the body of Christ’ of which St. Paul spoke to the faithful at 56 Donar-Thor, whose wagon was “drawn by goats” (Davidson, 84), was able to “raise his goats to life after they had been killed and eaten” (90). That “fact” alone was likely to have induced some reverence among the Franks for a sacred book written on kid skin. 57 Eucharisticum, 3c, 13–14. https://adoremus.org/1967/05/eucharisticum-mysterium/. 58 Ibid., 15. 59 Erasmus had arrived at a similar, if more overtly anti-institutional, conclusion in his Paraphrase on Galatians 3, where the “discord between [God] and the human race” required “a third party  … who would share both natures and reconcile them to each other.” Therefore, “by laying hold of evangelical faith,” all the faithful “should be restored to him, and cease to be under the jurisdiction of a pedagogue, but instead live freely as free-born sons under the mercy of a most kind parent” (Sider, Erasmus, 169).

33093_Williams.indd 89

2022-09-01 16:54

90

The Communion of the Book

Corinth was their mysterious union with the community, by virtue of the sacrament: it was the mystery of one body formed by all those who shared in the ‘one Bread’” (279). Deformed by ecclesiastical politics in the High Middle Ages, that ancient communitarian purpose was only restored in the broad reforms of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, under authority of Pope Paul VI. As the Sacred Congregation of Rites promulgates this reformed doctrine: “The mystery of the Eucharist is the true center of the sacred liturgy and indeed of the whole Christian life.”60 “It is through the Eucharist that ‘the Church continually lives and grows,’ … and the mystery of the Lord’s Supper is celebrated, ‘so that through the Body and Blood of the Lord the whole brotherhood is united’” (7). Indeed, it is only in the sacred rite that “Christ is present, by whose power the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church is united. For ‘the partaking of the Body and Blood of Christ has no less an effect than to change us into what we have received.’”61 What this doctrine occludes is the original mission of the Church to absorb the primordial culture of blood ties among kin-based institutions of sixth-century Europe, through a policy that Henrich locates in the historical record of marriage and inheritance laws. His findings make it highly likely that the Germanic tribes were indeed assimilated through suppression of their “cousin”-marriage practices.62 In this context, however, the principle of communitarian participation in “the Body and Blood of Christ” gains a more profound significance: a novel ­creation of displaced “blood” ties. For by the rite of Holy Communion, the Germanic tribes now joined a similar-but-different corpus mysticum, both by virtue of the “Real Presence” of the Son (and presence of the Father in the Son), and by their personal incorporation into that divine, patrilineal body. The “sons” of God had found new blood ties.63 Body and soul, they now belonged to another “kin”-based institution where Father no longer referred to the clan’s ancestor, but rather to il papa, el

60 “Eucharisticum Mysterium: Instruction,” 1. 61 Ironically, in view of its 400 years on the Index, the Ratio’s admonition to students of scripture that they “be transformed into what you are learning” still echoes in the Sacred Congregation’s pledge to communicants “of the Body and Blood of Christ” that they will be “change[d] … into what we have received” (Vessey, 117). 62 Henrich, 168–71; also see further discussion in this work: xii, 84–5, 427. 63 This conclusion is at least implicit in Erasmus’s Paraphrase on Galatians where all believers can expect to “live freely as free-born sons under the mercy of a most kind parent” (Sider, Erasmus, 169).

33093_Williams.indd 90

2022-09-01 16:54



The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis 91

papa, le pape, the pope, or “holy Father.” And the rituals of this reconstituted “clan” not only dissolved the old blood history; it transcended history altogether. Henceforth sharing in a substitute form of “blood” sacrifice, the tribe’s blood ties were amplified to infinity. The Church’s success in absorbing the pagan clans and tribes also depended, however, on a lucky “fit” between the Church’s preferred medium of communication and the tribal psychology of its adherents. Although the Arian bishop Wulfila had adapted Greek capitals to create “Gothic letters” as early as the mid-fourth century, “Only a small number of Goths … ever read, these being chiefly churchmen. Reading never permeated Gothic society” (Fischer, 97). Nor did it immediately ­penetrate the society of pagan Saxons whom Boniface converted several centuries later. The holy book64 from which the bishop regularly read aloud in the basilica nonetheless retained visceral connections for a people still close to the lifeworld of hunters and herders. Indeed, this book of eternal life had been fashioned from the hides of lambs or kids that were soaked in lime, then scraped, pumiced, and stretched, before being pumiced and stretched again to remove all trace of hair or blood (Clement, 5). And yet each page still kept the aura of blood sacrifice that underwrote the literal truth of the Word made flesh.65 No wonder the bishop regularly turned on his procession into the chancel to kiss, then hold aloft, that mysterious book which few of his parishioners could even read.66 The hidebound volume was a psychological link to the sacrificial goat that had bound ancient devotees of Donar-Thor together in familial and tribal bonds of blood, and that now bound the Germanic tribes together in a new corpus mysticum. For such reasons,

64 The Bible was not the only book to command attention in the region. Boniface, as book historian R.W. Clement notes, also brought Christian “monasteries, and book production to Germany,” the monastery at Fulda being “long famous as a center for book production.” See Clement, “Medieval,” 5. 65 David Rundle, “Medieval,” sees the very shape of the modern book-page as “the legacy of a manuscript culture in which the codex was unquestionably carnal, the flesh made Word” from “the hide of an animal” that is “longer than it is wide” (118–19). 66 Boniface wrote a revealing letter of thanks to “Abbess Eadburh for books she had sent him and asks her to continue her good deed by having written ‘with gold’ the Letters of St. Peter, to inspire ‘honour and reverence of the holy scriptures before the eyes of the worldly when I preach.’ In the Latin, the term ‘worldly’ is carnales: those given to the flesh and yet to be converted but who, Boniface believes, will be persuaded to appreciate the spiritual through awe of the physical, by seeing an object itself carnal glisten with gold” (Rundle, 121–2). The lesson is that of the icon, not of the written Word.

33093_Williams.indd 91

2022-09-01 16:54

92

The Communion of the Book

how could the Saxon Luther not feel a deep ambivalence about the Real Presence manifested in the sacrifice of the Mass? The former monk was not so far removed himself (a mere six years) from reading those ancient manuscripts penned on parchment in the Erfurt monastery of St Augustine. And it was difficult to dispel that powerful illusion of the martyred Lamb of God arising from the smooth surface of the fleshand-blood lamb on every rubricated page.

T h e I n c a r n at e T e x t a n d t h e E a r ly M o d e r n C r i s i s When we look back on the fiery controversies that set all Europe ablaze in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they may seem of greater consequence now than some trivial concern about the proper way to eat a “boiled egg.” For we are living through another communications revolution where a degraded version of the Eucharist appears nightly on the television news. If it bleeds, it leads; such is the proverbial maxim, at least, of modern news producers. As medium theorist Carolyn Marvin and psychologist David W. Ingle point out, however, it is not sufficient to see modern blood and gore as debased elements in a vestigial system. “Media preoccupation with violence speaks to their role in the ritual system of blood sacrifice. We stay in shape as a group,” conserving ­collective identities, “by imposing ritual form on events of the world, large and small.” To that extent, “media constantly rehearse the structure of sacrifice and its supporting myths.”67 And in an era of rapid media change, a secularized version of an ancient sacrament68 may have more to teach us than we think. But apart from newer media, Henrich’s account still overlooks two important steps in the process of mediated cultural evolution.69 The first is ­material change in the medium – paper replacing parchment after a millennium of use70 – which eliminates subliminal associations between blood 67 Marvin and Ingle, “Blood Sacrifice,” 773. 68 On this head, see my comparison of the communications theories of Harold Innis and Marshal McLuhan in “On Reading Darwin,” 15–32. 69 Henrich does note: “There are no unmediated personal relationships with God” (417). 70 Roberts and Skeat’s last word in The Birth of the Codex also reinforces this all-­important pairing of the “twin developments of paper and printing” that turned the codex “into the book of to-day” (76, my emphasis).

33093_Williams.indd 92

2022-09-01 16:54



The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis 93

sacrifice and material substance. The second step involves a major change in the process – the shift from oral-aural rituals, or externalized performance, to personal and private acts of silent reading,71 or internalized performance – a silent driver of Henrich’s weird psychology that will be more fully demonstrated in chapter 3, since it is a key ­prerequisite of modernity.72 As I have suggested elsewhere, the material nature of the medium appears to have been bound up with the psychology of Christian culture from its beginnings.73 Jewish culture had typically used leather rolls on which to write God’s word, dating from at least the post-exilic period of the sixth-century bce. As Jack Finegan notes, “The Jews … by no means considered it barbarian to write on leather skins, but evidently preferred this material, for in the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, some were written on papyrus but most were on leather” (24). By contrast, among 172 of the earliest biblical manscripts, “there are eleven which … may be assigned to the second century and are thus the earliest Christian manuscripts in existence. All are on papyrus and in codex form” (Roberts and Skeat, 40). Even when we turn to noncanonical Christian texts, “the conclusion remains the same, namely that where the Christian Bible first emerges into history the books of which it was composed are always written on papyrus and are always in codex form” (42).74 By comparison, as Jack Finegan observes, 97 per cent of surviving pagan manuscripts from the second century are papyrus rolls, whereas the “eight Christian biblical papyri known from the same century are in the form of the codex. Likewise in the entire

71 Indeed, “Nearly all reading audiences in the Middle Ages were ‘read to’ audiences” (Fischer, History, 159). The individual, or solitary, reader was still a social aberration. 72 Book historians James Raven and Goran Proot, Oxford Illustrated, insist nonetheless on the lingering influence of oral culture with respect to the products of printing: “Print undoubtedly transformed politics, religion, commerce, and intellectual, linguistic, and ­cultural life, but is it really possible to speak of a ‘print culture’ in early modern Europe when so much continued to depend on oral communication?” (158). 73 See my Imagined Nations, 6–8. 74 Carefully ruling out explanations of “economy,” “compactness,” comprehensiveness,” “convenience of use,” and “ease of reference” (45–51), Roberts and Skeat (“Birth”) argue: “If the first work to be written on a papyrus codex was” indeed “a Gospel” – that of Mark, likely composed in Antioch, not Jersualem because of “the Jewish War” against Rome after 66 ce – “it is easy to understand that the codex rapidly became the sole format for the Christian scriptures, given the authority that a Gospel would carry” (60).

33093_Williams.indd 93

2022-09-01 16:54

94

The Communion of the Book

period extending to shortly after the end of the fourth century, out of 111 biblical manuscripts or fragments from Egypt, 99 are codices” (29). So why did Christians overwhelmingly prefer the papyrus codex? The parchment codex had its place among Romans because it was reusable; like a wax tablet, it could be wiped clean.75 But it was still relegated to plebeian functions such as note taking or else consigned to household slaves. Did the “lower class origins” of many Roman ­converts to Christianity make it the medium of choice?76 Book historian Barbara Crostini thinks not. By favouring the codex, she argues, early Christians presented a visual “critique of the rhetoric and philosophy of pagan culture voiced by high-born converts. By contrast, the ­syntactically ­simpler and stylistically more direct language of Scriptures emphasized the potential for every human being to attain wisdom and salvation” (“Byzantium,” 61). One could still conclude that Christian culture ­differentiated itself from pagan culture by embracing “­egalitarian” rhetoric in a slave-class format, much as it distinguished itself from Judaic religion by its choice of the open codex,77 as opposed to the closed leather roll.78 But parchment, which could be produced

75 The poet Martial (40–104 ce) was the first Roman to praise “the form of the ­ archment codex” (ca 84 ce), recommending its convenience for travellers as well as for p librarians, given “how much space it saves in the library when compared with the roll” (Roberts and Skeat, 25). The authors point out, however, that Martial seems to have taken part in an experiment to replace the fashionable literary roll with the codex (27). The experiment failed; Martial never mentioned the parchment codex again. And “the next oldest Latin parchment codex” exists in fragments from “the third–fourth century” (28). 76 Of Christian works, Clement says, “All eleven of the [surviving] second-century books are papyrus codices. As far as we know the early Bible was always written in codex form. Of the non-Biblical Christian works, eighty-three are codices and thirty-five are rolls. Clearly the adoption of the codex was associated with the rise of Christianity” (2). 77 The cover illustration of The Birth of the Codex is from a painting in the Roman Catacombs of a young man from the third century holding up an open codex. While Roberts and Skeat do not explore the “openness” of this form, Peter Stallybrass does ­reproduce a contrasting figure in “Books and Scrolls” from Joseph Mede’s The Key of the Revelation (1643) of “the book of Revelation as a scroll with seven seals at the top,” pointing to the closed (and enclosing) nature of the roll, as compared with “the open codex with seven finding tabs at the bottom” (44). 78 For opposing cultural assumptions and usages that underwrite the Hebrew roll and Christian codex, see my Imagined Nations, 8–10. Perhaps the profoundest import of the codex form was that it naturalized “the appropriation of the ‘old’ by the ‘new’ through cutting up prophetic texts and redistributing them” among the Gospels and Epistles. “In codex form, the Alpha and Omega of the Gospels became immediately visible” (8).

33093_Williams.indd 94

2022-09-01 16:54



The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis 95

anywhere, eventually replaced Egyptian papyrus as writing material in the fourth century through much of the Roman Empire.79 So, why did a communications system that had satisfied the needs of cultural psychology in Western Europe for a thousand years after the fall of the Roman Empire so quickly degenerate into a system in crisis in the Gutenberg era? It is hard to doubt that the advent of the printed book led to what James Kearney calls “an object in crisis: the post-­ Reformation book” (4). In effect, the restless new culture of printing soon fractured a system whose hegemony had long been regarded as eternal. And yet sharp tensions between the older culture of ritual enchantment and the new culture of printing are neatly encapsulated in a sermon preached on Good Friday 1530 or 1531 by John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester, which “translates a scriptural text about an iconic book into a devotional image of Christ on the cross, an image he then ‘reads’ as an illuminated manuscript” (Kearney, 6). Kearney’s phrasing is meant to amplify a deeply visceral sense that we get from the late medieval churchman (who was also a humanist sympathizer) of what it felt like to see “the body of Christ transformed into a fleshy book, bloody and beaten.” Although the English, like other Germanic peoples, often wore clothing made from the skins of dead animals, there was something disturbingly animate in this apprehension of the book as a body of flesh and blood. As Kearney envisions it, “to think of the book as a thing of the flesh” (see chapter 3 below), a “manuscript codex, made of parchment, written with ink … helps Fisher and his congegration” to “imagine the suffering flesh in visceral ways” (6–7).80 But such figurative imagining is only possible because the illuminated manuscript of the Bible is not presented by the homilist as a creation of thought, or written language on a page, but as a material creation of ritual, a creature with an actual flesh-and-blood body. To Kearney, “the incarnate text” is more than a material remnant of the Middle Ages;

79 Roberts and Skeat (“Birth”) conclude that, “whereas production of papyrus was limited to Egypt, parchment could be produced wherever the skins of suitable animals were available in sufficient quantity” (8). They conjecture that it took “so long to replace papyrus” because of a variety of technical difficulties in its production (9–10). 80 Roberts and Skeat hold that “parchment of good quality is the finest writing material ever devised by man,” given how its flexibility, durability, and pleasant smoothness “provide unlimited scope for the finest writing and illumination” (8). What this view overlooks is the pyschological fit of the “incarnate” text with Christian theology. While it embodies “the Word made flesh,” it just as easily lends itself to pagan animism.

33093_Williams.indd 95

2022-09-01 16:54

96

The Communion of the Book

it is a handwritten emblem of a lost unity of being and the h ­ arbinger of a looming cultural crisis, unless the book of God’s Word can be refigured as a crucifix memorializing the flesh and blood of the dying Son of God. This crisis, as Kearney describes it, is in part the effect of tensions in an inherently dualist culture between the “Word” as Spirit and the “Word” as material object. And the new technology of printing ­exacerbated these tensions of spirit and matter. On the one hand, “Many Reformers embraced written language as the medium and the book as the vehicle of godly authority and Christian truth” (2). On the other hand, “Language cannot fail to have a material dimension; it cannot avoid being flesh or image” (22). Fisher was not just conventional but orthodox in his application of the theology of Incarnation to the ancient problem of duality. For he figured the doctrine of the Eternal Word – the second person in the holy Trinity – as a book made literally of flesh and blood that he could then “read” as the suffering body of the Son. Well over four centuries before McLuhan, Fisher had divined that the medium was in fact the message. For this book made from the skins of a whole flock of lambs, if not a herd of Thor’s goats, now spoke the message of the Lamb of God’s death for the salvation of sinners. As for communicants, the medium was itself the embodiment of personal blood guilt erased by grace of the Son’s sacrifice. A few years after Fisher preached his sermon in English, however, Luther was writing in German that the consequences of sin were more serious than the Church had allowed. The reason appeared in the language spoken by God in that book: it was no longer the language of paradise. Language in Eden before the fall had not been at all problematic for Luther; it was Adam and Eve’s sin that condemned them to speak a fallen language in which God’s meaning was henceforth uncertain.81 In his Lectures on Genesis (1535–45), for example, Luther had affirmed the ability of the first couple “to hear the divine word directly and to understand and obey it perfectly” (Kearney, 23). By their disobedience, however, they lost their immediate and “direct access to that

81 White argues that “Luther’s views” on language are “remarkably similar to corresponding scholastic views” such as those of William of Ockham (199–200); that he ­continued “to see arguments in” the “syllogistic terms” of Scholastic logic (202); and that he “tends to retain much of the medieval logical and semantic apparatus, and to use it when expressing and developing his doctrine” (207). By contrast, Erasmus is “modern.”

33093_Williams.indd 96

2022-09-01 16:54



The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis 97

word,” and were “exiled from a perfect world of direct communication with, and knowledge of, the divine to a fallen world of material signs” (23-4).82 Human language had thus been irredeemably corrupted by fallen human nature; even the printed book now signified to Luther a second “Fall into Writing” (21),83 despite his public assurance that “‘Scriptures are their own interpreters’ (sacra scriptura sui ipsius interpres).”84 Having lost direct connection with God’s voice, human beings could only hope to “transcend the merely material and irredeemably fallen world of objects, of things” (Kearney, 3), through the material object of the printed Bible. Luther’s public faith in sola scriptura, free of clerical mediation, does seem to have masked a deeper anxiety about a “fall into writing.”85 Or, as Renaissance literary scholar Yaakov Mascetti puts it, “Once the Scriptures were opened, by Erasmus and Luther, to humanist techniques of textual criticism,” thereby submitting them to linguistic scrutiny, “the sacramental unity between the written the [sic] Scriptural Word, the actual historical ‘utterance,’ and the fact that it was guaranteed by God’s meaning and intention, was threatened, leaving behind a sense of scriptural obscurity” (4). Luther’s doctrine of “justification by faith” was more like a leap of faith, without a guarantee of soft landings. The upshot, according to James Kearney, was a “crisis in representation and language” (2) that continued to deepen throughout the sixteenth century. (If that crisis has returned with a vengeance in poststructural

82 Contrary to Luther’s views on a “fall into language,” Milton scholar Martin Kuester maintains that equivocal signs existed in Milton’s paradise “before the Fall” (140n200), and that God himself had “deviated from unambiguous paradisal language” (82) in using irony as a “pedagogical strategy” in his discourse with Adam (83). Given Milton’s free-will defence of “God’s ways to men,” linguistic ambiguity was necessary in paradise for the sake of moral freedom by which to produce “self-reliant and responsible human beings who will be able to find their own way in the world” (123). 83 “In his Lectures on the Psalms,” Kearney says, Luther “insists that it is in the nature of God’s word to be heard (‘Natura enim verbi est audiri’). The crucial scriptural text here is Romans 10:17: ‘Faith commeth by hearing.’” In effect, “Luther emphasized hearing the word preached because he wanted to insist that the word of God is present not on the page, not in the scriptural text, but through the working of the spirit” (26). In his partiality to orality and syllogistic logic, Luther retained some key habits of late medieval thought. 84 Dobranski, Readers and Authorship, 27–8. 85 Luther’s views on a “fall into writing” were not shared by Johannes Reuchlin, the great German humanist, whose own Rudiments of Hebrew (1506) had introduced the language to many Christian scholars, including Luther (Price, 75, 213), as the idiom “in which, it is said, God spoke in person with humans and humans with angels” (cited in Price, 59).

33093_Williams.indd 97

2022-09-01 16:54

98

The Communion of the Book

theories of language, it now destabilizes theological meanings by ­virtue of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentric philosophies, or the “metaphysics of presence.”) But, as Kearney sees it, the Lutheran “­religion of the book” was not what it is so often presumed to be, because of its semantic uncertainty; the material object did not provide direct access to the divine mind. “Justification by faith,” or faith in the truth of God’s promise, was all that a “Lutheran” reader had to go on. Where my reading differs from Kearney, however, is not in the distinction he makes between “the letter and the spirit” of the Word, since that is a distinction intrinsic to the dualism of Christian orthodoxy, and applicable to each of the early modern authors he discusses. In any event, his conclusions would be sharply qualified in the late seventeenth century by Paradise Lost and its monist materialism, and by Milton’s monist theology in De Doctrina Christiana.86 But Kearney’s study ends before the political crisis of the Commonwealth, not to mention the Restoration, in a reading of Francis Bacon’s so-called “Impossible Book” (224), New Atlantis (1626–27). Throughout the whole of his extended century of study (1516–1626), Kearney finds no literary champion to challenge Luther’s “fall into writing,” and no clear way to reconcile mind or spirit with matter.87 Milton continued long after the Restoration, however, to insist that communication among humans had been mediated from the very beginning in Eden, not least in Adam’s face-to-face colloquy in Paradise Lost with God as with a friend to plead his case for a mate; and even more so in the muddled messaging of the “winged Messenger” Raphael88 before the Fall. Unfallen speech for Milton was just as ambiguous as fallen speech. And, as he seems to have realized, he was that much closer to Johannes Reuchlin (see chapter 4) than to Luther in rejecting a fatal “fall into language,” much less a second fall into

86 See my discussions of monism in both works in Milton’s Leveller God, 231–48, 252– 70, 301–2. 87 Conversely, Kuester notes Harold Bloom’s claim that Milton’s solution to the problem of dualism was implicit in his understanding of Hebrew: “The Hebrew word behind Saint John’s logos is davhar, as Milton knew, and davhar is both a deed and a thought, a word for ‘word’ that does not allow any dualism” (Prudent Ambiguities, 146n278). 88 Even a Miltonic conversation with God is open to interpretation, as Adam finds to his regret in Raphael’s alarmed response to his creation story. On the “Angelic Doctor” as an unreliable narrator, see Kuester, Prudent Ambiguities, 86–100; and Williams, Milton’s Leveller God, 194–9, 211–30, 261–9, 281–99.

33093_Williams.indd 98

2022-09-01 16:54



The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis 99

writing.89 Milton directly echoes what Reuchlin had written in his MiracleMaking Word (1494) that “[t]he language of the Jews is simple, pure, uncorrupted, sacred, concise, and eternal, in which, it is said, God spoke in person with humans and humans with angels, not through an interpreter but face to face … as a friend speaks to a friend” (cited in Price, 59). Milton’s God even sends the archangel Raphael “as friend with friend” to “Converse with Adam,”90 although God himself, speaking as a friend on a visit to Eden, tests Adam through highly oblique speech, before concluding: “Thus farr to try thee, Adam, I was pleas’d, / And find thee knowing … of thyself” (Paradise Lost 8.437–9). If God continues to speak “in person” in the sacred Hebrew of the Old Testament, his auditors do not hesitate to reply in the English of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563–83). This latter work is not in the least iconoclastic, at least not in the sense meant by Kearney; it is a true outlier in a reforming age, as John N. King shows, when even “the compilers of the Geneva Bible (1560)” had “eschewed narrative illustration almost wholly” (Foxe’s, 162). Kearney mentions only in passing Foxe’s part in “the Protestant campaign to replace the idolatry of Catholicism with the word of God” (88), or comments briefly on a woodcut depicting “English men and women of the sixteenth century coming to their beliefs through dramatic conversion experiences in which written texts, often the Bible newly translated into English, played the crucial role” (144). But he is silent about the many woodcuts depicting human ­bodies wreathed in flames and in the agonies of dying flesh. John King’s examination of surviving copies of nine editions of Foxe’s book from 1563 to 1684 suggests the opposite of the book as an object in “crisis.” King often shows from surviving copies how readers “doodled on pictures, incorporated drawings in margins, altered pictures, filled them in in the manner of a coloring book, or inscribed short speeches within blank scrolls that lack drop-in typesettings” (169). Leaving ­banderoles (speech bubbles) empty in many scenes of execution, the compilers and designers of Foxe’s book left room for readers to become authors in woodcuts that “undergo completion through the addition of memorable dying words” (King, 241). These responses offer evidence of something close to a physical compulsion among Foxe’s readers to 89 See above, 97n82. 90 Paradise Lost 5.230–1. This phrasing makes it almost certain that Milton had read very closely Reuchlin’s Miracle-Making Word.

33093_Williams.indd 99

2022-09-01 16:54

100

The Communion of the Book

mark up, physically engage with, or imagine famous last words for the execution scenes, as if to answer a speaking voice in the text, or step right into the scene. Such brains, rewired by reading, become literal exemplars of the flesh made Word. Furthermore, a comparison of Foxe’s woodcuts with those of Caxton’s Golden Legend eighty years earlier reveals significant differences in the visual forms of their textual embodiment. Even in a late-medieval printed work, “the static iconicity of hieratic images of saints who appear immune to pain and suffering is very different from the physical ­contortion, dynamic emotionality, and realism of Foxean woodcuts” (J.N. King, 212), making Foxe’s “incarnate text” into a visceral equivalent of the martyr’s body. But an approach of this sort to Foxe’s book in Kearney’s Incarnate Text would have required a complete reframing of the argument. And it is not his concern, but mine, to explain how the metaphorically “Incarnate Text” of Foxe began the reconciliation of this problem of duality, of resolving old antinomies of body and mind in figures of the flesh made Word.

The Cultural Psychology of Paper For a thousand years, the “blood” sacrifice of the Church’s sacrament had served as an effective substitute for animal sacrifice and the clan ties of blood. The social structure of a patriarchal Church also preserved ancient attitudes of deference to authority, respect for sages, and loyalty to a network of blood ties common among kin-based institutions. And its own holy book, which proclaimed the saving grace of the Word made flesh, was literally (until the mid-fifteenth century) an incarnate text, a creature of sorts made from the skin and blood of dead animals. Despite periodic challenges to the mystery language of this sacred book from proto-reformers like the Occitan-speaking Cathars in twelfth- and ­thirteenth-century Languedoc, the Middle-English-speaking Lollard followers of Wycliffe in fourteenth-century England, and the Czechspeaking followers of Jan Huss in fifteenth-century Bohemia, this cultural fit between a sacramental system of worship, a psychology of intensive kinship, and a theology of the incarnate Word produced a fairly stable social system that survived until the appearance of printed paper books ca 1450. Of the 27,000 editions of European incunabula91 published 91 Blair, “Managing,” Oxford Illustrated, 171.

33093_Williams.indd 100

2022-09-01 16:54



The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis 101

by 1500, Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin estimate the total number at some twenty million volumes. By 1600, at least two hundred million printed books were now available in Europe.92 What this story typically overlooks, however, are the effects on cultural psychology of this shift from a durable page of parchment to a far cheaper93 but less durable page of paper. For what had reached Europe in the thirteenth century from Baghdad and Cairo was a different substance from the one carried over the Silk Road from China to Samarkand, Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo in the eighth and ninth centuries. In Middle Eastern locales that lacked wood or water, a mostly Arabic-speaking people had adapted Chinese techniques of paper production to the best available substance  – recycled rags. 94 As paper historian Lothar Müller says, “Its raw materials could be found wherever people lived, wore suitable clothing, and engaged in trade” (6). If Arab papermakers recycled waste from products common in daily life, their rag pickers obtained these “raw materials … from cities and villages, not fields and forests, so from the Arab civilization of the Middle Ages until well into the nineteenth century, paper production remained closely linked to factors such as population development and textile production” (6). The reverse was true of Chinese paper that was made from “the bast fiber of the paper mulberry, which was soaked in water with wood ash and then mechanically processed until the individual papers separated” (Müller, 3). As Eleanor Robson explains, “[T]he invention of modern paper is traditionally dated to 105 ce, when Cai Lun, a senior official of the Han Dynasty, is said to have presented the Emperor He with a papermaking method inspired by watching wasps build their nests. An official history of the fifth century ce records how he pounded together the inner bark of mulberry trees and waste hemp fibre” (Robson, 35). But imperial luxuries were unlikely to find their way, as they most ­certainly did, into ordinary homes or to be used domestically. In fact, 92 Febvre and Martin, L’Apparition, 248–9. 93 Eisenstein, Printing Press, reports that “‘[i]n 1483, the Ripoli Press charged three florins per quinterno for setting up and printing Ficino’s translation of Plato’s Dialogues. A scribe might have charged one florin per quinterno for duplicating the same work. The Ripoli Press produced 1,025 copies; the scribe would have turned out one” (46). Clement, “Medieval,” adds that over-production led to deflated prices, “a printed book costing ­perhaps 20% or less of what it would cost to produce an equivalent manuscript” (14). 94 Müller, White Magic, 5–10, xii.

33093_Williams.indd 101

2022-09-01 16:54

102

The Communion of the Book

“the first archaeologically attested fragments of paper” were found in a sealed tomb, near modern-day Xian, and date from at least two centuries before the alleged invention of Cai Lun (35). It is probable, in other words, that papermaking was already in general use, and had originated among the rice paddies of the early Han Dynasty. What is certain from historical practice is that paper production in China had remained rural and clan-based, like rice farming, throughout at least the first millennium of the Christian era. By contrast, the arrival of Arab paper in Europe heralded the growth of city life, disenfranchising rural herders who supplied their local monasteries with hides. Although paper had reached Spain by the tenth century in the Islamic Caliphate of Cordoba, it did not come north95 until the first paper mill was established in Fabriano, near Perugia in north-central Italy, around 1235 ce. From the outset, paper production in Europe was mechanized; water mills drove the heavy hammers of the rag stampers. “By adopting mill technology and hammer mills from the textile and metalworking industries, European papermakers could pulp macerated rags with much more power than their Arab counterparts” (Müller, 22–3). Furthermore, whereas the “Chinese had used bamboo screens and the Arabs had made screens from reeds” to extract fibrous matter, mostly pouring water by hand over the raw material, the Italians adapted “stiff metal screens” from local metalworkers to use in paper mills, which “was the most important European innovation at the heart of the papermaking process. Paper mills therefore benefited from the ­metalworking industry both indirectly, through stamp mill technology, and directly, through the use of wire-pulling techniques to make the dip molds” (23). Moreover, the first German paper mill established at Nuremberg in 1390 was “situated on important long-distance trade routes” (Müller, 26). And since mechanized mills could produce “up to 3,000 sheets in a single day,” with a “a yearly output of nearly one million sheets” (26), exports were essential to economic viability. The port city of Genoa, a Mediterranean hub of trading with the Islamic world in the High and late Middle Ages, further “benefited from the migration of experts who 95 With the exception, that is, of the very first Christian manuscript inscribed on paper, “a late tenth- or early eleventh-century Mozarabic Breviary at the abbey of Silos (south of Burgos in Castile)” (Rundle, “Medieval,” 125), on material that could only have been imported, most likely from Andalusia.

33093_Williams.indd 102

2022-09-01 16:54



The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis 103

disseminated the knowledge that had originated in the oldest European paper mills in Fabriano” (37). In consequence, the establishment of larger paper mills west of Genoa, “in Voltri, along the waterways in the mountains near the coast, owed their fame above all to the fine writing paper they produced” (38) – a page of dazzling whiteness made from Egyptian linen which was unloaded from ships docked in the port of Genoa. “From the mid-fourteenth century,” high-quality paper from Europe “became an increasingly successful export to the Islamic world” (26), where traditional equipment and hand-work techniques could no longer compete with the “industrial” methods of the northern ­newcomers to paper production. But without paper, and without the mass production of printed books, there would have been no possibility of creating a mass readership. And without mass literacy, an unprecedented culture of the book that helped to midwife the modern world would not have been born. While the growth of this new culture was rapid, it was not always straightforward. By virtue of mass production, the uses of European paper were also diffuse at first and remained close to the lifeworld of the users. Increasing demand for student textbooks in the new universities expanded the work of commercial scriptoria. It also fostered a pecia system of copying, by which smaller pieces of an original work could be rented out to students, who in turn made their own copies for sale (Müller, 27). In city chanceries and village offices, the ranks of secretaries, clerks, and bookkeepers kept more records on less costly materials.96 The “­commercial paper used by manufacturers in Nuremberg to package their needles, grommets, and so on” (28) also found its way into the humblest of homes in this German city, as well as the largest urban centres in Europe. “This strand of paper’s history prior to the printing press is noteworthy not least because it led paper out of the world of cloisters, universities, and chanceries and into the world of the illterate general population” (28). One product in high demand in Europe after 1300 ce was “playing cards … made from layers of paper glued together” that created a “gambling craze” that “consumed far more paper than chanceries and town councils.” From Müller’s history of the rapid expansion of paper products in Europe, I draw what I take to be four far-reaching conclusions. First, 96 David Rundle, “Medieval,” reports that “even by 1280 in Bologna,” paper “was onesixth of the price of parchment” (127).

33093_Williams.indd 103

2022-09-01 16:54

104

The Communion of the Book

the new material had a levelling social effect, both in its distribution and its social uses. For the spread of written texts from monasteries to universities to town councils led to a spillover of paper products into the homes of many merchants and town officials, making paper both familiar and familial, and creating a “domestic” market for printed products. A second major consequence of increased competition from paper scribes and commercial scriptoria was that monks and other copyists were forced to enlarge their “lettering on parchment ­manuscripts, which had become more and more cramped” (Müller, 27). Of course, bigger letters and unique spacing between the words made reading easier and tilled the ground for mass literacy.97 Third, the domestication of writing that followed from cheaper w ­ riting materials elevated the status of vernacular languages, creating a market for translated books. To people who did not read Latin, the Gutenberg Bible (1455) was only printed for bishops and priests, many of whom could now buy a Bible for the parish church.98 Finally, given the word’s growing presence in a culture where the Bible had been more of a holy icon than a familiar voice, there occurred a marked, if still unremarked, shift in the psychology of readers. The ancient aura of blood sacrifice, which had long haunted the parchment Bible, was finally washed away. In terms of psychological effect, the printed Bible was a blank slate, unmarked by sacrificial blood. Like its fine white paper from Voltri, where the stamping mills smashed flax-seed linens to a fibrous pulp, the paper book no longer bore the stigma of a dying animal. Culturally, at least, it had become a tabula rasa.

97 Fischer points out the impetus given to silent reading by Carolingian minuscule of the ninth century, a script that not only required word separation, but the word to be ­written as a “self-contained graphic bundle” along (a,o,n), above (l), and below (g) the line; use of upper case for proper nouns and sentence beginnings; and rubrication of headings – reforms that all freed “the text more and more from the tongue” (180–1). 98 Deibert, Parchment, relates how Cardinal “Nicholas of Cusa, referred to the printing press as a ‘divine art’ because of the way that the technology would enable poor priests who would otherwise be unable to afford Bibles to have access to cheaper, mass-produced ­versions” (69). Eisenstein adds, “The poor priest needed” the Bible “even more urgently than did the prosperous layman. For fifty years before the Protestant Revolt, churchmen in most regions welcomed an invention which served both” (Printing, 317).

33093_Williams.indd 104

2022-09-01 16:54



The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis 105

Some Effects of Mass Readership in the Sixteenth Century The usual reason given for exploding numbers of readers in the towns and villages of early modern Europe was the supply of, and demand for, vernacular Bibles like Luther’s German New Testament of 1522, which made Erasmus’s Greek New Testament of 1516 its source text.99 The Dutch humanist had already weakened the ancient Church ­doctrine of works100 for a pan-European readership by showing the ­sacrament of penance to be without warrant in scripture.101 His translation of Matthew  3.2 in Novum instrumentum clearly revealed that the Greek metanoia, which “first appears at the beginning of John the Baptist’s sermon,” does not refer to “the sacrament of penance but the act of repentance” (Whitford, 537).102 To a certain extent, Luther’s Bible was telling German readers what Latin litterati already knew. But Erasmus also taught Luther to use “imputatio [the idea of God in his grace ­imputing righteousness by virtue of faith alone] in a new way soon after he received the Novum instrumentum” (534). The upshot was the Ninety-Five Theses attacking the sale of indulgences. Erasmus’s annotation of Matthew 11.28, “Come unto me all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,” led Luther to argue from grammatical evidence “that the Greek does not mean those that do labor (omnes qui laboratis), but those who are weary or fatigued (qui laborantes) and heavy laden” (535). “What is it that makes one weary?” Whitford paraphrases Luther. “Works ­righteousness,” i.e., the Church’s doctrine of works.

 99 Foxe credits Erasmus’s Novum instrumentum with having “prouoked” Luther “to studye the Greke and Hebrue tong, to this end, that after he had learned the phrase and propriety of the tonges and drawen the doctrine out of the very fountaines, he might geue more sound iudgement” (tamo [1563]: 3:455. 100 Whitford, “Erasmus,” 519. 101 Luther’s annotations at the back of a copy of Novum instrumentum which he ­received “in late spring of 1516 … begin to appear almost immediately with” his “lectures that began in July on Romans 9,” and that go “straight to the heart of the sacrament itself” of penance (Whitford, 529–30). The seed of “Lutheran” revolt was Erasmus’s translation. 102 “This understanding of” metanoia “was entirely dependent upon Erasmus,” Whitford claims (537), which is true if “this understanding” refers solely to Luther. By ­contrast, the Dutch humanist’s own understanding had been based on Lorenzo Valla’s discovery at least a half-century before of Jerome’s astonishing Vulgate mistranslation of metanoia. For further discussion, see chapter 3 of this work: 126–7.

33093_Williams.indd 105

2022-09-01 16:54

106

The Communion of the Book

And it wasn’t just Luther who rapidly expanded the market for printed books.103 The sceptical philology of humanists like Lorenzo Valla (d. 1457) had sold well since the first printing of De elegantiae in 1471.104 Moreover, Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly (1511), like his “­fast-selling Adages,”105 was one of the biggest print bestsellers to date, offering amusing satire and witty mockery of Scholastic theologians.106 In ­devotional works like Enchiridion militis christiani (1503), Erasmus called on readers to rethink the whole practice of Christian piety.107 And his Paraclesis (originally the preface to Novum instrumentum) tells us most of what we need to know about the emerging new culture of metaphor (see chapter 3).108 Out of the cornucopia of classical translations ­pouring from Erasmus’s pen, generations of readers could now consult a vast library of works of literature, history, philosophy, and republican politics that humanists had recovered from Antiquity. Up to 20 per cent of European book sales in the 1530s were titles by Erasmus.109 It was as if a village with one food stall had grown to a city with countless restaurants. And more had been thought and written in this feast of translations by Erasmus than almost anyone else could digest in a lifetime.110 While there is some truth to the demurral of M.T. Clanchy that “[a]s far as the history of literacy is concerned, the humanists have been all too successful as propagandists, since the educated public 103 Eisenstein reports that, “[b]etween 1517 and 1520, Luther’s thirty publications probably sold well over 300,000 copies” (303). 104 See chapter 3 of this work: 126. 105 Vessey, “Ratio in Erasmus’ Life and Work,” 22. 106 In his introduction to “The Philosophy of Christ,” Sider explains that “Erasmus will show in the Paraclesis that the philosophy of Christ contrasts in every way with the ­assumptions underlying theological studies then offered at the universities” (23). In his ­introduction to “Ratio,” he adds: “The backdrop against which he develops his system of education is the same as in the Paraclesis  – the scholastic system of education in the Universities” (39). In his general Introduction, he calls the University of Paris the source of a “new and deadly criticism” that “had begun to arise” (15) against Erasmus by 1525. 107 See further discussion in this work: 142, 145–6, 148. 108 See further discussion in this work: 148–55. As the case of Erasmus demonstrates, it was not simply “the literacy-obsessed Protestants” (14), as Henrich characterizes these proponents of cultural change, who had brought about the cultural revolution. One could just as well argue that a Catholic humanist like Erasmus had an even greater impact on this process. 109 Bingham, “Erasmus,” unpaginated. 110 In his introduction to “Ratio,” Vessey calls Erasmus “the most influential living writer in Europe” (32) during the first decades of the sixteenth century.

33093_Williams.indd 106

2022-09-01 16:54



The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis 107

(including many historians) continue to accept them at face value” (15), his a­ ssumption that “the Renaissance humanists’ programme of studies was deliberately elitist and backward-looking” (14) simply isn’t true. For fifteenth-century Florentine humanists like Poggio Bracciolini and Lorenzo Valla were forgery hunters as much as they were hunters of lost works from antiquity, bent on combatting a far more insidious sort of cultural ignorance.111 And the leading northern humanists of the sixteenth century, like the Catholic Erasmus and the Catholic Reuchlin, were intent on showing what the original scriptures had said and meant to their creators who wrote not in Latin, but in Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew. Here, too, the humanist search for doctrinal “interpolations,” if not outright “forgeries,” was something much more than an “elitist” attempt, as we shall see, to revive ancient l­ anguages and cultures. For forgeries left their own sort of bloodstain. In this respect, Erasmus should be regarded as the most important thinker of the age in his break with received ideas and traditional habits of mind, not least in the variety and wealth of “literate” innovations that he either pioneered or helped to introduce. Not least, his reverence for the original languages in which scriptures were c­ omposed had ensured, paradoxically, that their authors were now more present in the fullness of their thought than they had ever been in Latin ­translations (i.e., Church Latin, a “barbaric” version of classical Latin). And their intellectual presence would deeply reshape reader psychology in the early modern era. Joseph Henrich gestures toward that new psychology in his claim that “[i]ndividuals, through the power of their own choices, buil[t] a personal relationship directly with God, in part by reading and pondering holy scripture on their own or in small groups” (415). But “pondering” misses a far deeper, sacramental character of this reading, as we will see in chapter 3, that transformed the psychology of weird people. Finally, the commitment of a humanist like Erasmus to the best that had been thought and written in antiquity ensured that received notions and indisputable dogmas now had to be demonstrated from the original text or else be dismissed as a hindrance to “Truth.” Above all, the deep faith that Erasmus had in vernacular languages to be fit vessels of sacred and secular truth implied an equal faith in the rational

111 See further discussion in this work: 127–8.

33093_Williams.indd 107

2022-09-01 16:54

108

The Communion of the Book

capacity of ordinary people to weigh the truth for themselves, and to discuss and debate their readings with others in a type of Platonic symposium now rendered possible and even widespread by the printed book. In that sense, Erasmus also merits recognition as the father of universal literacy. In the first of several key scenes of reading that follow in the next chapter, my debt to Kearney’s choice of texts is obvious. As a medium theorist, however, I am predisposed to read “the crisis of the book” as a far-reaching consequence of the twinning of the press with paper, the outcome of which was not technologically predetermined, but shaped rather by the social embeddedness of the new technology, or “the historical and social context in which technologies are introduced”112 – what I call local adaptations to a new mode of ­communication in each society where it appears. And how we read English heirs of the Dutch Erasmus, such as John Foxe for example, depends on how we – and he – read books in the context of local ­conditions. Henrich’s emphasis on sixteenth-century reading as a sacralization of a “psychological ­complex that had been percolating in Europe during the centuries leading up to the Reformation” (416) needs to be revised in terms of local circumstances. I don’t doubt the validity of his premise that “the Protestant belief that each Christian should read the Bible for themselves [sic] drove the spread of literacy and formal schooling, first across Europe, and then around the globe” (418). Nor do I doubt ­neurological evidence that leads him to ­conclude: “By driving ­widespread literacy, Protestantism thickened people’s corpus callosa, sharpened their verbal memories, and eroded their facial recognition abilities” (418), by ­shifting brain functions to other cortical areas and creating ­neurological space for processing of the written word. But most of the psychological changes he documents had not been ­decisive, even though they had long preceded mass literacy. The context of “Lutheran” interpretation is also more complicated than diy (Do It Yourself) reading. Luther’s doubts about “a fall into language” suggest his uncertainty about the ability to interpret divine meaning for oneself; and his anxiety about a second “fall into writing” implies a distressing vacuum of authority that had once been filled by 112 Deibert, Parchment, 29. For a discussion of the distinct ways in which print culture in general and the novel in particular together with the new medium of television were received differently in English and French Canada, see my Imagined Nations, 54–64.

33093_Williams.indd 108

2022-09-01 16:54



The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis 109

patristic authority. Readers were now left to make their own meanings and choose their own associates, outside the corpus mysticum that had replaced old clan affiliations. But lingering ambivalence about the Real Presence in the sacrament suggests that Luther and his congregants had not yet freed themselves of the psychology of blood sacrifice, much less the blood ties of a substitute tribe whose rites had long ago replaced older loyalties. In a word, the Marriage and Family Plan of the Church had opened a window, but not a door, to weird psychology, to that highly individualistic mental landscape of early modern folk. And what was blocking any longer view of the landscape were the flying buttresses and high stone walls of the cathedral with its ancient rituals taking place right next door. Were there other factors that helped to mitigate the impact of the printed word on clean white paper? Book historians remind us that “[t]he printed fifteenth-century book was a direct imitation of the contemporary manuscript book” (R. Clement, 1). Moreover, “Gutenberg’s Vulgate Bible, with forty-two lines on each page, followed a format made standard in thirteenth-century Paris” (Raven and Proot, 160). Printers, in fact, went to great lengths during the first century of printing to preserve the appearance and layout of the parchment codex.113 The new page of paper was ruled and justified in familiar ways, with ornate capitals still heading chapters, and with rubrics or chapter headings as often as not rubricated in the manner of illuminated manuscripts. Illustration was provided by means of woodcut blocks locked with type into the forme or else through illumination by hand after printing, or binding, or even after purchase (Clement, 14–15). Type fonts “were modeled on the local scripts in common use, or the scripts appropriate for certain types of books” (15). In that sense, incunabula were most often designed to be continuous with the past, perhaps more so than digital media in our own deeply disruptive era. Despite the best efforts of printers to conserve the familiar appearance of the book, however, the new mode of communication was no longer an incarnate text. And the social changes wrought by this new medium were immense. The challenge it provided to received ideas was unrelenting, as was its appetite for new knowledge. And not so long after “the advent of printing, several hundred readers (even as many

113 See Eisenstein, Printing Press, 26, 33.

33093_Williams.indd 109

2022-09-01 16:54

110

The Communion of the Book

as 1000)” were able for the first time in history to “own identical copies of a work, its contents then public domain. Something like this had never happened before,” adds historian of reading Steven Roger Fischer. “And from this radically changed relation to the book a new intellectual community emerged, one transcending the abbeys, towns, and principalities of scribedom” (230). And it wasn’t just the intellectual community, but an entire society that found itself changed. “By making almost unlimited ­copies of identical texts available by mechanical means,” observes Fischer, “it brought society from limited access to knowledge to almost unlimited access to knowledge” (238). With a modicum of effort, readers now had something close to information on demand. And the expansion of literacy began to erode the reading model mentioned earlier, a hierarchical practice descending through the centuries from author to commentator to bishop to teacher to student. The changed social conditions of knowledge also led to differential increases in social levelling, these latter tending over time towards a modern culture of rights and a new sense, particularly in England, of national self-determination.114 All this came at a terrible cost, however. While three civil wars ­(1642–51) would alter the form of government to a “commonwealth” in England (1649–53), the republican experiment was doomed, leaving Milton in the last line of his sonnet 15 to “Fairfax” to ask plaintively, “For what can war but endless war still breed?” And on the Continent, the Thirty Years War (1618–48) killed one in three people in German lands, a casualty rate exceeding that in two twentieth-century world wars. Although the Continental war of religion ended in the Peace of Westphalia (1648) – to this day the basis of the international order – it did little to quell the desire for confessional and national autonomy in parts of the Holy Roman Empire. Jacob Burckhardt was not so far off the mark, then, to have sensed amidst the rising nationalism of his own century a similar spirit of nationalism in Renaissance Italy. What he ignored, however, was a sacramental system that still held the keys to eternal life. And it wasn’t just “poets” who failed to escape the pull of the Blessed Sacrament. Even Martin Luther, the leading Reformer in the North, succumbed to its gravitational force. Luther’s lingering attachment to the sacrament 114 Almost all these modern principles were first articulated in the parliamentary newspaper of the English Civil War (1642–46) and in the pamphlet wars of that decade carried out by the English Levellers and others. See my Milton’s Leveller God, 33–102.

33093_Williams.indd 110

2022-09-01 16:54



The Incarnate Text and the Early Modern Crisis 111

guaranteed the failure of the Marburg Colloquy in 1529 (see above, 83), before Zwingli ever set off from Zurich, or Oecolampadius from Basel, seeking to resolve their differences with Luther, Melanchthon, Bucer, and the rest. The truth was that Luther was a product of the Incarnate text as much as he was a preacher of the printed Word. To Zwingli’s point that Christ’s assertion, “This is my body,” was meant figuratively, not literally, Luther responded, “It is up to you to prove that the body of Christ is not there when Christ Himself says, ‘This is my body.’ I do not want to hear what reason says” (Sasse, 231). Zwingli and others had already learned from Erasmus how to read Christ’s words by ­reason of grammar, rhetoric, and the historical context. In the commentaries of the Catholic humanist, the Incarnate Word had also taken on a very different presence in the pages of the gospels. Sitting in one printshop or another, the Dutchman may not have had time enough to “scratch his ears.” What he meant was that he was working on another book. In the beginning was the Word. And the Word became philology.

33093_Williams.indd 111

2022-09-01 16:54

3

Philological Reading: The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech

The image of Christ as a book – the Incarnate Word made material text – has a long history in the Christian tradition, from its initial a­ppearance in John’s Gospel (“In the beginning was the Word”), to its widespread dissemination by Jerome’s Vulgate translation (late fourth century), down to the late medieval Dictionarium seu reportorium morale (ca 1355) of Pierre Bersuire.1 This tradition sidesteps the problem of translation,2 of course, much less the huge uproar that Erasmus’s second edition3 of the New Testament (1519) created by virtue of his latest revisions, where he translated the Greek logos4 in

1 Kearney, Incarnate Text, 14–15. 2 Erasmus wrote to Pope Leo X in February 1516 to explain his purpose and method in publishing a Greek New Testament with a new Latin translation: “I have revised the whole New Testament against the standard of the Greek original,” he maintained, and “have added annotations of my own, in order … to show the reader what changes I have made, and why” (Sider, Erasmus, 291). In the face of conservative reaction to his Novum instrumentum, Erasmus wrote to Maarten Lips in 1518, deriding one critic who “dreams up the idea that the Latin Translator produced what we now have under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, though Jerome himself in his preface openly testifies that each translator renders to the best of his ability what he is capable of understanding” (300). 3 As Sider comments, “Without question his enormous labours on the second ­edition virtually made a new work of his New Testament” (297). 4 Erasmus first explained in his 1516 Annotations on John that “[t]he Greek logos denotes several things: word, discourse, speech, reason, manner, calculation, sometimes it designates a book.” But by 1519, he admitted, “I am puzzled to know why Latin speakers preferred verbum [word] to sermo [discourse],” only to confess in 1522, “Although I knew that sermo expressed more accurately the Greek logos used here in the Gospel, nevertheless, due to a sort of superstitious fear I did not, in my first edition, replace the Translator’s verbum, for I did not wish to give any occasion to slander” (Sider, 215).

33093_Williams.indd 112

2022-09-01 16:54



The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech 113

the facing Latin column as sermo (discourse).5 In a word – literally one word – he had overturned eleven centuries of Christian tradition by reducing “Jerome’s” Eternal verbum6 (“In principio erat verbum”) to the time-bound sermo (or speech), “a living,” human “utterance which includes Christ’s recorded (written) words yet is infinitely renewed in their re-utterance by readers of subsequent ages.”7 By his fidelity to the Greek original, the humanist scholar had effectively dragged the Eternal and unchanging Word down from Heaven and limited His divine power to the ­familiarity of ordinary speech and social exchange.8 To orthodox churchmen, it was an assault on the majesty of Heaven.

Bishop Fisher’s “Booke” The bishop of Rochester, John Fisher was not a biblical philologist, but he was an early admirer of Erasmian humanism. As chancellor of Cambridge University, he had even appointed Erasmus to a teaching post in 1511.9 Charles Nauert remarks that “Though most of his biographers emphasize his activity as a teacher of Greek, it is almost certain that Bishop Fisher also arranged for him to hold the Lady Margaret professorship of divinity and that he lectured on theology as well as

5 Sider notes that Erasmus published a brief defence of this choice in February 1520 and a longer defence in August of that year, showing “at length from the writings of the Fathers that logos is frequently translated in the Scriptures by sermo” (215n48). 6 Erasmus writes in Annotations on John that “Sermo explicates more completely what the evangelist meant by logos, because to Latin speakers verbum does not mean speech as a whole, but a single word.” He thus reveals that the connotation of eternal in the Vulgate verbum derives not from this word but from its implicit function: “Christ is said to be the logos for the reason that whatever the Father says is spoken through the Son” (Sider, 216). 7 Cave, Cornucopian, 86n15. 8 Erasmus thus seems to have identified Christ with a new “rhetoric of intimacy” got from Petrarch. As Eden claims in Renaissance, Petrarch’s discovery of Cicero’s familiar letters in Ad Atticum helped to sanction public expression of one’s private life. Indeed, in De officiis Cicero had located “a rhetoric of intimacy” in two forms of discourse – sermo (29), i.e., spontaneous conversation, and familiar letter-writing – both of which fostered feelings of belonging between the “sender” and “receiver.” In Ad Atticum, he “describes the letter as a replacement for conversation when physical distance separates the two interlocutors” (30). Moreover, “this preoccupation with distance, and especially temporal distance,” as she maintains, “signals the beginnings of an early modern understanding of the past that students of the period have identified as one of Petrarch’s signature contributions” (63). 9 Huizinga, Erasmus, relates that, in 1511, Erasmus dedicated “a translation of Basilius’s Commentaries on Isaiah to John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester” (80), which might explain his appointment that year by Chancellor Fisher to teach at Cambridge University.

33093_Williams.indd 113

2022-09-01 16:54

114

The Communion of the Book

Greek. He did not enjoy his stay there (1511–14), but he was given a free hand, being allowed to lecture on the letters of St Jerome, which he was currently editing, rather than on the scholastic textbooks” (162). But after the publication of Erasmus’s New Testament and the controversy in 1519 over the translation of logos as sermo, Bishop Fisher seems to have lost some of his early enthusiasm for studia humanitatis.10 A dozen years later, in a sermon preached on Good Friday, ca 1531, he replied publicly, if still discreetly and obliquely, to Erasmus, whose “­zealous” supporter11 he had once been. Taking for his text the Book of Ezekiel, chapter 2, he began to speak about the Word in terms that put the Son well beyond the faculty of speech (sermo), reasserting his identity as the Eternal Word (verbum). Yet, in Fisher’s homiletic text, the hand of God first appears to the prophet not in a codex but in “a roll of a book” that “he spread … before me; and it was written within and without: and there was written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe” (Ezek. 2:9–10). The writings that Ezekiel depicts as “written within and without” were not two-sided, however, since the Hebrew scriptures could only be ­written “therein” on the inner surface of the scroll.12 But the bishop ignores this historical anomaly, quickly leaving the prophet’s “roll” far behind. He also quotes less of that roll in forty pages of sermon than I have done above, intent as he is on transforming his imagined codex into the “Body of Christ.” Indeed, “This was a wonderfull booke, and much to be merueiled vpon.”13 Hereafter, “merueiled,” “meruayling,” and “marueylous” are used eight times in the first two paragraphs of the sermon, if only to inculcate a sense of wonder and spirit of devotion among his auditors that, “if wee doe exercise our admiration, wee shall come to wonderfull knowledge.” Contrary to the humanist’s sermo, the late medievalist’s Word still functions outside the realm of human speech 10 As late as 1523, Huizinga writes, “John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, Erasmus’s great friend and brother-spirit,” still “looked forward” to his friend’s proposed work on “the true instruction of the Christian preacher” (181), and “urged the author to finish” his manual on “the art of preaching,” published (1535) in four volumes as Ecclesiastes (182). Bishop Fisher was already dead, beheaded in June of that year for refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy that had made Henry VIII head of the Church of England. 11 Nauert, Humanism, 163. 12 The two-sidedness of “within and without” is thus more apparent than real, given the realities of Hebrew scroll-writing. This is a key element of the written word that ought to have been considered by Kearney, given his concern with the material nature of the text. 13 English Works of John Fisher, 388.

33093_Williams.indd 114

2022-09-01 16:54



The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech 115

as the transcendent and eternal Logos, beyond any conceivable form of philological analysis. Moreover, the skilled rhetor, making effective use of anaphora (i.e.,  ­repetition in parallel syntax), begins sixteen consecutive ­paragraphs, “Is it not a wonderfull thyng,” repeated in a fashion similar to the repetition of ritual gestures such as kneeling (e.g., at the Communion Rail), prostrating (as in prayer at the mosque), or rhythmic nodding (as in prayer at Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall) – all rigidly prescribed and enacted gestures meant to ensure the ritual’s success. In the ­language of psychologists Nicholas Hobson and his colleagues, such ritual gestures are “determined by their physical and motoric features, such as the level of repetition and sequencing of movement.”14 And the type of psychological effects on participants in repetitive ritual actions can range from heightened “attention,” to “heightened value or meaning,” to a real sense of connection with “something that is ­bigger than themselves” (Hobson et al., 4). In his sermon, the bishop’s rhythmic repetition of “a wonderfull thing” is similarly designed to perform the action that it names (a ­performative utterance).15 He seeks to induce wonder in his auditors at how an imagined codex, conjured out of the prophet’s “roll,” ­magically turns into a crucifix, beyond the realm of human speech. And more wondrous still is the way in which this leather scroll, written solely on the smooth side of animal skin, is mysteriously transformed into a codex “booke” with “boardes” and “leaues” that can be “opened & spreade” until “the leaues be cowched vpon the boardes”: But you maruell peraduenture why I call the crucifix a booke? I will now tell you the consideracion why? [sic] A booke hath boardes, leaues, lynes, ­wrytinges, letters booth small and great. First I saye that a booke hath two boardes: the two boardes of this booke is the two partes of the crosse, for when the booke is opened & spread, the leaues be cowched vpon the boardes. And so the blessid [sic] body of Christ was spred vpon the crosse.

14 Hobson et al., “Psychology of Rituals,” 9. 15 J.L. Austin (How) defines a constative utterance as a “locutionary” statement of fact or description, whereas the “illocutionary” nature of contextual conditions shapes a ­performative utterance that performs the action it describes, as when a witness in a judicial proceeding responds to the question, “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” with the promise, “I do” (144).

33093_Williams.indd 115

2022-09-01 16:54

116

The Communion of the Book

The leaues of this booke be the armes, the handes, legges, and feete, with the other members of his most precious and blessed body. Never anye Parchement skynne was more strayghtlye stretched by strength vpon the tentors then was this blessed body vpon the crosse. (393–4)

As the bishop leaves off rhythmic repetition of eleven consecutive ­sentence-paragraphs, his segmentation of parts establishes a poetic conceit worthy of Donne or Crashaw, as James Kearney perceptively remarks (7). Indeed, its metonymies16 are as sensual as they are apt; here, the Ignatian style of meditation systematically unveils the presence of the spiritual in the material object of devotion. Just as “this booke” is figured as a medieval codex – not the Hebrew “roll” or scroll of Ezekiel – but “written within and without,” on both sides in the manner of a parchment codex, so too, “the sonne of God which by the holie Ghost was written in the inward syde of thys parchment” as “the word was in the begynning before all creatures” – so, too, the miraculous “Godheade of Christe was couered and hidde vnder the lykenesse of man” (Fisher, 394). The human nature of Christ is thus figured by the “hairy” side of the parchment page, while his “mysterious” divine nature is written on the smooth side in “but one worde,” the verbum of “In principio erat verbum” (394). Or, in the terms of Kearney’s usage, “Playing upon the figure of Christ as Word become flesh, Fisher makes the vision of an incarnate text come to life through a visceral conflation of body and book, through an insistence that books are flesh” (6). Except for one most disconcerting fact: the “Word become flesh” is only realized in the rigor mortis of its “boardes” as a lifeless corpse, much as the “roll” containing the prophet’s words has also been rewritten and nailed to the boards on which the codex pages are bound. Ezekiel, it seems, has also been “spred vpon the crosse.” The reality is that the homilist has left the Book of Ezekiel far behind, rendering the book qua book irrelevant. It is no longer what the Word speaks through the prophet’s lips, or what is written on that page from which the bishop reads. Much as the bread is replaced by the body of Christ in the rite of the Mass, the book is replaced in the homily by the 16 These seeming “metaphors” of the Word made Flesh are in fact metonymies because the speaking voice in Ezekiel’s “book” is “marvelously” replaced by the silent corpse of the crucified Christ in a homily meant to foreshadow the sacerdotal sacrifice of Christ on the altar of the Mass. “This is put for that,” or rather, “this” is put in the place of “that” in the same logical sequence that “the body of Christ” will replace the bread in the pyx.

33093_Williams.indd 116

2022-09-01 16:54



The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech 117

Word made lifeless flesh. In terms of his theology, the bishop’s meditation upon the “marvellous” nature of the Son of God’s sacrificial body is doubtless meant to recall the hope of Heaven in his sacrifice: “Thus who that list with a meeke harte, and a true fayth, to muse and to maruayle of this most wonderfull booke (I say of the Crucifixe) hee shall come to more fruitefull knowledge, then many other which dayly studie vpon their common bookes” (Fisher, 390). Reading such a “booke” is simply preparatory to the rite. Moreover, the reading of “common bookes” – common because a vernacular text was printed in the common tongue – cannot, in the bishop’s doctrine, bring salvation to anyone.17 Only “This booke,” which isn’t a book at all, “thys booke of the Crucyfixe” (396), “may suffice for the studie of a true christian man, all the dayes of his life. In this boke [sic] he may finde all things that be necessarie to the health of his soule” (390). No other “reading” is necessary, for no other “book” would be effectual. In this way, the threat to the Church’s power of humanist books such as Greek or vernacular Bibles is safely marginalized. The sermon is a categorical denial of the value of humanist reading. Bishop Fisher’s own reading is authoritative, however, to the extent that it centres not on historical, but on eternal Truth, conforming to traditional models of spiritual devotion. Apart from two instances of merely human learning,18 the “truth-language”19 (or foreign-sounding mystery language) of Jerome’s Vulgate Bible,20 and not the humanist’s Greek or Hebrew text, is quoted sixty-eight times. Most of the time, Fisher limits himself to a line, a phrase, or even a word, usually from 17 A decade or so later, such disdain for books in the “common” language, and the danger of letting them be read by unlearned folk, would be formalized in a statute of 1543 by the canon lawyer and bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, who “argued the inappropriateness of bible-reading for those of a lower station” (Covington, 199). 18 Fisher’s second paragraph refers to the marvels of natural philosophy (388–9), before turning to “the verye Philosophie of Christian people” (399). Later, he also refers to historians, or “The storyes” that “telleth of Cambises the King of Persia” who deprived a false judge “of hys office” (397). 19 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 14. 20 Eisenstein, Printing, points out that “vernacular Bibles were by no means the only bestsellers that were barred to Catholic readers after the Council of Trent” (415) in 1546, following that Council’s decision to make the Vulgate the only approved text of the Church. James Kearney, recalling that the Council wanted it “made known which” of the Latin translations of scripture was “to be held as authoritative [authentica]” in 1546, ultimately declared “that this ancient vulgate translation which is recommended by the long use of so many centuries in the church, be regarded as authoritative” (47).

33093_Williams.indd 117

2022-09-01 16:54

118

The Communion of the Book

the Prophets, Gospels, and Epistles of St Paul, although he does range in his sermon from Genesis to Job to the Psalms and Book of Wisdom, and even to the Apocalypse of St John the Divine. In this respect, Bishop Fisher’s “mincing of the bible” is essential to his homily, much as it is to the liturgy, where such an appropriation of the Hebrew Bible has always worked by a “flicking back and forth between the Jewish ­scriptures, the Gospels, and the Epistles (i.e., on the technology that Christianity had used and refined from the second century c.e.)”21 As Peter Stallybrass perceptively remarks, “discontinuous reading,” which “the codex enabled,” has always been “central to Christianity” (47), since the coherence of a hybrid text of Judaic, Greek, and Roman origins had to be achieved in terms of correspondences (both typological and prophetic) or flipping between the “Old” and “New” Testaments. Whatever continuity that Christian worship has enjoyed in practice has, for more than a millennium, been “provided above all by the liturgical year” (47). In fact, the liturgy and the rites that flow from it have always depended on widely separated texts to authorize its seasonal thematics, authorizing readings “from, say, the Pentateuch, the Prophets, the Psalms, the Gospels, the Pauline Epistles, a saint’s life, and so on” (47). Bishop Fisher is simply acting as a good Catholic reader in mincing the Latin Vulgate text as he does. What it means to be “a good Catholic,” then, is to follow a set of readings prescribed by the given liturgy, or by “the cutting up of the bible into specific, usable parts.” The codex is not of itself ideological; usage, or rather the insitutional user, had determined that ideology long ago. As we shall see, Erasmus’s individual reader is no less ­ideological in reading the gospels as a continuous narrative in the quest to encounter “Christ himself.”22 But, compared with the Graecist, Bishop Fisher better fulfills the role of the good shepherd who t­ ranslates his proof texts, written in the language of mystery (Latin), into the “common” (oral, but thus not written) language, so that his Englishspeaking flock will not go unfed. He thereby models the sort of ­discontinuous reading of a biblical codex that “was, and is, central to the Catholic liturgy” (Stallybrass, 47) in its ideological shaping of the institutional message.

21 Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls,” 50. 22 See further discussion in this work: 139–40, 142.

33093_Williams.indd 118

2022-09-01 16:54



The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech 119

Citing a single Church Father (Chrysostom) just once, Fisher grants equal space to the supreme doctor of the Church, St Thomas Aquinas. St Bernard of Clairvaux23 is quoted thrice, however, one of these passages citing an eight-line block of Latin in an extended meditation on the marvellous “booke of the Crucyfixe.” Indeed, this quotation is nearly twice the length of the next longest citation from John’s first Epistle. It is fitting, of course, to quote the mystic St Bernard in the course of a meditation on the Cross: “Who may not bee rauished to hope and confidence, if he consider the order of his body, his head bowing downe to offer a kisse, hys armes spreade to embrace vs, hys handes bored thorow to make lyberall giftes, his side opened to shewe vnto vs the loue of his harte, his feete fastened with nayles, that hee shall not starte away but abyde with vs. And all his bodie stretched, forcesing him selfe to giue it wholly vnto vs?” (411). The passage is powerfully evocative of human flesh in its death agony; even a sceptical philologist would have to admit that it manifests the Divine love in the supreme act of sacrifice. Furthermore, the bishop’s model for imagining the “Crucyfixe” throughout his sermon is the “holie Sainct Fraunces,” who “so profited in this lesson” of the Cross – i.e., his own extended meditation on the “booke of the Crucyfixe” – “that it caused in hys hearte such a feruent loue, such a deuotion, such an affection to Christ, that the capitall woundes which he beheld in the handes and feete, and syde of Christ, ware by myracle imprinted in hys owne handes and feete” (391). By inciting a similar rapt devotion in his auditors to such transcendent “wonders” by which to “feel” the suffering of Christ until the “woundes” in his flesh mysteriously become their own wounds, the bishop aurally prepares them to receive in oral form the Body of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. The animating function of this homily, it turns out, is the ritualized use of speech (sermo) to arrive at the eternal truth of the Word (verbum) made flesh. Style and matter, form and function, are thereby perfectly united in the mystery of the Incarnation.

23 Nauert, Humanism, remarks that “[s]uspicion of reason was an important source of opposition to the growth of early scholasticism in the twelfth century. An example is the hostility of St Bernard of Clairvaux to the founder of the dialectical method in theology, Peter Abelard” (208). Fisher thus seems to be modelling his reaction against Scholastic reason on the mystic St Bernard of Clairvaux, rather than on Erasmus, as he did before.

33093_Williams.indd 119

2022-09-01 16:54

120

The Communion of the Book

On a thematic level, however, the words with which the sermon began – that “thys booke was in my mouth as sweete as honye” (388) – come to mean something much different from the Hebrew prophet’s words and what they have long signified for his culture.24 In fact, the bishop has turned the “book” into something other than itself, making “thys booke … as sweete as honye” more of a metonymy (this is put for that, e.g., the sacrifice of the Mass put for ancient, tribal sacrifices)25 for the stigmata imprinted on the flesh of St Francis. Such an outcome is only reached by means of the bishop passing “hys time with this booke of the Crucyfixe,” rather than with the ancient Book of the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel. But by now, Bishop Fisher has also exposed his “­marvellous” way of transcending the Word as text: translate it into the Word made suffering flesh. A particular cultural meaning is thus translated into a cultural meaning completely alien to it. Fisher’s connection to this trope of suffering flesh and its fraught relationship to Johannine doctrine is not always mystical, however, or even theological, but shockingly literal. In his administrative c­apacity as episkopos, overseer of the diocese of Rochester, Fisher was responsible for defending the purity of the Church’s doctrines, and of rooting out any sign of heresy as quickly as possible. Only a year or two before the preaching of this homily, he had been asked by William Warham,26 archbishop of Canterbury, to take over where the ­archbishop had failed in the heresy examination of one Thomas Hitton. The supposed heretic was an ordained priest who had been apprehended with two copies of an English New Testament in his possession. Hitton was suspected of being an agent, and perhaps a close associate, of William Tyndale, who was now living in exile, and had recently published in the Low Countries

24 Fischer remarks that medieval Jews “celebrated learning to read by initiating their young boys into the community of religious readers … The boy repeated each word as the teacher read them aloud, whereupon the slate was coated with honey, which the boy licked off, symbolzing the ingesting of the holy letters” (History of Reading, 177–8). The irony of Bishop Fisher’s reading, then, is that he renders scripture-reading irrelevant to religious life, whereas the “sweetness” of religion for Ezekiel consists in such reading. 25 See further discussion in this work: 86n44, 86–91, 99, 104. 26 Warham, in his capacity as archbishop of Canterbury, had given Erasmus a prebend in 1512 in “the form of the rectory of Aldington, in Kent,” allowing him, contrary to c­ ustom, to continue to reside in Cambridge, “because he, ‘a light of learning in Latin and Greek literature, had, out of love for England, disdained to live in Italy, France, or Germany, in order to pass the rest of his life here, with his friends’” (Huizinga, 81).

33093_Williams.indd 120

2022-09-01 16:54



The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech 121

his own translation of the Greek New Testament into early modern English. Because of people like Thomas Hitton, the Tyndale translation had recently begun to make major inroads into the Church’s control over Kent and the neighbouring counties, by ­challenging the mysteryinducing “truth-language” of the Latin Vulgate and promoting a purer sense of the original Greek in English translation. The story of Hitton’s martyrdom in 1529/30 is not told until the fourth edition of The Actes and Monuments (1583), the final edition published in Foxe’s lifetime. Here, one finds details of Hitton’s examination for heresy in each of his five appearances before Warham. The archbishop is clearly frustrated by the obstinate heretic, deciding, after the fifth examination, to hand him over to Bishop Fisher for ­recantation or sentencing. Hitton had not merely denied repeatedly, but also refused to recant his other denial of “the authoritie of the bishop of Rome,” referring scandalously to “the religion then vsed” as a ­superstitious and “most abhominable idolatry, and contrary to the holy word of God. And as for the Pope (quoth he) he is Antichrist, the first borne of Sathan, and hath no more power or authoritie, then any other bishop hath in his owne diocesse, nor so much neither” (tamo [1583], 12:2160). But, because the renegade priest refused to swear an oath affirming these heretical beliefs, it was difficult to charge him. Hitton steadfastly held to his conviction that it was “against Gods lawes and good conscience for any man to sweare to shed hys owne bloud, for so he should be a murtherer of hymselfe, and become guiltie of his owne death.” On his fourth appearance, he even dared tell Warham to his face “that the Masse and all popish religion, is nothing els but Idolatry, lies, and open blasphemy against the maiestie of God and his word, and contrary to Gods word in euery respect.” At this, the archbishop, and “all the Bench was greatly offended, & commaunded him to prison agayne” (tamo, 12:2160). After a fifth futile attempt to get Hitton to swear to his beliefs on examination and, “After all maner of wayes and meanes attempted to drawe this poore man from Christ and his truth, the bishop seeyng that hee could not preuayle, determined to send hym to the bishop of Rochester.” At this point, the question-and-answer format of the “interrogatory” broke off. Wherever this happens, it appears that the see of Rochester had either lost, or else had destroyed, any record of the event by which to vindicate, or else to judge the inquisitor, since Foxe and his document hunters invariably published whatever historical evidence they were able to find.

33093_Williams.indd 121

2022-09-01 16:54

122

The Communion of the Book

The little that Foxe can relate of the sequel is told in six lines. We learn that the archbishop of Canterbury, “consulting with the B. of Rochester and other [sic], proceeded to his condemnation, reading the bloudy sentence of death agaynst him, and so was he beying ­condemned, deliuered to the secular power, who carried hym to the prison, and soone after he was burned for the testimonie of Iesus Christ” (12:2160). Here, however, Foxe will not leave the reader to imagine the execution scene but refers by page number to a woodcut portraying Hitton’s fiery death, “for whose constancie in the truth, the euerlasting God be praysed. Amen” (2160). Within the frame of this rather bare scene – bare of prosecuting witnesses or sympathetic ­members of the community, as is usually the case in John Day’s woodcuts – Hitton stands utterly alone in the devouring flames wreathed about him, the flames resembling the “cloven tongues like as of fire” (Acts 2:3) that descended at Pentecost to the assembled apostles of the resurrected Christ. Whether or not the bishop of Rochester was present at Maidstone in February 1530 to witness the burning of the first martyr of the English Reformation since the Middle Ages, he could not have been unaware of the suffering of this man whose flesh was burnt to ash in this deadly contest of authority over who had the right to read the Word of God in what language, or even to judge whether a “Book” was a book at all. But neither he nor anyone else could yet foresee how many others were willing in coming generations to die for the Real Presence they now insisted was in the English Word rather than in the Latin Mass. This scene, so familiar to readers of Foxe’s fourth edition in 1583, was to play out almost simultaneously in the family of the future poet John Milton, if less dramatically so and without fatal consequence. It was nonetheless a defining moment in the life of John Milton Sr, since the story had been handed down in family lore, how the poet’s “father was brought-up in the Univ of Oxon,” but was “disinherited” by “his gr.father … because he kept not the Catholique Religion.” The biographer even made space between his lines for the answer to his implied question: “Q. he found a Bible in English in his chamber.” Milton’s own father was a youthful victim of the Church’s ban on “common books,” or humanist translations of the Bible, and for it was dispos­ sessed of his inheritance by his Catholic father, “so that [sic] thereupon he came to London and became a Scrivener.” The words are those of the antiquarian John Aubrey, carefully collected in his “Minutes of the

33093_Williams.indd 122

2022-09-01 16:54



The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech 123

Life of Mr John Milton,”27 and based on first-hand recollections of the poet’s family and friends – at times filling in the blanks to those questions by their own hands – after the great man’s death in 1674. In the beginning, it turns out, was the Word, and a rapt reading of it had become the basis of the family mythology. Or more precisely, the humanist’s word sermo had become for the poet the ground of family history.

Critical Philology: The Historical Turn in Humanism While the bishop’s reading of the vision of Ezekiel showed little concern for the material form of his text,28 or for its cultural history, humanist philology was neither designed nor disposed to treat texts so cavalierly. The text of Ab urbe condita, on which Petrarch had based his narrative of Scipio in Africa, for example, had come down to his era as little more than a collection of scattered fragments. “Today,” however, as Christopher Celenza explains, “we possess 35 books with a fragment of a 36th” of Livy’s history, “and the fact that we do is owed in no small part to Petrarch, who brought together the thirty he was able to locate” (Petrarch, 46–7). But “[k]eep in mind,” cautions Petrarch’s biographer, “that there was no standard edition and no repository for Livy’s texts and that there was no appreciable medieval tradition of gathering Livy’s decades [sets of ten “books,” each seventy or eighty pages long] together.29 They were circulated separately and were, in effect, separate volumes with separate textual histories” (47). So how did Petrarch stitch those “books” he found into a coherent “whole,” given that the third decade he needed “was missing much of its final section”? Celenza explains only that “Petrarch managed to locate copies of the three surviving copies in his own day,” and set about “copying into the text as much of the missing 27 Darbishire, Early Lives, 1. 28 Fischer argues that the “veneration of the written word,” which grew out of Israel’s experience of the Babylonian Exile (ca 598–538 bce), was part of a larger cultural process whereby “the book also became metaphor.” For, Ezekiel’s “woe” heralds the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 bce, a prophecy that ends nonetheless in “his vision of the Temple of Jerusalem restored and the newly proposed ‘traditional’ faith of monotheism triumphant” (71). Bishop Fisher’s homily on Ezekiel could hardly be farther from its historical source. 29 A volumen or scroll from ancient Rome “measured about 25 cm in width by 6–10 m in length … (In general, a volumen held about as much text as one of today’s slim paperbacks)” (Fischer, History, 75). A codex of a single book by Livy was slim indeed.

33093_Williams.indd 123

2022-09-01 16:54

124

The Communion of the Book

section that he could find. And he found a relatively complete version of the fourth decade, all of which he paid a copyist to transcribe.” The primary responsibility of the humanist, as Petrarch had modelled it, was to guarantee the integrity of the text, first by collating it with other existing copies and determining the likeliest version; then by emending, in terms of the known rules of Latin grammar, scribal errors that stood out in the phrasing, to arrive at the version nearest to the text that was likely read by ancient Romans. Summarizing Petrarch’s philological method, Anthony Grafton says that he brought “together in one manuscript,” and carefully emended thirty of the surviving thirtyfive books we have today of a history “originally 142 books long.” In so doing, he provided “access to the most detailed account available in Latin of Rome’s origins and the city’s wars with Carthage” (158). As Gerhard Regn and Bernhard Huss conclude more largely, “It is only through Petrarch’s philology that the events described by Livy become available in the form in which Livy actually set them down. And it is only with their historicity restored that they could be made the subject of an epic whose explicit aim is the representation of historical truth” (98). The lasting result of this return to historical philology, as Charles Nauert explains, was Petrarch’s invention of a new temporal category in his discovery “of historical discontinuity” (19) between the worlds of ancient authors and present readers. Ultimately, it was these ancient methods of historical philology30 that would free him to identify vast differences between the late Roman and later Holy Roman empires.31 For all his brilliant reconstruction and exegesis of Livy’s history of republican virtue, however, Petrarch declined to apply his methods to the texts of sacred scripture. He had little knowledge of Greek,32

30 Turner, Philology, 8–14, locates the origins of philology in the museon of Ptolemy I in Alexandria (ca 300 bce), where Zenodotus of Ephesus (330–260 bce) pioneered such practices as alphabetical listing and textual collation, and Aristarchus of Samothrace (ca 216–144 bce) made linguistic usage (textual context), and social customs and cultural practices (historical context), the basis of emendation and interpretation of any text. Turner credits Valla, not Petrarch, with reviving the contextual philology of Aristarchus, and Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494) as restoring the practice of textual collation in his editions of Epictetus’s Enchiridion and Catullus’s poetry, and in his Latin translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (36–7). 31 See chapter 1 above: 60–3. 32 “Since his youth,” Philip Ford reports, “Petrarch had wanted to be able to read the Homeric epics, but it was not until the end of 1353 or early 1354 that he obtained a Greek manuscript of Homer … As he did not know any Greek, the text of Homer remained silent

33093_Williams.indd 124

2022-09-01 16:54



The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech 125

the  language of the New Testament and of the Septuagint (or “Old  Testament”), which had been translated into Koine Greek two ­centuries or so before the birth of Christ. And he neither knew, nor tried to learn Hebrew, the original language of Torah and Tanakh, apart from a few minor prophets who had written in Aramaic. In any event, Petrarch was a poet, and far more interested in challenging Scholastic philosophy and its arid logic, as Charles Nauert remarks of the humanist’s lasting dissatisfaction with his university education (44). The methodology of the Dominican Order (founded 1215 ce), which had already come to dominate university teaching in Petrarch’s era, required the identification of “an authoritative writer” whose work could be “dissolved into a bundle of individual statements,” the logic of which represented an authoritative “truth” without reference to context, ­historical circumstance, or authorial intention (Nauert, 17). Scholastic method, like Fisher’s homily, was narrowly based on a “closed world of foregone conclusions” as compared with “open-ended research.”33 Long after Petrarch’s attacks on this method, Erasmus commented wittily in his Praise of Folly (1511) on the so-called “eternal” truths of Scholastic logic that, as his eponymous heroine remarks satirically, the “subtle refinements of subtleties” in the method “are made still more subtle by all the different lines of scholastic argument, so that you’d extricate yourself faster from a labyrinth than from the tortuous obscurities of realists, nominalists, Thomists, Albertists, Ockhamists, and Scotists – and I’ve not mentioned all the sects, only the main ones.”34 If Scholastic knowledge was eternal, it was evidently so only in the eternal wrangling of the schools. The Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla (1406–1457), who followed Petrarch in reviving the historical philology of the ancients, was more cutting still in his critique (ca 1439) of the Scholastics’ “blind trust in Aristotle’s words,” given that they literally failed to understand “the correct meaning of terms,” as Valla demonstrated from the “usage of

for him – ‘Your Homer is dumb as far as I am concerned, or rather I am deaf as far as he is concerned’ – until he met Leontius Pilatus in the winter of 1358–59,” and persuaded the Calabrian “to translate the first five books of the Iliad.” Learning of Pilatus from Petrarch, Boccaccio invited him to Florence where he “spent two years (1360–62)” completing prose translations of the epics (“Homer,” 1–2). 33 Hankins, “Renaissance Humanism,” 76. 34 Collected Works of Erasmus, Vol. 27: 127.

33093_Williams.indd 125

2022-09-01 16:54

126

The Communion of the Book

speakers,” as well as more general “arguments from common sense.”35 He dismissed a wide array of “scholastic terms such as entitas (‘entity’), hecceitas (‘this-ness’) and quidditas (quiddity) for grammatical reasons: these terms do not conform to the rules of word formation in Latin.”36 He did not object to “the introduction of new words for things unknown in antiquity (e.g., bombarda for ‘cannonball’),” but “the terminology coined by the scholastics” signified little more than an imaginary reality, since “nothing exists apart from concrete things.” In his De elegantiae linguae Latinae (ms. 1441; print 1471), Valla further showed how a precise command of the grammar and subtleties of classical Latin was essential to understanding texts from Roman antiquity. In a demy-octavo edition of 522 pages, printed a century after his death, he was still supplying readers with a “manual for the correct use of Latin syntax and vocabulary” (Stanford), as well as a popular and accessible primer for the use of more than two thousand indexed words, grammatical cases, and phrases on a wide variety of topics.37 These included the proper use of comparatives and superlatives, proper names and diminutives, and complex constructions from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Virgil’s Aeneid, together with locutions from Cicero that were often misused or misconstrued by the medieval litterati.38 In the decade preceding his death in 1457, Valla completed the massive project he had begun in the early 1440s of systematically comparing the Latin Vulgate with the Greek New Testament, the first work of its kind in over a millennium.39 In Annotations on the New Testament he “observed serious stylistic defects in the currently used Latin Bible, the Vulgate, and sought to remedy these defects by referring to the Greek original” (Nauert, 42). But Valla’s return to the Greek text to improve the Vulgate raised “troubling questions” about Church doctrine, such as 35 The judgment is that of Count Terenzio Mamiani della Rovere, author of “one of the first Italian histories of modern philosophy in 1834,” cited by Copenhaver, “Valla,” 507. 36 Valla, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed 8 August 2020, https://plato.­ stanford.edu/entries/lorenzo–valla/#LifWor. 37 Ledo, “Recovery,” argues more broadly that Valla’s “work ushered in a new cultural sensibility” by reclaiming contentio (contention) for discourse from “the sins of the tongue,” thus differentiating it from “the confrontation of views and intellectual positions” in late medieval scholasticism that “serves no purpose except feeding the pride of the contenders and therefore remains motionless with regard to the final goal of language, that is, the advancement of learning” (395, 397). 38 See Valla, Elegantarium. https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/pdf/nah3375b2640013.pdf. 39 Price, Johannes Reuchlin, 28. See also Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

33093_Williams.indd 126

2022-09-01 16:54



The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech 127

Jerome’s stunning mistranslation of the Greek word metanoia (a change of mind, repentance) as paenitentia (penance). Valla’s recovery of the correct sense of metanoia inadvertently served to undermine the authority of a thousand-year-old Latin text, as well as the usual Scholastic arguments40 based on it, by exposing the embarassingly mistaken transmission of a term from Mark’s Gospel that, time out of mind, had afforded apostolic authority for Church doctrine and discipline.41 As early as 1440, Valla had already set out to show how mistranslation and miscopying were the least of several types of more serious textual corruption. The fourth-century Donation of Constantine – the parting “gift” of an emperor pulling up stakes for Constantinople and assigning political authority to the pope over the western Roman Empire, although the deed was only found in the eighth century – was politically corrupt, a forgery easily discernible from its “grossly unclassical grammatical forms” (Nauert, 41). Among its notable misprisions in diction, it employed the medieval word banna for flag instead of the classical Latin word vexillum. “Constantine’s reference to his crown [diadema] was also anachronistic, as was his reference to the four patriarchal sees of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Constantinople. The latter had not yet been founded” (Sheridan, “Placing,” 7–8). The use of medieval terms in a “classical” text introduced to historical discourse the concept of anachronism, an idea foreign to the medieval mind.42 Latin was Latin, eternal and unchanging.43 But Valla proved the fact of linguistic evolution over many centuries,44 an idea that became the basis of modern linguistics, much as Petrarch’s “invention” of historical discontinuity, or a temporal gulf between us and the world of our ancestors, remains the ground of critical history today.

40 Goering, “Scholastic Turn,” 219–37. 41 Prosser, “Church,” 35. 42 Legal historian C.P. Rodgers similarly remarks that, in the medieval era, “[t]here was no sense of historical perspective or anachronism, and history was only studied because it was a valuable repository of examples and precedents” (130). 43 As Dante had famously insisted in the Tuscan dialect of his Convivio (ca 1305), “Latin is perpetual and incorruptible [lo latino è perpetuo e non corruttibile].” Qtd. and trans. Celenza, “Petrarch, Latin,” 510. Latin was thus essential to the idea of an eternal “logos.” 44 Even Darwin made extensive use of linguistic analogies in On the Origin of Species (1859) to explain his theory of evolution (see my “On Reading,” 17–19). While the “time revolution inaugurated by Lyell’s Principles of Geology” (17) was Darwin’s direct inspiration, the “time revolution” of Valla’s linguistic change, four centuries in advance of Lyell, underwrote Darwin’s whole model of “modification with descent” (20).

33093_Williams.indd 127

2022-09-01 16:54

128

The Communion of the Book

Valla’s attention to the provenance of documents, the “elegance” or inelegance of Latin usage, and the “social embeddedness” (Kearney, 52) of texts, did as much as later controversies about the sacraments would do to break a clerical monopoly on knowledge. Valla even proved that the ancient writings of “Dionysius the Areopagite,” such as On the Celestial Hierarchy and On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy,45 were not the work of St Paul’s convert Dionysius, briefly mentioned in Acts chapter 17, but blatant forgeries of a sixth-century Christian Neoplatonist who supposedly was born five hundred years before his time. As Turner says, Valla “showed that a legal council, not philosophical academy, sat on the Areopagus, making Paul’s Dionysius closer to jurist than ­philosopher. Valla went on: Neoplatonism hardly existed in Paul’s day; a first-century date created historical absurdities in ‘Dionysius’s’ ­writings; no one before Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) mentioned the book” (36). Humanist reading of all kinds of texts that had been taken as authoritative in the Western Church began to expose a vexing ignorance at its foundation. Valla’s philology set the stage after his death for much riskier philological scrutiny of the Bible. Given the new findings of Erasmus in Greek, and Reuchlin in Hebrew, about holy writ, no matter what a “priest might claim” about “the sacred office of mediating between God and man,” most “editors and publishers” found themselves in “agreement with Roger Bacon and Lorenzo Valla” about scriptural exegesis: “They felt that Greek and Hebrew scholars were better equipped for the task” (Eisenstein, 320), since they alone grasped the historical meaning of scripture for those who wrote the Hebrew and Greek texts.46 That is not to say that Valla or Petrarch or other humanists were irreligious enemies of the Church; rather, they relentlessly contended against uncritical Scholastic traditions and opened the way towards historically verifiable “truth.” In fact, when Erasmus happened upon a copy of Valla’s Annotations of the New Testament in 1504 in “the Norbertine Abbey library of Parc, near Louvain” (Halkin, 63), he found more than “a collection of c­ ritical notes on the text of the Gospels, the Epistles and Revelation.” He also hit upon a critical method of textual analysis that led him to ­conclude that “the last twelve versus [sic] of Mark’s Gospel” were an unauthorized 45 A celestial hierarchy, of course, “naturalizes” the power of an ecclesiastical hierarchy. 46 Fisher’s treatment of Ezekiel’s text, for example, belies his humanist sympathies.

33093_Williams.indd 128

2022-09-01 16:54



The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech 129

addition, written long after the fact, as were “the verses in John VII, 53 to VIII, 11” (Huizinga, 92). His rallying cry “Ad fontes,”47 or “back to the sources,” by which Erasmus sought to purify the Church as well as Christian Truth, instead exposed the “truth” of tradition to controversy, calumny, and outright mockery.48 It was in this context that Bishop Fisher’s sermon took on the character of an aggressive defence of ­tradition, as much as the form of a spiritual preparation for receiving the Sacrament. Fifteen years before his old friend Fisher would turn the book into a “Crucyfixe,” Erasmus had already foreseen the controversy his work would create. He wrote a letter to William Warham, archbishop of Canterbury, published in the preface to a nine-volume edition (1516) of the writings of Jerome, where he assured his former patron that his sole purpose in the Greek Testament was to rescue the Vulgate from the errors of tradition and “the ravages of time”49 (cited in Kearney, 57). Later, Erasmus wrote to another English cleric, his former student Robert Aldrich, bishop of Carlisle, to defend himself against mendicant preachers at St Paul’s Cross in London who had accused him of “impiety and falsehood” for spurning the Vulgate equivalent of the word “given” in John 7, “For the Spirit had not yet been given.” But that word, Erasmus insisted, did not appear in any manuscript in Greek; so, the dogmatic reading, “For the Spirit had not yet been given, because Jesus had not yet been glorified,” was deeply misleading. “I have translated,” Erasmus insisted, “what the Greek text, omitting the participle, has: ‘For there was not yet the Holy Spirit because Jesus had not yet been glorified.’ By doing so, he says, I have exposed the Catholic faith to the utmost peril, encouraging everyone to believe once again that the Spirit is a creature who did not exist from eternity but began to exist in time.”50 “Gifted like Valla with a keen critical sense,” Charles Nauert explains, “Erasmus realized that even in the case of a sacred text, a skilled

47 Erasmus, De ratione studii (1511), trans. McGregor, cwe (24): 673. 48 Of course, as Eisenstein properly remarks, “The assumption that ‘the ancientest must needs be the right, as nearer the Fountain the purer the streams and that errors sprang up as the ages succeeded,’” also “conformed so completely with the experience of learned men throughout the age of scribes that it was simply taken for granted” (290). But a return to the “sources” in scribal culture more often meant textual, not cultural sources. 49 In his Annotations on I Thessalonians 2:7, Erasmus had praised Warham as a c­ lassical “Maecenas not only to me but to all of Britain” (Sider, Erasmus on the New, 283). 50 Correspondence of Erasmus, vol. 13, trans. Fantazzi, 252.

33093_Williams.indd 129

2022-09-01 16:54

130

The Communion of the Book

grammarian’s judgement on the meaning of the original words must take priority over any theologian’s interpretation of any passage” (160). Indeed, Erasmus “realized more than any of his humanist predecessors,” including Valla, “that in order not only to correct textual errors but also to get more directly at the meaning intended by the biblical author, scholars must apply to Scripture the same critical approach that had already proved fruitful in the restoration and interpretation of the secular texts of ancient literature.” The humanist’s faith in the historical text – read in its original language and sense, as well as in its original social context with a sharp eye to its historical difference – was his sole purpose in correcting the frequent errors of the Vulgate translation. To Aldrich, his former pupil, Erasmus insisted that those who reviled even the title of his New Testament, Novum instrumentum (1516), were just as ignorant of the Church Fathers as they had shown ­themselves to be of the scriptures: “They are not aware that St Jerome uses this term several times, nor do they seem to have read Augustine, who teaches that it is more appropriate to say ‘Instrument’ than ‘Testament.’”51 Indeed, all the “tablets and parchments on which ­compacts are written,” he explained, “are called instruments.” It was illiteracy of this sort that had led to false versions of some of the central beliefs of the Christian religion. Erasmus came under further fire from Scholastics and other traditionalists for his striking omission “from both the Greek and Latin texts in the first two editions of his Greek New Testament” of the “comma Johanneum (I John 5–7) [sic], the passage that theologians long had used as the most explicit scriptural proof of the doctrine of the Trinity” (Nauert, 63). Erasmus denied expressing doubt of orthodox theology or supporting heretical doctrine by this omission, appealing rather to the firm principle of historical priority, in which the oldest texts have the greatest authority. Not one of his Greek source texts had ­contained this dubious assertion of the Vulgate: “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one” (1 John 5.7–8).52 His philological method,

51 Ibid., 270. 52 Erasmus admits that he did find in “the manuscript supplied to me from the library of the Minorites in Antwerp” a marginal “comment about the witnesses of Father, Word, and Spirit, but it had been added by a fairly recent hand who did not want the words o ­ mitted” (Sider, Erasmus on the New Testament, 208).

33093_Williams.indd 130

2022-09-01 16:54



The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech 131

with its close attention to the historical text, had exposed the doctrine as a scribal interpolation or, more bluntly, a doctrinal forgery that had been added to the Greek text where it did not exist. “Accused of Arianism for having suppressed a Trinitarian formula, he promised to reproduce it if anyone showed him an ancient manuscript which gave it” (Halkin, 105).53 Neither Erasmus nor his critics were mistaken about the result; antiTrinitarianism did become more common over the next two centuries.54 While Trinitarians could still rely on the authority of tradition or Church Councils, they could no longer claim the authority of Holy Scripture for their doctrine.55 Only the Greek or Hebrew scriptures conferred such textual authority for would-be editors in the philological tradition of Erasmus. But that authority could only be gained by observing two key principles56 that Erasmus applied to printed scriptures: “that the same

53 Erasmus also suspected as a forgery “a Greek manuscript” that was soon “discovered in England” in 1521, “in which are found the words lacking in most Greek manuscripts” (Sider, Erasmus on the New Testament, 209). Against his better judgment, he wrote in his third edition of the New Testament (1522), “I have restored what is said to be lacking in the manuscripts I have seen,” immediately adding, “I have consulted the two extremely ancient manuscripts in the Library of St. Donation in Bruges. Neither had the witness of the Father, Word, and Spirit.” 54 As for his own Christology, Erasmus claims in his Annotations on Romans 1.7 merely “to point out the character of apostolic speech” in noting “that the grace he invokes for these people comes simultaneously from the Father, whom Paul customarily calls ‘God’ – a word peculiar, as it were [to the Father] – and from the Son, whom he most often likes to call ‘Lord’ but ‘God’ very rarely” (Sider, Eramsus, 234). On the other hand, his much revised annotation on Romans 9:5 does concede in his final version of 1535 that “if [God here] means the person of the Father (as is frequently true in Paul, especially when Christ or the Spirit is mentioned in the same passage) – [then] although from other passages in Scripture it is clearer than day that Christ, no less truly than the Father or the Holy Spirit, is called God, nevertheless this particular passage does not effectively refute the Arians, since nothing prevents it from being referred to the person of the Father” (Sider, Erasmus on the New Testament, 235–6). 55 Hamilton, “Humanists,” reports that “[t]he editors of the Complutensian Polyglot” Bible, printed under the authority of Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros at Alcalá in Spain in 1514–17 but not released until 1522, “went so far as to translate the passage” known as the Johannine comma “from Latin into Greek and added it to the Greek text” (108) in facing columns of the first complete text of both Testaments in their original languages – the Masoretic Text of Hebrew scripture with additions and variants from Aramaic Targums; the Septuagint Old Testament in Koine Greek; and the Latin Vulgate. 56 These principles did not always survive editorial practice. Lacking the final six  verses of the Book of Revelation in the single Greek manuscript in his possession (minuscule 1r), Erasmus, rather like the editors of the Complutensian Polyglot Bible,

33093_Williams.indd 131

2022-09-01 16:54

132

The Communion of the Book

philological rules apply to the Bible as to other ancient texts and that a text in its original language overrules any translation.”57 As early as 1498, Aldus Manutius, the Venetian publisher of classical Greek texts, had begun seeking the authority of the original language of the Old Testament in an unsuccesful attempt to procure Hebrew types for a trilingual Bible.58 Ten years later, Erasmus would spend eight productive months in the Venetian printshop of Manutius with a stellar humanist team of Greek and Latin experts preparing an expanded second edition of the Adages.59 “When in September 1508, the edition of the Adagia was ready, Aldus wanted Erasmus to remain to write more for him. Till December he continued to work at Venice on editions of Plautus, Terence, and Seneca’s tragedies” (Huizinga, 65). Erasmus, in turn, was so impressed by the scholarship of the Aldine editions that, ever after, he was unstinting in his praise of Manutius, who had brought the heritage of ancient Greece to cities north of the Alps, where it now circulated as freely as it had been doing in Italy in the half-century before the fall of Constantinople in 1453. “Aldus, he wrote, had taken up the task which had in other ages been undertaken by great rulers, such as the legendary founder of the Alexandrian library. But whereas the library of Ptolemy ‘was contained between the narrow walls of its own house’ the printer was ‘building up a library which has no other limits than the world itself.’”60 Manutius died in 1515, almost a year after Erasmus had travelled up the Rhine to Basel to prepare his bilingual edition of the first New Testament printed in Greek, the Novum instrumentum (1516). In Basel, “[t]he German humanists hailed him as the light of the world  – in letters, receptions and banquets” (Huizinga, 89). Although his new publisher was the renowned humanist scholar-printer Johann Froben, Erasmus never lost sight of his ­formative experience in a vast “library without walls,” the revivifying cultural goal of the Aldine editions.

translated the concluding verses of the Latin Vulgate into Greek and inserted them at the end of his Greek Novum instrumentum, although the result was not as critical for doctrine. See Krans, “Erasmus and the Text of Revelation 22:19,” 1–15. 57 Turner, Philology, 43. 58 Eisenstein, 340. 59 Huizinga reports that the renowned humanist-scholar printer received him so “­cordially” that he “procured him board and lodging in the house of his father-in-law, Andrea Asolani” (64). 60 Eisenstein, 219.

33093_Williams.indd 132

2022-09-01 16:54



The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech 133

Heuristic Philology: Erasmus’s Gospel of the “Heart” As the illegitimate sons of a Dutch priest, young Desiderius and his brother Peter had been sent to a school established by the Brethren of the Common Life at Deventer nearly a century before. The school at this time was directed by one of the great educational reformers of the age, Alexander Hegius (d. 1498). Before he was eclipsed by his student, Hegius was regarded as one of the foremost Dutch humanists, being the first in Europe to teach Greek in a public setting outside of a university. Erasmus’s early training in Greek and classical literature clearly predisposed him to read texts in their original language, as well as to understand their historical and social contexts.61 All of this underwrites his oft-repeated maxim, “Ad fontes” (back to the sources). For those “sources” remind us of our need to understand the world in which that literature had originated. But the “sources” for the Dutch humanist ran like a mighty river down to the present age; their reception must not be dammed up by Latin-reading litterati. Particularly in “A Paraclesis” or “Summons to the Pious Reader,” Erasmus cautioned readers of Novum instrumentum (1516): “I disagree entirely with those who do not want divine literature to be translated into the vernacular tongues and read by ordinary people, as if Christ taught such convoluted doctrine that it could be understood only by a handful of theologians and then with difficulty.”62 Truth was universal and meant to be understood by all. As Erasmus sees it, “The sun above is not so universal and accessible to all as is the teaching of Christ” (Sider, “Philosophy,” 29). Sidestepping institutional mysteries, the Paraclesis is a cheerful polemic against institutional theology, or at least a theological monopoly on truth, since the good and true theologian is one “who teaches not by convoluted syllogisms, but by his disposition, by the expression on his face and in his eyes, and by his way of life” (30). In other words, Christ’s philosophy is something to be lived, unlike the “systems of philosophers” 61 These two defining principles of “true theology” are stated from the outset of “The Ratio.” Here, Erasmus insists that “it is in no way possible to understand what is written if you are ignorant of the language in which it is written” (Vessey, 119); and that “if we will learn from ­historical literature not only the setting, but also the origin, customs, institutions, culture, and character of the peoples whose history is being narrated or to whom the apostles write, it is remarkable how much more light and, if I may use the expression, life will come to the reading” (121–2). 62 “The Philosophy of Christ” (Sider, Erasmus), 29.

33093_Williams.indd 133

2022-09-01 16:54

134

The Communion of the Book

that “rebuff the inquiring minds of many through the sheer difficulty of their concepts” (28). It is also a philosophy that “accommodates itself equally to all. It lowers itself to infants, adjusting to their need.” And, “while it does not fail the lowest, the highest also find it worthy of admiration. Indeed, the farther you have advanced into the riches of this philosophy, the farther you withdraw yourself from the splendour of other philosophers” (28). Conversely, Paraclesis presents a hopeful defence of ordinary people’s ability to understand sacred truths on their own terms. As Erasmus explains the social levelling implicit in this philosophy, “Christ desires his mysteries to be known as widely as ­possible,” and therefore longs to see “these books … translated into every tongue of every land so that not only the Scots and the Irish, but Turks and Saracens too could read and get to know them” (29). Nor is this social levelling limited by gender, race, or social station but includes the spiritual enrichment of ordinary women and men of every nation, and every type of labourer, not just the universal scholar: “I would like every woman to read the Gospel, to read the Epistles of Paul … How I wish that the farmer at his plough would chant some passage from these books, that the weaver at his shuttles would sing something from them; that the traveller would relieve the tedium of his journey with stories of this kind” (29). In the most inclusive way possible, Erasmus seeks to fill the world with readers who encounter “Truth” in the ­common language of human life and everyday experience,63 as well as the litterati who could and should read the ancient languages of his edition. In effect, this summons is to all readers to acquaint themselves with the simplest, yet most profound truth of all, the philosophy of Christ spelled out in the Son of God’s own words as recorded in the gospels and epistles of Novum instrumentum. As cultural anthropologist Joseph Henrich has suggested in another context, the appeal to a broad readership evidently highlighted emerging psychological differences in the era between readers whose inward truth came from their own reading of Scripture, and those whose ­religion was formal and external, and was therefore performed ritually in public. “Fancy rituals, immense cathedrals, big sacrifices, and ordained 63 Hankins (“Renaissance”) remarks a similar, if much earlier vernacularizing impulse, if for a secular purpose, in the Florentine historian Leonardo Bruni’s fifteenth-century “programme of vernacular translation of his Latin works” as a supplement to “his own ­vernacular writings in order to spread the ideals of his civic humanism” (83–4).

33093_Williams.indd 134

2022-09-01 16:54



The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech 135

priests,” as Henrich explains, “typically play[ed] little role” (415) in the development of what was still an emerging psychology of Reformed believers. What he refers to as an “emerging proto-weird psychology in medieval and Early Modern Europe” had, as he sees it, already been conditioned by the suppression of kin-based institutions and a rise of the nuclear family with social tendencies toward individualism, ­independence, and voluntary association among like-minded individuals (396). “To better navigate a world of individuals without dense social interconnections,” such persons “increasingly thought about the world more analytically and less holistically/relationally” (396–7). Thus, “[a]s the key substrates of social life shifted from relationships to individuals, thinkers increasingly highlighted the relevance of individuals’ ­internal attributes” (397). At the same time, the rise of literacy and vernacular translations of the Bible during the Reformation served as major p ­ sychological catalysts in this growing sense of inwardness. Particularly for Erasmus, but also for generations of humanists before him, as his modern editor Robert Sider explains, there was a powerful sense already of “intimacy” in writings from antiquity, however, that “brought its authors into the presence of the reader, their narratives providing a record of life that seemed capable of reaching across the ages to be absorbed by those who lived more than a millennium later” (5–6). Specifically, Petrarch’s discovery of Cicero’s Letters to Atticus in the library of Verona Cathedral in 1345, and his reply as Cicero’s familiar in the last volume of his Rerum familiarium libri I–XXIV,64 marks the beginning of a new and revolutionary psychology for English and Classics scholar Kathy Eden, as an ancient “rhetoric of intimacy” in Ad Atticum absorbed a fledgling Renaissance man like Petrarch.65 For, in the Roman rhetor, philosopher, and writer of familiar letters, Petrarch found an inspiring “likemindedness with his favorite ancient,” Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 bce).66 “This mind, like his own,” explains Eden, “both

64 Eden, Renaissance, takes Petrarch’s rediscovery of this epistolary familiaritas to be the origin of his rhetoric of intimacy and a style of individual expression that would ­characterize the best early modern writing from Petrarch to Erasmus to Montaigne. 65 Margaret King also notes that “[t]he humanists read ancient authors as their ­predecessors had not: as though they were alive and immediately present” (“Return,” 10), although it is most likely, as Eden claims, that Petrarch first taught readers how to do so. 66 By contrast, translator Peter Hainsworth claims that “the shadow under which the letters are composed comes from the moralizing essays of Seneca’s letters to Lucilius, rather than the more directly personal and impromptu letters of Cicero” (Essential, xvii).

33093_Williams.indd 135

2022-09-01 16:54

136

The Communion of the Book

reflects intensely upon its thoughts and feelings and undertakes in writing to communicate these to a friend in the role of another self” (Renaissance, 56).67 Enchanted by the intimacy of Cicero’s familiar letters, Petrarch began to follow “Cicero (often if not always) in trying to invest his letter writing with the immediacy and intensity of direct communication” (Eden, 54). From Cicero, he learned how to make his own voice resound in the mind of an absent friend in a manner unique to him, a style that spoke directly from the page to his friend in a way that firmly reinforced their bonds of affection.68 In “the programmatic first letter” of Familiares, reports Eden, his “abrupt question to his ‘Socrates’ – ‘What are we to do now, dear brother?’ – draws the reader unceremoniously into an ongoing conversation between intimate friends” who are separated by seventeen centuries, if not half of Europe.69 “So does a later lament, ‘Oh brother, brother, brother’ (Fam. 8.7),” a lament addressed to this imagined correspondent in antiquity  – a novel strategy Petrarch describes as “a new kind of beginning for a letter, indeed an ancient one used by Marcus Tullius almost fourteen hundred years ago” (54). It is a technique that Petrarch will use again in the last volume of Familiares in his letters 3 and 4 addressed to Cicero. In the latter, as Margaret King remarks, “Petrarch does not so much return to Cicero’s world as he pulls Cicero into his own, insisting that Cicero recognize Petrarch’s coordinates of time and place” (11). In doing so, he also hints at limitations in Cicero’s historical and religious knowledge, 67 Literary critic Eisner adds that Petrarch’s discovery of Ad Atticum carries all the force of “a primal scene that has been linked to other putative Renaissance discoveries of the individual, ideas of authorship, the stylistic principle of imitatio, and, most importantly … the past” (“Labyrinth” 755–6). Eden also resorts to the Freudian phrase: “this famous encounter between Petrarch and the epistolary Cicero sets the primal scene for the Renaissance rediscovery of intimacy” (Renaissance, 50). 68 Mazzotta, “Epistolary Epic,” remarks that Petrarch’s reading of a translation of Homer’s Odyssey in 1359 inspired him to create “an epistolary epic” (310), allowing each of his intimate correspondents “access to a part or fragment and not to the whole” (311), thus preserving a sense of himself as another “Ulysses,” whose “experience of homelessness” and exilic wandering turned into “an existential Odyssey” (313), in which “[h]e is forever on his way, forever displaced, never to be fixed in time and space” (315), as he constantly “take[s] cover from the possible violence of the gods of the city, be they popes,” or “despots,” or “the tyrants who are his patrons and who are likely to have the principles of their own authority violated by the poet’s sovereign claims” (317). 69 Socrates, as Mazzotta points out, is also “the pseudonym for Ludwig Van Kempen, a Flemish musician he had met in Avignon” (310).

33093_Williams.indd 136

2022-09-01 16:54



The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech 137

pointedly signing the epistle in the era of grace: “Written in the land of the living, on the right bank of the Adige, in the city of Verona in Italy north of the Po, on the sixteenth of June, in the thirteen hundred and forty-fifth year since the birth of that God whom you never knew” (trans. and qtd by King, 11). On the other hand, he often speaks ­dismissively of “his unskilled” Christian “contemporaries, including his would-be employers at the Roman curia,” who “not only write their own letters, but expect him to write his” (Eden, 57) in a manner devoid of any individual style by which to express private judgments or their innermost feelings. Although Eden takes Erasmus to be guilty of echoing “Petrarch’s letter to Cicero (Fam. 24.4), without attribution, upholding the Roman orator” alone “as the ‘great father of all eloquence’” (73n1), the result is salutary, given how closely he adheres to the “rhetoric of intimacy” that Petrarch had originally adapted from Cicero. As Erasmus exhorts readers in his Paraclesis, “We preserve the letters written by a dear friend, we admire them greatly, we carry them about, we read them over and over again; yet there are thousands and thousands of Christians who, although learned in other respects, have never even read the Gospels and Epistles in their whole life” (34). For Erasmus, Christ’s words in the gospel were like letters “written by a dear friend,” making no more demand on a reader than to embrace such intimate words written in the hand of a “dear friend.” Even calligraphy has a vital part to play in Erasmus’s revival of this rhetoric and hermeneutics of intimacy, as Eden demonstrates from a passage in De recta pronuntiatione (1528), where Lion, speaking for Erasmus, insists, “Why, even when we get letters in their own hand from friends and fellow scholars, how we welcome them and seem to be listening to their voices and to be looking at them face to face” (76).70 It is this sense that Christ’s words convey in the printed Gospels: that of an epistle received from a friend and written from the heart in the familiar speech of an intimate. Speaking of his editorial choices in a 1516 preface to the Froben edition of Jerome, Erasmus adds that “he has had to ‘rely on the ­intimacy (familiaritate) which repeated readings of Jerome’s works gained for me just as face-to-face association with him might have done’” (Eden, 86).71 But in “his dedicatory letter to William Warham 70 The quotation comes from Sowards, ed., Collected Works of Erasmus 25–6: 391. 71 Cited from Brady and Olin, Collected Works of Erasmus, Volume 61: 80.

33093_Williams.indd 137

2022-09-01 16:54

138

The Communion of the Book

introducing the same edition,” Erasmus expresses an even stronger sense that, even “‘if a man had lived in familiar converse (domesticam consuetudinem) with Cicero (to take him as an example) for several years, he will know less of Cicero than they do who by constant reading of what he wrote converse with his spirit every day” (86–7).72 Indeed, all great writers “live on for the world at large even after death, and live on in such fashion that they speak to more people, and more effectively dead than alive … In fact, they then most truly come alive for us when they themselves have ceased to live.”73 It is an epoch-making idea that writing preserves the truest and best part of the writer, and that the conversation could well be renewed or extended in each new reader. The writer’s sermo continues to live in the written word; the printed logos is the writer’s immortality. Likewise, in the “Summons” to readers of Christ’s philosophy in the gospels, Eden reports how Erasmus “exhorts Christians to read Scripture with the same expectation of intense feeling and intimate communication that they would bring to the letter of an absent and sorely missed friend” (89). In a very real sense, a letter from an absent friend does make the loved one present. For, as Erasmus “insists, the Euangelicae litterae ‘bring you the living image of His holy mind … and thus render Him so fully present that you would see less if you gazed upon him with your very eyes’” (cited in Eden, 89). It is a world-changing notion, notable not only for its faith in the written word to preserve the “living image” of a writer’s mind, but also to reveal more through the medium of writing than would be possible in a face-to-face encounter, as if the written Word were closer to the truth of a writer’s being than speech could ever be. It is as if Christ just now were opening his heart to the reader of the Gospels, and the reader’s heart were opened in return. From this figure of a heart-to-heart conversation, a novel system of hermeneutics begins to take shape in the Paraclesis. From its outset, Erasmus prays for “an eloquence that does not simply charm the ears by a pleasure soon to die, but that leaves barbs clinging in the hearts of those who hear; an eloquence that seizes, tranforms, and sends the listener away a much different person from the one it received” (25–6). This trope of the reader responding in a heartfelt manner is repeated again and again in the Paraclesis, such as when Erasmus says, “Yet this, 72 Sowards, Collected Works of Erasmus (cwe), 3 & 4:256. 73 cwe 3:256.

33093_Williams.indd 138

2022-09-01 16:54



The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech 139

rather, should be my prayer; that Christ himself, whose business is in hand, will so tune the strings of my lyre that this song will affect and move all hearts to their very core” (26). More largely in his polemic against scholastic theology, he declares that “[t]he philosophy of Christ lies more in the inclinations and intentions of the heart,74 than in ­syllogisms. It is a way of life rather than a form of argument. It is ­inspiration rather than erudition. It is transformation rather than argumentation” (32). And he sums up his affective hermeneutics of the “heart” as he sweeps into the peroration: “[W]hy do we not all learn our philosophy from the writings of those incomparable authorities, the Gospels and Epistles? Why do we not carry these books near our hearts, have these books always in our hands?” (36). For the true, and ultimately transformative knowledge of these books only comes to life in a reader’s heart. The intimacy of Eramsus’s appeal to the “heart” as the seat of understanding and the will to embody Christ’s philosophy also has a ­magisterial precedent in late antiquity. Augustine recounts in his Confessions (ca 400 ce) how he once paid a visit to his kindly acquaintance Ambrose, the bishop of Mediolanum, in that era (ca 384) when he was still weighing the merits of Christ’s philosophy against that of the Manichaeans. Augustine admits to being startled to come upon the saintly man reading his book in silence, since readers normally laboured to sound out each word in a running line of text devoid of spaces between words. But then he realized that it was Ambrose’s “heart [that] sought out the meaning.”75 Perhaps the human heart could only hear such sacred meaning in silence. Erasmus appears to allude to this story in the Ratio verae theologiae, his long essay on the “Method of True Theology” that was inserted between the Paraclesis and the Gospels in his second edition of Novum testamentum (1519). Appealing to readers who are about to begin their formal study of theology, he proposes a hermeneutics designed to help them read 74 In his Paraphrase on Matthew, Erasmus portrays Christ as teaching this philosophy in the Sermon on the Mount: “By an ostentatious display of these actions [of ‘praying’ and ‘fasting’] the Pharisees lay claim to a reputation for a certain outstanding holiness before men, although they displease God, who looks not upon the appearance but upon the heart” (Sider, Erasmus, 135). God himself is cast in the role of reader in this system of hermeneutics, albeit one whose authority derives from his knowledge of “the inclinations and intentions of the heart,” which is precisely how Erasmus asks us to read the Gospels. 75 Dehaene, Reading, 25. The story appears in Confessions, book 6, chapter 3.

33093_Williams.indd 139

2022-09-01 16:54

140

The Communion of the Book

the scriptures more effectively for themselves. And once again, he comes swiftly to the “heart” of the matter: “What has been fixed deep within through constant use will become a part of one’s nature. In my opinion, it will not be ill-advised to learn the divine books [i.e., the Gospels and Epistles] word for word even though they are not understood.” For, whether they realize it or not, they will “make your own breast [or “heart”] a library of Christ” (Vessey, 233, 234). As Renaissance literary scholar Yaakov Mascetti comments, Erasmus deliberately displaces “textual meaning from the words on the page to the reader’s conscience,” thereby “­making the reader’s heart (pectus) into the ‘library of Christ himself’ (Ratio verae theologiae).” By “engaging the text” of the divine Word “under the Holy Ghost’s enlightening guidance,” he adds, “while surrendering cognition to the text’s self-referential nature, and absorbing it by means of repeated readings and through its memorization,” the reader initiates “a process of naturalization,” or immersion “in the biblical text (in naturam ibit), to be transformed himself into a living image of the Scripture” (223). So the Word is made flesh in the reader’s heart. But Erasmus also demands, “Is he a theologian, let alone a Christian, who has not read the literature of Christ? ‘He who loves me,’ he said, ‘keeps my words’” (Paraclesis, 31). If “keep[ing] my words” means learning “the divine books word for word,” until you “make your own breast [or heart] a library of Christ,” it demands more than a merely public, ritual ­observance of one’s faith. It literally means becoming a flesh-and-blood transcript of the gospels so that the flesh is made Word by keeping Christ’s words in the “library” of one’s heart. In this declamation, we see at first hand the general character of a psychological shift that was taking place in early modern culture, a change that shows unusual concern for “people’s internal states, beliefs, feelings, and dispositions” (Henrich, 420), although these states begin to suggest something even greater than a private intimacy.

Absorbing the Mind of Christ: The Sacramental Word What has been left implicit in the rhetoric and hermeneutics of intimacy in Paraclesis becomes clearer when it is read against the bishop of Rochester’s homily on the “Booke of the Crucyfixe.” There, Fisher had swiftly turned the Book of Ezekiel (and its codex companions) into a holy icon of the Crucifixion, both as an object of devotion and

33093_Williams.indd 140

2022-09-01 16:54



The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech 141

as an emblem of the eternal Word (or divine Logos). His “booke” was then raised above the realm of colloquial, intimate speech (the sermo of Erasmus’s Latin translation) and restored to the eternal, hierarchical majesty of Heaven. But in the text of Erasmus’s “Summons to the Pious Reader,” a more humble, human Christ is encountered on the page. By dwelling on his sermo (familiar conversation), the reader gains access here and now to “His holy mind” or “spirit,”76 an equivalence that he glosses in the Ratio verae theologiae by a reminder that “whatever” the Apostle Paul views as “coarser he calls ‘flesh,’ ‘body,’ or ‘letter; whatever is finer and is more like the force of intellect he terms ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’” (201). By virtue of “constant reading of what” Jerome had written, for example, Erasmus was able to “converse with his spirit every day” (Eden, Renaissance, 87). Such a claim, however, puts Church teachings about the “Real Presence” in a new light. For if Christ’s words in the gospels should come to life in a reader’s mind, the “spirit” of the speaker would also be “absorbed” by the reader’s “spirit.” Or, as the neuroscientist Dehaene more poetically phrases it, what reading now enabled “was a new and almost magical ability – the capacity to ‘listen to the dead with our eyes’” (302).77 Here, in a word, is what Erasmus summons his audience to do in reading scripture: listen to the dead with our eyes.78 According to the gospels, Christ had appeared in person after his death to the disciples who saw him with their own eyes. So, when the written gospels proclaim, “He is risen,” that sense of listening “with our eyes” renews the intimacy of the disciples’ encounter with his living presence. It is not so much in the liturgy, or in the ritual sacrifice of the Mass that true communion takes place. Rather, it is in reading the Word and listening “with our eyes” that the mind of Christ is resurrected in our hearts. Instead of tasting his “body” in the Eucharist, one absorbs Christ’s mind in the “rite” of reading.

76 If any single contemporary theory of reception comes close to a phenomenological explanation of this spirit of “inwardness,” it is the claim of Georges Poulet that reading “is the act in which the subjective principle which I call I, is modified in such a way that I no longer have the right, strictly speaking, to consider it as my I. I am on loan to another, and this other thinks, feels, suffers, and acts within me” (354). See note 101 below. 77 Deheane quotes the sixteenth-century Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo (325). 78 The “Spanish theologian Isidore of Seville (ca 560–636), had praised silent ­reading,” remarking similarly that “[l]etters have the power to convey to us silently the sayings of those who are absent” (qtd. by Fischer, History of Reading, 179).

33093_Williams.indd 141

2022-09-01 16:54

142

The Communion of the Book

What had troubled many Catholics about Erasmus’s Enchiridion militis christiani, or Handbook of the Christian Soldier (1503) in the previous decade was its radical “emphasis on individual experience and its neglect of the external forms of Catholic piety” (Nauert, 159). Deliberately or not, the Dutch humanist’s privileging of individual experience had begun to pose a serious challenge to the public character of Christian worship as the “true” expression of faith. And the enthusiasm that Erasmus had latterly expressed in “summoning” Everyman or Everywoman to read the gospels as the purest expression of intimate religious feeling was more dangerous still, since it put an even greater emphasis on the importance of mental states, or inward dispositions, as the highest form of religious experience. Indeed, it hinted at the heterodox notion that the Eternal Word encountered directly by the reader was the original “Real Presence.” What startles in this formulation is not the resuscitation of the dead letter by a reader lending it new life; rather, that letter is already alive, is pure Spirit, is just as present here and now in the printed Word as it was when the Word first became Flesh. Indeed, it is “Christ himself,” Erasmus writes in his initial preface to Novum instrumentum, “who in these books especially fulfills what he promised, that he would be with us always, ‘even unto the end of the world’; for in them he lives even now, breathes and speaks to us, I might almost say more effectively than when he lived among men. The Jews saw less and heard less than you see and hear in the Gospel writings, provided you bring eyes and ears by which he can be seen and heard” (Paraclesis, 34). It is an extraordinary claim, insofar as “these books show you the living image of his holy mind and Christ himself, speaking, healing, dying, rising to life again. In short, they restore Christ to us so completely and so vividly that you would see him less clearly should you behold him standing before your very eyes” (37). Compared with Bishop Fisher’s version of “the booke of the Crucyfixe” – a book without speech in the form of the eternal Word (logos) – this is the living “heart” of what sermo means to Erasmus. It is literally an intimate conversation between the reader and the living Word, as well as a dramatic expression of the implicit social distance between sermo and verbum.79 The mystery and power of the Eternal Word 79 Erasmus’s view of the gospels as sermo, a living conversation, is also an implicit rebuke to such iconic embodiments of the “Eternal Word” as those found in the luxury codices of Byzantium (see Crostini, 68–74; Plates 6 & 8); or in Latin codices like the

33093_Williams.indd 142

2022-09-01 16:54



The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech 143

has been exchanged for the contingent, egalitarian reciprocity of speech. It is as if Christ’s “spirit” or mind were present and speaking here and now to the “heart” of every reader. The Word is made flesh so that the flesh can be made Word. It is one thing to seek, as Erasmus evidently did, to restore Christianity to its source, much as he aimed to bring the culture and literature of classical antiquity to his present age. It is quite another thing to insist that reading the gospels in their original language – and, if in Latin translation, why not in vernacular translation? – could create the “Real Presence” of Christ here and now. At least that is what Robert Sider suggests in his recent introduction (2020) to “The Philosophy of Christ”: “it is because Christ is in the pages of the Bible” that “we meet him there as a living person. As we read those pages we absorb his presence, we become one with him.”80 To become one with him – is that not the whole purpose of the sacrament? And that highly evocative phrase – “he lives even now, speaks and breathes to us” – only furthers this sense that readers can “become one with him.” For Erasmus conceives of Christ as being present and speaking to the reader directly from the page, although neither he nor his modern editor equates this idea of verbal “presence” to the reader with the experience of communicants of “the Real Presence” in the Mass. The humanist has come as if by accident to this novel means of communing with the Son of God, of becoming “one with him” through a type of sacramental reading. What is equally telling is how little Erasmus seems to conceive of reading, as Bishop Fisher surely did, as a collating, or “mincing” together, of the Old and New Testaments. Contrary to the practice of “discontinuous reading” in the liturgy, or in the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus’s reading practices in the Paraclesis suggest a primacy of narrative rather than of doctrine or ritual. And narrative is well suited

Berthold Missal from the Abbey of Weingarten (see Rundle, 119–24; Plates 3–5). “The ornate covers of books, figuratively and preciously manifesting on the outside the essence of their sacred content, enabled them to be fitting objects to be displayed and paraded ­during the liturgy” (Crostini, 80). The “inwardness” of reading for Erasmus differs radically from this “outwardness of” icons meant for show, or the inculcation of a hieratic mystery. 80 Sider, Erasmus, 24. Sider finds an “intimacy” in classical literature “that brought its authors into the presence of the reader,” thereby “providing a record of a life that seemed capable of reaching across the ages to be absorbed by those who lived more than a millennium later” (5–6). To this editor, it even becomes a sacramental trope of readers “absorb[ing] his presence” to become “one with him” (24).

33093_Williams.indd 143

2022-09-01 16:54

144

The Communion of the Book

to the continuous unrolling of papyri, let alone the leather scroll.81 Although Peter Stallybrass claims that “[t]o imagine continuous reading as the norm in reading a book is radically reactionary; it is to read a codex as if it was a scroll, from beginning to end” (48), Erasmus envisions Christ as present, and presently speaking to him in his “scroll reading” of the gospels, as if they were unrolling before his very eyes. In such fashion, the Eternal Word (Logos) translates himself into speech (sermo) in this continuing conversation with the reader. Nor is continuous reading of the gospels as a “scroll” regressive in the way suggested by Stallybrass. Rather than lament the loss of l­iturgical organization or the weakening of theological analogies got from the mincing and yoking of widely separated verses from scripture, the humanist reader affirms instead the primacy of narrative and the ­continuing speech acts of the Saviour. Almost inadvertently, the humanist scholar and translator has invested the experience of reading the Word with the Real Presence – that doctrine of the Blessed Sacrament whereby the bread is transformed in the sacrifice of the Mass into the Word made flesh, where the ritual is completed in the reception of the Body of Christ. Read in a non-liturgical way, Erasmian practice may well verge on “heresy,” since it no longer requires a priest or any altar on which to perform the ritual miracle or to approach its transcendent mystery.82 Only the book with its silent reader and its inward drama of “keep[ing] my words” are then necessary to experience the “Real Presence.” As James Kearney remarks of this passage, “The Word made flesh is nothing compared with the flesh made word, the incarnate Christ nothing

81 Conversely, Fulton, Historical, points to the influence of Erasmus’s Adages as a “mincing” together of widely separate texts. Fulton is certainly correct in relating the Adages to the “pedagogical traditions” of seventeenth-century England, particulary in the w ­ idespread practice of keeping commonplace books (56–61). Since adages and aphorisms are extractions, they are obviously the very antithesis of continuous reading practices. But this is not the whole of Erasmus’s influence; his Adages are less representative of his impact on early modern habits and Reformation practices than was his Greek Testament and his implied theory of reading in the Paraclesis. 82 Fischer (History of Reading) does suggest, however, that “the reading woman possessing a Book of Hours possessed also the Word of God, which, through literacy, she could now access for herself without male mediation. This was no gender subversion, but b ­ urgeoning egalitarianism. The Virgin Mary could make the Word flesh, too” (189). The frequency of the image in the High Middle Ages may have helped to pave a way for Erasmus.

33093_Williams.indd 144

2022-09-01 16:54



The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech 145

compared to the book that the reader of Erasmus’s Paraclesis holds in hand” (56). But is that what Erasmus had in mind? He had in fact suggested something similar thirteen years before in his “Handbook of the Christian Soldier,” the Enchiridion addressed “To a Friend at Court” who “entreated” him to set down “a kind of summary guide to living, so that, equipped with it, you might attain to a state of mind worthy of Christ.”83 Here, one is reminded once again of the psychological perspective of Henrich, where “mental states” and “inward” experience had become more important in early modern culture than outward, public acts (415).84 As Henrich summarizes, “Salvation – a contingent afterlife – is generally achieved based on people’s own ­internal mental states – their faith. Rituals and good deeds play little or no role. Intentions and beliefs, or what is in a person’s heart, are most important” (415).85 In effect, the Enchiridion by the Catholic Erasmus was more faithful to this norm than the Protestant Luther’s De servo arbitrio (On the Will Not Free),86 which would ultimately deny human agency by diminishing the role of individuals in their own salvation. Or, as Steven Fischer more generally remarks of such “privatization” of reading and its links to religious schism, “Something profound had occurred in the social psyche. The public member had become the private contender. The individual was coming of age” (182). What clinches this impression is the agency that Erasmus grants to individual readers, insisting that “[n]o one is a Platonist who has not read the books of Plato. Is he a theologian let alone a Christian, who has not read the literature of Christ?” (Paraclesis, 31). That is not to say that a Platonist is merely one who reads Plato; or a Christian is one who

83 “Enchiridion,” Collected Works of Erasmus: Spiritualia, vol. 66:24. 84 Burckhardt, Civilization, explains that “[t]he sense of dependence on rites and ­sacraments … is not surprising among that part of the people which still believed in the Church. Among those who were more emancipated, it testifies to the strength of youthful impressions, and to the magical force of traditional symbols” (287). 85 Margaret King insists that such a sense of “inwardness” was not, however, a spontaneous development but a specifically humanist one, encouraged by the philosophia Christi of Erasmus “that minimized the importance of rituals, formulas, and the apparatus of church hierarchy, and urged an inward and spontaneous religious devotion” (21). 86 Ledo, “Recovery,” makes a strong case for Erasmus’s moral elevation of sermo as a discursive category, “involving, among other things, an explicit opposition to the sin of contentio” and an affirmation of “the social and intellectual values of caritas/amicitia and the quest for sapientia/prudentia through honestas” (392). Erasmus’s sermo thus signifies an amicable inward disposition as compared with Luther’s contentious approach to reform.

33093_Williams.indd 145

2022-09-01 16:54

146

The Communion of the Book

simply reads Christ’s words. For, “with Divinely inspired knowledge of all these things,” Erasmus writes in Enchiridion, “Plato wrote in the Timaeus that the children of the gods had fashioned man in their own image a soul composed of two parts, one divine and immortal, and the other mortal and subject to various disorders” (42). Yet the “soul” of Plato, like the “soul” of Christ, lives, “divine and immortal.” While Erasmus does echo Plato in his rules for Christian conduct, he more directly affirms Paul’s struggle of the spirit against the flesh in his Epistle to the Romans.87 But he also adds the “Platonic” qualification that you must “establish firmly in your mind that perfect piety in the attempt to progress always from visible things, which are usually imperfect or ­indifferent, to invisible” (61). It is the doctrine of ascent promulgated by Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and his Neoplatonist school in late fifteenth-century Florence. If it accords with orthodox Christian thought, it still does not solve the dualist problem of spirit over matter. While Erasmus follows the Neoplatonic ascent from “visible” to “­invisible” worlds, he expresses it as an action of the indwelling “spirit”: “There is hardly a single Epistle in which Paul does not treat of this,” he says, “does not inculcate in us that we must not put any trust in the flesh, and that in the spirit there is life, liberty, adoption,” since “God is spirit” (Enchiridion, 70). Only now, Erasmus equates “spirit” with mind (or esprit as one says in French) when he scolds, “You worship the bones of Paul preserved in a relic casket, but do not worship the mind of Paul hidden away in his writings? You make much of a piece of his body visible through a glass covering, and you do not marvel at the whole mind of Paul shining through his writings?” (72). The “whole mind” or spirit “of Paul” only comes into view “through his writings,” and would perish were it not for the material medium that preserves his thought – the page of paper Erasmus has just read. Reading that material book has also given a reader access to the mental world of “spirit,” to think with another’s mind. The “whole mind” or spirit “of Paul” could not be more than a human mind preserved on a sheet of paper, however, were it not for the inspiring Word – now widely dispersed by “God’s gift” of print technology – that preserves and disseminates the products of the Divine mind. For Erasmus, sermo thus moves towards verbum as the printed word grows

87 See, for example, Romans 7:14–25, 8:4–14.

33093_Williams.indd 146

2022-09-01 16:54



The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech 147

ubiquitous, and as it literally preserves the essence of Paul’s mind. This sense of mind as the essence of his own being also shines through a letter Erasmus wrote in 1518 to a provincial bishop who had expressed a desire to meet him in person (some two years after the publication of the Paraclesis): “There is nothing in me worth seeing,” Erasmus replied self-deprecatingly; “and if there were, it is all expressed in my published work. That is the best part of me, and what remains would be dear at a farthing.”88 The written word (sermo) is a veritable distillation of this self that speaks, the essence of his being. Here in embryo is the same idea that John Milton would develop more than a century later in his Areopagitica (1644), that soaring hymn to the book. And, though Milton’s idea resonates in much the same key as it does in Erasmus, it remains a distinctly Miltonic hymn. Expressing with characteristic eloquence a profoundly humanist view of writing, Milton opposes the licensing of books with a similar Erasmian conceit: For Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them … And yet … unlesse warinesse be us’d, as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, Gods Image; but hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason it selfe, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life. (492–3)

The “Eternal” essence of mind for Milton at this stage is preserved by the medium, much as it was for Erasmus: the writer’s sermo continues to speak in the logos of the book.89 If books are written for the living, then “that living intellect that bred them” will live on in the writing, long after the death of the body. The book is the embodiment on paper of the mind that bred it. Or rather, the distillation of the human mind in

88 Correspondence of Erasmus, vol. 5:271. 89 To a variety of definitions of logos in Annotations on John, Erasmus adds that “sometimes it designates a book” (Sider, Erasmus, 215). My usage preserves Erasmus’s distinction between social speech and the “eternal” Word by identifying the preservative powers of print with the latter, and time-bound, discursive practices with the former.

33093_Williams.indd 147

2022-09-01 16:54

148

The Communion of the Book

book form is the very soul of the humanist enterprise. Milton makes it his first principle in his own humanist argument about reading. But in Areopagitica, it cannot yet reconcile flesh with spirit. Erasmus had anticipated this Miltonic mode of reading in Enchiridion, not least in his claim for the preservation of mind or spirit in written texts: “As long as the apostles enjoyed the physical company of Christ,” he asks, “do you not read how weak they were and how crass was their understanding? And yet after the … teaching that proceeded from the mouth of God, after so many proofs of his resurrection, did he not upbraid them for their incredulity at the very last hour as he was about to be received into heaven?” (73). Here, although Christ is portrayed as sermo, or speech, the humanist’s reading shades toward the fifthcentury heresy of Eutyches – who had maintained “an extreme form of monophysitism in which the Lord’s humanity is thought to be totally absorbed into his divinity”90 – a heretical “error” that Erasmus seems not to have realized:91 “It was the flesh of Christ that stood in the way, and that is what prompted him to say: ‘If I do not go away, the Paraclete [Holy Spirit] will not come. It is expedient for you that I go’” (73). The suffering human flesh of Bishop Fisher’s “booke of the Crucyfixe” begins to look more like an impediment to Erasmus than a means of union with the Son of God. For it is in the written text that the Real Presence becomes more truly present than in the human body of the Incarnate Christ. Its full reception seems to be possible only from the page. Though Erasmus may not hear the implication, the act of reading has become its own sacrament, thereby creating a priesthood of every devout reader of the printed Word. Coming more than a decade after Enchiridion (1503), the great ­peroration to the Paraclesis (1516) enlarges on such possibilities through the act of reading the Word: “Therefore, let us all desire these books

90 MacCallum, Milton, 211. 91 Conversely, McDonnell identifies a “Nestorian tendency” in Calvin, contrary to that of the Monophysite Eutyches, Nestor’s harshest opponent, “because of his desire to maintain the essential distinction of the two natures” (John Calvin, 213) of the Incarnate Son. Calvin, having weighed the opposing errors of Nestorius and Eutyches in The Institutes, concluded that both were “justly condemned,” since it is “not more lawful to confound the two natures of Christ than to divide them” (312). But Calvin, concludes McDonnell, is much closer than he thought to the Nestorian error of separating the two natures. Erasmus tends in an opposite direction by devaluing the bodily, human existence of the Son in a manner not so different from the theology of the fifth-century Eutyches.

33093_Williams.indd 148

2022-09-01 16:54



The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech 149

eagerly … let us admire them greatly; let us die in them; let us be transformed into them since ‘our preoccupations affect our character’” (37). By desiring, admiring, living, and dying into that spirit that ­continues speaking here and now in the written words of Christ, Erasmus affirms that one may indeed “be transformed into them,” the flesh made Word by the divine Presence contained in the book (although he doesn’t mention its apparent affinity with the Sacrament). Only now, the historical Incarnation of the divine Word (Logos) that had lived in Galilee begins to pale by comparison with the act of reading Christ the Word (sermo) here and now in his own speech, since these books “restore Christ to us so completely and so vividly that you would see him less clearly should you behold him standing before your very eyes” (37).

The Poetic Turn in Humanism: M e ta p h o r   a n d   T r a n s f o r m at i o n Erasmus never seems to have realized, or at least acknowledged, how his view of Christ resurrected in the minds of readers had become sacramental, although his argument for reading scripture does authorize readers to become their own priests. In the colloquy Confabulatio pia (“The Whole Duty of Youth”) first published in 1522, the young boy Gasparus admits to feeling quite let down by the preaching of his priest. So, “he is left to his own wits,” as literary critic Brian Cummings remarks, acknowledging that “he must,” as he says in his own voice, “‘provide myself with a little book containing the Gospel and Epistle for the day, and then I recite or read it myself (aut pronuncio aut oculis lego),’” ­evidently referring “to silent reading or reading by the book” (49). But, “[t]he whole thing is done so lightly we may not even notice what has happened.” In fact, as Cummings suggests, “Gasparus is reading, ­thinking, interpreting, and perhaps even believing, for himself. That is why the theologians at Paris are getting so worried” (50). Of course, Erasmus had given them far more reason to worry in the second ­edition of his revised New Testament of 1519, offering readers specific and effective methods by which to surmount the obvious difficulties of scripture without the aid of theologians. The work that follows Paraclesis in the second edition of Novum Testamentum, the Ratio verae theologiae (“Method of True Theology”), aims to teach aspiring theologians exactly how to do that – to read “divine literature” for themselves by following methods of interpretation proper

33093_Williams.indd 149

2022-09-01 16:54

150

The Communion of the Book

to all literature, rather than those of “dialectic” or “Scholastic ­theology.” Indeed, practitioners of the latter “attribute so much to this discipline,” he says, “that they suppose the Christian faith is finished and done for if it is not secured by the support of dialectic, though meanwhile they disdain grammar and rhetoric as utterly superfluous” (122). There does remain the problem of the original languages in which scripture was written, and “the fact that certain things, because of idioms peculiar to the languages, cannot even be transferred to a foreign language without losing their original clarity, their native grace, their special nuance” (119). “Of these languages,” in fact, “St Augustine was genuinely skilled only in Latin, had some small acquaintance with Greek, but neither knew nor hoped to know Hebrew” (118). Even a novice should be able, then, to get by, like him, with printed aids such as dictionaries and grammars of sacred languages. More problematic is the fact that “Scripture generally speaks indirectly and under the cover of tropes and allegories, and of comparisons or parallels, sometimes to the point of obscurity in a riddle” (197). That is why it is “useful,” and even necessary, “for the young man destined for theology to be carefully practised in the figures and tropes of the grammarians and rhetoricians, which are learned with little effort” (123), particularly with the aid of ancient experts, such as the Roman educator Quintilian (35–ca 96 ce), whose Institutio Oratoria was the basis of instruction in rhetoric and grammar in almost every Renaissance grammar school in Europe.92 From Erasmus’s Ratio, a novice could also absorb many of the lessons that he, too, had adapted from Quintilian, or else from the fourth-century grammarian Donatus, whose exegesis of the Roman comedies of Terence had taught none other than the Greek Church Father Origen how to read the Scriptures with equal skill.93 Indeed, Origen had done “for the divine books,” such as the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22, “exactly what Donatus does for the comedies of Terence in laying bare the intent of the poet. Would anyone see such things who had never applied himself to the more refined literature” (Ratio, 126) of the ancients?

92 This would not have been the case without the discovery of this lost work (until now known only in fragments) of Quintilian by Poggio Bracciolini in 1416. See further discussion in this work: 27n6, 53n69. 93 Eden, “Parable,” 97.

33093_Williams.indd 150

2022-09-01 16:54



The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech 151

Erasmus is keenly aware, even so, “with what arrogance some despise poetry as a subject worse than childish, with what arrogance they despise rhetoric and all good literature, as it is called – and is. And yet this literature, however loathsome to them, has given us those distinguished theologians,” many of them Church Fathers like Origen, “whom we are now more inclined to neglect than either to understand or to imitate” (127). But above any of these is the prime example of “Christ,” who “clothed almost all his teachings in comparisons; this belongs especially to poets. Augustine did not think it a childish exercise to note the figures of the rhetoricians in the writings of the prophets and the Epistles of Paul.” The truth that the present age has forgotten, Erasmus solemnly advises his readers, is that all the liberal arts, but particularly the arts of grammar and rhetoric, form the ­straightest and broadest avenue leading to the goal of reliable scriptural exegesis. The art of rhetoric – or pagan literature – also teaches one how to read scripture. But what is the purpose and worth of exegesis if the means of “divine” and “profane literature” are so similar? “Let this be your first and only goal,” Erasmus advises the tyro, “this your prayer, attend to this alone, that you be changed, be swept away, be inspired, be transformed into what you are learning” (117). As Kathy Eden paraphrases this advice in her essay “Parable,” Erasmus aims “to transform his listeners through his readings of sacred scripture” (Eden, 102). It is the same goal as the one announced in the Paraclesis, that we “all desire these books eagerly” so that we may “be transformed into them.”94 And yet how is this possible in theory, let alone in practice? Where does one even start on this audacious project, much less proceed in such an undertaking and by what means? Searching for the key to unlock the “diffuse” structure of the Ratio itself, Kathy Eden takes Erasmus’s “master trope” to be “the comparison. Whatever structure the Ratio has … it owes to Erasmus’ penchant for comparing this to that” (“Parable,” 93). This type of “penchant” is also evident in “the metaphoric and metonymic poles” of discourse that the structural linguist Roman Jakobson defines as the speaker’s verbal proclivity for either “semantic similarity” or “semantic contiguity” (91). The one involves “parallelism between adjacent lines, for example in Biblical poetry,” and the other a predilection for “contiguous ­relationships” and “synecdochic details” (92). Such mental habits can

94 Sider, Erasmus on the New Testament, 37.

33093_Williams.indd 151

2022-09-01 16:54

152

The Communion of the Book

inform entire literary genres: “In Russian lyrical songs, for example, metaphoric constructions predominate, while in the heroic epics the metonymic way is preponderant” (91). But the “metonymic way” can also result in “inability to use two symbols for the same thing” (94), and lead, in extreme cases, to “split personality,”95 or dissociative ­identity disorder. To Eden, Erasmus’s penchant for metaphor and his distaste for Scholastic metonymy is most evident in three types of comparison (or semantic similarity) on offer in the Ratio: 1) collatio or comparison of things in similes, metaphors, parables, and allegories of things “found everywhere in the Old and New Testaments” (“Parable,” 105), as well as in De copia, where he discourses on tropes in secular literature; 2) ­“exegetical collationes locorum,” or close comparison of passages, which “aid[s] in the explication of passages that are obscure by comparing them with those that are more easily understood”; and 3) “collatio studiorum,” or “comparison of the disciplines that establishes the divide between the self-serving, syllogism-wielding debater or dialectician” of the Schools, “and the rhetorically and grammatically trained yet deeply devout exegete” (Eden, 105). In each case, the usage remains the same, and is consonant with Erasmus’s oft-stated method: “[J]ust as Christ imitated the speech of the prophets, so Paul and the other apostles reflect the speech of Christ, projecting a theme visually, through ­parables, and, by frequent repetition, fastening it upon the mind” (Ratio, 200). “By the end of the Ratio,” Eden concludes, “it is the “sermo Christi” or “speech of Christ” that “Erasmus has followed … in creating his own parable – one that compares sincere discourse to its sophistical counterpart” (105). In fact, it “is the comparison … in all its forms, from the most compressed metaphors to full-fledged fabulae and ­allegoriae,” that gives Scripture its “vividness or energeia,” as if it were a force of nature that “effectively sweeps readers away, transforming them into

95 Jakobson’s governing assumption is that “[t]he development of a discourse may take place along two different semantic lines: one topic may lead to another either through their similarity or through their contiguity. The metaphoric way would be the most appropriate term for the first case and the metonymic way for the second, since they find their most condensed expression in metaphor and metonymy respectively” (90). To some extent, I follow Jakobson in locating Erasmus’s discursive predilections close to the “metaphoric pole” and the discursive practices of Scholastic theologians at or near the “metonymic pole.”

33093_Williams.indd 152

2022-09-01 16:54



The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech 153

what they are learning” (“Parable,” 98), in contradistinction to the ­syllogisms of the Schoolmen.96 For Erasmus, the “speech of Christ” is based on the parable, which is “an expanded metaphor,” much as “the metaphor is a compressed ­parable.” In his De copia, Erasmus had already defined “allegoria as a metaphora perpetua, a continuous metaphor” (Eden, “Parable,” 96). Here, we need look no further to understand Erasmus than his Roman model in the rhetor Quintilian, who had proclaimed the power of this “most beautiful of tropes,” Brian Cummings remarks, to bring about the transformation of readers “into what they are learning.” As he paraphrases Quintilian on this point, the name metaphor “is itself a trope, since the Greek word metaphora is in Latin translatio, a carrying away of something from one place to another” (55). Just as textual translation is a transfer of signifieds from one system of signifiers to another, the signified, or what is transferred or transported “from one place to another” in reading Scripture, is the living power of Christ’s mind through his speech to a reader who thereby “absorb[s] his presence” and “become[s] one with him” in the rhetorical process of metaphoric transfer (from Greek metaphora, transfer, carry across). Translatio is a transporting of Christ’s mind into the receptive mind of a reader.97 Minds are transformed by metaphor’s transfer. Christ, in the concluding words of the first gospel, had urged his disciples literally to “transfer” his words, saying, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations … to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” But he had also promised figuratively that “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world” (Matt. 28:19, 20). Given Erasmus’s promise that readers could see and hear Christ speaking from the printed page, it was but another step to absorb the “speech of Christ,” and speak that sermo Christi, until they, too, were “transformed into what 96 The distaste Erasmus has for Scholastic theology is expressed over and over in the Ratio not least as follows: “Those who coat their palate and tongue with wormwood taste the wormwood in whatever they then eat or drink … So to those who have spent a good part of their lives in the Bartoluses and Balduses, in the Averroës, in the Holcots, Bricots and Tartarets, in sophistical quibbling, in hotch-potch summulae and collections – to these divine literature does not have its true taste, but the taste they bring to it” (Vessey, Ratio, 128–9). 97 As Erasmus explains to his “Crabby Critics” in the wake of Novum instrumentum (1516), “Discourse consists of two elements, language as its body and meaning as its soul” (Sider, Eramsus on the New Testament, 305). The “body” of the translator’s work, in the terms of this trope, conveys the “soul” of the speaker into a reader’s mind, thus transforming it into “what is learned.”

33093_Williams.indd 153

2022-09-01 16:54

154

The Communion of the Book

they are learning.” Christ’s promise is thus fulfilled in the changed cultural conditions of the printed book, whereby every devout reader can become that which is read. So, if the chief vehicle of Scripture is metaphor, and reading is the motor of this transfer, the reader who is carried over “from one place to another” is like the work translated “from one” idiom into “another.” Creating a semantic parallelism between two idioms, translation for Erasmus seems to be inherently metaphoric, since it transforms one thing into another, without effacing the first term. His facing columns of Greek and Latin can then serve as both semantic and visual metaphors of the process. Robert Sider offers another helpful context for understanding how Erasmus would want his own works, such as Paraclesis and the Ratio, to be read: “We must not forget that he began his career as a poet and that throughout his life he showed an appreciation for the allegorical – the ‘poetic’ – interpretation of Scripture.”98 This is a productive context for understanding the thought of Erasmus in its implicit relocation of the Real Presence from bread and blood to the paper book. For in the text as it is conceived by the humanist, there is a greater poetic investment in metaphor than in metonymy – in the enabling assumption of metaphor that “This is identical to that,” or “merges with that,” rather than “This is next to,” “this follows that,” as in the homily of John Fisher, or in the metonymic practice of substituting the body of Christ in place of the original bread, or even replacing the blood sacrifice of the Germanic tribes with that of the Mass.99 In literary terms, one might say that the theology of the Mass tends toward metonymy, unlike the metaphoric theology of the Incarnation, since it leaves behind the substance (bread) on which it is based and becomes the Real Presence that transcends matter. Indeed, the bread is supposedly changed in the instant of transubstantiation, or rather, replaced by that for which it was put. The result is not a merger (or ­incarnation) of two terms in one, as in poetic metaphor, but a ­metonymic displacement in which the first term (the vehicle or “body” of the metaphor) is superseded by a second term (the tenor or “spirit” of the ­metaphor). Metonymy tends to be artificial (this takes the place of that), whereas metaphor tends toward the natural (this is also that). In fact, as linguistic philosopher Hugh Bredin insists, “Metaphor exists only in 98 Sider, “Preface,” New Testament Scholarship, xxix. 99 See previous discussion in this work: 86–8, 91, 100, 104, 109.

33093_Williams.indd 154

2022-09-01 16:54



The Iconic Word and the Word as Speech 155

partnership with the literal: without this it is not a metaphor, but a mistake.”100 Nor will Erasmus permit the reader’s literal identity to be erased in the larger metaphoric process of transformation: “becoming one with” the Christ of the gospels means communing with, or entering into, the life of the Word through “keeping [his] words,” the flesh itself made Word. In living by and through the sermo Christi, the reader becomes a bodily incarnation of that which is read – a this which is identical to that – the self simultaneously becoming other to itself in the act of reading – both it-self and not-self.101 The social and cultural impact of this shift from metonymy to metaphor repeats and renews the historic impact of the gospels, which were the work of humble fishermen, and other common folk such as tax collectors who recorded their encounter with the sermo Christi, becoming his Word in the process. Historically, this transition from a Scholastic culture of metonymy to a culture of metaphor would be strategically reversed in the next century by a Restoration culture in England that absolutely abhorred metaphor as an instrument of non-conformity and liberty of conscience, since it threatened the “settled” state of religion and civil government after 1660, much as Adrian Johns portrays that state in The Nature of the Book.102 As Lana Cable further demonstrates, Samuel Parker, the future bishop of Oxford, actively sought in his Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (1669) to reduce metaphor to a style that was at best naively literal and, at worst, fanatical, and therefore a primary index of religious enthusiasm: “It was metaphor that authorized the workings of private conscience, in Parker’s view, metaphor and not doctrine that makes a religious fanatic.”103 However, Cable adds, “As Milton and Parker both knew, what made free use of metaphor a threat to institutional rigidity was metaphor’s subversive capacity for world-making” (255).104 100 Bredin, “Roman Jakobson,” 100. Bredin also offers a stimulating critique of the logical limitations and terminological confusions of Jakobson’s binary theory of tropes. 101 This contrasts with the notion of Georges Poulet, in his “Phenomenology of Reading” (see n76 to this chapter), of “my I” being “on loan to another” who “thinks, feels, suffers, and acts within me” (354) through acts of reading. Instead of a reader’s Self being taken over by the Other, Erasmus envisions the merging, or marriage, of Self and Other in acts of reading, where “the flesh made Word” is metaphorically “made one flesh.” 102 See further discussion in this work: 38–9, 42. 103 Cable, “Licensing Metaphor,” 244. 104 See discussion in my chapter 1 above, 38–40, which amplifies Méric Casaubon’s ­warning about the dangers of figurative language: “Metaphors, for example, worked by the ‘representation of shapes and images’ to the imagination – that is, they worked ‘by a kind of Enthusiasme’” (qtd. by Johns, 422). See also chapter 6 below, 353.

33093_Williams.indd 155

2022-09-01 16:54

156

The Communion of the Book

In historical fact, it was the “world-making” capacity of metaphor – after Christ’s “Real Presence” had shifted to the page, a page printed in English – that helped to create the greatest literary flowering in English history, not least in the four editions of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1563–83) that appeared in his lifetime. To generations of readers, Foxe’s monumental work presented, as much as it represented, the metaphoric truth of the flesh made Word, of bodies turning into material text. In the Actes and Monuments, Foxe appears to have fully divined a form of sacramental reading that Erasmus had inspired but failed to explicate, much less to contain, in doctrinal terms. And at least some of Milton’s seventeenth-century readers ought to have recognized, in the pinnacle scene of Paradise Regain’d, a necessary, and decidedly metaphorical, prequel to the sixteenth-century vision of Foxe, where the enabling pattern of the flesh made Word was first established, though not revealed, as Milton says, until a later age. Milton’s Jesus, in other words, was literally the prior model for all those martyrs who would “later” step into the Word with him as the flesh made Word, though not in the gospels but in Foxe’s book of Actes.

33093_Williams.indd 156

2022-09-01 16:54

4

Sacramental Reading: Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel

The iconic woodcut that frames the title page of all the early editions of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1563–1684) has been typically, even justifiably, read by modern critics “as illustrating the print-oriented culture of early modern Protestantism in contrast to the less literate oral and ­material traditions of medieval Catholicism.”1 Similarly, the visual logic of the image has been thought to accentuate “the laity’s ability to read the Bible for themselves rather than having it interpreted for them by the Church.”2 In John N. King’s lengthy caption to a reproduction of the image in his magisterial Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ and Early Print Culture (2006), we are given a helpful description of the visual elements that helped to make that image such an effective piece of propaganda: Insets3 at the bottom offer contrasting caricatures of Protestant versus Roman Catholic worship. The sun-bright Tetragrammaton at the lower left symbolizes divine illumination of a congregation that includes figures who read the Bible as the preacher delivers a sermon. The opposed vignette ­depicts individuals who tell their rosary beads as a friar preaches and a Corpus Christi procession proceeds toward a roadside shrine. At the apex of this Judgment scene, Christ welcomes the souls of the saved and condemns the falling angels and priests who celebrate the Mass beneath them. (4)

1 Rust, “Reforming the Mystical Body,” 640. 2 Reist, “Writing the Relic,” 293. 3 Strictly speaking, these are not called “insets” in book history, but “compartments.”

33093_Williams.indd 157

2022-09-01 16:54

33093_Williams.indd 158

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 159

I begin with this summary description both because of what it recognizes and configures in these elements, but also because of what has not been noticed in the image.

T e t r a g r a m m ato n a n d C o r p u s C h r i s t i The Hebrew letters for yhwh in printer John Day’s woodcut shine radiantly on the man standing with his back to us, his arms half-raised in a welcoming embrace. They also illuminate several other figures kneeling in adoration, creating an image not merely of the ineffable Name, but of God’s immanence in this graphic representation of ­worship. For, as we shall see, the scene evokes a strong sense of the Real Presence that, heretofore, was available only in the sacrifice of the Mass and the reception of the Blessed Sacrament.4 4 Haller, Elect Nation, sees “the reading of the Bible” as the substitute that “reformers put in place of the Mass as the decisive high point of spiritual experience – instead of ­participation in the sacrament of the real presence on one’s knees in church, they put

33093_Williams.indd 159

2022-09-01 16:54

160

The Communion of the Book

To some of Foxe’s first readers, however, it would have been more likely that the Tetragrammaton was foreign, even alien to Christians, had the German Hebraist Johannes Reuchlin early in the century not championed “the primacy of the Hebrew Bible without the mediation of a Christian translation” (Price, 61). In good humanist fashion, Reuchlin advocated for Christianity’s return to its source in Judaism; but the provocative question he posed also came to have a ring of truth. Had St Jerome himself not “championed” the “Hebrew truth” in ­making his Vulgate translation? Daring to couch his challenge to the institution’s thousand-year-old tradition in a telling contrast, Reuchlin wrote, “I revere St. Jerome as an angel … but I worship the (Hebrew) truth as God.”5 Right there, on Foxe’s title page, one sees writ large that humanist faith in the Hebrew truth of God as it was originally revealed to Moses and written out for all to read. Those human figures standing and kneeling in the image are striking embodiments of Reuchlin’s lasting reverence for, and unreserved worship of, the historically inflected “Hebrew truth.” In this singular image of the immanent God, Foxe and John Day register the return of Christianity to its source, and the meaning of that long humanist struggle to make Church doctrine responsible to the original languages in which it was expressed. But the struggle was not nearly as fruitful as it had first appeared to Reuchlin and his ­followers, who early on had every reason to be confident in their battle against Scholastic philosophy, despite continuing attacks of theologians from Cologne to Paris to Madrid. For Rome, and even the Vatican itself, was now in the process of becoming a beacon for biblical ­philology. Under the aegis of the first Medici pope, Leo X, the University of Rome had established a chair for Hebrew in 1514. In addition, the papacy had “licensed a Hebrew printing press at Rome and also in Venice. Famously, Leo granted Daniel Bomberg a papal license for the

encounter with the Holy Spirit in the familiar language of men on the printed page of the sacred text, in church services employing that text, and in preaching devoted to its explication and application” (52). But Foxe’s Tetragrammaton is hardly “the familiar language of men”; and it appears to speak for itself in the reader’s (or auditor’s) direct encounter with the Word. If the “Spirit” or mind of Christ is present in the “letter,” the Word on the printed page is still the material mediator. 5 Price, 61; Johannes Reuchlin, Briefwechsel 2:43, ll. 250–1 (no. 138, 7 March 1506); cited by Price, 248n11.

33093_Williams.indd 160

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 161

printing of the Talmud (twelve volumes, printed in Venice)” (Price, 166).6 To Reuchlin, still hounded endlessly by the Dominican Order, both developments amounted to official approval for his biblical ­philology and his rabbinical scholarship, and his faith that the Talmudic writers really did possess the original “Hebrew truth.” “Fittingly,” recalls David Price, “both Erasmus and Reuchlin would dedicate monuments of their scholarship – the Bible in Greek and the Christian Kabbalah – to an appreciative Leo X” (164). Both were cautiously optimistic that the charges of heresy brought against Reuchlin to the Roman curia by the Dominicans in Cologne would end in vindication of the humanist cause.7 After all, the enrolments in Dominican faculties of theology were plunging in the second decade of the century (208), while humanist faculties faced a glut of students. “German universities scrambled to hire Hebrew professors in the 1510s” (Price, 76). Indeed, the Vatican commission trying the “Reuchlin Affair” over the spring and summer of 1516 would vote by an overwhelming majority, with only three or four dissenters (all Dominicans), to drop the baseless charge of heresy.8 Reuchlin’s humanist partisans were jubilant, although the Vatican, bowing to pressure from conservatives, immediately “­suspended the legal standing of the commission’s findings pending the pope’s final determination of the case” (173). Reuchlin and his humanist party would have to wait until 1520 for the papal verdict. In the interim, the Dominican inquisitor “began threatening Erasmus’s humanist Bible of 1516 with an inquisition trial … because of his many objections to scholastic theology” (Price, 196). The hostility of conservatives to the humanist cause had a predictable result: it swelled the ranks of rebel academics, creating a climate in which open

6 Hamilton adds that this edition, which was “accompanied by the targums [paraphrases in Aramaic] and the rabbinic commentaries,” was reissued in 1525 when Bomberg “produced a second improved edition” (“Humanists,” 113). 7 Nauert, Humanism, identifies Cologne as a bastion in the defence of Scholastic philosophy against the new humanism, where “in 1508, the theological faculty of Cologne formally condemned the teaching of pagan poets and certain modern poets (the Italian humanists) in the schools” (137). 8 There is some truth to Nauert’s claim that “anti-Semitism” (147) was the driving force of Dominican resistance to Reuchlin’s defence of Jewish books and scholarship, and that the humanist satire Letters of Obscure Men (148–50) was what had made anti-humanism rather than anti-Semitism the issue; but it is also true that in 1516 it was only Dominicans on the Vatican commission who voted to uphold the charge of heresy against Reuchlin, and that humanists in the Roman curia understood the affair as a victory for humanism.

33093_Williams.indd 161

2022-09-01 16:54

162

The Communion of the Book

revolt seemed possible. Luther, whose own Hebrew scholarship had made him “one of Reuchlin’s most industrious students during the 1510s” (Price, 213), even offered Reuchlin the Chair of Hebrew at Wittenberg University in 1518. As Charles Nauert points out, Luther had “realized early that the philological-historical approach to the study of the Bible and the Church Fathers that was emerging in the humanistic scholarship of Lefèvre and Erasmus was the key to a deeper insight into the meaning of Christian revelation” (141). In view of Luther’s hostility to Talmudic studies, however, and his scorn for Jewish scholarship in general, Reuchlin politicly declined, although he sent his protégé Philipp Melanchthon in his stead to teach Hebrew and Greek (Price, 77). “Melanchthon’s inaugural lecture at the end of August 1518 was a stirring manifesto in favour of humanistic educational ideals,” and it was he, as much as Luther (who was never truly a humanist), who, “by the summer of 1521,” had transformed Wittenberg “from a scholastic and Catholic university into a humanist and Evangelical one” (Nauert, 142, 144). Reuchlin offered no opinion on this development. While neither he nor Erasmus would leave the Church, each of these humanist scholars still “nurtured a generation of students eager to applaud” the assault on the stifling hold of Scholastic theology and its preservation of outmoded methods of thought: “they created an academic culture primed for theological controversy and turmoil before Luther’s career ignited” (Price, 209). By 1520, the “Reuchlin Affair” and the “Luther Affair” were virtually synonymous to reformers and reactionaries alike. The outcome of both “affairs” was not only the Lutheran Reformation, but also the Counter-Reformation, which finally crystallized in the Council of Trent (1545–63). Mercifully, Reuchlin (d. 1522) did not live to see his humanist campaign of two decades driven out of the Church, and his Hebrew philology and scholarship taken over by a generation of humanists largely hostile to Judaism. But the unbearable irony for the bulk of humanist Churchmen was that the promising campaign to make the Hebrew Bible and the Greek Testament final resorts in matters of Christian doctrine was fully and finally curtailed in April 1546 by the Tridentine decision to make the Vulgate “the official version of scripture for the Catholic Church … The key word in the Council’s declaration is authentica, which was understood to mean that the translation was more authoritative and authentic than any other text, including, it would seem, the original Greek and Hebrew

33093_Williams.indd 162

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 163

manuscripts on which it was based” (Kearney, 47). In the wake of that decision, Calvin, together with his colleague Guillaume Farel, began to teach Hebrew and Greek in Geneva to aspiring pastors, as well as to many Calvinist missionaries to the Huguenot communities in France. With the demand for places exceeding resources by 1559, Calvin appointed Théodore de Bèze (Beza) to assume the duties of the rector of a newly created Genevan Academy to carry on the teaching of Hebrew and biblical philology.9 It was in this latter decade that the Marian exile John Foxe fled, as Calvin had done a generation before, to Strasbourg, first turning “aside to visit the birthplace of Erasmus at Rotterdam” (Haller, 56), before following in the footsteps of the great Dutch humanist to Basel, where in 1516 the printer Johann Froben had published Novum instrumentum. Here, Foxe took employment as a learned corrector and editor with Johannes Oporinus, a former apprentice to the famous Froben, who had also published the first Hebrew book in Basel in 1524. Oporinus, whose humanist education had earned him a professorship of Greek at the University of Basel, gave up his academic post in 1542 to return to scholarly printing. Such a move was not unusual: “Almost from its beginning, the printing industry had employed humanists as editors and translators and as authors of tracts, poems, dedications, and polemics. Although most humanists still supported themselves as teachers in schools and universities, the print-shop became an alternative focus for their careers” (Nauert, 145). Indeed, it was in the printshop where Oporinus felt best able to use his humanist talents; and his reputation as a learned printer would be fully established the following year by his publication in seven volumes of the trail-blazing Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius’s challenge to the medical authority of Galen.10 Not incidentally, Oporinus produced in 1559 the first issue in Basel of the Magdeburg Centuries, a thirteen-volume compilation by Lutheran ministers of ecclesiastical history, including stories of the Roman persecutions (Lyon, “Baudouin,” 269), and of the growing corruption of the

 9 Knecht, French Wars, 9, 10–11, 16. 10 In De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), Vesalius disputed the anatomical assumptions of the Greco-Roman physician Galen (129–ca 216 ce).

33093_Williams.indd 163

2022-09-01 16:54

164

The Communion of the Book

medieval papacy (264).11 Presciently, he also published his new employee John Foxe’s Latin drama Christus Triumphans in 1556. Although Mary Tudor’s sudden death on 17 November 1558 gave Foxe a long-awaited opportunity to return from exile, he chose to stay on at Basel to see his “brief” Book of Martyrs – a mere 732 folio pages in Latin – through the Oporinus press in August 1559 (Haller, 71). Only then did he return to London, where he “forged an association” with the printer “John Day, who served not only as publisher, but also as a patron of sorts for the four ever-expanding editions of the Book of Martyrs” (King, 16). Given all the years he had spent at the heart of humanist publishing in Europe, Foxe did not have a sudden revelation of the Tetragrammaton or see Hebrew letters appearing out of the sky as they did to astonished worshippers on the title page of The Actes and Monuments (1563). But the profundity of the image is apparent in its contrast to the ­adjacent ­compartment on the right-hand bottom of the page. This latter scene presents, if anything, a more orderly and realistic scene of ­worship than that of the “Persecuted Church” (caption to the image, 2nd ed., 1570) on the left. Indeed, the priest at his lectern in the right-hand compartment delivers a homily likely meant to recall the one preached by Bishop Fisher, since the foregrounding of the priest in his pulpit looms over a Corpus Christi procession in the background, with its subtle echoes of Fisher’s meditation on the “booke of the Crucyfixe.” Furthermore, the carriage of the monstrance toward a roadside shrine in the distance, marked by a crossroads crucifix, entails more than a public display of the Blessed Sacrament; it is itself a powerful evocation of the Real Presence to a host of worshippers filing behind it. But what emerges from the juxtaposed elements of these two compartment panels is far more than an “ecclesiastical reality that includes two churches, two preachers, and two congregations, only distinguishable at first glance by the difference in their devotional aids – books versus beads” (Rust, 637–8). Indeed, the “ecclesiastical reality” that emerges from this opposed set of facing images is nothing less than the location of

11 In many respects, the 826 pages of pre-Henrician church history that Foxe added to the second edition of Actes and Monuments (1570) anglicized what Flacius and the compilers of the Magdeburg Centuries (1559) had done in representing the general corruption of Christian “Truth” under the papacy. “This account,” as Haller remarked, “he drew largely from Bale, Flacius and the centuriators of Magdeburg” (141).

33093_Williams.indd 164

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 165

the Real Presence. To the Church on the right, it is found in the Blessed Sacrament, the Word made Flesh, which is borne aloft. To the Church on the left, however, it is the Hebrew Word, and only that Word, whose manifestation constitutes the Real Presence. Luther’s sola scriptura and the notion of the priesthood of every believer has by now come in Foxe to signify something more radical – perhaps even revolutionary – when the object of worship is the numen of the Word encountered in the act of reading. Those open books on the laps of the man to the left and the woman to the right in the ­foreground of Foxe’s image of the “Persecuted Church” suggest that it is not just the preaching of the Word, but more so, the reading of the graphic Word by the man with outstretched arms that actualizes the Real Presence. For, “Where two or three are gathered in my name,” spoke the Word Himself, “there am I in the midst of them.”12 To readers of this ilk, it is patently this act of reading that evokes the Real Presence; to such worshippers, it is the only form of sacrament. And it is in their gathered communion of the vernacular Book, say believers of this ­congregation, and only here, where salvation is to be found.13 The uppermost tiers in the title-page woodcut confirm the visual logic of this reading where two contrasted forms of sacrament are juxtaposed in two opposed congregations. As the eye moves upward from the compartment with the Tetragrammaton, the reader encounters an initial consequence of faith in the Word as the Real Presence. Amid the flames at the stake, the bound martyrs trumpet their joy as willing sacrifices to the truth of the Word. And across the way, the priests kneeling to the elevated Host likewise trumpet their joy at their sacrifice of Christ, with its evocation of the Real Presence.14 But what is supposed to be “Real” in the latter figure is ultimately revealed to be false at the

12 Authorized Version of the Holy Bible: Matthew 18:20 (henceforth AV, Matt. 18:20). 13 By contrast, what Hamilton calls “[o]ne of the last great products of humanism in the sixteenth century,” the Antwerp Polyglot of 1569–73, was “accompanied by a large critical apparatus in which the Bible was treated as a work of literature in its historical context rather than as a source of dogma” (114, 115). 14 While Reist explains that “the Protestant service is centred around books and the numinous appearance of the Tetragrammaton,” she does not recognize a manifestation of the Real Presence in the Hebrew name of God, finding only that the “juxtaposition of the Logos (the Word) with the elevated host (the transubstantiated body) makes it clear that the reader is about to engage in a very polemical presentation of the persecuted, the Protestant, and the persecuting, the Catholic Churches” (“Writing,” 293).

33093_Williams.indd 165

2022-09-01 16:54

166

The Communion of the Book

apex of the highest tier, where priests and angels alike are cast out of Heaven. And yet, on the utmost tier at the left side of the woodcut, the martyred saints of sacramental reading are joyfully received in a blare of trumpets into eternal bliss. The visual logic of the image confirms the metaphoric truth of the burning flesh made Word, even as the ritual Word made flesh is revealed in the opposite panel of the Mass as a twisting of the “Hebrew” (or, in this instance, “Greek”) truth. Here is a graphic instance of the meaning of Foxe’s inversion of the Word made Flesh, this radical notion of the flesh being made Word through reading scripture, that adds another layer of significance to the evidence from neuroscience15 that reading rewires the human brain. Indeed, the neurocircuitry of Foxe’s readers has literally become the “flesh made Word.”16 But for such readers, it is ultimately the Hebrew Word manifested in such deeds that constitutes the Real Presence of the Judaeo-Christian God.

The Flesh Made Word The title page of The Actes and Monuments does not declare Foxe to be its author, but rather its compiler, the industrious gatherer17 of a vast body of communal materials ranging from early Church history to anti-papal polemics to religious doctrine to martyr stories.18 What is truly extraordinary about so many of these narratives of sacrifice is how many of them were authored by the martyrs themselves. As John N. King observes, “In writing down accounts of their interrogation and ­imprisonment, Protestant martyrs followed in the footsteps of Anne Askew and Lollard prisoners who preceded her” (51). In so doing, they sought as often as not to encourage others under examination or ­condemnation, urging them to keep a record of their own actes and deeds in heresy examinations,19 the true heart of the matter. At other

15 See further discussion in this work: vii–viii, 99–100, 141, 169n25, 170–1, 191, 242. 16 See Henrich, weirdest People, 3–7, 418. 17 It declares that these Actes and Monuments were “[g]athered and collected according to the true copies & wrytings certificatorie as wel of the parties them selves that s­ uffered, as also out of the Bishops Registers, which wer the doers thereof, by Iohn Foxe.” 18 J.N. King, Foxe’s, 23–37. 19 Haller remarks that “every examination, as Foxe reports it, tended to wind up in a dramatic scene in which an honest believer was shown pitting the plain truth of the Word against the super-subtle sophistries of hypocritical churchmen and a loyal subject of the

33093_Williams.indd 166

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 167

times, the stories come from eyewitness reports of ecclesiastical proceedings against the martyrs, as if to erect written monuments to the dead whose witness to the “Truth” compelled such memorials.20 Even though so many of these trials are based on written accounts of the accused, Sarah Covington notes with regret that the “theater of execution” continues to receive more attention21 from “historians and legal scholars” than have the formally dominant examinations for heresy (177). As both a legal and literary scholar, Covington is properly aware of the courtroom as the main stage of Foxe’s book. But that was as it should be: “As a playwright, Foxe would have been drawn to the dramatic potential inherent in the form of the examination, particularly as it could not help but evoke the confrontations apparent in traditional and contemporary morality plays depicting the encounter between good and evil” (176–7). For such reasons, it is not difficult to discount the claim of Peter Stallybrass that the substitution of the Christian codex for the older Hebrew scroll was a measure of intellectual progress, and that “the perverse habit” among many Protestants “of reading forward continuously” was really a retrograde cultural development. As Stallybrass explains the issue, “To imagine continuous reading as the norm in reading a book is radically reactionary: it is to read a codex as if it was a scroll, from beginning to end” (48). But in The Actes and Monuments, there are always two modes of simultaneous reading: that of the martyrs who collate a range of doctrinal proof texts, or thematic groups of illustrations or stories, from their careful readings of the codex Bible; and that of readers hors du texte, who follow the plotline of Foxe’s courtroom dramas in continuous reading of his vast, almost cubic, volume as if it really were a scroll. It is from Eusebius, the fourth-century bishop of Caesarea, who included a wealth of Roman martyr stories in his Historia ecclesiastica

Crown was shown asserting his rights as an Englishman against a popish prelate” (Elect Nation, 183). This sense of English rights doubtless contributed to a new sense of English nationalism, as Haller strongly suggests. 20 “In the particular case of Foxe’s collection, martyrological acts (in the sense of acta, i.e., ‘deeds’ or lives of martyrs) and monuments (i.e., written testimonials of faith maintained to the point of death) supplant emphasis on relics and miracles in medieval legends of the saints” (J.N. King, Foxe’s, 8). 21 This continues to be the case in Milton criticism, where it is the “spectacle of punishment” or the “theatre of power,” and not the courtroom drama or drama of reading, that is made the focus of Foxe’s work. See, e.g., Knoppers, Historicizing, 1–21.

33093_Williams.indd 167

2022-09-01 16:54

168

The Communion of the Book

(ca 324–25), that Foxe gets his model for the straightforward courtroom dramas that he relates in The Actes and Monuments. A modern reader needs to understand that “in the early Christian world it was not only the punishment of torture and death but the theatrical trial that ­represented the test of martyrdom” (Covington, 194). So too, the prevalence of “stand-alone, question-and-answer documents,” as compared with “embedded descriptions within his own narrative,” reveals the true extent to which Foxe’s “examinations could,” and should, “be read as performative play-texts” (183).22 And their linear performance is patently continuous with the life and death of Christ.The heresy examination of the Marian martyr Rafe (Ralph) Allerton in the spring of 1557 is a prime example of a heresy trial based on the martyr’s own written account of the event, if still noticeably shaped by Foxe’s instinctive preference for “performative play-texts.” Allerton, who a year before had recanted his beliefs at St Paul’s Cross under the watchful eye of Edmund Bonner, bishop of London, would subsequently endure “suche a bondage and terror of soule and conscience,” Foxe relates in his brief introduction to Allerton’s story, that he soon resumed his old practice of reading “a chapter of the new testament” to congregations in the ­vicinity of London. He was then re-apprehended “for readyng in the parishe of Welley” (tamo [1563]: 1702). As Foxe describes the status of the narrative, “The reporte of whyche examinations, wrytten by his owne hande wyth bloude,23 for lacke of other yncke, hereafter ­followeth” (1702). The story of “The martirdom of Rafe Allerton” is not unique, but it does represent an extreme, and grotesquely literal, example of “the flesh made Word,” of bodies turning into text in Foxe’s book. “A letter written by Rafe Allerton vnto Richard Roth, his fellow martyr” (1709) to encourage him in faithful constancy, is added after a brief narration of Allerton’s death. Here, Foxe explains “where hee had the bloud he wrote that letter withal: he said that Richard Rothe, sometime his prison fellowe did make his nose bleede, and therby hee got the bloud wherewith he did then wryte. The bishop agayne asked him to whom he would

22 For reasons relating to economy of space, I have recast the theatrical format of question-and-answer dialogue in narrative form. 23 The French martyrologist Jean Crespin (1520–1572) reports similar cases of Huguenot martyrs writing accounts in their own blood in examinations for heresy (J.N. King, 53).

33093_Williams.indd 168

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 169

haue sent the same: he answered, vnto one Agnes Smyth alias Syluersyde of Colchester” (1710).24 The letter to “Agnes Smith, widowe” follows one to Richard Roth, likewise printed by Foxe (tamo, [1563]: 1708). So, the flesh is made Word in a double sense by Ralph Allerton: in the literal sense of a text rubricated with blood; and in the metaphorical sense of a life that is about “to bee crowned with the most ioyfull crowne of martyrdome” (1708), as well as that life soon to be “translated” into print. Out of the blood and ashes comes the literally incarnate Word of Foxe’s text.25 As for dramatic tension in this narrative, it comes from Allerton’s acts of collating the books of “Daniel & Esdras” as a continuous history that enable him to confirm biblical prophecies “of these last daies,” when “ther shal come greuous wolues to deuoure the flocke” (1703). Although Bishop Bonner responds with disdain – “Why, wilt thou take vpon the [sic] to reade scripture, & canst not vnderstand neuer a word? for thou hast brought a text of scripture, the which maketh cleane against thee” (1704) – the martyr’s verbal acte is clear: “Nay not so my Lord. For hee maketh it more plaine, and sayth on this wyse: they shall take awaye theyr goods, and put them out of their houses, and then shal it be know[n] who are my chosen, sayth the Lord. For they shalbe [sic] tryed, as the syluer or gold is in the fyre.” On matters of doctrine and prophetic fulfillment, Foxe’s martyr first reads discontinuously, then skillfully ­collates his proof-texts in ways that both he and the reader now read continuously as the fulfillment of a biblical prophesy. But Allerton also convicts Bishop Bonner of the falsity of his discontinuous style of reading by the simple answer he gives to the key question of his examination for heresy. Bonner asks, “How say you syrra? after the words of consecration bee spoken by the Prieste, there remayneth no bread, but the very bodye of our sauiour Iesus Christ, God and man, & none other substance, vnder the forme of bred” (1705).26 To

24 Not every martyr made up for lack of ink by writing in blood; Foxe comments, for example, on the plight of the imprisoned Bishop Ridley who had “made an answer to the said M. Antonius Constant. with a cole in the margent of the booke, for lack of inke & paper.” tamo [1563] 5:1572. 25 Of course, we now know that the brains of such readers were literally rewired as the “flesh made Word.” 26 The orthodox doctrine of the sacrament thus seems to be based on contiguity rather than transformation and belongs at what Roman Jakobson calls the “metonymic pole” of discursive development (90–6).

33093_Williams.indd 169

2022-09-01 16:54

170

The Communion of the Book

which Allerton responds, “I maruayle why you leaue out the beginning of the institution of the Supper of our Lord? For Christ sayd: take ye, and eat ye, thys is my bodye. And if it shall please you to ioyne the former woordes to the latter, then shall I make you an aunswer.” The crux, of course, is Christ’s bodily presence in the act of holding out the bread; “thys” can only be a metaphor. But the discontinuity of Bonner’s reading appears to be the root of the problem, for it leaves out the context (or stage directions) of those words “thys is my bodye.” And in this continuous context, Allerton finds the truth of the sacramental Word. Since Allerton’s contextual reply is both more historically informed and more aware of humanist hermeneutics than Bonner’s dogmatic reading of scripture, he is able with relative ease to confute the cleric’s Scholastic logic: “I vtterly refuse to to [sic] take the wordes of oure ­sauiour so fantastically as you teache vs to take them. for [sic] then should we conspire with certen heretickes called the Nestorians. For they deny that Christ had a true natural body, and so me think you do my Lord: if you will affirme his body to be there as you saye he is, then muste you nedes also affirme, that it is a fantasticall body and not a true natural body” (1706). This is hardly a war of words that the humanist can expect to win in an ecclesiastical courtroom; Allerton is sentenced to burn for his heresy, never doubting, as he writes in his letter to Agnes Smith, that “it hath pleased almighty God of his infinite mercye, to cal mee to the state of grace, to suffer martirdome for Iesus Christes sake” (1708). Through his sacramental reading – by his reception of the printed Word and his testimony to the Real Presence in it – he is identified as one of those who has risen above the scene of burning on the middle-left side of Foxe’s title page, to be received into highest Heaven, there “to bee crowned with the most joyfull crowne of martyrdome.” In the blood of Allerton’s own script, the flesh is visibly made Word. And in reading this text which represent his deeds, the reader’s brain is likewise made Word. The hagiography of Rafe Allerton is typical of the form Foxe gives to his martyr stories. Wherever he can find them, he appends letters from the martyr at the end of the story, after the narrative of burning has ended, or where the woodcut – where there is one – has been duly inserted. As John N. King explains, “Foxe added them as textual monuments at the end of biographical accounts of the acts that led up to their death” (49). But the letters also restore the presence of a speaking voice, and indeed, a voice speaking in the first person to console a widow or instruct the martyr’s heirs, or reassure fellows of the martyr’s

33093_Williams.indd 170

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 171

c­ ongregation, but, above all else, to provide graphic evidence of the flesh made Word in the given martyrdom. For the Foxean martyr ­continues to speak from a seemingly sacred dimension of text as sermo, here affiliated to Christ’s own Word.27 It is a continuous story repeated hundreds of times in The Actes and Monuments, and in myriad ways. The heresy examination of Alice Driver, for example, is prefaced by a brief third-person narrative of how Driver had “likened Queene Mary in her persecution, to Iezabel,” and how the presiding judge Sir Clement Heigham had “adiudged her eares immediately to be cut of [sic], which was accomplished accordingly, and shee ioyfully yeelded her self to the punishment, and thought her selfe happy, that shee was counted worthy to suffer any thyng for the name of Christ.”28 Seeking her opinion of “the blessed Sacrament of the aultar,” the inquisitor Doctor Spenser asks, “Doest thou not beleue that it is very fleshe and bloud, after the wordes be spoken of consecration.” But Alice Driver responds, “I can not tel what you meane therby: for in all my lyfe I neuer heard nor read of any such sacrament in all the scripture” (1576, 3rd. ed., 1968). Then, feigning ignorance of her true command of scripture, she says, “I pray you shewe me what a Sacrament is.” Spenser replies, “It is a signe. And one D. Gascoine, being by, confirmed the same, that it was the signe of an holy thing.” So then, “You haue said the truth sir, said shee. It is a signe in deede. I must needes grant it: & therfore seeing it is a signe, it can not be the thing signified also.” Alice Driver’s response is pure Erasmus, but it also anticipates the semiotics of a Ferdinand de Saussure three and one-half centuries before the fact. The signifier indicates, but is not identical to, the signified. When Gascoine steps in to save face for his associate, the young woman deftly catches him in the toils of his own logic. Asking him to repeat the instituting words of the Lord’s Supper, she admits that “they be the very wordes in deede, I can not deny it: but I pray you, was it not bread that he gaue vnto them?” Suspecting nothing, the cleric answers, “No, it was his body,” completely failing to see where this is leading as she asks, “Then was it his body that they dyd eate ouer night.” Patiently, the lamb 27 In this respect, Allerton recalls Erasmus’s promise in the Ratio that those who absorbed the “speech of Christ” would be “transformed into what they are learning.” See further discussion in this work: 152–3, 178, 182. 28 “The Examination of Driuers wife.” tamo (1576): 1968.

33093_Williams.indd 171

2022-09-01 16:54

172

The Communion of the Book

replies, “Yea, it was his body.” Well, she pauses as if truly in worshipful wonder, “What body was it then that was crucified the next day?” And still the penny fails to drop. “It was Christes body.” Really? Alice Driver asks in seeming amazement. And yet it is she, not the inquisitor, who now catches the fool in her trap: How could that be, when his disciples had eaten hym vp over night? except he had two bodyes, as by your argument he had: one they did eate ouer night, and an other was crucified the next day. Such a Doctor, such doctrine. Be you not ashamed to teache the people, that Christe had two bodyes? In the. 22. of Luke, He tooke bread, and brake it, and gaue it to his disciples, saying: Take. &c, and do this in the remebraunce of me … for as often as ye shall eate this bread, and drinke this cup, ye shalle shewe the Lords death tyl he come: and therfore I marueile ye blush not before al this people, to lye so manifestly as ye do. (1969)

Like Rafe Allerton, Alice Driver insists on the continuity of the biblical narrative with itself and its own history, as well as its continuity with her own narrative of martyrdom. At this point, the dramatic format of question-and-answer, ­actor-and-speech act, used in the scene is dropped in favour of a few lines of transitional narrative, which now allow for an authorial ­judgment: “With that Gascoine held his peace, & made her no answere: for as it seemed, he was ashamed of his doings. Then the Chancellor lyft vp his head of [sic] from his cushion, and comaunded the Gayler to take her away.” Voiced in the third person within the dramatic format of the examination, the story is evidently not Alice Driver’s account, written in her own hand; rather, it seems to be the report of an unnamed witness that is jotted down in the act of watching proceedings of the ecclesiastical court. It belongs, in other words, to the ­category of written monuments erected by others to the courage and constancy of the martyred subject. And whether it was Foxe himself, or Henry Bull, or someone else who has tracked down this written record, it matters little whether the woman herself lacked occasion or materials, or even the ability to write her own story, because she is both a superb example of the endlessly repeated courtroom dramas that played out in early modern England, and, even more so, a luminous example of the intelligence of ordinary folk who live (and die) by their vernacular wit.

33093_Williams.indd 172

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 173

On the second day of Driver’s examination, Doctor Spenser shows his true character in a way that suggests a dangerous discontinuity with himself: “Thou lyest noughty woman: we did not say that it [the Sacrament] was a signe.” Oblivious to the watching eyes and listening ears of a packed courtroom, a lying Doctor of the Church now exposes his fabricated authority and, by it, the illegitimacy of the entire ­inquisition. Indeed, as Sarah Covington comments more generally on such authority, “When various ecclesiastics, at least in Foxe’s telling, proceed to fumble futilely in the texts, their authority is further ­undercut, their ignorance exposing the empty power on which their legitimacy rests” (199). In a wider sense, however, it is the terrible rancour, as well as a lack of competency and a surplus (or surplice) of lies that vitiates the proceeding. As Covington sums up, “The rancor that pervades such exchanges, especially coming from the mouths of individuals considered to be socially inferior individuals, is proof of the diminished and in fact illegitimate authority that the interrogators claim to wield” (197). Despite the vicious class prejudice that she faces, Driver’s witty wordplay deftly exposes the hypocrisy of her “betters”: “Why masters, be ye not the men that you were yesterday? wyl ye eate your owne wordes?”29 But her pun on the doctrine of the Blessed Sacrament is not the least of her extraordinary daring. Summoning up the truth of her whole being, she shows herself to be the native fulfillment of that profound humanist faith expressed by Erasmus and Tyndale alike in their hope that “the farmer at his plough would chant some passage from these books” (Sider, New Testament Scholarship, 414). For Driver next asks a simple, if inescapably logical and also revolutionary question: Haue you no more to say? God be honoured. You be not able to resist the spirit of God in me a poore woman.30 I was an honest poore mans daughter, neuer brought vp in the universitie as you haue ben, but I haue driuen the

29 As mocking as her words really are, Alice Driver’s conceit is based on a metaphoric habit of mind in which the literal being of a thing is preserved in the metaphoric process of transformation. She mocks the idea, “this is put for that,” rather than “this is also that.” 30 Covington argues that women, let alone social inferiors like Alice Driver, are “­particularly unsettling to the questioning prelates, not only because of the impertinence they displayed, but even more because of their skilled use and knowledge of scripture” (198).

33093_Williams.indd 173

2022-09-01 16:54

174

The Communion of the Book

plough31 before my father many a time (I thank God:) yet notwithstanding in the defence of gods [sic] truth, & in the cause of my master Christ, by his grace I wyl set my foot against the foot of any of you al, in the maintenaunce and defence of the same: & if I had a thousand lyues, it should goe for payment thereof. (1969)

Tragically, the only life Alice had was consumed by fire just two weeks before the sudden death of Mary I, and the accession of the boy Edward VI, an English “Josiah.” One of the more moving accounts is a heresy examination that predates the Marian martyrs. It is taken from the written account of Anne Askew, a Henrician martyr whose story was first published in 1546, not long after she died, where it was interspersed with long commentaries by the ex-Carmelite John Bale. In fact, Bale’s publication of The Examination of Anne Askew (1546–47) is constructed as a suite of alternating passages: bits of narrative by Askew, followed by passages of editorial commentary. Bale, like Foxe, later became a Marian exile himself, boarding in Basel with Foxe in the home of their employer, the printer Johannes Oporinus. Scholarly collaboration of this sort, in which Bale’s work is reprinted in Foxe’s book, is the essence of Foxe’s method, which relied heavily on Henry Bull and many others who swept the county and parish records,32 searching for letters and eyewitness accounts of the actes of the martrys.33 By such a “skillful and laborious gathering,” the communal story becomes a story of communion. Askew’s story, which had its Foxe première in 1563, six months before Bale’s death, is mostly a verbatim reprint of that earlier edition,34 minus 31 The Jesuit controversialist Robert Parsons had nothing but disdain for the likes of Alice Driver, “a ‘famous doctrix,’” and “a feminine variation of Tyndale’s plowboy” (J.N. King, 263). In his attack on Foxe’s book in A Treatise of Three Conversions of England from Paganism to Christian Religion (1603–4), Parsons also registered “his disapproval of the reading and interpretation of the Bible by members of the laity” (J.N. King, 263). 32 Of Foxe’s friendship with Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, Haller observes that “judging from the frequency of the notation ‘ex accomodato D. Math. episc.’ in the margins of his book, he had the free run of the great collection of books and manuscripts which Parker was gathering together” (Elect Nation, 158). 33 J.N. King, Foxe’s, 23–5, 27–8. 34 Close comparison with Bale’s “First Examination of Anne Askew” in 1546, the year of her death, and “The Latter Examination of Anne Askew” (1547), reveals little more than stylistic changes by Foxe: differences, for example, of punctuation, of wordbreaks, of sentence breaks. Where Bale wrote, “The priest asked me, what I said to the Sacrament of the Altar? And required much to know therein my meaning,” Foxe writes, “The Priest

33093_Williams.indd 174

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 175

Bale’s commentaries that had made the narrative so discontinuous. But Askew, an accomplished poet, is finally allowed to speak for herself without a male commentator intervening to speak for her, apart from a single intervention where Foxe explains that the signed recantation by Askew was a forgery, thereby reproducing the critical methods of readers like Valla and Erasmus35: Here mayest thou note, gentle Reader, in this confession, both in the Bishop and his Register, a double sleight of false conueiaunce. For although the confession purporteth the woordes of the Bishops writing, whereunto she did set her hand: yet by the title prefixed before, mayest thou see that both she was araigned and condemned before this was registred [sic], and also that she is falsly reported to haue put to her hande, which in deede by this her own booke appeareth not so to be, but after this maner and condition: I Anne Askew do beleue all maner thinges contayned in the fayth of the Catholicke Church, and not otherwise. (tamo [1570], 8:1455)

Askew, unlike Allerton or Driver, could not be arraigned for merely reading scripture, since she had a legal right, as the daughter of noble parents, to own or read a Bible, as did all members of the clergy or gentry.36 Instead, as she recalls, she faced the usual dogmatic questions about “thinges touching the Sacrament … and all things els touching the Christen belefe, vvhich [sic] are taught and declared in the kings Maiesties booke lately setforth [sic] for the erudition of the Christen people” (1455). The site of her martyrdom is thus hedged in by the autocratic politics of The Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for Any Christian Man (1543), the book that Henry VIII had first commissioned to replace the Bishop’s Book of 1537, The Institution of the Christen Man. In some ways, The Necessary Doctrine was literally “the King’s Book,” since it included some of his own revisions, such as rejecting Lutheran

asked me what I sayd to the sacrament of the aulter, and required much to know therein my meaning” (tamo [1570] 8:1453), dropping the period to make one sentence in place of two, the latter a sentence fragment. On occasion, Foxe adds a word or phrase, such as the Archdeacon of London asking in Bale’s text, “mastres wherefore are ye accused?” but asking in Foxe’s text, “Mistres wherefore are you accused and thus troubled heare before the Byshop?” (8:1454). For Bale, see The Firste Examinacion, 9–10. 35 See further discussion in this work: 126–9. 36 Haigh, English Reformations, 160–1.

33093_Williams.indd 175

2022-09-01 16:54

176

The Communion of the Book

“­justification by faith” and reasserting the truth of the doctrine of transubstantiation in the Mass. In a statute of 12 May 1543, the provision for clergy, nobility, and gentry to read the Bible was henceforth rendered enforceable by law. But it wasn’t for merely reading a Bible that Askew was arrested in 1545. Askew first ran afoul of her examiners by denying that she had said, “that the Sacrament remainyng in the pixe, was but bread,” and then refusing to give them a direct answer, “til such tyme as they had assoyled me this question of myne, wherefore Steuen was stoned to death. They said they knew not” (8:1454). Whether forgetting or dissembling with respect to Stephen’s denial of uttering “blasphemous words against Moses, and against God” (av, Acts 6:11) – given Israel’s history of ­reverting to idol worship – the bishop of London did not respond to her implied charge of idolatry, instead claiming only that she “had alledged a certayne text of the Scripture. I aunswered that I alledged none other but S. Paules owne saying to the Athenians in the xvii. chap. in the Apostles actes, that God dwelleth not in Temples made with handes. Then asked hee me what my fayth and beliefe was in that ­matter? I ­aunswered hym: I beleue as the Scripture doth teache me.” What “the Scripture doth teache” her is remarkably close to what Milton a century later would describe in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce as the work of “a skilfull and laborious gatherer” (cpw 2:338), since Askew is more adroit at scriptural collation or indexical reading than any of her inquisitors. For example, she moves easily from the sixth to the seventeenth chapter of Acts, and then back to Proverbs nineteen, in answer to Bishop Bonner’s question, “why I had so fewe wordes? And I aunswered, God hath geuen me the gift of knowledge, but not of vtterance. And Salomon sayth, that a woman of few wordes is a gift of God. Prou. xix” (8:1454). The scene, as Peter Stallybrass remarks, demonstrates a clear “dependence upon her own reading of the bible against the authority of the Church.” And it encapsulates Askew’s remarkable ability to collate scriptures from a wide variety of biblical authors. For the technology of the codex, as Stallybrass suggests, helps to explain why “her voice is haunted by the scriptures that she collates” (71). That technology, in his words, offered “the combination of the ability to scroll with the c­ apacity for random access” (42). A very different aspect of this scene also emerges from the bishop’s nigh-comic inability to understand metaphor, or his evident incapacity to grasp the metaphoric character of Askew’s

33093_Williams.indd 176

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 177

collation of texts. His penchant for metonymic thinking37 evidently limits him to the literal meaning of that crucial verse, “This is my body,” without close consideration of the instituting words as a dramatic context for the scene. “And vppon this argument he taried [sic] a great while to haue driuen me to make hym an aunswere to his minde. Howbeit I would not, but concluded this with him, that I beleue therin and in all other thinges as Christ & his holy Apostles did leaue them.” Where Anne Askew finally ran afoul of canon law, however, was in her equivocal response to a confession that the bishop had written for her in the hope of sparing a fellow member of the nobility. Since he penned the words himself, he literally put words in her “mouth”: “I Anne Askew, othervvise called Anne Kyme, doo truly and perfectly beleue, and so here presently confesse and knovvledge [sic]” the a­ uthority of “the kings Maiesties booke” by solemnly promising “that hence forth I shall neuer say or do any thing against the premisses, or against any of them” (1455). But “Then,” Askew shrugs off the bishop’s impersonation of her voice to speak in the first person, “because I did adde vnto it the Catholicke Church” (1455). But as soon as she yoked a truly catholic, universal church together with her faith in reading and ­believing only what “the Scripture doth teache me” (1454), the bishop “floonge into his chamber in a great furye.” And when her cousin “­followed him, desiring hym for Gods sake to be good Lord vnto me,” “He aunswered that I was a woman, and that he was nothyng deceiued in me” (1455). Askew is one of the shining examples in the Foxean tradition of what “the Scripture doth teache me.” Among other things, she writes: “The breade and the wyne were left vs for a sacramentall communion, or a mutuall participation of the inestimable benefites of his most precious death and bloudsheeding” (1456). For, when Christ said, “This doo ye in remembraunce of me,” he merely established a form of commemoration; “Els should we haue bene forgetfull of that wee ought to haue in dayly remembraunce,” she adds, and so have been “altogether vnthankfull for it.” Indeed, “it is mete, that in our prayers we cal vnto God to graft in our foreheades, the true meanyng of the holye Ghost concerning this Communion. For Saint Paule sayth: the letter slayeth: the spirite is it onely that geueth lyfe.” The “spirite” is evoked in the reading; but the

37 See further discussion in this work: 151–5.

33093_Williams.indd 177

2022-09-01 16:54

178

The Communion of the Book

bishop and his ecclesiastical court show themselves unable or else unwilling to read beyond the letter. Deft at collating widely separated texts, Askew evokes nonetheless a continuous speaking presence in a text that others like her would also read sacramentally. When, in a second examination at Greenwich, she is asked to give her “opinion in the Sacrament,” she sounds a lot like Erasmus saying that we must “be transformed into” those same texts that we read.38 Indeed, her “aunswere was this: I beleue, that so oft as I in a Christian congregation, doe receiue the bread in remembraunce of Christes death and with thankes geuing, according to his holy institution: I receiue therewith the fruites also of hys most glorious passion” (1456). It should have been an answer to satisfy Big-Enders and LittleEnders alike. Still, “The bishop of Winchester bad mee make a direct aunswere. I sayd, I woulde not syng a new song of the Lorde in a straunge lande. Then the bishop sayd, I spake in parables.39 I aunswered it was best for him.” In the end, Anne Askew would be condemned for speaking metaphorically in parables like Christ her Lord.40 However biblical her English speech really is, it remains unintelligible to this ecclesiastical court. Some of the nobility struggled with her parables as they tried to save one of their own: “Then came my Lord Lisle, my Lord of Essex, and the bishop of Winchester, requiring me earnestly that I should confesse the sacrament to be fleshe, bloud, and bone” (1456). Trusting that the bishop of Winchester would not divine her true meaning, she made him this brief response: “Then said I to my Lord Parre and my Lord Lisle, that it was great shame for them to counsel contrarye to their knowledge.” For the court took the desperate measure of making “me a bill of the sacrament, willing me to sette my hand therunto [sic]: but I would not.” Instead, she wrote, “The confession of me Anne Askew for the tyme I was in Newgate, concerning my beliefe.” We are not told whether Askew ever gave it to the court, but Foxe did choose to render it in print at the climactic point in her story. “I Finde in the scriptures (sayd she) that Christ tooke the breade and gaue it to his disciples,

38 See further discussion in this work: 148–9, 151, 153. 39 The bishop of Winchester thereby seems to disavow Erasmus’s Ratio as well as Askew. 40 But Askew is only one of Foxe’s most obvious Erasmian examples of the transformative power of the sermo Christi or becoming “what was learned.”

33093_Williams.indd 178

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 179

s­ aying: Take, eate, this is my body which shall be broken for you, ­meaning in substance his own very body, the bread being therof an only signe or sacrament.” Peter Stallybrass draws due attention to Askew’s extraordinary “feat of remembrance in finding and putting together the passages that she needs” in all that follows. As he notes, “Such an interlacing of quotations is radically emphasized in Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, where Askew’s citation of book and chapter (but not verse)41 of the bible are doubled by the marginal notes that re-cite her scriptural quotations in the second and later editions” (71). But she also returns to the semiotic and poetic dimensions of an argument from which Scholastic churchmen seemed almost eager to debar themselves: For after like maner of speaking he sayd, he would breake downe the temple, and in three dayes builde it vppe againe, signifying hys own bodye by the temple, as Saint John declareth it, John. ii. and not the stony temple it selfe. So that the breade is but a remembraunce of hys death, or a sacrament of thankes geuing for it, whereby wee are knyt vnto hym by a communion of christen [sic] loue. Although there be many that cannot perceiue the true meanyng thereof, for the veile that Moyses put ouer hys face before the children of Israel, that they should not see the clearenes therof. Exod. xxiiij. and ii. Corin. iii. I perceiuve the same veile remayneth to this day. (8:1456)

As Peter Stallybrass deftly remarks, “It is Askew’s acts of collation, as much as of courage, that are materialized on the pages of Actes and Monuments” (71). What is less certain is his broader judgment of the remarkable feat of scriptural collation that appears in her confession of faith “for the tyme I was in Newgate, concerning my beliefe” (8:1456). Noting that “[i]n a single paragraph, Askew collates John 2, Exodus 34, II Corinthians 3, the history of Bell, Daniel 14, Acts 7, Luke 21, Amos 9, [and] Isaiah 59” (72), Stallybrass is doubtless correct to identify her “new techniques of disassembling and reassembling” with “the codex and the printed book as machines that enable discontinuous reading” (73). He is on solid ground as well regarding the purpose of her c­ ollative style of reading: “Askew’s method, at least at her examinations, was

41 The Geneva Bible of 1560 was the first English translation to use numbered verses.

33093_Williams.indd 179

2022-09-01 16:54

180

The Communion of the Book

forensic not liturgical.” She aimed, that is, to expose a deeply faulty form of indexical reading, or “mincing of the bible,” that stands “right at the heart of institutionalized Christianity in England” (50–1). Put baldly, she convicts her examiners of mincing scripture in ways that have clearly perverted that Word. Here, however, Stallybrass stops short of teasing out the full significance of such a “forensic,” rather than a “liturgical,” method of reading. Is her prosecution of the case justifiable or misguided, progressive or reactionary? The answer depends on one’s assumptions about the sort of continuity created by the Church’s practice of discontinuous reading that was first enabled by “the codex and the printed book as indexical forms” (47). If it is true that “the perverse habit of reading forward continuously” is in fact “radically reactionary; it is to read a codex as if it was a scroll, from beginning to end” (48), then Anne Askew is hardly ­reactionary in using a forensic method of indexical reading to expose the “perversity” of her examiners’ method of reading. And yet the liturgy that her inquisitors defend is clearly based on “the cutting up of the bible into specific, usable parts.” So why would she need to prosecute them? Here, Stallybrass hedges. “This is not to say there was no continuity” in the reading methods of the churchmen, “but the continuity was provided above all by the liturgical year, during the course of which much of the bible would be read (and the Psalms, for instance, would be read repeatedly” (47). Ignoring this attempt to naturalize the liturgy by mincing the text of scripture, he asks, “How and why, then, did ­continuous reading become the norm (or at least begin to be perceived as a norm to which one could contrast, say, phone books and technical manuals),” given the nature “of the codex and the printed book as indexical forms”? The answer emerges from a distinctly different form of “continuous reading” in Askew’s confession of belief that supplements her scriptural collations. As she says of her reading of “the breade” as “a remembraunce” of Christ’s “death, or a sacrament of thankes geuing for it,” her inquisitors appear unable to recognize what she sees with the eyes of faith. “Although there be many that cannot perceiue the true meaning thereof, for the veile that Moyses put ouer hys face before the children of Israel, that they should not see the clearenes therof. Exod. xxiiij. and. ij. Corin. iij. I perceiue the same veile remayneth to this day” (8:1456). She has just confessed to her own place in the narrative, as

33093_Williams.indd 180

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 181

it were, having witnessed the reality of God’s presence like Moses on his ascent of Mount Sinai. But her examiners cannot see it for that veil they cause her to wear to shield them from the sight of the glory she has seen. For their part, they are like the Israelites mistaking what they see from far below: “And the sight of the glory of the Lord was like devouring fire on the top of the mount in the eyes of the children of Israel” (Ex. 24:17). Although Askew modestly refrains from quoting this verse, or claiming any form of identity with Moses, she is keenly aware of the “devouring fire” which is about to consume her, whereby she will be caught up into that “glory.” She calls on readers, it seems, to recall Moses’s third ascent of Mount Sinai, after Israel’s return to idolatry in their worship of the golden calf, when he intereceded for them, acknowledging God’s ­judgment that they are “a stiff-necked people,” but pleading with the Lord to “pardon our inquity and our sin” (Ex. 34:9). And after Moses returned from the presence of God on the Mount, “the skin of his face shone”; and the people “were afraid to come nigh him,” so that he had to “put a veil on his face” until he “had done speaking with them” (Ex. 34:30, 32). What readers are left to infer from her scroll reading is that Askew has found her true place in the narrative, stepping into scripture at precisely the point where she finds her story merging with the story of the exodus, of the journey of God’s people on their way to the Promised Land. This interplay of reading intermittently (collation) with reading forward (typology) in the martyr’s examination makes it difficult to believe that the “indexical forms” of the codex and printed book are in fact opposed to the reading practices native to the scroll. Equally hard to believe is that “[w]hen cultural critics nostalgically recall an imagined past in which readers unscrolled their books continuously from beginning to end, they are” actually “reversing the long history of the codex and the printed book as indexical forms” (Stallybrass, 47). To say that indexical strategies of reading have “depended upon the bible as a book as opposed to a scroll” is to naturalize the outcome. But the liturgical year itself is cultural, not natural; it is ordered by a seasonal thematics (48–51) devised by the institution in its mincing of the scriptures. Yet the basis of this institutional “truth” is not Askew’s providential history but the seasonal round of the liturgy; the natural order is recruited to the service of a ritualized history (and the institution that performs those rituals). So, the “natural” repetition of discontinuous passages in

33093_Williams.indd 181

2022-09-01 16:54

182

The Communion of the Book

the liturgy really ensures that nothing ever changes in the codex “­history of the bookmark” (42). Finding one’s metaphoric place in scripture, as Anne Askew has done through her metaphor of transformation, is now overwritten by a form of indexing used to protect the stability of the institution. In substituting nature for scripture, the liturgy is finally metonymic rather than metaphorically transformative.42 By contrast, the poet Anne Askew appears to have retained an instinctive faith in the transformative power of metaphor, echoing Erasmus’s claim that those who absorb the speech of Christ will be transformed into the sermo Christi, and so become “what they are learning.”43 But the poet, whose sacramental style of reading enabled her to commune with the Real Presence, and yet whose “poetry” appeared to her inquisitors to be nothing more than “parables” or metaphors, was cruelly broken on the rack for presuming to speak like the Word himself. In his marginalia, Foxe tells us only that “An. Askew” was “lamed vpon the racke,” not specifying that she was tortured to reveal the names of her fellow believers, which she refused to do. But, by separating cause from effect, Foxe delays the full impact of the reader’s discovery that, “the day of her execution beyng appoynted, she was brought into Smithfield in a chaire, because she could not go on her feete, by meanes of her great torments” (1459). And “When she was brought vnto the stake, she was tied by the middle with a chayne, that held vp her body,” then, even then, Anne Askew, on hearing the sermon of one Doctor Shaxton,44 answered “againe vnto hym, where he sayde well, confirmed the same: where he sayd amysse, there sayd she, he misseth, and speaketh without the booke.” It is perhaps the most moving conclusion to any of the stories

42 See further discussion in this work: 143–4, 148–9, 151, 154–5. 43 See further discussion in this work: 152–4. It is not improbable that Askew had read Erasmus’s account of Christ’s parable in the Ratio, that “when in John he speaks to those who were admiring the great edifice of the temple, and says, ‘Destroy this temple and within a space of three days I will raise it up’ [2:19], not even the apostles perceived that he was speaking about his body that was to be killed and that would live again within a period of three days” (Vessey, 202). In any event, poets like Askew and Erasmus did not read metaphor as language in the indicative mood and had grammatical skills surpassing Scholastic logic. 44 Askew writes, “Then came there to me Nicolas Shaxton,” the former bishop of Salisbury, “and counseled me to recante as he had done. I sayd to hym, that it had bene good for him, neuer to haue ben borne” (tamo [1570]: 8:1457). The following week, Shaxton was assigned to preach at the scene of execution.

33093_Williams.indd 182

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 183

in a folio edition amounting to 2,314 pages,45 given how the poet-reader remains continuous with the “booke” in which her own place is now bookmarked. And the scene becomes even more powerful when one realizes what it means within Foxe’s book to be a sacramental reader. Looking again at that title-page figure of a woman with an open book in her lap, seated between the pulpit and the Tetragrammaton shining over her shoulder, one flinches at the poet’s destiny in an age of Scholastic logic-choppers. But Anne Askew did not flinch from that end, any more than she swore off writing poetry, gathered as she now was into Foxe’s congregation of the flesh made Word.

N o T r u e R e a d e r s h o r s d u t e x t e ? 46 The historical reception of The Actes and Monuments could almost make it seem that no reader ever stood outside of Foxe’s text, and that the only position hors du texte (pace Derrida) was, by design, that of the inquisitor. Indeed, readers like Anne Askew and Alice Driver appear and reappear within Foxe’s text because they bear constant and faithful witness to the truth of their reading. At the core of Foxe’s book, such acts of reading most resemble Christ’s reading of the Word in Luke 4:16–24, where he returns from the Wilderness to the synagogue in Nazareth “where he had been brought up,” and where, in standing to read a passage from “the prophet Esaias,” he implies that prophetic writ is now fulfilled in him, that he is inside the text. Significantly, he has just returned from the Wilderness to publicly re-read Isaiah and express his deeper understanding of the Word made flesh as that flesh literally made Word. For he has been led by the Spirit to step, as it were, directly into the pages of scripture. Richard Woodman also appears to perform this type of reading when he “composes a highly circumstantial account of his arrest and imprisonment with an eye to manuscript

45 Like Shaxton, Robert Parsons, S.J., took a dim view of Askew: “Deploring the fact that the affective power of ‘this yonge womans story is so pittifully related by John Fox, as he would moove compassion on her side’ (2.492), Parsons represents her as an unruly ­dissident, whose misinterpretation of the vernacular Bible led her to flout patriarchal expectations concerning feminine chastity, silence, and obedience” (J.N. King, 262). 46 I acknowledge my exclusive debt in this section to Professor King’s research in ­parish libraries and town and university libraries in England, the fruit of many years spent in tracking down textual marginalia and other markings by the readers of Foxe’s work.

33093_Williams.indd 183

2022-09-01 16:54

184

The Communion of the Book

publication for a readership made up of fellow believers whom he addresses familiarly in the first person: ‘Gentle reader here you shal perceaue how the scriptures be partly fulfilled on me, being one of the least of his poore lambes’ (1570, p. 2171)” (King, Foxe’s, 51). Reader and text become one. Outside such a heated nucleus of martyr-readers, there are concentric rings of readers within Foxe’s Book, as appears in John King’s examination of the many surviving copies from the sixteenth century. A goodly number of these readers felt compelled to augment the images or ­narratives of death-by-fire in adding a word, a line of speech, or even a verse in their own hand. For example, a woodcut from the 1563  ­edition portrays the poet-martyr Robert Smith seated with his hand on an open Bible, as he awaits martyrdom with his fellows in Newgate Prison. A double column of verses in one copy of the book bears a reader’s inscription: “Beholde moe shepe here by, / Addrest to Boners [Archiepiscopal] stall: / Whose thursty throte so dry, / For more bloude styll dothe call.”47 In another discrete copy of this edition, a second reader responds in verses that are not in the least satirical, but consolatory rather. Beneath the woodcut of Smith sitting with his fellow prisoners in a Newgate cell, the unknown author addresses these moving words to the condemned poet, as well as to future readers who might pick up this physical copy: Feare not for death passe not for bandes only in God put thy whole trust: for he will require thy bloud at theire handes, and this thou doost knowe that once dye thee must Only for Christ thy sealf if thou give death is no death but a meanes to live And doo not despaire: Of no worldly tyraunt be thou adreade, for God’s worde thy compasse shall thee leade.48

It is a remarkably consoling admonition of this reader-participant in events who insists, “martyrdom will lead to everlasting life – ‘death is 47 J.N. King, Foxe’s, 198, citing as his source the copy in his university’s library (Ohio State University): osu br1600.f6 1563, p. 1260. 48 Quoted by J.N. King, Foxe’s, 296.

33093_Williams.indd 184

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 185

no death but a meanes to live.’” Indeed, “this inscription exemplifies an eloquent variation” (King, 296) on the genre of famous last words, most often appearing in the narrow space of a speech bubble. In John Day’s woodcut of William Gardiner, who was martyred by the Portuguese in 1552, the banderole has been left empty of a purpose by the printer, most likely to invite the reader’s response. Of several early modern copies examined by King, every banderole in this woodcut has been filled in by a responsive reader: “In one instance, an inscription attributes the following words to Gardiner: ‘I Suffer for the Truth’ (Figure 36). The reader who inscribed this banderole appears to be the same one who has enhanced the pathos of this scene by augmenting the spurting of blood from the stumps of his hands by drawing in lines” (King, 202). In another copy of the 1563 edition, the same unprinted banderole is inscribed with “the following pathetic appeal … ‘Pitty, Pitty.’” In a third copy, the reader writes a stern judgment “in the m ­ anner of an Old Testament prophet,” judging the Inquisitors: “O you wicked People.” And in a fourth copy, “the banderole contains these words: ‘Lord rec[e]ave my soule’” (202). In every instance, the intensity of the response suggests that viewers of the image are just as likely as readers of the biblical Word to experience the Real Presence in these scenes of reading or viewing, and so to “write back,” as Petrarch did to Cicero, seeking to supply the intimate words that are missing from the visual representation. As King notes, “The variability of speeches inscribed into empty banderoles indicates that these spaces provided sites into which early readers channeled highly emotional responses to these affective woodcuts” (239). What is equally clear, however, is that the visual image also called for its verbal supplement. Much in the way that the word is metaphorically made flesh in all these images, the flesh is also made word in the intimate response of these early modern readers “writing back” to provide speech for the silent images. The very status of The Actes and Monuments “as a ‘holy’ book,” “[r]e-­ vered by many Protestants,” lends support to this idea that reading Foxe’s book was akin to reading scripture, since “it was frequently chained alongside the Bible for reading by ordinary people at many public places including cathedrals, churches, schools, libraries, ­guildhalls, and at least one inn” (King, 1). This sense of affinity or identity is natural: Foxe’s martyrs tended to be readers like themselves who refused an “idol” of the Sacrament in order to read sacramentally. In the Oxford Disputations of April 1554, where Bishops Ridley, Latimer, and Cranmer were tried

33093_Williams.indd 185

2022-09-01 16:54

186

The Communion of the Book

for heresy, we find inquisitor Chedsey asking, “[W]hen Christ toke breade & brake it, what gaue he?” Cranmer responds, “He gave bread. The bread sacramentally, and his body spiritually, and the bread he called his body.”49 But such a figurative, or “spiritual” reading is literally anathema to the Schoolman who seeks metaphysical certitude (Nauert, 15). “This aunswere is against the scripture, whiche sayth that he gaue his body.” In a trice, Chedsey converts the instituting words into this Scholastic syllogism:50 [Major Premise] “The same bodye whiche was geuen for vs on the crosse is in the sacrament”; [Minor Premise] “But bread is not the same bodye which was geuen on the crosse”; [Conclusion] “Ergo, Bread is not geuen in the sacrament.”51 Cranmer can play the Scholastic game to syllogize every bit as well as his orthodox colleagues:52 “I denie the Maior,” he says, “whiche is, the same naturally [sic] body is geuen in the sacrament whiche was geuen on the crosse, except you vnderstand it spiritually. And after he denied also the argument as vtterly nought, as he might well do, ­hauing the Minor and the conclusion both negatiue in the first figure” (5:1011). But Cranmer ultimately refuses to play the Schoolman’s game, instead adopting the language of a classical rhetor: “You should saye, Quale corpus. I answere to the question. It is the same bodye whiche was borne of the virgin, whiche was crucified, whiche ascended: but tropically, and by a figure. And so I saye, Panis est corpus is a ­figuratiue speache,53 speaking sacramentally, for it is a sacrament of his body” (5:1010). 49 tamo (1563): 5:1010. 50 A half-century before, “Erasmus’s dislike of what seemed antiquated and worn out” had reached its apogee in “medieval theology and philosophy,” and above all in “the ­syllogistic system” where “he found only subtlety and arid ingenuity” (Huizinga, 101). At the metonymic pole of discourse, syllogisms stand opposed to metaphoric reasoning. 51 In another scholastic quibble, the inquisitor Oglethorp employs a more homely syllogism: “The good man of the house hath a respect that his heires after his departure may lyue in quiet, and without brablyng. But thei [sic] cannot be in quiet if he do vse tropes. Therefore (I say) he vseth no tropes.” And Cranmer, responding in the terms of Ogelthorp’s method, says, “I denie your Minor.” Still, the inquisitor cannot think outside his system of Scholastic reasoning: “He is a wicked heire, whiche saieth that the Testator did lie. But he that sayth he spake by figures, saith that he did lie, [sic] Therefore he speaketh not by figures.” To which Cranmer simply replies, “I deny the Minor” (tamo [1563] 5:1012.) Cranmer will later expose the shocking incompetence of the Prolocutor Weston in his own discipline, saying, “Your Maior and conclusion are al one” (5: 1014). 52 Cranmer moves easily between the discursive extremes of what Roman Jakobson terms “The Metaphoric and the Metonymic Poles.” He thus avoids both “contiguity disorder” and “similarity disorder.” 53 Cranmer evidently shares the Erasmian hermeneutics of the Ratio.

33093_Williams.indd 186

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 187

Although both the inquisitor and accused converse as easily in Latin as they do in English, they speak very different l­anguages: the one a ­medieval dialect of Scholastic logic, and the other a literary idiom proper to Greek or Roman rhetoric. And so, a culture of metonymy, figured in the linear contiguities of Scholastic logic, labours to eradicate a ­threatening new culture of metaphor embodied in the printed book and brought to life by and in receptive readers.54 Evidently, Foxe and Day could not long afford to ignore this dialogue of the deaf that threatened to limit their potential audience. In 1563, Foxe’s preface Ad doctum Lectorem (King, 244) (“To the Learned Reader”) was presented as “‘a Latin address to literati’ [sic], readers of Latin and the vernacular, in which he demonstrates that he embraces a solely English readership with considerable uneasiness.” In a letter accompanying “a copy that he donated to Magdalen College on 2 May 1563,” Foxe even “apologizes that ‘the book is not written in Latin, and so more pleasant to your reading: but the needs of the common people of our land drove me to the vernacular” (107–8). Yet, in the edition of 1570, Foxe ultimately decides to drop the Latin prefaces, along with a trove of Latin documents that limited sales by making the book more expensive, not to mention more “foreign,” henceforth to fill his pages with narratives and letters in English (117–18), and to place more readers still within the text. Apart from Day’s printing of the first edition, with its distinctive roman and italic typefaces for Latin and Greek, and black-letter (Gothic) typeface in English, each of the succeeding editions was “designed to make it more accessible to ­vernacular readers,” and to increase “its appeal to a broadly diversified audience of secular readers at the middle of the social scale, who were able to buy, borrow, or receive copies by gift or inheritance. Indeed, seventeenth-century yeomen were known to bequeath prized copies to their beneficiaries” (King, 246, 267–8). This raises a bottom-line question of how large the potential audience was for such a massive (and massively expensive) book in the early modern era. Print runs at that time rarely exceeded 1,000– 1,500 copies, so the traditional idea that Foxe’s book was required by law to be placed in every church in the realm is surely denied by the fact that 8,000 parish churches in England would have had to compete 54 In the terminology of Jakobson, the inquisitors are given to a metonymic style of thinking that is threatened by metaphoric habits of mind.

33093_Williams.indd 187

2022-09-01 16:54

188

The Communion of the Book

for copies from a number closer to four or five thousand as the sum total of four editions printed from 1563 to 1583. The famous Privy Council order of 1570 was more likely “designed to ensure public access to this book,” with continuing encouragement from a directive of the upper house of the Convocation of Canterbury in 1571 “that enjoins archbishops, bishops, and archdeacons to acquire copies for reading in their households. Many parish churches chained copies for public reading alongside the Bible” (King, 112–13). In the same year, a civic “order of the aldermen of the City of London” mandated “that copies be placed in Orphan’s Court and guildhalls of companies that could afford to buy the book.” As John King submits, “The relative rarity of parish copies that survive to the present day tends to suggest that members of the public read chained copies to pieces rather than that copies never existed in parishes” (276). King’s hunch is borne out by surviving copies, including some “at the parish library of St. Botolph’s church in Foxe’s home town of Boston” (277). And since “the Book of Martyrs was frequently chained alongside copies of the Bible, Book of Common Prayer, and Book of Homilies for public consumption,” the probability increases that communal reading, i.e., the practice of reading aloud for the benefit of unlettered audiences, was quite common.55 But even in private settings of affluence or nobility, “Writings by well-to-do women document how they integrated the Book of Martyrs into their daily observance of public and private prayer, meditation, attendance at church services, and reading of the Bible, printed sermons, and theology” (289). This was a book that was performed at least as often as it was read in silence.56 “Indeed, Foxe’s account of the reading of the Great Bible at St. Paul’s Cathedral” confirms “that communal reading of it and other chained books, such as the Book of Martyrs, was a performative activity that entertained at the same time that it edified” (King, 272). Conceivably, it continued to do so in the time of young John Milton, who a half-century later attended school in the churchyard of St Paul’s Cathedral. 55 King finds several forms of evidence for the “communal reading and hearing of private copies or copies chained in public places (e.g., guildhalls and churches)” (Foxe’s, 20). 56 Elsewhere, John King points to sixteenth-century female readers such as “Lady Margaret Hoby,” who “studied the Book of Martyrs within her household at Hackness Hall in the North York Moors  … Although she was literate in the vernacular and presumably engaged in private reading, she preferred aural reception through communal readings to silent reading on her own.” See J.N. King, “Reading,” 122; Foxe’s, 290.

33093_Williams.indd 188

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 189

Of course, there was strong scriptural authority for this sort of performative activity. Had not the Word Himself stressed the performative ­character of sacramental reading? “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matt. 18:20). In his pioneering speech-act theory, J.L. Austin famously defined a ­constative utterance as a statement of fact or description, whereas a performative utterance performs the action it describes, as when a bride or groom answers the pastor’s or state official’s question with a promise, “I do.” Or, in Sarah Covington’s formulation, speech is “a performative act that does rather than merely represents something” (191). And ­promising is the act that Christ performs par excellence in Matt. 18; he promises to be present with his followers who are truly gathered in his “name,” i.e., the Word. So it is that no true reader can ever be truly hors du texte if he or she has already been gathered into that text.

From the Sacrament of the Mass to the Sacrament of Reading By now, it will be obvious that, at the heart of every heresy examination in The Actes and Monuments, there is an intensely dramatic struggle over the instituting of the Lord’s Supper. And what is at stake (quite literally) is the heretic’s repudiation of the sacrifice of the Mass – the “­marvellous” Blessed Sacrament – in the ritual Word made flesh. What each martyr affirms instead is the evocation of the Real Presence in the act of ­reading that Word. And the Word that speaks to the martyrs, and so to readers of each of these stories, does so in the local idiom, the English tongue. The Real Presence of the Word is now felt in the language of hearth and home. And what only a priest was once authorized to perform in the mysterious Latin tongue has now become the prerogative of every reader in the priesthood of all believers. Furthermore, the burning of so many heretical bodies could only deepen the martyrs’ deeply felt conviction that their anguished flesh would be made Word if they remained faithful to the end, and bravely performed the “Truth” of a sacramental reading of their native Word. What we encounter in Foxe’s book is then a very different sort of “incarnate text” than the one e­ nvisioned by James Kearney.57

57 See further discussion in this work: 95–6, 99, 116.

33093_Williams.indd 189

2022-09-01 16:54

190

The Communion of the Book

Kathrin Reist’s reading of “the book” as “the only surviving remnant attesting” in Foxe “to the martyr’s significance, rather than his body” (298), gestures in one important respect toward the creation of this incarnate text: “The physical body, inscribed with the significance of dying a martyr’s death, is then transformed into text, thereby investing the ‘logos,’ and by extension the material object that is the book, with invaluable religious significance” (299). Indeed, “Once committed to paper, writing becomes self-contained, reminding us of Luther’s perception of the Holy Scripture as something that interprets itself” (300). Therefore, “The written text … virtually closes the gap between author and reader, connecting them in a way that eradicates the need for an actual encounter in the flesh.” What is missing from this interpretation, however, is that direct encounter with the Real Presence figured in Foxe’s book in the act of reading the Word. That lack is not incidental; it is intrinisic to the trope of relics that governs her approach: “The Catholic hagiographical tradition and veneration of relics were not discarded entirely but displaced by, and indeed overwritten with, a new, Protestant order of saints and relics” (303). As much as this may seem like an evolutionary adaptation, this particular “relic” is not strictly speaking a relic at all, not if it is that Real Presence encountered in the reading of the text. And that is because of the rhetorical “truth” of the Word’s own instituting words: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matt. 18:20). The instituting words demand a direct communing with the Word himself. Mark Breitenberg evokes a related image of the incarnate text in “The Flesh Made Word: Foxe’s ‘Acts and Monuments,’” where he finds “an ‘open’ text” designed “to fashion a Protestant community by including a vast number of texts, authors, events and individuals while at the same time discrediting those who are not part of the community” (388). He likewise acknowledges the value of the “epistolary form,” which “serves the function of presenting a network of religious sympathy connected by the written word” (391). And he offers a resonant précis of Foxe’s overarching theme, how “the ‘true’ church of God has remained ­invisible since the days of the apostles, and God has only recently decided – in part through the medium of the Acts and Monuments – to make it “so visible again that every worldly eye may perceive it” (394). And yet Breitenberg tends to scant the medium itself by ignoring the persistence in each heresy examination of one central question: the status of the sacrament. Is it flesh or word, a body or a book? In other words,

33093_Williams.indd 190

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 191

Breitenberg never asks how the medium qua medium figures in all these fractious debates about the Eucharist. In his final sentence, at least, there is a nod in this direction: “Just as the dominant strategy of Protestantism in general is to return to the Word, the Protestant martyr is transformed from his own corporeality into the logos made immortal by texts such as the Acts and Monuments” (404). But as sound as this notion may be “in general,” it fails to specify how this result is achieved by drawing readers into the text. Or, if one is reluctant to go beyond the material terms of modern neuroscience, then it fails to account for functional changes taking place in a reader’s brain through the “­neuronal recycling”58 of fleshy matter by the reorganizing power of the textual Word. Jennifer Rust’s splendid account of a related species of change occurring in the shift “From Mass to Martyr” in Foxe’s work also requires qualification. For this shift is only fathomable in the cultural turn, not from Mass to martyr, but from “Mass” to the “Word” in a new and world-upending – because technologically mediated – form of Sacrament,59 where readers are transformed into the Word. Instead, Rust reads “the paradox of Foxe’s text” in Freudian terms as a “tension between the manifest intention of [his] text and its repressed content,” or what she calls “the perpetuation of a traditional sacramental ­repertoire, even in the midst of overt affirmation of sola fides and sola scriptura” (629). Drawing on Henri de Lubac’s Corpus Mysticum: Essai sur L’Euchariste et l’Église au moyen âge” (1944), which “was among the first modern theological studies to recover the full complexity of the communitarian sense of the sacrament in the early church,” Rust provides an excellent summary of how the corpus mysticum tradition in the early Church was later assimilated “to the church as an institution,” and thereafter ­appropriated by the secular institution of monarchy in terms of a powerful medieval doctrine of “the king’s two bodies,” one of which “never dies,” since it “figures the collective, ‘mystical’ life of the nationstate” (627). But in Foxe’s book, as Rust reads it, there is also a textual

58 See my “Prolegomenon,” viii. 59 Such a techno-cultural shift is the reverse (I mean no disrespect) of today’s disruptive move towards autonomous vehicles. It is rather the autonomy of the reader, not the vehicle, that formed the basis of this revolutionary mentalité in the early modern era.

33093_Williams.indd 191

2022-09-01 16:54

192

The Communion of the Book

“transposition of a communitarian sacramentality, which traditionally had been associated with the Eucharist, to the figure of the Protestant martyr” (628). Here, I am on the same page with Rust in her historically verifiable claim that the Eucharist was “not an objective Real Presence” in its original formulation, nor was “the church simply a hierarchy channeling this intervention” (631). Rather, as the Jesuit de Lubac was the first to argue, observes Rust, “a performative rather than constative understanding of ‘mystical’ held sway in the early church” (631). In response to the institutional – both ecclesiastical and regal – degradation of the original “performative” understanding of the “communal body” of the Church, Foxe represents “the ideal of Christian sacrifice” in the Mass as being transferred “to the figure of the Protestant martyr” (634). My doubts about this conclusion arise from a single, deeply misleading formulation: “In this gesture, the community of immolated martyrs also becomes the sacramental equivalent of the consecration that is supposed to happen during the Mass.” For, if it is true that “the martyrs themselves become the sacrifice, the true imitatio Christi” (639), then the martyrs finally usurp the sacrifice of the Word himself, rather than “keeping my words,” as Jesus said, by being translated into that Word. Rust is on firmer ground in the claim that Foxe’s polemics against the Mass at the beginning of Book 10 show how “the ritual denies participation to all in the actual eating of the host as the body of Christ, the usual state of affairs in the pre-Reformation Church” (Rust, 643). Foxe’s marginal gloss also shows “the performative acts of the priest” as being made “at the expense of the spiritual wellbeing of the whole congregation; the Mass falsifies itself – and fails to inculcate an authentic communitarian spirit.” Yet there remains a theologically suspect ­substitution of “martyr” for “the body of Christ,” which distorts the true process of substitution. For it is not the “martyrs who offer themselves as these sacrifices” who “constitute the true corpus mysticum” (644) – not unless we jettison any notion of a divine sacrifice. Rather, martyr-readers are drawn into that Word. In other words, the formation of the communal body in Foxe’s book does not derive from the martyrs’ acts of sacrifice but from acts of reading about that sacrifice. And it is more than a mise-en-abyme effect, where a Foxean reader hors du texte reads the martyr within the text reading the Saviour within the Word reading that Word who is the Word.

33093_Williams.indd 192

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 193

Infinitely more than a hall of mirrors, this sacramental reading is a recursive process whereby the Foxean martyr and reader alike bear witness to Christ’s sacrifice, the reader thereby being drawn into this “community” founded in the infinite sacrifice, which of “itself” extends “the body of Christ” (Rust, 634). Or rather, in the terms I have been using so far, Rust’s corpus mysticum is only realizable in the performance of a continuous story by which a believer enters into or, rather, becomes this metaphor of the flesh made Word. And this, I submit, is what underwrites the theological poetics of Anne Askew, whose brilliant use of metaphor was finally incomprehensible to the likes of Edmund Bonner, bishop of London. Where Rust’s argument matters most is in its historical sense of why “[d]ismantling of the sacramental system of the Middle Ages and rechanneling its investments into the narrative of martyrdom was a volatile tactic” (650). As we shall see in the next chapter, this process of dismantling the sacramental system would also give birth to a type of political disassembly in the reading of the Leveller John Lilburne, and eventually, as we shall see, in the late, great poems of John Milton. For now, it suffices to recall John King’s apt notice of “the social upheaval that produced the English Civil Wars and Interregnum,” when “many readers looked to the Book of Martyrs as a source for ­dissident ­religio-political ideas. Just as the Laudians corrected Foxe’s ­endorsement of royal supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs with the ideal of juro divino episcopacy” – i.e., bishops’ rule by the law of God, not that of the king – “many nonconformists denied the authority of both princes and martyr-bishops” (King, 308). In Foxe’s generation, The Actes and Monuments inspired religious revolution, and in the next a political revolution. Extracts from The Actes and Monuments, as King recalls, were often published in pamphlet form during the 1640s and ’50s as direct commentary on events of the English Revolution, the Commonwealth, and the Protectorate (153). Overall, then, it is clear, or at least less opaque, why proliferating debates about the sacrament so often spiralled downward into savage violence, ending in various degrees of fracture in Church and State alike. For the issue was not finally a matter of dogma so much as it was about envisaging another form of community, based upon the book in a radically different style of reading. And in all this vast expense and waste of blood, very little, it turns out, had much to do with the proper cracking of an egg, whether at its big or little end.

33093_Williams.indd 193

2022-09-01 16:54

194

The Communion of the Book

Milton’s Fifth Gospel The slender octavo volume containing Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes (1671) was almost certainly published in late 1670,60 precisely one hundred years after Foxe’s massive tome, first expanded and ­anglicized, was published in a second edition of 1570. England had burned no heretics, of course, since 1612. On the other hand, whole armies of “heretics” – in both religion and politics – had tasted victory in two civil wars (1642–48); had sentenced a king to death; and had established a republic in 1649. But, after the third civil war of 1649–51, the ambitious conqueror Oliver Cromwell was able to outsmart Parliament and everyone else in the Commonwealth, and to “accept” a quasi-regal role as Lord Protector by late 1653. Less than eight months after Oliver’s death in September 1658, however, military leaders forced the abdication of Richard, his son and hereditary heir, and the country descended into chaos and nostalgic yearning for a restored monarchy. On the “coming in” of the king in April 1660, John Milton, the notorious defender of the regicides, was closely considered for exclusion from the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, but his name was finally ­written, as it were, in disappearing ink, and he did not appear on the final list of thirty-three to be excluded from the Bill on its legislative passage in August 1660.61 Even so, John Milton, the old Arian and materialist heretic, spent a number of tense weeks in prison62 during the autumn of that year, seemingly as a stone-blind political scarecrow erected to deter other political heretics.63 After a decade of rule by a dissolute monarch who gave a free rein to the Cavalier Parliament (1661–79) bent on suppressing religious dissent, the political and religious climate was in some ways reminiscent of the Marian persecutions. Twelve Aylesbury Baptists were sentenced

60 Lewalski, Life, 494. See also Knoppers, “Headnote” to Complete Works … The 1671 Poems. Knoppers adds significantly to Lewalski’s evidence that the book was already available from the bookseller John Starkey by at least mid-December 1670, in advance of the 1671 date advertised in the Michaelmas Term Catalogues of 22 November 1670 and thus printed on the book’s title page (xcviii–xcix). 61 Keeble, Restoration, 72. 62 Keeble recalls that Milton and Bunyan both “found themselves in prison” in November 1660, “Bunyan under the old Elizabethan Act against Conventicles, and Milton by order of the Commons” (132). 63 See Parker, Milton: A Biography, 1:567–76; and Lewalski, Life, 398–402.

33093_Williams.indd 194

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 195

to death in 1663, after three prescribed months of imprisonment mandated by the old Elizabethan Act for suppressing Conventicles, months in which they were still “encouraged” to recant for refusing to conform, although the sentence was “not carried out … To this body of law the 1660s added the ‘Clarendon Code.’ It visited upon ­nonconformists the most sustained persecution in English history,” at least in numerical terms. N.H. Keeble claims that “150,000 to 200,000” ­dissenters were directly affected (141) by the Conventicle Act of 1664, which made it illegal for more than five adults to gather for worship unless they were of the same household. Dissenters got around this prohibition by clever ruses such as situating their preacher at an open window among several houses, or else meeting in the open air far from any household. Because of the Act’s deficiencies, the Quakers William Penn and William Mead could be charged in 1667 only with “perpetrating a riot and disturbing the peace” (Keeble, 141) for ­preaching in a park, since their defiance was literally outside the terms of the Conventicle Act. Others like George Fox “generally disdained such attempts to avoid detection and the Quakers on the whole refused to employ such expedients” (142). But fines and dispossessions were ­ruinous. And the “defendant could not appear in his or her own defence,” much less enjoy the right of cross-examination or challenge to sworn testimony (143). Arrested in the same month as John Milton in November 1660, John Bunyan remained in prison until 1671 under the terms of the Elizabethan Conventicle Act. Milton was let out of jail in a few weeks. As usual, the ability to pay a heavy fine favoured the “middling” sort more than it did poor tinkers. Keeble’s conclusion is sound: the second Conventicle Act of 1670 was almost certainly aimed at the “extirpation” (142) of dissenting communities. There was also a perceived threat of the nation’s imminent return to Catholicism after the reign of Charles II. After nearly a decade, the king had not produced an heir with his Queen Catherine of Braganza, although he had sired fourteen illegitimate children. Unless he ­legitimated one of his bastards, it was clear that his brother James, rightly suspected of being a Catholic, would be the sole legitimate heir to the throne. And the kingdom under James II would be certain to return to the yoke of papal authority, just as it had done in the reign of Mary I. Of even greater concern was the Treaty of Dover, signed on 1 June 1670 by a cash-strapped Charles II, which took England out of the Triple Alliance with the Dutch and Swedes and into an alliance of convenience

33093_Williams.indd 195

2022-09-01 16:54

196

The Communion of the Book

(or rather the lure of “filthy lucre,” it was often said) with Louis XIV and his politics of absolute monarchy. Had the English people been privy to the “secret provisions” of the treaty – whereby “Charles promised to convert publicly to Catholicism and to reconcile his three kingdoms to Rome”64 – they would likely have revolted to prevent a “return to Rome.” And then there was that more nagging, because immediate, cause of religious conflict: the two Conventicle Acts of 1664 and 1670, the latter Act brutally designed to redeem the failures of the former. For Milton, the gory executions that befell his friends and associates on the Council of State – like “Major-General Thomas Harrison, Thomas Scott, and Edward Dendy the council’s sergeant-at-arms” (Lewalski, Life, 399), and more grievously still his very good friend Sir Henry Vane the Younger – was an ever-present and potent reminder of the Marian martyrs. Although Vane had not been excluded from the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, even the Cavalier Parliament had strongly petitioned the king to show him clemency, and Charles solemnly ­promised to spare his life (407). Even so, “Vane was tried for treason in April 1662 and, despite his reprieve, executed, less for his past” – since he had refused to enter Parliament after Pride’s Purge, making himself scarce until the High Court concluded its business – “than for his ­present refusal to recant his belief in the Good Old Cause and for his resolute defence of his actions” (Keeble, 75–6). Vane showed himself to be as steadfast in his political convictions as those in Marian times who went to the stake for witnessing to the “truth” of Christ’s Presence in the Word. And Milton himself was forced into hiding in a friend’s house for three months after the Restoration, trying to evade arrest before passage of the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion. “In October 1660 sleds carrying condemned regicides to Tyburn passed close to Milton’s house in Holborn” (Worden, 122). Yet once more, the blind poet had to sit and listen to noisy mobs beyond his house in Jewin Street in June 1662, as they followed the hurdle-cart conveying his friend Henry Vane to the place of execution. Given the climate in which Milton’s last poems were conceived, David Loewenstein has good reason to note the apparent similarities in language and situation between an “inward and human Messiah” who finds himself in “the wilderness of Paradise Regained” where he “undergoes

64 Knoppers, “General Introduction,” xxvii; see also Lewalski, Life, 498–9.

33093_Williams.indd 196

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 197

‘just trial’ (3.196),” and the religious inwardness65 of “early Quakers” who were also “fully tested and proven by trials and tribulations in the hostile wilderness of this world.”66 Milton famously refused to hear ill spoken of Paradise Regain’d, which, from its first publication down to our present, was and has always been much less popular than Paradise Lost or Samson Agonistes. As his nephew Edward Phillips recalled in his “Life” of the poet, Paradise Regain’d was “generally censur’d to be much inferiour to the other, though he could not hear with patience any such thing when related to him” (75–6). There are at least two good reasons for Milton to feel as he did. First, he actually believed that his poem about Jesus’s trial in the wilderness constituted a new revelation, inspired by that sacred presence addressed in his invocation: “Thou Spirit who ledst this glorious Eremite / Into the Desert, his victorious Field / Against the Spiritual Foe, and broughtst him thence / By proof the undoubted Son of God, inspire.”67 Even in terms of this motive, there are several good reasons why Milton claims to have written what is tantamount to a fifth gospel. He petitions God, for one thing, to inspire him

to tell of deeds Above Heroic, though in secret done, And unrecorded left through many an Age, Worthy t’ have not remain’d so long unsung. (1.14–17)

Here is a “secret” not contained in any of the synoptic gospels, and “unrecorded left through many an Age,” if making its singular debut in the age of print.

65 Such “inwardness,” of course, is a hallmark of Erasmian reading (see above, 134–9), as it is of early modern psychology in general in Henrich’s account of the rise of Western ­culture (weirdest, 35–6, 382–4, 415). 66 Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 247. Loewenstein points to many parallel phrasings in the writings of Quakers such as George Fox, Isaac Pennington, Margaret Fell, and others, with very similar wording in the responses of Jesus to Satan’s temptations in Paradise Regain’d. The phrasings are suggestive of a “concern with spiritual inwardness and vocation characteristic of radical religious culture of the 1650s and 1660s” (255), although they likely say more about the dramatic contexts of the poem than Jesus’s biblical quotations reveal about the dramatic resolution of the poem. 67 Paradise Regain’d, 1:8–11, in Knoppers, 5. All citations by book and line number refer to this edition.

33093_Williams.indd 197

2022-09-01 16:54

198

The Communion of the Book

In substance, this is a reading of scripture that departs from existing doctrine quite as much as Foxe’s readers departed from the doctrine of the Sacrament (the subject of that sacrament being, of course, this same epic hero of Milton’s poem). But an even stronger motive for Milton’s impatience with his readers was that his new gospel required a momentous change in our understanding of the wilderness temptations. For it is from this crucial event that Jesus returns from the desert, “By proof the undoubted Son of God” (11). Since “undoubted” cannot, by definition, refer to God, and since the “deeds” or acts of the “­glorious Eremite” were indeed “in secret done,” and remained hidden from the world for well over sixteen centuries, there could be only two characters in the poem to whom “undoubted” might apply: Jesus, who becomes “the undoubted Son of God,” or Satan, who evinces such doubt until the very end. Unless, of course, Jesus needs to prove to himself, as much as to the world or the devil, that he is truly the figure of the Messiah about whom he has read assiduously in prophetic writ.68 If Milton “could not hear with patience any such thing” as readers judging Paradise Regain’d to be “inferiour,” he was doubtless disappointed that no one seemed to grasp the significance of its form. Any reader who has perused even one of the hundreds of narratives in The Actes and Monuments is not likely to forget those scenes of bodies wreathed in flame; yet even these are not the heart of the matter. For the form of every one of Foxe’s martyr stories is that of a courtroom drama, much as they are figured in the Historia ecclesiastica of Eusebius, where the truth of the matter is tested by law – from the vantage point of inquisitors, tested to expose the defendant’s heresy; and from the vantage point of sympathetic readers, tested to prove the sufficiency of scripture among readers willing and skilful enough to bear witness to the “truth” of the scriptures they profess. The fiery conclusion of each story more closely resembles the seal of truth incised in a written monument, a Quod erat demonstrandum composing a superscription to the legal process. And the only matter of any real moment is for each martyr-reader to demonstrate the falsity of traditional – i.e., institutional – readings of

68 Contrary to her early work in Milton’s Brief Epic (1966), Lewalski no longer bothers, much less feels a need, to hedge her flat assessment in The Life that “Milton’s Arianism is central” to Paradise Regain’d, or that “God describes him [the Son] to the angels in almost Socinian terms” (513). For the dramatic necessity of an “Arian,” or more precisely, a nonTrinitarian theology in the poem, see Milton’s Leveller God, 356–60.

33093_Williams.indd 198

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 199

scripture. Milton’s Jesus, one could say, is generically situated in a “courtroom” drama where, like every Foxean martyr, he is tried for heresy, or his anti-dogmatic reading of scripture. Evidently Milton had divined in Foxe the “secret” of Jesus’s greatest test: that he had no special help from God, indeed no more help than any of us would have apart from what we read in scripture.69 The principle to which Anne Askew and Alice Driver invariably held so stoutly – “that which scripture doth teach me” – is the principle ­informing this courtroom drama in the wilderness. As we learn from the marvellous soliloquy that introduces Jesus in the first book of the poem, he is not free of doubt if he considers, “What from within I feel myself, and hear / What from without comes often to my ears, / Ill sorting with my present state compar’d” (1.198–200).70 Not a lack of faith but rather cognitive dissonance has led to a “multitude of thoughts,” he admits, which “Awaken’d in me swarm” (1.196–7). Even so, he feels a troubling discrepancy between his self-image and his outward circumstance; but such doubts have less to do with the truth of what he reads and almost everything to do with his possible means, not ends. In his youth, Jesus had suffered confusion about those ends, admitting that “my Spirit aspir’d” to “victorious deeds” and

heroic acts, one while To rescue Israel from the Roman yoke, Then to subdue and quell o’re all the earth Brute violence and proud Tyrannick pow’r. (1.215–19)

Milton’s own doubts appear to have paralleled those of his character when, at the last moment in the print shop, he changed the line “Then to destroy and quell” to “Then to subdue and quell.”71 For destroying “Brute violence” with brute violence had left the youth on the cusp of a contradiction. Better by far to “subdue and quell,” even if it recalls the imperial hero of Virgil’s Aeneid who was taught by the spirit of his

69 Readers will find evidence for Jesus as a “Foxean Reader” in my Milton’s, 351–66. 70 This “inwardness” of Milton’s Jesus is the first sign we have in the poem of a Son of God who resembles “early moderns” more than he resembles “Christ the King,” that most imperial figure created by Emperor Theodosius’s Edict of Thessalonica (380 ce). 71 Dobranski, “Text and Context,” 45.

33093_Williams.indd 199

2022-09-01 16:54

200

The Communion of the Book

dead father in the Underworld that his true mission was to found “an empire without end,” and that, based on Roman law, he must then learn to “impose the custom of peace by sparing the humble and ­battling down the proud.”72 The younger Jesus sounds all the more like Aeneas73 in his mental reservation about “the stubborn only to subdue” (1.226). If anything, he is extraordinarily well read, “above my years,” since, then as now, “The Law of God I read, and found it sweet, / Made it my whole delight” (1.206–8). Nor was the youthful Jesus yet disabused of his youthful ambition when his mother first told him that “thou art no Son of mortal man.” More troubling still, though “men esteem thee low of Parentage, / Thy Father is the Eternal King” (1.234–6). To an Ovidian character like Phaethon, whose mother swears that the sun god Apollo is his father, the news is disastrous for the world, since the boy insists that his father should keep his promise to let him drive the chariot of the sun.74 But such childishness is utterly foreign to Milton’s Jesus. While never doubting his mother’s story of the song of the angels at his birth, or of the journey of “the Wise Men” following “thy Star new grav’n in Heaven, / By which they knew thee King of Israel born,” or even his mother’s testimony of the prophecy of “Just Simeon and Prophetic Anna” (1.252 5) to his future glory, Jesus turns again to scripture to find the truth. Here, his verb “revolv’d” highlights the capacity of his medium for indexical reading, or random access, since it at once suggests a turning back to “The Law and Prophets,” and figuratively, an unscrolling or unrolling of the Hebrew scriptures in the leather scroll that would be preferred in Judaism for at least another millennium (Stallybrss, 43). But what he discovers is not in the least reassuring: This having heard, strait I again revolv’d The Law and Prophets, searching what was writ Concerning the Messiah, to our Scribes Known partly, and soon found of whom they spake 72 My translation. Anchises informs his son of future things in Aeneid, Virgil’s epic of Rome’s founding. See further discussion in this work: xiv, 60–1, 61n90, 227n101, 303n14. 73 While I find Milton’s Jesus refusing this Virgilian temptation, and putting Aeneas behind him for good, Knoppers sees a purposeful renovation of classical epic in Paradise Regain’d, in which the Son actually “goes beyond Aeneas in his temperance and willingness to suffer to found his eternal kingdom” (“General Introduction,” liii). 74 The story is told in Ovid: Metamorphoses, 2:1–405.

33093_Williams.indd 200

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 201

I am; this chiefly, that my way must lie Through many a hard assay even to the death, E’re I the promis’d Kingdom can attain, Or work Redemption for mankind, whose sins Full weight must be transferr’d upon my head. (1.259–67)

Much like her son, Mary has come to a similar conclusion about what lies ahead of him. She had hoped for more, of course. But, on hearing that her “Son” has been “own’d from Heaven by his Father’s voice,” she says, “I look’t for some great change; to Honour? no, / But trouble, as old Simeon plain fore-told” (2.85–7). She had known since his childhood that his suffering would, for her, be “my favour’d lot, / My Exaltation to Afflictions high” (2.91–2). Not all knowledge, then, is necessarily transmitted by the written word; the voice of the prophet alerts a loving mother to the fact that her own exaltation is not what she had at first believed. Her son, who was only recently exalted by the voice “Audibly heard from Heav’n” (1.284), appears to have retained no memory whatsoever of his previous exaltation in Heaven, where the same voice had declared to all the assembled angels, “This day I have begot whom I declare / My onely Son,” and had flatly announced, “[Y]our Head I him appoint; / And by my Self have sworn to him shall bow / All knees in Heav’n, and shall confess him Lord.”75 Nor does he have so much as a flicker of memory of that tense colloquy in Heaven (Paradise Lost 3) where he had volunteered, after a stern but respectful disagreement with his Father, to die for humankind, only to be told that this was precisely what he was expected to do.76 What ensuing events demonstrate is that no memory of the voice that once spoke to him in Heaven is available to him in his current condition. Would it not be reassuring to recall that voice having once named him “the only peace / Found out for mankind under wrauth, O thou / My Sole complacence” (pl 3.274–6)? Or would it not be comforting to recall an earlier scene from the War in Heaven, after two unsettling days of combat, when the same voice had said, “For thee I have ordain’d it, and thus farr / Have sufferd, that the Glorie may be thine / Of ­ending this great Warr” (PL 6.700–2)? He does not appear to have any recollection of his former commission as Judge to descend to fallen mankind, 75 Paradise Lost 5.603–4, 606–8, in Flannagan, Riverside. 76 See Milton’s Leveller God, 154–68, for details of my reading of this scene.

33093_Williams.indd 201

2022-09-01 16:54

202

The Communion of the Book

where he had heard something of momentous relevance to his present situation. The Father had said: “I told ye then he should prevail and speed / On his bad Errand, Man should be seduc’t / And flatter’d out of all, believing lies / Against his Maker” (pl 10.40–3). In fact, the poem shows us repeatedly that the only knowledge that this most human Jesus has about the trial he now faces is derived from reading scripture. Soon, he will need to find a way to object to Satan’s claim of also being serviceable to God – “For what he bids I do” (pr 1.377). But even here, he has little more than what he has read in the Hebrew Bible to expose Satan for the malicious liar that he is: “What but thy malice mov’d thee to misdeem / Of righteous Job, then cruelly to afflict him / With all inflictions, but his patience won?” (1.424–6) But for now, that contest with supreme “malice” still awaits beyond his desert horizon. All that he can really say of that marvellous voice speaking out of the heavens is that it astounds him. For the voice, as Jesus admits, had “pronounc’d me his, / Me his beloved Son, in whom alone / He was well pleas’d” (1.284–6). Nor has that astonishment abated. Indeed, it sounds more pronounced in his use of the iamb “me his,” only to be repeated at once in a double-stressed spondee, “Me his,” as if to further amplify his sense of wondering amazement. So, the question for Jesus from the outset of his human mission is how to find his way, “through many a hard assay,” to what the scriptures say will be his destiny. He has not read Foxe, of course; but he has read Virgil and, though tempted at first, had quickly set aside that imperial version of his mission. But a reader of the poem needs to understand that the form this “mission” takes is that of Foxe’s martyrology. For the story of “temptation” is structured as a courtroom drama, or formal disputation that has many parallels, so long unnoticed in criticism, with the Oxford Disputations that shape the eighth book of The Actes and Monuments (1563). While the substance of a heresy examination hardly seems ­relevant to one who will institute that same sacrament of reading on which so many of his followers are later questioned, Milton’s Jesus ­nonetheless establishes the pattern for others to follow in demonstrating the courage of his convictions, the integrity of his faith, and above all else, a thorough knowledge of scripture, through which he counters every wilful misreading, every sophism, and every appropriation of the Tempter. The inquisitor also comes, almost uncannily, to resemble the inquisitors in Foxe’s narratives, although Satan is far more urbane than Bishop

33093_Williams.indd 202

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 203

Bonner and more sophistical than professors like Doctor Spenser. The form of the argument and counterargument of Paradise Regain’d is evidently based on the Oxford Disputations of 1554–55, which were never an academic debate, but rather a capital trial of those three Edwardian bishops and “heretics,” Thomas Cranmer, Nicholas Ridley, and Hugh Latimer. They were separately examined by the Prolocutor Weston, along with his staff of legal experts, including ViceChancellor Young and Doctors Chedsey and Tresham.77 Like them, Jesus must outface what Cranmer, the former archbishop of Canterbury, calls “a sophisticall cauillation” of his examiners, even urging one opponent to “go plainly to worke, there is some disceipt [sic] in in [sic] these questions, you seeke deceipt, Leaue your crafte” (5:1019). Anyone who has dipped into the hundred or so folio pages of the Oxford Disputations in Foxe’s book will come away amazed at Milton’s skill in rendering those repetitive debates with such concision and force. Of course, the dramatic stakes of the poem are far higher than “just” the lives of three “heretical” bishops engaged in mortal combat for the theological “truth” of the Real Presence. As Jesus alerts us from the outset, the stakes are literally the redemption of humankind. And ­success is not a given, even though it is prophesied of him, “through many a hard assay,” to die in the end. Although Milton’s readers are told from the outset that he will emerge from his “trial” as “the undoubted Son of God,” the means are still uncertain. For Jesus seems to be hardly more than a perfect human reader, as Satan has suspected all along, and will confess at the climax: And opportunity I here have had To try thee, sift thee, and confess have found thee Proof against all temptation as a rock Of Adamant, and as a Center, firm To the utmost of meer man both wise and good. (4.531–5)

77 In Of Reformation (1641), Milton had showed little or no sympathy for the three bishop-martyrs Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer: “But it will be said, These men were Martyrs: What then?  … Saint Paul writes, that A man may give his Body to be burnt, (meaning for ­religion) and yet not have Charitie: He is not therefore above all possibility of erring, because he burnes for some Points of Truth” (cpw 1:533). Thirty years later, Milton now showed more charity by appearing to make the erring Cranmer’s story a subtext to Jesus’s success in resisting the Tempter.

33093_Williams.indd 203

2022-09-01 16:54

204

The Communion of the Book

What this means, of course, is that the climactic scene on the Temple pinnacle is the final stake on which the martyr’s truth will be tried. But Milton, who is nothing if not a superb dramatist, requires of us to read and try to anticipate how “the utmost of meer man” is ever going to come out of this drama “By Proof the undoubted Son of God.” That he does so in stark contrast to Thomas Cranmer, one of the historic founders of the Church of England and the author of one of its most sacred writings – the quasi-scriptural Book of Common Prayer – becomes even more revealing as a quasi-canonical rewriting of the very text that is the formal inspiration for his poem.

F ox e ’ s R e l e va n c e t o M i l t o n For the most part, Milton criticism has disenfranchised itself from the great heritage of Foxe’s book because of a supposition of Milton’s ­suspicion of Foxe as an apologist for episcopacy and monarchy. Despite French Fogle’s claim in his introduction (1971) to The History of Britain that Milton’s view of church history “conformed to that set forth by John Foxe eighty years before” (xxx), David Loewenstein is typical in supposing Foxe’s views to be much too conservative for Milton. Although an “apocalyptic vision of history assumed a particular immediacy and attraction during the years of Milton’s early controversial prose,” Foxe was not a useful model, Loewenstein concludes, since his apocalyptic vision “was not yet an ideology of revolution.” “In Of Reformation,” for example, Milton portrayed the history of the Church “as a tragic process of degeneracy beginning with the age of Constantine.” Although Loewenstein concedes that the author of Paradise Lost “admires Foxe’s learning (I, 547), and is indebted to his work, Milton himself protests that he does not see Constantine as ‘The Load-starre of Reformation as some men clatter’ (I, 555).” Indeed, “Milton here is closer to the view, expressed in the Radical Reformation, that the church fell when it allied itself with the Empire under Constantine” (Loewenstein, Drama of History, 9, 10, 16–17). The crux of the problem for Loewenstein and others is the portrait in The Actes and Monuments of Elizabeth as another Constantine. It was she, after all, who had ended the persecution of Bible-reading Christians, much as Constantine had ended three centuries of Roman persecution of Christians by overturning the Diocletian edict of 303 ce and making Christianity a state religion in the Edict of Milan in 313. Visible proof

33093_Williams.indd 204

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 205

of Elizabeth as an English Constantine even appears front and centre on the first page of the 1563 Actes and Monuments – “the large historiated initial capital C that begins Foxe’s dedication to Elizabeth I” (King, 186). Indeed, that wreathed letter C all but encloses a majestic image of this female Constantine seated on her throne, abutting as it does nineteen lines of narrow-column text that also heralds “Constantine, the greate and mightie Emperour, the sonne of Helene, an Englysshe woman of this your Realme and countrie (moste Christian and renowmed [sic] Princesse Queene Elizabeth.”78 One can imagine Milton snorting in disgust at such an anachronistic version of the Golden Calf. What remains hidden, however, from those who know only the first edition of The Actes and Monuments is that Foxe had, by 1570, left Constantine in the dustbin. The historiated C that opens the second edition is redesigned to incorporate Christ as the first word (King, 246) and henceforth the governing image of Foxe’s “holy book.” In place of Constantine, Elizabeth is described (not pictured) as “a new Solomon,” engaged in “a task that he likens to King Solomon’s ‘buildyng of the Lordes Temple (which he had vii. yeares in hand)” (King, 247). Or so one might think. For the only temple in sight is the book itself on which Foxe, not Elizabeth, had spent seven years to renovate in a series of endless additions and revisions. Even the pope’s excommunication of Elizabeth in 1570 had failed to make her more, not less, prominent in the second edition. Instead, as John King says, “By stressing the supremacy of Christ, Foxe hints at criticism of the queen as one who has failed to fulfill expectations that she would not only restore the Edwardian settlement of religion, but also go beyond it by implementing a full set of ecclesiastical reforms” (116). For Foxe, Christ, not the monarch, was the sole head of the Church. Inserting “a description of her compliant attendance at Mass during imprisonment at the Tower of London,” Foxe “implicitly tarnishes” Elizabeth’s “image by including details about attendants who incurred considerable personal risk by demonstrating their nonconformity” (King, 117). What is more, the “[a]ddition of a considerable amount of heterogeneous material concerning the final years of the reign of Henry VIII contributes to his critique of Elizabeth’s failure to root out vestiges of Catholic ceremonial because he implicitly likens her policy

78 The image is reproduced by J.N. King, Foxe’s, 187, fig. 31.

33093_Williams.indd 205

2022-09-01 16:54

206

The Communion of the Book

to her father’s failure to implement thorough ecclesiastical reform.” Substantial revisions to the fourth edition published in 1583 further “reflect the defeat suffered by English Puritanism,” John King argues, “during the years following the suspension from office in 1577 of Edmund Grindal, the reform-minded Archbishop of Canterbury” (131). Foxe, in other words, grew increasingly radical in his advancing age, a trait that was certain to make him more, not less, palatable to Milton. And when one explores Milton’s early references to, or his direct echoes of Foxe, a much different impression emerges of his attitude to the English martyrologist. First and foremost is his hymn of praise in Of Reformation (1641) for the incomparable blessing of the printing press, the historical means by which “the bright and blissful Reformation (by Divine Power) strook through the black and settled Night of Ignorance and Antichristian Tyranny.” Out of this “bright and blissfull” Reformation, “a soveraigne and reviving joy must needs rush into the bosome of him that reads or heares; and the sweet Odour of the returning Gospell imbath his Soul with the fragrancy of Heaven” (cpw 1:524). All this is pure Foxe, who had likened “this gifte of printyng … to the gifte of tongues.”79 In the second edition of 1570, Foxe had even trumpeted that “[t]he science of Printyng beyng found, immediatly folowed the grace of God, which styrred vp good wittes, aptely to conceaue the light of knowledge and judgement: by which light, darkenes began to be espyed, and ignoraunce to be detected, truth from errour, religion from superstition to bee discerned” (tamo [1570]: 7:1006). In “The benefite and inuention of Printyng,” Foxe counted among God’s greatest blessings that “[i]n this very tyme so daungerous & desperate, where mans power could do no more, there the blessed wisedome and omnipotent power of the Lord began to worke for his Churche, not with sworde and tergate to subdue his exalted aduersarie, but with printying, writing, and readyng, to conuince darkenesse by lyght, errour by truth, ignoraunce by learnyng” (6:858). In his swelling music of thanksgiving to “the light of printing,”80 he intoned, “how many printying presses there bee in the 79 tamo (1570): 6:858. 80 John N. King remarks in “Light of Printing” that “Foxe entertained no doubt about whether the advent of printing provided a necessary precondition for the Reformation,” asserting from the first and succesive editions of The Actes and Monuments (1563) “that divine providence assured the invention of printing” (55). Foxe further “associates scriptural imagery of light and darkness, sight and blindness, with the emergence of Protestant book culture in his own writings. His account of the invention of printing in Acts and

33093_Williams.indd 206

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 207

world, so many blockhouses there be against the high Castle of S. Angell [the papal prison]. So that either the Pope must abolish knowledge & printyng, or printyng at length will roote him out” (6:859). Milton’s rapturous song of thanksgiving likewise hymns the social and religious blessings of Everyman’s and Everywoman’s reading of the printed scriptures: “Then was the Sacred bible sought out of dusty corners where prophane Falshood and Neglect had throwne it, the Schooles opened, Divine and Humane Learning rak’t out of the embers of forgotten Tongues, the Princes and Cities trooping apace to the new erected Banner of Salvation; the Martyrs, with the unresistable might of Weaknesse, shaking the Powers of Darknesse, and scorning the fiery rage of the old red Dragon” (cpw 1:524–5). This would have made excellent catalogue copy for the ninth edition of Foxe’s book, published in the year 1641 when Of Reformation first appeared in print. In Animadversions, another of Milton’s writings of 1641, he objects to what “one of your Bishops in print scornfully termes the Foxean Confessors. Are not these [Bible-reading martyrs] they whose” own “Acts and Monuments are not onely so contemptible, but so hatefull to the Prelates, that their Story [of martyrdom] was almost come to be a prohibited book” (678–9). What higher recommendation could there be than for Foxe’s martyrology to appear on the Index? In The Reason of Church Government, the third of his major prose works in 1641, Milton also refers to rumours of the “many Sects and divisions … amongst us” as “meere fictions and false alarmes of the Prelates,” dating back to the “objected feares and suspicions” of “that suttle Prelat Gardner” who in the time of Mary Tudor had “sought to divert the first reformation” (794). Foxe, whose martyrs were often snared in the toils of Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, wrote that, just as Gardiner “was of a cruell nature, so was he no lesse of a subtile and crafty witte, euer gapyng for some occasion how to let & hynder the Gosepll.”81 Foxe’s politics, as much his histories, thus came to grace the pages of Milton’s early prose, since Foxe’s politics and his histories are very much to Milton’s purpose in 1641. Monuments declares ‘that through the light of printing the world beginneth now to have eyes to see, and heads to judge’” (77). Had the printing press been invented “in the time of Wyclif” and other Lollard writers, then “many things had remained in light, which now be left in oblivion. But by reason the art of printing was not yet invented, their worthy books were the sooner abolished’” (78). 81 tamo (1570): 8:1320; Milton’s “suttle Prelat” is evidently derived from Foxe.

33093_Williams.indd 207

2022-09-01 16:54

208

The Communion of the Book

Above all, it is Foxe’s commitment to the religion of the book – his own book having brought The Acts of the Apostles up to date in terms of English history – that makes the martyrologist’s work the sine qua non for Milton’s story “of deeds / Above Heroic, though in secret done,” if “Worthy t’ have not remained so long unsung” (1.14–15, 17). Once again, those “deeds” have their true origin in courageous acts of r­ eading, through which devilish misreadings are exposed for what they are. One hears in Milton’s poem more than an echo of Thomas Cranmer railing against “sophisticall cauillation” (5:1019), or gross hypocrisy. Jesus finds himself in a like danger from Milton’s Satan, the most sophistical of readers who is so learned and skilful in his ­interpretations that he will instantly absorb the stated position of his  opponent and turn it to advantage. Take the example of the Adversary’s return to Jesus on the morning of the second day, claiming to be the “providing Angel” of yesterday’s narrative. There, Jesus had recalled from Torah a story where he now found himself reliving the stones-to-bread temptation. Satan was ­aiming to induce mistrust of God again, just as he had done among wandering Israelites so long ago in the desert. In recalling that ancient scene, Jesus also recalls a key text of scripture saying how God had “humbled” Israel, “and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna … that he might make thee know that man does not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live” (Deut. 8:3). Even though he finds the right ­passage from scripture, and answers with the appropriate Word – proving that a scroll still allows for indexical reading – his victory is only momentary. For it is also a means of his potential undoing, given that Satan will return the next morning with a new instance of that same temptation, claiming to have been the providing angel who once fed Moses and his people in the desert. Finding Jesus awakening from a dream of “the Ravens with their horny beaks” bringing “Food to Elijah” (2.267–8), or else waking to find “his Supper on the coals prepar’d, / And by the Angel was bid rise and eat” (2.273–4), Satan most preternaturally recalls how

33093_Williams.indd 208

Others of some note, As story tells, have trod this Wilderness; The fugitive Bond-woman with her Son Out cast Nebaioth, yet found he relief

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 209

By a providing Angel; all the race Of Israel here had famish’d, had not God Rain’d from Heaven Manna, and that Prophet bold Native of Thebez wandring here was fed Twice by a voice inviting him to eat. (2.306–14)

Here is a moment of extreme danger to Jesus, insofar as Satan, by appropriating both stories to his own “providential” care, now makes it impossible for Jesus to appeal any longer to these specific examples. Without so much as a hint of a sneer, Satan, for good measure, writes himself into the story of Hagar and her infant son Ishmael, dying of thirst in the desert. Let me help, says the faux “providing angel”: God sent me to provide for you. By such means, the Tempter removes one more resource available to the faithful reader of scripture. Of this fraught dramatic moment, it is disconcerting to confront the claim that “[t]he poem is deliberately antitheatrical or, rather, it links theatricality with Satan, who has a full complement of props, costumes, scenery, and dramatic ploys.”82 To her credit, Laura Lunger Knoppers has only the best of intentions in arguing that Milton seeks to expose the “theatrical suffering” of the “royal martyr” who had also appropriated this discourse of martyrdom, whether in Foxe or the Davidic Psalms or Isaiah, in order to preserve the House of Stuart’s claim to the throne. And Milton’s Son of God is clearly “the opposite of the kings who act out a well-calculated pageant before a gullible audience,” because he obviously rejects the role of “royal martyr” by accepting debarment from that very throne promised in scripture.83 For Knoppers, “The witness of Milton’s Son of God counters and challenges the pathos and dramatic appeal not only of the theatrical martyr-kings, but of the Christ whom they imitate” (37). But this claim would only be valid were it really the case that the poem is anti-theatrical. Were there no threat to Jesus, and were he unable to fail, drama would be beside the point, though it would also damage the poet’s art, in what is essentially a tense courtroom drama, by failing to reveal what his reading of Foxe had taught the poet.

82 Knoppers, Historicizing Milton, 36. 83 Here, Knoppers equates Jesus’s martyrdom with the renunciation of a throne, rather than with his entrance into the Book as the flesh made Word.

33093_Williams.indd 209

2022-09-01 16:54

210

The Communion of the Book

In Milton’s dialectical84 form of drama, every reading of Jesus will be used against him, and every success he achieves in refuting the devil’s claim will become the basis of a later temptation. The hallmark of this dramatic method is most evident in Jesus’s expressed sympathy for “Poor Socrates.” For “who next more memorable” could there be than patient Job,” this poor Socrates, “By what he taught and suffer’d for so doing, / For truths sake suffering death unjust” (3.95–8)? Somewhat disconcertingly, that same judgment will be challenged and finally renounced in the temptation of Athens, after Satan offers the full wisdom “Of Socrates,85 … / Whom well inspir’d the Oracle pronounc’d / Wisest of men” (4.274–6). Jesus has little choice now but to refuse what Satan reclaims as his own: “The first and wisest of them all profess’d,” he is forced to respond, “To know this only, that he nothing knew” (4.293–4). In this aspect of his trial, at least, “Our Saviour” now faces an Adversary the like of which not one of Foxe’s martyrs ever had to face. Can this very human Son of God expect to keep his innocence without presuming on God, or will he necessarily slide into a sense of self-sufficiency and attempt to stand or fall by his own merits? Will he step into the logical trap that the sophisticalTempter cunningly sets for him? On the horns of a dilemma Milton leaves his human hero to ­balance as best he can. Yet, should Jesus fail, we fail in him as well, and that before the fact. For then, the divine plan of salvation will surely come to naught. “Where will this end?” Jesus sounds forgivably plaintive at the outset of his soliloquy in the second book (2.245). There is no good answer to his pained question, apart from “many a hard assay even to the death, / E’re I the promis’d Kingdom can attain, / Or work Redemption for mankind” (1.264–6). He only knows what must come first: a crown of thorns before he gains a throne. In any event, the nature of this Foxean trial depends upon the inquisitor’s next question, and the next one after that. Because the inquisitor’s style is already discontinuous, Milton’s Jesus must be able to collate a wide variety of texts, although the only scriptures he has read come from a cumbersome scroll, not from a more navigable medieval codex. And no matter how skilfully he 84 For discussion of this “dialectical” form of drama, see Milton’s Leveller God, 370–87. 85 Loewenstein is that exceeingly rare reader of Paradise Regain’d who recalls how “Jesus had earlier singled out the poor Socrates for praise because of his suffering unjustly for ‘truth’s sake (3.96–99)’” (Representing Revolution, 266).

33093_Williams.indd 210

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 211

draws on the text, or how scrupulously he answers with whatever “scripture doth teach me,” the answer will be made the basis of yet another temptation.86 Where will this end indeed? Subtler than anything in Foxe, this is a story of diminishing means and increasing risks – for the sceptical reader hors du texte, as well as for this sole “true” reader within the text. And if he fails, even death will not be the end of the story.

The Martyrdom of Thomas Cranmer The story of the martyrdom of Thomas Cranmer, formerly archbishop of Canterbury, is a useful model by which to assess the Foxean form of Milton’s “fifth gospel.” Cranmer, the author of the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer, was both a man of deep and settled convictions and a highly skilled dialectician. Rejecting the literalism of Doctor Chedsey, who held that “[i]n the Sacramente of the altare is the naturall bodye of Chryste,” Cranmer also rejects what he finds “[i]n the assertions of the church & of religion, trifling & new fangled nouelties of wordes.” In fact, he sounds a lot like Milton defending a key principle of Erasmian hermeneutics, that “we muste folowe somuche [sic] as we may, the maner of speaking of the scripture.”87 Again, in answer to a further objection from Chedsey, Cranmer replies that the inquisitor’s complaint “recedeth and swarueth from the accustomed maner and speache of scripture.”88 Later, he will refer to the “sacramente & mistical bread” as “seales of gods [sic] promises, & gyftes, & also of the holy ­fellowship, which we haue wyth Christ and al his members” (1008). When asked to explain what work Christ’s words could accomplish if they were no more than a sign, he responds in a dignified way that “God worketh in his faythfull, not in the sacramentes” (1021). In other words, this is a man willing and able to parry every logical assault of the Tempter. He thus reminds us that it is in the reader, not in the bread, that the real transformation takes place, as Erasmus had always maintained. Even on the verge of being condemned, Cranmer writes an admonitory letter to Queen Mary, advising her that he has learned from one 86 Satan’s appropriation is mostly used in each subsequent temptation, if not in the finale. 87 Cranmer, tamo (1563): 5:1007. Cf. cpw 2:282–3. 88 Cranmer, tamo (1563): 5:1008. The “maner and speache of scripture” in this instance is the sermo Christi by which, as Erasmus said, one would be “transformed” into what was being learned. See chapter 3 above: 140, 143, 148–9, 151, 153–4.

33093_Williams.indd 211

2022-09-01 16:54

212

The Communion of the Book

“D. Martin, that at the day of your maiesties coronation, you toke an othe of obedience to the pope of Rome. And the same time you toke an other othe to this realme, to mainteine the lawes, liberties, & customs of the same.” To his eternal credit, he will not hesitate to add, “I feare me that there be contradictions in your othes, & that those which should haue informed your grace throughly [sic], did not their dueties” (5:1558). He recognizes, though he does not excuse, the contradiction between Church and State law. For this man of utmost gravity and integrity refuses to shrink from the truth of what he takes to be his sacred duty to his sovereign to provide her with good counsel, though it should cost him his life. And yet Cranmer fails, fails pitiably. After three years in prison, he has been utterly worn down, a broken man. As Foxe says, the “Archb. beyng overcome, whether through their importunitie or by his own imbecillity, or of what mind I cannot tel, at length gaue his hande” (1566) to a recantation that was written for him. It is painful to read, his point-by-point rejection of every argument he had won by careful reading of scripture, and by logical refutation of each fallacy he had managed to face down. And all was for nought. For, on receipt of his signed recantation, they dressed him up as a mock-archbishop and formally degraded him, before proceeding to burn him anyway. As Foxe tells the story: The lamentable case and syght of that man gaue a sorowfull spectacle to al  christen [sic] eies that beheld him. He that of late was archbishop Metrapolitan, [sic] primate of all England, and the kynges priuie counsellor, being now in a bare & ragged gown, & yl fauoredly clothed with an old square cap, exposed to the contempt of all men, did not seme so much to admonish men of his calamitie, as of their owne state & fortune. for [sic] who wolde not pitie his case, & bewaile his fortune, & feare his owne chaunce, to se [sic] so noble a prelate, so graue a counsellor, of so long continued honor after so many dignities, in his old yeres to be depriued of his estate, adiudged to dye, & in so painfull a death to end his life. (1568)

The wheel of fortune has not just turned; the topmost man lies crushed at the bottom. And there is a surprising turn at story’s end. Made to stand and preach a homily to the gathered community of St Mary’s Church, Oxford, all of whom expect this recanted heretic to confirm the orthodoxy he has

33093_Williams.indd 212

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 213

rejected, he takes his auditors aback by saying that “for as much as my hande offended, wrytyng contrarie to my harte, my hande shal first be punished therfore [sic]. for [sic] maye I come to the fyre, it shalbe first burned. And as for the Pope, I refuse hym as Christes enemye and Antichriste, with all his false doctrine” (1570). At once, they dragged him “downe from the seat” and into the street, carrying him to the heap of dried faggots waiting outside the wall. And “stretching out his arme, he put his right hand in the flame.” And “His body did so abide the burning of the flames, with suche constancie and stedfastnes, that standing always in one place … he semed to moue no more then the stake to whiche he was bound.” And then, “so long as his voyce would suffer him: & vsing often the words of Stephane, Lord Iesus receiue my spirite, in the greatnes of the flames he gaue vp the ghoste” (1571). Although it is an intensely moving scene, Cranmer’s last-minute reversion to the “truth” saved no one, least of all himself. For that, he had to depend on “Our Saviour,” whom we last saw patiently waiting out his trials in Milton’s poem,89 trusting that he would be able, if the means presented themselves, to live up to what was predicted of him in prophetic writ.

F o x e a n S i t u at i o n s i n P a r a d i s e R e g a i n ’ d The immediate occasion of Jesus’s question that opens his second day of trial – “Where will this end?” – does not suggest uneasiness about martyrdom. It is only his admission of human need: “But now I feel I hunger, which declares, / Nature hath need of what she asks” (­ ­2.252–3). His bodily desire underscores his genuine humanity, clarifying the Father’s prediction to Gabriel at the beginning of the poem that, “By Humiliation and strong Sufferance / His weakness shall o’recome Satanic strength” (1.160–1). It is that same bodily weakness – his liability to the common condition – that proves the moral strength of his human nature. So, we should not in the least be surprised when bodily appetites become Satan’s next point of attack: “Tell me if Food were now before thee set, / Would’st thou not eat?” (2.320–1). In just six words, the Son will establish his moral rectitude and his total control of animal appetite: “Thereafter as I like / The giver, answer’d Jesus” (2.321–2). The Tempter will have to do better than this. 89 This is not to say that Milton directly alluded to Foxe’s story of Cranmer, but that the situation of the dignified old archbishop raises the stakes of this temptation in the desert.

33093_Williams.indd 213

2022-09-01 16:54

214

The Communion of the Book

The scene is reminiscent nonetheless of the difficulties that Cranmer’s inquisitors had encountered in the Oxford Disputations to confound Archbishop Thomas by logical argument. After “the ­doctors & diuines of Oxford” had burned Ridley and Latimer in a ditch outside the city wall, they “busyed them selues all that euer they could about M. Cranmer to haue him recant” by virtue of the “crafty allurementes they might deuise.” As Foxe shows, logic now gives way to physical allurements, that “they might win him more easely.” And so “they had him to the Deanes house of Christes church in the saide vniuersitie, where he lacked no delicate fare, plaied at the boules, had his pleasure for walking, & al other thinges that might bring him from Christ: All this notwithstanding, yet could not he be caused to recant, & so was brought again to his prison of Bocardo” (5:1566). The only difference in Cranmer’s situation is that his strong faith in the written Christ of scriptures would now have to be compromised in a written recantation. The situation of Milton’s Jesus is more fraught, since taking anything from the Tempter’s hand will subject him to the dominion of Satan. When the latter asks, “What doubts the Son of God to sit and eat?” (2.368), the Son’s predicament is further complicated by his reliance on that very promise he holds from scripture that I can at will, doubt not, as soon as thou, Command a Table in this Wilderness, And call swift flights of Angels ministrant Array’d in Glory on my cup to attend. (2.383–6)

As bold and self-assertive as he sounds, Jesus is only keeping faith with the metaphoric promise he has read in the Psalms: “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies” (Ps. 23:5). Here, however, the situation is totally reversed, since the psalmist had added that “he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways” (91:11). And this promise, unbeknownst to him, is going to become the source of his gravest danger. For the psalmist says, “They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone” (91:12). It is a promise that Satan will save to use against Jesus in the final scene on the pinnacle. But for now, the Adversary is still hoping to gain his prize at a lower price, rather than risk all on a single throw of the dice.

33093_Williams.indd 214

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 215

So, the fiend turns back in the third book to contiguous temptations of glory, zeal, and duty. Convicted of the emptiness of his own ambition for glory, Satan finds himself stiffly rebuked for his claim that he and God differ little in seeking glory. For glory, as Jesus sees it, is never God’s “prime end”; his only desire is “to shew forth his goodness, and impart / His good communicable to every soul / Freely” (3.123–6), for which even “glory” would be insufficient thanks. So, Satan must probe ­further: what about zeal, then, or duty? The prophets have said that “to a Kingdom thou art born, ordain’d / To sit upon thy Father David’s Throne” (3.152–3). Ironically, Satan shares the inability of Foxe’s dramatic Tempter(s) in their astounding incapacity to understand metaphor.90 He assumes that “kingdom” can only mean a literal throne, to which “the Son of God” must accede in this lifetime. As Barbara Lewalski says, “Typically, Satan takes literally the prophecy that Jesus is to reign as king of Israel, while Jesus redefines Israel to refer to the invisible church his spiritual kingdom, and his millennial kingdom to come” (Life, 517). Later, Satan openly admits to being metaphor-­ challenged, as he confesses what he has known from the outset, though not from his reading of scripture, but from his perusing of “the Stars” (4.383) and what they “give me to spell, / Sorrows, and labours … / Violence and stripes, and lastly cruel death” (4.385–6). Finally, he exposes his real handicap vis-à-vis metaphor, without quite recognizing it as such: “A Kingdom they portend thee, but what Kingdom, / Real or Allegoric I discern not” (4.389–90). Bishop Bonner could not have said it better, handicapped as he was in “discerning” Anne Askew’s poetic metaphors.91 Jesus understands from his own reading of the Prophets, however, that there can be no crown without a cross, nor any throne without his death. In such a situation, what does throne even mean? He can only hold, as he replies to Satan, to his patient policy of waiting, “quietly expecting / Without distrust or doubt, that he may know / What I can suffer, how obey” (3.192–4). It is not passivity, however, but genuine fear of presumption that colours his response. For Jesus can be certain

90 In the terms made famous by Roman Jakobson, Satan, like Bonner, appears to s­ uffer from a “similarity disorder” (90, 94), or a metonymic style of thought, that prevents him from understanding “poetic” similarities. 91 See further discussion in this chapter: 176–7, 193.

33093_Williams.indd 215

2022-09-01 16:54

216

The Communion of the Book

of just one thing about that poetic figure of a “throne” – his certainty that he must die, as he knows from scripture, “E’re I the promis’d Kingdom can attain” (1.265). Satan’s dazzling series of metonymies that offer “The Monarchies of the Earth, thir pomp and state” (3.246) is then one of his most frenetic tests at an evident point of vulnerability for Jesus. For Satan’s dire warning that “thy Kingdom though foretold / By Prophet or by Angel, unless thou / Endeavour as thy Father David did, / Thou never shalt obtain” (3.351–4), is meant to induce crippling doubt and make “our Saviour” liable to temptation. Because Jesus has admitted (at least to himself) that there was something more “To which my Spirit aspir’d, victorious deeds” (1.215), he must continuously reconcile himself to death as his sole means of victory, and trust that his death could still bring about the reality of his metaphoric kingdom. It is at a similar point that the learning and resolve of Thomas Cranmer ought to stand him in better stead. For, while his inquisitors had kept the Archbishop almost now 3. yere in prison, seing by no meanes they could preuail with him, to turn him from his religion, dyd secretly s­ uborn certain men, which, when they could not ouerthrow him by ­arguments  & ­disputation, should by entreaty & faire promises, or any other means allure him to recantation: for these men wily enough for their own profite, p ­ erceaued how great a wound they shold receiue, if the Archb. had stoode stedfast in his sentence, & contrarywise how great profit they shold get, if he as the principal standerbearer shold sing a retreit. (5:1566)

In fact, they promise him the one thing most likely to destroy him: the hope of life instead of death. He might yet be again, even be what he was before: archbishop. They put him in hope, that he shold not only haue his life but also be ­restored to his auncient dignity: saying it was but a smal matter, & so easy, that they required him to do, only that he wold subscribe to a fewe words with his own hand, which if he did, ther shold be nothing in the realme that the quene would not easely graunt him, whether he wold haue riches, or dignity, or els if he had rather liue a priuate lyfe, in quiet rest, in whatsoeuer place he ­listed … But if he refused, ther was no hope of helth & pardon: for the quene was so purposed that she wold haue Cranmer a catholike, or els no Cranmer at all. Therfore, he shold chose [sic] whether he thought it better to end his life shortly in the flames & firebrands now redy to be kindeled, then with

33093_Williams.indd 216

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 217

much honor to prolong his life, vntill the course of nature did call him. for [sic] there was no middle waye. (5:1566)

One can only pity poor Thomas Cranmer, the author of a “middle way” for the English Church between Rome and Geneva. For this frail old man with “his fatherly face” (5:1569) had yielded at last to the Tempter’s promise to let him be again what he was before, never thinking that the Queen merely wanted his signature as a propaganda triumph, before he was committed to the flames. Had the hope of humanity’s deliverance now rested on the author of The Book of Common Prayer, then all humanity had been lost with him. Except that he would not finally be lost himself by virtue of another, more selfless, and more steadfast human hero – the dramatic subject of Milton’s “Fifth Gospel.” Milton’s Jesus escapes the temptation of the literal only by his careful re-reading of the apocalyptic metaphors92 he had found in the Prophets, not least in the final vision he cites from Daniel 2 of the destruction of five great kingdoms, from the statue’s head of “gold” down to its feet made of “iron” and “mixed with miry clay.” For in their stead “shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed” (Dan. 2:41–2), even though it doesn’t yet exist, and is not likely to be realized any time soon. As he interprets this prophetic metaphor, Jesus predicts, Know therefore when my season comes to sit On David’s Throne, it shall be like a tree Spreading and over-shadowing all the Earth, Or as a stone that shall to pieces dash All Monarchies besides throughout the world. (4.146–50)

The problem, of course, is that he can be certain of only one thing from this metaphor – that he will not sit on a “Throne” in this lifetime. He must take it entirely on faith that God’s promises are not empty, much as Foxe’s martyrs faithfully expect to wear that day “a Crown” after

92 Like Erasmus and his later followers in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, Milton’s Jesus also has a penchant for metaphoric thinking. He thus differs fundamentally from Satan, whose serial temptations are based on a series of anxious metonymies that reveal his inherent incapacity to understand the identity of the Son through the metaphor of the Incarnation.

33093_Williams.indd 217

2022-09-01 16:54

218

The Communion of the Book

­ assing through the fire.93 Milton’s Jesus likewise has to trust in somep thing beyond the metaphor,94 more than this empty assertion that “of my Kingdom there shall be no end” (4.151). This difference between Jesus and Satan recalls a similar difference between Foxe’s inquisitor Chedsey and his victim Thomas Cranmer, as Chedsey doggedly insists on Cranmer’s acceptance of the Sacrament as “the natural bodye of Chryste,” while Cranmer remains quietly faithful in his reading to “the maner of speaking of the scripture.”95 But the Inquisitor’s problem in both works is his inability to read metaphors aright, and therefore imposing the “truth” of his misreading as the gospel. While Cranmer is presented with a hope of returning to the private satisfactions of his scholarship, Jesus is given the prospect of immediate access to all humane wisdom, starting from “the low-rooft house / Of Socrates” (4.273–4), and passing on to many other philosophers of Greek antiquity, from Plato to Epicurus to the Stoic school. Barbara Lewalski reads the bent of this temptation as an instrumental use of wisdom to acquire power or fame or even “influence on later schools.” Less certain is her claim that Jesus “denies that the classical writers are sources of true wisdom” (Life, 520–1). For, at the beginning of the third book, Jesus had rejected Satan’s temptation to fame or glory, ranking Plato’s hero second only to Job among the world’s greatest heroes: “Who names not now with honour patient Job? / Poor Socrates (who next more memorable?) / By what he taught and suffer’d for so doing” (3.95–7). Jesus has evidently read Plato’s The Death of Socrates, with its moving portrait of Socrates’s contempt for death in submitting to a capital sentence for having encouraged Athenian youth to doubt immoral divinities such as those still worshipped by the Greeks. In fact, Socrates died as bravely as any of Foxe’s witnesses to the truth portrayed in his

93 Foxe prints the letters of John Careless, who, expecting martyrdom, writes from prison to others in a similar condition, assuring all such “constant confessours of the ­euerlasting veritie: how glorious a crown of victory shall you shortly receaue, which is ­prepared for all such as do continue to the end?” (1570: 11:2146). Rafe Allerton’s similar letters are discussed in this chapter above, 169–70. Also see discussion in chapter 5 of John Lilburne’s hope of a “crown” in his “martyrology,” 240. 94 It is the same faith in the reality of the metaphor that Foxe’s martyrs must evince, a reality of being “crowned” with glory and entering a mutual “kingdom” of the blessed. 95 Cranmer, tamo (1563): 5:1007. That manner of speaking is the humanist’s sermo Christi that Erasmus had portrayed in the Ratio as the true vehicle of transformation.

33093_Williams.indd 218

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 219

martyrology. And the truth for which Socrates died? His similar insistence that morally corrupt gods were no gods at all. The temptation of Athenian wisdom thus permits Satan to a­ ppropriate the strength of Jesus’s previous answer, once again rendering it useless to him. The pattern is particularly clear when Satan concludes the temptation of wisdom with his assurance that “[t]hese rules will render thee a King compleat / Within thy self” (4.283–4). Only now, he also takes over Jesus’s answer to the previous temptation of riches, where Jesus had argued that “he who reigns within himself, and rules / Passions, Desires, and Fears, is more a King” (2.466–7). From this instant, the co-opted Stoic virtues are necessarily rendered Satanic. After his unsuccessful temptation of wisdom, however, the sophistical Tempter can no longer conceal his desperation to “learn / In what degree or meaning thou art call’d / The Son of God, which bears no single sence” (4.515–17). It is the ambiguity of this uncertain phrase that has occupied Satan from the outset of the poem, where he first reminded his demonic council that “His first-begot we know, and sore have felt, / When his fierce thunder drove us to the deep; / Who this is we must learn” (1.89–91). But it is also a question that remains to be answered dramatically in terms of how that final, and equally ambiguous, scene plays out on the pinnacle. Is it a miracle? a merely human act of good triumphing over evil? or an act that exposes and expresses the intrinsic meaning of the Incarnation? Satan does not know what we had heard from Jesus when, filled only with gnawing hunger, he had murmured just before the banquet scene: “Where will this end?” Though Jesus questioned, he still was able to assure himself that “from the sting of Famine [I] fear no harm, / Nor mind it, fed with better thoughts that feed / Mee hungring more to do my Fathers will” (2.257–9). It is a moment that tells us most of what we need to know about this man, and it is knowledge made available solely to readers, one of the few pieces of knowledge that, in the absence of a Fifth Gospel, Satan still lacks. Even so, Satan will devise a most clever way of determining what it means to be the “Son of God.” Those who had examined Cranmer were just as concerned as Milton’s Satan to probe the meaning of the Incarnation, to extract the martyr’s true sense of what means “Son of God.” Cranmer’s “subtyle” opinions are even likened at one point to the heresy of Arius. For, as the inquisitor Tresham says accusingly, “[Y]ou leaue but a spirituall vnion, and ioyning together of mynde” of Son and Father. Recalling St Hilarie in

33093_Williams.indd 219

2022-09-01 16:54

220

The Communion of the Book

his “disputinge against the Arrians, octauo de trinitate, he sayeth that this was their opinion: videlicet, that the father & the sonne are conioyned onely through vnitie of wyll. Whereupon euen Arius him selfe, when scripture was alleged againste hym, did as you do nowe, elude the right meaninge of it by his false interpretacions” (5:1016). The consequences are clear for orthodoxy and the maintenance of social authority, as Tresham admitted to Cranmer’s fellow bishop Ridley: “If there were an Arrian whiche had that subtile wytte that you haue, he myght soone shyft of thauthoritie [sic] of the scriptures and the fathers.” The orthodox doctrine of the hypostatic union of two natures – human and divine – is put at risk in this dispute “whether Christe be now in vs truly by nature, or onely by thagrement [sic] of wylles.” For, as Tresham concludes, “This truly is Arius opinion, that Christ is vnited to his father, by coniunction of myndes, and not naturally” (5:1017). This is likewise the ulterior significance of the Son’s metaphoric ­representation of himself, on the second day of the temptations, as “Mee hungring more to do my Fathers will” (2.259). The theological “error” of Arius is thus writ large in Milton’s dramatic conception of the Son. And it is essential to his understanding of human redemption as a union of two wills, that of the Father and of the creature.96 At the end of three days of disputation with the Son, Satan is no closer to being sure of his identity, though he has had sufficient occasion “To try thee, sift thee, and confess have found thee / Proof against all temptation as a rock / Of Adamant” (4.532–4). And yet he is no closer to knowing whether Jesus is God or simply a “meer” man. The ancient “heretic” Nestorius had also wrestled with this problem in advance of the Council of Chalcedon in 415. “Emphasizing the distinctness of the

96 It is an understanding similar to that of Erasmus in the Paraphrase on Galatians where he remarks of Christ, “He interposed himself between God and men in such a way that he included in himself the nature of both, for he intended to reconcile the one to the other,” although “a third party was necessary who would share both natures and reconcile them to each other” (Sider, Erasmus on the New Testament, 169). At least on this one occasion for Erasmus, a “third party” appears to require a Christology in which the idea of an essential identity between Father and Son is a logical absurdity, since “it is quite inconceivable,” as Milton says in De Doctrina, “that anyone could be a mediator to himself or on his own behalf.” For, “The God to whom we were reconciled, whoever he is,” Milton concludes, “cannot, if he is one God, be the same as the God by whom we were reconciled, since that God is another person” (cpw 6:218). The role of mediator demands “another person” who alone can be that “third party.”

33093_Williams.indd 220

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 221

two natures, Nestorius did not reach a clear expression of their unity.”97 Good (or bad) Nestorian that Satan proves to be, he is desperate to separate the two natures by which to determine whether Jesus is either God or man. As for what Jesus has revealed of himself to date, Satan can only declare him to be “the utmost of meer man both wise and good, / Not more” (4.535–6). Milton’s first readers, clearly mindful of the practices of Dissenting conventicles, had reason at least to suspect his Son of participating in such non-conformity. Ultimately, whatever one concludes depends on how one reads that lighting-quick poetic conclusion in which the Son is raised aloft, Satan seeks to entrap him in nine bare lines of speech, and the Son answers with a single line of scripture, before Satan falls “smitten with amazement” (4.562), and

strait a fiery Globe Of Angels on full sail of wing flew nigh, Who on their plumy Vans receiv’d him soft From his uneasie station. (4.581–4)

So, what just happened? Did the Son at last reveal his long-concealed divinity? Did Satan fall because he recognized his foe of old from the War in Heaven? Or is the human Son of God saved by a perfect unity of mind and will with the Father, not by a supposed unity of the divine nature shared between them? Nothing is explained. And all is explained. To the indexical, collating reader who follows this pattern of biblical quotation and Satanic misappropriation through the final flurry of action, the answers are less mysterious, although they require some teasing out. Satan, holding his prey steady upon the needlepoint of the Temple pinnacle, scoffs: “I to thy Fathers house / Have brought thee, and highest plac’t, highest is best” (4.552–3). The physical danger in which the Son is placed is evident from Satan’s setting of the stage: “There stand, if thou wilt stand; to stand upright / Will ask thee skill” (4.551–2). If Jesus is a mere man, he will crack his head on the pavements below; but if Jesus is the Son of God, he will surely call upon the angels to save him. Satan has created an either/or dilemma in

97 MacCallum, Milton and the Sons of God, 211.

33093_Williams.indd 221

2022-09-01 16:54

222

The Communion of the Book

which the Son is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. Either way, he can only obey Satan: “Now shew thy Progeny; if not to stand, / Cast thyself down; safely if Son of God” (4.554–5). And the reason for Satan’s confidence is clearer still: ever since the temptation of the banquet scene and Jesus’s fervent faith in the psalmist’s promise that “I can c­ ommand angels,” Satan has held in reserve such scriptural “proof” of the Son’s heavenly origin. If the Son has misread that ­promise, he is bound to die; but if he saves himself by appealing to the notion of his own divinity, he will suffer a moral fall in the very instant he manages to stand “upright.” Indeed, Satan is so confident of success that he mockingly quotes the same scripture the Son had used in that previous temptation: For it is written, He will give command Concerning thee to his Angels, in thir hands They shall up lift thee, lest at any time Thou chance to dash thy foot against a stone. (4.556–9)

It is clever, and devilishly cruel, quite as cruel a twisting of the scriptures as anything in the sophistry of Foxe’s inquisitors. The work of redemption could be lost on the instant. And then it isn’t. With little more than steady nerves and an amazingly human memory, Jesus quotes the single line in scripture left to him that would ensure a purely human triumph of faith in scripture against all the devil’s wiles: “To whom thus Jesus: also it is written, / Tempt not the Lord thy God, he said and stood” (4.560–1). It is an astounding instant in which Satan realizes what has just happened, and suddenly falls like the giant Antaeus, who was vanquished by the halfgod, half-man Heracles; and what is more, falls like the Sphinx, the Theban monster routed by virtue of that brilliant answer Oedipus had given to her riddle: “Man.” As for Jesus, the perfect man suddenly stands revealed – to himself as much as to Satan98 – as the heavenly Son of God. It is as if he had stepped, in an instant not of his choosing, through a doorway into the Word, as if that door had just opened and he found 98 Here, Milton departs radically and dramatically from Erasmus’s Paraphrase on Matthew, where the latter concludes of the temptations of Christ in Matthew 4 that “although he [Satan] had come to find out if he [Jesus] was the Son of God, he left somewhat more uncertain than he had come” (Sider, Erasmus, 88).

33093_Williams.indd 222

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 223

himself safe inside, just before the angels arrive. It is a colossal, but understandable, error on the part of Satan, whose compulsion to ­determine whether this was or was not the Divine Son, had led to the very answer he dreaded most. In fact, the Son’s response grows out of the same rebuke once made by God Himself to Israel in their desert wanderings: “Ye shall not tempt the Lord your God, as ye tempted him at Massah” (Deut. 6:16). As Jesus reminds Satan, “also it is written: Tempt not the Lord thy God.” And suddenly the true import of the biblical scene at Massah confounds the Tempter. For the ancient Israelites had likewise asked: “Is the Lord among us or not?” (Exodus 17:7). It is as if the Real Presence had stepped off the page into this scene atop the Pinnacle. And it proves to be … himself. In his perfect unity of will with the Father, he has unwittingly re-established his prior state in Heaven. And in becoming one with the Father through no more than right reading, this perfect man has just established a wider communion of the book by which Foxe’s martyrs will likewise be able to step into the pages of the book.

Erasmus and Milton It was Erasmus who had inadvertently relocated the Real Presence from the pyx to the page, though he was not tried for heresy. Indeed, Erasmus never once denied the doctrine of the Real Presence as it was orthodoxly received in the Blessed Sacrament. Rather, he contributed without quite realizing it to a new and revolutionary religion of the Book. For, as he had claimed in the Paraclesis, which prefaced his Novum instrumentum (1516), “[T]hese books show you the living image of his holy mind and Christ himself, speaking, healing, dying, rising to life again. In short, they restore Christ to us so completely and so vividly that you would see him less clearly should you behold him standing before your very eyes” (ed. Sider, 37). It is a world-shattering concept by which the Son of God is more alive to us in his Book than in his physical person, where he “lives even now, breathes and speaks to us, I might almost say more effectively than when he lived among men” (34). In effect, it is the humanist’s profound respect for the “speaking” text handed down to us, surviving throughout the ages, that goes on speaking to any who will “listen to the dead with their eyes.” Such a view is born out of the sensibility of a humanist scholar who knows how precarious the unbroken transmission of a scribal text always was

33093_Williams.indd 223

2022-09-01 16:54

224

The Communion of the Book

to have survived into this brave new age of printing where its future was now secure. And it also expresses the liberal sentiment of the humanist that the unread text, or one, at least, that is no longer read, could cease to exist. As a humanist, Erasmus had assumed, however mistakenly, that all readers would be as diligent as he to determine the truth of the text, to read it in its own terms within the context of its distant creation, and to respond to the speaking voice that could now be heard with one’s “eyes.” In many respects, Milton shared this spirit of liberal humanism, quoting Erasmus with regularity in his prose until relatively late in his career.99 Judging by Milton’s poetic works, he also agreed with Erasmus on the point that Christ still lives as surely in his gospels as he had once lived in the company of his disciples. He might also have agreed that the disciples understood Jesus better after he had left them to carry on his teachings, although his monist philosophy and his mortalist “heresy” would have made it difficult for him to accept a notion, expressed in the early Enchiridion, that “[i]t was the flesh of Christ that stood in the way, and that is what prompted him to say: ‘If I do not go away, the Paraclete [Holy Spirit] will not come. It is expedient for you that I go’” (O’Malley, CWE 66:73). Evidently, the confused and bewildered followers of “Messiah” in Paradise Regain’d resemble those same disciples described by Erasmus, for they, too, are left to struggle with his absence during his wilderness trial: “Now missing him thir joy so lately found,” the epic narrator says, and repeats “So lately found,” as if to emphasize their deep confusion. For they “Began to doubt, and doubted many days, / And as the days increas’d, increas’d thir doubt” (2.9–12). In another echo of Erasmus, they also confess, “[O]ur eyes beheld / Messiah certainly now come, so long / Expected of our Fathers” (2.31–3). But they are not, it seems, readers of the same ability he has demonstrated, for they have not yet learned what he had found, “searching what was writ” about the Messiah. More at home in traditional oral culture, they know only from the traditions “of our Fathers,” literally by what “we have heard, / His

99 Boswell, Catalogue, lists eight titles by Erasmus that either belonged to Milton’s library, or that he had borrowed and quoted. Boswell lists eleven citations from Erasmus in Milton’s writing, from Prolusion VI, where he cites In Praise of Folly, to Pro Se Defensio. For at least thirty years, Milton had been reading and adapting the writings of Erasmus to his own use.

33093_Williams.indd 224

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 225

words, his wisdom full of grace and truth” (2.33–4), who he truly is. He is thus less present to them, whether absent or present in the flesh, than he is to a reader of Erasmus who encounters him only in the text, and who hears with his eyes that voice still speaking from the page. From our experience of reading Paradise Regain’d, it is impossible to doubt that this flesh-and-blood Son of God was a figure who moved and inspired Milton, even if we are likely to say today that it was in such reading acts that the brains of Western Europeans were first rewired and continue to be reshaped, even in our increasingly precarious culture of reading. At the very least, it is still possible to say that Milton leaves his figure of a deeply human Jesus to struggle, as we ourselves are left to struggle, to read, absorb, and live such texts in the midst of our human uncertainty. But all of that had always been true, even before Jesus met the smiling, polished, sophistical face of evil. For such reasons, then, Milton would doubtless endorse the final word Erasmus had to offer on “the written Gospels” in Paraclesis, how “they restore Christ to us so completely and so vividly that you would see him less clearly should you behold him standing before your very eyes.”

Reading Milton Reading Jesus Reading Scripture It is no accident that the stunning climax of Paradise Regain’d turns on the answer to the question, “Is the Lord among us or not?” It had always been the answer that Satan had been dreading from the moment of his first declaration to his “gloomy Consistory”: His first-begot we know … Who this is we must learn, for man he seems In all his lineaments, though in his face The glimpses of his Fathers glory shine. (1.42, 91–3)

Even in the presence of the heavenly Father in Book 1 of Paradise Regain’d, readers are left to ask what God could have meant in saying that the Adversary “now shall know I can produce a man / Of female Seed, far abler to resist / All his sollicitations,” and so thereby “Winning by Conquest what the first man lost / By fallacy surpriz’d” (1.150–2, 154–5). Producing a man is what God had done in the very beginning, in the first Eden by “the first man lost.” But now, “Of female Seed”

33093_Williams.indd 225

2022-09-01 16:54

226

The Communion of the Book

adds a further layer of ambiguity about whether God is the creator or perhaps procreator of this man, and about whether this iteration of the Son is more, or less, human than Adam by virtue of having been born of a human mother. The Son himself was curious to know what his mother meant in urging, “By matchless Deeds express thy m ­ atchless Sire. / For know, thou art no Son of mortal man” (1.233–4). Indeed, Jesus’s sense of being led “by some strong motion … / Into this Wilderness” (1.290–1) has only amplified the governing question of the entire poem: Is the Lord among us or not?100 For this Jesus, the question still had not been adequately answered in his death-defying performance on the Temple pinnacle, although the question he posed to Satan was exactly right, so that the fiend “smitten with amazement fell” (4.562). In the same instant, “a fiery Globe” of angels arrives, a “fiery” reminder of the fate of the Foxean martyrs, but also a welcome transformation of that icon of early modern ­martyrdom burned into the minds of Foxe’s readers. For the angels have arrived just in time to catch a frail and very human Son on the cusp of his moral, if still human triumph, and so to “set him down / On a green bank” (4.586–7), where he hears a full revelation of his identity that, until now, he had sensed only occasionally in a lifetime of reading and collating scattered texts. But now the angels inform him very directly that he is the True Image of the Father, whether thron’d In the bosom of bliss, and light of light Conceiving, or remote from Heaven, enshrin’d In fleshly Tabernacle, and human form. (4.596–9)

What Jesus learns, in fact, is that he is literally a living metaphor of the divine man, a flesh-and-blood metaphor that makes its own response to the biblical conundrum, Is the Lord among us or not? For it is only after he has won his purely human victory over the Tempter for all of humankind that he is apprised of that former victory “Against th’ Attempter of thy Fathers Throne,” whom “long of old / Thou didst 100 Among early readers of Milton, Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) certainly suspected him of holding unorthodox opinions on Christ and his “eternal generation” as the Son of God in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain’d. See McCarthy, “Defoe, Milton, and Heresy,” 71–3.

33093_Williams.indd 226

2022-09-01 16:54



Foxe’s Book of Actes and Milton’s Fifth Gospel 227

debel,101 and down from Heav’n cast / With all his Army” (4.603–6). By his internalization of that Word he has just become, he wins a greater victory, worthy of a new gospel telling “of deeds / Above Heroic,” “though in secret done.” And what does he do? The triumphant “Son of God our Saviour meek” (4.656) wraps his robe a little more tightly about him and, in one of the most understated lines in all of poetry, “hee unobserv’d / Home to his Mothers house private return’d” (4.638–9). Any reader who has followed this deeply human Jesus reading and quoting scripture to rebuff Satan is placed in the position of having to actively recreate that original temptation, of needing to read the outcome in much the way that “our Saviour” has done: “This having heard, strait I again revolv’d / The Law and Prophets, searching what was writ/ Concerning the Messiah” (1.259–61). In the recursive action of reading, or mental unscrolling and rescrolling of this “revolving” text, the reader repeats what the poet has done, “searching what was writ” by which to absorb the plain “truth” of scripture” – that the divine presence is to be found, not in the pyx, but in acts of reading and communing with the Real Presence on the page. Is the Lord among us or not? As it turns out, he is present – both on the page and in the reader’s embodiment of the “truth” of Christ’s instituting words of the sacrament: “This is my body. Take and eat.” And here, for Milton at least, if not for Erasmus, is where Christ, in the life-giving sacrament of reading, is fully and bodily present, standing vividly before all eyes in this novel and unprecedented sacrament of reading.102 It is also where historical and modern acts of reading are joined in this ­common state of becoming the “flesh made Word,” quite literally so in a ­biological reconfiguration, or neurological reorganization, of the reader’s brain.103 So, this mental and cultural revolution in the conception of the Sacrament was always so much more than a Lilliputian quarrel between Big-Enders and Little-Enders about how to eat the meat of an egg. Yet, 101 In this rare usage of “debel” in English (from the Latin debellare, to war down), the angels signal the true heroism of this man who has far exceeded the heroism of the Virgilian hero Aeneas, who had been tutored in the Roman hero’s mission by his father’s spirit in the Underworld, “to spare the humble and war down the proud” [parcere subiectis, et debellare superbos]. See Virgil, vi:853. 102 See Erasmus, Paraclesis, 422. 103 See Henrich, weirdest, 3–7; see also further discussion in this work: viii, 108, 166.

33093_Williams.indd 227

2022-09-01 16:54

228

The Communion of the Book

as revolutions go, it was neither instantaneous nor fully decisive. Although it didn’t involve a storming of the barricades, or some other political act of violence, some sort of political revolt was always latent in Foxe’s stories. For now, it was a cultural revolution that would ­eventually lead to a civic revolution, carried out over more than three centuries of humanist reading in a wide variety of languages, both ancient and modern. And it would find its apotheosis in the verse of the greatest humanist poet in the English language. For what Erasmus had brilliantly intuited at the beginning of the sixteenth century would, by the mid-seventeenth century, manage to transform a cultural ­revolution into a political revolt. Whether readers realized it or not – whether they knowingly performed a type of sacramental reading or not – the Real Presence was henceforth available, as we have seen in Foxe’s stories, to each reader through his or her own performance of reading, rather than in the performance of a sacerdotal hierarchy in an alien and mysterious tongue. And this is what was always implicit in the Erasmian notion of the priesthood of every reader. The “true” presence of divinity in scripture was intrinsically a levelling presence – socially, linguistically, politically – as much as it had once been in the gospels and would be once more in Milton’s “fifth gospel.” For now, it was directly and immediately available to every reader of the printed Book in English, from the humblest ploughman of Tyndale to the most learned poet of the age. It was only waiting to be realized, right there on the page.

33093_Williams.indd 228

2022-09-01 16:54

5

Juridical Reading: John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law

The humanist revolution may have inspired English readers to determine their own truth in religion, but they were not free to proclaim it in the seventeenth century, any more than they were free to choose their form of government. Church and State were so intertwined in the culture of the Tudor court that, at the Hampton Court Conference of 1604, even the Stuart monarch James I could fend off Puritan divines who urged an immediate end to episcopacy, with his devilishly clever quip: “No bishop, no King!”1 As James VI of Scotland, he had endured seventeen years of humiliation by the general assembly of the Church of Scotland, and James I of England wanted none of it. “If you aim at a Scottish presbytery, it agreeth as well with monarchy as God and the devil,”2 he upbraided the Puritans at Hampton Court. No one remarked on the positional ambiguity of his syntax. In the reign of Elizabeth, there had still “been a large measure of toleration” in the Church Court of High Commission, “owing to the

1 MacDonald, “James VI,” describes the king’s conversion from the Scottish Kirk to the Church of England almost as succinctly as the king rebuffed his petitioners: “Its hierarchical structure, presided over by the monarch, suited James nicely” (887). He adds, “England, as far as James was concerned, treated its monarchs with proper respect and formality and the Church of England played a prominent role in that.” The situation in Scotland had always been humiliating to a king who was given little say in religious matters, because sixty-six presbyteries chose their delegates to the general assembly that decided issues of Church governance. MacDonald overturns conventional historiography on James I’s “benign” policy on the Kirk by examining succeeding drafts (1615, 1619, 1623) of his proposed changes to the liturgy in Scotland. Although they were never implemented in the parishes, they were imposed on “the chapels of Scottish universities,” where “[a]ll new ministers were graduates in the early seventeenth century” (897). 2 Lockyer, James VI and I, 107.

33093_Williams.indd 229

2022-09-01 16:54

230

The Communion of the Book

chaotic condition of the ecclesiastical law and to slackness in enforcing it.”3 This court stood among the “new ‘high courts’  – some ‘­prerogative courts’” created by the Tudor monarchs – courts that were more “Romanist in character, that is, they operated to some extent, though by no means entirely, according to doctrines and procedures derived in part from the earlier canon law of the Roman Catholic Church and in part from the secular Romanist law which had been studied for some centuries in the universities of Europe” (Berman, 213). Even in the reign of James I, claims legal historian P.B. Waite, the bishops’ defence of prerogative right had remained relatively tolerant, although “opposition to the Court of High Commsission was gradually extended” because of its use of “the oath ex officio” by which “a man could be obliged,” in cases of heresy or schism, “to testify against himself” (147–8). In the reign of Charles I, however, the bishops’ powers grew exponentially, particularly after the elevation in 1633 of William Laud, bishop of London, to the Archbishopric of Canterbury. Laud’s editing of the Scottish Canons of 1636 aimed to impose the ceremonialism and ­sacramentalism of the English Church on the Scottish Kirk.4 It also extended ecclesiastical prerogative5 in the English Canons of 1640.6 Prerogative courts became much more “efficient” than the dilatory common law courts, taking advantage of procedural differences, like the use of “written 3 This is the view of Waite, “Struggle of Prerogative and Common Law,” 146. 4 According to Leonie James, the Scottish Canons of 1636 were drafted in a way that produced “a radical redefinition of Protestant orthodoxy along ceremonial” and sacramental lines (“I was no master,” 506). Although she does not itemize their provisions, the canons are notorious among the Scots for requiring that extemporary prayers be banned in favour of “order and decency” (i.e., the English prayerbook); that ministers be “subordinated to bishops and bishops to the king”; that the communion table be moved out of the midst of the congregation and into the chancel; and that the Lord’s Supper be sacramental rather than memorial. She does mention in passing the alarming provision that communicants be required to kneel to receive the sacrament (509). 5 Although Leonie James refers to the prerogative creation of the Scottish Canons of 1636, her evidence is also pertinent in the context of English reform: “An expression of Laud’s conviction that canonical reform was a purely prerogative matter can be found in a letter he wrote to Wentworth in April 1634, shortly before Charles instructed the Scottish bishops to begin drafting new canons” (515). 6 Leonie James argues that this extension was made with the design of bringing the  Churches of all three kingdoms into nearer alignment. She concludes that Laud played the determining role in the writing of the Scottish canons of 1636, particularly in the way these “sought to emphasize the royal supremacy and episcopal government” in Scotland “as the bases [sic] of ecclesiastical authority, rather than synods or assembly” (510).

33093_Williams.indd 230

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 231

evidence” instead of “cross-examination”; judges, not juries, deciding cases; an automatic “presumption” against rather than for “the defendant”; and the enforcement of “right,” rather than “remedies” providing conciliation in religious matters (145). Fines, imprisonments, and mutilations became the norm in prerogative courts for any number of religious offences. Bitter resistance from London Presbyterians such as William Prynne, Henry Burton, and John Bastwick produced a flood of writings, arrests, and savage punishments by the Courts of High Commission and Star Chamber. Prynne, a lawyer from Lincoln’s Inn, had opposed pending ecclesiastical reforms in Lame Giles his Haultings (1631), and attacked the court masques of King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria in Histrio-Mastix (1633), which cost him both his law licence and his ears in a Court of Star Chamber judgment in 1634. For defying the censorship rules of the Laudian regime in 1637, Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick were sentenced by Court of Star Chamber to life imprisonment after having their ears cropped, being put in the pillory, and forced to pay fines amounting to a king’s ransom. Prynne’s ears, already abbreviated, lost even their stubs, while his cheeks were branded SL for seditious ­libeller. Dr Bastwick, handing a knife to the hangman, showed him how to perform more skilful surgery, then was led to the pillory to stand in the June sun for two hours. At the end of the day, he was clapped back in prison.7 And Burton, the pastor at St Matthews Church, found himself evicted from the ministry, degraded from his degrees, and placed in the pillory where his ears were likewise sheared. Worse yet, he was s­entenced to life imprisonment in Lancaster Castle, without access to visitors or to pen and ink. As he was conveyed out of the city on 26 July 1637, the Earl of Strafford “estimated that a hundred thousand people lined the streets to acclaim the earless hero.”8 Contrary to the Marian martyrs eighty years before, none of these “heretics” was asked his opinion on the sacrament, but only what he had published to defame the bishops and their charitable ways. This martyred trio was not unique, but their personal stories further helped to turn Foxe’s Book of Martyrs into a handbook for political revolution.

7 Wolfe, “Repression and Resistance,” cpw 1:41–5. 8 Ibid., 44–5.

33093_Williams.indd 231

2022-09-01 16:54

232

The Communion of the Book

It was in this context that John Lilburne (1614–1657), a draper’s apprentice, was arrested on 11 December 1637 on his return from Holland. Lilburne, a son of the lesser Yorkshire gentry, had been educated at Auckland and the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle9 – the alma mater of the Marian martyr Nicholas Ridley – where he received a humanist education “in Latin and Greek.”10 Rather than going up to Oxford or Cambridge at the age of fifteen, or following the law at the Inns of Court, he was apprenticed to Thomas Hewson, a London cloth merchant, who was sympathetic to Bastwick and his ­fellow martyrs (Rees, 26–30). As Lilburne described his arrest on his return from the Low Countries, he was examined on two sworn oaths against him. Declining to offer more than curt denials, and refusing to take the oath ex officio, or Oath of Inquiry by which he could be compelled to testify against himself, he was put on trial in March with “old Mr. Wharton” the printer, to face “the great Prelate” himself. Lilburne quotes Laud’s boast to other Lords of the Court of Star Chamber about having caught “this fellow (meaning me)” who “hath been one of the notoriousest dispersers of Libellous bookes that is in the Kingdome.”11 It was a phrase he had heard before on a dreary December day when his captors had forced him into a shop where “they threw [him] over a Sugar-chest,” and tried “to take [his] Sword from [him], and cried out for helpe,” saying they “had taken one of the notoriousest dispersers of scandalous bookes that was in the Kingdome” (1). Down on the street, it looked like five men against one, but Lilburne swore he would have fought his way out, had his assailants not “pulled my cloake crosse over my armes, that so, though I had my sword halfe drawne, yet by no meanes could I get it out” (12). Yet, up here, in the Court of Star Chamber, he now faced ten Lords of the Realm, including the archbishop of Canterbury. To be sure, neither side had much idea of what they were facing.

 9 Ian Green, Humanism, reports that the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle had an enrolment of about 100 students in the 1610s, as compared to 80 in 1577; young John Lilburne was enrolled with his elder brother Robert in the mid- to late 1620s. Grammar schools like this one – if tuition rates from a grammar school in Shrewsbury were typical – “charged the son of a lord 10s., the son of a knight 6s. 8d., the eldest son of a gentleman 3s. 4d. and a younger son 2s. 6d.” (60, 58). The boy’s tuition was a bargain. 10 Gibb, John Lilburne, 22. See also Royal Grammar School, ed. Mains and Tuck, 23, which reports that the Lilburnes were students at the school during the 1620s. 11 Lilburne, Christian Mans Triall, 8.

33093_Williams.indd 232

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 233

T h e “ H e r e s y ” E x a m i n at i o n of John Lilburne A decade later, the Leveller leader John Lilburne looked back from his new lodgings in the Tower of London – imprisoned this time for his defiance of political, rather than ecclesiastical authority – and offered a revealing glimpse of his reading as a young apprentice. Even though he remained in service to his Master “several days in the week” during the early 1630s, “I had spare time enough,” he recalls, “yet I never misspent it, but continually spent it in reading the Bible, the Book of Martyrs, Luthers, Calvins, Bezaes, Cartwrights, Perkins, Malins, Burtons, and Rogers Works, which multitude of other such like books, with histories that I had bought with my own money.”12 His rank ­ordering is telling: Foxe’s Book of Martyrs stands next to “the Bible” in importance, followed by the German, French, and Swiss Reformers, and finally by English preachers and historians. Like the nation, Lilburne had moved on from his youthful campaign against episcopal prerogative to his new crusade against political tyranny. But the author who taught him to act as well as to create monuments was undoubtedly Foxe; indeed, it is from the Book of Martyrs that he had acquired the appropriate language by which to address the multitude. In The Actes and Monuments, Lilburne found an ideal form for buttonholing readers and drawing them into an interrogatory, or legal ­examination, allowing them to witness the intrinsic drama of a courtroom trial. In The Christian Mans Triall (1638), Lilburne adds a further cloakand-dagger element to the account of his arrest on “the 11. or 12. of December, 1637” by the Prelate’s officers, to whom he was “treacherously and Judasly betraied” (1) by one John Chilliburne, a quondam friend. While Lilburne was away in the Netherlands, this Judas-friend had been caught “dispersing” writings by the likes of Bastwick, Prynne, and Burton, “whereupon he covenant[ed] with some of the Bishops Creatures, to betray me into their hands” (10). The resulting narrative of Lilburne’s arrest is a “performative play-text”13 of the same sort that Sarah Covington identifies in Foxe’s courtroom dramas, one that helped to make the Book of Martyrs a performative link between religious and political 12 Lillburne, Legal Fundamental Liberties, 25. 13 Covington, “Foxe’s,” 183. Also see chapter 4 above, 168, 188–9, 192; and see this chapter, 237.

33093_Williams.indd 233

2022-09-01 16:54

234

The Communion of the Book

revolution. While the apprentice portrays himself as a Foxean martyr, the substance of his reading is more often juridical than scriptural. Even the pamphlet’s structure suggests as much, dividing Foxe’s continuous narrative into two distinct instalments: a scene of legal examination and a scene of justice administered. First, we endure with him The Christian Mans Triall; and then we suffer an “execution” scene, in this case, A Worke of the Beast, or, A Relation of a most unchristian Censure, executed upon john lilbvrne (Now Prisoner in the Fleete) the 18. of Aprill, 1638. Following the question-and-answer format of Foxe’s heresy examinations, Lilburne provides a blow-by-blow account in The Christian Mans Triall of his “interrogatories” by the “chief Clerke” (2) of Sir John Banks, Attorney General, in his offices at Westminster. Most of the questions faced by Lilburne concern his whereabouts in the Netherlands from Rotterdam to Amsterdam, and what people he met there. He portrays himself as a skilful reader of the law, sounding at times more like a ­barrister than a defendant: “But Sir (as I said before) why doe you aske me all these questions, these are nothing pertinent to my imprisonment, for I am not imprisoned for knowing and talking with such and such men: But for sending over Bookes: And therefore I am not willing to answer you to any more of these questions: because I see you goe about by this examination to insnare me” (3). When he is confronted with intelligence gathered from the “Judas” informant Chillington, Lilburne snaps, “I doe not beleeve that Chillington said any such things, and if he did, I know, and am sure, that they are all of them lies” (4). When he is pressed about finances and payments received since his return to London, he is legally precise in his wording14: Clerk: You received money of Mr. Wharton since you came to Towne, did you not? Lilburne: What if I did? Clerk: It was for Bookes? Lilburne: I do not say so. (4)

Like Foxe’s martyrs who are portrayed as more knowledgeable than their inquisitors as readers of scripture, Lilburne presents himself as well versed in the law. When the Chief Clerk sees it is hopeless, he sends 14 To heighten the scene’s inherent drama, I have put the speeches in dramatic format.

33093_Williams.indd 234

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 235

him “down to Sir John Bankes himself,” along with his written report of the examination. But the apprentice Lilburne will not even “owne it for my Examination for your man hath writ what it pleased him and hath not writ my answer.” After this legal cavil, he goes on to challenge the grounds of the legal charge, “for the thing for which I am imprisoned (which is for sending over bookes) I am cleare, for I did not send any, and for any other matter that is laid to my charge. I know it is ­warrantable by the Law of God, and I thinke by the Law of the Land, for me to stand upon my just defence, and that my accusers ought to be brought face to face, to justifie what they accuse me of. And this is all that I have to say for the present” (4). Technically, he did have a right to deny the charge of “sending over bookes,” since his role in the scheme to print Bastwick’s Letany outside the jurisdiction of Laud’s censors seems to have been as the courier who delivered, rather than caused to be sent this manuscript of Bastwick to Dutch contacts.15 In terms of the common law, that is, Lilburne was on terra firma, though not in the prerogative court. Only in the former did he have a right to confront his accuser, in this instance Chilliburne, who had sworn two oaths against him. Lilburne shows other signs of legal sophistication in his steadfast refusal of the Oath of Inquiry. Indeed, he leaves an office full of clerks astounded by his assertion that “they had no grounded matter against me for to write a Bill, and therefore they went about to make me betray my owne innocency, that so they might ground the Bill [of Indictment] upon my owne words” (5). But “they could not in the least intangle mee, though I was altogether ignorant of the manner of their proceedings.” When one of the “Clarkes” tells Lilburne to remove his glove and lay his “hand upon the booke” to “sweare”(5), he soon exposes the specious reason offered for doing so: “But Sir, though I have received the Sacrament, and have heard Sermons, yet it doth not therefore follow that I am bound to take an Oath, which I doubt of the lawfulnesse of” (6). When Lilburne insists, “Sir, I will be better advised first” before submitting to this legal formality, “there was such looking

15 Biographer Mildred Ann Gibb writes at one point that Lilburne carried with him to the Low Countries a copy of Bastwick’s Letany, got from a Christ Church schoolmaster named Vicars (45); later, she offers that “[h]e apparently took the manuscript with him to Holland, and it seems reasonable to assume that, directly or indirectly, he was responsible for its publication and shipment to England” (49).

33093_Williams.indd 235

2022-09-01 16:54

236

The Communion of the Book

upon mee, and censuring me for a singular man, for the refusing of that which was never refused before.” Lilburne is indeed “a singular man,” as events prove, but his narrative of legal cavilling falls well short of the tragic dignity of an Alice Driver or an Anne Askew standing on “the truth of what scripture doth teach me,” against a mighty phalanx of bishops and learned doctors. The truth of English law, not of ­scripture, is his only brief. A month later, Lilburne did make a back-handed acknowledgment of the real powers ranged against him as he stood before the Bar of the Court of Star Chamber, a Tudor-restored prerogative court not just in its connotation of royal right but also in its “freedom from the procedures of common law” (Waite, 144): “[W]hen I came there, the Lord according to his promise was pleased to be present with me by his speciall assistance, that I was inabled without any dantednesse [sic] of spirit, to speake unto that great and noble Assembly, as though they had beene but my equalls” (7). It is a political stance that he pointedly shares with the Marian martyrs. Asked once more to take the Oath of Inquiry, he is undaunted, calling it “unlawfull” and without “warrant in the Word of God, for an Oath of Inquiry,” adding for obvious legal reasons that “I dare not take the Oath” (14). He adds how, “when I named the Word of God, the Court began to laugh, as though they had nothing to doe with it” (14.) Yet he knows his place, volunteering to “submit my body” with deference “unto your Lordships pleasure, and whatsoever you please to inflict upon it yet must I refuse the Oath” (8). In response, Laud sneers: “My Lords, said the Arch Prelate (in a deriding manner) doe you heare him, hee saith, with all reverence and submission he refuseth the Oath.” Their jeers notwithstanding, Lilburne quickly begged leave to speak, and began his “just defence” (8) by asking what trust they could possibly place in a false witness, and on what ground was he denied a right to face his accuser? As for their charges against him, “I doe protest before your Honours in the word of a Christian, that I did not send over these bookes, neither did I know the Ship that brought them, nor any that belongs to the ship, nor to my knowledge did never see with my eyes, either the ship, or any that belongs unto it” (10). His arguments hew closely to the available legal evidence. For his troubles, they asked him again if he would take the oath, and he repeated all his reasons why “I durst not take it. Then they said, they would proceed to Censure,” according to prerogative custom of

33093_Williams.indd 236

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 237

judge-decided law. “I bid them doe as they pleased, for I knew my selfe innocent of the thing for which I was imprisoned and accused” (14). But “then stood up Judge Ioans, and said: It was fit, that I being a young man for example sake, should have some corporall punishment inflicted upon me. So my Censure was to be whipt” (14). Lilburne, wanting the satisfaction of last word, added, “when I came from the Bar, I spoke in an audible voice, and said: My Lords, I beseech God to blesse your Honours, and to discover and make knowne unto you the wickedness and cruelty of the Prelates” (15).16 He willingly confesses, that is, to being a social heretic who divides the sheep (lords) from the goats (bishops). For, as much as he professes trust in the temporal Lords, he makes it clear that the prerogative of spiritual lords like Laud is baseless. In the grand tradition of The Actes and Monuments, goodness dares to publicly confront evil; and truth remains as willing as ever to endure the whips and scorns of falsehood for the greater victory. Such resistance is not just to the spiritual as opposed to temporal Lords, as it was in Foxe’s world; because of Laud, these two have become indistinguishable. Lilburne published his “performative play-script,”17 modelled on Foxe, weeks before he was taken from prison to be whipped from the Fleet to Westminster. The strict regime of surveillance over printing and distribution was still unable to silence this printed performance, although “Charles’ Star Chamber Decree of July 11, 1637” was supposed to be “the most elaborate instrument in English history,” as Ernest Sirluck claimed, “for the suppression of undesired publication” (cpw 2:159). And Liburne could have been punished more severely still for publishing his account of Star Chamber proceedings, whose details of process were a closely guarded secret. A decade later, the king himself would be tried in open court for all and sundry to remark his flagrant abuse of power. As Sharon Achinstein remarks, “The previously secret operations of the courts, analogous to the secret and unaccountable nature of kingly prerogative, were in these deeds overturned by 16 On his return to the Fleet, Lilburne heard old man Wharton, his fellow accused, telling “the Warden, how the Bishops were the greatest Tyrants that ever were since Adams Creation; and that they were more crueller than the Cannibals, those Men-eaters, for (said he) they presently devoured men, and put an end to their paine, but the Bishops doe it by degrees, and are many yeares in exercising their cruelty and tyranny upon those that stand out against them; and therefore are worse than the very Canibals [sic]” (Christian, 15). 17 See further discussion in this work: 115n15, 168, 189, 192.

33093_Williams.indd 237

2022-09-01 16:54

238

The Communion of the Book

political actions conducted in public and for the public.”18 The publication of the details of Lilburne’s trial and sentence by Star Chamber – the very antithesis of an open court – thereby anticipates the trials of the early 1640s in open court against Laud and Strafford, as well as the climactic trial of the king himself by a parliamentary Court of High Commission, which began its own (extra-legal) proceedings on 20 January 1649. To that extent, Lilburne’s publication of his martyr story necessarily differed from those of Foxe, which were neither ­self-hagiography nor broadsides taking aim at the existing political regime of Queen Elizabeth, who, contrary to her sister Mary, tended to side with the martyrs.

The “Martyrdom” of John Lilburne We know how Lilburne read The Actes and Monuments because he made a record of it in his self-martyrology, A Worke of the Beast (1638). Published soon after his flogging by the bishops, A Worke stops short of a Foxean narrative of death; even so, it reveals much about Lilburne’s burning ambition to gain a place in the Book of Martyrs. Like Foxe’s Alice Driver, who “yeelded her self to the punishment” of losing her ears, and yet still “thought her selfe happy, that shee was counted worthy to suffer any thyng for the name of Christ” (tamo [1576]: 12:1968), Lilburne expresses the same sentiment, verbatim. With his hands tied to the tail of a cart on Fleet Street on the morning of 18 April 1638, he braces to receive the lash of a triple-corded whip that attends him on the two-mile journey down the Strand to Westminster. And yet, “when the first stripe was given, I felt not the least paine, but said, Blessed be thy Name, O Lord my God, that hast counted mee worthy to suffer for thy glorious Names sake” (5–6). On reaching the pillory two miles farther on, down in the square beneath the windows of the Court of Star Chamber, Lilburne exclaims, “And this I counted my wedding day, in which I was married to the Lord Jesus Christ: for now I knowe hee loves me, in that hee hath bestowed so rich apparell this day upon mee, and counted mee worthy to suffer for his sake” (8). Foxe’s narrative of the “Martyrdom of Rawlins White a Fisherman,” had recounted similarly how the martyr “was brought out of prison, having on hys body the long Shiert … he called his

18 Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, 29.

33093_Williams.indd 238

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 239

wedding garment”19 which his wife had sewn for his “marriage” to the Lamb.20 Typically, many of Foxe’s martyrs “professed they were neuer so merrye before in all theyr lyues, some lept for ioye, some for tryumphe woulde put on theyr Scarfes, some theyr wedding garment goying to the fire, others kissed the stake.”21 Lilburne follows explicitly in this performative tradition of rejoicing to be made a martyr with Christ. Some portion of the martyr’s ambition, of course, is to display the sort of courage that heartens other believers and strengthens them, if necessary, to face a like fate. Foxe had published a “letter written by Rafe Allerton vnto Richard Roth, his fellow martyr,” to encourage him in his examination by Bishop Bonner: “O deare brother, I praye for you, for I heare say that you haue been diuers tymes before my Lord at examination. for [sic] I was once with him. Wherefore take hede [that] you … shrynke not away when you are entised to confesse an vntruth for hope of lyfe, but be ready alwayes to geue an answer of the hope that is in you.”22 Lilburne gives (and receives) the like encouragement, not from a fellow sufferer but from a whole host of witnesses to his extreme suffering: “And as wee went through Kings street, many encouraged mee, and bidd mee be cheerfull” (Worke, 7). There is a similar, if far more potent, moment in Foxe’s account of the martyrdoms of Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer, when “a fagot kindled with fire” being laid at the feet of Ridley, Latimer “spake in this maner: Be of good comfort maister Ridley, and play the man: wee shall this day light such a candle by Gods grace in England, as (I trust) shall neuer be put out.”23 Athough Lilburne cannot rival this heroic example, he still makes it his bright lodestar at every stripe of the lash upon his bare skin. In view of Latimer’s heroic declaration, Lilburne likewise feels obliged to exhort his audience, despite his bizarre posture, stooping to fit into the pillory: “My Brethren, be not discouraged at the waies of God for the affliction and Crosse that doth accompany them, for it is sweete & comfortable drawing in the yoake of Christ for all that, and I have found it so by experience” (20). With total disregard for what further pains 19 tamo (1570): 11:1767. 20 Fischer, History, adds that “White, a poor fisherman, paid to have his son go to school so that when White returned home from fishing the boy might read the Bible to him after supper” (249). 21 tamo (1583): 12:2137. 22 tamo (1563): 5:1709. 23 tamo (1583): 11:1794.

33093_Williams.indd 239

2022-09-01 16:54

240

The Communion of the Book

might be inflicted upon him, he declares: “I stand this day in the place of an evill doer, but my conscience witnesseth that I am not so. And hereabout I put my hand into my pocket, and puld [sic] out Three of worthie D. Bastwicks Bookes, and threw them among the people, and said, There is part of the bookes for which I suffer, take them among you, and reade them, and see if you find anything in them, against the Law of God, the Law of the Land, the glory of God, the honour of the King or State” (20). While this is not quite the heroic indifference of Latimer’s exhortation to burn like a “candle,” it is a memorable gesture nonetheless of his contempt for whatever additional pains the authorities could inflict on their stoic captive. It also speaks volumes about his sense of acting in a “performative play-script,” of auditioning for the one theatrical role he wants above any other. What fuels a semblance of self-sacrifice in his story is tied at every step to Foxe’s script. Ralph Allerton had written to encourage the widowed Agnes Smith, noting that, “although heretofore I haue most negligently dalied [sic] therwith, and therfore farre vnwoorthy I am of suche an high benefite, to be crowned with the moste ioyfull crowne of ­martyrdom,” yet “it hath pleased God not so to leaue me, but hath raised mee vp againe according to his promyse, which sayeth: Although he fall, yet shall he not be hurt.”24 Lilburne, setting off along the road to Westminster, likewise confesses that “I looke for an immortall Crowne, which never shall fade nor decay; the assured hope and expectation whereof makes, [sic] mee to contemne my sufferings, and count them as nothing; for my momentary affliction will work for me a farre more exceeding Crowne and weight of glory” (7). Addressing the multitude who have gathered at the pillory, he rejects any notion of self-­preservation, proclaiming, “I looke for that crowne of immortality, which one day I know shall be set upon my temples [B]eing in the condition I am in, I dare not hold my peace, but speake unto you with boldnesse in the might and strength of my God, the things which the Lord in mercy hath made knowne unto my soule, come life come death” (20). And, for the most part, he stays on script. At other times, however, there is a Monty Pythonesque quality to the martyrology, derived from Lilburne’s reading not of Foxe but of the far more difficult Book of Revelation. On such occasions, a note of

24 tamo (1583): 12:2041.

33093_Williams.indd 240

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 241

unintentional comedy accentuates his straining to force his way into the Book of Martyrs. Take, for example, the sermon which he preaches to the multitude upon stooping his head through the hole in a pillory that is much too low for him. Yet it has just enough proper sentiment to keep us believing in his martyrdom: “But Oh my brethren, it behoues [sic] all you that feare God, and tender the salvation of your owne soules, to looke about you, & to shake off that long security and formality in Religion, that you have laine in: For God of all things cannot indure Lukewarmenes, Rev. 3.16. And search out diligently the truth of things” (17). His martyred dignity is still most evident as he implores: “I beseech you doe not contemne the things that are delivered to you, in regard of the meanesse and weaknesse of mee the instrument, being but one of the meanest and unworthiest of the servants of Jesus Christ” (19). His present circumstance surely confirms the truth of his words. And he still speaks with scriptural authority when he claims that God “hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and God hath chosen the weake things of the world to confound the things which are mighty, & base things of the world, & things which are dispised hath God chosen, Yea things which are not, to bring to nought things that are, I Cor.1.27.28.” Yet his wild ravings about “the Bishops and their ­calling,” though not without resonance in this circumstance, soon ­leapfrog logic into absurdity as he begins to remonstrate: “That their Calling is so far from being Iure Divino (as they say they are) that they are rather Iure Diabolico. Which if I be not able to proue, let mee be hanged vp at the Hall Gate” (14). For proof, Lilburne now embarks upon a ranting exegesis of Revelation chapters 9 and 13 that turns the whole performance into the ravings of an inmate of Bedlam Hospital. For “there you shall see, that there came Locusts out of the Bottmlesse Pit, part of vvhom they are, and they are ther liuely described. Also you shall there finde, that the Beast (which is the Pope, or Roman State and government) hath given to him by the Dragon (the Devill) his Power and Seate, and great authoritie. So that the Popes authoritie comes from the Devill, and the Prelates, and their Creatures in their printed Bookes, doe challenge their authoritie, ­jurisdiction and Power, (that they exercise over all sorts of people) is from Rome” (14–15). The character of this judgment is written into the site of its preachment; yet Lilburne drags an even higher authority into the proceedings – the apocalyptic prophesies of St John the Divine – though he will make no use of the mythology of the Lamb’s War to

33093_Williams.indd 241

2022-09-01 16:54

242

The Communion of the Book

which Quaker preachers like George Fox would turn twenty years later with great effect.25 But, compared with Foxe’s dignified readers, Lilburne exhibits the lack of decency26 officials typically expected from unschooled readers of holy writ: For the Pope cannot give a better authoritie or calling to them then he himselfe hath. But his Authority and Calling is from the Devill: Therefore the Prelates Calling and authority is from the Devill alsoe, Revel. 9.3. And there came out of the smoake, Locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power as the Scorpions of the earth have power to hurt and vndoe men, as the Prelates daily doe. And also, Revel. 13.2. And the Beast which I saw (saith S. Iohn) was like unto a Leopard, and his feete were as the feete of a Beare, and his mouth as the mouth of a Lion, and the Dragon (that is to say, the Devill) gave him his power, his seat and great authoritie. (15)

It is a scene that might have once resonated in a world that took its ultimate meanings from the printed Word. Contrary to Foxe’s martyrs, however, Lilburne hardly sounds like a sober recipient of the sacramental Word, but rather as a raving exponent of an apocalyptic allegory. And from our vantage point in a world long since taken over by the medium of film or the digital image, the exercise quickly descends into farce. The speaker’s assumption of “Holy Orders” is a good case in point. As he begins to exhort the crowd, Lilburne manages to sound foolish in spite of his solemn assurance that “I speak to you in the name of the Lord, being afflicted with the spirit & power of the God of Heaven and earth, & I speake not the words of rashnesse or inconsideratenesse, but the words of sobernes, and mature deliberation; for I did consult with my God before I came hither, and desired him that hee would direct and enable me to speake that which might be for his glory, and the good of his people” (19–20). All “order and decency” have now been lost, as far as the Warden of the Fleet is concerned. He “commanded me to hold my peace. To whom I replied, I would speake and declare my cause and minde, though I were to be Hanged at the gate for my speaking” (23). The outcome is foreordained: “So then he commanded mee to be gagged, and if I spake any more that then I should be whipt againe upon the Pillary.” One can see John Cleese in the role of Lilburne, 25 See Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 125–42. 26 As, for instance, in the Scottish Canons of 1636. See above in this chapter, 230n4.

33093_Williams.indd 242

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 243

persisting in defiant, if still muffled, speech through his gag, a gag so tightly bound that blood foams at the corners of his mouth. If the scene is a “performative play-script,” it is no longer so in the sense meant by Sarah Covington or John King, since Lilburne is literally playing to his audience, whether down in the “pit” or else on the page. Indeed, at the end of this scene, “when I was to come downe, having taken my head out of the Pillarie, I looked about mee upon the people and said. I am more than a conqueror through him that hath loved mee. Vivat Rex. Let the King live forever” (24). The logic of performance should lead to James I’s bon mot: “No bishop, no King!” But the stop in Lilburne’s mind still p­revents closer scrutiny of that structure of authority; he remains the self-obsessed contradiction of his own heroic image. At the end of A Worke of the Beast, Lilburne attests nonetheless to the truth of his account: “I set to my name, by mee iohn lilbvrn, being written with part of mine owne blood” (30). His page is not literally reddened, of course; the Foxean image of written in blood is merely another indicator of his attempt to cut into that line of martyrs who are crowned in Foxe’s book of life. But later, he will affix a document recalling the autograph letters and other relevant documents inserted by Foxe at the end of many martyr narratives. Lilburne’s addendum is not intended to recall to his text the living voice of a dead martyr, however; he still speaks after all. He does so only to expose the contradictory character of the ruling authority, to delegitimate its right to stage public “executions.”27 What Lilburne’s text finally points to in this iterated image of the Court of Star Chamber is a real “worke of the Beast,” and the sitting archbishop as a genuine image of the Antichrist. To reprint an Order of the Court of Star Chamber in this context is no longer a saintly expression of a dying martyr; he allows that Court to convict itself: Whereas Iohn Lilburne, Prisoner in the Fleet, by sentence in Starchamber, did this day suffer condigne punishment for his severall offences, by whipping at a Cart, and standing in the Pillory, and as their Lordships were this day ­informed, during the time that his body was under the said execution, ­audaciously and wickedly, did not only utter sundry scandalous speeches, but likewise scattered divers copies of seditious bookes among the people 27 Achinstein makes the pertinent observation that “[p]ublic execution in general performed a symbolic function in English society to legitimate ruling authority” (27).

33093_Williams.indd 243

2022-09-01 16:54

244

The Communion of the Book

that beheld the said execution, for which very thing, among other offences of like nature, he hath beene censured in the said Court by the aforesaid sentence: It is therefore, by their Lordships ordered, that the said Iohn Lilburne should be laid alone, with yrons on his hands and legges in the Wards of the Fleet, where the basest and meanest sort of prisoners are used to be put; and that the Warden of the Fleet take especiall care to hinder the resort of any persons whatsoever unto him … And it was lastly ordered, that all persons that shall be hereafter produced to receive corporall punishment according to sentence of that Court, or by order of the Board, shall have their garments searched before they be brought forth, and neither writing nor other thing suffered to be about them; and their hands likewise to be bound, during the time they are under punishment.28

It is hardly surprising that Lilburne would suffer “condigne punishment” just short of death, given his public display of contempt for the prerogative court, and his theatrical defiance of its ecclesiastical ­authority. As we learn from his later writings, together with the archival findings of Mildred Gibb (54–7), Lilburne came very close to dying in irons. For the damp and cold of his solitary confinement and a sadistic delay in treating his wounds put him in a high fever. After the bravura performance was over, the young apprentice was left to count the cost, forced at last to beseech the implacable authorities that they “would be pleased to give leave to my Chirurgion to come to dresse and let me [sic] blood, otherwise I was in danger of a Feaver, which might take away my life” (1641:34). Some years later, Lt-Colonel John Lilburne, formerly of the Army of the Eastern Association, printed sworn testimony from several persons who had witnessed his sufferings eight years before; the witnesses appeared before a parliamentary committee to consider a bill of reparation for him. “In the first place, Mr Thomas Smith Marchant, upon his  oath declared to their Lordships” that he had seen Lilburne “whipt … so neare as hee was able to judge every 2.3. or 4. steps … and 28 This postscript is from the 1641 edition, which reprinted together The Christian Mans Triall and A Worke of the Beast, with this concluding addition of the Court Order (only available in 2nd ed. on ProQuest). The Court Order can also be found at: https://www. british-history.ac.uk/rushworth-papers/vol2/pp461-481. Since the Act for the Abolition of the Court of Star Chamber was passed by Parliament on 5 July 1641, however, Lilburne’s reprinting of the Court Order was mostly posturing. The original postscript of 1638 had included doggerel that Lilburne wrote to versify his martydom.

33093_Williams.indd 244

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 245

for the number hee did not judge them so few as 500. he was confident was the least” (“True relation,” 3). A woman named Mary Dorman also ­testified “that she saw Mr Lilburne whipt from Fleet bridge to Westminster, in such a barbarous, and cruell manner, that she was not able to expresse it, and that shee did beleeve both his shoulders were swelled almost as big as a penny loaf with the bruses of the knotted Cords.” There was also “Mr. Higs his Chirurgion,” who “testified upon oath” that he had “drest his back which was one of the miserablest that ever he did see: for the wheles in his back, made by his cruel whipping, were bigger then Tobacco-pipes.” And a “Mr Thomas Haws testified “that he did see Mr Lilburn set upon the Pillory, above (as he judged) the space of 2. hours,” and that “the Warden of the Fleet caused him to be gagged, in such a cruell manner, as if they would have torn his jawes in peeces, in so much that the blood came out of his mouth.” This retrospective of the martyr’s textual body suddenly puts the execution scene in a more ambiguous light. For what had begun to resemble The Life of Brian has just reverted to the moving solemnity of the sixteenth-century’s greatest prose work in English, The Actes and Monuments.

C o m m o n L aw v. P r e r o g a t i v e L aw : The Trial of Charles Rex Sharon Achinstein begins her study of Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (1994) with a telling truism: “The English Revolution was a revolution in reading” (3). As Sabrina Baron (2002) explains, “Most seventeenthcentury contemporaries would have agreed that the revolution they experienced was in large part constituted in the highly politicized act of (and greatly increased opportunity for) reading” (217). More importantly, Achinstein reads and interprets the revolutionary writings of the 1640s and ’50s as an expression of the political desire to construct a radically new public sphere in print – what Milton would later call a “fit audience” in Paradise Lost – in order to pry open the closed, ­secretive, private sphere of King and Court.29 In terms reminiscent of Elizabeth Eisentstein, Achinstein describes “the printing press” as “a major ­political agent during the English Revolution” (32), since it not only opened royal prerogative to public view30 but provided a revolutionary 29 Achinstein, Milton, 21–6. 30 As it did, for example, in 1645 in The King’s Cabinet Opened. See this work, xvii n25.

33093_Williams.indd 245

2022-09-01 16:54

246

The Communion of the Book

forum for all sides and every shade of political belief, in the continuing effort to sway public opinion. Her approach is both historical and rhetorical, examining a wide variety of ways in which “the construction of the ­revolutionary reader was not an abstract entity, nor a coherent ideology, but the product and sum of political and rhetorical practices of the revolutionary writers, both low and high” (22). On this model, she offers as Exhibit A the treason trial of John Lilburne in 1649. Of course, Lilburne had already crafted a viable form of revolutionary rhetoric a decade earlier to create readers who would contest the power of prerogative law. But now, “Writers justifying the trial and execution of the king” in 1649 had at all costs to avoid the rhetoric of martyrdom. They located authority rather “in the law of conscience or reason, which they claimed took precedence over custom and kingly prerogative” (28). But the shoe was on the other foot once Charles I claimed the martyr’s role. At the king’s trial, the lord president of the High Court of Justice said “This Court is founded upon that Authority of the Commons of England, in whom rests the supreme Jurisdiction.”31 This appeal of an English justice to the authority of the Commons rather than to regal authority, or “divine” prerogative,32 marks a major shift from a jurisprudence of inherited right, custom, and precedent, to abstract principles of law based not on custom, but on reason and “natural” principles.33 Yet how had such a legal revolution come about? In his account of the psychological changes wrought “by the demolition of Europe’s kin-based institutions,” Joseph Henrich identifies new “impersonal norms for dealing with nonrelations or strangers” as the prime reason why people in the late Middle Ages had begun “to prefer impartial rules and impersonal laws” instead of “a relational approach to law” (396, 397, 400). By contrast, “punishments for crimes in China during the same era depended on the relationship between the

31 Cited in Achinstein, Milton, 29–30. 32 In other words, the shift to abstract principles of law over regal prerogative was not nearly as straightforward or as immediate as it appears to be in Henrich’s weirdest People, 398–407. 33 Berman, Law, adds that in Parliament, in the era of the English Commonwealth, “the House of Commons now for the first time assumed greater power than the House of Lords” (9). Following the regicide, one of Parliament’s first acts was the abolition, on 19 March 1649, of the House of Lords, doing away with lordly prerogative, and confirming the “natural” supremacy of the Commons, “in whom rests the supreme Jurisdiction.”

33093_Williams.indd 246

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 247

individuals involved. In general, crimes committed against kin were punished more severely than those against nonrelatives, although elders could commit crimes against junior kin with lesser penalties than vice versa” (400). Indeed, “Chinese fathers could murder their sons and receive only a warning, while a son who harmed his father or older brother faced … stiffer penalties.” The difficulty with this history is the prior existence of impersonal law in the Code of Hammurabi (ca 1750 bce), for instance, in ancient Babylon. By the sixth century bce, the Greeks were also obliging “­citizens,” without respect of persons, “to come to the defense of their state.”34 And Lucius Junius Brutus, founder of the Roman Republic in 509 bce, was literally forced to choose between blood ties and impartial justice when his sons conspired to restore the tyranny of the Tarquin kings. For the sake of the Republic, Brutus sacrificed personal relations to the rule of law – a law that was no respecter of persons. As a nephew of Tarquinius and a member of the Tarquin clan, Brutus represents what Henrich calls the “medieval” principle of adherence to impersonal law over clan loyalties.35 According to the Roman historian Livy, Brutus, elected as one of two consuls of the Roman Republic, “bound” his ­fellow citizens “by an oath, that they would never suffer any man to assume the authority of king at Rome,”36 renouncing his own claim to the throne as a grandson of Rome’s fifth king. When his stepsons Titus and Tiberius were implicated in a plot to restore dynastic rule, Brutus ­condemned them to death rather than forswear his oath. As much as it grieved him to do so, his choice of impartial justice over ties of blood made Brutus a paragon of republican virtue in Livy’s Ab urbe condita.37 Livy began writing From the Founding of the City soon after Augustus’s naval victory over Mark Antony at Actium (31 bce), a triumph that ended the triumvirate and enabled Augustus to assume the office, if

34 MacMillan, War, 68. 35 Petrarch’s history of the popular uprising led by Brutus against the tyrant Tarquinius in the third book of Africa concludes: “Yearly oaths keep back the tyrants in perpetuity. The rule of law crushed their cruel scepters, and two men replaced one” (3.775–7). Ellis, 64. 36 Livy, Ab urbe, trans. Baker, Legendary, 42. 37 Concepts of impersonal justice and social equity likewise underwrote the law requiring military service for any candidate for public office in Rome: “In the early Roman Republic male citizens were liable for sixteen years of military service and could not hold office until they had done at least ten” (MacMillan, War, 53).

33093_Williams.indd 247

2022-09-01 16:54

248

The Communion of the Book

not the title, of emperor under cover of ancient republican forms.38 A century later, the poet Lucan, nephew to Seneca the Younger, was implicated in the failed Pisonian conspiracy to assassinate the emperor Nero. He did not cease to mourn the loss of the Republic and its impersonal laws in his epic poem The Civil Wars, left incomplete in 65 ce when he and his uncle were condemned to death.39 The example of Brutus continued to excite the imaginations of English republicans two millennia after the founding of the Roman Republic. In the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81, when fears of a Catholic successor to Charles II had the whole country in an uproar, Nathaniel Lee’s play Lucius Junius Brutus (1681) provoked a swift reaction from the Lord Chamberlain who “stopped it after a few days because of ‘Scandalous Expressions & Reflections upon ye Government.’”40 But even this staged account of the “difference betwixt the sway / Of partial tyrants and of a free-born people, / Where no man shall offend because he’s great” (5.2.43–5),41 shows how thoroughly and profoundly ­seventeenth-century Englishmen grasped the character of this ­psychological revolution that had taken place in ancient Rome over five hundred years before the birth of Christ. The example of Brutus was not mentioned at the trial of Charles I in January 1649, although the monarch was accused of attempting “to subvert the fundamental laws of the land.”42 Rebuking John Bradshaw, Lord President of the Court, for the audacity of the charge, Charles insisted, “I would know by what authority I was taken … When I have understood the lawfulness of the Authority, I will make my Answer … In the mean time [sic], remember that I am your King, your lawfull King” (“Full Proceedings,” 14). But his regal claim of hereditary ­prerogative was summarily dismissed by Bradshaw, who insisted that 38 In Defence of the English People (1651), Milton emphasized the immediate relevance of the story of Brutus to the trial and execution of Charles I, expressing his “pride in our fathers who, in establishing this [republican] state, displayed a wisdom and a sense of ­freedom equal to that of the ancient Romans” (cpw 4.i:495). 39 In 1627, at the beginning of Parliament’s struggle with Charles I, Thomas May, mp, published his translation of De bello civili, Lucan’s elegy for the Republic. Norbrook, Writing, remarks that “Lucan was the central poet of the republican imagination, and his traces can be found again and again amongst leading Parliamentarians” (24). 40 Owen, “Partial tyrants,” 463. 41 Lee, Lucius Junius Brutus, 101. 42 “The full proceedings of the High Court of Justice against King Charles,” 72. Acces­sed 7 February 2021. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A40615.0001.001?view=toc.

33093_Williams.indd 248

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 249

the court required “of you, in the Name of the People of England, by whom you are elected King, that you make answer to them” (15). Although Bradshaw would liken “Charles to Nero, and even to Caligula, condemned by the Senate of Rome,” at his sentencing hearing on 27 January 1649,43 the High Court’s case was more nearly predicated on the supposed laws of Edward the Confessor, the last Saxon king of England before the Conquest. By now, the Confessor appeared to many on Parliament’s side to be the “veritable personification of Saxon England”44 and its supposed custom of elective monarchy.45 As legal historian Janelle Greenberg recounts one such popular legend of Edward: “According to medieval chroniclers, an assembly of estates elected him king while still in his mother’s womb, even though he had two older brothers. Here was striking proof that Parliament could alter the succession, a power inimical to the idea of a divine right of hereditary succession” (Greenberg, “Confessor’s Laws,” 616). Even John Foxe, whose Actes and Monuments was widely regarded at the time as a pillar of the Elizabethan settlement, appealed to “the sayde lawes of Edward” for a “true” historical example of “The Office of a King,” whose holder was supposedly chosen “to rule the earthly kingdom, and the Lordes people: & aboue all things, to reuerence his holy church: to gouerne it, and to defend it from iniuries: to plucke away wicked doers, & vtterly to destroye them. Which vnless he do, the name of a king agreeth not vnto him, but he loseth the name of a king” (tamo, 3:231).46 Given that every one of the twenty-four English kings from William the Conqueror to Charles Stuart had sworn a ­solemn oath at his coronation to “keep and observe the laws of King Edward,” the leges Edwardi Confessoris came to suggest “that there had been no Norman conquest” (Greenberg, 614, 613). Among a respected group of “antiquarians and lawyers” (619), including “William

43 Terchetti, “Regicide,” 6. 44 Greenberg, “Confessor’s Laws,” 614. 45 Greenberg credits John Sadler’s Rights of the kingdom, or, Customs of our ancestors (1649) with the first full explanation of these twin principles of elective monarchy and contractual government, to which Bradshaw would appeal in the case against Charles Rex, as these were often derived in radical polemics from the Confessor’s laws (625–7). As she rightly concludes, Milton used the Confessor’s Laws in Defense of the English People (1651) “even more tellingly than Sadler” (627). 46 Greenberg offers a valuable summary of Milton’s own use of Foxe’s “The Office of a King” in his first Defense of the English People (629–31).

33093_Williams.indd 249

2022-09-01 16:54

250

The Communion of the Book

Lambard, Sir Henry Spelman, John Selden, Sir William Dugdale, and Sir Edward Coke,” notes Greenberg, the laws of Edward “were held in such awe that they were equated with the common law itself” (615). For such reasons, the trial of an English monarch for the crime of High Treason took on the Janus-face of a trial of two opposing systems of law, the one asserting common law precedents, the other defending Norman prerogative. The priority, and even supremacy, of the common law had already been claimed in the reign of James I by Sir Edward Coke, who was “chief justice first of Common Pleas and then of King’s Bench” (Berman, 214). Under Coke’s leadership, a bitter battle had ensued as “the twelve judges of the Common Pleas and King’s Bench … sought to control the ­jurisdiction of the prerogative courts.” It was a battle that would soon be fought by opposing armies through two terrible civil wars, for which James’s son Charles now stood arraigned in the High Court of Justice. Charles stoutly denied that England had ever been “an Elective Kingdome, but hereditary, for almost, these two thousand years” (“Full Proceedings,” 15), defending the royal prerogative that he claimed had continued unbroken for millennia. By the second day of his trial, he would add a further claim of defending “the liberties also of the people of England,” based on the idea that “if Power without laws, can make laws and change the Fundamentall laws of the Kingdome, I know not what subject in England can be secure of his life, or of any thing which he doth call his own” (26). Sharply reminding the king, however, that “you have been heard to let fall such language, as if you had not been subject to the law, or that the law had not been your superiour” (64), Bradshaw invoked the “impersonal” principle that “the law is your superiour: you ought to have ruled according to the law, you ought to have done so, and your pretence hath been, that you have done so. But sir, the question is, who shall be the expositors of the law?” The same question had been asked in other ways by Chief Justice Coke in the reign of James I, one that in the reign of his son Charles I would be left to clashing armies to settle. To Bradshaw, the issue was already settled by common-law precedent and legal provenance: “[N]ay this soveraign and high Court of Justice, the Parliament of England, … may well be obliged to be the highest expounders of the law, since they are the sole makers of it.” Based on the principle of parental priority, “Sir, as the law is your superior, so truly, there is something that is ­superiour to the law, which is the Parent or Author of the

33093_Williams.indd 250

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 251

law, and that is the people of England” (65). It is the same principle remarked by Joseph Henrich as one of the hallmarks of early modern psychology. It is also a principle well summed up in Bradshaw’s peroration on the fourth and final day of the trial, when he asks “whether you have been as you ought to be, a Protector of England, or a destroyer of England, let all England judge, or all the world that hath beheld it; and though Sir, you have it by inheritance, in the way that is spoken of, yet it cannot be denyed, but your Office is an Office of Trust, and indeed an Office of the highest Trust that can be lodged in any single person” (81). But was the issue so clearcut? By what authority? That of the Parliament? How so, if a majority of the mps had been ejected just weeks before by Colonel Pride’s Purge of royalists and Presbyterians? The king had reason to ask. As for the people, the majority scorned the proceedings as a military coup. After the regicide, but before his own trial for treason, John Lilburne spoke for a majority of the people in predicting where such arguments must lead. Using many of the terms that Bradshaw had used to impeach Charles Rex, Lilburne now moved to impeach Oliver Cromwell for his leading role in violently overturning the laws of the nation: And yet this very Mr. Oliver hath since been the principal Instrument to pluck up the House of Lords by the roots, as usurpers and encroachers, ­because they would not joyn with him to cut off the Kings head (for that which he is as guilty of himself,) and so take him out of his way that he might be absolute King himself, as now he is, and more then ever the King was in his life … The like of which tyranny the King never did in all his Raign; and yet by Saint Olivers means, lost his head for a Tyrant.47

From the standpoint of Henrich’s weird folk, the dictates of prerogative law may well have been exposed as unjust, as instanced by Lilburne in the Court of Star Chamber. But were the Confessor’s laws, referenced in the basic principles drawn by Bradshaw from the common law, more reliable as a guide? To answer that question, some comparative understanding of English law is required. For English legal history remained parochial, and most of a century behind humanist approaches to jurisprudence on the Continent.

47 Lilburne, Legall Fundamental, 31.

33093_Williams.indd 251

2022-09-01 16:54

252

The Communion of the Book

Mos Gallicus: Humanist Jurisprudence and the English Legal System One must look across the Channel to Guillaume Budé (1467–1540) and his juridical reading at Bourges in France to understand the nature of common law jurisprudence in England. As C.P. Rodgers remarks, Budé48 was the first humanist jurist in Europe to engage in “the ­historical study of law and legal institutions, and a heightened awareness of ‘­system’ and the need to present law as a rational discipline.”49 Budé’s Annotations on Twenty Four Books of the Pandects (1508), a “Digest” of sixth-century Byzantine law, had taken on the Herculean “task of d ­ ismantling the Justinianic texts of Roman Law” by identifying “the amendments and interpolations made to the texts by Justinian’s ­compiler Tribonian because of the latter’s vulgar Byzantine style” and anachronist usage.50 “Instead of glossing the texts or merely providing commentary on them – as medieval scholars [the so-called Glossators and Commentators] had done – Budé analysed the social changes reflected in Roman Law e.g. the decline of the Senate” (Rodgers, 130). As a result, Bourges became the humanist centre for historical study of law – the so-called Mos Gallicus or French style of humanist jurisprudence – which put “each text in its proper historical perspective,”51 exposing the ways in which Justinian’s Corpus Juris had been “amended by the compilers to suit sixth century Byzantine social conditions” (130–1). Once humanist jurists understood that Roman law was in fact an anachronism – reflecting the social circumstances of a dead past, not of present life – the Mos Gallicus of jurists like Jacques Cujas and François Hotman began the wholesale intellectual “shift from Roman Law studies to the study of French feudal law and then to an

48 In his Annotations on Luke 1.4, Erasmus had penned an extraordinary encomium to Budé: “I am able to think of absolutely no one north of the Alps who demonstrates so ­perfectly all the gifts and all the qualities of an educated man” (Sider, Erasmus, 280). 49 Rodgers, “Humanism,” 129–30. 50 Budé, who cut his teeth on Homeric Greek with the help of his friend Janus Lascaris, a transplanted Byzantine scholar, had been equipped to expose Tribonian anachronisms in the Pandects well before Lascaris’ publication of the “Didymus or D scholia” in 1517 (Ford, “Homer,” 9). 51 As Rodgers outlines these developments in French legal scholarship in the generations after Budé, it was students of the humanist jurist Jacques Cujas who made the shift (131).

33093_Williams.indd 252

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 253

examination of feudalism in general and French national history” (Rodgers, 131). There is nonetheless a problem with this version of the Mos Gallicus: parts of it are likewise ahistorical. While a “historicist approach to Roman law unquestionably did develop at the University of Bourges during the sixteenth century,” Renaissance historian Debora Shuger remarks that it “developed contemporaneously with the reception of Roman law, which in 1495 became the common law of the Holy Roman Empire.”52 Evidently Roman law was not a relic of the past; it was a living creation, and of more than antiquarian interest. Even the Reformer Martin Luther accepted it as the patrimony of ancient Rome. Both Philipp Melanchthon, Luther’s friend and co-Reformer at Wittenberg who had studied law at Tübingen, and “Calvin, who was both a lawyer and a humanist, shared this extraordinary reverence for Roman law” (63). Calvin had even replaced canon law at Geneva “with Justinian’s Corpus.” Moreover, the Mos Gallicus still had to contend, as Donald R. Kelley points out, with “not only the Aristotelianism of the university of Paris but also the methods of the jurists at the university of Orléans,”53 a jurisprudence based on the medieval Commentators’ procedures. But, by virtue of a mere handful of these anti-Scholastic jurists at Bourges, it was France, not Italy, that would become the birthplace of humanist studies in the law, contrary to the medieval and thoroughly anti-humanist Mos Italicus. Kelley, a leading historian of medieval jurisprudence, disputes any notion, however, “that the conflict between humanist and scholastic jurisprudence was a gradual victory of the children of the light against the forces of medieval darkness,” claiming that such a view “is in no way historically tenable” (778). Honouring such Perugian jurists as Cino da Pistoia and their leader Bartolus da Sassoferatto as opposed to the Bourges jurists like Budé, Cujas, and Hotman, Kelley puts far more weight “not on the amateurs of the mos gallicus … but rather on the ‘pros,’ the advocates of the mos italicus – that is, so to say, on ‘jurisprudence Italian style.’” Contrasting Bartolist jurisprudence with that of Bourges, Kelley argues, the main “difference is that the mos italicus was concerned to preserve the spirit of classical forms rather than the ­letter of classical texts” (784). While he allows that “[the] iconoclasm of Valla and the ‘grammatical’ method of Poliziano were certainly 52 Shuger, Renaissance Bible, 61. 53 D.R. Kelley, “Civil Science,” 781.

33093_Williams.indd 253

2022-09-01 16:54

254

The Communion of the Book

essential for the restoration and interpretation of legal texts … they had no closer relation to jurisprudence than the higher criticism of the Bible has to theology – which is to say, not necessarily any at all” (778). To cavil about historical matters, as humanist jurists were wont to do, was to miss the point of good jurisprudence: “law was the product of justice” (786), an impartial process requiring the highest principles of reason and equity. In fact, Scholastic “jurists were professionally bound to subordinate literary accuracy and even historical fact to legal principle. ‘Grammarians will not fight with jurists if they understand them aright,’ wrote the sixteenth-century legist Rebuffi, ‘for justice must have priority’” (785). (Erasmus was similarly rejected by Scholastic theologians who scorned “poetry.”)54 Kelley’s defence of the Bartolist jurists remains a reflection of the broad authority granted to Aristotle in the Middle Ages, and of the Scholastics’ use “of Aristotelian categories and ‘scholastic method’” to resolve contradictions in a discipline that kept its independence from Scholastic philosophy, holding to “philosophical ideas and ­constructs embedded in its own tradition” (782). Elsewhere, however, Kelley quite sarcastically concedes the force of Valla’s philological critique of the Bartolists in their failure to understand the meaning of many words used in Tribonian’s Digest of Justinian law, often replacing classical terms with medieval ones having no clear referents in reality and, just as often, valuing abstraction over concreteness. As Kelley puts it, Valla had faulted Scholastic jurists for inflict[ing] upon law the same kind of atrocities which their Aristotelian brethren had inflicted upon philosophy. With their quibblings and their quiddities, they had detached Roman law from common sense as well as from historical context; they had dehumanized a “human science.” For this flock of philistines, who preferred the company of such “geese” as Bartolus and Accursius to the “swans” of ancient jurisprudence, Valla had nothing but scorn.55

Even if Kelley’s criticism of Bartolus is meant ironically, he clearly prefers Baldus de Ubaldis (1327–1400), Bartolus’s student and successor at Perugia, for his notable originality “in developing the conceptual 54 See this work, 74n16. 55 D.R. Kelley, Foundations, 41.

33093_Williams.indd 254

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 255

resources of civil law” that were available to the mos italicus (783). Rather than ignore or explain away “the contradictions or ‘antinomies’ which Justinian’s editors were unable to purge from the millennium of ­accumulated legal experience and legislation on which the Digest [or Pandect] was based,” Baldus “went so far as to welcome contraria on the grounds that they opened up new possibilities of interpretation and of resolving difficult cases.” As Kelley holds, law was a tool to resolve conceptual and social contradictions by means of the Scholastic method of dialectics. One striking example of how Baldus used dialectics to overcome contraries concerns the traditional antinomies of “nature and will.” If the natural world is inherently subject to natural law – indeed, has no choice but to obey the jus naturale – human will, as Kelley defines it, is left free by its very nature. And yet it is law that still protects human free will, ensuring “that it is not reduced to” a state of nature, or left entirely subject to natural law, “and so free will is limited for the sake of justice” (783). Simply put, the law does not exist to bind human will but rather to free it – within limits – from necessity. Law is that plane on which human freedom and natural necessity can be reconciled. As Kelley then remarks, quoting Baldus, “‘The science of law cannot exist without the acts of men,’ … and elsewhere,” as Baldus writes, “‘jurisprudence is the science of accidents.’” From such a premise, Kelley concludes that a just outcome is the law’s highest priority, an outcome that is inherently reasonable and equitable. For Kelley, Scholastic jurisprudence is then grounded in pure reason more than it is in contingent history, since it is the search for universals amid mere accidents. “What Valla claimed for rhetoric and Poliziano for grammar, Renaissance jurists claimed for their discipline: it represented the highest product and agency of the civilizing process” (794). English history, however, made English law almost impervious to the resolution of contraries. Prerogative law, a product of the Norman Conquest, was a reaction against “the High Court of Parliament’s” ongoing attempts to constrain the sovereign lawgiver. The first, though surely not the last, document in that historic struggle was Magna Carta (1215). By virtue of Magna Carta, common-law precedents and the court of common law now became the bulwark of an unwritten constitution against the regal abuse of power, as instanced in the Petition of Right of 1628 presented to King Charles I. John Lilburne even called Magna Carta “a Bulwarke to secure the Commons of England from being eaten

33093_Williams.indd 255

2022-09-01 16:54

256

The Communion of the Book

up and destroyed, by the prerogative and wills of Kings of England.”56 He also appealed to Coke’s fourth Institutes for proof that William the Conqueror “three severall times took his oath after his being owned for King, to maintaine their Laws and Liberties, as being not able, nor judging his Conquest so good, just and secure a Plea to hold his new got Crown by, as an after mutuall compact with the people, or their Representatives over whom he was to rule.”57 His good friend and defender, the anonymous author of Regal Tyrannnie Discovered, appealed similarly to the implied contract between sovereign and subject in Coke’s common-law view of an “ancient constitution” that, “by his Coronation Oath,” the king was firmly “bound to passe and assent to all such Lawes, as his people or Commons shall chuse.”58 The only way English jurisprudence could hope to square this circle was to make common law the progenitor of prerogative law.59 And yet, in historical fact, royal prerogative was the foundation both of common law and of prerogative courts. Across the Channel, sixteenth-century jurists of the Mos Gallicus had devised several ways to make native history the ground of a “reorganisation of jurisprudence,” putting it “on a more universal basis” (Rodgers, 132). Whereas Jacques Cujas had “considered the Corpus juris civilis exclusively as a historical document,” and François Hotman (1524–1590) was “vociferously anti-Romanist,” “at least in the AntiTribonianus,” Debra Shuger argues that it was reasonable to accept “[t]he generalization of Roman law as a basis of a universal and comparative system of jurisprudence” (62). Both Hotman and Jean Bodin ­(1530–1596) had created “a deliberate countermovement to the ­historicist and antiquarian tendencies of Cujas and his followers, a movement designed to refute charges that Roman law had become irrelevant in post classical society” (65). But, contrary to Bodin, a staunch

56 Lilburne, Resolved Mans, 20. 57 Lilburne, Legall Fundamentall, 44. 58 Regall Tyrannie discovered, 43. 59 But “if the foundation of the prerogative courts rested on the royal prerogative, so too, though in a less specific sense, did the courts of the common law” (Waite, 144). P.B. Waite sees no “clear distinction between the justices in the prerogative courts and those in the common law courts,” given how, “in the Court of High Commission in 1601 there were as many common law lawyers and judges as there were bishops” (144). As Waite concludes, “It is too simple to say that the struggle” between the two legal systems “was a defence of liberty against oppression: it was also a quarrel of law against law” (152).

33093_Williams.indd 256

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 257

defender of absolute monarchy,60 Hotman was renowned as an opponent of royal prerogative. So, when Hotman succeeded Jacques Cujas in the chair of jurisprudence at Bourges in 1567 and resumed his predecessor’s project of editing the twelfth-century Libri Feudorum, he could show how French jurisprudence was not derived from Justinian law. This discovery opened a chasm between Roman and native law. As Rodgers argues, “the rise and spread of the feudum” that Hotman had exposed revealed “a pays de droit écrit [country of written law] and pays du droit coutoumier [country of customary law], governed by different systems of law” (150, 132). A native system of customary law, distinct from Roman law, now offered a revolutionary concept “of the history and origins of their own national law” (131), making it historically distinct from imperial law. In Francogallia (1573), Hotman even found historical precedents for an elective monarchy [equivalent to the leges Edwardi] by consent of the people.61 Decades later, Hotman’s historicist methods inspired Sir Henry Spelman (1562–1641) to rethink the ­historical origins of English law. Following Hotman’s lead, Spelman identified two distinct systems of English law in his landmark Treatise on Feuds and Tenures by Knight Service in England (1639), where he showed that the common law was not ancient but relatively recent. Because he “corresponded with continental scholars,” and “had a knowledge of medieval European customs,” he “approached English history as a part of European history. ‘Spelman, reading continental books saw that English law for all its insularity was a member of a great European family, a family between the members of which there were strong familial likenesses.’ This was the vital realisation the common lawyers could not grasp” (Rodgers, 149). English law had never existed sui generis; it had arrived in successive waves of ­invaders, the latest being the Norman Conquest. In making “a detailed analysis of Anglo-Saxon customs,” Spelman was able to prove “stage by stage that they did not reveal a developed feudal law” and that “AngloSaxon law was Germanic in origin, contrary to the fantasies of Coke and Fortescue who believed the common law to be of pre-Roman

60 Berman says that “Bodin’s major work, The Republic, published in 1576, was directed in part against French Huguenot doctrines of divided sovereignty, legal limitations on monarchical authority, and a right of resistance to monarchs who defy such limitations” (236). In Berman’s estimate, Bodin was a defender, not a critic, of absolute monarchy. 61 Jackson, “Elective Kingship,” 155–71; see especially 157–9.

33093_Williams.indd 257

2022-09-01 16:54

258

The Communion of the Book

antiquity” (149). While “the Anglo-Saxons had an embryonic form of feudal land tenure, feudalism in its developed form only arrived when William I divided the country among his followers. From this time we hear of ‘feudal’ tenure, and the terminology of feudalism becomes commonplace” (150). Indeed, the two systems were not just distinct, but deeply antagonistic: Norman law had superseded Saxon law. Spelman’s work, published on the eve of the Revolution, brought a “knowledge of feudalism” (149) into English legal history that laid bare the fictional continuity of the common law from pre-Roman to modern times, much as Petrarch’s Africa had exposed the whole fiction of Rome’s imperial continuity in the Holy Roman Empire.62 Edmund Gibson, who at century’s end published the first “Life of the Author” as a preface to The Posthumous Works of Sir Henry Spelman Kt. Relating to the Laws and Antiquities of England (1698), singled out Spelman’s efforts to learn the “Saxon” language in which the ancient laws were written – a prerequisite for any humanist after Valla – as the ground of his ­revolutionary ­discovery that the common law was of feudal Norman origin. Gibson further emphasized the value of a comparative “search into the Reasons and Foundations of the Law” that had prompted Spelman “to examine the ancient Laws and Monuments, not only of our own, but also of most other Northern Kingdoms.”63 Now, jurists could read law comparatively, historically, and critically. But if common law and prerogative law were both products of the Norman Conquest,64 what was the relevance of Saxon law? And to what other source of law could one turn in the face of an intervening “dark” age?

M o s A n g l i c u s ( 1 ) : T h e C o m m o n L aw of “Continuity” By 1649, the king’s “uncommon” abuse of law in two civil wars had made it expedient for the High Court of Justice to appeal for authority to the Confessor’s Laws and the coronation oath of each king since Edward (d. 1066) to uphold said laws, thus ruling out the Stuart dogma 62 See further discussion in this work: 59–61, 59n85, 60n88, 61n92, 124, 247n35, 302nn11–12, 303nn14–18, 317n49. 63 Gibson, “Life of Sir Henry Spelman.” 64 Pocock, Ancient Constitution, recognized that the Levellers came to reject the common law as continuous with Saxon law, identifying it rather with the “Norman Yoke” ­(125–7), and turning then to natural-law theory for their proposed Agreement of the People.

33093_Williams.indd 258

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 259

of a “sacred” monarchy with timeless prerogatives. The High Court went further, publishing its proceedings against the usurper of the people’s liberties in its appeal to the court of public opinion, both at home and abroad. But then, on 30 January, the day of the regicide, Eikon Basilike landed in the bookstalls like a smoking petard. The “King’s Book” portrayed the monarch as the sole protector of the people’s liberties by appropriating the rhetoric of martyrdom to bolster his image as God’s representative on earth. Foxe’s Actes and Monuments was turned inside out, as it were, transforming the absolutist and abusive prerogative of Henry VIII and his daughter Mary into the abused prerogative of King Charles I. And the Eikon carried the day by virtue of the pathos of its appeal to the masses, going through “thirty-five editions in London within one year of its first appearance” and “twenty-five more in the same period in Ireland and abroad.”65 The rhetoric of martyrdom had made an about-face in the service of a counter-­revolutionary politics. Laura Lunger Knoppers suggests that Milton was thus no longer able to resort to the discourse of martyrdom in his poetry. Instead, his divinely human hero in Paradise Regain’d followed Milton in making the same sort of answer the poet had given in prose to the “royal ­martyr”: reject theatrics in favour of reason.66 Eikonoklastes, Milton’s prose response to the “King’s Book” by order of the Council of State, would not appear before 6 October 1649. A second, enlarged edition was published only at some point after 6 June 1650.67 In terms of sales, the republican campaign for the hearts and minds of the “People” was lost from the outset. No amount of reasoned analysis, certainly not that of the revolutionaries whom Achinstein portrays as arguing for a government of reason in the ­relatively free public space of print (27–30), could stanch the tide of the royal martyr’s blood. Few readers saw any contradiction in the “king’s” (or his ghostwriter John Gauden’s) claims to uphold “a rational soverantie of soule, and freedom of will in every man,” as Milton wrote, “and yet, with an implicit repugnancy would have his [own] reason [be] the sovran of that sovranty” (cpw 3:412). To Milton, it was the king’s will, not reason, that had made itself sovereign. In The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, published a few days after the regicide, Milton turned to a 65 cpw 3, ed. Hughes, 150. 66 Knoppers, “Paradise Regained and the Politics of Martyrdom,” 212–14. 67 Campbell, Milton Chronology, 108–9.

33093_Williams.indd 259

2022-09-01 16:54

260

The Communion of the Book

thirteenth-century chronicle for proof that the king’s will was legally bound upon his coronation by the ceremonial “Sword of St. Edward born before them by an officer who was call’d the Earle of the Palace, eev’n at the times of thir highest pomp and solemnities, to mind them, saith Matthew Paris, the best of our Historians, that if they errd, the Sword had power to restraine them.”68 Citing Paris again in Eikonklastes, “as though” he were “intent on not leaving one scintilla of doubt in the reader’s mind as to his meaning,” remarks Greenberg, “Milton added that punishment by the sword was rarely short of capital” (628). But Milton could insist until he was blue in the face that “[m]artyrs bear witness to the truth, not to themselves”; death had given King Charles an authority that Milton could not hope to equal, not even by quoting John 31:31: “If I beare witness of my self, saith Christ, my witness is not true” (3:575). The death of the regal martyr endowed him with an authority that rivalled scripture. Milton could only conclude with disgust that the “Portrait of the Royal Martyr” was written “but to catch the worthless approbation of an inconstant, irrational, and Image-doting rabble” (3:601). As Knoppers shows from the historical record, the image of the royal martyr soon transcended reason altogether: “The cult of the royal martyr circulated by image or by printed word; following the Eikon Basilike, Charles I was represented in a number of Christ-like poses,” where he even “holds up his hands” in one of them “as if to show Christ-like wounds; in royalist iconography, the Stuart king is, apparently, not beheaded but crucified.”69 The “King’s Book” had turned Foxe inside out, transforming the royal martyr into a likeness of Bishop Fisher’s “crucyfixe,” where the “book” was no longer a book, much less a ­narrative or an argument to be read. Instead, it was a holy icon to be kissed, an idol to be worshipped, a calculated perversion of the Word made flesh.70 The government that Milton served after 15 March 1649 now felt itself threatened on two sides: on the one hand by the multitude insistent on the mythic continuity of regal authority and eager to “kiss” the King’s Book; and on the other, by Levellers urging Army radicals to “mutiny” against “Agreement” breakers just weeks after the king’s trial and 68 cpw 3:218. Milton quotes from the chronicle Historia maior by Matthew Paris (d. 1259). The passage appears “in The Common Place Book” (Hughes, 218n105). 69 Knoppers, Historicizing, 23. 70 Knoppers, “Politics,” argues that the “King’s Book” conflated the Davidic Psalms with the Passion of Christ to assimilate the “Royal Martyr” to Foxe’s martyrology (205–6). She ignores Foxe’s choice of “Actes,” along with Eusebius’s courtroom dramas, as more modest “human” models which don’t presume on a gospel model of the divine Passion.

33093_Williams.indd 260

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 261

execution. As a result, the Council of State ordered Lilburne and three of his Leveller associates to be dragged out of bed and haled before them in the early hours of 28 March 1649, to account for what had been printed in a two-part pamphlet, Englands New Chains (26 February, 24 March 1649). Particularly in the latter, Lilburne had challenged the legality of an unelected Council of State and accused the Army ­leaders – Cromwell in particular – of having bargained in bad faith toward An Agreement of the People in the negotiations that had begun in November but were broken off after Lilburne published his own version of the Agreement and abruptly left London on 15 December 1648.71 As David Loewenstein shows in some detail, Englands New Chains exposed some basic contradictions in the character of the Revolution. Particularly, Lilburne and “the Levellers felt that the new regime had betrayed their Agreement of December 1648 whereby the people were ‘flattered with notions of being the Original of all just power.’” Worse still, as Loewenstein dissects a number of logical inconsistencies in the “legal” claims of the new government, “A realm governed by the politically conservative Rump, ‘where … liberty [is] so much pretended, so deerly purchased,’ only confirms for Lilburne the alarming disjunction between a vision of hard-won revolutionary freedom achieved with great difficulty by the people and the reality of a new age of centralized, military power cunningly masked by the public discourse of liberty” (Representing, 44). After their examination by the Council of State on 28 March, the four Leveller leaders were charged with treason and imprisoned in the Tower of London. Lilburne, the first of the four to be brought to the bar, was tried in open court (something he had demanded) in the last week of October; his trial was the second courtroom drama of that spectacle-filled year. As Sharon Achinstein remarks, “Lilburne evoked, crafted, and sparked the public,” particularly the jury, “into becoming readers of law who could understand and take part in the political process” (42). He found his authority in Sir Edward Coke’s Institutes,72 a copy of which he held “in his hand during the entire course of the trial” (50).

71 Henderson, “Drafting,” 164, 169. 72 Bodet, “Sir Edward Coke’s Third Institutes,” 476. Achinstein mistakenly identifies the book in Lilburne’s hand as a volume of Coke’s Reports.

33093_Williams.indd 261

2022-09-01 16:54

262

The Communion of the Book

Coke (1552–1634), chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas in the reign of James I, had been a keen student of the common law, untouched by the humanist jurisprudence of Budé, Cujas, and Hotman on the Continent, and thus “insular” and even “anti-historical” in his methods.73 “Central to the common law attitude to history, which accompanied this insularism,” C.P. Rodgers explains, “was the theory that the common law was a body of ‘immemorial custom’” whose ­origins were “time out of mind” (136), and whose timeless provisions even kings were bound to obey. For the most part, as Harold Berman remarks, “Coke justified judicial decisions and parliamentary positions that had the effect of limiting royal power on the ground that they were dictated by the historical precedents of English law – precedents endorsed by previous monarchs” (240). It was not that Coke denied, or even doubted, James’s “theory of absolute monarchy,” expressed in a Bodinish argument that had been published by James VI of Scotland in The Trew Law of Free Monarchy (1598). Prosecuting his case against followers of John Knox, James claimed to be God’s representative on earth. If “[t]he sovereign’s oath was to God alone,” “he could not, even if he wanted to, divest himself of any part of his indivisible supremacy” (237). The Trew Law of Free Monarchy insisted, as Jean Bodin put it, that “[t]he monarch alone is ‘free.’” At the same time, it was “Coke’s belief that the laws of James’s predecessors remained in force that was the chief bone of contention between him and the king” (240). Holding these deeply contrary beliefs, Coke, a disgraced justice in 1621, but now an elected mp, would urge Parliament to challenge with a “Protestation” in its Journal the king’s arbitrary closure of debate, proclaiming rather “that the liberties, franchises, privileges and ­jurisdictions of Parliament are the ancient and undoubted birthright and inheritance of the subjects of England” (cited in Berman, 240). The common law, which Coke sought to make the supreme law of England, had already made freedom of speech an English birthright, at least in the precincts of Parliament. Coke, a believer in absolute monarchy, could thus assert, quite unselfconsciously, the primacy of the common law. Before the regicide, John Lilburne, “prisoner in the Tower of London,” had used Coke to claim that the common law was “the Law of this Land,” which “is equally and alike our common birthright and inheritance

73 Rodgers, 140, 139.

33093_Williams.indd 262

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 263

(for all the distinguishing, deviding [sic] names amongst us) unto which the meanest man in England is as much intituled and intaled [sic] unto, as the greatest Subject.”74 “Freeborn John” proclaimed himself Coke’s intellectual heir as a tireless advocate for the common right, who had begun his “legal” career – and gained political notoriety – by petitioning “the high Court of Parliament” in 1646 to “preserve and defend my birth right and priviledges, which is the inheritance of all the freeborne people of England.”75 Now, in October 1649, he stood in the “high Court of Parliament” to defend with his life that Coke-inspired version of liberty. Despite, or perhaps because of, its contradictions, Coke’s legal principles proved most useful to Lilburne. Since Coke assigned to juries the sole right to decide criminal cases,76 Lilburne appealed to his jury over the heads of his judges, dismissing the latter as mere “cyphers” (Achinstein, 46) and insisting on the complete competence of a ­common-law jury to acquit him of the prerogative charge of treason.77 But he went further: “You that call yourselves Judges of the Law, are no more but Norman Intruders [on the common law], and indeed and in Truth, if the Jury please, are no more but Cyphers, to pronounce their Verdict.” Like an actor in a French farce, Judge Jermyn whinged: “Was there ever such a damnable blasphemous Heresie as this is … to call the Judges of the Law Cyphers? … there was never such a damnable Heresie broached in this Nation before” (Gregg, 299). But, holding to the continuity of the “ancient” common law, Lilburne sought to annul the laws of the Norman Conquest. As Achinstein parses his ­performance, by “adopting the model of a national jury for his audience, first in the court-room, and then in the press, he contributed to a revolutionary theory of citizen activism, endowing his audiences with the positive powers of authority for judgment” (42). And he was swiftly rewarded – within the hour (Gibb, 294) – by a jury vote of Not Guilty, although he and the other three Leveller leaders, now unlikely to be tried, were not released from prison until 74 Lilburne, “The oppressed mans importunate,” 1. 75 Lilburne, “To the Hon[ble].” Single sheet. 76 Sir Edward Coke, Third Reports, VII. 77 “Cyphers” was a term that Lilburne before now had only used conditionally in his printed pamphlets. See his “Grand Plea” (20 October 1647), where he warned that “if the House of Commons suffer the Lords to exercise such an arbitrary illegall tyranny as they have done upon me … then the House of Commons stands for meere cyphers, the Judges in Westminster-Hall for cyphers, and all the Lawes in England for cyphers” (11).

33093_Williams.indd 263

2022-09-01 16:54

264

The Communion of the Book

8 November 1649. Three weeks later, Lilburne put his name to a pamphlet declaring the justice of the jury verdict in terms that recall Coke’s doctrine of “the wisdom of many generations” (Rodgers, 137) embodied in the mythical continuity of common law,78 a wisdom that, as Lilburne wrote after his acquittal, hath been of so long continuance in this Nation, that all the changes of  turning the Nation upside down, could never alter it, either by the Conquest  of  the Romans, Saxons, Danes, or the late Normans: and though since William the Conquerours time, some Princes, and their Fathers have ­attempted the Alteration, and overthrow of that just way of triall, by twelve men of the Neighbour-hood, yet it hath proved very fatall & destructive to those that were busied in it.79

Sir Edward Coke could not have appealed more clearly to the continuity of common law. Even so, “The Norman Conquest was the one obstacle,” demurs Rodgers, “with which the common law version of English legal history had to contend. The idea that Norman laws were introduced into England at the Conquest cut right across the ‘immemorial custom’ theory of the common law” (139). Coke’s tactic to remove this obstacle had been to claim that “the grounds of our common law at this day were beyond the memory or register of any beginning, and the same which the Norman Conqueror swore to observe.”80 On this reading, the king’s coronation oath subjected his prerogative to the anterior common law. Since the “idea that all rule must be by ancient law was one of the most deep-rooted conceptions of the medieval mind … it was thus as important for the Normans as for Coke to maintain that they governed England according to the Laga Edwardi” (139), the laws of William’s Saxon predecessor. It was a tactic designed to make written law part of an unwritten tradition from “immemorial antiquity” (138). But it was also an unexamined “myth of an unbroken continuity” 78 As Berman explains, “Coke’s conception of the English common law as the embodiment of the reasoning of many generations of learned men represented a different c­ oncept of reason from that which had previously prevailed in Western legal philosophy.” What underlies it is “his conception of artificial reason, that is, reason that is brought into being not by nature but by human effort and human art” (242). 79 “Certaine Observations” (1 December 1649), 6. 80 Sir Edward Coke, The Reports, 4:iv.

33093_Williams.indd 264

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 265

(Berman, 207); for, in this version of the common law, historical precedent (as well as the first written version of any law) was trumped by oral tradition; the law originated outside of history because it recorded what had always been. Royal prerogative was then subject to a myth of absent origins, the king swearing an oath on his coronation to be faithful to the common law, as if the Conquest never happened. Lilburne’s arguments were based on a myth of inherited, unalterable law that, like oral culture itself, stood outside the ken of written history.

T h e A n t i n o m i e s o f L aw and Revolution Political revolution is by its nature an overturning of law and the old legal order. And the lawlessness of revolutionaries can be taken as a given, as in “the sixteenth-century German Revolution,” as Harold Berman terms it, “of which the Lutheran Reformation was a critical part” (1). In June 1520, after Pope Leo X issued his bull, giving Luther sixty days to recant and ordering in the interim the public burning of his writings, “Luther responded by leading a large delegation of teachers and students of the University of Wittenberg to a place just outside the city, where the books of canon law on which papal power was predicated were thrown into a huge bonfire” (46). As four centuries of canon law began to curl, then melt into flame and float up as ash, Luther sealed his repudiation of the canon law by casting his copy of the papal bull into the fire. But, as Berman wisely cautions, “At the outset of the Lutheran Reformation, many of its leaders launched a bitter attack not only on the old law but on law altogether. This was the apocalyptic phase of the Revolution, when Luther and other Reformers sometimes seemed to want to replace the visible, legal, hierarchical Roman Catholic Church with an invisible egalitarian fellowship of believers who would live by faith alone” (Berman, 63). Not surprisingly, such an attitude quickly degenerated into the Peasant Revolt of 1524–25, during which time “Thomas Müntzer and other leaders of the massive revolt … expressly expounded a radical antinomianism that bordered on anarchism.” Luther, who had started out as a doctoral student in civil law at the University of Erfurt, before deciding to read canon law as a monk in the local Augustinian monastery, was forced in consequence to condemn antinomianism. Henceforth, he repeatedly explained the relation of

33093_Williams.indd 265

2022-09-01 16:54

266

The Communion of the Book

divine law to human law as an extension of the twin tables of the Ten Commandments into civil and criminal law. The one required obedience to the civil magistrate as God’s representative on earth, the other a similar commitment to just relations among one’s fellows (73–5). By contrast, “Freeborn John” Lilburne was less the English counterpart of Thomas Müntzer, antinomian leader of the German Peasant Revolt, than he was a common-law advocate for the “birthright” of all “freeborn” Englishmen. Acquitted on 26 October 1649 by a jury of his peers on a capital charge of high treason, he was elected by acclamation on 21 December, under existing election laws, to the Common Council of London. It was now the turn of the Council of State, a quasi-legal creature of Parliament, to play both the roles of Pope Leo X enforcing, and Martin Luther burning, the law. The new Council of State, made up of thirty-four elected mps from the “Rump” and a handful of citizen appointees, was clearly anxious about Lilburne’s increasing ability to challenge their authority, and issued an order to the City that he not be allowed to take his seat.81 After all his mighty labours from the autumn of 1647 to the spring of 1649 to shape three written constitutions, each one designed to create a government by consent through An Agreement of the People,82 Lilburne was denied his right by the new authority to take the Common Council seat to which he had been duly elected. The Revolution’s extra-legal Council of State made it ­exceedingly clear why no monarchical “protector” of liberty, or cruelly unchristian archbishop, need apply to serve as the face of political hypocrisy. The present g ­ overnment was just as capable as the former one of governing by contradiction. David Loewenstein has shown at length how “Puritanism itself ­harbored contradictory impulses: its tendencies towards liberty of conscience and towards discipline, towards spiritual individualism and towards building a godly community.” In refreshing ways, his Representing Revolution (2001) sets out to examine how any number of “radical visionary writers exposed ambivalent trends within the Revolution, including tensions between political conservatism and religious ­radicalism, and between radical social change and a society organized along traditional lines” (8). As he shows, a broad variety of English

81 Lilburne, Engagement Vindicated, 1–2. See also Brailsford, Levellers, 607–8. 82 Peacey, “People of the Agreements,” 50–75.

33093_Williams.indd 266

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 267

radicals and revolutionaries like Lt-Col. Lilburne, as well as the Digger Gerrard Winstanley, the Ranter Abiezer Coppe, the Quaker George Fox, Milton’s colleague and fellow poet Andrew Marvel, and Milton himself “acutely analyzed the ambiguities and contradictions of the English Revolution” (1). As Lilburne’s whole career suggests, the Revolution was compromised from the outset by contradictions in the meaning assigned to words like “liberty,” “the people,” and “the Nation.” William Walwyn, one of Lilburne’s closest Leveller associates, had recognized early on the social contradictions that were likely to doom the Revolution, foretelling its outcome more than a year before the regicide when he wrote that the great ones of the Army, what ever they pretended, are of nearer relacion, and more strongly contracted to the Lords and great ones of the Nation, then to the Commons or such faithfull patriots as Mr. Lilburn; which being discerned by him sooner then by other men, and that their practices tended not to a common good, he spares neither pains, cost nor hazard, forthwith to discover their delusion (as well as he had done other mens formerly) to the world. (Englands Weeping Spectacle, 9).

As Loewenstein sums up this prescient view of where the Revolution was leading, Lilburne and his Leveller associates used their “highly polemical texts to expose interconnections between new forms of tyranny and political dissimulation” in response “to the contradictions of the Revolution. Distrustful of Leveller egalitarianism, the Army leaders symbolize all that has become equivocal about the New Commonwealth” (32–3). Although Loewenstein doesn’t mention it, one of the more obvious contradictions of the English Revolution, and a portent of its outcome, was Cromwell’s own equivocal position as Lt-General Oliver Cromwell, religious radical and political revolutionary, and as Oliver Cromwell, mp, conservative country squire and representative of the landed gentry. Loewenstein offers a striking portrait of Cromwell as “a man often torn between conservative social and radical Puritan impulses,” who “was anxious about the ‘many’ in the Interregnum who had ‘apostatized’ and justified themselves ‘under the notion of Liberty,’ and ‘instead of contending for the Faith … contended against Magistracy, against Ministery [sic], against Scriptures, and against Ordinances” (6). In a sense, the lasting contradictions of the Revolution were the work of a

33093_Williams.indd 267

2022-09-01 16:54

268

The Communion of the Book

substantial majority of its actors, being personal and inward as much as outward and social contradictions. Revolution is by its very nature, of course, a drama of contradictions; one need not be a Marxist to see contradiction as its driving force. But any attempt to theorize revolution has at least to acknowledge dialectical materialism, which aims to naturalize revolution by virtue of an inherent contradiction in all things. Marxists take material forces to be the underlying cause of revolution, as opposed to what might be viewed in terms closer to a sociology of revolution, where social contradictions take the place of material ones. Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolution (1938), although a very dated analysis of social contradictions as the pre-condition of revolution, describes a bourgeois revolution well enough. Contrary to popular opinion, neither extreme poverty nor inept government, Brinton insists, is the decisive factor in the four ­revolutions he studies – English, French, American, and Russian. Rather, the decisive factor in each revolution is increasing prosperity, where the nouveau riche begin to feel hemmed in by the policies of the ruling elite. In all four cases, this restriction appears to have supplied an incendiary motive for change.83 While the suppression of an underclass ­paradigmatically creates hunger, hunger of itself rarely produces ­successful resistance; instead, restrictions on the rising class do far more to create an organized and determined opposition. Ultimately, “social antagonisms seem to be at their strongest when a class has attained to wealth, but is, or feels itself, shut out from the highest social distinction, and from positions of evident and open political power. This, broadly speaking, does describe the situation of the Calvinist gentry and merchants in seventeenth-century England” (Brinton, 78–9). Among other social contradictions that make up the pre-conditions of a bourgeois revolution, Brinton identifies the “desertion of the intellectuals” (52) from the ruling elite, like those English preachers, both Presbyterian and Independent, who abandoned Laud’s episcopal regime; and pamphleteers, both religious and political, who, like Lilburne, moved on from episcopacy to monarchy as the target of their discontent. There are even defections by some in the ruling class who, for social as well as moral reasons, turn against their own interests, “upper-dogs voluntarily turning under-dogs” (67). Gilbert du Motier,

83 Brinton, Anatomy, 39–52.

33093_Williams.indd 268

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 269

Marquis de Lafayette, who served with Washington in the War of Independence and remained his lifelong friend, “is in some ways a good example of this kind of upper-dog, since he seems to have been” an aristocrat “whose course was largely determined by fashion,” going “to fight for freedom in America … something his circle admired.”84 Similarly, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, had served as the Commander in Chief of the Parliamentary Armies in the early stages of the English Civil War, until his hesitancy to attack the king’s army clouded his ­military judgment, forcing Parliament in 1644 to pass the “Self-Denying Ordinance,” henceforth enabling “a career open to the talents,” which furthered the ambitions of those who felt most restricted. Nonetheless, Essex and others such as the Earl of Manchester, or in a later century, the American George Washington, typically led public armies of ­commoners to fight against the aristocrat’s own private interests. As Brinton says, such men “are essentially conservatives driven to rebellion by the ineptness of their immediate rulers; they are not, like Lafayette, sentimental deserters of their own class” (69). The first main clause could serve as Cromwell’s epitaph. Social contradictions of this sort are less causes, however, than preconditions for revolution. But once a rebellion has broken out, it is only natural for contradictions to abound, since revolt is essentially a ­contradiction of the laws, as well as of the political, cultural, and social forms that preceded it. Nor is it easy to cast off cultural assumptions, political values, and social practices of the regime that shaped its ­adherents. Of this quirk of human nature, Joseph Hall, one of the leading defenders of episcopacy, was acutely aware in A Defence of the Humble Remonstrance (1641): “Was ever a bishop, asks Hall, more autocratic than Calvin himself?”85 And John Milton, one of Hall’s leading opponents in the pamphlet wars against the bishops, reached a similar ­conclusion after three years of black-coat tyranny by the Westminster Assembly of Presbyterian divines, appointed in 1643 by Parliament to reform and reorganize the government of the Church of England.

84 Ibid., 67. On a recent visit to Mount Vernon, I was particularly struck by a giant key hanging in the hallway of the Washington mansion that Lafayette had sent to his friend General Washington in 1790 through an intermediary, Thomas Paine. It was the principal key to the Bastille Prison that Lafayette had helped to demolish, and thus a material emblem of their shared war against tyranny. 85 Don M. Wolfe, “Introduction,” cpw 1:82.

33093_Williams.indd 269

2022-09-01 16:54

270

The Communion of the Book

As Milton characterized the ecclesiastical face of the Revolution a mere three years later, “New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large.”86

Mos Anglicus (2): T h e “ L aw ” o f C o n t r a d i c t i o n A tense dialectic of rupture and continuity is bound to haunt every revolution, since it puts revolutionaries in dialectical tension with ­themselves. Lilburne, for example, was replete with irresolvable contradictions, despite his best efforts to locate himself in the Foxean tradition of sacramental reading. If he was a political revolutionary in his first printed pamphlet in 1638, he still deferred to the temporal Lords by maintaining a proper social acknowledgment of his place: “Most Honorable and Noble Lords, with all reverence and submission unto your Honours, submitting my body unto your Lordships pleasure, and whatsoever you please to inflict upon it” (Christian, 8). Nor did he overtly contest the power of the temporal but only the spiritual Lords, whom he clearly meant to shame when “the Executioner tooke out a cord and tied my hands to the Carts-Arse, which caused me to utter these words. Welcome be the Crosse of Christ.” Lilburne’s reprinting of the Court Order of Star Chamber at the end of his martyrology (2nd ed., 1641) is an overt attempt, however, to construct the sort of public space identified by Achinstein in those later appeals to readers and juries alike in 1649. Indeed, the StarChamber Order is a documentary expression of an unjust power, still based on prerogative, that was soon to be abolished by an Act of Parliament in 1641. But in 1638, Lilburne had asked his readers to read it in the light of the Book of Revelation, from which his apocalyptic vision of A Worke of the Beast is derived. Furthermore, no appeal to “the Crosse of Christ” is ever completely free of subversive intent. Such an intent is already apparent in Lilburne’s apocalyptic title, as well as in his later quotation of I Cor. 1:27–8: “And he hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and God hath chosen the weake things of the world to confound the mighty … and things which are despised hath God chosen, yea, things which are not, to bring to nought things that are” (30).

86 “On the New Forcers of Conscience.” Flannagan, Riverside, 265–6.

33093_Williams.indd 270

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 271

The more closely one examines A Worke of the Beast, the more one finds evidence of intrinsic cultural contradictions in its rhetorical appeals to the reader. On the same page that Lilburne had attacked the Court Order of Star Chamber, there follows an aggressive display of confidence that, “by the might and power of my God, in whom I rest and trust, valiantly to display the weapons of a good souldier of Iesus Christ; Come life, come death” (38). Of course, the battlefield on which the good “souldier” fights is supposed to be spiritual: “Therefore, gird on your Spirituall armour, Spoken of Ephes. 6. that you may quit your selves like good & faithful Souldiers, and feare no coulors [sic] the victory and conquest is ours allready; for wee are sure to have it (I doe not speake of any bodily and temporall battell but onelie of a spiritual one)” (19). And the Apostle’s admonition to “Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil” (Eph. 6:11), refers explicitly to spiritual warfare: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (v. 12).87 Yet when flesh and blood are involved in such warfare, is it possible to read in a wholly “spiritual” way? “Oh repent,” says Lilburne, “I beseech you therefore repent, for that great dishonour you have suffered to bee done unto God by your fearfulnes and cowardlines.” Then he adds, “[F]or the time to come, put on couragious resolutions like valiant souldiers of Iesus Christ, and fight manfullie in this his spirituall battell, in which battell some of his s­ouldiers haue allready lost part of their blood” (18). Manifestly, the “part of their blood” lost in this “spirituall battell” is his own blood, drawn by the lash. In view of the stripes and welts he has endured we need not begrudge him his boast of having fought “manfully.” And yet it does appear that “submitting” his body to the “pleasure” of the Lords has been a “worke” of preparatory militancy, if not the ploy of a recruiting agent. In fact, the “time” is fast approaching when Parliament is going to recruit men to “fight manfully in this his spirituall battell” on temporal fields of flesh-and-blood combat, like one

87 This cultural contradiction of physical and spiritual warfare is traditionally resolved in the image of the War of the Lamb in Revelation 17, a part of St John the Divine’s vision that Lilburne could have used to resolve the paradox of the sacrificial Lamb drawing the blood of its slaughtered enemies. George Fox employed this paradoxical myth to great effect in the 1650s in his attack on established powers; see my discusson on pp. 241, 352.

33093_Williams.indd 271

2022-09-01 16:54

272

The Communion of the Book

of the early battles of the first Civil War at Edgehill on 23 October 1642. Protecting London’s western flank from an attacking force of royalists, the company commanded by Captain Lilburne fought very well at Edgehill.88 But at Brentford on 12 November 1642, Lilburne’s regiment “bore the full weight of a furious attack” (Rees, 77–84). and he was captured and taken prisoner to Oxford, the king’s wartime capital, where he barely escaped hanging for treason. Back in April 1638, however, the apprentice Lilburne had been dragged out of his pulpit in the pillory and sent back to prison in the Fleet, where the Warden tried to make him face the truth: “Well (said hee) you have undone your selfe with speaking what you did yesterday. Sir (said I) I am not sorry for what I have said, but am hartely gladd that the Lord gave mee strength and courage to speake what I did” (25). What he had in fact spoken, however, compromised his claim of “innocency,” much less his insistence that, “my conscience beares mee witnes that I have laboured ever since the Lord in mercy made the riches of his grace knowne to my Soule, to keep a good ­conscience, and to walke inoffensably both towards God, & man” (13). For the sake of conscience, he had rebuked the Prelates for “their Sermons that they preach before his Majestie,” where “they incense the King & Nobles against the people of God, labouring to make them odious in his sight & stirring him up to execute vengeance upon them, though they be the most harmelesse generation of all others” (16). For “mine owne part,” he protests, “I stand this day in the place of an evill doer, but my conscience witnesseth that I am not soe” (20). Still, the assembled multitude can easily see how much his protestations are theatrical: “I put my hand into my pocket, and puld [sic] out Three of worthy D. Bastwicks Bookes, and threw them among the people, and said. There is part of the bookes for which I ­suffer” (20). So, what exactly does he mean that he has acted “­inoffensively both towards God and man,” or that he belongs to a “harmelesse generation,” or keeps “a good ­conscience”? If he does not mean to deceive his audience, is he self-deceived? For a deeply equivocal figure who is charged with a smuggling offence, and protests his innocence to anyone who will listen, has also smuggled those same books onto the public stage from which he now distributes them as charged. How has he not undone himself?

88 Brailsford, 87.

33093_Williams.indd 272

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 273

And for much of the next decade, the “spiritual” warrior will literally be a “temporal” soldier, frequently reminding his readers that “I have been in the field with my sword in my hand, to venter [sic] my life and my blood (against tyrants) for the preservation of my Freedome.”89 Typically, he identifies his foe as “the Norman yoke,” that regal system of prerogative law which, he declares, “is the greatest mischiefe of all.” Such is the case even after he leaves the Army of the Eastern Association, when his former commander, the Earl of Manchester, has him haled before the Bar of the House of Lords in June 1646 to answer for his “slander” concerning the Earl’s reluctance to prosecute Parliament’s war against the king. Railing that “the oppressing bondage of England ever since the Norman yoke is this, I must be tried before you by a Law (called the Common Law) that I know not, nor I thinke no man else, neither do I know where to find it, or reade it; and how I can in such a case be punished by it, I know not,”90 he was “­commanded” by the Lords “to kneele at their Barre.” But this “I absolutely refused to do,” since “any subjection unto the power and judicature of the Lords (which my kneeling would have done)” made him a “traytor thereby, to the Lawes and Liberties of England,”91 as he read Coke’s Institutes on the “antiquity of the English common law and the immemorial character of its basic principles” (Berman, 245). Lilburne even denied that a prerogative court like the House of Lords had any jurisdiction over him; as a commoner, he was subject only to the House of Commons. At that point, Manchester, speaker of the Lords, instantly “commanded the Clerk to read me my charge,” a charge both brought and judged by the Lord Speaker, among others, “which he began to do. At which I stopped my eares with my fingers, till such time as I perceived the Clerks lips to leave moving. Whereupon I was commanded to with-draw: and after some distance of time, I was called in again, and was again commanded to kneele; but I told them, My Lords, you may save your selves the expence of your breath, for I shall not kneele without compulsion” (13). The Lords answered such blatant contempt by returning him to Newgate Prison. After his publication of several more incendiary accusations, he was finally sentenced by the prerogative court of Lords 89 Lilburne, Copy of a Letter, 2. 90 Lilburne, Just Mans Justification, 11. 91 Lilburne, Anatomy, 4.

33093_Williams.indd 273

2022-09-01 16:54

274

The Communion of the Book

to seven years’ imprisonment in the Tower, and fined £2,000, a sum amounting to a king’s ransom.92 In a speech of protest that Lilburne made to the House of Commons, published under the title “An Anatomy of the Lords Tyranny,” he depicted his brutal treatment at the hands of “the Norman intruder” for refusing to kneel: [F]or about 3. weeks together, I was debarred of pen, inke, or paper, and my Chamber, by Mr. Brisco, for that end, strictly searched, and my wife, councellers [sic] and friends kept from me: my wife, &c. after I was first locked up, not being permitted to set her foote within my Chamber doore, nor permitted to come into the Prison yard, to speake with me out of my window, nor I suffered to receive from the hands of my wife, servant, or friends, either meat, drinke, money, or any other necessaries; and yet their Lordships, nor none by their order, allowing me all that time, the valew of one penny loaf to live upon. (6)

In the interim, Lilburne had become embroiled in a sharp public controversy over the election of Thomas Adams, Lord Mayor of London, who, meeting supporters of his rival Major Henry Wansey at the door of Guildhall on election day, blocked them from voting by interposing a company of men armed with “staves, bills and ­halberds” (Rees, 163). The issue, under the “irregular constitution of the City” (166), concerned the practice of direct and indirect ­voting, not unlike the Electoral College and the popular vote in US presidential elections. Lilburne’s part in the fray was a pamphlet of seventy-two pages, followed by a second part of sixty-four pages, in which he first proclaimed two of his cardinal political principles: firstly, the true reason of government, that “all lawfull powers reside in the people, for whose good, welfare, and happinesse, all government and just policies were ordained”; and secondly, their means of governance, that all “Officers and Magistrates should be elective By Votes and Approbation of the free people of each City; and no longer to continue then a year, (as the Annual Consuls in Rome.)”93 “And,” he adds, “for illustration, and more cleare manifestation hereof, I need none other Evidence, or Proofe, then the Charter of King John, granted to the Citizens” more than a century “before the Incorporation of any 92 McKenzie and Bell, Chronology, 184. Today, Lilburne’s fine is equal to $494,000. 93 Lilburne, Londons Liberty in Chains, 2.

33093_Williams.indd 274

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 275

Company” (3). Manifestly, such “proof” is not drawn from the “­antiquity” of common law, but from the Norman precedent of ­prerogative law. The only alternative is to appeal to still more ancient rights – the “Annual Consuls in Rome” – as a check on local aldermen who, “by their power and policy, have invaded your rights and just priviledges” (5). Roman – not Saxon precedent – is his new authority. He has now joined Petrarch in rejecting a “Middle Age” by returning in this instance to Roman “light.” While this case prosecuted by Lilburne is merely glancing in its turn to Roman antiquity, it is still a compelling performance by a “prerogative prisoner” in the Tower who turns to “The Charter of King John” to restrain the Lord Mayor of London and his elected sheriffs, before appealing in the second part, “The Charters of London,” to ­concessions granted by royal prerogative and right of custom ever since the thirteenth century. How was legal scholarship of this scope possible in a dungeon? The inmate went “immediatly [sic] to old Mr. Colet, the Record-keeper of the Tower,” to ask “if hee had the originall Records of the Charters of London,” which Mr. Colet provided, for the princely sum of “three or foure pound” (21). The portrait is familiar to any reader of Lilburne. There he sits at the table of his “chamber,” ­surrounded by stacks of books and bundles of paper as he jots copious notes, writing on his foolscap as if he were a Fellow of a well-stocked law library. Lilburne often portrays himself as a solicitor manqué, advising all who read and heed his pamphlets of their legal birthright as “free-born” citizens, never as humble suppliants of the regal prerogative. At the same time, his recourse to the “Charter of King John,” the Magna Carta signed by the king in 1215 as a guarantee of “English” – meaning baronial – rights, puts Lilburne in an awkward position vis-à-vis the Norman Conquest, granting authority both to Norman precedents and to that written Norman charter. In Lilburne’s rebuke to the Lords concerning “the oppressing bondage of England ever since the Norman yoke,” he had already voiced his continuing ambivalence about “the Common Law,” and where to find it, and how it was hardly an ­effective curb on either the king or his lords with all their inherited prerogatives. For this once, at least, he had to admit that the common law was not timeless but fully historical. It was part and parcel of the Norman Yoke, and thus a foreign imposition without a solid ground apart from the military “right” of conquest.

33093_Williams.indd 275

2022-09-01 16:54

276

The Communion of the Book

More broadly still, this new view of the Norman Yoke94 contradicted Coke’s (and his own) strong faith in the unwritten “ancient ­constitution” that Coke claimed had existed from “time immemorial” in England. Yet, if Saxon law had been ended by “the Norman intruder,” and replaced by a feudal system of law – which Lilburne knew not “where to find it” – then the only continuity in his thought was an awkward persistence of two incompatible ideas.95 At times, he could argue that Norman law had been imposed to annul “the splendour and glory of that undivided Majestie and Kingship, that inherently resides in the People, or the State universall”96 from time immemorial. Yet, at other times, as in his confident display of Coke’s Institutes at his trial, he could assure his jurors, as he did readers of his pamphlets, that there c­ontinued to this day an “unbroken” system of common law in England, dating from “immemorial antiquity.” Still, the “majesty” of the common law, supposedly in force from “time immemorial,” and the historical rupture of 1066, with its prerogative rights and prejudicial Norman law, could not both be true. One was a myth of absent origins, the other an all too present historical reality. Was there a third term, perhaps the ­equivalent of a “Scholastic” dialectic of “natural” law, that could resolve this dialectic of absence and presence, and produce a reconciliation of contraries?

Lilburne’s Case: A Dialectic R e s o lv e d   o r   R e n e w e d ? As early as 1646, Lilburne had appealed to a “law” of universal and unquestionable authority: the creation in Genesis chapter 1 of a man and woman “who are, and were by nature all equall and alike in power, dignity, authority, and majesty, none of them having (by nature) any authority domination or majesteriall [sic] power, one over or above 94 Several weeks after Lilburne had first identified the Norman Yoke in Just Mans Justification, Richard Overton and William Walwyn wrote that “[t]he History of our Forefathers since they were Conquered by the Normans, doth manifest that this Nation hath been held in bondage all along ever since by the policies and force of the Officers of Trust in the Common-wealth” (A Remonstrance, 4). In Milton’s Leveller God, I treat this pamphlet as the founding manifesto of the Leveller party (111–12, 404n58). 95 Conversely, Seaberg, sees a “basic distinction between procedure and substance” – procedural forms of law being a Norman imposition, but substantive law preserving the substance of Saxon traditions – that “explains how the Levellers could both criticize English law as a creature of Norman force and call on it for support and defence” (794). 96 Lilburne, Just Mans Justification, 14.

33093_Williams.indd 276

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 277

another,97 neither have they, or can they exercise any, but meerely [sic] by institution, or donation, that is to say, by mutuall agreement or consent.”98 Nor had the Fall into sin ended such primordial “majesty.”99 That the creation story was just as mythic as Coke’s “ancient constitution” was not obvious to anyone (excepting, perhaps, Thomas Hobbes) in 1646. Here was a different beginning, where consent would create its own continuity. At the end of the first civil war, with the Army and Parliament still at loggerheads over how to use their military victory, Lilburne began to realize that the “common consent and mutuall agreement”100 of the Army’s refusal to disband could be extended to the nation by An Agreement of the People,101 thereby providing a written, contractual foundation for popular government. Whereas Lilburne had often defended Coke’s common law as a timeless and unwritten authority for reining in kings, he now102 appealed to readers to implement a government of God-given reason, formalized in written laws, and where every citizen was endowed by the Creator with rights and responsibilities. For once, Lilburne was more than the sum of his contradictions.

 97 Lilburne’s terms support Harold Berman’s thesis in Law and Revolution, II, that a form of Christian “belief system” underlies all Western legal traditions since 1000 ce. Lilburne likewise anticipates by more than a century the Deist version of “Christian” law, thought to have been first expressed in both the French and American Revolutions, which “taught that human beings are born equal and free, with the capacity to achieve, by use of reason, both knowledge and happiness” (11). While Berman deems the main emphasis of the English Revolution to be “on aristocracy and aristocratic privileges” (11), this is to ­confuse outcomes with aims, and even to mistake Lilburne, Edmund Ludlow, and other officers of the parliamentary army for the Lord General Cromwell. See further discussion in this work: 314–17.  98 Lilburne, Free-Mans Freedome, 11.  99 As Lilburne’s friend Marchamont Nedham wrote in Vox Plebis (19 November 1646), “For as God created every man free in Adam: so by nature are all alike freemen born; and are since made free in grace by Christ: no guilt of the paren: [sic] being of sufficiency to deprive the child of this freedome. And although there was that wicked and unchristianlike custome of villany introduced by the Norman Conqueror; yet was it but a violent ­usurpation upon the Law of our Creation, Nature, and the ancient Lawes of this Kingdome” (4). For further discussion of this conceit, see Milton’s Leveller God, 19–20. For evidence of Nedham as the likely author of Vox Plebis, see ibid., 397n60, 398n72. 100 Lilburne, ionahs Cry,13. 101 Lilburne, Foundations of Freedom.” This was the second “Agreement” that had full support of the junior army officers, and might well have passed had Lilburne, refusing compromise, not published his version and left town, rejecting further negotiations. 102 That is, in June 1646, in The Free-Mans Freedome Vindicated. See note 98 above.

33093_Williams.indd 277

2022-09-01 16:54

278

The Communion of the Book

Still, there was never any end of the latter, just as there was no end of his high principles and good reasons. Contending with the ­prerogative power of the Lords from his prison cell in the Tower in November 1646, Lilburne swore: “I am now resolved, by the power of the Almighty, to sell my life to you my conjoyned adversaries and enemies, as dear (if it be possible) as ever Sampson did his to the Philistines: of whom it is said, he did them more mischiefe at his death, then he did them in all his life, Judg. 16.”103 Back in 1638, standing in the pillory, he had used the story of the Hebrew folk hero in exactly an opposite sense to accuse the English people of having been seduced by the sensuous liturgy of the Prelates, and so of having played the part of Samson to a voluptuous Dalila: “If out of a base and cowardlie Spirit thus thou dost, Let me tell thee here and that truly to thy face, thou hast a Dalila in thine heart, which thou louest more then God, and that thou shalt on [sic] day certainly finde by wofull experience” (Worke, 23). But now, finding himself in the clutches of the “Philistian” Lords, he begins to see himself as God’s strongman, seeking to lay waste to his foes. In the event, Lilburne makes himself more than the English analogue of Luther burning the papal bull, or of Thomas Müntzer, leader of the Peasant Revolt, rejecting law altogether in the hope of finding an antinomian paradise. He turns into the antithesis of Christ and his “new Law,” the biblical strongman Sampson, who acts not as a Judge of Israel but rather as a private citizen who prays fervently to God “to be avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes” (Judges 16:28). Following his self-identification in April 1647 as a “Prerogative Prisoner” of the Lords “in the Tower of London,” Lilburne produced another pamphlet that reprinted a letter “to a true friend of his, A Citizen” of the City, announcing Lilburne’s clear resolve to maintain with the last drop of his heart blood, his civill Liberties, and freedomes, granted unto him by the good, just, and honest declared lawes of England … and never to sit still, so long as he hath a tongue to speake, or a hand to write, til he hath either necessitated his Adversaries, the house of Lords, and their Arbitrary Associates in the house of Commons, either to doe him justice and right … or else send him to Tyburne: of which he is not

103 Londons Liberty in Chaines, 34.

33093_Williams.indd 278

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 279

afraid, and doubteth not if they doe it, but at and by his death, to doe them (Sampson like) more mischiefe, then he did them all his life.104

The Army’s ongoing efforts during that fraught summer of 1647 to resist disbandment gave Lilburne good reason to fear that his former friend Lt-General Oliver Cromwell was about to be betrayed by Oliver Cromwell, mp, now siding with the Presbyterian mps in the Commons against the Army as the guarantor of the nation’s liberty. In a third ­self-identification as Samson, Lilburne even likened Cromwell to the “Philistian” Lords of Parliament. And once again, the leader of the rising Leveller party proclaims: I am resolved Sampson like, to sell my life at as deare a rate as I can, to my Philistine Adversaries, that shall either by force without law, endevour to destroy me, or by treachery to undoe me. And if the Army doe disband ­before they petition, I and all such as I am, must truly lay the whole blame upon you, and truly declare the House of Commons bribe Cromwel to betray the liberties of England into their tyrannicall fingers.105

Mere weeks before the Putney Debates in October 1647, Lilburne published another broadside aimed at heading off Cromwell and the generals from crushing his growing Leveller movement. At Putney, the rank and file were nearly unanimous in their support of the draft proposal – developed with the help of Lilburne by some of his civilian associates – for An Agreement of the People as a lawful and reasonable way to govern the nation in the absence of monarchy. Having raged repeatedly against the squirearchy of Cromwell and the traditional rulers who embodied the unwritten, “ancient constitution” of England, Lilburne now raged in The Juglers Discovered, “I hope it will be to their fatall and finall destruction: which I with all my might and strength with as much earnestnesse as Sampson prosecuted the Philistines, should helpe forward, though I should thereby pull the roofe of the house about my eares as he did.”106 The spectacular violence lurking in these self-identifications as “Sampson” is crucial to any estimate of Lilburne’s contribution to a 104 Lilburne, The resolved mans Resolution, 1. 105 Lilburne, Jonahs Cry, 4. 106 Lilburne, The Juglers Discovered, 6.

33093_Williams.indd 279

2022-09-01 16:54

280

The Communion of the Book

public sphere of print in which citizens are imagined and figured as revolutionary citizens, able to participate in the making of positive law. This was part of Foxe’s political agenda as well in portraying ploughgirls like Alice Driver and “churls” like Rafe Allerton as entirely capable of confuting their social betters and of exposing the dubious knowledge of learned Doctors of the Church. Again, Lilburne made effective use of what he had learned from Foxe – everything, perhaps, except the martyr’s pacific, non-violent embrace of death. At the same time, we cannot ignore Cromwell’s deliberate and methodical strategy in defeating the first two Agreements of the People in 1647 and 1648, which was a source of enormous frustration for Lilburne, as was Cromwell’s increasing control over the extra-legal Council of State. In Englands New Chains (Feb.–Mar. 1649), Lilburne no longer threatened explicitly to pull everything down like an English Samson, although his incitement of the army to resist Cromwell and the Council of State seemed to imply as much. With his trial looming throughout the summer of 1649, he could not be certain of his liberty to appeal to his jury, much less of its likely response. Could judges truly limit his jury to mere consideration of the facts, barring them from judging the validity of laws passed by Parliament over the course of the summer, laws making it easier to convict him on a capital charge? Fearing the outcome and preparing for the worst, Lilburne decided to offer his literary remains as his legacy to the English people, listing sixteen titles, the authorship of which he had not once acknowledged “[s]ince his first Contest with the Bishops, in the yeare 1637”; after these, he listed twenty titles published “[s]ince my Contest with the Lords,” together with another nine that had appeared “[s]ince his Contest with the Counsell of State March 28. 1649.” At the end of this auto-bibliography, he added, “Let therefore Angells and Men judge whether they can deserve the benefit of Law themselves, which thus wickedly deny it to others; and if this bee suffered, what possibilitie of protection can there bee for any, since therefore ordinary meanes cannot prevaile, extraordinary must, and if in the use thereof wee perish, wee perish.”107 Such an attitude was neither fatalism nor helpless resignation; three weeks before, he had only pretended to be this abject in a politically astounding pamphlet entitled “Strength out of Weaknesse, or The final and

107 Lilburne, The Innocent Man’s second-Proffer, 1.

33093_Williams.indd 280

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 281

absolute Plea of Lieutenant-Col. John Lilburn, prisoner in the Tower of London, against the present Ruling Power siting [sic] at Westminster.” Here, however, he evidently scorned to plead with the ruling power, returning to the same argument he had made eleven years before in A Worke of the Beast, where he had invoked God’s choice of the foolish things of this world to confound the mighty. By now, he had a sufficient body of writings that he could afford to sneer at “a Parliament or Majestrates [sic]” who were no more “then so many robbing Theeves in the high way.” In the public space of print, he now returned to those hard truths he had learned from Foxe by appealing to readers whom he had apparently been training all along, in his entreaty to “do this in remembrance of me”: only this I intreat of you, that if I should die in this contest (for putting them in mind of their promises) that you will improve your utmost interest, that this Epistle may live, and many Thousands of them be reprinted, and seeing by their new pretended Act about Printing they cannot be sold, they may be thrown away, and given, and sent all up and down the Nation; So with my true love presented to you all, I commit you to the safe Protection of the Lord God omnipotent, and rest, From my unjust and causelesse Captivity in the Tower of London, this 30. of Sept. 1649.108

This is my body; take and eat. This do in remembrance of me. Lilburne’s identification with the warrior Samson has given way once more to the martyred Christ, almost in the manner of a “split personality,” or what is now called dissociative identity disorder. At least in his beginning, Lilburne has found his symbolic end – a new form of political sacrament by which he hopes to step fully and conclusively into the Book, promising to be with his readers always, underwriting and guiding their every attempt to achieve his vision of a constitutional and democratic paradise, with justice, equality, and rights for all. In this way, Achinstein’s notion of a public sphere of printed public business needs to be expanded to include this novel (and novelistic) version of the public sphere adapted from Foxe as a radically new form of political communion – and community – of print.

108 Lilburne, Strength out of Weaknesse, 25.

33093_Williams.indd 281

2022-09-01 16:54

282

The Communion of the Book

Milton’s Case: A Dialectic R e s o lv e d o r   R e n e w e d ? Lilburne, the apprentice revolutionary, always acted first, and then wrote about his performance. Wishing to be counted “worthy to suffer any thing for his [Christ’s] great Name,”109 he invariably embroiled himself by his rhetoric in cultural and personal contradictions, beginning with the martyr who favoured St Paul’s “spirituall” warfare in putting on “the whole armour of God,” and being “a good souldier of Iesus Christ” to smite his enemies. In the event, his welcoming “the crosse of Christ” as a martyr bearing witness to Truth shades all too often into the image of a soldier carrying the Cross as a pike or halberd in a regiment of foot. In this way, Lilburne’s ideal of “meek” sacrifice often devolves into brash force, much as his whipping morphs into military strength. By contrast, Milton, the belated revolutionary, continued to read for six years after he received his ma from Cambridge, and then read some more and talked his way through the Grand Tour of Europe, before returning to write about his ongoing reading. He was never whipped through the streets like Lilburne, and he was only briefly imprisoned, and then only after the revolution had failed. But much like the Leveller leader, his first venture into polemics was against the bishops. Of Reformation appeared in May 1641, some two months after Laud’s imprisonment in the Tower. It competed in the bookstalls with a 1641 reprint of Lilburne’s trial and punishment in the escalating war on prelacy. At first glance, Milton’s anti-prelatical tracts, in their historical scope and range of reference, seem antithetical to the autobiographical, performative prose of Lilburne. In a “Petrarchan” first book Of Reformation (1641), Milton traces the origins of the office of bishop in the “primitive Church,” and the course of its historical decay, a decline that he dates from the reign of the emperor Constantine, and the merging of Church and State. In the second book, Milton anatomizes the royalist claim, under the harsh light of history and the electron microscope of reason, “That no form of Church government is agreeable to Monarchy, but that of Bishops.”110 In this latter argument, he is no more revolutionary than Lilburne had been in his conventional codicil to the Pillory scene. Indeed, Milton even sets out to prove that episcopacy tends “to the 109 Lilburne, A Worke of the Beast, 5. 110 Milton, Of Reformation (1641), cpw 1:576.

33093_Williams.indd 282

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 283

destruction of Monarchy” (cpw 1:576). By ridding the kingdom of bishops, he proposes to save the king. Vivat Rex! There is always the possibility, of course, that his apparent support of monarchy in Of Reformation is a rhetorical strategy intended to win over readers who could be tempted by the former, but not by the latter part of the proposition, No bishop, no king! Thomas Fulton sees evidence in Milton’s Commonplace Book, for example, of a highly structured program of historical reading in the 1630s and ’40s that is already focused on revolutionary issues of political authority and forms of government. In his entries to the “Political Index,” Milton had not only expressed favourable views of popular sovereignty and representative government,111 but also laid out something like a series of topics for himself as a future polemicist.112 Indeed, concludes Fulton, “the manuscript notes suggest a more pronounced republicanism than appears in print in the 1640s, and Milton softens the republican language when he reuses his notes in print,” even reshaping “the original entries” quite often “to support the notion of individual free will and an idea of popular sovereignty that is based on the freedom to choose” (78). Such differences between Milton’s private notes and his public statements are thus doubly “politic,” with Milton adjusting his rhetoric to differing audiences in changing circumstances. Perceived “contradictions” are explicable in terms of “a deliberate rhetorical function” (Fulton, 6). In his earliest polemics against the bishops, however, Milton is not always in full command of his moral criticisms. Like other Protestants, he hews to the logic of historical discontinuity established by Petrarch to make the “renaissance” a restoration of high civilization that was disastrously interrupted by a “dark age.”113 The first book in Of Reformation paints a highly idealized portrait of the primitive office of bishops as being modelled on Christ’s office as Shepherd and Saviour, both in his compassion and his infinite sacrifice on behalf of erring human beings. Milton’s first sentence even sets the gold standard for godly episcopacy in “the story of our Saviour Christ, suffering to the lowest bent of weaknesse, in the Flesh, and presently triumphing 111 Fulton, Historical Milton, 61–76, 130–6. 112 Fulton recalls that “[i]n the Defensio Secunda,” Milton “also suggests a teleological design to his political work in the 1640s, culminating in the treatises on civil liberty. In a basic sense, this seems quite plausible: there remained a major arsenal of unused political arguments in the Commonplace Book, waiting for some kind of application” (116). 113 Nauert, Humanism, 19.

33093_Williams.indd 283

2022-09-01 16:54

284

The Communion of the Book

to the highest pitch of glory, in the Spirit, which drew up his body also, till we in both be united to him in the Revelation of his Kingdome: I do not know of any thing more worthy to take up the whole passion of pitty [sic], on the one side, and joy on the other” (cpw 1:519). Finding strong support in the writings of Ignatius, a first-century bishop of Antioch, and then in the histories of Sulpicius Severus, a fifth-century chronicler of Aquitaine, and above all in the work of Cyprian, the thirdcentury bishop of Carthage, Milton insists that the office of bishop was originally elective, with each “bishop” or “presbyter” (without distinction between them) being chosen democratically by each congregation (cpw  ­1:541–7). It follows that a proper job description for the office of bishop should be based on the needs and desires of each community: “He that inabl’d with gifts from God, and the lawful and Primitive choice of the Church assembl’d in convenient number, faithfully from that time forward feeds his Parochial Flock, ha’s [sic] his coequal and compresbyteriall Power to ordaine Ministers and Deacons by publique Prayer, and  Vote of Christs Congregation in like sort as he himself was ordain’d, and is a true Apostolick Bishop” (cpw 1:537). The ascendancy, however, of a hegemonic, imperial Church under Constantine marked the advent of a “dark age” in religion, until the “the bright and blissful Reformation (by Divine Power) strook through the black and settled Night of Ignorance and Antichristian Tyranny” (cpw 1:524). Out of this “bright and blissfull” Reformation, “a soveraigne and reviving joy must needs rush into the bosome of him that reads or heares; and the sweet Odour of the returning Gospell imbath his Soul with the fragrancy of Heaven.” It only becomes a “reviving joy,” however, to the extent that the true light of Reformation succeeds in dispelling the night of a “dark age.” For the nonce, sad to say, every Laudian bishop “steps up” as ever “into the Chayre of Pontificall Pride, and changes a moderate and exemplary House, for a mis-govern’d and haughty Palace, spirituall Dignity for carnall Precedence, and secular high Office and employment for the high Negotiations of his Heavenly Embassage, Then he degrades, then hee un-Bishops himself; hee that makes him Bishop makes him no Bishop” (cpw 1:537–8). Nothing in this judgment is surprising. It is essentially Petrarch’s vision of the new “Babylon of the West” holding court at Avignon for most of the fourteenth century.114 It was still the view of a substantial 114 See related references in this work: 4, 59–60, 61n94.

33093_Williams.indd 284

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 285

minority of the English people, making a good fit with the Protestant narrative of historical discontinuity adapted from Petrarch to explain the necessity of cultural rebirth or a return to a prior golden age. As such, the third term in this recovery of ancient history ought to be the story of an age of blessed purity restored. But Milton’s reading of ­historical rupture and recovery far exceeds Petrarch’s acid characterization of the Holy Roman Empire’s claim to be a legitimate successor to the Roman Empire, and the claim of “Babylonian” popes to be rightful successors to the bishop of Rome. Indeed, the barrage of insulting and abusive nouns and adjectives that Milton uses to portray the “Servile crouching” of the English people “to all Religious Presentments” (cpw 1:522) is unrelenting and brutally unforgiving. While Milton’s language is rarely conspicuous for its humility, its only precedent in scripture might be the prophetic books of the Bible, one of which has lent its name to such fervent condemnation. But as this jeremiad grows increasingly sharper in tone, it becomes more and more difficult to excuse it morally, except, perhaps, in terms of existential necessity: Then was Baptisme chang’d into a kind of exorcism, and water sanctified by Christs institute, though little enough to wash off the original Spot without the Scratch, or crosse impression of a Priests fore-finger: and that feast of free grace, and adoption to which Christ invited his Disciples to sit as Brethren, and coheires of the happy Covenant, which at that Table was to be Seal’d to them, even that Feast of Love and heavenly-admitted fellowship, the Seale of filiall grace became the Subject of horror, and glouting [sic] adoration, pageanted about, like a dreadfull Idol: which sometimes deceve’s [sic] wel-meaning men, and beguiles them of their reward, by their voluntary humility. (cpw 1:523)

By now, however, it is also apparent that the moral repertoire of the Laudian episcopate does not include such “voluntary humility,” certainly not in the opinion of this jeremiad. What follows could still be taken for justified outrage against the sins of prerogative appointees who are not “Bishops, god and all Good Men know they are not, that have fill’d this Land with late confusion and violence; but a Tyrannical crew and Corporation of Impostors, that have blinded and abus’d the World so long under that Name” (1:537). Could be taken for justified outrage, except that the vengeful tone and sheer violence of the rhetoric outstrips anything in Lilburne’s (not to mention Petrarch’s) repertoire of calumny:

33093_Williams.indd 285

2022-09-01 16:54

286

The Communion of the Book

But he that will mould a modern Bishop into a primitive, must yeeld him to be elected by the popular voyce, undiocest, unrevenu’d, unlorded, and leave him nothing but brotherly equality, matchles [sic] temperance, frequent fasting, incessant prayer, and preaching, continual watchings, and labours in his Ministery, which what a rich bootie it would be, what a plump endowment to the many-benefice-gaping mouth of a Prelate, what a relish it would give to his canary-sucking, and swan-eating palat, let old Bishop Mountain judge for me. (cpw 1:548–9)

Equally jolting is the relish with which Milton portrays Foxe’s “grave Prelates Cranmer and Ridley” as “halting and time-serving Prelates” (1:531–2): “But it will be said, These men were Martyrs: What then? Though every true Christian will be a Martyr when he [or she] is called to it; not presently does it follow that every one [sic] suffering for Religion, is without exception” (cpw 1:533). Milton is not wrong to protest that it was not their office that had distinguished the Edwardian bishops Cranmer and Ridley as martyrs, but their reading and modelling of the Word. But he turns a dictum of St Paul most cruelly against them, claiming “that A man may give his Body to be burnt, (meaning for Religion) and yet not have Charitie: He is not therfore [sic] above all possibility of erring, because hee burnes for some Points of Truth.” An aged Milton was no longer lacking in true charity, as we saw in the previous chapter, where the story of the erring Cranmer serves very well as a moving subtext to the story of Jesus’s trial by Satan in Paradise Regain’d. But a much younger Milton is conspicuously lacking in this Christian virtue, at least at an early stage of his career as a polemicist. By the end of the second book that bisects Of Reformation, the learned historian and sober prosecutor of episcopal crimes against the office has established himself not only in the temporal seat of the London Executioner, whose duty it was to tie convicted prisoners to the “CartArse” and to be whipped through the streets to a place of shame in the public Pillory, but also in the high seat of the Almighty at the Last Judgment. Of course, it is not individual bishops, but the institution of episcopacy that is pilloried here, although it is clear from his peroration that Milton’s damning judgment against lordly prerogative does encroach on the Divine prerogative. Most conveniently, he neglects to quote St Paul: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (Rom. 12:19). Thundering in his own voice out of the Judgment Seat, Milton thus pronounces the dreadful sentence, that “they that by the

33093_Williams.indd 286

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 287

impairing and diminution of the true Faith … after a shamefull end in this Life (which God grant them) shall be thrown downe eternally into the darkest and deepest Gulfe of hell, where under the despightfull ­controule, the trample and spurne of all the other Damned, that in the anguish of their Torture shall have no other ease then to exercise a Raving and Bestiall Tyranny over them as their Slaves and Negro’s” (1:617). For a moment, we seem to be watching another episode in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. In its imagined violence, Milton’s rhetoric is shockingly blind to its contradiction of “the plaine and homespun verity of Christs Gospell” (cpw 1:557), and so inexplicably hostile to the apostolic application of the gospel’s principle of “Fatherly admonishment, and Christian rebuke” to the erring soul, “to cast it into godly sorrow, whose end is joy, and ingenuous bashfulnesse to sin” (cpw 1:608). Ironically, the omniscient Judge is so unaware of himself in Of Reformation that he ends his “admonishment” by casting all the bishops in the world into the “deepest Gulfe of hell,” where “they shall remaine in that plight for ever, the basest, the lowermost, the most dejected, most underfoot and downetrodden Vassals of Perdition” (1:617). Whereas Lilburne was more inclined to play the role of martyr, Milton assumes the role of God as Judge to condemn all the bishops. It is a thoroughly unlovely version of the younger Milton, who in his first polemical tract leaves no doubt that “New Pamphleteer is but old Prelate writ large.” The public sphere created by print in the English Revolution was then more than a forum for political debate; it was also a public pillory that became a scaffold for Archbishop Laud in 1645. David Loewenstein more cautiously remarks “that Milton’s representations of history reveal his sensitivity to the contradictions and conflicts involved in historical and social processes, not a naïve and disengaged political sensibility, as is sometimes claimed.”115 Certainly, by the time that Milton published The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates eight years later (February 1649), he had now examined more thoughtfully and generously the social and historical contradictions informing his works on divorce (1643–45), the pamphlet on education (1644), and his arguments for the “liberty of printing” in Areopagitica (1644). The reader is assured from the first sentence of The Tenure of Kings and

115 Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History, 3.

33093_Williams.indd 287

2022-09-01 16:54

288

The Communion of the Book

Magistrates (1649) that Milton’s chief political loyalty is now to a government of reason: “If men within themselves would be govern’d by reason, and not generally give up thir understanding to a double tyrannie, of Custom from without, and blind affections within, they would discerne better, what it is to favour and uphold the Tyrant of a Nation” (cpw 3:190). After four years of ruinous fighting in the first Civil War (1642–46), and five more months of bloody conflict in a second Civil War (1648), the majesty of reason might well be the only sovereign worthy of obedience. Thomas Fulton argues persuasively, however, that Milton makes use of a number of ironic ambiguities and glaring contradictions in The Tenure which, though declaring on its title page “that ‘it is Lawfull … for any, who have the Power, to call to account a Tryant,’” merely “seems” in good Calvinist fashion “to reaffirm the exclusive right of magistrates,” at least in the second edition of the tract, “to doe justice on a lawless King,” which “is to a privat man unlawful, to an inferior Magistrate lawfull’ (257)” (Fulton, 152). From a careful reading of ambiguity in Milton’s use of “magistrates” and from many other instances, Fulton shows how “Milton seeks to wrest political thought from its theological and biblical moorings” by exposing “the inconsistency of the theological argument” (171, 170). Not every contradiction of a revolutionary polemicist need be unwitting. As Fulton concludes with respect to The Tenure, Milton’s “rhetorical indeterminacy is part of a deliberate process aimed at eroding the relationship between theology and politics” (171). But after Milton has shrewdly allayed the suspicions of conservative readers by citing several orthodox theologians with seeming favour, he is also free in The Tenure to draw on a wide array of political writings to overturn arbitrary rule by divine right in support of popular sovereignty and representative government. His political sources range across the millennia from the Politics of Aristotle to Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy. And he concludes quite reasonably that “the power of Kings and Magistrates is nothing else, but what is only derivative, transferr’d and committed to them in trust from the People, to the Common good of them all, in whom the power yet remaines fundamentally, and cannot be tak’n from them, without a violation of thir natural birthright” (cpw 3:202). Overall, The Tenure succeeds in its appeal to the notion of the people’s sovereignty, which Lilburne had briefly sketched in The Just Mans Justification (1646), affirming “the splendour and glory of that

33093_Williams.indd 288

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 289

undivided Majestie and Kingship that inherently resides in the People” (14). This sine qua non of Leveller thought had already been developed at far greater length (108 pp.) in Regall Tyrannie Discovered (6 January 1647), a work often attributed to Lilburne, although he denied authorship of it, attributing it instead to “some of my friends.”116 But, as I have shown elsewhere, there are extensive parallels between Regall Tyrannie and Milton’s The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, both in their phrasings and historical examples of settled government by and for the people.117 The principles of popular sovereignty, of an expanded franchise, and of specific rights reserved to the people were all formalized in Lilburne’s three versions of An Agreement of the People, the first of which was overruled by the political manoeuvring of the Army High Command in the Putney Debates of October–November 1647,118 and then again in December 1648 at the Whitehall Debates,119 before Lilburne and his fellow Levellers published their third Agreement on 1 May 1649 from the Tower,120 where they had been held since their arrest on 28 March. In Milton’s Tenure, which appeared ten weeks before the third and final Agreement, the polemicist left no doubt that he, like Lilburne, had finally crossed the yawning abyss at the centre of that clever quip, No bishop, no king. As he confidently declares, “It follows lastly, that since the King or Magistrate holds his autoritie of the people, both originaly [sic] and naturally for their good in the first place, and not in his own, then may the people as oft as they shall judge it for the best, either choose him or reject him, retaine him or depose him though no Tyrant, meerly by the liberty and right of free born Men, to be govern’d as seems to them best” (cpw 3:206). The problem, however, as Claude de Saumaise (or Salmasius, reputedly the greatest living scholar in the Latin language) pointed out, was that the material facts contradicted the rational principles that Milton

116 Lilburne, Oppressed Mans Oppressions, 13. See Milton’s Leveller God, 395n32, for ­evidence that Marchamont Nedham was the author of Regal Tyrannie Discovered. 117 See Milton’s Leveller God, 43–7. 118 Woolrych, “The debates,” 76–7; Gentles, “The Agreements,” 148–56; Foxley, “Freedom of Conscience,” 117–26; Elliot Vernon, “‘A Firme,’” 195–217. 119 Lilburne, Legal Fundamental, 41; Gentles, The Agreements, 156–68; Rachel Foxley, “Freedom of Conscience,” 126–8; Henderson, “Drafting,” 163–94; Gentles, “The New Model Army,” 139–62; Rees, Leveller Revolution, 250–79. 120 Gentles, “The New Model Army,” 157.

33093_Williams.indd 289

2022-09-01 16:54

290

The Communion of the Book

had used in The Tenure to justify the English regicides. In Defensio Regia Pro Carolo I (11 May 1649), Salmasius hammered away relentlessly on the question of which people, how many people, and what part of the people had done this? And it quickly became apparent that it had not been the “common people” at all, but rather, “The army with their leaders [who] did this. If they do deny it, the fact itself refutes them.” Milton’s reply in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (February 1651) was as “disingenuous” as Fulton deems it to be, since Milton was left to argue here that he “had always meant ‘select part of Parliament’ when speaking of the people,” thereby glossing “over the real ‘act of the people’ – the army – in forcibly creating this Parliament” (Fulton 175). Moreover, chided Salmasius, “The form of government” which the English “have introduced is quite new and was unheard of in former times” (never a good sign in early modern Europe). “It is not popular, nor kingly, nor aristocratic, but military.”121 It was proof that no amount of rhetoric could ever dispel, because the principle was indeed controverted by the facts. And try as Milton might in 1651, and then again in 1654 in his Defensio Secunda, or even in Pro Se Defensio (8 August 1655), to uphold the principle of popular sovereignty, he could not get around that stern fact of a military dictatorship. His appeal to the “people’s” right was merely a legal fiction of what the word people really meant in practice. In the interim, Milton was likely present on 28 March 1649 when Lilburne and his fellow Levellers were brought before the Council of State on a capital charge of high treason. Milton had been appointed two weeks before as secretary for foreign tongues to the Council of State. And, on 20 March, he “took the required oath of secrecy pertaining to his office, at which time he probably met Cromwell for the first time.”122 Then, on 26 March, “he was asked to ‘make some observations upon a paper lately printed called old & new Chaines.” So, on that fateful day, 28 March, relates Barbara Lewalski, “Milton attended the council to receive a commission relating to Ireland, and so may have heard the Leveller authors – Lilburne, Walwyn, Overton, and Thomas Prince – examined, charged with high treason, and sent to the Tower. Lilburne later claimed that from outside the council door he overheard Cromwell say, ‘I tell you Sir, you have no other way to deal with these men but to break them in pieces’” (239–40). 121 Salmasius, Defensio Regia (1649), cpw 4ii:989. 122 Lewalski, Life, 238.

33093_Williams.indd 290

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 291

Lilburne’s full account puts this scene in an even more dramatic light. As he wrote in The Picture of the Councel of State that appeared in bookstalls two weeks later, “I marched into the Room with my hat on, and looking about me, I saw divers Members of the House of Commons present, and so I put it off” (a sign of respect for the thirty-four elected mps who, as legal representatives of the state, comprised a majority of the Council). Politely, he approached citizen John Bradshaw, president of the Council, saying, “Well then, M. Bradshaw … If it please you and these Gentlemen to afford me the same liberty and priviledge [sic] that the Cavaliers did at Oxford, when I was arraigned before them for my life for levying War in the quarrel of the Common-wealth, against the late King and his Party (which was liberty of speech, to speak my mind freely without interruption) I shall speak, and go on; but without the Grant of liberty of speech, I shall not say a word more to you. To which he [Bradshaw] replyed, That is already granted you.”123 Then Lilburne, standing on “the Laws and Liberties of England” which he had always claimed from the common law as his “inheritance and birth-right” as an Englishman, proceeded to ask pointed questions about “your late Declaration, published about four or five daies ago, wherein you lay down the grounds and reasons (as I remember) of your doing Justice upon the late King, and why you have abolished Kingly Government, and the House of Lords” (4–5). He said as much, however, not to question the legality of their acts, but to challenge, as a barrister manqué, the legality of that Council as it was now constituted, since “I never saw any Law in Print or writing, that declares your power so proclaim’d or published, and therefore Sir, I know not what more to make of you, then a company of private men, being neither able to own you as a Court of Justice, because the Law speaks nothing of you; nor as a Councel of State, till I see, and read, or hear your Commission, which I desire (if you please) to be acquainted with” (6). It is an eminently reasonable question about the legality of these proceedings, made about as succinctly as possible under the circumstances, where neither prerogative law nor statute law authorized the arrest of any of the defendants. And it should have rendered doubtful the Council’s legal authority to hold these four accused men without bail, since neither the common law nor prerogative law justified

123 Lilburne et al., The Picture of the Councel of State, 3–4.

33093_Williams.indd 291

2022-09-01 16:54

292

The Communion of the Book

their assumed authority in the exercise of English jurisprudence. In his latest role as a “barrister,” Lilburne stood at last on solid ground. In a similarly reasonable way, Lilburne would end the account of his confrontation with extra-legal authority in The Picture of the Councel of State by reminding Bradshaw, Cromwell, and others on that Council that “[t]he Officers of the Army have already compiled, and published to the view of the Nation, an Agreement of the people, which they have presented to the present Parliament” (22). Although he was forced to concede that there remained notable “exceptions … in our Addresses” to Parliament, even so, were a majority of the Council’s members to agree to “mend their Agreement according to our exceptions,” he gave his word that “we wil [sic] acquiesce and rest there, and be at peace with them, & live and dy with them in the pursuance of those ends; and be content for Cromwel and Iretons security.” But Heaven help them “if they will not condescend to a just Agreement that may be good for the whole Nation,” because he would be forced in that case to “bid defiance to them, assuredly knowing they can do no more to me, than the divel did to Job” (22). At least this is the sum of the issue laid out in the barrister’s introduction and conclusion to his “legal” brief. In between is a very different story, since the drama that played out in the Council chamber was far less equable and reasonable than the manner of its framing. The Council of State wanted to know about the authorship of the mutinous Second Part of Englands New Chaines (24 March 1649), and nothing more. (They had already decided that the contents, which encouraged a mutiny in Army ranks, were ­treasonous.) Lilburne refused to answer, holding to a valid principle in the common law, that his inquisitors had no legitimate authority. As he grew increasingly impatient with his questioners, Lilburne burst out, “I have bin a contestor and sufferer for the Liberties of England these twelve years together, and I should now look upon my self as the basest fellow in the world, if now in one moment I should undo all that I have bin doing all this while, which I must of necessity do, if I should answer you to questions against my self” (11). In principle, he was right; and the latter right to which he referred – the right of refusal to incriminate oneself (the original of “pleading the Fifth,” the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution) – was in fact on that proleptic list124 of common 124 “Proleptic,” since they pre-existed most of the rights spelled out in the first ten ammendments to the US Constitution.

33093_Williams.indd 292

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 293

rights reserved in the second Agreement of the People. But in reality, his sudden outburst alienated the likes of even President Bradshaw, who three years before had acted as his solicitor in a suit to the Lords, and who still secretly supported him.125 Lilburne declared, “And therefore in short, were it that I owned your power (which I do not in the least) I would be hanged, before I would do so base, and un-Englishman-like an Action, to betray my Liberty; which I must of necessity do, in answering questions to accuse my self” (12). The climax, or rather semi-climax to this stunning scene now played out in accents of high rage: “But if for all this,” Lilburne fumed, “you shall send me back to the Military sword again, either to White-hall, or any other such like garison’d place in England, I do solemnly protest before the Eternal God of Heaven and Earth, I will fire it, and burn it down to the ground, if possibly I can, although I be burnt to ashes with the flames thereof” (13). It is Lilburne in the role of Samson again, tying foxes together by their tails to set fire to the Philistian harvest. As keenly as Lilburne the barrister saw through the muddled legalities of the Council of State now facing him, he failed to recognize himself as a product of this muddled, and often contradictory, system of English jurisprudence. So, for Lilburne, the dramatic climax only came after he was escorted out of the room: I laid my eare to their dore, and heard Lieutenant General Cromwel (I am sure of it) very loud, thumping his fist upon the Councel Table, til it rang againe, and heard him speak in these very words, or to this effect; I tel you Sir, you have no other way to deale with these men but to break them in pieces; and thumping upon the Councel Table againe, he said Sir, let me tel you that which is true, if you do not breake them, they will break you; yea, and bring all the guilt of the blood and treasure shed and spent in this Kingdom upon your heads and shoulders; and f­rustrate and make voide all that worke, that with so many yeares industry, toile and paines you have done, and so render you to all rationall men in the world, as the most c­ontemptible generation, of silly, low spirited men in the earth, to be broken and routed by such a despicable contemptible generation of men as they are; and therfore Sir I tel you againe, you are necessitated to break them. (14–15) 125 John Bradshaw represented Lilburne in his suit of 1646 to the Lords for reparations from Star Chamber and appeared to retain some sympathy for him. See Firth, “Lilburne, John,” Dictionary of National Biography, 1885–1900, vol. 33:245.

33093_Williams.indd 293

2022-09-01 16:54

294

The Communion of the Book

The likelihood that Milton witnessed this scene has by and large been overlooked by historians and literary critics.126 Being an eyewitness to Lilburne’s self-destructive fury, however, was likely to have put Milton in mind of Lilburne’s previous self-identification as an English Samson in 1646–47, when his championing of the people as the ­solution to the nation’s constitutional impasse had been repeatedly thwarted by Cromwell and the Lords in their several jurisdictions. During that tense year leading up to the Putney Debates, no literate person could have remained unaware of those hotly debated political arguments about whether to establish a limited monarchy or a limited democracy. And no one, illiterates included, could have stayed ignorant for long of Lilburne’s powerful advocacy for popular sovereignty, much less his repeated meltdowns in the face of political frustration. Given the ­prisoner’s stunning vehemence and threats of violence in this last arraignment scene, one must also keep in mind Lilburne’s ambiguous ­self-portrait in A Worke of the Beast as the Christ-like martyr, placing himself in the ecstatic tradition of Foxe, rather than in the counter-tradition of the vengeful destroyer of lordly prerogative, an English “Sampson” here recast in the apocalyptic language of the Book of Revelation. In the face of Lilburne’s towering rage on that dreary day in March 1649 in the Council’s meeting room, Milton might well have recalled an equally troubling version of himself in Of Reformation, written eight years earlier. At the time, he had hardly acted any better than Lilburne in his fulminations against the bishops, casting the lot of them into the “deepest Gulfe of HELL,” there to be trampled underfoot by the souls of all the damned. And he certainly lacked the excuse that Lilburne could use of years and years of legal grievance against Cromwell who, like the Lords, was holding him prisoner once again, even threatening to ­condemn him to death. But in either case – his own or that of Lilburne – Milton might also have wondered how it was possible to reconcile such sharp contraries – that towering rage with the patient suffering of the Saviour. Nor was it the first time in that tumultuous decade that Milton would be moved to reject one version or another of his contradictory, at times almost incoherent, “self.” After tracing a noticeable turn in Milton’s thought between his writing against the 126 Whether he was present or not, Milton was sure to have heard details of the Levellers’ examination from his good friend John Bradshaw, president of the Council of State.

33093_Williams.indd 294

2022-09-01 16:54



John Lilburne and the Contradictions of English Law 295

bishops and his writing on toleration and “the Liberty of unlicenc’d printing” (2:486), Fulton concludes: “In the space of a couple of years, Milton thus turned sharply from key concepts identifying a long tradition of Puritan and Calvinist political thought, and in systematically repudiating his ­contemporaries, he seems to be renouncing his former self” (96). Twenty years later, Milton’s portrait of Jesus in Paradise Regain’d appears to put him on the path to resolving that moral issue related to the controversial champion, “the great Deliverer” Samson, by ­making the tribulations of Jesus – “unrecorded left through many an Age” (pr 1.16) – available in print as the model and sound moral basis for that wealth of “sacramental” narratives in Foxe’s Book. Reading them had by now become, even for ordinary readers, a true form of spiritual and political communion, of doing “this in remembrance of me.” Reading in such fashion had even come to be modelled as well by ­others as a revolutionary act. And yet Jesus, like Foxe’s martyrs, would harm no one. At the end of the Saviour’s bloodless triumph over Satan, Milton had made a point of sending his deeply human hero, “unobserv’d” and “private,” “Home to his Mothers house” (4.638–9), indifferent to fame or public position or even the cosmic proclamation of his divinity. In most respects, he appears to be the moral and psychological contrary of Samson, a truly unified consciousness, as compared to the fractured mind of the Hebrew “deliverer.” So what in Heaven’s name are they doing together in one volume?127 Could two such different beings ever be truly reconciled in a book of poetry?128 Or must we read them as two “testaments” joined typologically129 together by a mincing and

127 Wittreich, Interpreting, concludes: “As interpretive fictions, Milton’s last poems are how-to-live and how-not-to-live poems. They demystify their biblical stories, interrogate the ideologies that had accrued to them, and reverse what had become their accepted m ­ essages in Milton’s age” (379). 128 John Carey finds a “new temper” in Milton’s poetry, where the Greek and Roman classics are renounced, and we are left “in Reason’s stony land” (Milton, 122). The only merit Carey finds in this “new temper” is that it reduces Samson to an “outmoded hero” (138), thereby renouncing both the classical and Old Testament models of heroism. 129 Krouse, Milton’s Samson, acknowledges that “the disparity between the Samson of Judges and the Samson of Hebrews placed before Christian exegetes a problem,” which he “solves” by rehearsing an “allegorical interpretation of Samson, descending from the Alexandrian school of exegesis, which elevated Samson still higher in the Christian mind by making him a figure of Christ” (30–1).

33093_Williams.indd 295

2022-09-01 16:54

296

The Communion of the Book

stitching of their opposed stories, one gesturing toward an ideal that measures the real?130 Are we, perhaps, expected to read them, as ­opposing faces of an English Revolution that Milton had both defended and criticized?131 Or would they better serve as a gauge of the conditions of success and failure in an undertaking as uncertain as the ­overturning of a settled political and social system?132 Might they even supply a final summing up of unexpected contradictions in this revolution that had only become manifest in the shock and confusion of the Restoration? A juridical reading might not resolve all, or any of these issues; but it ought to make one thing perfectly clear. The indisputabe fact of historical discontinuity between the two differing systems of Saxon and Norman feudal law, together with the conflicting aims of English ­prerogative and common law, had made the medieval Schoolmen’s project of resolving such contraries seem hopelessly quaint – and ­haplessly impotent – in the face of an intractable reality. What other answers could conceivably exist have yet to be excavated from the shifting ­contexts of two decades of revolutionary history.

130 Shawcross, “Genres,” sees links of “could have” and “should have,” of possibilities avoided or aborted between the two works: “The wisdom of putting these two works t­ ogether in the same volume is the commerce which is thus established between them: we see in Samson what the Son as Man could have become had he succumbed to any of the ­temptations of Satan, and in the Son we see what Samson as the ‘great Deliverer’ – the ironic earthly counterpart of the true ‘heavenly’ deliverer–should have been” (240). 131 Worden, “Milton, Samson Agonistes,” argues that the poem shows how “[t]he saints of the Restoration must come to terms with their past and with their failures and, like Samson, ‘Repent the sin’ (line 504, cf. line 1376). Milton had long questioned the ‘fitness’ of the English for godly reformation, and had concluded that they were ‘fitter to be led back into their own servitude’” (128). 132 Mohamed, “Memorial,” recalls the “association” made by Raymond Williams “between tragedy and revolution” that seems to have been a given “in the seventeenth century, when the desire to bring a ‘social system’ into harmony with ‘permanent order’ is cast as a ‘restoration of the true and ancient constitution,’ a ‘consciousness that contained the most radical and even revolutionary actions,” although Mohamed’s Samson Agonistes is “rather more suspicious of political constitution than this, allowing for a truly revolutionary action that ultimately departs from all social order” (499).

33093_Williams.indd 296

2022-09-01 16:54

6

Historiographical Reading: The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow

In his “Afterword” to Representing Revolution (2001), David Loewenstein writes that “Milton’s publication of his 1671 poems together was a provocative gesture” (292), in so far as he managed “to juxtapose two ­distinctive representations of radical religious and political ­sainthood without necessarily suggesting that one model is altogether preferable to the other” (293). While Loewenstein concedes that “the shattering apocalyptic violence of the second poem is not altogether reconciled with the verbal combat of the other” (292), he does find in the prose of the poet and parliamentary soldier George Wither a hermeneutical model for reconciling the duality of Milton’s final diptych. In FidesAnglicana (1660), Wither had envisioned “the lord of Hosts” as the “General of a two-fold Militia, furnished with distinct weapons,” some of which are “Natural” and others “Spiritual,” yet both of which are necessary to “destroy the Enemies of his Kingdom.”1 But is this pairing much more than figurative language that works to conceal the ethical duality of Milton’s “Saviour” and the “great Deliverer” of Israel who fails to deliver anyone in the act of killing himself and thousands of others? How would a trope of “natural” and “spiritual” weapons possibly resolve, say, the moral duality of John Lilburne as a Christ-like martyr and a militant Samson? Is the historian not seeking to leave history behind in this resort to allegory to reconcile implacable contradictions? Clearly, Loewenstein does not flinch from exposing the historical contradictions of Puritanism itself. Much of his rigorous scholarship 1 George Wither, Fides-Anglicana. Or, A Plea for the Publick-Faith of these Nations, Lately pawned, forfeited, and violated by some of their former Trustees (London, 1660), 25; quoted by Loewenstein in Representing Revolution, 293.

33093_Williams.indd 297

2022-09-01 16:54

298

The Communion of the Book

describes radicals such as Lilburne, Winstanley, Coppe, and George Fox as seeking, each in his own way, to lay bare the social, political, and religious contradictions of the Commonwealth and Protectoral governments. So why not assume that Milton is similarly engaged in dramatizing those contradictions that had doomed the revolution? Lilburne, as we saw earlier, embodies a wide variety of contradictions, even more than those of a patient martyr and pugnacious “soldier” of Christ, none of which offers much hope of squaring the circle. In treating Milton’s paired poems, however, Loewenstein appears willing to treat inconsistencies as complements, not as contradictions, thus “enabling two radical religious perspectives to appear side by side” (294). Perhaps we should take his concept of a “two-fold Militia” as being “merely” literary, then, a “poetic” attempt to untie the stubborn knot of history. As much as each poem is treated as a lack in search of a supplement, Loewenstein’s approach at least remains engaged in the historical struggle, unlike Balachandra Rajan’s “hilltop” vision of Paradise Regain’d that is counterposed to the “valley of the shadow of death” (102) in Samson Agonistes. Rajan’s dualist reading requires a doctrinal vision of transcendence and immanence that appeals to an “eternal” perspective outside of events. By contrast, Loewenstein’s vision of the historical struggle continues to acknowledge the existential contradictions, ­conflicts, and ambiguities that most of the radicals had tried (and failed) to resolve from within their position in the revolutionary moment. If we expand the historical moment of the “paired poems” to include the manuscript in the hands of the compositor, there are several signs that the poet, even at this late date, was still seeking ways to amplify the differences in his portrait of Jesus as a paragon of patient reading, and his characterization of Samson as the epitome of an active, if impulsive, vengeance.

The Printing History of Milton’s Poems of 1671 In his ground-breaking bibliographical study of “The 1671 Text,” Stephen Dobranski (2002) adds two key pieces of evidence to our understanding of how Milton viewed the hero of his “brief epic” in relation to his tragic protagonist. The uncorrected text of the former presented Jesus as reflecting in soliloquy on the “heroic acts” he had envisioned for himself as a youth, “one while, / To rescue Israel from

33093_Williams.indd 298

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 299

the Roman yoke, / Then to destroy and quell o’re all the earth / Brute violence and proud Tyrannick pow’r” (1.216–19). But a decisive change appears in the Errata: “Only after turning to the errata do we discover that ‘destroy’ in Paradise Regain’d is to be replaced with ‘subdue’ – a change that substantially mitigates (without entirely eliminating) Jesus’ threat of violence.”2 Although Laura Lunger Knoppers properly observes that “[t]here is no evidence that Milton supervised the Errata” (lxxxiv), this substitution of “subdue” for “destroy” does seem to be in keeping with his larger poetic design. For one thing, it is more consistent with the general theme of Paradise Regain’d (“perswasion” rather than “the work of fear,” 1.223), one of its key differences from the Samson story. Moreover, as Dobranski adds in his final chapter of Readers and Authorship (2005), where he broadens discussion of the pattern of ­omissions and revisions that Milton made to Paradise Regain’d to which is added Samson Agonistes, “Revising Jesus’s diction calls our attention to the question of violent action and forces us to examine how far Jesus warrants Samson’s destruction.”3 The Omissa, an unprecedented category of correction,4 further clarifies the nature of the change implied in emending “destroy” to “subdue.” Ten new lines, as Dobranski had first explained in “Text and Context” (2002), are “printed on the book’s penultimate leaf (P3v),” which “especially call attention to the poems’ interdependence” (31). Still, Knoppers cautions that it “may have been a late authorial addition to the manuscript, perhaps even when the work was already in the press” (lxxxiii). Nor is it unreasonable to suspect with her that “the Omissa may have been added deliberately late; after the censor had approved the manuscript,” given “its politically charged content” (lxxxiv). But the omission is still thematically telling, particularly in view of the process of printing.

2 Dobranski, “Text and Context,” 44. Laura Knoppers, in her “General Introduction” to the poems notes, however, that “this change could have been made by the compositor or corrector looking at copy” (Complete Works, 2:lxxxiv). 3 Dobranski, Readers and Authorship (2005), 204. 4 Coincidentally, Dobranski (2005) reports that “I have yet to find another instance of Omissa per se in a seventeenth-century publication; however, some books do include omitted passages at the end of the text. John Lilburne’s Englands Birth-Right Justified (1645), for example, concludes with a ‘Postscript’ that contains ‘divers sentences belonging to severall passages of this Book, which were in their due places omitted, and here at last remembered (F4v)’” (194n24).

33093_Williams.indd 299

2022-09-01 16:54

300

The Communion of the Book

Directing its readers where to insert these additional lines, the Omissa prints nine consecutive new verses, followed by an existing line, before adding a single verse, making ten lines in all that mark a crucial ­afterthought in the poem’s composition. These ten verses (numbered 1527–35, 1537) could not possibly have been omitted in the various stages of correction,5 but must have been submitted either on a separate sheet that was overlooked, or else received by the compositor at a stage when most of the book was already printed in sheets. But the effect, as Dobranski maintains, is utterly transformative, since it “seems to highlight the different perspectives of the poems’ two protagonists – Samson’s defiance and destruction versus the Son’s reason and renewal … Like Jesus’ momentary temptation to ‘quell’ violence and perform ‘­victorious deeds’ during his own visit to a temple (B6v/I.215, B7r/I.218), the Omissa teases readers with a fleeting image of Samson’s sudden, perfect triumph” (Dobranski, Readers and Authorship, 197–8). Readers who are made aware “that Milton deliberately added the Omissa” are thereby given “license to emphasize the impact of these ten lines,” and so to “better understand how Milton portrays Samson’s final destruction. If, like Samson, we resort to violence, Milton suggests through the contrastive imagery of the Omissa, we must do so blindly and at considerable cost” (199).6 Such differing conclusions not only put readers in an authorial position; they pose a subtle temptation to the inattentive reader, let alone the dogmatic one. From the outset of his revised argument, Dobranski foregrounds the manner through which the Omissa serves to guide the reader’s appropriate response: “Holding out the promise of Samson’s restored sight and perfect victory, the omitted passage points up the actual consequences of his final act; requiring readers’ intervention to restore the 5 Identifying four separate stages of proof corrections, Dobranski (2005) points to three key factors that suggest the Omissa was not “a compositor’s error”: the added “lines of text” were “non-consecutive,” which would require the compositor to be twice mistaken (194); the “printed line numbers along the left margins” were “set separately and added during the imposition” (194–5), and were never changed; and the process of “cast[ing] off” required a compositor to estimate the number of pages needed by pre-counting the lines for each single page – a very clearcut process for poetry, as opposed to prose (195). This Omissa was obviously not an omission, then, but the author’s late addendum. 6 Conversely, Lewalski finds that this coda with the Omissa both inside and outside the text, “allows Milton to have it both ways. Within his text these lines describe a false hope for Samson’s physical restoration; here they project a future possibility of liberation and also foreshadow Christ’s final victory over the forces of Antichrist” (The Life, 536).

33093_Williams.indd 300

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 301

text, the Omissa also emphasizes the need for the type of active o ­ bedience that Jesus embodies” (186). Perhaps the most important consequence of this change is the generic focus, since the “difference between the Omissa and the conclusion that Milton writes for Samson Agonistes is the difference between miracle and tragedy, between revenge fantasy and real-world violence, between divine intervention and the struggle of a ‘wayfaring’/ ’warfaring’ Christian (cp 2:515)” (199). Although this doubled conclusion may still offer a belated “glimpse” of “a miraculous version of Samson’s restitution in the Omissa” printed at the end, it more likely implies a further temptation, since “the poem instead concludes with a problematic image of his final act – suicidal, large-scale, ‘dearlybought … yet glorious!’ (O8v/1660) – which, we know from the Book of Judges, ironically fails to effect a lasting political change for Israel” (199). The generic irony of tragedy is thus emphasized, not least in a more hopeful sort of reading that would, at all costs, turn a tragedy into a miracle play. Since “the text presents these changes as the readers’ responsibility,” readers are then invited to “become collaborators in the 1671 volume” (Dobranski, “Text and Context,” 45). Whatever we make of Samson’s final act, we are now required to take responsibility for how we read. Indeed, “Milton’s use of the Greek word agonistes” in the title refers not only to Samson but also to “an ideal reader: the author subtly challenges his audience to become contestants in both the text and their world” (47). For it is “[o]nly through the efforts of diligent readers” that things can ever “be set right,” as “Milton suggests in 1671.” And the tragic irony of Samson’s story is that his final act might not set anything right.

M i l t o n ’ s H i s t o ry o f B r i ta i n a s a C o n t e x t for Reading Samson Agonistes As Milton was readying his poems for the press, he was also preparing The History of Britain for another bookseller. His History appeared on 1 November 1670, a few weeks in advance of Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes. In most respects, it belongs to what historian William J. Connell calls the “Renaissance revolution in historical writing [which] came from the world of Latin letters”7 in its effort to revive classic

7 Connell, “Italian Renaissance,” 349.

33093_Williams.indd 301

2022-09-01 16:54

302

The Communion of the Book

cultural forms from antiquity. (Such a notion of cultural recovery further belies the anthropologist Joseph Henrich’s more linear view of cultural evolution in the “Lutheran revolt.”8 The Reformation also aimed, like its Renaissance cousin, to restore a prior, and far “superior” culture.) One of Petrarch’s titles, De viris illustribus (1338 ce) even links his heroes9 to those of Cornelius Nepos (ca 40 bce) and Suetonius (113 ce) in Roman antiquity, as well as to the Church Fathers of Jerome’s history of the Church Fathers (393 ce).10 Modelled on Plutarch’s Lives (ca 115 ce), Petrarch’s history11 inauguarated a historiographical revival that reached its full maturity in the work of Leonardo Bruni’s Historiarum Florentini populi (1442), Niccolò Machiavelli’s (1469–1527) Istorie ­fiorentine (published posthumously, 1532), and the Storia d’Italia ­(1537–40) of Machiavelli’s friend Francesco Guicciardini. Like Petrarch, Milton would make ancient Rome – at least the Roman Republic12 prior to “Julius” who “before his Death tyrannously had made  8 Henrich, weirdest People, 7–16. See related discussion herein: vii–viii, 13, 106n108.  9 Simone Marchesi argues that Petrarch had conceived Scipio’s epic history in Africa “as the poetic counterpart, possibly even the culmination, of the contemporaneous De viris illustribus” in his more general historiographical “attempt to replace Dante’s typological work with his own philological epic,” reflecting “his strategy to make of himself the initiator of an essentially new kind of classicism” (“Petrarch’s Philological,” 113–14). 10 Mommsen remarks that Petrarch not only “confined his work De viris illustribus to the time ‘from Romulus to Titus’” Flavian (234), but that “when he started work on the second version” in the 1340s, “he emphasized everything that was Roman and excluded everything that was outside Rome” (237), because “the period stretching from the fall of the Roman Empire down to his own age” was “a time of ‘darkness.’ In Petrarch’s opinion that era was ‘dark’ because it was worthless, not because it was little known” (237). 11 Regn and Huss maintain that Africa (published posthumously) undercut a ­supposed continuity between the teleological history of Roman destiny in Virgil’s Aeneid and the “salvific history” of Dante’s Divine Comedy by evoking “both the grandeur and the decline of Rome,” thereby demonstrating “that human actions in history are no longer indicative of the divine plan according to which God governs historical events” (99, 102). Thus, Petrarch rejected the hoary claim of historical continuity between Roman and Christian empire that was taken for granted from patristic times to the era of Dante. 12 Petrarch may not sound like a republican in what Laelius says in his embassy on behalf of Scipio to King Syphax in the third book of Africa: “Fixa, manet Populo sententia tollere turbas / Regum atque indignis sceptrum extorquere tyrannis, / Omnia ut ad paucos redeant; nam rege sub uno / Optimus est patrie status et male vivitur inter / Regnantum sine lege greges” (3.303–7); “[T]he desire to remove the mobs of kings and to take the scepter from unworthy tyrants so that everything should revert to the few stays fixed in our people, for a country’s best condition is under a single ruler. Evil prevails in a lawless mob of rulers” (trans. Ellis, 50). But when Syphax points out that Laelius’s history avoids the fate of Roman kings, the story Laelius next tells of the rape of Lucretia and a citizens’ revolt against Tarquinius is unambiguously republican: “Regnorum hic finis. Post hec meliora

33093_Williams.indd 302

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 303

himself Emperor of the Roman Common-wealth”13 – and its vast literary culture the apex of civilization. For Petrarch, the fall of the empire had resulted in a tragic rupture between Roman antiquity and “his own time, a time of ‘shadows,’ which had come after” (Connell, 350).14 But for Bruni, as for Milton two centuries later, it was more likely “that the Roman empire began to collapse once the disastrous name of Caesar had begun to brood over the city. For liberty gave way before the imperial name, and when liberty departed, so did virtue.”15 In the Trecento, Petrarch still had to contend with medieval historians who “had seen world history as a succession of empires culminating in the Roman Empire and the Incarnation of Christ,”16 with “the pax romana” serving, remarks Renaissance historian James Hankins, as a vehicle for Christianity’s triumph over Rome.17 But Petrarch turned this narrative of history upside down by making Christian “triumph” a source of cultural decay, and “light” a source of darkness.18 “Far from sequuntur / Tempora, et hinc nostri libertas incipit evi. / Annua perpetuos straverunt iura tyrannos / Sevaque legitime fregerunt sceptra secures / Atque unum pepulere duo” (3.773–7); “That was the end of our kings. Better times followed, and the liberty we now enjoy began. Yearly oaths keep back the tyrants in perpetuity. The rule of law crushed their cruel scepters, and two men replaced one” (Ellis, 64). At the beginning of the fourth book, King Syphax praises the valour exhibited by Roman republicans: “Vix tamen hec paucis usquam, vix contigit uni: / Publica sed vobis. Eadem est statque unica vestris / Mens ­exercitibus: pro Libertate tuenda / Recta fronte mori” (4.13–16); “A scarce few have it, scarcely even one, yet it is a common attribute of your people. To die for liberty’s defense with face forward is a quality possessed solely by your armies” (Trans. Ellis, 66). 13 Milton, cpw 5.i:61. 14 Petrarch spent the last thirty-five years of his life composing and revising Africa (left unfinished at his death) as a new Aeneid designed to restore Rome to a position as “queen of the world.” But his first two books follow very different literary models: the descent of Virgil’s Aeneas in Aeneid 6 into Avernus with the Sibyl to preview Rome’s imperial glory and to gain the Stoic virtues of the future emperor Augustus; and the dream of Scipio Aemilianus in Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis to bolster the mission of Petrarch’s republican hero Scipio Africanus Major and his defeat of Hannibal at Zama (202 bce). 15 Leondardo Bruni, History: I. Ed. and trans. by Hankins, 51. No sentence by any historian is more “Miltonic” than this latter one. 16 Hankins, “Renaissance Humanism,” 87. 17 Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, approvingly characterizes the medieval ­conception of history, for example, as being “divided into two distinct periods  – a long period of” pagan “error and darkness, and then a period of purification and truth, while midway between the two stood the cross of Calvary” (174). 18 Petrarch unambiguously repudiates the medieval idea of Christianity as the fulfillment of Roman destiny. A parade of republican Roman heroes in Book 1 of Africa is ­followed in Book 2 by brief biographies of various heroic generals and civic-minded emperors, before the empire is taken over by Christian pretenders whom Scipio’s father, the old

33093_Williams.indd 303

2022-09-01 16:54

304

The Communion of the Book

accepting the idea” of Orosius,19 the most popular historian during the Middle Ages, “that Christianity had improved the condition of humans in this world,20 Petrarch expressed repeatedly the idea that an age of continuing decline had set in, either after the conversion of Constantine, or after the reign of Titus, when emperors of non-Roman extraction acceded to the throne” (Connell, 350).21 The result was a lasting eclipse of biblical narrative in European historiography. Leonardo Bruni, who was praised by contemporaries as “the first modern historian to equal the ancients,” did so by returning to classical models like Livy, notes historian Robert Black, to compose his “history of Florence from antiquity to the early fifteenth century” (38–9). Bruni reports, for example, how “Livy says that he has sources to show that Roman boys, before the period when they were given instruction in  Greek literature, were commonly taught Etruscan literature” (Bruni, 1:27). Bruni’s immediate purpose was to make Etruscan culture the historical source of Roman civility: “The Romans took from the Etruscans the toga praetexta and the phalera; the painted togas and embroidered tunics; the rings of office; the handsome golden chariots used in triumphs; the fasces, the lictors, the trumpets and curule chairs, and all the other insignia of kings and magistrates” (Bruni, 1:25). What is more, “Etruria was ruled for a long time by the equal will and authority of all its twelve peoples” (1:21) in the twelve cities of the twelve tribes. Thus, for Bruni, the Roman republic had its actual historical and cultural roots in the republicanism of ancient Etruria. As Hankins inventories these sources of Roman republicanism, “In a free state (as Bruni had Roman general, disparages as “dregs of humanity” and “disgraced leavings of our sword” (2.274–8, 290–3); (trans. Ellis, 33–4). See further discussion in this work: 3nn1–2, 60–1, 302n10. 19 Paulus Orosius (d. after 418 ce) wrote Historiarum adversum paganos libri VII in the wake of Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410, and at the invitation of his mentor Augustine of Hippo, whose own City of God (413–26) would support the Historiarum’s providential h­istory to counter pagan claims of the erosion of the old Roman virtues by Christianity. Petrarch effectively revived this claim. 20 There are nonetheless suggestions of Christ-like virtue in Scipio Africanus Major in response to the prophecy of his countrymen’s betrayal, as he remarks after his dream: “patrieque ignosce furenti; / Nescit enim quid agat” (3.20–1): “[F]orgive your raging fatherland, for it knows not what it does” (trans. Ellis, 42). 21 Rodgers remarks: “The prevalent medieval conception of history was one of a unified Christian drama extending from the Creation to the Last Judgement, within which there was little scope for the realisation of the differences which divided one period from another” (130).

33093_Williams.indd 304

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 305

learned from Sallust and Tacitus), great men competed for glory and made their city glorious and powerful as a result. Under tyrants, great men are cut down as a threat to the prestige of the ruler. Hence republican liberty was not only the best form of rule; it was the precondition of empire and the motor of historical change” (Hankins, History, xvii). Like Bruni, who thought that “the Roman republic before the domination of Caesar had been antiquity’s Golden Age, destroyed by the tyrannical rule of the emperors” (Hankins, “Renaissance Humanism,” 88), Milton also showed a marked preference for republican Rome. But since Britain never came under the rule of the Republic, resisting two attempts at conquest by Julius, and was only conquered under the imperial banner of Claudius, Milton was left to conclude that “with the Empire fell also what before in this Western World was chiefly Roman; Learning, Valour, Eloquence, History, Civility, and eev’n Language it self, all these together, as it were, with equal pace diminishing, and decaying” (cpw 5.i:127). At the same time, Milton expressed genuine admiration for the ancient “Britans,” much as Bruni had acclaimed “a triumph for the Etruscans unequaled by any other people. To no other ruler or people had the Romans ever given hostages in order to sue for peace” (1:35). For his part, Milton applauds the “stranger terrors” posed by British warriors to Claudius’s “Roman Armies to meet the native and the naked British valour defending their Country” (cpw 5.i:66). His portrait of Caractacus, the British leader who rode up and down his line, shouting “that this was the day, this the field either to defend thir Libertie, or to die free” (cpw 5.1:70), and who, even as a Roman captive, addressed the Senate with all the dignity, eloquence, and equanimity of a British Cicero, is unquestionably based on the Roman historian Tacitus’s ­characterization of him in The Annals of Imperial Rome (ca 120 ce).22 “Like any contemporary historian, Milton was forced,” remarks historian Philip Hicks, “to confront the legacy of Tacitus, whose works exerted a powerful grip over the historical imagination of European elites at this time.”23 Milton was influenced, however, by more than a Tacitean historiography, particularly in textual readings and a choice of form that both recall Bruni. Although Bruni’s History of the Florentine People took Livy’s From the Founding of the City (begun ca 27 bce) as its formal model, it still assumed 22 Tacitus, Annals, 232–4. 23 Hicks, “Ancient Historians,” 571.

33093_Williams.indd 305

2022-09-01 16:54

306

The Communion of the Book

the “fundamental task of correcting Livy’s method” (Connell, 351).24 Whereas Livy began his monumental work with the “myths and legends” of the founding of Rome “that he confesses not to believe,” Bruni dismisses similar legends of Florence’s founding as “‘mythical beliefs’ which he does not even bother to repeat” (351). At the end of his “Preface,” Bruni asserts his duty “to relate what I think is the most correct tradition concerning the city’s founding and its origins” (1:7). In claiming the antiquity of the Etrurian people, Bruni recalls the embassy of Virgil’s Aeneas to the “Etruscan” King Mezentius, if only to invert the story: “Another account, somewhat more removed from the inventions of the poets and therefore truer and less corrupt,” Bruni says curtly, “tells us that it was Turnus, not Aeneas, who turned to Mezentius” for help. “Whichever account we accept, however, we must admit that the Etruscan nation flourished before the Trojan War” (1:23).25 Hankins briskly summarizes Bruni’s bold denial of the legendary origins of Florence: “Florence was founded not by Trojans fleeing the fall of Troy, but by veterans of the Roman dictator Sulla as the result of a land distribution” (“Introduction,” xiii). Indeed, Bruni’s opening sentence of the History bluntly asserts, “The founders of Florence were Romans sent by Lucius Sulla to Faesulae [Florence]” (1:9). The “inventions of the poets” are then pointedly delayed for another fifteen pages, and then are only noted latterly to be finally written off as “corrupt.” Seemingly closer to Livy than to Bruni in this regard, Milton opens his History with the story of “Brutus, and the whole Trojan pretence” (cpw 5.i:8) of British founding. Calling it a “pretence” is a strong hint, however, that Geoffrey of Monmouth had invoked Virgil in order to legitimate the Norman Conquest.26 Milton adopts a similarly dismissive tone in characterizing Geoffrey’s Historia regum Britanniae (ca 1139 ce) as a Norman “affectation to make the Britan of one Original with the Roman.” Turning from “poetic” fables to documented events at the end

24 Black insists nonetheless that it is only “[i]n their own way” that “the early humanist historians were critical of their sources” (40), which is equally true of Milton’s retelling of Geoffrey’s fables, before he dismisses them out of hand. 25 Margolis, “Quattrocento,” maintains that Bruni invented the “myth” of “an Etruscan past of free, powerful and independent cities” as “the animating principle for the city he celebrates” (208). And he did so to serve “the needs of the ruling oligarchy: triumphant, expansionist, and in search of a historical precedent for the sovereignty in Tuscany it now hoped to exercise” (217). 26 See my discussion of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s political project in Imagined, 10–11.

33093_Williams.indd 306

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 307

of his first Book, Milton finally expresses relief to have done with such paltry stuff: “By this time, like one who had set out on his way by night, and travail’d through a Region of smooth or idle Dreams, our History now arrivs [sic] on the Confines, where day-light and truth meet us with a cleer dawn, representing to our view, though at a farr distance, true colours and shapes” (cpw 5.i:37). Of course, Bruni’s critical method of writing history had not come to a screeching halt at the border between fables and the “true colours” of the city’s founding. Recounting the success of the Florentine army at the Battle of Campaldino (1289), Bruni repeats a fable of the ­miraculous voice that had acquainted Florentine authorities with the ­victory taking place at that very moment several leagues away. He then “­confirms” the vocal miracle by recalling other telepathic messages received in “the Macedonian War,” or in the Roman defeat of a Germanic army “in the time of Domitian,” before offering a frankly jaded view of “this prolix sort [eo genere verbositatem] of research” (4:343, 342). Connell points to another facet of Bruni’s critical method: “Rather than follow one writer for a certain set of events, and another for the next, as Livy had done, Bruni set the available sources for individual events side by side and he determined on the basis of the evidence what he thought must really have happened” (351). Beyond Livy and his sources, Bruni looked to “Cicero and Sallust, two great Latin writers,” who also “record the existence of these settlers” (1:11). Since the Etruscans left no written records, the ancient sources can only be Greek. “According to ancient sources” (1:19) invariably refers to Greek-settler records. Bruni was certainly unique among historians of the era in learning Greek “when the opportunity to do so appeared in 1398, when Manuel Chrysoloras, a Byzantine émigré, came to lecture at the University of Florence” (Hankins, xii). As he neared the present of writing, Bruni still fell back at times on eyewitness accounts such as “Giovanni Villani’s chronicle as his main source for Florentine history from 1250 to 1348” (Black, 41). Yet, just as often, he “supplemented Villani’s account with documentary material from the Florentine archives and on several occasions he corrected Villani’s account by reference to original documents” (41).27 As Hankins sums up this quintessentially “modern” form 27 See Bruni’s use of archival material to correct his sources concerning one attempt to “overthrow the Ghibelline faction in Tuscany. Thus for the first time, as some think, there was established a college for the Guelf Party with publicly chosen captains  …

33093_Williams.indd 307

2022-09-01 16:54

308

The Communion of the Book

of critical source study, “Bruni’s crisp dismissal of civic myths enshrined in revered medieval chronicles such as that of Giovanni Villani is among the most impressive feats of humanist criticism in the fifteenth century, anticipating and rivalling Lorenzo Valla’s more famous debunking of the Donation of Constantine in the 1440s” (xiii). Bruni likewise demonstrates the importance of linguistic evidence (which Valla first employed with notable success) for debunking the chronicler’s claim that Florence had been “razed … by Attila the Hun.” Not only does Bruni prove that “the Hun was never in Tuscany at all, and that he never crossed to this side of the river Mincio” (1:95), but he explains the old error of the chroniclers as a “confusion of names,” the appellation Attila being mistaken in medieval oral culture for that of Totila, a later invader. As a matter of fact, “Florence was destroyed not by Attila the Hun in the fifth century, but by the Gothic chieftain Totila in the sixth” (Hankins, xiii). In consequence, “The city was not so much refounded as restored by Charlemagne.28 Bruni’s history is full of clear-sighted historical revisionism of this sort, its conclusions often supported by documents from papal and Florentine official archives, to which Bruni was given privileged access” (xiii–xiv). Here too, Milton, like Bruni, turns from spurious “authorities” to more “reliable sources, namely Caesar’s own Commentaries” (Hicks, 572), to buttress his account of Julius Caesar’s two attempted invasions of Britain in 55–54 bce. But Milton also issues another caveat: “Howbeit other antient writers have spok’n more doubtfully of Cæsar’s Victories heer; and that in plaine termes he fled from hence; for which the common verse in Lucan with divers passages heer and there in Tacitus is alleg’d” (cpw 5.i:56). In this respect, Milton holds Lucan’s De bello civili firmly as a bridle on Caesar’s Commentarii de bello Gallico, much as Bruni uses Cicero and Livy as a check on Virgil’s Aeneid. In other ways, too, Milton follows the Florentine humanist’s method of source comparison. Treating the Saxon invasions of Britain, for example, Milton singles out for praise the sixth-century monk Gildas, who, “in Antiquity far before these [such to oversee its interests. But I have discovered that there were leaders of the Party in the city long before that time, and this fact is visible in the public records in many places” (2:229). 28 Margolis misleadingly claims that “Leonardo Bruni’s fame as the father of critical methods rests” solely “upon the first book of his twelve-book Historia, and especially on his demolition of the Charlemagne foundation legend found therein. This was perhaps the most egregious of the ‘common and incredible opinions’ touted by the unmentioned Villani’s vernacular chronicle that Bruni in his preface rejected out of hand” (207).

33093_Williams.indd 308

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 309

as “Nennius, a very trivial writer yet extant”],” was “every way more ­credible” (cpw 5.i:163, 165). Describing the Danish invasions, Milton concludes that the twelfth-century historian “William of Malmsbury must be acknowledg’d, both for stile and judgment, to be by far the best Writer of them all: but what labour is to be endur’d, turning over Volumes of rubbish in the rest … is a penance to think” (cpw 5.i:230). The value of Malmesbury’s “stile,” compared with such monkish “rubbish,” lends further support to Hicks’s idea that “Britons” of this era “valued ­eloquence over truth” (570), although Milton’s pairing of “stile and judgment” suggests that mere eloquence is likely to be empty without truth. Milton’s periodization of British history (like that of Lilburne ­concerning the Norman Conquest)29 also aligns him more closely with Bruni30 than with Petrarch. As Hankins attests, we “see in Bruni’s History, for the first time in the Western tradition, the outlines of a conceptual framework that has dominated European history ever since: the tripartite division of history into an ancient period … a medieval period … and a modern period” (xvii–xviii).31 Although Bruni does date “the decline of the Roman Empire” as beginning “almost from the moment that Rome gave up her liberty to serve a series of emperors” (1:49), it also seems, for him, that the invading Odoacer’s defeat of “the patrician Orestes,” and his conquest of the Roman emperor Augustulus were catastrophic.32 In fact, “When the barbarians then took over Italy, the western empire ceased to exist … for almost three hundred years” (1:89). As Connell sees it, Rome’s decline may have seemed gradual to Petrarch, but to Bruni it was terrifyingly abrupt, since it was “caused directly by the Germanic invasions, culminating with the overthrow of Romulus Augustulus in ad 476.” Yet, “where Petrarch had only distinguished antiquity from his own time, an age of ‘shadows,’ Bruni 29 See my references to, and discussions of Lilburne’s evolving views of the Norman Conquest in this work: 255–6, 263–5, 273, 275–6, 276nn94–5, 277n99. 30 Turner, Philology, notes that Flavio Biondo had proposed a similar periodization: “However, Biondo thought that the new, happier age began with the revival of letters in his own day.” In any event, both, “probably independently, divided European history into ancient, middle, and modern – a blueprint with us ever since” (38–9). 31 Again, this historical structure of discovery, loss, and recovery differs markedly from the notion of a linear evolution of history in Henrich’s weirdest People (2020). 32 Margolis says that Bruni “rejected the theory that the medieval empire in the West was in any way a continuation of the ancient one that came to an end in 476 with the deposition of Romulus Augustulus by Odoacer” (208). More accurately, Bruni depends on Petrarch for this view of historical discontinuity.

33093_Williams.indd 309

2022-09-01 16:54

310

The Communion of the Book

introduced a second major caesura, at the year 1250, to distinguish his own more fortunate time from the period of Germanic domination” (Connell, 351). It is by means of this latter caesura that Bruni’s history approaches the more “fortunate” light of modern history. The death of the Holy Roman emperor Frederick III effectively ended Germanic rule over Florence and restored republican government to the comune. The tone is set from the outset of Book 2, resounding throughout the next ten books: “After the death of Frederick, whose shocking crimes we have already described, the Florentine People, having long been consumed with hatred for the arrogance and ferocity of those who had seized the commonwealth, roused itself to take the reins of government, defend liberty, and to direct the affairs of the city-state in accordance with the popular will” (2:109) The plot of Bruni’s History thus follows the classic Renaissance ­narrative of a recovery of “virtue” after a “dark” age. As Bruni declaims, “It is wonderful to relate how great the strength of the People grew from these beginnings” (2:111); now, “having tasted the sweetness of liberty,” the Florentines “bent all their strength on raising themselves up and acquiring an honorable standing in their own community. Thus the People grew strong in prudence and industry at home, in courage and arms abroad.” Even though the traitorous Ghibellines soon regained their ascendancy within city walls, this imperial faction was expelled after just seven years. And “the People, having now in no uncertain terms taken over the governance of the commonwealth in their own right, decided to order the city government after the old popular ­fashion” (2:213–15). After centuries of Germanic rule, the form of magistracy decided on by the “People” consisted of the “Priors of the Guilds” who “enjoyed popular approval and preference because they were neither predatory nor seditious, but frugal and peace-loving ­persons” (3:295). Bruni’s civic pride is clear: “That this magistracy under the same name has lasted in the city up to the present day, one hundred and thirty-eight years later, is a sign that it was excellently designed.” His funeral oration in 1428 for Nanni Strozzi proclaimed: “We do not tremble beneath the rule of one man who would lord it over us, nor are we slaves to the rule of a few. Our liberty is equal for all, is limited only by the laws, and is free from the fear of men.”33

33 Bruni, “Oration for the Funeral of Nanni Strozzi,” 138.

33093_Williams.indd 310

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 311

For Milton, the Germanic invasions of the fifth century had threatened a similar end to British “liberty,” although the cataclysm was evidently not so abrupt as it was in Bruni’s Rome. But the signal difference of Milton’s History emerges in its generic distance from Bruni’s epic ­history.34 If the end of Roman rule in Britain ca 410 ce had signified to Milton an end of “Learning” and even the end of “History” itself (127), his “Britans” still had several decades, dating from the departure of the Roman legions to the arrival of the Saxon ships, in which to learn “to govern well themselves” (131), employing all the arts of “Civility” left them by the Romans. While this structure holds out the same ­prospect for self-rule as that of Bruni’s Florence, Milton understands that he now “must change / Those Notes to Tragic.”35 For, “so soon as” the Britons “felt by proof the weight of what it was to govern well themselves, and what was wanting within them, not stomach or the love of licence, but the wisdom, the virtue, the labour, to use and maintain true libertie, they soon remitted thir heat, and shrunk more wretchedly under the burden of thir own libertie” (cpw 5.i:131).36 In this respect as well, Milton holds to the governing principle of humanist historiography that “human causation” (Connell, 351), and not the will of an inscrutable providence, is the overarching truth of history: how and why did things happen as they did, and what responsibility do societies bear for their fates? Or, as Hankins puts it succinctly, “Human beings themselves make their own history” (xviii).

34 Bruni’s focus on the “famous deeds” of arms, and the “great deeds” of its citizen army (2:117, 123) in wars against the Sienese, Pisan, and Aretine Ghibellines and their closet allies in Florence, resembles at times Virgil’s plot in Aeneid which justifies Roman rule. From the outset of his second book, Bruni traces the consolidation of Florentine power – in the name of “a prudent concern for preserving its own liberty” (2:111) – after the effective end of Germanic empire. Thereafter, he traces the waxing and waning of republican fortunes, given that the Ghibelline faction repeatedly seeks to undermine the republican faction in favour of a restored Holy Roman Empire. As Hankins summarizes this era of contested imperial power, Florence’s “popolo first organized itself around 1250” in a popular form of government that was interrupted by the “Ghibelline ascendancy of 1260–67,” with intermittent power until 1282. But, “[f]rom the 1280s down to the second half of the Quattrocento the governing body of Florence, officially at least, was the Priors of the Guilds of the Comune and People of Florence” (xvi). 35 Paradise Lost, 9.5–6. In this respect, Milton is closer to Petrarch than to Bruni. 36 This linking of government of the self to political self-government recalls the cultural anthropologist Joseph Henrich’s test of “self-discipline” as one of the five dimensions of personality among weird people giving rise to political self-government (382, 415).

33093_Williams.indd 311

2022-09-01 16:54

312

The Communion of the Book

The sense of human agency that underwrites humanist historiography from Bruni to Milton is another clear measure of its difference from the records of medieval annalists that aligns it more with our conception of history. As Hayden White, a leading theorist of historiography has pointed out, the most important page in all medieval annals is the title page, specifically the title “Anni Domini, which stands at the head of two columns, one of dates, the other of events” (8). Such a title ascribes all agency, as well as historical coherence, to God: Providence is the true author of events, and of the meaning of this particular “ordering of events” from Creation to the Second Coming. “Since everything that happened did so apparently in accordance with the divine will,” White observes, “it is sufficient simply to note its happening, to register it under the appropriate ‘year of the Lord’ in which it occurred” (13). By contrast, medieval chronicles already had “a central subject – the life of an individual, town, or region; some great undertaking, such as a war or crusade; or some institution, such as a monarchy, episcopacy, or monastery” (16) – that is to say, something beyond the mere chronology of an unfolding Divine will.37 The chronicle form, however, lacks closure, or any real “sense of an ending,” because it “presents events in the order of their occurrence and cannot, therefore, offer the kind of meaning that a naratologically governed account can be said to provide. Second, probably owing to the ‘annalistic’ order of the discourse, the account does not so much conclude as simply terminate” (White, 17). A chronicle, for example, like “the History of France by one Richerus of Rheims” (ca 998) simply ends with military defeat and flight in the hasty ending offered by Richerus to settle “a dispute over which two claimants to the office of archbishop is the legitimate occupant” (17). The mere fact of occupancy is proof that God willed it so; to the military victor goes the holy office. In the endings of other chronicles, it may be the arrival of a foreign army, or a plague, or a sudden disaster that provides a 37 It could be said that Bruni’s History in some respects still holds to a chronicle form: he retains a “central subject” in the Florentine popolo, meaning “the middle ranks of society in city-states” who “organized themselves collectively to check the violence and political turmoil caused by rival factions of nobles, and to impose peace and civil order” (Hankins, xvi); and he follows a yearly narrative – “The year following was the thirteen hundredth year of Christian salvation” (4:391); “The following year the Pistoians …” (4:403); “The following year, the Florentines and Lucchesi joined forces …” (4:415) – passing over any given year only when “I have found nothing worth recording” (4:379).

33093_Williams.indd 312

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 313

conclusion for which “[t]here is no justice, only force” (20) or fate. Still, for the chronicler as for the annalist, the triumph of force is justified by the logic of God’s permissive will. In humanist historiography, by contrast, foreign invasion preserves a sense of human justice. When Charles VIII and his French army swept into Tuscany in 1494, the young Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici, heir to his father Lorenzo the Magnificent, was forced into exile in Venice, never to return.38 But when his younger brother Giovanni (who later became Leo X, the first of the Medici popes) regained control of Florence in 1512 with the aid of a Spanish army, Niccolò Machiavelli, secretary and second chancellor of the Florentine Republic, was ­pointedly excluded from the good graces of the Medicis, and was not restored until he accepted a commission in 1520 from Giovanni, now Pope Leo X, to write the history of Florence from 1434, the time of Cosimo’s return from exile, up to Leo’s “fortunate” present. Machiavelli ignored the terms of this commission, however, beginning his Istorie fiorentine (completed 1525) much in the manner of Bruni, “with the barbarian invasions.” Connell believes that Machiavelli, “like Bruni,” had meant by this structure to signal “the importance of 1250 for the decline of the German emperors in Italy” (358–9). Although Machiavelli did write “with restraint about the Medici in the period from 1432 to 1492” (359), his idiosyncratic structure was more likely designed, like Virgil’s Aeneid, to present history in the future tense, where the sudden departure of the imperial power in 1250 anticipates, as in Bruni’s more explicit fashion, the implied decline of Medici “emperors” in the papacy, and thus hints at restoration of the Florentine Republic, the manifest theme of Bruni’s history. Choosing to end his Florentine Histories in 1492, two years before the banishment of the Medici for crimes against the Republic, the former chancellor of the Florentine Republic is thus able to offer an implied, if still scathing, judgment on Medici power in the recent ascensions of Giovanni (Leo X, 1513–21), and his cousin Giulio (Clement VII, 1523–34), to the throne of St Peter.

38 Piero was exiled by the Signoria for his patent betrayal of the republic (Wegener, 129).

33093_Williams.indd 313

2022-09-01 16:54

314

The Communion of the Book

Like Machiavelli – and like Virgil before him – Milton apparently chooses to write history in the future tense39 by opening his own History with the subjugation of the ancient Britons in successive waves of ­foreign invaders. From his collaboration with Marchamont Nedham, the “English Machiavelli,” Milton had already learned to dress ­contemporary events in a Roman toga for a series of editorials they wrote in 1651–52 for the newsbook Mercurius Politicus.40 Milton’s near contemporary John Toland recognized the relevance of past to present history in The History, given that “it was Milton’s hostile references to the Saxon Church” and its bishops [Laud, etc.] which had “provoked the censorship of the History.”41 Moreover, Milton seems to have outwitted the censor by making “the imperial jurisdiction departing hence” from Britain (cpw 5.i:129) an implied commentary on the recent end of royal jurisdiction in England, followed by the failure of modern republicans to secure their freedom, much as the ancient “Britans” had lost their freedom to the Saxon invaders several decades after the “imperial” departure. In general, the portrait of “Britans” in Book 3 of Milton’s History makes a powerful indictment of the Revolutionary leaders.42 For instance, “[T]his Battell of Mount Badon where the Saxons were hemm’d in, or besieg’d” (cpw 5.i:168) was, or at least should have been, a signal victory, had it not been squandered by the “Britans” who had no idea how to use it for their liberty. The victory at Mount Badon serves as a direct parallel with the Battle of Naseby on 14 June 1645; for, although Naseby proved to be the decisive victory in the first English Civil War, it did not result in a thriving republic. Milton’s Sallustian conclusion is both pithy and scathing, given that “the peace they enjoy’d, by ill using it, prov’d more destructive to them then War” (cpw 5.i:174). And he concludes Book 4 in similar fashion with a barely concealed barb aimed at the regal ambition of the Lord Protector: “Mean while the Northumbrian Kingdom of it self was fall’n to shivers; thir Kings one 39 Milton, like Machiavelli and Bruni, was writing “history in the future tense” on the formal model of Virgil’s Aeneid (19 bce), without the political baggage of an imperial ­fiction. In theme, all three are much closer to Lucan’s republican epic De bello civili (65 ce) than to Virgil’s imperial epic. 40 See my Milton’s Leveller God, 71–102. 41 Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s “History of Britain,” 159. 42 See von Maltazahn, 22–48; Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History, 81–91; Jenkins, “Shrugging Off the Norman Yoke,” 306–25.

33093_Williams.indd 314

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 315

after another so oft’n slain by the people, no man dareing, though never so ambitious, to take up the Scepter which many had found so hot, (the only effectual cure of ambition that I have read) for the space of 33 years” (cpw 5.i:255). In dating the so-called “Digression” of The History to eleven portentous weeks in the autumn of 1648, Thomas Fulton concludes that Milton had despaired of Parliament’s negotiations with the king on the Isle of Wight toward a possible Treaty of Newport.43 “The same extreme exasperation with the revolutionary efforts and with the Parliament,” Fulton concludes, “is seen in such texts as the Petition of 11 September 1648, written by John Lilburne and others, with the supposed backing of forty thousand signatures. The petition, prompted by an impending parliamentary treaty with the king, complains that Parliament deserted the very cause for which it had taken arms against the king” (130). In its distinctive phrasings, “The Petition, like the ‘Digression,’ laments with ‘exceeding grief’ the seeming inability of Parliament to make” any constitutional “change, given the extraordinary sacrifice of the country. The monarchy has held the people in a condition of ‘intolerable’ and ‘destructive bondage,’ and despite the war of liberation from this, Parliament endeavors to set ‘one single person’ in ‘competition with the whole body of the people whom ye represent’” (Fulton, 131). If the “Digression” was composed, as Fulton believes, in late 1648, it is another instance of Milton finding himself on the same page with Lilburne and other Levellers, since a “republican position” is what Milton adopted soon after “in The Tenure, arguing that setting ‘one body [of the people] inferior to him single … were a kinde of treason against the dignity of mankind to affirm’ (cpw 3:204)” (Fulton, 131; ellipses in original). Here, as elsewhere in The History, Milton often sounds very much like a Leveller.44 Not one of Lilburne’s historical examples, however, antedates the Norman Conquest, whereas The History of Britain begins with Celts s­uccumbing to a succession of Roman, Saxon, and Danish invaders. In proceeding thus, Milton seems, like Bruni, to have followed the example of Sallust, his favourite Roman historian45 (86–35 bce), whose stinging attacks on corruption in Bellum Catilinae (42 bce) and on the self-interest 43 Fulton, Historical Milton, 115–33. 44 See Milton’s Leveller God, 44–60. 45 Milton’s letter of 15 July 1657 to Henry de Brass, cited in Lewalski, Life, 345.

33093_Williams.indd 315

2022-09-01 16:54

316

The Communion of the Book

of the powerful few in Bellum Jugurthinum (40 bce) made him a major defender of Roman civic virtue, and a cogent analyst of the failures of the Republic. While Philip Hicks remarks that Milton follows Sallust stylistically, “forgo[ing] the lush Ciceronianism of his earlier political pamphlets to write in chaste, sombre prose reminiscent of Sallust,” he adds that Milton “also follows Sallust thematically.” Sallust blames Roman degeneration on “luxury, idleness, love of money, and irreligion, ideas certainly not unique to Sallust but prominent in his writings. The same Sallustian leitmotifs are conspicuous in Milton’s pessimistic account of British national decline” (572).46 Nicholas von Maltzahn offers a similar view of Sallust’s historiographical influence on Milton in The History: “Political sympathies contributed to this preference for Sallust. Sallust was exemplary not only for his prose style but for his moral elevation in judging the corruption of Rome” (76). And Barbara Lewalski likewise observes that Milton read “Sallust’s eloquent denunciations of corruption and the dangers of military rule as a lesson for the Cromwellian court” (345). It is reasonable, then, to assume that Sallust’s portrait of political rivalries and a bitter factionalism between the traditional rulers (­aristocrats) and “new men” supported by the plebs, offered Milton ready-made parallels with the failure of the English republic47 since Sallust’s moral purpose in writing history was highly relevant to present circumstances. But, having treated the failure of the “Britans” to establish their own form of government after the Roman withdrawal ca 410 ce, Milton more largely concludes that the lessons of history are vital to forming a nation’s character. For, “such remarkable turns of State, producing like events among us,” have the power, he argues, “to raise a knowledg [sic] of our selves both great and weighty … for if it be a 46 Smalley, “Sallust in the Middle Ages,” lists three distinct ways that Sallust was valued in the Middle Ages: first as a “moralist”; then as a “stylist”; and last (and least), as “a storehouse of historical information” (165–76). As Philippa Byrne adds in “More Than Roman Salt,” 1–26, “Cataline and Jugurtha did not look the way which medieval readers expected their histories to look,” given their “relatively short spans of time” as compared with “the longue durée vision of medieval Christian historiography exemplified in annals, c­ hronicles, and universal histories.” Also “medieval authors” most often “preferred to turn to late antique Christian writers as their source material” (5). 47 Less certain, perhaps, is Loewenstein’s reading of the influence of Sallust in the second Defense: “Milton’s Cromwell combines features of the classical hero and the Puritan saint. Like Sallust’s Cato, he appears upright, austere, self-controlled, and a man of t­owering merit who wages war with mighty kings” (Milton and the Drama, 79).

33093_Williams.indd 316

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 317

high point of wisdom in every private man, much more is it in a Nation to know it self” (cpw 5.i:130). The need of “a Nation to know it self” entails a like responsibility on the part of readers (and historians) to know themselves, collectively as well as individually. But those “turns of State” that may have a power “to raise a knowledg of our selves” also echo Aristotle’s account of the better sort of tragedies, where the tragic action involves both peripeteia (reversal) and anagnorisis48 (recognition or discovery), such as the decisive turn (or reversal) in Sophocles’s King Oedipus, where the eponymous hero learns the truth of his birth, thereby discovering or recognizing his tragic error in having run toward the very fate predicted for him. Milton thereby signals his tragic plot from the outset of The History of Britain. Over the last three decades, modern theorists of historiography have revived in various ways this deeply Petrarchan notion of history as a species of tragic literature.49 In his eloquent commentary on Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of history, Hayden White maintains that the “­ultimate content” of literature and history “is the same: the structures of human time. Their shared form, narrative, is a function of this shared content. There is nothing more real for human beings than the experience of temporality – and nothing more fateful, either for individuals or for whole civilizations” (180). Aphoristically, White adds that, “every great historical narrative is an allegory of temporality,” insofar as the truth of historical stories “resides not only in their fidelity to the facts of given individual or collective lives but also, and most importantly, in their faithfulness to that vision of human life informing the poetic genre of tragedy. In this respect, the symbolic content of narrative history, the content of its form, is the tragic vision itself” (181). While cultural theorist Francis Barker downplays the importance of narrativity that White makes the supreme value in historical writing, he does concede that, if one were “to demand a literary genre as the

48 “Recognition [anagnôrisis], on the other hand, just as the name too signifies, is a change from ignorance [agnoia] to knowledge [gnôsis], whether toward friendship or enmity, of those whose relation to good or ill fortune has already been defined.” Aristotle, On Poetics, 1452a, trans. Benardete and Davis, 30. 49 Petrarch had made himself the author of this idea of history as tragedy in his ­historical epic Africa, where the downfall of the Roman Empire is predicted on the very eve of the making of that true icon of the Roman Republic, Scipio Africanus, thus giving to the “heroic in history” a deeply “tragic note” (Regn and Huss, 100).

33093_Williams.indd 317

2022-09-01 16:54

318

The Communion of the Book

appropriate metaphor” for history, it would be “tragedy.”50 For two ­reasons, Barker maintains that “tragedy, either as a genre or a concept, is likely to be more historical than much history.” For one thing, history resembles tragedy in its handling of complex temporalities: historians must also construct the past, and various levels of time within it, in a present moment that has its own layers of intervening time and conflicting perspectives. Such temporal complexities thus mimic the mysterious interactions across time when, for example, Fate appears to alter the present of young Oedipus by predicting that very future he seeks to avoid. What Barker reads in Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin’s “formulations of the complexity of historicity as the interaction of past, present and future temporalities” (110) is also very close to what he describes as the tangled temporalities of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy. Moreover, Barker claims that history “is also tragic in the extent to which it consists in violent depredation” (111). And this is unquestionably the case for a goodly number of defeated republicans in 1660.

The Tragic Temporalities of Edmund Ludlow’s Memoirs (1698–99) Following his death in 1692 in Vevey in the Swiss Canton of Bern, The  Memoirs of the republican exile Edmund Ludlow (b. 1617) appeared in England in three volumes (1698–99) purporting to have been printed in “Vivay.”51 The Memoirs is a chronicle as well as a personal recollection by a leading member of the “Commonwealth-party” (1:141), covering the years 1625–72, and recalling key events of the civil wars in England, Scotland, and Ireland; the trial and execution of Charles I (Ludlow’s firm signature was thirtieth of fifty-nine on the death warrant); the abolition of the monarchy and establishment of the Commonwealth (Ludlow was both a nominator and founding member of the Council of State); the “usurpation” of Cromwell and ­establishment of a quasi-regal Protectorate; the death of the Lord Protector and revival of the English Republic; the “crafty” betrayal of the republican General Monck to deliver a restored monarchy; and sundry ­assassinations and bloody acts of justice meted out to any number of republican leaders. As the nineteenth-century historian Charles Firth 50 Barker, The Culture of Violence, 110. 51 Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, 1:title page, 1.

33093_Williams.indd 318

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 319

noted, “In describing the fate of his political associates” in the second volume of his Memoirs, “Ludlow follows those pamphlets” of 1660–62 “with such closeness that he must clearly have had them before his eyes at the very time when he was writing.”52 The perspective remains that of an exiled republican mp and defeated army officer, written from memory of the years before the Restoration and of ensuing years with the help of documents that Ludlow had received from friends in England. It is structured as a chronicle-memoir, narrating the events of each year, and proceeding chronologically, although Ludlow misplaces some events or assigns them to the wrong year or a faulty sequence; but, for the most part, he does put things in their proper order in a strictly linear narrative.53 What surprises most, however, is how much of this chronicle history is a signature tangle of differing layers of time and competing p ­ erspectives. Since the telling depends on a complicated interaction of past, present, and future, it has much in common with the mysteries of Fate so central to Greek tragedy. “Having seen our cause betrayed,” Ludlow writes in his opening sentence, “and the most solemn promises that could be made to the asserters of it, openly violated, I departed from my native country” (1:9). Having “seen” the “cause betrayed” and having fled, the memoirist has clearly survived the catastrophe; but having “departed from my native country,” he is compelled to recall that tragedy from a distance, both exiled and self-condemned by what he failed to see in events, despite what he was able to discern at the time. Such a doubled perspective, and therein a consistent doubling of the narrator’s historical position, is already manifest in Ludlow’s first extended narrative of Cromwell. The scene takes place at an undefined time in the interbellum between Charles I’s surrender to the Scots Army in May 1646 and the struggle between Parliament and the army in 1647 for control of a constitutional settlement. Ludlow recalls “walking one morning with LieutenantGeneral Cromwell in Sir Robert Cotton’s garden,” when “he [Cromwell] inveighed bitterly against them [the Parliament], saying in a familiar way to me; ‘If thy father were alive, he would let some of them hear what 52 C.H. Firth, “Introduction,” Memoirs of Ludlow, 1:lxvii. 53 Commenting on “his trustworthiness as a historian,” Firth concludes that Ludlow’s “memory of events of which he was an eyewitness is extremely accurate, but he is often in error in recounting affairs in which he was not personally concerned. The accuracy of his recollections of his own services in Ireland is in sharp contrast to the blunders contained in his account of Cromwell’s two campaigns in that country” (lxv).

33093_Williams.indd 319

2022-09-01 16:54

320

The Communion of the Book

they deserve:’ adding farther, ‘that it was a miserable thing to serve a Parliament, to whom let a man be never so faithful, if one pragmatical fellow amongst them rise up and asperse him, he shall never wipe it off. Whereas,’ said he, ‘when one serves under a General, he may do as much service, and yet be free from all blame and envy’” (1:144–5). It is a profoundly revealing scene, pregnant with intimations of Cromwell’s eventual military takeover, the collapse of “the common cause” (1:390), and the destruction of all the “Commonwealth party” (1:172). But none of this is yet evident to the twenty-nine-year-old Ludlow, although the exile does confess two decades later: “This text, together with the comment that his after-actions put upon it, hath since perswaded me, that he had already conceived the design of destroying the civil authority, and setting up of himself; and that he took that opportunity to feel my pulse whether I were a fit instrument to be employed by him to those ends” (1:145). The writing of history, it turns out, is more than temporally distinct from living that history; the ­meaning of events inheres in the relation of the “text” lived to those “after-actions put upon it.” As a form of second sight, history as narrative is intrinsically a literary construct, requiring both a continuous, as well as a discontinuous, or indexical, reading of events.54 For the historian who knows the hero’s fate – fatum, “that which is spoken” by Jove or his oracle of future things – stands in much the same relation to his younger self as the tragedian stands in relation to his hero. The historical actor named Edmund Ludlow is never quite as certain, however, as the memoirist shows himself to be of a secret “design” in the “after-actions,” not even when the former seemingly agrees with the latter, as when Edmund Ludlow, mp, objects to an attempt of Oliver Cromwell, mp, to control negotiations with the king after crushing an army group of Leveller democrats at Ware on 15 November 1647. As Ludlow writes: yet now the bargain for the people’s liberty being driven on by himself, he [Cromwell] opposed those who laboured to obstruct it, pretending his so ­doing to be only in order to keep the army in subjection to Parliament; who being very desirous to have this spirit suppressed in the army by any means, not only approved what he had done, but gave him the thanks of the House

54 See Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls” (72–3); also see chapter 4 above: 176–83.

33093_Williams.indd 320

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 321

for the same: whereunto, tho singly, I gave as loud a “No” as I could, being fully convinced that he had acted in this manner for no other end but to ­advance his own passion and power into the room of right and reason. (1:173)

Nor do subsequent objections turn into decisive action, as in one heated debate that took place at Cromwell’s home in King Street, months before the outbreak of the Second Civil War in 1648, when the “Commonwealthsmen” among the army officers urged yet again “the establishment of an equal commonwealth founded upon the c­ onsent of the people, and providing for the rights and liberties of all men … Notwithstanding what was said, Lieutenant-General Cromwell, not for want of conviction, but in hopes to make a better bargain with another party, professed himself unresolved, and having learn’d what he could of the principles and inclinations of those present at the ­conference, took up a ­cushion and flung it at my head, and then ran down the stairs” (1:185). As the immediate target of Cromwell’s wrath, “Levelling Ludlow”55 seems to have been the chief republican in the debate; and he seconds the memoirist’s words by flinging his own ­cushion back at the general, “which made him hasten down faster than he desired.” Despite their public quarrel, Cromwell appears willing for the time being to confide in Ludlow about “having made the greatest part of the nation his enemies, by adhering to a just cause” (1:190), and so to seek the advice of a fellow officer and parliamentarian. In response, Ludlow bluntly admits to the general, “I could not but acknowledge … that many who were friends to the cause had conceived suspicions of him,” advising his colleague that “if he persisted in the prosecution of our just intentions, it was the most probable way to subdue his e­nemies” (1:190–1). The general “seemed to take well what I said,” recollects the memoirist in the voice of his younger self, while adding, from later knowledge of the general’s “after-actions,” that “his design was rather to perswade me, for the present, of the rectitude of his intentions, than to receive counsel from me” (191). Determining motives is often a generic feature of textual acts of reading and interpreting; but the trusting nature of Cromwell’s younger confidant now stands out just as clearly as the “perfidy” of Cromwell’s “design” appears to the forensic historian. 55 “‘Levelling Ludlow’ is the nickname given him in a list of members of Parliament by a contemporary pamphleteer” (Firth, 1:xxviii).

33093_Williams.indd 321

2022-09-01 16:54

322

The Communion of the Book

Upon the Lord General Fairfax’s decision in 1650 to resign his command and distance himself from the extra-legal Council of State, Ludlow the historian recalls: “Lieutenant-General Cromwell pressed, that notwithstanding the unwillingness of the Lord Fairfax to command upon this occasion, they would yet continue him to be General of the army; professing for himself, that he would rather chuse to serve under him in his post, than to command the greatest army in Europe. But the Council of State not approving that advice, appointed a committee of some of themselves to confer farther with the General in order to his satisfaction” (1:243). In fact, the motion to appoint a committee had proceeded from the politic Cromwell, “who acted his part so to the life, that I really thought him in earnest; which obliged me to step to him as he was withdrawing with the rest of the committee out of the council-chamber, and to desire him that he would not in compliment and humility obstruct the service of the nation by his refusal; but the consequence made it sufficiently evident that he had no such intention” (1:243–4). Despite the older historian’s indexical reading of events, the younger Ludlow is still persuaded by the general’s ensuing profession in the summer of 1650, “to desire nothing more than that the government of the nation might be settled in a free and equal Commonwealth, acknowledging that there was no other probable means to keep out the old family and government from returning upon us” (1:246). A trusting younger Edmund Ludlow appears to take the general’s ­declaration at his word, “that he looked upon the design of the Lord in this day to be the freeing of His people from every burden, and that He was now accomplishing what was prophesied in the 110th Psalm.” Obviously, his appeal to prophetic fulfillment, supported by military success, was one of Cromwell’s major assets in a Bible-reading culture. But young Ludlow’s reassignment of the term design from the politician to Providence also shows him to be yet a pliant supporter of the Lord General, and not the forensic reader of character that the historian has now become. Among other instances of suspicions aroused and fears allayed, the  ­historian Ludlow gives us a revealing portrait of himself as a deeply naive “scroll” (or continuous) reader of a deeply duplicitous letter penned by Cromwell after his “miraculous” victory at Dunbar on 3 September 1650, where his army had been desperately outnumbered:

33093_Williams.indd 322

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 323

But the victory it self was not more welcome to me than the contents of the General’s letter to the Parliament; wherein amongst many other expressions savouring of a publick spirit, there was one to this effect; that seeing the Lord, upon this solemn appeal made to Him by the Scots and us, had so signally given judgment on our side, when all hopes of deliverance seemed to be cut off, it became us not to do His work negligently; and from thence took occasion to put us in mind, not to content our selves with the name of a Commonwealth, but to do real things for the common good, and not to permit any interest for their particular advantage to prevail with us to the contrary. (1:254)

It is a reading, of course, that will come back to haunt the historian in his Swiss exile. Other “after-actions” of Cromwell, such as his subsequent victory at Worcester on the first anniversary of the victory at Dunbar, are what will later force Ludlow the historical actor to revise his reading of Cromwell’s character over the period covering the first two volumes of the Memoirs. After the rout of the Prince’s army at Worcester, the historian reports without further comment how “[t]he General after this action, which he called the crowning victory, took upon him a more stately behaviour, and chose new friends,” dismissing barely a day “after the fight” all who had come “from all parts to assist against the common enemy,” knowing “that an experienced militia was more likely to obstruct than to second him in his ambitious design” (1:282). Even here, the historian seems to be reading back into events what he had failed to read during his service in Ireland from 1651 to 1654, as, for example, in that heroic eulogy he wrote for Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton (1:292–4), whom he still fails to recognize as a prime instrument in the general’s “design,” from as far back as the army debates at Putney in October–November 1647.56 It was not until Cromwell had dissolved the Rump Parliament on 20 April 1653 that Ludlow reached an unwavering verdict on Worcester as “The Crowning Victory” (1:344) in the long-standing “design” of Cromwell to become king. Indeed, Ludlow the historical agent continues to emphasize his own blindness among the signal failures of a majority

56 See my Milton’s Leveller God, 130–46, for a summary of this view. For a contrary view of Ireton, see Taft, “From Reading to Whitehall,” 175–93.

33093_Williams.indd 323

2022-09-01 16:54

324

The Communion of the Book

of “Commonwealths-men” to foresee the “usurper’s design” to betray the “common cause”: General Cromwel had long been suspected by wise and good men; but he had taken such care to form and mould the army to his humour and interests, that he had filled all places either with his own creatures, or with such as hoped to share with him in the sovereignty, and removed those who foreseeing his design, had either the courage or honesty to oppose him in it. His pernicious intentions did not discover themselves openly till after the battel at Worcester, which in one of his letters to the Parliament he called The Crowning Victory. (1:344)

The irony of Ludlow’s belated recognition of Cromwell’s “design” is that it is a literal misreading, not of Cromwell’s intent, but of the written text of the letter sent after the victory of Worcester to the Speaker of Parliament, William Lenthall, on 4 September 1651, where Cromwell remarks the “crowning mercy”57 of Providence in having granted the victory to the Parliamentary Army. True to form, Ludlow’s reading of Cromwell’s design to corrupt the Good Old Cause and usurp the crown is once again a misreading, if still a useful misremembering, of a text which Ludlow no longer has to hand. Having mistakenly transformed “crowning mercy” into “Crowning Victory,” Ludlow catches the “usurper” in an act that he has yet to commit. The whole design is seen by a blind man. Even so, Ludlow the historical actor fails to act for several months following the dissolution of the Rump. Long afterward, the historian admits: “Cromwel having acted this treacherous and impious part, ordered the guard to see the House clear’d of all the members, and then seized upon the records that were there, and at Mr. Scobell’s house” (1:355). Yet Ludlow the historical agent must admit, “We who were in Ireland being not so well informed of these clandestine practices, and no less confident that the principles of some men who joined in this attempt were directed to the good of the nation … thought our selves by the rules of charity obliged to hope the best, and therefore continued to act in our places and stations as before” (1:356-7). Nothing, in other words, had truly changed for him after the dissolution of the Rump

57 Thomas Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell’s Letters, “Letter CLXXXIII,” 331.

33093_Williams.indd 324

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 325

Parliament. It is a spectacular admission by the historian of the ­sluggishness of his intelligence, and of his moral failure to warn of the clear and present danger to the Commonwealth. Only after it was too late, after Cromwell had dissolved the Nominated Assembly on 12 December 1653, and then, just four days later, assumed the mantle of Lord Protector, would Ludlow finally appear to grasp the tragic fate of the “common cause”: “The perfidious Cromwel having forgot his most solemn professions and former vows, as well as the blood and treasure that had been spent in this contest, thought it high time to take off the masque,” having sacrificed all “our victories and deliverances to his pride and ambition, under colour of taking upon him the office as it were of a High Constable, in order to keep the peace of the nation” (1:365). From this point on, Ludlow the historical agent does act consistently on the convictions of the future historian, bravely refusing to proclaim the Instrument of Government as the new law of Ireland, while clinging to his commission as Lieutenant-General of Horse in Ireland, in case he could be of service to the now defunct Parliament that had given him his commission. Urged by his commander and sole superior in Ireland, Lieutenant-General Fleetwood, to think of “the example of Cornelius, who was a centurion under Nero,” the historical actor Ludlow remains adamant that the situation is not at all the same, “that tho in an evil government already established, an honest man may take an imployent, and bless God for such an opportunity of doing good, yet our case seemed to me to be very different, the dispute lying between tyranny and liberty; and that I durst not in any measure contribute to the support of tyranny against the liberty of my country” (1:376). It is a decision from which “solid,” stolid Ludlow never wavers, not even after his return from Ireland in 1655 and his subsequent arrest, forced to explain himself to the Lord Protector and his henchmen, such as Major General Lambert, who “desired to know from me why I could not own this as a lawful Government: ‘because,’ said I, ‘it seems to me to be in substance a re-establishment of that which we all engaged against, and had with a great expence of blood and treasure abolished’” (1:435). On this principle, he adamantly refuses to resign his commission from Parliament or to sign a binding “engagement” to support the “usurper,” even refusing, should occasion present itself, to forswear armed resistance to the new regime. “Solid” Ludlow, the historical actor who has been excruciatingly slow to arrive at the truth of the matter,

33093_Williams.indd 325

2022-09-01 16:54

326

The Communion of the Book

proves in the end to be just as incapable as the stolid historian, exiled to a Swiss canton, of ever renouncing his “Commonwealth principles.” His penance is to correct the “scroll” readings of his youth. When one more closely examines the doubled “design” of Ludlow’s Memoirs, the historical actor does appear to have much in common with the protagonist of Sophoclean tragedy. He can even be read as young Oedipus to whom the aged historian serves as the Delphic oracle, ­prophesying the tragedy to come. But the tragic hero never arrives at his deserved Colonus or finds redemption through his years of painful atonement. Instead, all that survives him at his death is an enormous manuscript, appropriately titled A Voyce from the Watch Tower,58 a label certainly in keeping with the self-blinded hero of a tragedy whose latter “design” can only be to give eyes to those he has left behind, urging “Commonwealths-men” of the future to keep a better watch than he had done in trusting the hypocrite “usurper.”

R e s to r at i o n C o n t e x t s for Reading Samson Agonistes In the “Headnote” to her edition of Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes (2008), Laura Lunger Knoppers expresses little interest in the memoirs of “defeated republicans and regicides” as a subtext, or even a sounding board, for readers of Samson Agonistes. As she remarks of historian Blair Worden’s 1995 study of the “shared language of the Good Old Cause” in writings by or about Ludlow, Algernon Sidney, and Sir Henry Vane – language that is clearly echoed in Samson Agonistes, although Ludlow’s memoirs and Sidney’s “maxims” were not yet extant in 1671 – “For Worden, there is nothing in the poem that would post-date 1663, although he acknowledges that Milton may not have completed writing before this time.”59 The apparent “defeatism” of republican responses to the Restoration is far less evocative of Milton’s poem for Knoppers than the radical resistance that she and others, like Sharon Achinstein,60 David Loewenstein,61 and Janel Mueller,62 have firmly located in “the

58 59 60 61 62

33093_Williams.indd 326

Worden, “Milton, Samson Agonistes,” 113. Knoppers, “Headnote,” Complete Works of John Milton, xcvi. Achinstein, Literature and Dissent, 130–53. Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 242–91. Janet Mueller, “The Figure and the Ground,” 137–62.

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 327

resistance of Dissenters through the 1660s,” whether in various “­activities of the Quakers” throughout that decade, or among London Nonconformists “at the time of plague and fire in 1665–6” (Knoppers, xcvi–xcvii). Continuing resistance, rather than tragic defeat, hints at an ideological emplotment of this criticism. While Worden thinks it possible “that Milton had planned a poem on Samson, perhaps drafted one, before 1660” (111n2), the value of his reading of the poem inheres in the many parallels he locates in the language, sentiments, and situations of adherents to the “Good Old Cause” that echo similar phrasings, sentiments, and situations in Samson Agonistes, establishing through a “language of the times” the Restoration provenance of the poem. Whereas Milton’s Samson reminds Dalila that her country, soliciting her help in making him their captive, did so “‘unjustly, / Against the law of nature, law of nations’ (lines 888–90): Ludlow records that the regicides were seized in Holland contrary to all ‘laws … of nature or nations’” (Worden, 124). “Like Samson,” Worden opines, “Ludlow knows that the defeat of God’s cause owes nothing to its enemies – to the Philistines in Samson’s time, to the Cavaliers in Ludlow’s – and everything to the sinfulness which God punishes in His servants. Like Samson,” he concludes, “Ludlow has to absorb the lesson of divine humiliation. And like Samson, he has to learn how to keep faith with – in Ludlow’s words – God’s ‘seemingly dead and buried cause’” (113). Yet phrasings like these are hardly defeatist in the way that Knoppers seems to think, since Ludlow’s tragic vision is indeed designed to restore sight to Commonwealths-men in the “Watch Tower,” enjoining vigilance to warn of danger, as well as to inspire hope in the future. Most of Worden’s verbal parallels come from the later volumes of The Memoirs recalling the period after the Restoration in which, “No less than Samson’s ‘restless thoughts’ do Ludlow’s meditations ‘present / Times past, what once I was, and what am now.’ No less than Samson is Ludlow’s cause ‘the glory late of Israel, now the grief’ (line 179)” (113). Even Manoa’s busy attempt to ransom Samson, “a theme which owes nothing to biblical or literary tradition,” is reminiscent of the episode Ludlow relates concerning how “‘my father Oldsworth’ – his father-in-law – approached ‘the Lords’ and ‘solicited many of them’ to get Ludlow spared” (Worden, 120). Such parallels embody the experience of the memoirist and poet alike. Ludlow, like Milton, was forced to hide out in safe houses in London after the Restoration, Ludlow

33093_Williams.indd 327

2022-09-01 16:54

328

The Communion of the Book

spending five months, Milton three, in anxious obscurity. What is more, “Ludlow was ‘not to be found,’” as the sergeant-at-arms advised the Commons, “just as the official proclamation against Milton admitted that, by ‘obscuring himself,’ he had thwarted the government’s intention to try him for treason” (Worden, 119). Between Milton and the republican writer and theorist Algernon Sidney, Worden finds more parallels of phrasing than of situation: “Like the Milton of the prose works, Sidney sees ‘liberty’ as the natural ally of ‘discipline,’ of ‘frugality,’ ‘industry,’ ‘temperance,’ ‘sobriety,’ ‘honest poverty,’ and regards ‘tyranny’ as the natural ally of ‘license’ and of ‘luxury.’ With Milton, Sidney grasps ‘how firm a union there is between idolatry and tyranny’” (114). In terms of situation, Sidney is much closer to Ludlow than he is to Milton, having been forced to flee after the king’s triumphant return to London, and having to shift between Geneva, Holland, and Paris for the better part of two decades, though beginning a manuscript in the mid-1660s that well resembles Samson’s “restless thoughts” (sa, 19). But Sidney’s Court Maxims had remained in manuscript until recently (1996), and so was not available to Milton any more than was Ludlow’s Memoir. Neither would Sidney die in exile like Ludlow, nor even at home like Milton; he was publicly executed in 1683 by the government of Charles II on suspicion of his involvement in the Rye House Plot. In all this, he seems to be at the antipodes from Milton’s Samson. Worden’s third defeated republican, Milton’s friend Sir Henry Vane, scorned exile, even after his name was excepted in 1660 from the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion. Alhough he was not a regicide, Vane died on the block – in 1662, after two years in prison. In the biography published by Vane’s chaplain George Sykes soon after the execution, the “relevance of the Samson story” to republicans was obvious. Sykes “refers to it on his opening page. Later, and more suggestively, he writes that Vane ‘has more advantaged a good cause and condemned a bad one, done his honest countrymen more service and his enemies more disservice, by his death (as Samson served the Philistines) than before in all his life, though that also were very considerable.”63 Furthermore, the sonnet that Milton wrote and sent to Vane on 3 July 1652,64 when 63 Worden, 115. The quotation comes from George Sykes, The Life and Death of Sir Henry Vane the Younger (1662), 119. 64 Fulton, Historical Milton, 24.

33093_Williams.indd 328

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 329

the latter was still a member of the Council of State, was published for the first time in Sykes’s biography as a dedicatory poem. To Milton, Vane had doubtless died a martyr to the Good Old Cause. Sykes’s biography also supplies Worden with evidence of the effect that The Life and Death of Sir Henry Vane the Younger seems to have had on Samson Agonistes and its blind hero: “Vane’s chaplain protests at the determination of the restored regime ‘to put out the eyes of all the good people of England.’ Samson, despairing at his impotence and his affliction, thinks his ‘race of glory run’ (line 597): Vane, his ‘race of action being run’ after his fall from power, subsequently endured his ‘suffering scene’” (115). Worden adds: “Where Samson’s sin has broken his military prowess, in Vane’s mind ‘our sins have been the cause that our counsels, our forces, our wit, our conquests, and ourselves have been destructive to ourselves.’” Here, however, the parallel is less a likeness than a contrast; for it was Samson’s foolish indiscretion in revealing the secret of his strength that ended “his military prowess,” not his military “conquests” that “have been destructive” in any way to himself. Moreover, there is a moral chasm between the historical and literary figures: Vane, in his tragic scene on the scaffold, took no one with him to the grave. In fact, Vane died a witness to “the truth” in the selfless manner of a Foxean martyr; he did not bring the roof down on a latter-day version of Bishop Bonner or his fellow inquisitors. In this sense, Vane’s “tragedy” obviously stands (although Worden doesn’t say so explicitly) in the Foxean tradition of revolutionary martyrdom. “Preparing for his execution,” Worden concludes, “he was ‘certain’ that ‘this cause shall have its resurrection in my death.’ Milton’s Chorus assures us at the end that the benevolence of God’s providence has become evident ‘in the close’ (line 1748): Sykes, in his conclusion, assures the persecuted godly that God ‘will send deliverance in the close’” (116). For such reasons, “Ludlow repeatedly tells his kindred spirits,” Worden concludes, “that ‘this is the day of the patience of the Lord and his saints.’ Vane’s advice to the saints recalls the experience of Milton’s Samson: they must be ‘patiently waiting till God’s time come wherein He will open the prison doors, either by death, or some other way’” (128). Also, Ludlow “recommends a middle course, so that ‘by making haste we may not strengthen the hand of the enemy, nor by standing still neglect the opportunity He puts into our hands, but that, being on our watch tower, and living by faith, we may see our duty so plainly, that

33093_Williams.indd 329

2022-09-01 16:54

330

The Communion of the Book

when the Lord’s time is come we may’ – like Samson at the last – ‘be up and be doing’” (129). The fact of keeping “watch,” and so keeping faith with the design of Providence to restore the “common cause,” may yet transcend defeat. Laura Knoppers, though less invested in the experience of defeat, seems closer to Worden’s reading of these republican martyrologies than she cares to admit. In an earlier book, Historicizing Milton (1994), she graphically demonstrates the “contrary effects”65 of all those public spectacles of punishment visited on defeated regicides by the royalist regime, suggesting that the hope of revolution might yet spring from defeat. Ten republicans who were either signatories to the death warrant for Charles I, or else had served on his jury, were publicly tried in the year of the king’s return, and summarily executed in October 1660. These were shocking public spectacles where the condemned were hanged, then cut down just short of death to be emasculated, drawn, and quartered, after which their severed heads were staked on public display. But all these horrifying demonstrations of state power failed to produce the intended effect, in part because of the dignified conduct of the condemned on the scaffold, and in part because of the swift and effective use of print that made each of them an instant martyr to the Good Old Cause. Because Knoppers offers an explicitly Foucauldian reading of The Speeches and Prayers of Some of the Late King’s Judges (1660), she fails to see it as a catalogue brimful of tropes from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments that transform the regicides into martyrs much like those who died bearing witness to “Truth” in the reign of Mary Tudor. The first sentence of the pamphlet martyrology depicting these Restoration executions on 13 October puts the death of Major-General Thomas Harrison squarely in the Foxean tradition: “The day of his coming from Newgate to the Tower, at night he sent his Wife word that that day was to him as his Wedding day.”66 The trope derives, as we have seen, from such stories as that of the fisherman Rawlins White, and others like him, whom Foxe describes as putting on “theyr wedding garment goyng to the fire.”67 For a political martyrology of ninety-six pages, the “wedding day” trope proves to be a powerful lead sentence, since all of these martyrs to regal 65 Knoppers, Historicizing, 47. 66 The Speeches and Prayers of some of the Late King’s Judges (1660): 1. 67 tamo (1570): 11:1767; (1583): 12:2137. Also see my chapter 4: 170–1.

33093_Williams.indd 330

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 331

power are instantly assimilated to Foxe’s sacred martyrs to papal power. And the topic sentence, comprising the entire opening paragraph of Harrison’s martyrdom, functions as a graphic subtitle as much as it serves as a generic signpost. It even recalls an identical figure used within living memory by John Lilburne in his contest with the bishops, where he had “counted it” his “wedding day” to be whipped en route to the public pillory.68 The second paragraph of The Speeches and Prayers, also composed of just one sentence, relates how, “When the Sentence was pronounced, he [Harrison] said, whom men have Judged God doth not condemne, blessed be the name of the Lord.” Readers would most likely recall that Lilburne, tied to the “Cart-Arse” as he was whipped along the Strand, had exclaimed, “Blessed be thy Name, O Lord my God, that hast counted mee worthy to suffer thy glorious Names sake” (5–6). The topic sentence of the pamphlet’s long third paragraph describes, in a manner also reminiscent of Lilburne, how, “as he was carried away from the Court through the croud, the people shouted, And he cryed good is the Lord for all this; I have no cause to be ashamed of the cause that I have been ingaged in.” At mid-paragraph, the narrator further relates in Lilburnesque prose how, “When he came to Newgate there was Chaines put upon his Feet; And he said, Welcome, Welcome, Oh this is nothing to what Christ hath undergone for me.” The phrasing echoes Lilburne’s calculated repetition of Foxe’s phrasing, “Wellcome be the Crosse of Christ” (Worke of the Beast, 5), as he ecstatically cries out at such proof of his martyrdom. Finally, the third paragraph, replete with Foxean tropes, ends with the awe-struck testimony of the woman sent to clean his prison cell who was ask’t when she came out by divers people (whereof some were scoffers) how the Major General behaved himself, and what he said. To which she answered, she knew not what he had done to deserve to be there, but sure she was that he was a good man, and that never such a man was there before: for he was full of God, there was nothing but God in his mouth; so that it would have done any one good to have been neer him, or with him; And his discourse and frame of heart would melt the hardest of their hearts. (Speeches and Prayers, 1)

68 See my chapter 5: 238–9; see also John Lilburne, A Worke of the Beast (1641): 21.

33093_Williams.indd 331

2022-09-01 16:54

332

The Communion of the Book

By the bottom of the first page, we have been schooled to identify each of these victims of regal power with Foxe’s victims of Mary Tudor’s regal power as an accessory to papal power. Thomas Harrison has already stepped into the pages of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Six pages later, the reader arrives at “M. Gen. Harrison’s Speech upon the Ladder” on 13 October 1660, which, in the manner of Foxe, makes the execution a site for preserving the martyr’s voice, maintaining an enduring witness to the truth. In propria persona, Harrison says, “I did not expect to have spoken a word to you at this time, but seeing there is silence commanded, I will speak something of the work God had in hand in our dayes. Many of you have been Witnesses of the Finger of God that hath been seen amongst us of late years in the Deliverance of his people from their Oppressors” (7). This pattern holds through the other nine stories of the October martyrs to the Good Old Cause, as the author appends, for example, at the end of John Cooke’s story – one of the more infamous regicides to have prosecuted the High Court’s case against Charles I – “A Letter written from the Tower to a Christian friend, by Mr. Justice Cooke” (38). There follows “A letter … to his Wife,” seeking in the manner of Foxe’s martyrs to reassure his loved ones, and to encourage later martyrs to be faithful witnesses to the Truth. “I write it out in a verse,” as the great Irish poet of a later age penned names which, for defeated republicans in 1660, would have sounded as resonant as “MacDonagh and MacBride” now sounded in 1916: “[Carew and Scroop, / Axtel and Scott, ]/ Now and in time to be, / Wherever green69 is worn, / All are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.” As Knoppers summarizes this revolutionary use of print to contest the truth of state spectacles of power, “The Speeches and Prayers thus directly counters the strategies of display, rewriting treason and justice

69 Though I have substituted the names of the martyrs of 1660 for those of “MacDonagh and MacBride / And Connolly and Pearse,” I have kept Yeats’s phrase “Wherever green is worn,” used to honour the Irish martyrs of the Easter Rebellion of 1916, since “seagreen” was also the colour of the ribbons worn by thousands of Leveller supporters in the streets of  London on 14 November 1648, following the casket of the assassinated “martyr” Col. Thomas Rainsborough, one of the most eloquent Leveller defenders of the welfare of ordinary people. It was also the colour of Leveller mutineers in the army who would soon die for their republican commitment at Burford on 15 May 1649. Brailford, The Levellers, relates the story of full regiments of mutineers who “came to the rendezvous on 9 May with sea-green ribbons in their hats” (515).

33093_Williams.indd 332

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 333

as suffering and witness to the Good Old Cause” (47).70 She is also keenly aware of the impact that such spectacles were likely to have had on Milton, as when one Captain Silas Titus expressed a hope that “the House would order the Carcasses of those Devils, who were buried in Westminster, Cromwell, Bradshaw, Ireton, and Pride be taken out of their graves, dragged to Tyburn, there to hang for some time, and afterwards to be buried under the gallows.”71 An eyewitness report of this ghastly spectacle recalls the gruesome display of “Bradshaw in his winding sheet,” his body “better preserved” than the others, “‘the fingers of his right hand and his nose’” alone having “perished, the rest very perfect, insomuch that’” the witness “‘knew his face, when the hangman after cutting off the head held it up.’”72 Whether Milton was told of this or had heard some other report of the grisly spectacle, his own pained response to the desecration of his friend’s body resonates in Samson Agonistes, as the Chorus taxes God with allowing shameful evils to befall his faithful servants: “Nor only dost degrade them, or remit / To life obscur’d,” they protest, as if speaking for the poet himself, “But throw’st them lower then thou didst exalt them high, / … Too grievous for the trespass or omission” (687–9, 691). Indeed, the poet’s own anguish still seeps out between the lines: Oft leav’st them to the hostile sword Of Heathen and prophane, thir carkasses To dogs and fowls a prey, or else captiv’d: Or to the unjust tribunals, under change of times, And condemnation of the ingrateful multitude. (692–6)

This bitter indictment of Heaven is remarkable enough; but its bold impeachment of the royalist regime is astounding, given the dangers of speaking out. One surmises that the censor Thomas Tomkins must have nodded off in failing to catch the anachronism of “unjust tribunals, under change of times” in ancient Philistine. Nor did he seem to catch the more direct protest of “carcasses” left “To dogs and fowls a prey,”

70 Those counterstrategies of republican “display” were also put on trial in the case of the bookseller Thomas Brewster in 1664, as the judge sought to establish the clandestine nature of his sales of The Speeches and Prayers. See Johns, Nature, 119–20. 71 Varley, Oliver Cromwell’s Latter End, 43–4. Cited by Knoppers, Historicizing, 51. 72 Varley, 55–6; cited by Knoppers, Historicizing, 52.

33093_Williams.indd 333

2022-09-01 16:54

334

The Communion of the Book

although the “condemnation of the ingrateful multitude” could have given him sufficient satisfaction to let it pass. Overall, the work of Knoppers, like that of Worden, leaves no doubt that the poem had flowered in the blood-soaked soil of the Restoration. Like Worden, Knoppers demonstrates that “Milton’s choice and treatment of a tragedy on the biblical figure of Samson has, in relation to the punishment of the regicides, more specific, extensive, and resonant political implications than have been previously recognized” (55).

Protectoral Contexts for Reading Samson Agonistes There is another historical context for reading the tragedy of the Good Old Cause in Samson Agonistes that has yet to be recognized, one that has broader implications for understanding the poem. For a variety of reasons, Milton scholars have not remarked on John Lilburne’s biography as a likely model, let alone a structural pattern73 for the sequence of visitors to Samson, even when the Levellers were unmistakably “The First Losers”74 of the English Revolution, as Christopher Hill called them in The Experience of Defeat. The first reason is that the Leveller defeat took place far too early in the failure of the republic to be taken as representative; greater evils befell a greater number after the Restoration. Another reason is that Lilburne’s early death cut him off from key events leading up to the Restoration, including the death of Oliver Cromwell on 3 September 1658; the succession of Richard Cromwell as Lord Protector and then his abdication on 25 May 1659; and the series of revolving-door governments (Rump- or Army-led) during the tumultuous months before “the King’s coming in” on 29 May 1660. Lilburne, in other words, had left the stage long before the “play” even began. And he would not, in any event, have been a particularly sympathetic character in this latter instance of the world turned upside down. As Hill admits, “Lilburne was notoriously volatile, and had thriven on his personal popularity in London. He was not at his best in defeat” (31). 73 W.R. Parker, Milton’s Debt, took the structure of Milton’s tragedy to be modelled on “the Oedipus Coloneus of Sophocles” and “the Prometheus of Aeschylus”  … “But the chief debt,” at least for the structure, he claimed, “is undoubtedly to Aeschylus. In its scarcity of characters, its bare dramatic conflict, its complete concentration upon a single figure, the English play is thoroughly Aeschylean” (90). 74 This is the title of Christopher Hill’s second chapter in Experience of Defeat, 29–50.

33093_Williams.indd 334

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 335

Still, Lilburne’s tragic agones before his two capital trials – the first in October 1649, the second in July 1653 – and the prevailing tone of his letters and pamphlets written while he “was illegally detained in prison until his death in 1657” (Hill, 32), undoubtedly fit the mood of despair, recrimination, and questioning in the life and death of Milton’s Samson. The best reason, however, for Lilburne’s absence from the established historical contexts for the poem is that Knoppers, Achinstein, and o ­ thers have succeeded so well in identifying a Restoration context for Samson Agonistes. By now, the poem’s composition is so firmly set after 1665 that any prior context might seem superfluous. Consideration of Lilburne’s life as a model for the poem need not return us, however, to theories of early composition. It is possible to surmise that, after the death of the “volatile” Lilburne on 29 August 1657, Milton had begun to imagine, or even to draft, a “dramatic poem” on the biblical Samson. In doing so, he was unlikely to have forgotten Lilburne’s posturing in the 1640s as another Samson, willing to topple the republican enterprise, if necessary, if only to thwart the ambitions of the “Philistine” Cromwell. In Lilburne’s sudden death, Milton might also have glimpsed an outline, if not the full body, of “Samson’s” tragedy. So far as we know, Milton had little else to occupy his time in the autumn and winter after Lilburne’s death, apart from continuing work on The History of Britain, which he resumed at some point after the publication of Pro Se Defensio in August 1655.75 (To entertain this ­possibility does not detract in any way from the real dangers, horrors, and political risks that do underwrite a Restoration context for the poem.) And yet much of this Restoration framework is carefully restricted to Samson’s opening monologue and ongoing dialogues with the Chorus, as if to engage its first readers in the character of the times. And even the constant refrain of this context is overshadowed by the melody of various dramatic visitors who come to treat with Samson. Here, the story of Lilburne’s illegal imprisonment from the time of his acquittal in 1653 until his death in 1657 offers a compelling historical model and a coherent dramatic structure for a poem based on the

75 For the dating of the last two books of Milton’s six-book History of Britain, see Fogle, 5.i:xxxvii–xli; von Maltzahn, Milton’s “History,” 22–48; Woolrych, “Dating,” 929–43; Worden, Literature and Politics, 387–8, 410–26. cpw

33093_Williams.indd 335

2022-09-01 16:54

336

The Communion of the Book

biblical folk hero and mythological Trickster. Inherent in the details of Lilburne’s life is a deeply moving poetic structure that the varied miseries and deaths of Edmund Ludlow, Algernon Sidney, Sir Henry Vane, Lt-Gen Thomas Harrison, and the other republican martyrs cannot provide with an equal degree of transparency and utility.

L i l bu r n e ’ s T r i bu l at i o n s a s a S t r u c t u r a l M o d e l f o r S a m s o n ’ s T r a g e dy In January 1652, what had begun as a property dispute between Lilburne and Sir Arthur Haslerig, mp, soon turned into a Commons examination of the “volatile” Lilburne for slander and breach of privilege of a sitting member of Parliament. Mildred Gibb, the author of one of two modern biographies of Lilburne, describes the inquest as follows: “In its final dealings with Lilburne, the House of Commons broke every fundamental principle of liberty as embodied in English law. The decree of ­banishment was passed without formal charge, and without the prisoner being allowed to speak in his own defence” (301–2). Lilburne spent seventeen months in exile in the Low Countries but decided, after Cromwell’s expulsion of the Rump Parliament on 20 April 1653, that the judgment against him must also have been voided by the dismissal of the judging body. Returning from lifelong banishment to London on pain of death, he was arrested and, in a dramatic trial at the Old Bailey in July 1653, was able to persuade a jury of his peers to acquit him yet again of a capital offence. Acting as his own attorney, Lilburne defied instructions from the bench that his jurors were fit only to be judges of fact, not law, and set out to build his defence around the illegality of the prosecution’s charge that he had violated an act of the very Parliament that Cromwell had just ejected from power. As he outlined this case of undue process to the jury, either the act was just and Cromwell a usurper of Parliament’s just power, or else the law itself was unjust and rendered null and void by Cromwell’s just action. The jury were unanimous in their verdict of not guilty. But once again, though Lilburne won the battle in court, he soon lost the war to Cromwell and the Council of State. As the Venetian secretary in London reported to the Doge’s palace at the end of the trial in August 1653, “Covert steps are being taken to prevent the inconvenience anticipated from his release, as Lilburne is known to have many followers. As the declared enemy of Cromwell he is still in prison

33093_Williams.indd 336

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 337

and expected to remain there in spite of the verdict, for the avoidance of all possible disturbance.”76 It was an astute observation, borne out by another, quite unrelated appeal to case law77 in which “Captain [John] Streeter, imprisoned by the Council of State for publishing seditious pamphlets, obtained a habeas corpus in January 1654 on the grounds that an Order of Parliament ceased to be of force after a dissolution, and on February 11 he left prison a free man.”78 Cromwell, as Lilburne’s most recent biographer Pauline Gregg remarks, realized that “there was only one way to prevent Lilburne following this precedent – to remove him where the writ of habeas corpus did not run” (334) – the Isle of Jersey.79 So Lilburne was hastily shipped off on 16 March 1654, by order of the Council of State, to the gloomy and remote castle-fortress Mount Orgueil, on the east side of the island, just off the coast of Normandy. Fifteen months would pass before a family member was able to pay a visit to Lilburne in his far-off prison. A letter to Cromwell, dated 4 July 1655 from Robert Gibbon, the governor of Jersey, and preserved in the State Papers of John Thurloe, secretary of state, supplies the details: “Upon fryday last beeing June the 29th, I received your highnes two letters by mr. Dewell, mrs. Lilborne’s father.”80 As a matter of course, the letter would have been read at the next meeting of the Council of State, since it was by order of Council, and not by a court of law, that Lilburne was being held, despite his acquittal, in an offshore prison 76 Cited in Gibb, 321. 77 Ludlow, recalling in his Memoirs a number of Commonwealth men rounded up by Cromwell and imprisoned in widely separate regions of England at the beginning of the Protectorate, names “Mr. William Ashburnham, Sir Tho. Armstrong and others, to whom may be added Lieut-Col. John Lilburn, who contrary to all law, and after an acquittal by a jury, had been formerly banished. And now to prevent Major-General Overton from the benefit of a Habeas Corpus, for which Cromwel was informed he intended to move, tho he had no reason to alledg why it should be denied him; yet he sent him in custody to Jersey, with the hazard of his life and to the great prejudice of his estate” (1:417–18). Characteristically, Ludlow misremembers the details, though not their significance, since it was the republican printer John Streater, not Robert Overton, whose appeal to habeas corpus threatened to create a precedent for the litigious Lilburne. See note 79 below. 78 Gregg, Free-born John, 334. 79 Adrian Johns concludes similarly regarding John Streater’s appeal to the legal principle of habeas corpus in late 1653 and early 1654 to secure his release from prison, where he was held by order of the Council of State for having printed pamphlets objecting to the illegal dissolution of the Rump Parliament. As Johns pointedly observes, “A release for Streater might well establish a precedent for a parallel action on Lilburne’s part” (277). 80 Thurloe State Papers, xxvii:83 (4 June [July], 1655).

33093_Williams.indd 337

2022-09-01 16:54

338

The Communion of the Book

(the seventeenth-century equivalent of Guantanamo Bay). As Latin secretary to the Council, Milton was almost certain to have heard, were he unable to attend the Council meeting, about Gibbon’s letter. For it was the duty of Marchamont Nedham, with whom Milton had produced the Council’s weekly newsbook Mercurius Politicus81 three years before, to survey the correspondence received weekly at Whitehall and to print authorized selections from the correspondents both at home and abroad. No précis of Gibbon’s two letters appeared in the newsbook, given their potential to arouse public sympathy for the defeated Leveller leader; so, their reading in camera would have been more vital still to subsequent decisions of the Council. Lilburne’s mental state was clearly of concern to the Council, given Governor Gibbon’s report that the prisoner was wild with rage and despair, and “that I conceive it the liklyest way to bring his spirit to be meek and quiet, is, that he beeing in some garrison there, or elsewhere, neare home, that some of his soberest and wisest freinds [sic] might come to him and deale with him by arguments and perswasions one after another” (Thurloe xxvii:83). Mildred Gibb duly notes that “[d]uring his imprisonment in Jersey, Lilburne’s nerves and temper suffered considerably from the loneliness and close confinement, and he appears to have been in a depressed, violent mood such as had afflicted him during 1647. Colonel Gibbon also reported in July, 1655, that Lilburne was giving more trouble than ten cavaliers” (Gibb, 326). Here is graphic evidence of more than a Restoration context for Samson’s mood of despair, recrimination, and swings of emotion that toll like a fog bell through the first 325 lines of Milton’s dramatic poem. Even more germane to Milton’s portrait in the prologue of a despairing Samson is this salient detail in Gibbon’s letter to Cromwell on 7 July 1655: “I have offered him to walke abroad againe upon the platforme, that so his spirit may be a little qualified, and the fitter to be dealt with; but he refuseth it, except he may walke without his keeper, a dogg att his heeles, as he calls it” (Thurloe xxviii:246). Here, in embryo, is what might be described as Samson’s total situation from the outset of the poem, raging at his “glorious strength / Put to the labour of a Beast, debas’t / Lower then bondslave” (36–8), and bewailing his own failure to live up to the glorious “Promise” from Heaven 81 For the story of Milton’s role as State censor of Mercurius Politicus and his removal from that post, see my revisionist reading of events in Milton’s Leveller God, 75–102.

33093_Williams.indd 338

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 339

“that I / Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver” (38–9). Lilburne had always seen himself, and was often regarded by others in those buoyant years ­1647–49, as the nation’s awaited deliverer from tyranny. Samson’s poignant opening lament is not difficult to grasp as it relates to Lilburne’s desperate complaints on Mount Orgueil. The ironic distance between Samson’s deeply anguished recollection, “Promise was that I / Should … deliver” (38–9), and his sense of aborted fulfillment, is immediately evocative of Lilburne’s situation, as when Samson mordantly remarks: “Ask for this great Deliverer now, and find him / Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves, / Himself in bonds under Philistian yoke” (40–2). Governor Gibbon’s kind, if expedient, offer to allow Lilburne “to walke abroad againe upon the platforme, that so his spirit may be a little qualified,” is not much less resonant, as Samson’s comment suggests on reaching the shady bank outside his prison walls: “I seek / This unfrequented place to find some ease, / Ease to the body some, none to the mind” (16–18). Clearly, Samson’s mental state differs from Harrison’s or Vane’s serene conviction of suffering for Christ as much as for the Good Old Cause. Samson’s “restless thoughts” also closely parallel those of Lilburne, which “rush upon me thronging, and ­present / Times past, what once I was, and what am now” (19, 21–2). Equally evocative of the story of Lilburne, the sole sign of relief on Samson’s mental horizon is that concerted effort by his father and friends to pacify the hero and render him reasonable. More pertinent still to Samson’s desperate circumstance is the fact that Henry Dewell, “Lilborne’s father,” as Gibbon calls him, comes to the prison hoping to tempt his son-in-law to drop his stubborn opposition to the Protector in exchange for his liberty.82 But, as the Governor ruefully concludes, “I cannot but report, that he is the very same man as formerly; I see no alteration.” Although “his father-in-lawe and myselfe had a long discourse with him,” it was all “to little purpose … He ­protested against all wayes, and saith, he will owne [sic] none for his liberty, but by the waie of the lawe” (Thurloe xxvii:83). This latter 82 W.R. Parker remarks the parallel between Aeschylus’s Prometheus and Samson, who “is visited by his father; Prometheus by his father-in-law. Both visitors bewail the ­misfortunes that have befallen their kin. As a matter of fact, the dramatic purpose of each epeisodion seems to be the same. Even the character drawing is similar, for both old men are blunt, sententious, reproving, yet eager to help. Oceanus, like Manoa, offers to find release for the hero, advising against an increase of present trouble” (180).

33093_Williams.indd 339

2022-09-01 16:54

340

The Communion of the Book

equivalence between Lilburne and Samson (not to mention Gibbon as the Philistian Officer) is both striking and thematically relevant. For it is Samson’s strict adherence to the Law, without precedent in Judges 16 and entirely original to Milton, that implicates Lilburne as well in the catastrophe that will soon follow from the tortured thoughts of the Hebrew champion.83 Furthermore, when one recalls that the ­biblical Manoah was long dead at the time of his son’s death in Judges 16, and that no Officer ever appears in the biblical narrative to reason Samson into compliance with the Philistian Lords, it is futile to dispute the fact that the second “agon” of the drama84 – a paternal temptation of Samson to give up his quarrel with the civil authorities and accept his father’s ransom to live at home in relative ease – closely corresponds to the temptation offered by Lilburne’s father-in-law. In other words, John Lilburne’s biography provides a further, and most pertinent historical context for reading and assessing the structure of Milton’s drama.85 Furthermore, Milton’s Samson stands just as stoutly on the principle of Hebrew law as the Leveller leader had stood on the principle of “the just rights and Liberties of the free-borne people of this Nation” against “all Arbitrary Usurpation.”86 And neither hero, it is clear, is willing to renounce his principled reading of “holy” writ. As William Riley Parker long ago remarked, “The visits of the Chorus, Manoa, Dalila, Harapha, and the officer are entirely without Scriptural justification” (Debt, 9). But Parker’s contention that the “last two people” in that list “seem to be creations of the poet’s imagination” is without warrant, since the scenes with “Samson’s” father and his c­ ontretemps with the Philistian Officer were not invented whole cloth out of the poet’s imagination, but evidently adapted from a p ­ articular history. (In the scene adapted from Mount Orgueil Castle, even the French place name is likely to have suggested to Milton the overweening pride or excessive self-esteem of the hero, and thus to have given him another reason to import this specific history into his adaptation of a scriptural story.) 83 Samson, like the early modern Lilburne, already demonstrates a decided preference for “impartial rules and impersonal law” that Henrich (397) finds unique to Western culture. 84 Lewalski, Life, 527–9. 85 On the principle of Occam’s razor, or the principle of economy – “numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate” [plurality should not be posited without necessity] – the simplest explanation for this sequence of events is likely the right one. 86 John Lilburne, Englands Birth-Right: 10, title page.

33093_Williams.indd 340

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 341

Were it just these two scenes – Samson with Manoa; Samson with the Officer – that permitted us to identify the champion of the English people with the Hebrew hero, a real-life, historical model for the poem could still be dismissed as conjecture. But the drama’s third agon87 makes it more difficult to read the sequence of visitors as being ­unrelated to the events of Lilburne’s life. Parker’s explanation for the transformation of the biblical Delilah from whore to wife is worth repeating here: “Milton gives his hero a tragic dignity by having him wed, with the idea of serving God, the cause of his downfall.”88 Literary critic Tobias Gregory adds: “Far from undermining his protagonist, Milton does what he can to clean Samson up, by marrying him to Dalila, by making his motives more nationalistic and less personal than they are in Judges, by denying his suicide … The likeliest explanation for this pattern is that Milton wanted readers to see his hero as a hero.”89 For Gregory, who regards Samson as a terrorist, this particular “reformation” of the hero further condemns Milton’s poem as blatant bigotry. Still, as Joseph Wittreich responds, “Virtually everyone in Milton’s century, of whatever religious or political persuasion, registered un easiness concerning Samson’s marriage. By fixing attention upon Dalila, Milton can reflect upon Samson’s marrying, without the encumbrance of having to dispute with commentators from Luther onward” (Interpreting, 85). Milton had a more immediate reason, however, than either Gregory or Wittreich has noticed for turning “consort” into wife.90 The story of Elizabeth Lilburne coming to visit her husband in prison later that autumn provides the appropriate context, as well as a moving subscript, 87 Lewalski, Life, 529–31. 88 Parker, Milton: A Biography, 1:318. 89 Tobias Gregory, “The Political Messages,” 181. 90 W.R. Parker regards Dalila as the most “Eurpidean” of Milton’s characters, “partly because of the realism of her portrait, partly because of the nature of her character, and partly because of the rhetorical device by which she is presented” (126). Her nearest literary relative, Parker thinks, is Helen of the Troades, who “comes before her husband richly attired – her finery bought with Trojan gold.” Parallels between Dalila and Helen as wives, and Manoa and Oceanus as fathers, while apt and pertinent to issues of “characterization,” do not create structural parallels, much less historical parallels. The latter (Manoa, Dalila, Harapha, the Philistian Officer) are better linked, on the principle of Occam’s razor as noted above, to a single source (the life of Lilburne). A biographical model also allows for an intrinsic dramatic unity that, for Aristotle, requires “an action that is single and entire, with its several incidents so structured that the displacement or removal of any one of them would disturb and dislocate the whole.” See Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Kenny, 27.

33093_Williams.indd 341

2022-09-01 16:54

342

The Communion of the Book

to Dalila’s apologia pro vita sua.91 Given her separation from her oftimprisoned husband for most of the twelve years of her marriage, Elizabeth Lilburne is surely within her right to plead with her husband for a more regular, if not exactly settled, domestic life. Instead of his never-ending, and ultimately hopeless contest with authority, Elizabeth Lilburne offers him the most human of all temptations, domestic love and peace. So, too, Milton’s Dalila, much like Elizabeth, protests to her husband: “And what if Love, which thou interpret’st hate, / The jealousie of Love, powerful of sway / In human hearts, nor less in mine towards thee, / Caus’d what I did?” (790–3). For what Elizabeth “did” quite literally was to conspire again with Cromwell in 1655 (as she did in 1653) against her husband in her fond hope of repealing the terms of his banishment. In the spring of 1653, Lilburne had berated his wife in print for refusing “most irrationally,” on her return from visiting her exiled ­husband in Bruges, to obey his strict command to find a publisher for his impolitic “Address” to Cromwell, “so that now I must take some other course to get it printed, whether she will or no; let the issue be good or bad, I care not.”92 Here, too, more was at stake in the broken promise of a wife than what other husbands might regard as a mere inconvenience. “She was angry, rebellious, resentful,” writes Pauline Gregg, in “entering into ‘new paper skirmishes’ with her husband, the pages ‘filled with womanish passion and anger.’”93 And given Lilburne’s complete and utter dependence on print to keep him in the public eye, it is tempting to suggest that his wife had conspired, figuratively at least, to have his “eyes” put out. It is hardly fanciful, however, to speak of Elizabeth’s total humiliation on finding her marital difficulties writ large in the very public “Address” which her husband now had printed to spite her in The Upright Mans Vindication (1 August 1653), enlarging on the evident legal triumph he had enjoyed in his recent vindication by a jury of his peers:

91 Kahn, “Disappointed Nationalism,” remarks that “Milton went out of his way to make her Samson’s wife rather than a harlot. And he did so not simply to aggravate Dalila’s betrayal  … but rather to magnify her claims” for “something like cultural relativism” ­(­262–3), a position highly suggestive of Milton’s ultimate awareness of “the vexed relationship between the claims of the nation-state and the law of nations” (249–50). 92 Lilburne, The Upright Mans Vindication, 26. 93 Pauline Gregg, Free-born John, 314.

33093_Williams.indd 342

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 343

In all which regards, it was below me, and inferior to me, and inconsistent with my interest and reputation in many respects, to write of late in any ­respectful way unto you [Cromwell], without a kinde of compulsive force and necessity; but in regard first for that tenderness of affection that I owe to her, whom I formerly entirely loved as my own life: though your late barbarous, tyrannical dealing with me, hath exposed her to so much folly and lowness of spirit in my eys, in some of her late childish actions, as hath in some measure, produced an alienation of affection in me to her. (26)

It is a contemptible airing of the couple’s dirty laundry, since the husband’s declaration of his “alienation of affection” from his wife had simply been occasioned by her pleading with him to be quiet, to live in peace with his family, and to accept the powers that be. Even worse, Lilburne literally owed his life to this woman who, ten years before, had ridden a horse through enemy lines from London to Oxford, bringing an ultimatum from Parliament just in time to save her husband from being hanged by the royalist faction for treason. And it was not just her own life that she had risked, but that of her unborn child in riding seventy miles on horseback barely a month before the birth. And now, after all those years of being forced to live like a widow with her children, often lacking food to put in their mouths … to find herself publicly paraded in print as an unloved wife? For her husband’s part, it is no less clear that Lilburne had felt besieged by the “importuning” of a wife who, with “assaults” and “snares besides,” much like Milton’s Dalila, had worn her husband out with “peals” of words (797, 845, 906). Nor would it be stretching a point to hear Lilburne’s “alienation of affection” echoed in Samson’s own admission that “I … lov’d thee, as too well thou knew’st, / Too well” (878–9). But then, as the poem’s husband flatly concludes, “thou and I long since are twain” (929). Indeed, “Thy fair enchanted cup, and warbling charms / No more on me have power, their force is null’d” (934–5). Whatever else one thinks of Lilburne’s cruelty to his wife in betraying the intimate details of their married life, it is fair to say that her anguish continues to resonate in that sorrowed remembrance, if self-justifying explanation, of Dalila. That this is surely the case emerges from the next visit Elizabeth paid to her imprisoned husband in Dover Castle, not long after his removal from Jersey in October 1655. For, in the wake of her father’s journey to the island, Elizabeth had learned that her husband’s “abusive l­anguage

33093_Williams.indd 343

2022-09-01 16:54

344

The Communion of the Book

and threatenings grew worse.” And so, “On 31st July, 1655, she appealed to the Protector to grant liberty to her husband, beseeching him to take into account the latter’s sufferings as sufficient to explain any unguarded and rash language on his part … ‘I am confident that if you would enlarge him, he would be quiet and thankful,’” she wrote at the time to Cromwell (Gibb, 328). From what ensues, two facts stand out: Lilburne was not prepared to accept a favour of any kind from his bête noire, the Lord Protector; and the couple’s long-standing quarrel about the sacrifices she was asked to endure for the sake of her husband’s quixotic politics had burst into sudden flame again. And once again, Lilburne chose very publicly in 1655 to blame his wife, as he had done two years before, for pressing him to forswear his “sacred” principles. In the last pamphlet he ever published, Lilburne appended a copy of the letter he wrote to Elizabeth on 4 December 1655 from Dover Castle that “what distemperedness my earthly spirit was in, at, and towards thee, at thy and my last meeting upon Saturday, the tenth of November last, I need not to repeat unto thee, being (I beleeve) it is fresh enough in thy own memory.”94 Biographer Mildred Gibb admits that “[t]his is no more than conjecture, but there is evidence that in November, 1655, they had a bitter quarrel followed by a reconciliation” (330). More confidently, Pauline Gregg reports, “Bitter were the ­quarrels between Lilburne and his wife and father, marring the homecoming that might have been the beginning of a happier life” (Gregg, 340). Following so nearly upon his adamant refusal to bend to his “father’s” will and thereby owe his liberty to Cromwell rather than to law or natural right, it is fair to say that Lilburne was every bit as stiff and unyielding as Milton’s Samson proves to be in resisting his wife’s will. In much that carries over from this historical parallel to Samson’s dramatic quarrel with Dalila, it is both reasonable and revealing to see how Milton had reached the same conclusion. Gregg offers what can hardly be more than conjecture that Lilburne’s isolation in Jersey was alienating for another reason: “There was no audience outside to hear his words, no printers hurriedly and secretly to print them” (336). Such a conjecture is at least possible, however, given that his long imprisonment in the Tower, in the heart of the city, “had been a life on its own, an excitement full of hope.” And his

94 Resurrection of John Lilburne, 2.

33093_Williams.indd 344

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 345

“Imprisonment” on the Isle of Jersey had doubtless been “a hard and lonely exile, made the more bitter since it spelt the failure of his cause and the end of his personal following.” Lilburne, in short, rightly believed that a pardon would render him useless. Here is a powerful parallel with Samson’s self-loathing as he also rejects his father’s temptation of a purchased pardon: To what can I be useful, wherein serve My Nation, and the work from Heav’n impos’d, But to sit idle on the houshold hearth, A burdenous drone; to visitants a gaze, Or pitied object, these redundant locks Robustious to no purpose clustring down, Vain monument of strength. (564–70)

This tone of self-recrimination is appropriate to the Leveller leader in ways that are not in the least applicable to condemned prisoners of State like Thomas Harrison or Henry Vane, much less to other martyrs to the Good Old Cause, and certainly not to self-exiles like Ludlow and Sidney living abroad, who still had freedom to act in a variety of ways. Given Pauline Gregg’s provocative premise that Lilburne lived to be in the public eye, this latter scene of tense reunion with his wife in Dover and its aftermath is what appears to have threatened a similar “alienation of affection” from his beloved audience. Given so many close and pertinent biographical parallels, it is not only possible but necessary to expand our contexts for reading the “Restoration” tragedy of Samson. Two points will be obvious by now: I claim that in these last years of Lilburne’s life, Milton did find in Lilburne a theme, a “tragic” psychology, and a ready-made structure for a tragic “history” that awaited only the poet to turn it into a “dramatic poem.” And a procession of three historical visitors with motives and personalities so close to those of Manoa, Dalila, and the Officer are not even the whole of the story. A fourth visitor, initiating the fourth agon in advance of the catastrophe, appears to be based on Lilburne’s need to enter the lists again in print. While no actual “giant” ever came to taunt Lilburne in prison, nor was there any giant who came to taunt Sampson in Judges 16. (Nor was there a Manoah or an Officer, it bears repeating, who had paid a visit to the biblical Sampson; nor did Sampson’s concubine Delilah suddenly appear in the Book of Judges

33093_Williams.indd 345

2022-09-01 16:54

346

The Communion of the Book

to treat with him after his blinding and incarceration.) But even if no bodily giant showed up in John Lilburne’s life to inspire Harapha’s visit to Samson, there is a wonderfully comic parallel in print for the hero’s literary flyting, or verbal combat, with a “giant.” Lilburne, who liked to think of himself as one of “the middle sort of the people of London,” regularly touted himself as “one of their stout Champions for their Liberties and Freedomes,”95 a title that served as his calling card in much of the pamphlet literature he published in that era. He warned Cromwell in The Upright Mans Vindication not to “contemn and despise me, by keeping me out of England, and thereby endeavouring as much as in you lies, to make me from a present friend that now courts you, to become your open and professed enemy to defie you, and to do you all the mischief, that an inraged and greatly provoked metled and nimble Spirit can invent or devise” (16). In phrasings close to the challenge issued by Samson to Harapha, Lilburne comes even more to resemble the “great Deliverer,” allowing Milton to hint wittily at the giant’s identity with the Lord Protector: “I once again / Defie thee to the trial of mortal fight” (1174–5). That Lilburne ventured to enter the lists with his personal “giant” is made explicit in the conclusion of his printed “Address” to Cromwell on the eve of Lilburne’s return in 1653 from exile. Sent as a private letter, and published thereafter for all England to read, the “Address” needs no Town Crier, much less a gentleman’s second, to proclaim: [A]nd if when I come into England, you have anything to say to me, for any evil I have done you, either in word or action, or any way else, I do hereby engage to give you real satisfaction face to face, either first as a Christian, or secondly as a rational man, or thirdly as a sturdy (though very much ­wounded and cut) fellow, that dare yet subscribe himself, Honest and stout JOHN LILBURNE, that neither fears death nor hell, men nor Devils (Upright Mans, 26–7)

As David Loewenstein broadly remarks, “Lilburne senses the vital role of argumentative written discourse as weaponry in fighting the wars of truth to protect the sovereign people’s rights, civil liberties, and 95 Upright Mans Vindication, 15–16.

33093_Williams.indd 346

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 347

power – even if that means employing his pen to expose the encroaching treacheries of oligarchical power in the Long Parliament and the Commonwealth of Cromwell.”96 But in this instance, Lilburne is both more creative and more aggressive in the choice of weapons he offers to Cromwell – spiritual, rational, and martial ones – than the blind Samson could ever hope to be in his limited offer, “with an Oak’n staff” to “meet thee, / And raise such out-cries on thy clatter’d Iron, / Which long shall not with-hold mee from thy head” (1123–5). Once more, Samson stoutly insists, “Who now defies thee thrice to single fight, / As a petty enterprise of small enforce” (1222–3). Surely Lilburne would have preferred to stick to his role as a warring bookman, with only a pen for a weapon, rather than assume the role of warrior with “Oak’n staff” to cudgel the warrior-general of the army, though he continues to paint a familiar image of himself, even now, as “a man, that even in field [sic] have adventured my life with as much hazardousness, gallantry, and bravery, as any man whatsoever in the whole Army” (Upright Mans, 4). Lilburne’s continuing public contest with Cromwell evidently required a giant (a political, if not a physical, enemy) for Samson to fight. And this characterization of Cromwell as a Philistian miles gloriosus is in its own way very funny. More problematic, however, are those later “rouzing motions” experienced by Samson “which dispose / To something extraordinary my thoughts” (1382–3). For they are apparently suggestive of Milton’s attitude, supportive if still sceptical of Lilburne’s professed conversion to Quakerism in the last year of his life. No “rouzing motions” ever figure in Lilburne’s death, as they do in Samson’s self-destruction; but they are no less central to The Resurrection of John Lilburne (1656), the last publication of the Leveller leader’s twenty-year career in print. Here, Cromwell’s political victim explains how he has come to possess “the light of the Lord now shining clearly within me” (1). It has been, Lilburne writes, through “real breakings, or shame of soul, that so ­glorious a Talent, as my Lord and Master (by the clear, lively, and ­powerfull breakings in of his divine and heavenly light into my heart)” (2) has left him with “that measure of the Light of JESUS shining in my soul” (1) that enables him to hear “that divine and heavenly voice of God speaking plainly in my heart, unto which I am truly able to set my seal to,

96 Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 25.

33093_Williams.indd 347

2022-09-01 16:54

348

The Communion of the Book

that it is that spirit, or power of the Holy Ghost” (2). Although he had fifteen months yet to live, these were to be Lilburne’s last published words, creating another powerful parallel with Samson’s final stage utterance at line 1426 of the poem’s 1758 lines. But Milton’s depiction of Samson’s inwardness as he leaves the stage for the last time raises crucial questions about how far Milton was able to trust “the light within” as opposed to his own lifelong reliance on the “Truth” of scripture to be his arbiter or brake on private impulse, or whimsy, or even passing fancies. Suffice to say for now that Lilburne’s public silence for over a year at the end of a life lived mainly in the public eye, offers a powerful situational parallel with Samson’s absence from the stage during the final 332 lines of the play.

Lilburne Agonistes In view of such pertinent supplements to the biblical narrative of Samson, and in view of a plot and a dramatic structure so similar in incident and tone to that of Lilburne’s biography, it is reasonable to conclude that it is the tragedy of the nation in Samson Agonistes that has been figured in terms of Lilburne’s personal history – except for one crucial difference which threatens to invalidate every parallel. Whereas Lilburne had offered to pull the edifice of the Revolution down about his and everyone else’s ears, he never did so. Lilburne’s sole weapon in his political career was print and more print, not force of arms. His political pamphleteering thus makes him profoundly different from the semi-literate Samson whose own means were mostly, and mostly always, brute force.97 And yet, much as Samson would take up the ­jawbone of an ass to slay a thousand men, Lilburne takes up whatever he finds to hand to snatch victory from defeat.

97 By contrast, Derek Wood, Exiled from Light, claims that Samson is a prisoner of the written Law, “an emblematic or iconic embodiment of his vision of Old Testament ­consciousness: the state of religion under the Law, rigorous, incomplete, enslaved, literalistic, and uncomprehending” (xx). According to Wood, the antinomian Milton thought that “an inward law,” even an unwritten law, “had replaced the old Law … The former old slave was now emancipated; this was Christian liberty” (xix), although he is obliged to admit that “Samson does not even know the Old Testament as a whole; most of it has still to be acted out in the time before Christ comes. He seldom turns to Scripture for guidance” (xx). It is true, for the most part, that Milton’s Samson is not a reader, although his phrase, “Our Law forbids,” does suggest a modicum of textual knowledge.

33093_Williams.indd 348

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 349

Standing trial for his life at Guildhall in the autumn of 1649, Lilburne had chosen to argue his own case against Edmond Prideaux, the Commonwealth’s attorney general. The latter, in prosecuting a charge of high treason against him, made the rather odd decision in his ­summation of the case to read at length from the accused’s own ­writings. Rehearsing some of the more offensive passages from Lilburne’s “two Pictures of the Counsell of State,” from “His discourse with Mr. Peters,” “His impeachment of High Treason against cromwel and ireton,” “A hue and cry after Sir Arthur Haslerigge governour of New-Castle,” and “His discourse with Prideaux” (who, in reading aloud this latter scene was obliged to play himself), the attorney general greatly “pleased the People … as if they had acted before them one of Ben Iohnsons Playes, for their excellency.”98 So when Lilburne requested more time to ­prepare his response to this new evidence against him, Judge “Ieering Iarman bawl’d out, and said, with vehemency of Malice, ‘Master Lilburn, either Answer now, or for ever hold your tongue’” (Truths Victory, 6). To which Lilburne, finding a surprising weapon to hand, responded in a mighty voice, “Well then, if it must be so, that you will have my blood, right or wrong, and if I shall not have one hour’s time to refresh me, after my strength is spent, to consider of that which hath been alleged against me, then I appeal to the righteous God of Heaven and Earth against you, where I am sure I shall be heard and find access.”99 Astoundingly, “So soon as they had said this, a Scaffold in the Hall fell down, some (being hurt) crying out, which so amazed, and terrified the unjust Judges, that for almost the space of an houre, they did nothing but stare one upon another.”100 No one who was present at that scene was likely to have forgotten Lilburne’s repeated self-identifications with Samson that suddenly sounded more like a prophetic utterance: “I am now resolved, by the power of the Almighty, to sell my life to you my conjoined adversaries and enemies, as dear (if it be possible) as ever Sampson did to the Philistines: of whom it is said, he did them more mischief at his death, then he did them in all his life, Judg. 16.”101 Nor, it seems, had Milton – revising a draft of his play long after the Restoration – ever forgotten  98  99 100 101

33093_Williams.indd 349

Truths Victory, 4, 5, 4. Cited in Gibb, John Lilburne, 291. Truths Victory, 6. Lilburne, Londons Liberty, 34.

2022-09-01 16:54

350

The Communion of the Book

those mighty outbursts, whether at Guildhall or the one before that at Whitehall, during Lilburne’s initial interrogation by the Council of State. Only the outcome in this latter instance is rather more benign than it would be in the Theatre at Gaza. The jury took less than a half hour to render its verdict. Not Guilty! At Lilburne’s second capital trial in July 1653, where the returned exile had yet again to face down his old foe Attorney General Edmond Prideaux, it would appear to many, including his biographer Pauline Gregg, that he was “obviously playing to the people in a way he had not done before. It was as though he realized that this was to be his last public stand, and he would portray Free-born John, the leader of the populace, with an abandon he had never before displayed” (328). A longer view of his career would further suggest that, from the time of his first contest with the bishops in 1638, Lilburne had not ceased to play the part of Free-born John, valiant champion of the English people and “Worthy Assertor of his Countreys Freedoms,” as Truths Victory would trumpet.102 There is an element of self-absorption, even narcissism, in all these public performances, of course; but there is also a principled conviction that his performance was a noble and selfless act, seeking justice and equity for the Many. And it was only Lilburne’s sudden death four years later that put a period to the character actor’s singular performance. His final trial thus brought down the curtain on a life, we might say, unless Lilburne were to be granted his proper, if still posthumous, role in the greatest “Greek” tragedy in English ­literary history, although “the Stage” on which the “English” Samson appeared was one for which Milton himself had clearly stated “this work never was intended.”103

102 Truths Victory, title page. 103 Knoppers, Complete Works, 68.

33093_Williams.indd 350

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 351

Quaker Contexts for Reading Samson Agonistes There can be little doubt that Lilburne faced literal temptations in the prison visits he received from his father-in-law and his wife, not to mention that third “visit” from the Lord Protector, offering possible pardon. The Leveller leader resisted each temptation by maintaining a principled commitment to the letter of the “Law” (a law which he himself had caused to be printed), whether by refusing to give up exile to live at ease with his wife, or by rejecting any semblance of pardon from the Lord Protector. But there is a final, and more obvious, difficulty with this reading referred to before now only in passing – the English Samson’s conversion to Quakerism a year before his death. In The Resurrection of John Lilburne (1656), Lilburne professed a “light within” of the Spirit’s leading, declaring his faith in “that spirit, or power of the Holy Ghost, or true Comforter” which “leads my soul by its divine and strong power,” and brings him “step by step in its measure and degree into truth” (2). At the end of this last work he would ever publish, Lilburne confessed “that therefore I confidently now believe, I shall never hereafter be an user of a temporal sword more, nor a joyner with those that so do” (13–14). In so doing, he also anticipated by four years the “Declaration of Friends to Charles II” in 1660, signed by George Fox and other Quaker leaders seeking to allay the “suspition” of royalists that the “Harmless & Innocent People of God, called Quakers,” constituted a political threat to the restored monarchy. “For the removing of the ground of Jealousie and Suspition,” the Friends’ Declaration aimed to assure the political establishment that “[a]ll bloody Principles & Practices we (as to our own particular) do utterly deny, with all outward Wars & Strife, & Fightings with outward Weapons, for any end, or under any pretence whatsoever.”104 Lilburne’s inward “regeneration” and his conversion to pacifism do not fit well with Samson’s “outward” and brutally violent act, whatever his polemical use of Samson may have been a decade earlier. At the time of Lilburne’s conversion, however, the Quakers still represented a clear and present danger to the established order, including threats of armed resistance and violent overthrow. As David Loewenstein

104 George Fox, “A Declaration,” 1, 2.

33093_Williams.indd 351

2022-09-01 16:54

352

The Communion of the Book

reports, the Quakers’ leading prophet George Fox “repeatedly represents God as a dreadful and mighty power – shaking and levelling mountains, making ‘the Earth reele to and fro’ and cleaving it ‘asunder,’ bringing down low all who are exalted, and throwing down the wordly kingdoms as he prepares to reign with his saints.”105 So there was reason to fear that “his saints” were indeed prepared to support a wrathful God in his “throwing down” all worldly kingdoms. “During the summer of 1659,” in fact, “the terrifying Quakers were raising the specter of social and religious revolution, thereby increasing fears of radical sectarianism. Indeed, there was widespread panic that thousands of millennarian Quakers and sectaries were in arms” (138). By the mid-1650s, Fox had already begun preaching on Revelation 17:14, where “the Lamb who battles earthly kings not only fueled a sense of early Quaker persecution, but, as an agent of apocalyptic victory, it inspired the sense of intense human agency interwoven with divine forces which characterizes the fierce Quaker engagement with wordly institutions and Antichristian powers” (Loewenstein, 125). And the paradoxical figure of the Lamb laying waste to its bloodied enemies was hardly less terrifying for being an oxymoron. Nor was the thundering preacher and wild-eyed prophet George Fox the only source of anxiety about Quaker revolt. Even the mildest of Quaker speech behaviours and social practices could threaten the social order. For example, the Quaker “belief that everyone was spiritually equal fostered the practice of abandoning honorific titles, of using the egalitarian ‘thee’ rather than the respectful ‘you’; and refusing to doff hats.”106 As late as 11 January 1664, Samuel Pepys recorded with a mixture of alarm and amusement the faux pas of a woman he had observed conversing with his Majesty, the king “arguing the truth of his spirit against hers,” and she “replying still with these words, ‘O King!,’ and thou’d him all along.”107 A mere woman, and a Quaker woman at that, dared to collapse the impassable distance between monarch and commoner. Moreover, the Quakers’ refusal to “swear oaths which stressed human hierarchies above God” (Peters, 2) left them subject to

105 Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 133. 106 Kate Peters, Print Culture, 2. 107 Pepys’s Diary, Vol. 2, selected and edited by Robert Latham, 6.

33093_Williams.indd 352

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 353

no human authority. Worse yet, Quaker rejection of specific oaths,108 like the oath of allegiance to the Commonwealth and the Restoration oath of supremacy, was taken to be politically subversive, leading to Quaker arrests and imprisonments by the thousands. Not least, the Quakers’ defiant, and very public, refusal to pay tithes or attend services of the established Church filled the county jails after 1660. In 1656, even the Protectorate had felt challenged by the Quaker threat to the social order in a “symbolic re-enactment of Christ’s entrance to Jerusalem” by James Nayler on 24 October 1656, mere months after Lilburne’s conversion to the sect. Nayler was attended along his route by a throng of (mostly female) followers who scandalously “sang ‘Holy, holy, holy’” to proclaim “the light of Christ … within each individual,” as he rode on a horse (not a colt, as Jesus had entered Jersusalem) into Bristol.109 Nayler’s subsequent trial for blasphemy in NovemberDecember 1656 exposed a growing rift in the Quaker leadership between Nayler and George Fox,110 one that turned, at least in part, on the issue of action versus prophetic utterance, of “outward” versus “inward” means. But it just as clearly dramatized to the public at large the growing danger of religious enthusiasm and the practical “paucity of the Protectorate’s religious settlement.”111 The Quakers’ fervent insistence “that the light of Christ was present within each individual and that this could lead to salvation and to ­perfection” (Peters, 2), was also impossible to refute by any external standard. And there were few restraints – beyond the boring of a hole through Nayler’s tongue with a hot iron, followed by his lengthy imprisonment – to inhibit Quaker claims to speak or act by authority of the Spirit. Even the “Quaker Peace Testimony” of 1660 failed to assuage the concerns of the restored Church and State. Milton’s young friend and amanuensis Thomas Ellwood spent weeks and months in various prisons throughout the 1660s, suffering for his Quaker beliefs. Soon

108 Graves, Preaching, attributes this radical Quaker principle to their “belief, based on a strict interpretation of Jesus’ teachings, that they should never take an oath under any circumstances,” lest they be thought to “be lying when not under oath” (227). 109 Peters, Print Culture, 236, 2. 110 Rudrum, “Milton Scholarship,” comments that “[t]he post-Restoration history of Quakerism is complex, and, since Milton’s radicalism was generally antinomian, we might reasonably imagine him as siding with those more antinomian Quakers, who rebelled against the iron hand of George Fox” (16). 111 Peters, Print Culture, 236.

33093_Williams.indd 353

2022-09-01 16:54

354

The Communion of the Book

after renting a house on behalf of Milton in Chalfont St Giles in June 1665 to provide him with a refuge from the Great Plague raging in London, Ellwood was arrested on 1 July and spent the rest of that month in Aylesbury jail. On his release, the blind poet invited his young friend to read the manuscript of Paradise Lost and render an opinion. Under such circumstances, Milton’s depiction of Samson’s sudden departure with the Philistian Officer becomes more, rather than less, ambiguous: “Be of good courage, I begin to feel / Some rouzing motions in me which dispose / To something extraordinary my thoughts” ­(1381–3). Given Milton’s friendship with Ellwood and other Quakers such as Isaac Pennington,112 it is possible to read the Quakers’ appeal to “the inward Light” as a synonym for Samson’s “rouzing motions,” and so to conclude with David Loewenstein that “Samson the militant, faithful champion of God embodies Milton’s unsettling dramatic vision of a radical saint who, having followed the impromptu motions of the Spirit, proves ‘dreadful to the Enemies of the Lord.’”113 By contrast, a year before his premature death, Lilburne had publicly renounced violence and armed resistance, as the entire Quaker leadership was later to do in 1660, a full decade before the publication of Samson Agonistes. While “impromptu” preaching among the Quakers had invariably “assumed or claimed direct inspiration of the Spirit,” thereby exalting “experiential, even mystical, religious experience” over “mere reverence for or rational understanding of the Scriptures,”114 it did not mean that the impromptu experience of “rouzing motions” supplied moral justification for thousands of Philistine deaths. While George Fox taught that their “restoration in Christ” had restored believers to the first state of Adam and Eve in Eden, able to converse directly with God, this doctrine also implied that “if ordinary persons could be in direct contact with the first speaker [God] and feed directly on the bread of life, what was the need of the Bible?”115 Here,

112 Loewenstein, Representing, remarks in connection with Paradise Regain’d: “Even the  saintly Pennington, who grew intensely inward during his trials and exercises of the Restoration, nevertheless remained, like Milton’s firm and inward-looking Jesus, ‘very ­zealous … for the Truth, unwearied in promoting it, bold and undaunted in the defence of it’” (256). One recalls Henrich, weirdest, who claims that such inwardness is a hallmark of early modern psychology (35–6, 382–4, 415). 113 Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 291. 114 Graves, Preaching, 228, 238. 115 Ibid., 235.

33093_Williams.indd 354

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 355

in a nutshell, was the crux for the author of De Doctrina Christiana who was highly unlikely to privilege any “Light within” over the written Word.116 The radical theologian, whose every doctrinal statement was meticulously based chapter and verse on scripture, was far more likely to say with Foxe’s martyrs, “I beleue as the Scripture doth teache me.”117 So, too, the Foxean-style martyr of Paradise Regain’d answers every ­temptation of Satan with pertinent quotations from scripture, actively extending his first principle that “man does not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord.” In view of Milton’s hermeneutical principles and lifelong habits of mind, it is surely impossible to claim these “rouzing motions” as a metonym for “the inward Light.” Instead, Samson’s “rouzing motions” are more likely to involve a dangerous misreading of that “Light.” At the very least, these “motions” remain as ambiguous and impulsive in character as the nature of the man we have encountered in Lilburne’s (auto)­ biography. And the profound ambiguity that makes Samson and Lilburne alike the embodiments of a “fractured”118 consciousness most characteristic of Euripidean tragedy brings us back to the key question of the generic relation between historiography and poetic tragedy.

History and Self-Knowledge: T h e   E x p e r i e n c e   o f D e f e at If Aristotelian tragedy and Miltonic historiography are both designed to arrive at anagnorisis, or tragic discovery,119 what difference might the story of Lilburne Agonistes make to our reading of Milton’s achievement in his dramatic poem? In terms of the “Nation” coming “to know it self” through its written history, the likely presence of a Leveller subtext in Samson Agonistes suggests that Milton did regard Lilburne’s personal tragedy as the beginning of a series of national tragedies ­leading to the fall of the English Republic. In our era, we have had 116 Loewenstein, Representing, claims that “[i]n his De Doctrina Christiana the heretical Milton had considered the Spirit ‘the pre-eminent and supreme authority,’ even in relation to scriptural authority.” But he concedes that “other religious radicals, including the Quakers, went even further in elevating the Spirit above the Scriptures” (273). 117 See further discussion in this work: 176, 177, 199, 210–11. 118 Henry McDonald, “A Long Day’s Dying,” uses the phrase to describe both Euripides’s Greek, and Seneca the Younger’s Latin Heracles (267). 119 See further discussion in this work: 317, 317n45, 381, 383–4, 414.

33093_Williams.indd 355

2022-09-01 16:54

356

The Communion of the Book

sufficient experience of political revolutions to understand that the offspring of revolutions devour their parents with dismal regularity. And who would doubt that two hundred or so pamphlets published by the Levellers from the mid-1640s to their public disappearance in the early 1650s, were a true “parent” of the Revolution, raising the hopes of even a fractional minority in English political culture of establishing some degree of social and political equality, as well as a more equitable legal system? Where Lilburne had written in December 1646 that “the poorest that lives, hath as true a right to give a vote, as well as the richest and greatest,”120 Col. Thomas Rainsborough, not a year later, expanded that principle in the Army Debates at Putney in OctoberNovember 1647, into his own sweeping statement of social justice that continues to echo down the ages: “[T]he poorest he that liveth in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he,” Rainsborough spoke so very movingly and eloquently, “and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under.”121 It is equally true that the nickname “Levellers” given to these men (whether by Cromwell or by Charles I)122 was a reliable indicator of reactionary forces at work in the High Command of the army, mustered in opposition to the threat posed by the social and political doctrines of the Levellers.123 The propertied class, whether in the upper ranks 120 Lilburne, The Charters of London, 4. 121 Col. Thomas Rainsborough, quoted in Woodhouse, Puritanism, 53. 122 Worden, “Levellers in History,” notes: “It is in royalist writing of November 1647 that we find the earliest surviving uses of the term to describe Cromwell’s opponents in the army,” although “Lilburne and his allies … maintained that during the army’s sojourn at Putney in the autumn of 1647 the army grandees had put the word into circulation, ­perhaps with the general purpose of discrediting those to whom it was applied, perhaps with the more particular aim of bringing home to Charles I the danger he faced from those troublemakers and of frightening him into fleeing from his captivity at Hampton Court” (280). 123 C.H. Firth offers an important reminder, however, that “[o]ne of the reasons to which Ludlow owed his influential position was doubtless his connexion with the Levellers. Though he could scarcely be regarded as one of their party, and did not share many of their views, they looked upon him as their friend. ‘Levelling Ludlow’ is the nickname given him in a list of members of Parliament by a contemporary pamphleteer. On three occasions he intervened on behalf of Lilburne, to obtain redress for his grievances, offer bail for him, or procure his release from prison” (xxviii).

33093_Williams.indd 356

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 357

of the army or among the landed nobility, or gentry, or merchants of London, was broadly united in the opinion that the Levellers were little more than troublemakers who would “level mens Estates, destroy Propriety, [and] make all things Common.”124 If making Lilburne’s story a subtext in the tragedy of Samson was designed to teach the nation what it needed “to know” about “itself,” the nation had clearly forgotten how it was this most progressive element in English society that first tasted the “experience of defeat,” followed by those less ­progressive, and lastly the more moderate elements who suffered harsher defeats still, until the forces of reaction had regained full ­control, and the ­“natural rulers” of England were restored to their “rightful” place. The “Nation” would finally have to acknowledge, in other words, that its native conservatism favoured the few as usual, since it came at the expense of the many, and always denied the lesser sort of folk any part in the “Nation,” although these latter could perhaps begin (perish the thought!) to recognize themselves in an emerging communion and growing community of print. As for the dénouement of Milton’s poetic tragedy, Christopher Hill stoutly insisted that “[i]t was the leadership that had gone wrong, betraying the Cause: not, as Sedgwick argued, the Cause itself. Samson’s ability to purge himself of pride, anger, ambition, lust, qualifies him to play the same role as the Son of God whose type he was: the Saviour of his people.”125 Hill had good reason to think that “[i]n Samson Agonistes the remarkable line, ‘the vulgar only scaped who stood without’ seems to suggest a more optimistic attitude … Milton is unique in putting the common people outside, safe from Samson’s vengeance” (314). Nor was there any “evidence,” said Hill, “that Milton ever adopted the ­post-1661 Quaker position of pacifism and abstention from politics” (315). But Hill’s defence of Samson’s act of mass murder is mostly drawn from Milton’s prose of the 1640s and 1650s, from The Tenure and Eikonoklastes and Defensio in Hill’s own apologia for an unambiguous Hebrew “hero.” In this context, Hill mistakenly claims that “Adam did not lament ‘for the whole world of wicked men destroyed’ by the Flood, but rather rejoiced at Noah’s survival” (315). Hill either forgot or else

124 Gentles, “The Agreements,” 171. 125 Hill, The Experience of Defeat, 314.

33093_Williams.indd 357

2022-09-01 16:54

358

The Communion of the Book

decided to ignore the direct address126 of the narrator to Father Adam at the sight of a world destroyed by flood: “How didst thou grieve, then, Adam, to behold / The end of all thy Ofspring.” The epic voice adds more touchingly still, “another Floud, / Of tears and sorrow a Floud thee also drown’d, / And sunk thee as thy Sons.”127 Hill is not mistaken, however, in his insistence that “[t]he onus of proof is surely on those who argue that in Samson Agonistes Milton had abandoned a conviction which he had expressed both publicly and privately, and which was widely held among his Protestant contemporaries” (316). “If there is positive ­evidence that Milton thought Samson’s rousing motion was not from God, that Samson was not heroic, that he was wrong to think it pious to kill those who tyrannized over his country, that he ‘dies in vain’ and that his fellow citizens who ‘did not balk at slavery’ were right – then this evidence has still to be produced” (316). Such evidence is readily available in numerous passages from Paradise Lost that Hill has ignored, such as the bloody consequences that Adam witnesses in the shocking history of future things that the Archangel Michael has just revealed to him. The first consequence of his sin, Adam learns, is the terrible reality of “Sword-Law” and bloody “Man-slaughter” (pl 11.672) that will become the scourge of human life. Indeed, the warrior Michael, who had been the commander-in-chief of all Heaven’s troops in the War in Heaven, has nothing but contempt for what in future “shall be held the highest pitch / Of human Glorie” (pl 11. ­693–4), that is to say, warrior-heroes like Samson128 whom Manoa celebrates as having brought “To himself and” his “Fathers house eternal fame” (1707)[1717].129 Scoffing at the so-called “Patrons of Mankind, Gods, and Sons of God,” the archangel insists rather that they are

126 Virgil had used this technique of direct address to express his own “fatherly” sorrow for the dying Trojan warriors Nisus and Euryalus in Aeneid 9.447: “nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo” [“No day shall ever erase you from the memory of time”]. 127 Paradise Lost 11.754–8; Flannagan, 683. 128 “That warriors were superior to writers and to all their works was not merely a Norman assumption,” M.T. Clanchy remarks, but “seems to have been part of the traditional ideology of the barbarians, who had conquered the Roman empire and replaced the constraining written law of Rome by flexible oral custom” (From Memory, 37). Through Michael, Milton appears both to repudiate “Sword-Law” and to champion the values of literacy and written history against “barbarian” oral custom. 129 See further discussion in this work: 385–6, 417, 421n118, 423n119.

33093_Williams.indd 358

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 359

“Destroyers rightlier call’d and Plagues of men” (pl 11.696–7).130 Nor is it a coincidence that Dalila uses the same term to fend off Samson’s fierce charge “Of Matrimonial treason” (sa 959), explaining that she did so “to save / Her countrey from a fierce destroyer” (984–5), a term that even Samson does not deny. It appears, then, that Milton did mean to validate Adam’s more pacific world view by the joint means of a supporting witness and a hostile one: Samson is “rightlier call’d” a “Destroyer” and a “Plague of men,” than he is God’s “faithful Champion,” to whom God himself, the Chorus in Samson latterly chants, “hath in place / Bore witness gloriously” (1741–42) [1751–52]. As we shall see in the next chapter, Milton’s Chorus is the major vehicle, nonetheless, of a corrosive mode of irony to which a multitude of scholars have remained typically deaf. For the dead hero who “lies / Sok’t in his enemies blood” ­(1715–16) [1725–26] cannot possibly embody the sort of heroism Adam will come to admire, where “suffering for Truths sake,” and being “weak” and “meek” (pl 12.567–9) are more likely to represent God’s way.131 What is surely meant to be a proximate guide to our interpretation of Samson’s final act, of course, is the companion poem published in the pages preceding his tragedy. In Paradise Regain’d, the adolescent Jesus had already considered and rejected “heroic acts” as a means of rescuing “Israel from the Roman yoke.” This potentially martial Deliverer of his countrymen anticipates Samson and Lilburne in his initial plan “to subdue and quell o’re all the earth / Brute violence and proud Tyrannick pow’r, / Till truth were freed, and equity restor’d” (pr 1. ­216–20). In his hope of restored “equity,” Milton’s Jesus is closer to Lilburne near the end of his life than he is to Samson. But in his growth toward self-knowledge, Jesus also “held it more humane, more heavenly first / By winning words to conquer willing hearts, / And make perswasion do the work of fear” (pr 1.221–3). And in his emphasis on “winning words” and “perswasion” instead of fear, “Our Saviour” ­ultimately sounds closer to the older Lilburne than to Samson. The only question is by what means Jesus had intended “the stubborn only to subdue” (pr 1.226).

130 Wittreich, Interpreting Samson, 294, comes to the same conclusion, quoting these words of Michael to Adam from Paradise Lost 11.697. 131 For a comprehensive survey of Milton’s strategic silences and omissions of Samson from the biblical lists and proof-texts of his status as a hero of faith, see Wittreich, Interpreting Samson, 69–75; “Thought Colliding,” 101–12.

33093_Williams.indd 359

2022-09-01 16:54

360

The Communion of the Book

Milton left no doubt about his views on force and violence in The History, which appeared just weeks before the twin “poems of 1671.” Here, he cuttingly remarks: “For what wonder, if in all Ages, Ambition and the love of rapine hath stirr’d up greedy and violent men to bold attempts in wasting and ruining Warr which to posterity have left the work of Wild Beasts and Destroyers, rather then the Deeds and Monuments of men and Conquerours” (40). The passage of three years had not changed his mind at all about the sentiments Michael expresses to Adam at the end of Paradise Lost; if anything, the poet seems to expand on Michael’s view of “Destroyers rightlier call’d and Plagues of men.” Ultimately, Milton spells out precisely the sort of proof that Hill thought was “still to be produced.” For, in Milton’s late judgment on the use of force, he insists in The History: But he whose just and true valour uses the necessity of War and Dominion, not to destroy but to prevent destruction, to bring in liberty against Tyrants, Law and Civility among barbarous Nations, knowing that when he Conquers all things else, he cannot Conquer Time, or Detraction, wisely conscious of this his want as well as of his worth not to be forgott’n or conceal’d, honours and hath recourse to the aid of Eloquence, his freindliest [sic] and best supply; by whose immortal Record his noble deeds, which else were transitory, ­becoming fixt and durable against the force of Yeares and Generations, he fails not to continue through all Posterity, over Envy, Death, and Time, also victorious. (History, 40)

Unlike Calvin forbidding armed resistance to the Huguenots, Milton does not reject “the necessity of War” in order “to bring in liberty against Tyrants.” But in his Fifth Gospel he had endorsed the stance of Jesus, who values the true “aid of Eloquence” above all else to make him his Nation’s deliverer, “by winning words to conquer willing hearts.” As for the historian himself, what might his History have taught him about what was yet lacking “to know himself”? In view of the evidence just reviewed, it is not surprising that the poet prefers “eloquence” and “winning words” to martial “conquest,” or that he shows a profound humility in the face of his “dramatic poem.” For here, I think, is the final lesson that Milton had to learn from his own work – that early on, and even at mid-career as a revolutionary, he had too often resembled the irascible and impulsive Lilburne in his more Samsonesque moments. Indeed, Milton’s language, from the moment of firing his opening shot

33093_Williams.indd 360

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 361

in the pamphlet wars against the bishops, had been more abusive than “winning” or “perswasive.” Nor was he less intemperate in writing against the monarchy in Eikonoklastes (1649) and Defensio (1651). If he did come at last to see this aspect of himself reflected in the now-deceased Leveller leader, then his own “dramatic poem” about Samson would, in the best tradition of Aristotelian tragedy, gain more, not less power to arouse emotions of “pity and fear” in the reader – pity for a good, but ultimately flawed man whose own defeat in the face of powers greater than anything at his command, made his tragic end seem fated, or at least inevitable. At the same time, Lilburne’s career was certain to arouse tragic fears about the nature of his failure, or more precisely, of the character flaw that had contributed to his defeat. On that October weekend in 1647, for example, when representatives of the army were still locked in debate at Putney over the first Agreement of the People, Lilburne had received a visitor in the Tower during a Sunday recess (31 October) – Col. Rainsborough, the strongest advocate of universal manhood ­suffrage in the Army debates.132 Although there is no record of what was said during their two-hour conversation, subsequent events at Putney do offer a strong hint: “When the council reconvened on 1 November anti-monarchist sentiment was on the rise”; the junior officers and civilian Levellers appeared to be winning the argument against the High Command to establish a written constitution on the model proposed by the Levellers. Indeed, “on the following day, 2 November, the committee passed a proposal which reproduced much of the Agreement of the People” (Rees, 212). The tide was beginning to run powerfully in the direction of the radicals at Putney, who were gaining the upper hand on the generals to establish a form of limited democracy, based on popular consent. On 3 November, “An agreement of the people (as presented to the General Council on 28 October) was on the bookstalls in London, carrying the boast of ‘the general approbation of the army.’ It was as if the laborious work of compromise by the General Council’s committee had never taken place.”133 It seems to have been Lilburne who took the impulsive step of releasing the Putney Agreement prematurely to win public support in London. The Agreement was immediately condemned in Parliament and 132 Rees, Leveller Revolution, 211. 133 Gentles, “The Agreements,” 154.

33093_Williams.indd 361

2022-09-01 16:54

362

The Communion of the Book

denounced as being “destructive to the Being of Parliaments, and to the fundamental Government of the Kingdom” (Rees, 213). Thirteen months later, the likelihood that this tactical error was Lilburne’s doing became a virtual certainty when, of his “own accord,” he did it again. In mounting frustration at Ireton’s reluctance throughout the autumn of 1648 to compromise on An Agreement of the People, and after reaching a hard-fought compromise with the working committee, only to see it reopened and picked apart in the General Council of the Army at Whitehall, Lilburne impetuously decided to publish The Foundations of Freedom, on 15 December 1648, even though the carefully balanced interests of all four parties to the compromise – the Army, the Parliament, the City, and the Levellers who met periodically at Windsor throughout November – were once again a subject of tense debate in the General Council. The Whitehall Debates, which continued from about 11 December134 until 20 January 1649, had barely begun when Lilburne “jumped the gun” in a rash decision to publish, “with the help of an obscure printer, his [own] slightly amended version of the Committee of Sixteen’s text of the Agreement of the people.”135 Historians are generally agreed that, from this point on, the Leveller movement was effectively marginalized, and that Lilburne’s obduracy and impetuosity were what had galvanized the conservative forces opposed to him to prevent the implementation of a more democratic constitution. In terms of Samson’s tragedy, it is difficult not to recall Lilburne trumpeting his own version of the Agreement to the public as Samson announces to a public gathering: “Now of my own accord such other tryal / I mean to shew you of my strength, yet greater; / As with amaze shall strike all who behold” (1633–5). In such a circumstance, Lilburne’s impulsive nature and volatile temperament have much in common with the Aristotelian idea of a tragic flaw, or hamartia, on the part of the hero. The more’s the pity … and the fear since it is the Agreeement itself that Lilburne brings crashing down on everyone. David Loewenstein makes the telling observation that “[i]n the first year of the Commonwealth, Lilburne prays to God as he feels himself fallen on evil days, with dangers compast round, and living in a cold political climate, not unlike the isolated Restoration poet of Paradise Lost or the Miltonic Samson ‘enclosed … round’ by ‘many evils’” (43). 134 This is the best estimate of Frances Henderson, “Drafting,” 167. 135 Gentles, “The Agreements,” 159–60.

33093_Williams.indd 362

2022-09-01 16:54



The Tragedy of History in Milton and Ludlow 363

In the end, the question remains as to how much Lilburne really came “to know” about himself from his endless self-representations of his “chivalric” and quixotic contests with authority. Milton, at least, seems to have learned something of what he still needed “to know about himself” from the personal and political tragedy of Lilburne, as well as from those sober second thoughts that he had expressed in his History, and then applied to his companion “poems of 1671,” where he attains the summit of human wisdom in the close of a surpassingly eloquent poetic career.

33093_Williams.indd 363

2022-09-01 16:54

7

Classical Reading: Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy

Of all the critical controversy generated by Samson Agonistes in recent decades, neither the “regenerationist”1 nor “revisionist”2 critics of Milton’s dramatic poem have shown much interest in two questions posed by its preface: why this “work was never intended” for “the Stage”;3 and its logical corollary – what difference does reading, rather

Milton criticism moved on some time ago from the dictum of W.R. Parker, Milton’s Debt: “There is nothing more misleading than the sort of loose generalization which labels Samson Agonistes as ‘Aeschylean’ or ‘Sophoclean’ or ‘Euripidean’” (75). 1 Radzinowicz, Toward Samson, offers the leading regenerationist reading of the poem as a record of the hero’s (and the poet’s) spiritual growth and rebirth; see also Radzinowicz, “The Distinctive Tragedy.” Other important twentieth-century advocates of a regenerate Samson include Woodhouse, “The Tragic Effect”; Stein, Heroic Knowledge; Waddington, “Melancholy”; Anthony Low, Blaze; Shawcross, “Genres” and “Misreading”; Kerrigan, “Irrational”; Henry McDonald, “A Long Day’s”; Lieb, Milton and … Violence; and Lieb, “‘Our Living Dread’; and Loewenstein, “The Revenge of the Saint.” Here, too, is a place to include the heavily qualified views of Revard, “The Politics of Milton’s Hercules”; and those of Rogers, “The Secret.” The most notable “regenerationist” to date in this century is Rudrum, “Milton Scholarship.” 2 Half a century ago, the first “revisionist” reading of Samson along the lines of Samuel Johnson’s eighteenth-century critique of the play appeared in Carey’s Milton (1969). In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001, Carey added an even more impassioned critique, “A work in praise.” Other notable twentieth-century “revisionists” who also recognized an ironic or critical intent in the poem were Samuel, “Samson Agonistes as Tragedy”; and Wittreich, Interpreting (1986). In this century, the tide has largely turned in a rising flood of “revisionists,” including Wittreich in Shifting Contexts and “Samson Agonistes: Thought Colliding”; Mark Kelley, “Milton’s Euripidean”; Greenberg, “Dalila’s ‘feminine assaults’”; Stoll, “Milton Stages Cherbury”; Wood, “Exiled”; and Rumrich, “Excluded Middle.” Most notable among more recent revisionists are Maggie Kilgour, “Odd Couplings”; and Mohamed, “Confronting,” and “Memorial.” 3 Samson Agonistes, in The Complete Works, Vol. 2, ed. Knoppers, 68.

33093_Williams.indd 364

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 365

than viewing, this dramatic poem make?4 Most readers have ignored the effect of a printed artifact that casts them as silent actors in a drama performed in the theatre of their minds. In fact, reading is the ­performative act par excellence of Milton’s “Tragedy,” which belongs, as he indicates at the end of his preface, to that ancient Greek family of tragedies produced on the stage of the Great Dionysia of Athens for “Æschulus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the three Tragic Poets unequall’d yet by any.”5 The usual, and perfectly reasonable, explanation given for Milton’s decision to write a closet drama rather than a performance piece includes the constraints of his political position after 1660, together with his blatant contempt for the Restoration stage.6 Feisal Mohamed does mention the political reality of Milton’s “removal from the realm of pure social power,” as well as his “disdain for Restoration drama” expressed in his “brief essay on tragedy,” but only as evidence of our critical need to explore the formal differences between a play-text and “a text read rather than performed.”7 In taking these differences to be “fundamental to the relationship Milton imagines between tragedy and revolutionary subject formation” (498), Mohamed more largely aims at restoring the poem to that revolutionary culture of print which made it possible. The expected result of his “revolutionary subject formation,” however, may not appear exactly as advertised. Although Mohamed offers a rare and stimulating suggestion about the experience of watching versus reading a play, the fundamental differences between stage and page raise other questions about the medium of presentation that he does not consider. To his credit, however, Mohamed does identify the need for a “forensic” reading of at least one character in the poem: we “might detect dramatic irony in Manoa’s planned memorial” (494) for his dead son. Indeed, Mohamed

4 Shawcross, “Genres,” remains the important exception, remarking that “Samson Agonistes takes on the form of characters on a verbal stage speaking to themselves or in conversations: its structure does not imply acts and scenes, resembling instead a kind of pageant, and thus it does not emphasize a story” (236). 5 Complete Works, Vol. 2, ed. Knoppers, 68. 6 Lewalski, The Life, sums up decades of conventional wisdom on this point, which, though true, is still only half of that truth: “The title page of Samson Agonistes terms it ‘A Dramatic Poem,’ not a drama: Milton did not suppose that it might be presented on the Restoration stage, alongside Dryden’s exotic tragedies” (522). 7 Mohamed, “Memorial,” 497–8.

33093_Williams.indd 365

2022-09-01 16:54

366

The Communion of the Book

argues that “Milton discredits the ideas” expressed in the father’s final eulogy for his son, at least for those readers who “have internalized the lessons of his oeuvre” (495). Rehearsing several relevant passages from Milton’s body of poetry, ranging from “Lycidas” to Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain’d, Mohamed remarks of Manoa’s soaring proposal to build his son “A monument,” that he more likely “cultivates the kind of cultural memory that Milton consistently critiques in Paradise Lost.” Mohamed thus begins with a helpful forensic audit of the poet’s other writings to explain that “misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the tragic hero, even by sympathetic onlookers, seem to be constitutive elements of Milton’s view of biblical tragedy” (496). What, then, is the substance of Samson’s tragic vision? Measuring it against several tragedies in antiquity as well as in the early modern era, Mohamed concludes: “In the arc of his development, Samson resembles Lear much more than he does Prometheus or Oedipus, even if we take Oedipus at Colonus into account” (496). The reason for this judgment is that Samson has arrived at a vision “that shows the paltriness of politics as traditionally conceived” (497). Samson’s tragedy, in other words, is that he learns too late the lesson “that all nations must attend the ­guidance of the Spirit.” But “Samson’s return to divine favor” permits at least a “glimpse in the poem of the end-time when God will be all in all” (499). That time remains in God’s keeping, however, and stands outside the scope of human will. “In this way, Samson’s final act is that of a revolutionary politics eschewing received forms of authority and resistance.” But if quiet waiting informs this model of “revolutionary subject formation,” Samson’s final act must not be wilful or agressive. There is only one reason, then, why “[a] politics, or religion, or ­aesthetics striving to reflect divine will had to be encountered on the page” (498). It had to be the will of God, not Samson’s will, to bring about the end of Philistine power. So, it is only his “faith in things unseen,” not his self-assertion, that makes Samson worthy to be included in the company of all those other “heroes of faith” listed in Hebrews 11 (502). The complexities of a non-figurative engagement with “things unseen” are rather difficult, of course, to represent on the stage. A theatregoer would be particularly hard pressed, more so than a reader enjoying the resources of whatever “politics, or religion, or aesthetics” might “reflect divine will,” to grasp the enormity of the challenge ­facing this “hero” of biblical tragedy. For, in the final analysis, “[t]he reader of a poem responds differently,” argues Mohamed, from a theatregoer:

33093_Williams.indd 366

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 367

“head inclined, as one who prays or some great matter in his or her mind revolves, a kinship is struck with the quiet, interior experience of Samson at the pillars” (497). It is only the reader who enters the dramatic space of “revolutionary subject formation,” transformed in the act of reading the play. The reader nonetheless enjoys an enormous advantage over the “Judge” of Israel. Even before he was blinded, Samson seems not to have read a Torah scroll. Unlike Milton’s Jesus, most of what Samson knows is derived from oral sources, such as the story of his “birth from Heaven foretold / Twice by an Angel” (23–4). Samson’s sense of himself does not come, as it does for Milton’s Jesus, from reading scripture. Rather, his self-image is shaped entirely by what he hears from without, as the member of an oral culture: “Am I not sung and proverbd for a Fool / In every street, do they not say, how well / Are come upon him his deserts?” (203–4). Contrary to Jesus, who “revolv’d / The Law and Prophets” (1.259–60)8 in seeking God’s express will for him, Samson’s decision to marry the woman of Timna is impulsive and entirely subjective. So, when Samson complains that “she pleas’d / Mee, not my Parents,” he adds, “they knew not / That what I motion’d was of God; I knew / From intimate impulse” (219–23). His interioriziation of God’s will is not informed, then, by any external standard such as ­reading scripture. Rather, it is his tragic misfortune to live in scripture, rather than to see himself externally, like Jesus, writ large in the Law (though not the Prophets, of course, who wrote too late to be of use to the folk hero of Israel). He is God’s sacred instrument, not his own agent. Here is where the intriguing claim of Peter Stallybrass that “the ­history of the codex is the history of the bookmark”9 is most telling and useful.10 For the codex form was inherently revolutionary, both historically and culturally, not least in the type of textual collation it enables. It is in the intertexts of Samson Agonistes, in fact, that we are most likely to discover the kind of “revolutionary subject formation” that Mohamed identifies as the ulterior motive of the dramatic poem. And it is the reader, as he properly insists, who is the object of this poetic design. But for a critic who started out as an indexical reader  8 See further discussion in chapter 4 above: 200–1, 227.  9 Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls,” 42. 10 See further discussion in this work: 47, 115, 144, 176, 179–81.

33093_Williams.indd 367

2022-09-01 16:54

368

The Communion of the Book

of Manoa’s project of monumentalizing his son’s “victory,” Mohamed has put down those forensic tools by the time he comes to test his governing assumption of “Samson’s return to divine favor” (499). As ­we recall from our earlier reading of Stallybrass, the advantages of ­discontinuous reading of the codex were mostly contrary to those of a scroll; the readers of a Catholic or Anglican spiritual formation were trained to read liturgically, while dissenters such as Anne Askew read forensically. And since forensic reading, like forensic science or forensic medicine, aims at prosecuting a crime or identifying a malignancy, we might be advised by Mohamed’s own example of collating relevant texts from the poet’s long career to search out the frequent traces of those very texts to which Milton had pointed at the end of his brief essay on tragedy. Instead of reading continuously, we will read indexically, stopping to consult the parallel phrasings and situations from other dramatic tragedies to which Milton’s poem refers.

I n d e x i n g M i lto n ’ s P o e t i c T r a g e dy It is the reader of Milton’s dramatic poem, and not the tragic hero, then, who is called on by the preface to read indexically, collating the texts most relevant to Samson’s story. But where Milton points directly to the Attic stage, and “the three Tragic Poets unequall’d yet by any” whose plays were performed over the course of the fifth century bce, Mohamed mentions only two  – “Promethues” (Aeschylus) and “Oedipus” (Sophocles)11 – and these only in passing. He next refers briefly to Shakespeare’s “Lear,” before moving on to tragic heroes in twentieth-century works by Raymond Williams and Alain Badiou ­(498–501). But what if we were to take Mohamed at his word and review those Greek tragedies Milton “bookmarked” for us to consider? How might their collation affect our sense of “revolutionary subject formation” in Samson, the poem paired with Paradise Regain’d? On its face, Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound seems closer to Milton’s Samson than the latter is to Shakespeare’s King Lear. But the intrinsic problem of the Prometheus is insuperable; to make the sufferings of the Aeschylean hero a model for Samson’s agon would be to make God

11 This choice evidently follows W.R. Parker’s dictum: “These are the two ancient dramas which most obviously resemble Samson Agonistes” (Milton’s Debt, 109).

33093_Williams.indd 368

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 369

the  author of evil.12 Nor does Samson challenge an evil deity, as Prometheus does. But what, then, about Sophocles’s Oedipus? Unlike Prometheus’s sufferings, his are not innocent; he is clearly guilty of hybris in fleeing the fate predicted for him by the Delphic oracle. And  his hybris leads directly to parricide. But he suffers for that crime; and in Oedipus at Colonus, he is ultimately redeemed into glory without – one shudders at the fate Samson may have mistakenly chosen for himself – killing others along with himself. Nor does he impose his will on anyone else, although he refuses to forgive his son Polynices when the latter seeks his aid in a war with his brother to take their father’s throne.13 Neither Oedipus nor Prometheus fits very well with the Samson story. But what about Lear? Like Oedipus, he is surely humanized by his sufferings, his foolish pride outfaced by his longsuffering Fool. Nor is there any breezy consolation for him, as in Oedipus’s ultimate translation into glory. He is simply humanized by his grief for his dead daughter Cordelia, having perversely misread the depth of her love. But Samson is not ennobled by such love, and his grief continues to be centred on himself. If Samson were to bestride the stage, however, another Greek hero would be staring us in the face: the eponymous hero of Euripides’s Heracles.14 Like the Hebrew Samson, he is a physical specimen of overwhelming force. And as an impulsive character of appetite, imposing will, and sudden rage, Heracles would be perfect for the part. And yet the sheer physical presence of Samson on the stage, not to mention the pulsating immediacy of his brute force, is likely to banish the Greek hero from a viewer’s mind. The simultaneous presence of Heracles and Samson in the theatre of a reader’s mind, however, is not just ­possible but rendered likely by the printed page. In this context, we might recall how the bodily presence of Christ to his disciples had seemed a danger to Erasmus, as compared with the presence of “Christ himself” in the

12 See further discussion in this work: 334n73, 339n82. 13 See further discussion in this chapter: 388. 14 Although recent archaeological discoveries of the links between Heracles and Samson in the Greek settlements of Philistia were not available to Milton, he clearly ­recognized the parallels in Judges and Euripides. For evidence in both the archaeological and written records, see Korpman, “Dan Shall Judge,” 490–9; see also Margalith, “The Legends.”

33093_Williams.indd 369

2022-09-01 16:54

370

The Communion of the Book

gospels.15 Something similar is likely true of this performance and its development of an absent presence. Hearing echoes of Heracles, as well as other tragic heroes of the Greek stage sounding in Samson’s voice, however, allows us to hear a much different story of “revolutionary subject formation.” For, in a manner opposite to Paradise Regain’d, Milton’s tragedy summons ­readers to detect ironic differences from, as well as an increasing distance of, this tragic hero from the human hero of the “brief epic.” In fact, a “skilfull and laborious” gathering, or reading as collation, seems necessary to the tragic effect of Samson Agonistes, given how that effect differs ­generically from Jesus’s epic victory over Satan. Still, it is in the reader’s understanding that such effects must occur. Much as Erasmus had summoned the faithful reader of the gospels to be transformed into the Word through reading that Word, so Milton summons the reader of Samson Agonistes to be transformed in the act of reading the tragedy, if in a manner opposite to reading his epic. For Samson now poses a stern test of the reader of the paired poems to show that the reading lessons of Paradise Regain’d have indeed been learned. It is one thing to be transformed into the Word by reading Jesus reading scripture; it is quite another to read a character f­ orensically to establish his tragic difference from that Word. Only a full gathering of the multiple pages requiring collation – pages from Euripides, from scripture, from law, history, and aesthetics – will finally enable a reader to see what is truly “revolutionary” about the type of “subject formation” at work in this poem.

A Brief Biography of the Bookmark: Reading Milton Reading Euripides From the time he was a boy at St Paul’s School, Milton read ancient Greek. By the Eighth Form, he was already reading Homer, Euripides, and Isocrates in a way that would have delighted Erasmus, a good friend of St Paul’s founder, John Colet,16 in the previous century. Dissatisfied

15 See related discussion in my chapter 3: 138, 141–2, 146–8. 16 Clark, John Milton, reconstructs from a variety of sources “The Course of Study” for  the Eighth Form as follows: “Hebrew Grammar and Psalter in the morning. Read Homer, Euripides, and Isocrates (and perhaps Demosthenes), Persius and Juvenal [in the ­afternoon]” (121). “Because Euripides was in the school library,” Clark adds, “I suggest that

33093_Williams.indd 370

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 371

and disillusioned by his Scholastic education at Cambridge (1625–32), Milton spent six years after Cambridge as a solitary reader in his father’s house, first at Hammersmith, then at Horton. From the flyleaf of his copy of “the plays of Euripides in the edition of Paulus Stephanus of 1602,”17 we learn that “the two-volume” edition was purchased for “12s 6d / 1634.”18 Some 560 autograph annotations in the two volumes would lead John Hale to conclude that, before his blindness had become total in 1652, Milton “read the whole of Euripides, and closely, at least twice” (31), over a period of eighteen years. The Stephanus edition reprinted the prefaces and arguments related to each of the plays from the ground-breaking edition of 1562 by the German ­h umanist Gasparus Stiblinus, 19 containing eighteen surviving ­tragedies20 by Euripides in facing columns of Latin and Greek21 in a folio of “more than 800 pages”22 which was published at Basel in 1562 by Johannes Oporinus.23

Milton studied him” (120)  – with an emphasis in “studied” on the focus in Renaissance grammar schools on close analysis of the grammar, phrases and epithets, tropes and figures, and etymologies and histories of proper names used by the authors. 17 Hale, “Milton’s Euripides Marginalia,” 23. 18 Kelley and Atkins, “Milton’s Annotations,” 680–1. 19 Crawforth, “The Politics,” 239–69. Crawforth reports that Stephanus also reprinted “the commentaries of Jacobus Micyllus, Joannes Broadaeus and an index to Euripides’ works,” although “Stiblinus’ contributions would have an enduring influence, as attested by their foundational relationship to the Stephanus’ [sic] edition printed over 40 years later” (242). 20 Mastronarde, The Art of Euripides, explains that Stiblinus’s “Euripides is significant because it seems to offer the earliest particular assessments of all the plays in the corpus” (10). He adds that, in drawing “inspiration from the Donatan commentaries on the ­comedies of Terence,” Stiblinus “divides each tragedy into five acts,” which could be another reason for Milton’s need to explain in his foreword that, while not dividing Samson Agonistes “into Act and Scene referring chiefly to the Stage” of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, “It suffices if the whole Drama be found not produc’t beyond the fift Act” (Knoppers, Complete, 68). 21 Pollard, “Greek playbooks,” reminds us that “the first and most influential translation of Greek drama, Erasmus’s Latin version of Euripides’ Hecuba and Iphigenia in Aulis” (1506), was carried out mostly in England and dedicated “to his English patron William Warham, the Archbishop of Canterbury.” Tellingly, the printing of Latin and Greek lines opposite one another “graphically enacted Erasmus’s preoccupation with promoting the study of Greek, and implicitly presented Latin as a gateway language” (102–3). 22 Mastronarde, “Stiblinus’ Prefaces and Arguments on Euripides (1562).” 23 In his headnote, Mastronarde qualifies the date of “Stiblinus’ Prefaces and Arguments”: “Although Praefatio ends with the date October 22, 1559, and a following letter to the reader by Stiblin bears the date October 23, 1558, the colophon of the book

33093_Williams.indd 371

2022-09-01 16:54

372

The Communion of the Book

Milton’s knowledge of Greek was exceptional: the depth of his l­ inguistic ability, as well as his contextual grasp of Euripides’s tragedies, was such “that some twelve” of his proposed textual emendations are still “accepted in a standard modern edition, the Oxford Classical Texts series” (Hale, 25). The overall impression is that of an extraordinary level of philological and literary skill “combin[ing] to make up” an unusual “empathy” with the Greek poet, and to exhibit a superb “grasp of idiom and of the stage moment, a concern for accuracy, fidelity; perhaps an irritation with the flatness of the received text, exacerbated by the Latin version; an affinity with Euripides’ habit of mind, its ­continual and natural rising to gnomic utterance” (Hale, 30).24 Overall, the excellence of Milton’s annotations places him in a line of distinguished classical humanists from Erasmus onwards, whose labours were demonstrably aided by print and the ongoing proliferation of Greeklanguage texts.25 The effective result was to displace the Scholastic Aristotle’s doctrine of decay that could be taken for granted in scribal culture, with its inherent corruption of texts by copyists, rendering possible and even probable the early modern doctrine of progress26 based on a new “stability” of print knowledge (a situation ironically called into doubt in this instance by an edition riddled with misprints).27

gives the date March 1562.” The timing is worth noting: John Foxe was still a corrector and editor for Oporinus until August 1559; but it is unclear whether Foxe read or corrected any portion of Stiblinus’s manuscript. For details, see my chapter 4: 163, 174. 24 J.C. Scaliger (1484–1558), an older contemporary of Stiblinus (1526–1562) and the supreme arbiter of taste for later French neoclassicists, clearly preferred Seneca’s Latin tragedies over those of Euripides. What he seems to have valued most in the latter was Euripides’s stock of “sententia” (Clements, “Literary Theory,” 573). 25 This extended line of classicists includes J.C. Scaliger’s son Joseph Justus (­ 1540–1609), the historian-philologist whose emendations in the margins of two volumes of Euripides held by the Bodleian Library were identified some fifty years ago from “the distinctively bold hand” of J.J. Scaliger, and so reattributed to their true author (Collard, “Marginalia,” 243). 26 Milton clearly subscribed to the argument “against decay” of George Hakewill’s An Apologie or Declaration of the Power and Providence of God (1627) in a Latin poem that he likely wrote ca 1628 at Cambridge as an academic exercise, “Naturam non pati senium,” translated as “That Nature does not grow old” (Flannagan, Riverside, 218–20). 27 Kelley and Atkins point out that “[t]he Stephanus text is far from a model of ­typographical and editorial accuracy, and a good portion of Milton’s labors was devoted to correcting it” (685). This continuing need for corrections to the text supports the case made by Johns, in The Nature of the Book, for a lack of “fixity” in printed books, although Johns ignores the resulting stability of a printed text. The fact remains that the continued existence of the philological enterprise points to an ongoing need to improve and perfect printed texts. See related discussion in this work: 29–30, 39–40, 71n6.

33093_Williams.indd 372

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 373

Milton’s two epigraphs from Euripides,28 and his frequent allusions throughout the 1640s to Euripides, suggest that he took the Athenian playwright to be his ally in the struggle against all forms of tyranny, whether religious, political, or domestic. His epigraph from The Suppliants, printed in Greek with an English translation, succinctly anticipates the argument of Areopagitica (1644), with its soaring appeals for political liberty, freedom of the press, and social liberation of the talents: “This is true Liberty when free born men / Having to advise the public may speak free,” declares the Athenian king Theseus, as if to anticipate the mid-seventeenth-century demand by “free-born” John Lilburne – “Which he who can, and will, deserv’s high praise, / Who neither can nor will, may hold his peace; / What can be juster in a State then this? ”29 As Nicholas McDowell comments, “The Stephanus edition glosses these lines, which are spoken by Theseus in response to a Theban herald who questions the capacity of the people to guide a city, as an example of parrhesia, the term used in Euripidean tragedy for the exercise of free speech which characterizes Athenian democracy 30 and civic culture.”31 Barbara Lewalski, commenting on Milton’s reference to Attic drama in Tetrachordon (1645), adds that “[t]he untranslated Greek epigraph from Euripides’s Medea on the title page specifically invites” an audience of learned scholars,32 while Nicholas McDowell remarks that Milton’s refusal to “translate the four lines of Greek,” combined with the Greek title-word itself, “(meaning ‘four-stringed’)[,] would seem to display a clear disdain for those who would try to encounter his arguments without a good degree of classical learning” (219). McDowell also notes Milton’s willingness, in his initial defence of tyrannicide in

28 Milton’s marked preference for Euripidean drama was first noted by Masson, Life, 568. See also Timberlake, “Milton and Euripides,” 315–40; Norbrook, “Euripides, Milton,” 37–41; and Festa, The End of Learning, 22–32. 29 Areopagitica, cpw 2:485. For the relation of this epigraph to the contemporary writings of John Lilburne, see my Milton’s Leveller God, 7–8. 30 Crawforth further notes: “If Euripides’ works denounce tyranny, they are commensurately read as paeans to Greek democracy by many early modern readers” (244), not least of whom was Gasparus Stiblinus in his extended commentaries reprinted in the Stephanus edition of 1602 owned and annotated by Milton. 31 McDowell, “Milton’s Euripides,” 219. 32 Lewalski, The Life, 185.

33093_Williams.indd 373

2022-09-01 16:54

374

The Communion of the Book

The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), “to assert the truth of Euripidean tragedy over and against that of scriptural texts” (222). Milton stakes his daring claim not on the ground of Calvinist resistance theory or “extraordinary inspiration from God,” but rather on the secular authority of “the ‘Heathen King’” (224) in Euripides’s Heracleidae, who insists, in Milton’s translation from the Greek, “I rule not my people by Tyranny, as if they were Barbarians, but am my self liable, if I doe unjustly, to suffer justly.”33 As McDowell justly concludes, it is king Demophoon who “speaks ‘more rationally’ than those ‘interpreters’ of the Psalm [51] who would read it as a defence of divine right monarchy” (223). In the 1650s, Milton resorted in his systematic theology to Euripides in order to support a mortalist reading of scripture, even using The Suppliants “as a gloss upon the biblical texts” (226) to clinch his argument that body and soul are wholly one substance, and that the soul thus dies with the body, rendering null and void the Church’s ancient doctrine of purgatory, which derives, not from scripture, but from what the Sibyl had revealed to Aeneas in Aeneid 6 upon the Roman hero’s descent into the Underworld. Soaring over the logical disputation of Milton’s prose are also the allusions made to Euripides in his lyric poetry, as in that witty, but also deeply moving, reference to Electra in Sonnet 8, “When the assault was intended to the Citty [sic]” (1642). John Hale sums up Milton’s deep “empathy” for Euripides as a dramatist in terms of Sonnet 8: “Running through the whole allusion is the delighted emulation of Euripides, alike as poet and as a citizen and human being, one who became in his life by this writing ‘a true poem.’”34 Indeed, the poem could of itself sum up the profound grip of the Greek poet on Milton’s imagination, given how “the repeated air / Of sad Electra’s Poet” sung to the ­conquering Spartan generals in council35 was credited by Plutarch with having “had the power / To save th’ Athenian Walls from ruine bare.”36 Milton’s choice of “Athenian Walls” to demarcate the line between Attic democracy and bloody tyranny37 is extended suggestively in McDowell’s 33 Milton, The Tenure, cpw 3:205. 34 Hale, “Milton’s Euripides,” 32–3. 35 Leonard, “Saving the Walls,” 1. 36 Milton, Sonnet 8, “When the assault was intended to the Citty” (Flannagan, 86). 37 Here is the sort of evidence that is sorely missing in Henrich’s anthropological account of the links between literacy and democratic governance (weirdest People, 17, 407–15).

33093_Williams.indd 374

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 375

commentary on “Milton’s sense of the Greek tragedian as a poet of thresholds.” Indeed, as McDowell magnificently concludes, the poem “may be seen as an instance on a national scale of the dissolution of the boundaries between oikos and polis, household and civil state, that is the source of much Greek tragedy” (221). Most moving of all is Milton’s allusion to Euripidean tragedy in the heart-rending vision of Sonnet 23, “Methought I Saw,” where the blind poet dreams of seeing “my late espoused Saint / Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave” (1–2). “But O, as to embrace me she enclin’d,” he cries out almost involuntarily at the end, “I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night” (13–14).38 And the reader, feeling the drudgery of that plodding final line of monosyllables, begins to sense how very much Euripides’s plays continued to haunt Milton’s imagination in ways entirely relevant to his personal tragedy, both in the loss of his beloved second wife, Katherine Woodcock, and in his earlier loss of sight. Finally, there is the testimony, long after the fact, of Milton’s third daughter Deborah Clarke (d. 1727), who grew up reading to her blind father in several ancient languages, and in her old age could still quote from memory “a considerable number of verses” from Homer and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and “several verses likewise out of Euripides.”39 The rich poetic inheritance that Milton had received from Euripides thus survived him in flesh and blood as well as in his verse.

Bookmarking Euripides’s Plots in the Plot of Samson Agonistes The opening sentence of Milton’s preface to Samson Agonistes assigns due authority to Aristotle as the leading theorist of tragedy.40 So it is safe to assume that Milton agreed with Aristotle that “[t]he most 38 Flannagan, 259. 39 Newton, “The Life of Milton,” lxxv. 40 Pollard, “Greek Playbooks,” suggests that the concern with audience affect in the commentaries of Stiblinus (1562) “recalls rising contemporary interest in Aristotle’s newly published Poetics” (108). Mastronarde, Art, adds that “Aristotle’s opinions were especially decisive for reception once interest in tragedy was revived in Western Europe in the sixteenth century,” if largely to the detriment of Euripides for his lack of “tragic decorum and lack of ‘necessity’ in construction of scenes or speeches” (2–3). But Milton’s choice of Aristotle as the leading authority on tragedy, rather than Horace or the late classical commentators Evanthius and Donatus (fourth-century ce), whose work was conflated in a Renaissance essay, “De Tragoedia et Comoedia,” already had a century of scholarly consensus behind it.

33093_Williams.indd 375

2022-09-01 16:54

376

The Communion of the Book

important element is the construction of the plot.”41 He was also likely to have kept top of mind Aristotle’s insistence that “it is not in order to portray moral character that the actors perform; rather, they include character for the sake of action. The events, the story, are the point of tragedy, and that is the most important thing of all” (24). “So the story,” he sums up, “is the foundation and as it were the soul of tragedy, while moral character is secondary” (25). But then, as if feeling qualms about his claim for the primacy of plot, Aristotle adds, “It is clear from all this that the poet must be a maker of stories rather than verses, in so far as it is representation that makes him a poet, and representation is of actions” (29).42 As for why tragedians so often took their stories from the actions of famous families, Aristotle says, “The reason for this is that what is possible is credible. If something has not happened we are inclined to disbelieve that it is possible” (28). For the sake of plausibility, given the extreme suffering that is common in the traditional stories, tragedians needed to keep the familiar family names, though comedic writers did not (28). And it is precisely for his plausible portrayal of horrific suffering and extreme forms of unhappy endings that “Euripides, even if he mismanages some other matters, is at all events the most tragic of the poets” (32).43 In choosing the traditional story of the biblical Samson, and in representing his tragic hero in extremis, Milton clearly follows the plot types 41 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Kenny, 24. 42 Sixteenth-century theorists of tragedy who either follow or qualify Aristotelian theory, include Benedictus Philologus (1506), Jacobus Micyllis (1562, printed along with Stiblinus), Nicodemus Frischlin (1586), and Florent Chrestien and Isaac Casaubon (1605). They are all surveyed in Pollard’s “Greek Playbooks,” 111–14. 43 Mastronarde, Art, acknowledges the “backhanded” nature of this “compliment,” while adding that “in the Hellenistic and Roman periods,” Euripides “rapidly became a cultural icon of wisdom and skill” since, soon “after his death he quickly eclipsed all other fifth-century dramatists in the performance repertoire” (2, 4, 5). Doubtless this is another reason why more of his plays survive than those of any other ancient dramatist. Indeed, “Euripides is, after Homer, the poet most commonly represented in the scraps of ancient books that have accidentally survived from ancient antiquity” (6). While the Roman “Quintilian leaves undecided whether Euripides or Sophocles is the better poet overall,” he “effusively explains why Euripides is far more useful to the person training himself for oratory” (7). That helps to explain why he was denigrated by both philologists and philosophers for dramatizing high emotions instead of rational behaviour (8–9). By contrast, both nineteenth-century German classicists and Romantics more often identified Euripides with “rationalism,” or as having an “affinity to Socrates” (12), and therefore writing “in such a way as to convey one impression to the masses while signaling a quite different meaning to a small group of intellectuals” (13).

33093_Williams.indd 376

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 377

of Euripides, whose Heracles and Hippolytus, as well as Medea and The Bacchae, represent the highest pitch of suffering and unhappy endings ever to appear on the Attic stage. Euripides renders each of his horrific endings possible, as well as conventionally plausible, by retelling ancient family stories, thus ensuring public acceptance of the traditional story of the tragic hero. In his imitation of a Euripidean plot, with its ­compression of a life down to its key moment and its removal of all extraneous action, Milton then takes the last eleven verses of Judges chapter 16 as his skeletal plot, although the story of Samson’s life is told over four complete chapters in Judges 13–16, comprising ninetysix verses in all (details of which will emerge periodically in Samson’s recollections and dialogue with the Chorus). But in so doing, Milton clearly seeks, like Euripides, to uphold the principle of dramatic unity that Aristotle had deemed necessary in “the representation of an action,” a unity consisting of “an action that is single and entire, with its several incidents so structured that the displacement or removal of any one of them would disturb and dislocate the whole” (27). A decocted version of Milton’s plot might then read as follows: a famous Hebrew strongman who has betrayed the secret of his divine strength and been blinded by his foe appears to have forfeited his role as the promised deliverer of his nation. To fulfill that promise, he destroys himself along with his oppressors, thereby validating the ­prophesy. A similar plot is extractable from Euripides’s Heracles, where the hero’s long-delayed return from Hades has left his family at the mercy of a tyrant-usurper. But, as their promised deliverer, Heracles returns just in time to save his family. However, in a god-goaded fit of sudden madness, he kills the wife and children he had come to save, thereby exposing a deeply “fractured” consciousness that leads inexorably to tragedy.44 Each of these dramas contains a tragic paradox that is the hallmark of Euripidean tragedy – that what was expected has come to pass, if in a horribly unexpected way. Both tragedies are also shaped by an exploration of the moral paradox of saving strength in the culture hero that is joined to murderous violence. As Henry McDonald sees it, there is “an ‘absolute contradiction’ between Samson’s divine mission and the moral tenor of his actual deeds” that “is comparable to the conflicting

44 McDonald, “A Long Day’s Dying,” 267.

33093_Williams.indd 377

2022-09-01 16:54

378

The Communion of the Book

images we receive of Heracles in Euripides’ play” (273). In fact, each of these heroes is “split” by a deep contradiction; but Samson, who confuses means (marriage) with ends (national deliverance), remains just as oblivious as Heracles is to his own contradictions. Maggie Kilgour adds of the Greek strongman that “he is characterized by an essential ambiguity and doubleness,” meaning that “it is hard to keep these different aspects of his character” – the “tyrant slayer” and the “deranged murderer”  – apart, and so to separate the strands of his moral ­ambiguity.45 Finally, McDonald remarks of this moral duality that each play “inscribes within it a conventionalized interpretation of its protagonist and his story, then radically subverts without completely destroying that interpretation” (282). At the heart of each drama stands a radical ambiguity that resists resolution, thereby intensifying our pity and fear.46 Similar paradoxes inform the plots of Euripides’s Hippolytus and Milton’s Samson, the influence of the former on the latter “supported by evidence provided by the annotations in Milton’s copy of Euripides’ plays,” which are in the holdings of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. From her examination of these annotations, Hannah Crawforth remarks that “the level of attention paid to this particular tragedy is unusual” (248). In some respects, this is surprising, given the f­ oreknowledge of the goddess Aphrodite in the prologue speech which, as the classical Greek scholar Donald J. Mastronarde explains, “invites the audience to understand Aphrodite’s motivation in anthropomorphic terms: honor and violent protection of honor,” although the absolute “gulf between divine and human is also clear.”47 Indeed, “The goddess’ ­chilling confidence in her own knowledge and efficacy is displayed by the future tenses she uses (‘I’ll swiftly demonstrate’ 9, ‘I’ll avenge on this day’ 21–2; ‘men will say in the future’ 33; ‘I’ll reveal … it will come out’ 42; ‘his father will kill the youth’ 43–4)” (178). In terms of the superior understanding afforded the audience by this sort of prologue, her preview of divine agency “casts a pall over the efforts of understanding and action subsequently taken by the characters.” 45 Kilgour, “Odd Couplings,” 80. 46 Revard, “The Politics,” suggests something similar in her reading of Greek and Miltonic tragedy: “Ancient tragedy was meant to inspire mixed emotions in its audience – pity and terror, sympathy and revulsion. Like Sophocles, Milton may want his audience to pity his dying hero but not necessarily to approve of the destruction he accomplishes” (241). 47 Mastronarde, Art, 177.

33093_Williams.indd 378

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 379

It is the absence of such knowledge that haunts characters and a­ udience alike in the plotting of Samson Agonistes; but there is one aspect of Hippolytus that is of vital importance to Milton. In Euripides’s emplotment of the tragedy, the youthful Hippolytus, a prodigy of virtue ­combined with great beauty, worships the virgin goddess Artemis, scorns the goddess Aphrodite, and spurns his stepmother Phaedra’s lust. But the latter, who commits suicide to save her reputation, leaves a letter accusing the youth of rape, thereby causing her husband Theseus in a fit of rage to curse the life of his virtuous son. In his commentary of 1562, the Renaissance humanist critic Stiblinus48 had singled out the careless rashness (“inconsulta temeritas”) and impulsive anger (“­praecipitata ira”) of Theseus, which are always accompanied by repentance and unhappiness (“quae semper habet comites paenitentiam et infelicitatem”).49 Theseus appears to be one of Milton’s nearest models for the rash and impulsive act that precipitates the tragedy of Samson. But where Hippolytus is drawn into the tragic plot by a blab of a Nurse who betrays her mistress’s secret, Samson is his own blab, betraying the secret of his strength to Dalila and the Philistines. And, in the world of Euripidean and Euripidean-styled tragedy, moral strength surely seems no better – and certainly no safer – than moral weakness. In both Hippolytus and Samson, the hero is brought to ruin, ironically, by his greatest strength, after the tragedy is precipitated by a rash act, whether his own action or that of another.50 As Mastronarde concludes with respect to Hippolytus, “An audience can be expected to understand, at some intellectual level, Aphrodite’s position, but the forbidding aspects of her role and the fully portrayed anguish of her victims ­suggests that it is not a position they can be expected easily to admire, adopt for themselves, or share at an emotional level” (178). As we shall see, there 48 Mastronarde remarks of Stiblinus that “[m]any of his notes are drawn from the scolia, but he also adduces information and comparative passages from ancient authors, especially prose writers like Plutarch and Cicero on ethical issues. Stiblinus’ efforts stand out because philologists editing Euripides in this period rarely addressed broader issues of dramatic interpretation, but simply cited or paraphrased what they found in the ancient sources” (Art, 10–11). 49 “Praefatio et Argumentum Gaspari Stiblini, in Hippolytum,” ed. Mastronarde [my translations from the “Praefatio”]. 50 Mastronarde sets the commentaries of Stiblinus in the context of other “sixteenthcentury writers on poetics” who attempted “a reconciliation of Platonic and Aristotelian views of poetry by insisting that poets both delight and instruct, and that representations of morally suspect behavior edify by providing a model of what is to be avoided” (Art, 10).

33093_Williams.indd 379

2022-09-01 16:54

380

The Communion of the Book

is also a cognitive dissonance between the understanding of the Chorus and that of the audience at the end of Samson Agonistes. In the tragedy of Euripides’s Medea, the plot concerns a wife’s revenge on her faithless husband Jason for whom she had renounced parents and homeland to become a stranger in Jason’s adopted city of Corinth. When he dismisses her accusations of injustice in setting her aside for King Creon’s daughter, Medea uses their young sons to bear the gift of poison to Jason’s new bride and father-in-law, then kills her boys to gain her terrible revenge.51 In his preface to the play, the humanist Stiblinus warns against the “unbridled passions” (“ab insanis amoribus”) of love and hate from which example “men should be deterred” (“homines deterreri debent”), since such passions “often drag their slaves into the most obvious calamity and often involve entire city-states in ruin” (“qui sua mancipia ut plurimum in manifestum exitium trahunt et saepe totas ciuitates clade inuoluunt”).52 Here, as elsewhere, “Stiblinus’ prefatory arguments to Euripides’ tragedies repeatedly emphasize the most ­political aspects of the drama” (Crawforth, 242), which further underscores Milton’s concern in Samson with the political health of the polis. The biblical Samson, whose unbridled passion for Philistian Delilah led to his enslavement and blinding at the hands of her countrymen, prays in the temple of Dagon to be “avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes” (Judges 16:28). Although Milton’s Samson never voices this prayer, or even hints at such a vengeful intent, his father Manoa blurts out, on learning of his son’s death, “A dreadful way thou took’st to thy revenge” (1581) [1591].53 And the Chorus, encouraged by this judgment, declaims in a sudden flush of triumph, “O dearly-bought revenge, yet glorious!” (1650) [1660]. Manoa later concludes, “Samson hath quit himself / Like Samson, and heroicly hath finish’d / A life Heroic, on his Enemies / Fully reveng’d” (1699–1702) [1709–12]. It remains to be seen whether Milton shares this view; but those closest

51 Sypniewski and MacMaster, “Double Motivation,” recall how “Euripides was criticized for bringing innovations to tragedy that affronted Athenian society, especially for giving prominent speaking parts to women and slaves.” As they conclude, “By reading Samson Agonistes alongside Medea,” it is possible “to show that Milton learned from Euripides how to bring tragedy to its fullest potential for cultural critique” (145). 52 “In Medeam Praefatio,” trans. Michelangelo Macchiarella. 53 Numbers in parentheses in Knoppers’s edition refer to the numbering in the first edition; numbers in square brackets refer to modern editions, after the ten lines of the Omissa have been added in their proper place.

33093_Williams.indd 380

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 381

to Samson in the drama regard his last act as the fulfillment of his “epic” role as a heaven-sent Avenger, though at the cost of his life. Conventional as usual, they see him in the same terms that Medea uses to justify herself, even if they lack a sense of tragic irony that is a hallmark of Euripidean tragedy. Something similar can be said of the complexity of the dramatic plots, particularly the critical turning points in the tragedies of both Euripides and Milton. For Aristotle, the best tragic plots are not simple but complex. As he explains, “I call an action simple if it is, in the sense defined, continuous and unitary, and in which the change of fortune takes place without reversal [peripeteia] or discovery [anagnorisis]; I call it complex if the change of fortune involves a reversal or a discovery or both” (29). As Aristotle defines the elements of a complex tragic plot, “Reversal is a change of direction in the course of events, as already stated, taking place, as we insist, in accord with probability or necessity. For instance, in Oedipus a messenger comes to bring Oedipus good news and rid him of his fears about his mother; but by revealing his true identity he produces the opposite effect” (30). And “Discovery, as the term implies, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, and thus to either love or hate, on the part of those destined for good or bad fortune. Discovery takes its finest form when it coincides with reversal, as in the Oedipus.” But a complex tragic plot must include both anagnorisis and peripeteia. Such a reversal of the action of Heracles comes at the midpoint of the tragedy (line 749 of 1428), as the Chorus sings of the hero returning in the nick of time: “Joy once more! I weep for joy! / The king has come again! / He has come, of whom I had no hope, / my country’s king, come back again!” 54 At that precise instant, “Help! Help!” comes a call from inside the house, and the usurper Lycus rushes out, crying, “O land of Cadmus! Treachery! I die!” (754). What we are not told is that Heracles, goaded to a frenzy by his divine nemesis Hera, and mistaking his wife and children for his enemies, has set upon slaying them, along with the tyrant Lycus. As Maggie Kilgour astutely remarks, this abrupt reversal of c­ haracter, and with it the reversal of the entire action of the play, is formally mirrored in Euripides’s Heracles, as well as in Sophocles’s Women of Trachis: “The 54 As Revard comments, “Euripides lets us savor the irony of the tyrant foiled in his very act of tyranny. He also emphasizes the reaction of the citizens, who outside hear the death cries of Lycus and exult at the tyrant’s death and their liberation” (222), thanks to Hercules, the “tyrant slaying hero” (217) of traditional Greek myth.

33093_Williams.indd 381

2022-09-01 16:54

382

The Communion of the Book

divided and even incoherent nature of the hero is reflected formally in the bifurcated structures of Euripides’s and Sophocles’s tragedies, which both fall into two disconnected parts ­mirroring the hero’s split identity as both god and man, as well as in the gap between his past heroism and present savagery” (80). This dangerous psychological split in the hero is also widened on the formal level by a mode of dramatic irony that is fundamental to Euripidean tragedy. For example, the Chorus of Heracles dances joyously in Strophe even as the hero’s murders of his family take place offstage; they also sing in ironic incomprehension, “Let dancing and feasting now prevail / throughout this holy town of Thebes! / Joy and mourning change their places, / old disaster turns to dancing!” (763–6). With equal (and equally terrible) irony, the other half of the Chorus sings in delirious joy as it dances in Antistrophe: “The gods of heaven do prevail: / they raise the good and scourge the bad. / Excess of happiness – it drives / men’s minds awry” (772–5). Of course, the full Chorus is oblivious to the real tragedy ­taking place inside the palace, as the “tyrant slayer” turns into the tyrannical murderer of his wife and three young sons. The remainder of the play depicts the gradual awakening of Heracles and his shattering discovery of the truth of his actions.55 In Samson, once the hero leaves the stage, he is not seen again throughout the last 332 lines of the drama. It is the “Euripidean” Messenger who will come from the Theatre of Dagon to report the hero’s final speech of six lines. But is there any real evidence of an awakening or Discovery that takes place in the interim? Samson is reported as saying: Hitherto, Lords, what your commands impos’d I have perform’d, as reason was, obeying, Not without wonder or delight beheld. Now of my own accord such other tryal I mean to shew you of my strength, yet greater; As with amaze shall strike all who behold. (1630–35) [1640–45] 55 Revard suggests that it is this “Herculean Samson … Shorn of his strength” who is recalled in Adam’s awakening after the Fall in Paradise Lost, as well as in Milton’s drama: “It is a deeply human Hercules – not the glorious hero – that Milton refers to here, one who has made tragic mistakes and must, just like Samson or Adam and Eve, come to terms with them. It is the same Hercules (although never alluded to directly) that is also implicitly present in Samson Agonistes” (235).

33093_Williams.indd 382

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 383

In the aftermath of the destruction, these lines are hard to differentiate from the type of tragic irony that haunts the choric lines of Heracles. As a reversal of the action of the drama, the peripeteia also comes rather late, compared with the Attic tragedy; but at least it constitutes the type of structural reversal prescribed for an Aristotelian form of tragedy. But is there any real “change from ignorance to knowledge” in Milton’s tragedy? His admonition to the Chorus does not prove an awakening in Samson: “Be of good courage, I begin to feel / Some rouzing motions in me which dispose / To something extraordinary my thoughts” (1381–3). He still sounds uncertain about what he will do, even as he leaves the stage for the last time: “This day will be remarkable in my life / By some great act, or of my days the last” (1388–9). While each outcome proves to be true, Samson does not know it, unless he dissembles. And even when he does decide on a course of action, the announced motive – “of my own accord” – is just as ambiguous as his ensuing claim to display “my strength, yet greater.” And yet those highly equivocal puns (“amaze” and “strike”) are too cunning to arouse our pity, although they ought to arouse our fear. About the only thing of which we are certain at this point is that Samson has recovered his “secret” of old – his cunning habit of hiding his advantage – although his “knowledge” amounts to little more than the recovery of a “secret” as the source of his strength. Is this return of the riddling Trickster mandated by God, or is it simply Samson’s will, “of my own accord”? No answers are provided unless the triumphalism of Milton’s Chorus is much less ironic than the triumphalism of Euripides’s Chorus. But then if Milton’s giddy Chorus does not arrive at tragic knowledge, could it be Samson’s hero-worshipping father Manoa who bears the burden of anagnorisis, that crucial change from ignorance to knowledge which is the sine qua non of Aristotelian tragedy? Or does no one arrive at a tragic “Discovery”? Is the burden of knowledge perhaps left to the reader, in lieu of theatrical viewers of Samson? Is this the answer to the question of why “this work never was intended” “to the Stage”? Similar problems are highlighted by the complex plot of Euripides’s Hippolytus. The tragic irony that informs the Greek story concerns a naively virtuous “hero” who warns his lustful stepmother, “Shall I who cannot even hear such impurity, / and feel myself untouched – shall I turn wicked? / Woman, know this. It is my piety [that] saves you” ­(654–6). Hippolytus has no idea, of course, that his naive piety will be

33093_Williams.indd 383

2022-09-01 16:54

384

The Communion of the Book

the occasion of his ruin.56 Later, he vainly protests to his returning father, “I’m ignorant of the deed. Nor do I wish / to see such things, for I’ve a maiden soul” (1006–7). But the impulsive anger of his father Theseus knows no bounds: “This letter here is proof without lot-casting” (1057), he says, attempting to clear himself of any failure to observe his legal obligation as the chief magistrate to weigh the evidence, and, even then, still patiently to consult the gods. Hippolytus is left in the pitiable position of having to protest, “So, I’m condemned and there is no escape. / I know the truth but cannot tell the truth” (1090–1). But after the god Poseidon fulfills the tragic curse of Theseus on his son, a deus ex machina – the virgin goddess Artemis, ever loyal to her accolyte Hippolytus – appears above the stage on the gabled rooftop to accomplish the tragic “change from ignorance to knowledge,” a change that grows increasingly unbearable: “Theseus, poor man, what joy have you here? / You have murdered your son most impiously. / Dark indeed was the conclusion / you drew from your wife’s lying stories” (1286–8). Indeed, Theseus, who had previously been rescued from the Underworld by Heracles, has come to resemble that Theban hero-turned-monster more than he wants to admit. As Maggie Kilgour sums him up, “It looks very much as if the new Athenian were but old Theban writ large” (94). Such dreadful ambiguity even threatens to call Athenian democracy into doubt. Fortunately, the goddess Artemis follows up the peripeteia (reversal) with the germ of an affecting anagnorisis (discovery) when she says, “You, Theseus, are the one who suffers most – / misfortune for you, but also grief for me. / The gods do not rejoice when the pious die; / the wicked we destroy, children, house and all” (1338–41). And the dying Hippolytus completes his Discovery by confirming that it was indeed the goddess Aphrodite who “ruined all three of us” in revenge for his proud scorn of her. “Yes,” his idol Artemis responds, “you, your father, and his wife, all three” (1403–4). Yet even now, the youth still shields his father from the pollution of filicide, sparing the city-state the further burden of his father’s crime. When Theseus cries out, “And so you leave me, my hands stained with murder,” Hippolytus murmurs, “No, for I free you from all guilt in this” (1448–9). Athens and its 56 In his preface to Hippolytus, Stiblinus compares the “innocence and chastity” of Hippolytus to that of “chaste Joseph … put into great peril in Egypt by the false accusation of a shamless woman” (trans. Jeremy Simmons). Neither here nor in The Bacchae does Stiblinus ever comment specifically on the irony of “piety” in Euripides.

33093_Williams.indd 384

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 385

democratic ideals are spared a final descent into the chaos of civil war, which, since the time of Oedipus, has been the recurring fate of Thebes. Euripides’s ending is telling for several reasons that will have some bearing on the end of Samson Agonistes. It is no accident that “Hippolytus’ final scenes, in which a father learns of his son’s self-destructive act and imminent death” (Crawforth, 248) are virtually the mirror image of Samson. For the joy that Manoa takes in his son’s heroic death is the very reverse of the joy that Theseus takes in vengeance. As the goddess Artemis reminds the Athenian father, his exultation was tragically misplaced; the celebration has turned to mourning, made endurable only by the nobility of his son’s forgiveness, so relieving him of the terrors of filicide and bloodguilt. This Euripidean critique of vengeance and impulsive anger is equally applicable to Manoa’s triumphalism and to Samson’s impulsivity – “I begin to feel / Some rouzing motions in me” – given the apparent egotism of Samson’s claim to act of “my own accord,” by which he means “to shew you of my strength.” With such Euripidean ironies echoing in the closing lines of Milton’s Chorus, more devastating ironies still begin to sound in every utterance about the Philistines: “Among them he a spirit of phrenzie sent” (much like the “phrenzie” that had seized both Theseus and Heracles), “Who hurt thir minds, / And urg’d them on with mad desire / To call in hast for thir destroyer” (1665–8) [1675–8]. Given the jubilation of their song – quite as elated as that of the Chorus in Euripides’s Heracles – Milton’s Chorus appears to be stone deaf to the reverberating ironies of their bloody song. For the Philistines, who are “only set on sport and play,” reappear in the darkening mirror of the “sport” of the Chorus to mock those thousands who have “Unweetingly importun’d / Thir own destruction to come speedy upon them” (1669–71) [1679–81]. The unseemliness of this toxic song of rejoicing grows increasingly unsettling, given Milton’s adherence in theory to Aristotelian ­conventions of tragedy, and in practice to Euripidean “tragic effect.” For rejoicing at the death of an enemy surely belongs to the genre of epic, not tragedy. And even then, the epic poet had meant to chasten Achilles by forcing him to recognize the lasting pain, and so his need to comfort Priam, the father of Hektor, whom Achilleus had not only slain but despoiled.57 57 See discussion of this scene in “Oral Memory and the Anger of Achilleus” in my Media, Memory, 69–71.

33093_Williams.indd 385

2022-09-01 16:54

386

The Communion of the Book

Here, perhaps, is the key correspondence between the divergent endings of Hippolytus and Samson, where “heroic” memorial is the issue. As Philip Hardie explains, “A cultic aetiology, connecting legendary past with present-day institutions, is itself a frequent closural element in Attic tragedy, especially Euripides. Particularly close, and a possible model for Milton, is the speech of Artemis at the end of Euripides’s Hippolytus, after another mangled body has been brought on stage, prescribing the honours to be paid to Hippolytus by unwed maidens, 1423–40.”58 Honours of this sort are also the subject of Manoa’s final speech, where he envisions that “Monument” he plans to build for his son, “with shade / Of Laurel ever green, and branching Palm, / With all his Trophies hung, and Acts enroll’d / In copious Legend, or sweet Lyric Song” (1724–7) [1734–7]. The difference, of course, is that he creates a generic shift at poem’s end “from tragic into epic register” (Hardie, 550), a shift that is shocking for any number of reasons. Suffice to say for now that Hardie is justified in generic, as well as thematic terms, to claim that father and son have been obsessed throughout with the hero’s “epic glory,” and that Manoa, at least, remains impervious at the close to tragic emotions of pity and fear.59 From some of his earliest speeches to the Chorus, it is also clear, as Hardie maintains, that “Samson suffers catastrophic loss in verbal reputation,” since his “fama … has been reduced to an elegiac fabula” (552, 551). In his earliest speeches to the Chorus, Samson could not hide an equal concern with fame and shame, asking, “[T]ell me Friends, / Am I not sung and proverbd for a Fool / In every street” (202–4)? Thus, a marked shift at the end of Samson Agonistes into the conventions of epic – the promise of eternal fame to the warrior in compensation for an early death – puts a generic exclamation point on what is terribly amiss in Manoa’s “monumental” address at the end of the tragedy.60

58 Hardie, “Fama in Milton,” 548. 59 Given the “windy joy” of both Manoa and the Chorus, tragic emotions would surely be impossible without a Euripidean mode of tragic irony at the end of Samson Agonistes. 60 For more on Mohamed’s argument, see this chapter: 365–8, 399–400. Also see McDonald’s claim that the biblical “Manoah … was from the lowly tribe of Dan (‘notorious for their idolatry’)” (268), a tendency apparently repeated in Milton’s poem in the efforts of Manoa to make an “idol” of his “heroic” son.

33093_Williams.indd 386

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 387

Aristotle’s comments on the source of tragic effect dictate that the actions of tragedy are necessarily productive of both pity and fear. And Euripides’s humanity is obvious in his sympathy not just for the innocent Hippolytus, but for the poor soul whom we have witnessed struggling to control, even as she is finally consumed by, her lust. For Phaedra surely arouses our pity by preferring death to dishonour; and she arouses our fear by her exculpatory need to fix the blame on Hippolytus. Nor can we help but pity the traduced youth who has done very little to deserve his fate, further deepening our fear. As Theseus watches his son’s life ebbing away in the instant that he discovers his own tragic error, we also feel the poet’s pity for the suffering father to be of the essence of tragedy, not least in the son’s magnanimous forgiveness of his parent’s impulsive rage. Much the same thing is true as we watch Heracles struggling to come to terms with his impulsive murder of his wife and sons; human pity stretches far beyond the stage of the familial tragedy, spilling down the ages. But Aristotle goes one step further: “Actually seeing a play p­erformed may evoke fear and pity, but so too can the plot itself – this is more fundamental and the mark of a better poet. The story should be put together in such a way that even without seeing the play a person hearing the series of events should feel dread and pity” (33). The plot of Samson is manifestly structured in such a way that a reader – any reader – is bound to feel both pity and dread at Samson’s actions. And this is the point of Milton’s closet drama: its readers are left to feel what viewers of the onstage tragedy – Manoa and the Chorus – have been incapable of discovering in their “epic” celebration of Samson’s “­triumph.” Either Milton was mistaken in his view “Of that sort of Dramatic Poem which is call’d Tragedy” (Knoppers, Complete, 66), or else it is his internal audience that is grossly in error about “A life Heroic” (1701) [1711], and an epic “victory.” Based on Euripidean precedent, “tragic effect” alone is what could properly define Milton’s purpose in naming as a “Tragedy” a “dramatic poem” “which was never intended” “to the Stage.” Philip Hardie then justly scoffs at Manoa’s fevered insistence that “Samson has quit himself like Samson”: “Has Samson changed then? Not according to his proud father, who picks up on the Chorus’ image of the self-identity of the phoenix by asserting that his son has, in the end, fully lived up to his name” (558).

33093_Williams.indd 387

2022-09-01 16:54

388

The Communion of the Book

Indexing the Structure o f   M i lto n ’ s   T r a g e dy W.R. Parker famously argued in Milton’s Debt to Greek Tragedy (1937) that Milton found his structure for Samson Agonistes in a pair of plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles, not in any work of Euripides.61 Of thirty-two62 extant Greek tragedies, argued Parker, only two bore a structural resemblance to Samson: the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, and the Oedipus Coloneus of Sophocles. “The plot in each,” Parker observed, “consists largely of a series of visits; and in each a greatly suffering hero laments his misery to all who will listen” (177). If any “Greek” plot informs the story of the “bound” Samson, it would be the story of Prometheus bound to the rock by a tyrannical Zeus and doomed to suffer the pain of the god’s liver-eating bird. But for Milton, this would mean making God the author of evil and rendering moot a requirement of tragic error on Samson’s part, leaving only the heroic suffering that Aeschylus had made the essence of tragedy. For Parker, there remains only the structural pattern of Oedipus Coloneus, where the blind and suffering old man likewise receives a series of visitors: Theseus, the king of Athens; Creon, his cousin-uncle who replaced him as king of Thebes; and Polynices, the son who pays a visit to his father in naked self-interest more than in any real sympathy (168). But Sophocles’s Chorus, who guard the sacred grove at Colonus, is averse at first to granting him sanctuary. Its members are just as abusive as they are horrified on learning that he is the infamous parricide and husband of his mother. Contrary to the Chorus of Milton’s Samson Agonistes, this Chorus is not predisposed to pity the tragic hero; yet in the end, it is they who will be changed by their “Discovery” of a tragic hero who is redeemed at last by his suffering. More problematic still, Sophocles’s play ends in the apotheosis of the tragic hero, his ­metamorphosis as the guardian spirit of the Athenian polis. So, there 61 Parker, Milton’s Debt, 90. Parker concludes that Milton’s chief debt overall was to Sophocles, not to Euripides (248–9). Parker was not aware, of course, of an analogue in English history for the structure of Milton’s “dramatic poem.” And Milton obviously ­continued to value the formal similarities between the sequence of visitors in Aeschylus and Euripides, while filling his form with a notably different content and “tragic effect.” 62 Mastronarde more authoritatively reports that, of the thousand or so plays performed at the Great Dionysia in Athens in the fifth century, “we have in complete form only thirty-one tragedies written by only three or four poets” (Art, 26).

33093_Williams.indd 388

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 389

is neither a tragic paradox nor an ambiguous catastrophe at the end, leaving Milton’s dramatic poem closer, at least in the outcome of its plot, to what we find in Euripides63 (as well as in Lilburne’s history), as ­compared with Sophocles. There was nothing, of course, to prevent Milton from borrowing an existing form or structure and emptying it to refill it with a new content. And this appears to be what he did, whether deriving his content from the Book of Judges, from Euripides, or even from recent English ­history. There remains, however, one final, and likely incontrovertible, point of contact with the form of Oedipus Coloneus. The three visitors who come to Oedipus all tempt him, for various reasons, to abandon the sanctuary at Colonus and accompany the visitor to Athens, if not to Thebes. But to do so would abort the promise of blessings that were prophesied to accrue to Athens from Oedipus’s death in the sacred grove. And to his credit, the hero for once keeps faith with the sacred oracle, spurning each of his tempters to die by a peaceful translation into glory, a moral climax and a fate that are closer to the dénouement of Paradise Regain’d than to Samson Agonistes. Because of the glorious ending that the Chorus and Manoa have imagined for Samson, however, readers might be tempted by Parker to impose a Sophoclean plot of glorious redemption onto Milton’s Euripidean ending. For Samson does refuse the scheming of his father to appeal “To some Philistian Lords, with whom to treat / About thy ransom” (482-3), piteously answering: “Spare that proposal, Father, spare the trouble / Of that sollicitation; let me here, / As I deserve, pay on my punishment” (487–9). Samson is most unsparing of himself, although his fear at this point is evidently his loss of reputation, and thus of his last hope of immortal fame. As his father departs, despite his son’s plea, still looking for a way to alleviate his sufferings, Samson sinks ever deeper into dark despair: So much I feel my genial spirits droop, My hopes all flat, nature within me seems

63 Wittreich, Shifting, 33–4, 215, has very ably led a critical revolt against Parker’s view of Sophocles’s Oedipus Coloneus as the primary influence on Samson Agonistes, recalling that “Thomas Newton once remarked of this now favourite yoking of” Oedipus Coloneus with Samson Agonistes that “there is scarcely a single thought the same in the two pieces” (199). See also Wittreich’s “Thought Colliding,” 109; and his Shifting Contexts, 98–131.

33093_Williams.indd 389

2022-09-01 16:54

390

The Communion of the Book

In all her functions weary of her self; My race of glory run, and race of shame, And I shall shortly be with them that rest. (594–8)

It is more than acedia that causes him to sink into “swounings of despair, / And sense of Heav’ns desertion” (631–2). Indeed, he is in the grip of a powerful death wish.64 Dalila, the second “Sophoclean” visitor to offer Samson respite from his sufferings, is thus reduced to making “womans frailty” (783) her best tool to mollify his anger. But her gentle pleading with him to “Be not unlike all others, not austere / As thou art strong, inflexible as steel” (815–16), has the reverse of its intended effect by restoring him to the cherished image of himself as a man who “in strength all mortals dost exceed” (817). Her plea of weakness also leaves him with a gilt-wrapped opportunity to repeat the traditional sententiae about weakness as moral failure: “[W]eakness is thy excuse, / And I believe it, weakness to resist / Philistian gold” (829–31). As Lynne Greenberg interjects, from the perspective of contemporary English law, “Samson explicitly constructs Dalila as a petty traitor,” and “threatens to punish Dalila for her alleged treason” with the same punishment that “men, not women, faced for treason (appropriate, perhaps, considering [her] perceived gender inversion”), in being torn apart “‘joint by joint’ (953)” (204–5). But Dalila’s subversion of the “natural” hierarchy and her “gender rebellion,” as Greenberg shrewdly concludes, are not “contained, but instead are permitted to survive unchecked” (207), assuming that Dalila is not seated under the roof of the theatre that Samson brings crashing down. While Samson prosecutes his moral case against his wife with a memorable aphorism that “All wickedness is weakness” (834), he acts as if the reverse were true – All weakness is wickedness – surely a fatal flaw in the epic warrior, since his undying fame depends on his victorious strength. Only this time, in a stern effort to avoid any hint of weakness in her presence, Samson tries to undo the “effeminacy” that his marriage has “produced” in him. Such, at least, is the apparent motive of the savage epithet he uses to brand her as a “Hyaena” (748), the only creature ­supposedly able to change its sex, and thus typical of the sort of gender

64 Wood, Exiled, concludes that “[t]he continuing death-wish is one of a number of markers that show the absence of progress or growth in Samson’s nature” (143).

33093_Williams.indd 390

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 391

inversion that he seems to fear in himself.65 “Out, out Hyaena!” he snarls in his first words to her, as if to undo a “fatal” sex-change wrought in him by contagion of the woman’s “weakness.” All weakness, it bears repeating of the “epic” Samson’s misreading of his predicament, is wickedness. For the warrior, weakness only ever leads to death. Still, Dalila suffers with admirable patience his endless taunts and insults, renewing her appeals to “fetch thee / From forth this loathsom prison-house, to abide / With me, where my redoubl’d love and care / With nursing diligence, to me glad office” (921–4). And for a moment, Samson seems genuinely moved by her evident concern for him, before he retreats into renewed hostility and accusation: “No, no, of my condition take no care; / It fits not; thou and I long since are twain” (928–9). Samson is determined, however, to have the last word in their quarrel by rendering her more infamous than any of her sex. Stung, Dalila defends herself by imagining her future place “among the famousest / Of Women” in her own country, “sung at solemn festivals, / Living and dead recorded” (982–4). As a moral relativist, she would justify her actions by “the piety / Which to my countrey I was judg’d to have shewn. / At this who ever envies or repines / I leave him to his lot, and like my own” (993–6).66 She then comes to resemble him in his epic obsession with fame, much as she had previously resembled him in her pained desire to “expiate” her crime of betrayal, assuring him at first sight that “My penance hath not slack’n’d, though my pardon / No way assur’d” (736, 738–9). Samson, it seems, is not the only one seeking to “pay on my punishment; / And expiate, if possible, my crime” (489–90), hoping to transform a tragic error into heroic victory. But when the Chorus announces, “She’s gone, a manifest Serpent by her sting / Discover’d in the end” (997–8), Samson sinks only further into bottomless despair and self-hatred: “So let her go, God sent her to debase me, / And aggravate my folly who committed / To such a viper his most sacred trust / Of secresie, my safety, and my life” ­(999–1002). His sole remaining hope, it seems, is his passing mention of God’s continued involvement in the action, if only to further “debase” 65 Greenberg, “Dalila’s ‘feminine assaults,’” 199. 66 Sypniewski and MacMaster, “Double Motivation,” identify several parallels between Medea and Dalila as moral relativists, including their marginal positions as foreign wives without native-born rights, facing the barbarous behaviour of a “civilized” Greek and “godly” Hebrew husband, each of whom repudiates his spouse with self-serving logic and a fierce gender bias endemic to his culture (150–2).

33093_Williams.indd 391

2022-09-01 16:54

392

The Communion of the Book

his mighty champion. Otherwise, Samson is sunk, and sinking further, in the quicksand of a baseless trust in fame, pulled down by his lost promise of “epic” triumph. Samson’s response to his third visitor, the giant Harapha, is more ambiguous still, since the incident provides him with another disturbing mirror image of himself. He had already remarked in his war of words with his father, how “like a petty God / I walk’d about admir’d of all and dreaded / On hostile ground, none daring my affront” (529–31).67 Now he avoids such knowledge of himself, mocking instead the miles gloriosus for being exactly like that “petty God” he had once been himself: “Boast not of what thou wouldst have done,” he urges, “but do / What then thou would’st, thou seest it in thy hand” (1104–5). And he slips back further into his old heroic mode, boasting that “I only with an Oak’n staff will meet thee, / And raise such out-cries on thy clatter’d Iron,” that “Thou oft shalt wish thy self at Gath to boast / Again in safety what thou wouldst have done / To Samson, but shall never see Gath more” (1123–4, 1127–9). Such flyting, or verbal combat of the warrior of oral epic, only relaxes its terrible grip on him when Harapha offers a telling rebuke. “Presume not on thy God” (1156), the giant says, awakening a last vestige of humility in the berserker of Israel. To which God’s “champion” responds in one of his more affecting speeches in the poem: All these indignities, for such they are From thine, these evils I deserve and more, Acknowledge them from God inflicted on me Justly, yet despair not of his final pardon Whose ear is ever open; and his eye Gracious to re-admit the suppliant.68 (1168–73)

It is a moment of such humility, and such truly chastened wrath, that it sounds as if Samson might yet find grace. Except that he immediately returns to “epic” form, stoutly declaring, “In confidence whereof I once

67 Wittreich, Interpreting, sees “the blustering Harapha” as “not so much a foil to” the hero “as a revelation” to the reader of “an equally blustering Samson who has more than a fair share of Goliath in him” (310). 68 The term is likely meant to recall Euripides’s The Suppliant Women, with its overtones of pity for the bereaved and piety toward the gods in properly honouring the dead.

33093_Williams.indd 392

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 393

again / Defie thee to the trial of mortal fight, / By combat to decide whose god is God, / Thine or whom I with Israel’s Sons adore” (1174–7). For God, he assumes in his bull-headed way, would cease to be God if his mighty “champion” failed to beat the truth of God into this heathen idol worshipper. Samson, in other words, is a deeply unstable figure, often the contradiction of himself to an extent that he often seems, like Euripides’s Heracles (or the historical Lilburne) to be two distinct characters. He invites us, as it were, to join him on one side or the other of a line in literary criticism that is policed by a “regenerationist” or else a “­revisionist” persuasion,69 by those who find Samson to be reborn into God’s grace, or those who see him as self-deceived, a barbarian (Dr Johnson), if not a modern terrorist (John Carey). In keeping with Oedipus at Colonus (or even Lilburne at Mount Orgueil), Samson has refused the temptation of his first two visitors to act in his self-interest. But the third time, he gives way to the temptation to fight, to be an “epic” warrior who triumphs over his giant foe. But Harapha has come only to put Samson in his place: “With thee a Man condemn’d,” he quavers, “a Slave enrol’d, … / To fight with thee no man of arms will deign” ­(1224, 1226). So, Samson does “quit himself like Samson,” raging: “Cam’st thou for this, vain boaster, to survey me, / To descant on my strength, and give thy verdit? / Come nearer, part not hence so slight inform’d; / But take good heed my hand survey not thee” ­(1227–30). Three times Samson resists the intent of his visitors; and three times he ends in despair, unwittingly edging toward the catastrophe that begins to shadow him: But come what will, my deadliest foe will prove My speediest friend, by death to rid me hence, The worst that he can give, to me the best. Yet so it may fall out, because thir end Is hate, not help to me, it may with mine Draw thir own ruin who attempt the deed. (1262–7)

It is our clearest indication to date that, when he finally insists, “I begin to feel / Some rouzing motions in me” (1381–2), his “rouzing motions”

69 See notes 1–2 of this chapter.

33093_Williams.indd 393

2022-09-01 16:54

394

The Communion of the Book

are literally repetitive.70 He had married on an impulse, and, in the episode with Harapha, he had again “quit himself like Samson,” blustering and bullying, quite as unreformed and unregenerate as ever. In between, there arrives a fourth visitor, the Public Officer whom the hero likewise refuses thrice, as if to reprise his stiff response to all three visitors he had just rejected. At first, he tells the Officer that “Our Law forbids at thir Religious Rites / My presence; for that cause I c­ annot come” (1320–1). It is a decision based on his “reading” of the Law, the first three commandments of the Decalogue that God gave in writing to Moses: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them” (av, Exodus 20:3–5a).71 As “an Ebrew,” and as a servant of the “living God” whose written Word he is bound to obey, Samson must not bow down to Dagon, the fish-tailed72 deity, much less “serve” any god from “the water under the earth,” as Dagon is clearly represented by his graven image. As a Judge of Israel, Samson needs to be both ­authoritative and observant in his reading of the situation: “for that cause I cannot come.” On his second rebuff, Samson is firmer still, refusing to allow the foe to “make a game of my calamities … / Return the way thou cam’st, I will not come” (1331–2). Only now, there is a disturbing slippage from God’s written Law to his own reputation, as mandated by the traditions of oral epic. On his third refusal, Samson even pronounces the performance of feats of strength “before thir god” as “The worst of all indignities, yet on me / Joyn’d with extream contempt,” before concluding, “I will not come” (1340–2). In each refusal, however, he seems increasingly concerned with himself. And once again, the outcome is ambiguous: does he wish to defend God’s honour or his own? Finally, the fourth time, as the Officer returns, all mention of the Law 70 Indeed, Sypniewski and MacMaster, “Double Motivation,” conclude: “Following the lead of Euripides, Milton allows the whole tragedy to unfold from a marriage that is questionable as to its origin in either ‘divine impulsion’ or carnal desire” (155). 71 Knoppers notes of this line 1320 in her edition of the poem that “the Second Commandment forbids idol worship: Exod. 20: 4–5” (155), although the line’s implied reference to the First as well as the Third Commandment more largely points to questions about divine and heroic honour. 72 See Knopper’s note to line 13 in her edition of the poem (144).

33093_Williams.indd 394

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 395

disappears, as if stone were suddenly turned to running water. More ambiguously still, he agrees to go peaceably, although his renewed riddling grows even more abstruse: “Masters commands come with a power resistless / To such as owe them absolute subjection; / And for a life who will not change his purpose?” (1404–6). As with Dalila, “the fourth time … mustring all her wiles,” “to make me Traytor to my self” (402, 401), his performance appears to suggest that the Public Officer will be a “fourth-time” lucky, even as the hero’s riddling “secret” of old seems to grow more menacing. Instead of looking to Greek tragedy for the structure of the drama, William Kerrigan locates it in the “three” of folkloric structure, as in thrice Dalila tempted him, failing each time to extract Samson’s secret. In Kerrigan’s psychoanalytic reading of the poem, “we find the structure of the drama … in Samson’s failed temptation at the hands of Dalila.”73 While he has been visited by, he has also been able to reject his three ­previous visitors and their temptations. On the fourth occasion that a visitor comes to him, he again refuses thrice, but then suddenly gives way, as if on impulse or “some rouzing motion.” As Kerrigan sees it, “The genetic ancestor of the godly motions that rouse Samson freely to break the law was ‘the intimate impulse’ that drew him to the woman of Timna – urged him with divine sanction, in other words, to lose his viriginity” (227). To a Freudian, of course, the “rouzing motions” and “intimate impulse” could only proceed from a single source: the natural impulse of the life-giving sexuality of men and women. Yet the problem in this instance is that such “rouzing motions” lead not to procreation, but rather to thousands of deaths, Samson’s corpse crushed among the rest. This is hardly the normative gateway to adult maturity, and nothing like a supposed “entrance to the sexual life.” In any event, how many times can one lose one’s virginity? Samson’s “rouzing motions” have always been a part of his impulsive life. Neither should his penchant for riddling be called normative, unless his true “secret” is to equate sex with death.

73 Kerrigan, “Irrational,” 226.

33093_Williams.indd 395

2022-09-01 16:54

396

The Communion of the Book

C o l l at i n g E u r i p i d e s ’ s H e r ac l e s with Samson: Barbarity and Civility So how do we decide what Milton meant by Samson’s riddling and his “rouzing motions” that work jointly to overthrow his understanding of the Law? Holly Sypniewski and Anne MacMaster suggest that “[t]hrough Manoa and the Chorus, Milton questions Samson’s sense that he is divinely led to marry Dalila, thus laying the groundwork for uncertainty about Samson’s motives at the end of the play” (155). They link such radical uncertainty to similar critiques made by Euripides and Milton of the arrogance of their fellow citizens at moments of civic crisis: “While Euripides attacks Athenian arrogance on the eve of the Peloponnesian War, Milton, with the hindsight of the Restoration, attacks republican certainty about God’s role in the English Civil Wars” (146). Nicholas McDowell plausibly locates any uncertainty about providential inspiration much earlier in Milton’s career, as early as the prose argument of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), where a “Stoic analysis of tyrannicide as a rational and moral action undertaken out of civic responsibility and human fellowship” proves to be more reasonable “than the biblical examples of king-killers like Jehu and Ehud, distinguished by their extraordinary inspiration from God” (224). McDowell demonstrates that Milton had, by 1649, begun to move away from this ambiguous and rather dangerous notion of “extraordinary inspiration from God.” And he “would return to treat powerfully these issues in Samson Agonistes, for which the Euripidean and Senecan Hercules is one of the obvious models and where the great crux is whether Samson’s suicidal violence is legitimated by extraordinary divine dispensation” (224). Arguing from the tradition of humanist commentary, Hannah Crawforth adds that, because “Milton takes his template for writing politically engaged drama directly from reading Euripides via the lens of Stiblinus’ commentaries,” we should be mindful how “the prefatory arguments to Euripides’ tragedies repeatedly emphasize the most political aspects of the drama, and insist upon a connection between the events depicted onstage and those of the dramatist’s contemporary society” (243, 242). While she does not question Samson’s inspiration for his suicidal act of political sacrifice in her treatment of the ­commentary tradition, she does say that “Stiblinus emphasizes Euripides’ exploration of the necessity of abolishing tyranny in order

33093_Williams.indd 396

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 397

to establish good government” (243). She thus implicitly justifies revolutionary violence in a state of tyranny, whether it be that of Israel under Philistian rule, or of Restoration Dissenters subjected to the Clarendon Code. The long shadow cast by Euripides’s Heracles over the ending of Samson Agonistes nonetheless deepens our reasonable doubt about the legitimacy of Samson’s final act. For Samson, as Stella Revard points out, is just as ambiguous as Heracles appears to be as a rational political actor. In paradoxical fashion, the “tyrant killer” Samson is also “the tragic Samson, who, like the Hercules of Euripides, Sophocles, and Seneca, is a political leader who has been politically disabled” (236). Much as Heracles’s moral pollution has disqualified him for leadership in Athens, Samson’s moral doubleness disqualifies him as the “Deliverer” of Israel. Maggie Kilgour similarly observes: “Like those of Hercules and Oedipus … Samson’s last action and death are ambiguous.” Here is the key question that demands a clear answer: “Is the pulling down of the temple proof of his recovery of his powers and his fulfillment of God’s plan, an admirable act that implicitly urges the English to future republican action? Or does Milton mean us to denounce Samson’s last bloody effort as a return to barbarism?” (99). The answer Kilgour favours is implicit in the biblical Israelites’ reluctance to follow Samson’s lead. In taking over the story of the promised deliverer, Milton could hardly change the ending of the story; the most he could hope to do was to reframe and thereby to reinterpret it. As Kilgour reads it, Milton’s dramatic ending recontextualizes the typology of the “great Deliverer” in terms of Euripides’s Heracles, where the tyrant slayer and culture bearer is ­suddenly struck by divine madness. Instant inspiration of this sort is thus inseperable from Heracles’s tragic error. At the outset of Euripides’s drama, Amphitryon, the father of Heracles, laments that his son has not returned from Hades where he went on a mission “to civilize the world.”74 In consequence, Amphitryon, his daughter-in-law Megara, and Heracles’s three young sons are forced to take refuge at the altar of Zeus in Thebes, since, as Amphitryon says, “this land’s new tyrant, Lycus, plans to kill / the sons and wife of Heracles – and me” (38–9). Lycus, who had “attacked our city, sick with civil war,” and had “murdered Creon, and usurped his throne” (33–4),

74 Euripides, Heracles, trans. Arrowsmith. Euripides III, 18, l. 20.

33093_Williams.indd 397

2022-09-01 16:54

398

The Communion of the Book

clearly and unambiguously rules by the sword. Even Lycus admits, “I am well aware / that I killed Creon, the father of this woman, / and only on this basis rule this land” (166–7). Even so, Lycus commands: “Burn them all alive / until they learn the dead man rules no more; / I, and I alone, am the power here” (244–6). But at that instant the tyrant slayer returns: “O daylight returning” (531), Amphitryon ironically exclaims at Heracles’s return. While the culture bringer will mete out justice and begin to restore order, the goddess Hera afflicts him with a sudden delusion that his wife and children are allied to his enemy. In destroying them, Heracles thus pollutes himself and is effectively disabled from leadership in the polis. Or, as Kilgour applies this lesson to Samson and his tragedy, “Milton has chosen a conflict that suggests not the difference between good and evil but their similarity. At the very moment in the poem that Milton represents the separation of good from evil, he recalls a hero who confuses the two” (90). Tragic irony of this sort is typical of Euripides, although it is also used in Heracles to explore the paradox of power, since the power we find in Heracles is both civilizing and lawless, both restorative and destructive. After the frenzy of his killings, Heracles sinks into a stupor and must be firmly bound by his friends and father to spare him, on waking, from suicidal rage, since the depth of his grief, when he comes to his senses, is literally unimaginable. But the Athenian king Theseus, previously freed on Heracles’s descent into Hades, arrives just in time to save him from self-harm. And even then, Amphitryon still urges Heracles to “tame that lion of your rage / that roars you on to death, / yoking grief to grief” (1211–13). The kindly Theseus is only able, after much exhorting, to persuade Heracles to accept permanent exile in Athens, where “I shall purify your hands of blood, / give you a home and a share of my wealth” (1324–5).75 To which Heracles responds in a speech that offers an unequivocal and illuminating gloss on Samson’s “rouzing motions,” since it shows that even the greatest of the Greek heroes has finally learned to resist divine promptings, such as those by which Samson’s barbarous act is justified by critics:

75 For Revard, this might well be the crucial achievement of Euripides’s tragic hero: “Heracles in restoring Theseus to his city also restores democratic institutions to Athens, for, as Eurpides tells us in this and other plays in which Theseus appears, he is a ruler who defends the democratic constitution of that city” (221).

33093_Williams.indd 398

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 399

Ah, all this has no bearing on my grief; but I do not believe the gods commit adultery, or bind each other in chains. I never did believe it; I never shall; nor that one god is tyrant of the rest. If god is truly god, he is perfect, lacking nothing. Those are poets’ wretched lies. (1340–6)

Readers of Milton’s poem also need to beware of the “wretched lies” that would turn Samson into an “epic” hero and “deliverer” of his people. Indeed, the generic misreading of “A life Heroic” is still the bane of a criticsm that ignores Milton’s claim to rival “the three Tragic Poets unequall’d yet by any” (Complete Works 2:68; emphasis added). Laying the ground for Socrates’s critique of the intrinsic immorality of Greek religion, Heracles can still serve Milton two millennia later as an unambiguous model of a tyrant killer and culture bearer who fails to learn how to reject “divine” impulse, and thereby to surmount the ambiguity of his own power. And it matters greatly that Heracles does finally forsake the city of Thebes, the “country of Cadmus” (217), sower of the dragon’s teeth and bringer of civil war, for the more civilized climes of Athens, a polis renowned for stability and justice in what is at least a limited form of democracy.

The Dragon’s Teeth of the English Civil Wars On the page, Samson’s final act takes place in the shadow of Heracles’s terrifying act, leaving a reader to “awaken” to what Samson has ­apparently failed to learn from his own agon – what it means to refuse Theban civil war and look to Athens and its civil politics. For the “divine will” encountered on this multilingual page of “Greek” tragedy is essentially different from the divine will encountered on a tribal, chauvinistic stage. What Mohamed calls the “subject formation” of the “­revolutionary” is unlikely to take place in the mind of Samson, let alone that of any theatregoer who needs to hold simultaneously in mind these ­differing times and contrapuntal source texts. Samson requires a reflective, indexical reader called on by the work to identify its cruces and textual ­difficulties in the manner of a classical philologist. Through the act of reading, readers can then be called on to traverse the road from Thebes

33093_Williams.indd 399

2022-09-01 16:54

400

The Communion of the Book

(or Philistia) to Athens (or New Jerusalem), to forsake Cadmus’s ­warring city for the liberties and responsibilities of Theseus’s city. On this head, Mark Kelley presents important historical evidence that “[t]he myth of Cadmus and Thebes, the sowing of the dragon’s teeth and the attendant thematics of internecine and fratricidal division, was, like the biblical Judges narrative and the Samson story in particular, used to express contending ideologies during the English Civil War and interregnum years” (137). And Milton, as Kelley remarks, was one of those deeply knowledgeable contenders who had already portrayed “books” in such terms, though in opposition to the usual concerns about the internecine dangers of free speech. Famously, Milton described books in Areopagitica as being as “lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men” (138).76 However, books for Milton were nothing that even remotely resembled a source of civil war, much less of religious schism or fratricidal division; rather, they offered a neutral space, or forum, for public debate, or better, for a present if also inward theatre of the mind where rational debate and logical resolution are brought together in order to subdue the forces of irrational division and brute violence.77 Of similar pertinence is evidence presented by Kelley to suggest that Leveller writers such as Katherine Chidley (140–1), William Walwyn (141–2), and John Lilburne were all proponents of “a powerful rhetoric of nonviolence, a rejection of revenge and the martial practice of lex talonis” (141) to counter “Theban” royalists in their bitter disputes over religious toleration and liberty of conscience. Kelley opines that “perhaps the most eloquent and forceful statement on nonretaliative practice comes from John Lilburne, who in The Legall [sic] Fundamentall Liberties of the People of England (1649) details his torments and his enlightened, Christlike reaction to torture” (142). What Kelley misses, however, is the fact that Lilburne was widely thought to be the most quarrelsome man in England, “so turbulent,” as Lilburne comically admitted as he combatted yet once more the charge of “Turbulency of Spirit,” “that if there were none in the world but John Lilburne, rather then want one

76 Kelley quotes from Areopagitica, cpw 2:492. 77 It is this quality of “inwardness” that cultural anthropologist Joseph Henrich identifies as one of the hallmarks of early modern psychology and Western identity.

33093_Williams.indd 400

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 401

to strive withal, forsooth, John would certainly quarrel with Lilburne.”78 Furthermore, Kelley does not seem to realize that Lilburne’s “rhetoric of nonviolence” is more like a cunning attempt to turn religious ­martyrdom into political theatre, which can just as easily turn into its opposite, as when he plays the role of an English “Sampson.”79 If Lilburne is an early modern equivalent of the Hebrew Samson and a Greek Heracles in his “fractured” consciousness or dissociative identity disorder, he is also a subject of genuine pity and fear in the tragic effect of Milton’s “dramatic poem.” Pity is aroused by the spectre of tragic waste in a man yearning to be the deliverer of his nation, who nonetheless fails because of an impulsive, tragic error he makes, not once, but repeatedly. In Samson’s case, the reader’s pity is further aroused by a genuine humility and residual goodness that he exhibits in admitting to Harapha that “these evils I deserve and more, / Acknowledge them from God inflicted on me / Justly” (1169–71). He even appears for a moment to be close to spiritual restoration in his confession of faith, where he “despair[s] not of his final pardon / Whose ear is ever open; and his eye / Gracious to re-admit the suppliant” (1171–3). Milton’s choice of the word “suppliant” directly recalls Euripides’s The Suppliants,80 and its famous encomium for Athens as a polis humanely accepting of foreigners and affording protection for the weak and bereaved, each of these a cherished democratic ideal. Apparently, Samson has not yet decided, as he begins “to feel some rouzing motions in me,” whether he will pull down the Theatre of Dagon or not: “The last of me or no I cannot warrant” (1426), he insists on leaving the stage; and his declaration does not seem to be equivocal. Indeed, just before the catastrophe, as the Messenger recalls Samson’s final act, “with head a while enclin’d, / And eyes fast fixt he stood, as one who pray’d, / Or some great matter in his mind revolv’d” (1626–8)

78 This delightful bit of self-mockery, which Lilburne adapted from a jest of Marchamont Nedham in his newsbook, appears in The Just Defence of John Lilburn, Against such as charge him with Turbulency of Spirit (25 August 1653), 2. 79 See examples in my chapters 5 and 6: 278–9, 294, 349–50. 80 In The Suppliant Women, trans. Jones, Eurpides III, King Theseus is persuaded by his mother to honour the request of the suppliant women of Argos to help retrieve their dead and give them proper burial: “Child,” says Aethra to her regal son, “won’t you go to help / the dead, and these poor women in their need? / It is a just campaign” (ll. 326–8). Samson the Suppliant, however, quickly turns his back on pity for the bereaved as well as piety toward the dead, reverting to an impious and pitiless chauvinism.

33093_Williams.indd 401

2022-09-01 16:54

402

The Communion of the Book

[1636–8]. His hesitation is telling, because Samson will not pray aloud, as he does in Judges 16:28, to be “avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes”; nor do we hear him proclaim, as he does in Judges 16:30, “Let me die with the Philistines.” Rather, he appears, like the hapless John Lilburne, to be acting on a rash impulse, after barely a moment of deliberation, and so abandoning any sense of obligation to the Law in favour of imposing his will – “of my own accord” – (1633) [1643] on his enemies. In so doing, he brings down the house on his own as well as on the nation’s political tragedy, leaving us to make whatever sense we can of events. Here, in brief, is the historical tragedy of the Leveller champion of the English people, a potential hero and great-souled revolutionary whose sudden rages and impulsive actions ended in the destruction of all his political hopes, and left audiences, then as now, to feel pity and fear for a man all too much like ourselves.

C o l l at i n g C h o r i c F u n c t i o n s in Euripidean and Miltonic Drama Greek drama originated in the religious ritual of choral song and dance.81 It is fair to add, with Renaud Gagné and Marianne Govers Hopman, that the Chorus of Aeschylus or Sophocles, the earliest ­tragedians of the classical Attic stage, “stands as a collective impersonated by Athenian citizens and thus entertains a special relation with the Athenian audience.”82 While a further claim is debatable that “the chorus stands as a representative of the city on stage” (25), no one questions the idea that the space of the stage in the fifth-century bce Theatre of Dionysus played a mediatory role. The Chorus danced and sang and announced character entrances and exits on a square, or ­possibly hexagonal, dance floor between the audience and the narrow stage in front of the skênê, the one-storey wooden building where actors made entrances and exits.83 The Chorus as a whole also commented on the action from the dance floor for the sake of the audience, although originally, only the Chorus Leader was permitted to engage in dialogue with the character, or later, multiple characters, on that strip of stage between the skênê and the dance floor, “the orchestra, (orchestra, 81 Montgomery, “Some Later Uses,” 148. 82 Gagné and Hopman, “Introduction,” Choral Mediations, 25. 83 “How the Plays Were Originally Staged,” Euripides V, 9.

33093_Williams.indd 402

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 403

‘dancing place’).”84 Spatially, temporally, and verbally, the Chorus ­mediated between an audience of Athenian citizens and professional actors who impersonated the fiction. Or, as Mastronarde describes it, “The chorus represents an audience within the play and is an intermediary between actors and theatrical audience. This intermediary status is spatial, temporal, and communicative” (Art, 93). But if the Chorus represented the polis to itself, it also functioned as an authorized ­representative from antiquity of the power and dignity of oral culture. In this sense, the mode of classical drama was always already hybrid – both oral and scripted. As the official representative of present-day citizens to fictive actors in a mythic past, the Chorus then had to mediate between differing temporalities and realities. But their mediate position as a group speaking simultaneously to actors and audiences alike raises troubling political questions for twentieth-century French classical scholar Jean-Paul Vernant: “Working with an idea of tragedy as the staging of the tensions and limitations of the democratic ideal, Vernant argued that the contrast between the collective chorus and the individual actors reflects on democratic anxieties about the respective roles of the group and the individual.”85 At the very least, “scripted” individuals in a theatrical system of representation were set in dramatic tension with an “oral” community. Moreover, “[t]he notion of a special connection between chorus and polis” gains further support from “the fact that the choruses of Athenian drama were made of non-professional citizens.”86 In terms of the earlier dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles, we could then view the Chorus, as fifth-century Athenians surely did, as the ­standard-bearers of the “nomoi and ethea,” the “custom-laws and folk-ways”

84 Mastronarde, The Art of Euripides, 94. 85 Gagné and Hopman, “Introduction,” 25. The editors point out that “the Vernant model” has since been “challenged by John Gould and others” who have “stressed that the chorus speaks in non-Attic dialect and often impersonates marginal figures such as women or slaves. Subsequently, Gould insisted that the dramatic chorus be analyzed primarily in terms of its “dramatic identity,” since it introduces “into the fiction a particular voice, that of collective wisdom, that contextualizes the tragic action performed by the actors” (26). Recent historicist criticism suggests, however, that “[f]rom early on, tragedy draws on, appropriates, and competes with older genres of poetry and performance that are the shared property of many Greek communities, so that the playwrights were probably conscious of a wider intellectual and cultural horizon than that which is specific to the Athenian democracy” (Mastronarde, Art, 17). 86 Gagné and Hopman, Choral Mediations, 26.

33093_Williams.indd 403

2022-09-01 16:54

404

The Communion of the Book

long memorialized in archaic Greece by the oral epics of Homer.87 “Gnomic utterances” in archaic Greek drama were evidently meant, as Donald J. Mastronarde suggests, to “invite from the audience renewed assent to inherited, shared wisdom. They demonstrate the acceptance of traditional values by the chorus itself” (91). More broadly, “the horizontal relationship of the performers with the audience of human onlookers is” also “in some sense a selection that presents the community to itself, and thus speaks with authority because it articulates shared values” (90).88 Overall, we could best think of the Chorus of Aeschylus and of Sophocles as a lasting, and thus inherently conservative, representative of traditional oral culture.89 Such is not the case for Euripides, however, whose “chorus,” Mastronarde observes, “shares in creating the instability of perspective and interpretation that is fostered by many aspects of Euripides’ art” (88–9). Although Euripides’s “choral technique lies within the same continuum as that of Aeschylus and Sophocles,” there are other “factors that prevent a facile identification of the impersonated group in the orchestra with the community of citizens” (89, 98). Firstly, “the ­impersonation by the chorus of a group of human characters from an identified time and place” differs “from the actual time and place of the spectators” (98). Secondly, “the language and meter of the chorus are more remote from the idiom of the audience and of civic discourse than are the language and meter of the characters, and this may be taken as an indication of the otherness of the chorus” (98–9). And finally, and most importantly, “the audience is, in most respects, in a position of superior knowledge” about the action taking place in the mythic past, with greater understanding than any traditional Chorus normally “privileged as a repository of collective memory of the past” (99). For example, in the sort of tragedy that opens with a “prologue god,” the goddess Aphrodite begins Hippolytus by telling the audience what a Chorus of household women will soon fail to grasp in their series of bemused questions posed to the love-struck Phaedra: “Is she ‘possessd 87 Havelock, Preface to Plato, 62–3. For a contrasting view of the displacement of oral by written epic, see “Scripts of Empire: Remembering Virgil in Barometer Rising,” in my Media, Memory, 53–71. 88 Similarly, “it is possible to claim,” Mastronarde maintains, “that all mythic narrative in archaic Greek poetry had an exemplary function” (92). 89 See my survey of scholarly debates on oral culture in “Oral Memory and the Anger of Achilleus,” Media, Memory, 53–65.

33093_Williams.indd 404

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 405

by a god?’ (141–4)? Yes, but not by any of those proposed by the chorus. Has some failure to worship Artemis correctly caused her wasting disease (145–50)? No, the failure is Hippolytus’ and not hers, and the offended goddess is Aphrodite and not Artemis” (Mastronarde, 108). Thus, the theatre audience already knows what the ancient folk of the Chorus try – and haplessly fail – to guess. But, As the play proceeds, the chorus’ knowledge, along with the nurse’s, comes to match that of Phaedra herself; all speak of the baneful power of Aphrodite, but no one realizes the motivation and true target of Aphrodite’s assault. The chorus’ ability to cite mythic exempla, to yearn for release or escape from human woes, or to agonize over the injustice of what they observe is unimpaired by its deficit in knowledge, but the deficit means that the audience is left to itself to try to makes [sic] full sense of the disaster. (108–9)

For such reasons, the Chorus of Euripidean tragedy often functions dramatically as an unreliable mouthpiece of the traditional oral culture they represent. Their lack of knowledge renders their oral culture inferior to that of a literate, “modern” audience. In Medea, to cite another example, the members of an all-female Chorus are supposed to be “singers and guardians of traditional wisdom,”90 and thus the moral guardians of the polis. And yet, by play’s end, its members stay unforgivably silent about Medea’s secret plan to be revenged on Jason by murdering their children. As critic Laura Swift says, these women have set “the ties of gender above those of community to the extent that the Chorus become complicit in the destruction of their own royal house” (144). Similarly, in Ion, a play with a Delphic setting, the Chorus – made up once again of women, if this time Athenian slave women who stay surprisingly loyal to the polis that has enslaved them – pervert that “loyalty … to reinforce their anger at the damage done” to their mistress’ “status as a mother and wife” (Swift, 153). The first sign in Ion of their dramatic unreliability is “the Chorus’ hatred of foreigners,” which “flies in the face of real-life Athenian ideology” (149).91 “Hence the Athenian audience is in a 90 Swift, “Conflicting Identities,” 142. 91 Contrary to Henrich’s argument in weirdest People, the “impersonal prosociality” that he finds in free cities of the late Middle Ages (290–301) had long preceded the Hanseatic League; it was taken as the moral norm in Athenian democracy.

33093_Williams.indd 405

2022-09-01 16:54

406

The Communion of the Book

position to observe how the Chorus’ defence of Athens misrepresents the values central to Athenian self-belief” (Swift, 149–50). And “the Chorus’ attitude to Athenian identity, and the ease with which it is turned to violence” becomes more troubling still “in a play which also foregrounds the advantages of being Athenian” (152). In Andromache, where the enslaved Trojan woman is pitied by the father of her h ­ usband’s slayer who sets her free with her child, we are misled by a Chorus that “display[s] a mixture of involvement and aloofness, authority and error.”92 Indeed, the Euripidean Chorus appears to speak for itself more often than it does for the author, much less the oral traditions of a community in ancient Athens.93 In effect, the choruses of Euripides stand for an outmoded culture.94 By the end of his career in the late fifth-century bce, Euripides had by and large made the Chorus an ironic instrument of religious piety, as he did in The Bacchae, first produced at the Festival of Dionysus in 405, the play for which he posthumously received the Festival prize.95 This development alone would be sufficient, I think, to justify the answer given by Mastronarde to Aristotle who had criticized Euripides for his failure to integrate the role of the Chorus with the dramatic development of his characters. In brief, Aristotle argues “that the chorus should ‘share in the struggle’ (sunagonizesthai) in the manner exemplified in Sophocles and not as in Euripides” (Mastronarde, 147), both to create organic unity in the form and to ensure emotional harmony between Chorus and protagonist. But, as Mastronarde infers, “It is as if Euripides decidedly does not want his chorus to be thought of as ‘one of the actors’” (150). If that is the case, however, how do we explain 92 Gagné and Hopman, Choral Mediations, 27. 93 Scholarship on classical Athenian drama over the last three decades has overturned “a long tradition of scholarship informed by Aristotle’s Poetics and shaped by the idea that  Athenian drama reached its full level when it broke away from its choral origins ­(Poet. 1449a10–15)” (Gagné and Hopman, 19). The current scholarly view “of the plays as largely choral events,” and the drama “as an extension of a choral dance” related to “a religious ritual” (19, 20, 21), was already implicit for most Renaissance readers of The Bacchae, though not explicitly related to social practice. While female Chorus members were ­devotees of the god who performed his secret rituals, they did so in terms of a fictional plot set in Thebes, not in the space of performance in Athens. The setting of many of Euripides’s tragedies in Thebes or other places alien to Athenian values is a primary device in creating ironic Choruses whose communal values are usually foreign. 94 This would explain why the Chorus disappears from the stage after Euripides’s death. See note 97 below. 95 Griffith and Most, “The Bacchae: Introduction,” Euripides V, 13.

33093_Williams.indd 406

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 407

the plot of The Bacchae? Here at least, if not elsewhere, Euripides makes the Chorus an active foe of the protagonist, and so, dramatically ­complicit in the catastrophe. As in Hippolytus, the prologue of the god Dionysus is dramatically shaped to create a degree of cognitive dissonance between the understanding of the Chorus and that of the theatrical audience. In the case of Hippolytus, Mastronarde points out, however, that [n]o other extant Euripidean divine prologue has the same degree of disturbing nakedness of divine power. Bacchae and Hippolytus are often paired as examples of the plot-type of god vs. scorner of god and are compared in assessing the problem of Euripides’ attitude toward the gods of mythology. Yet in Bacchae, Dionysus speaks with much less definiteness about the future course of the play, and his appearance has as much to do with letting the audience in on the secret of his disguise in human form as with making them superior in knowledge to the characters and chorus. (178–9)

The question is whether this divine reticence in the prologue is expressive of lassitude, permissiveness, or cunning on the part of Dionysus, or whether it is a tactical necessity to avoid offending audiences at the Great Dionysia. In other words, is the withholding of divine omniscience in the prologue the bad faith of the god or that of the dramaturge? The plot of The Bacchae portrays the establishment of the cult of Dionysus at Thebes after the abdication of King Cadmus in favour of his grandson Pentheus, who resists the god’s advent. There is already a distancing in time and space, as Mastronarde notes, between the stage representation of cultic origins and the “context of the performance,” with its “multiple evolved forms of Dionysiac choral dance as well as with” public events in Athens of “processions, sacrifices, and festivity” at the Great Dionysia (159). In the setting of Boeotian Thebes, there are also token signs on stage of official approval of the cult, chiefly from the prophet Teiresias, who says, “We do not trifle with divinity,” but as well from Cadmus, the retired king, who wears a “dappled ­fawnskin” and carries a “fennel wand” to accompany Teiresias as a ­bacchant on the wild mountain.96 Cadmus assures the prophet, “I do not scoff at gods” (199); and he cautions his hostile grandson Pentheus,

96 “The Bacchae”: Euripides V, trans. Arrowsmith, ll. 200, 249, 251.

33093_Williams.indd 407

2022-09-01 16:54

408

The Communion of the Book

“Even if this Dionysus is no god, / as you assert, persuade yourself that he is. / The falsehood is a noble one, for Semele [Pentheus’s aunt] will seem / to be the mother of a god, and this confers / no small distinction on our family” (333–7). But, as Mastronarde remarks, “The contrast of (divine) knowledge and (human) ignorance is fundamental” to this, as “to many tragedies” by Euripides (160). Thus, Pentheus dramatically signals the course of this plot of resistance to cultic founding by his furious reply: “Take your hands off me! Go worship your Bacchus, / but do not wipe your madness off on me” (343–4). This situation, as we shall see, is remarkably suggestive of the function of Milton’s Chorus in Samson Agonistes – the most artful use of a Chorus since its disappearance from the Greek stage upon the death of Euripides.97 And yet even this development is ironic, given how the Chorus of The Bacchae, for once in Euripides’s long career, is wholly traditional in its moral alignment with the public cult of Dionysus. At the same time, Euripides’s Chorus is visibly foreign to Athens, all garbed as “Asian bacchants”98 in foreign dress accompanied by Theban women who, though representative of their own community, represent Theban rather than Athenian values. Doubtless the Chorus is devout in its songs and words of worship, as devout as one would find today in a Southern Baptist church: “The deity, the son of Zeus,” they sing, “in feast, in festival, delights … To rich and poor he gives / the painless delight of wine” (416–17, 421–2). Stressing their untrammeled orthodoxy – “What the common people / believe and do, / I too believe and do” (430–2) – the Chorus springs in song to instant defence of their beleaguered god as soon as he is jailed by King Pentheus: “Descend from Olympus, lord! / Come, whirl your wand of gold / and quell the violence of this murderous man!” (553–5). When “his voice is heard from within, and this voice announces itself as that of the god himself (581),” it seems that “[a]t this moment, the audience understands the god and the Lydian stranger are one, but the chorus and Pentheus do not” (Mastronarde, 176). The latter part of this claim is rendered dubious, however, by what follows. In antiphonal response 97 Mastronarde prefaces his rebuttal to received explanations of this choral disappearance as follows: “Euripides’ choral technique has usually been viewed as one aspect of decline from the ‘true’ tragedy of Sophocles, and indeed as preparing the way for the ­embolimon [or ‘unrelated songs’ between acts of many fourth-century tragedies] by admitting a distinct looseness of connection and relevance in the content of his choral songs” (88). 98 Griffith and Most, “Introduction,” 13.

33093_Williams.indd 408

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 409

to Dionysus’s appeal from prison, “Ho Bacchae! Hear my cry!” (577), the Chorus sings, “O lord, lord Bromius! [another of the god’s many names], “Bromius, come to our holy company now!” (583–4). And the god sings in antiphonal response, “Let the earthquake come! Shatter the floor of the world!” To which they respond, “Look there, soon the palace of Pentheus will totter!” And it does, on the instant. To which they all cry out, “Dionysus is within. Adore him!” (585–7) Later, after Dionysus tricks Pentheus – another character who seems, rather like Euripides’s Heracles, to be “split,” – into cross-dressing as a woman to satisfy a morbid fascination with the same bacchantes he scorns, the Chorus celebrates the frightful power of the god’s ­impending victory: “What is wisdom? What gift of the gods / is held in honor like this: / to hold your hand victorious / over the heads of those you hate? / Honour is cherished forever” (877–81). The function of the Bacchic Chorus can now be summed up as the communal need to herald and uphold the ­religious “truth” of this totalitarian cult of Dionysus, without offering so much as a hint of criticism of their fellow cult member Agave as she moves toward the catastrophe. But neither do they show much sympathy for her in the end, as she casts aside her bloodied instruments of worship. Despite the absence of a visible god (such as Dionysus) on stage,99 the Chorus of Samson Agonistes performs a similar function to that of The Bacchae. From its arrival on the scene, Milton’s Chorus is portrayed as the adoring comforter of its persecuted champion: “O change beyond report, thought, or belief!” they murmur at first sight of Samson: “See how he lies at random, carelessly diffus’d, / With languish’t head unpropt, / As one past hope, abandon’d, / And by himself given over” (117–21). The political function of the Chorus is evidently to recall the hero’s former glory – to himself, as well as to the community – in order to restore him to the traditional version of the nation’s deliverer. “Matchless in might, / The glory late of Israel, now the grief” (178–9), the Chorus “sings” in its opening address to him. Indeed, its members are exactly what they profess to be, true “friends and neighbours,” who

99 Nor is there any sign of the divine presence in Samson Agonistes. See Stoll, “Milton Stages Cherbury,” who explores the significance of Samson’s “anxious sense of heaven’s desertion,” arguing that “the angel of Judges 13 represents what Samson’s disenchanted world lacks: the certainty that Samson is operating with the authority of divine will” (282).

33093_Williams.indd 409

2022-09-01 16:54

410

The Communion of the Book

have come “To visit or bewail thee, or if better, / Counsel or Consolation we may bring, / Salve to thy sores” (180, 182–4). On their first attempt at consolation, the members of Milton’s Chorus fully endorse, as do the Theban bacchantes, the hero’s diatribes against all who refuse to follow the “great Deliverer” out of bondage. In this instance, Samson can do little more than to rail at the failure of Judah, as much as any other “Tribe” (265), to join his private war of liberation. But after the Chorus recalls the shameful ingratitude of the Ephraimites to “Thir great Deliverer … / The matchless Gideon” (279–80), Samson quickly despairs of his mission, if not of “Gods propos’d deliverance” (292). And the Chorus is left struggling to defend its traditional oral wisdom: “Just are the ways of God, / And justifiable to Men” (293–4), it chants, before rehearsing a cartload of blatant contradictions, past or present, in each of its promised “Deliverers.” And so, the collective answer of the Chorus hardly improves on the traditional – or at least purported – credo of Tertullian, their Christian heir in the third century ce, who was supposed to have said, “I believe because it is absurd.”100 In compensatory fashion, the Chorus literally cry out, “Down Reason then, at least vain reasonings down” (322). For “Reason” in this instance remains helpless, much in the same way that oral “Tradition” shows itself to be impotent in both Heracles and Hippolytus. On their second attempt at consolation, the Chorus is left to deal with Samson’s despair at his father’s attempts to ransom him, even as the hero mourns what once he was and has since become: “I was his nursling once and choice delight, / His destin’d from the womb” ­(633–4); and yet the God of Israel “now hath cast me off as never known” (641). Samson’s “swounings of despair” (631) leave the Chorus in desperation, if not absolute despair. What can one say to the man who cries, “This one prayer yet remains, might I be heard, / No long ­petition, speedy death, / The close of all my miseries, and the balm” ­(649–51)? The prayer will ultimately obtain an answer; but it remains open to question whether it is of God or only of Samson. Searching for something, anything, to succour a potential suicide, the Chorus falls back on the psalmist’s anguished cry: “God of our Fathers, what is man!” (667).101 But their answer is darker than anything found in their oral 100 Harrison, “‘I believe.’” 101 The phrase is a paraphrase of Psalm 8:4: “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” For a different answer to the Chorus’s question, see Radzinowicz, Toward Samson, 334.

33093_Williams.indd 410

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 411

resources, ending in bitter blame of God: “Nor only dost degrade them, or remit / To life obscur’d, which were a fair dismission, / But throw’st them lower then thou didst exalt them high” (687–9). At the end of the day, the hero’s prayer is answered, if in a way chillingly similar to the final judgment of the Chorus in The Bacchae: “But god has found his way / for what no man expected” (1392–3).102 The oral resources of the traditional Chorus thus appear quite as insufficient in Milton as they were in Euripides to enable its members – much less their “great Deliverer” – to cope with the pressing ironies of fate. In brief, the members of Milton’s Chorus do prove themselves faithful friends who, all the same, struggle to keep their faith in God, clinging to their fading hope that the nation’s failure to follow Samson’s lead might be providential in the God’s-eye view of things. But Manoa’s speedy visit, with its freight of veiled accusation, of fatherly disappointment and attempted reclamation, puts Samson beyond the pale of hope, and on the brink of suicidal despair. After his father leaves the stage, Samson admits: “Nor am I in the list of them that hope; / Hopeless are all my evils, all remediless; / This one prayer yet remains, might I be heard, / No long petition, speedy death, / The close of all my ­miseries, and the balm” (647–51). And the Chorus is left to try to make sense of the mysteries of God’s ways, even as it scrambles to fend off the looming suicide of God’s former servant. In this respect, they are more sympathetic, and far more supportive, than the Chorus of The Bacchae, if just as outmoded in their appeal to traditional wisdom. At this point, however, the role of Milton’s Chorus seems asymmetrical to that of Euripides. But any pereceived lack of symmetry has more to do with the relative strength of the god Dionysus and Milton’s human hero, each of whose powers has been denied and betrayed. Over the latter half of each play, the symmetry of these choric roles will emerge, as each not only aids and abets the suffering champion in a world of blasphemous idolaters, but also finds a way to re-establish the glorious “hero” of an ethically dubious victory. As Pentheus leaves the stage in a final blaze of irony – “I go to my reward” (970) – the Chorus signals

102 The conclusion that Mastronarde draws with respect to questioning of the gods in many of Euripides’s tragedies resembles the one reached at this moment by the Chorus of Samson. As Mastronarde notes of the former, “there is revealed a tragic gap between the ­uncertainty, inscrutability, and amorality of the strongest powers in the universe and the human aspiration for certainty, clarity, and the comfort of comprehensible justice” (174).

33093_Williams.indd 411

2022-09-01 16:54

412

The Communion of the Book

its complicity in the impending disaster: “Run to the mountain, fleet hounds of madness!” (978), it sings in Strophe. And in Antistrophe, the other half of the Chorus responds: “Uncontrollable, the unbeliever goes, / in spitting rage, rebellious and amok, / madly assaulting Bacchus’ mysteries and his mother’s” (996–9). The actual viciousness of the choric attack fully emerges only at the end of the Antistrophe, in the high invocation before the Epode: “O Justice,” the half-Chorus invoke ethical norms that sound more like those of a totalitarian state: “come! Be manifest; reveal yourself with a sword! / Stab through the throat that godless, lawless, unjust man, / the earth-born spawn of Echion!” And the full Chorus begins to dance together in the frantic Epode: “O Dionysus, reveal yourself a bull! Be manifest, / a snake with darting heads, a lion breathing fire!” (1011–17). In this beastly apotheosis of the god, we could not be further from the values of the Athenian polis, with its concern for the rule of reason, protection of the weak, and respect for family. Indeed, the Chorus ­joyously proclaims its violation of every moral norm of the Athenian polis. On hearing from the Messenger that “Pentheus, the son of Echion is dead,” it sings in a burst of collective joy, “All hail to Bromius! Our god is a great god!” (1030–1). Confounded by their pleasure in disaster, the Messenger reproves the Chorus for its inhumanity: “You dare to rejoice / at these disasters which destroy this house?” (1032–3). In effect, he accuses them of hybris, of tempting fate by their obvious scorn of ­suffering mortals and disavowal of their common humanity. Soaring, rather, on the wings of song, they giddily proclaim their barbarous character, as if they were not subject to the human condition: “I am no Greek. I hail my god / in barbarian song. No longer need I / shrink with fear of prison” (1034–5). So, it falls to the Messenger to spell out the moral difference between “barbarian” and “civilized” responses to the sufferings of other humans: “Your feelings might be forgiven, then,” he admits of their suffering from the brutality of Pentheus. “But this, / your exultation in disaster – it is not right” (1339–40). The Messenger’s narration of the manner of the victim’s death also establishes an ethical basis for his disgust at this spectacle of “exultation in disaster” – a telling parallel with the besetting problem of choric triumphalism in Samson Agonistes.103 In its essence, his judgment turns 103 Milton’s attribution of the Byzantine tragedy “entitl’d, Christ Suffering” to “Gregory Nazianzen, a Father of the Church” (Knoppers, 67), further highlights the irony of the

33093_Williams.indd 412

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 413

on that instant of transformation from humane to barbarous action, as when Pentheus’s “own mother, like a priestess with her victim, fell upon him,” and the son cried out, “Pity me, spare me, Mother! I have done a wrong, / but do not kill your own son for that offense” (1113–14, 1120–1). “But she was foaming at the mouth,” the Messenger recounts, “and her crazed eyes / rolled with frenzy. She was mad, stark mad, / possessed by Bacchus” (1122–4). What it means to be “possessed by Bacchus” emerges from the dependent clause that begins the next sentence: “Ignoring his cries of pity ...” It is this lack of pity, in fact, that transforms the son, in the mother’s “crazed eyes,” into “The cub of a wild mountain lion” that she has “snared,” she boasts, “without a noose” ­(1173–4). Holding the severed head aloft on her thyrsus, she literally enacts – and graphically embodies – what it means to be a “barbarian.” In failing to recognize the “Other’s” humanity by her reduction of her own child to a beast, she has temporarily lost her humanity. The tragic irony could not be more explicit: holding her son’s head aloft on her triumphal entry into the city, she shouts with giddy joy, “Where is Pentheus? / Fetch him. I will have him set his ladder up / against the wall and, there upon the beam, / nail the head of this wild lion I have killed” (1211–14). The irony makes any audience recoil. Still, the tragic discovery of a mother who progresses from ignorance to terrible knowledge, and from madness to reason, is only achieved by means of her father’s tender leading. Cadmus patiently asks her to look skyward and clear her mind, before Agave begins, haltingly and hauntingly, to awaken to the reality of what she holds in her hands. And Cadmus, who also becomes a figure of tragic suffering in this scene, underscores the true extent of the change from happiness to misery: “O gods, / how terribly I pity you and then myself. / Justly – yes, but excessively has lord Bromius, / this god of our own blood, destroyed us all, every one” (1248–50). The point is taken; not only has the god broken the sacred bond of blood and family but has revived the “dragon’s teeth” of civil war, that ancient curse on Thebes. For the actions of this god joined in blood (begotten by Zeus, born of Agave’s sister) to

Chorus’s triumphalism with respect to Samson’s death, as compared with the “patient” suffering expressed in the homonym of Christus Patiens. See Wittreich, “Still Nearly Anonymous,” for Milton’s attribution of this “Byzantine Euripidean pastiche” to Gregory. This idea was “generally preserved” by “the Grotius circle” (193, 195), contrary to a broad consensus of Protestant and Catholic scholars that Christos Paschon was by Apollinaris of Laodicae.

33093_Williams.indd 413

2022-09-01 16:54

414

The Communion of the Book

frail mortal beings have now resulted in the shedding of familial blood. And it is the grieving father who must open his daughter’s eyes to the true nature of the blood on her hands, and the character of her service to a barbarous divinity: “And whose head do you hold in your hands?” he asks the possessed woman. “Study it carefully” (1276, 1281). “No! O gods,” Agave cries out in horror, “I see the greatest grief there is” (1282). It is a grief almost impossible to fathom. “But we – / what were we doing on the mountain?” she murmurs in evident bewilderment. “You were mad,” replies her grieving father. “The whole city was possessed.” Only then does the boy’s mother come to the full Discovery [anagnorisis]: “Now, now I see: / Dionyus has destroyed us all.” And even then, Cadmus is left, while pitying his poor daughter, to explain, “You outraged him. / You denied that he was truly god” (1294–7). The change from ignorance to knowledge is finally and painfully achieved. But the tragic irony is not yet complete. Even as Cadmus acknowledges the god’s prerogative in leading his daughter to take responsibility for the disaster, the question of divine justice remains tantalizingly open. So, when the god – a deus ex machina hoisted aloft on a crane – does appear on high to survey the tragic scene (though not to console or prevent further violence, but only to display his power and issue a divine judgment),104 Cadmus quickly turns the accusation back on him for his presumption of genuine justice. Yet, even as the god proceeds to pronounce judgment on the House of Cadmus – the aged king will be “changed / to a serpent” along with his queen (1330–2) – Cadmus humbly concedes a fault that is not his own, but rather that of his family. In an ensuing rapid-fire scene of stichomythia between the god and the man, Cadmus tries to differentiate between divine and human knowledge. Piteously, he cries, “We implore you, Dionysus. We have done wrong.” To which the god cruelly responds, “Too late. You did not know me when you should have.” Cadmus does not deny the humanizing effect of tragic knowledge: “We have learned,” he says contritely, then adds: “But you punish us too harshly.” To which Dionysus stiffly retorts: “I am a god. I was blasphemed 104 Mastronarde cautions that the opening of this speech (“perhaps two-thirds or three-quarters of it is missing, while 1330–43 survive”) (189), might well have offered further explanation for a divine epilogue that is neither consolatory (as in founding a cult), nor revelatory (in providing access to divine knowledge), nor prohibitive (in preventing further destructive action), but merely accusatory and self-exculpatory. This epilogue, however, is unique among other instances of the epilogue gods in Euripides (182–91).

33093_Williams.indd 414

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 415

by you.” The aged king’s response is eminently just: “Gods should be exempt from human passions” (1344–8). In other words, if the gods profess knowledge denied to humans, their wisdom should not be clouded by human passions. Conversely, if they are burdened by human passions, should those passions not include such feelings as pity that humans feel for one another – at least something more than the coldness of this god whose dignity has been injured? But the god reasserts only the justice of what is fated [fatum, that which is spoken] by Zeus: “Long ago my father Zeus ordained these things” (1349). The insufficiency of his response to the charge of injustice grows harder to stomach as the responsibility for tragedy assigned to humans is manifestly evaded by the god himself.105 By virtue of his immortality, the god is thus immune from, but cannot understand, or worse, remains indifferent to human suffering. Lacking knowledge of what mere mortals suffer, his “human passions” enjoy none of their virtues. The final scene of sorrow, where father and daughter go their separate ways into exile, is heart-rending. But it is also redeeming in what it reveals about divine and human nature, and the consequences of that disparity. “O Father,” Agave wails, “to be banished, to live without you!” She mourns, “Farewell, my home! City, farewell, / O bedchamber, banished I go, / in misery, I leave you now.” Responsively, Cadmus chants, “Go, poor child, to the burial place / of Aristaeus’ son on Cithaeron.” And Agave cries, “I pity you, Father.” Cadmus answers tenderly: “And I pity you, my child, / and I grieve for your poor sisters. I pity them” (1362–74). In this aching scene of human sympathy and pity for one another, father and daughter come to accept their frailty and human limits, bowing before the spectre of their own mortality, admitting their human errors. But they also demonstrate what is best in human nature, and what is likely worst in the divine nature. Even the Leader of the exultant Chorus must admit, “Cadmus, I pity you. Your daughter’s son / has died as he deserved, and yet his death / bears hard on you” (1327–8). Euripides, it is clear, is not willing to impugn the justice of the god on a stage set into the south slope of the 105 Mastronarde acknowledges that “[t]he epilogue gods undoubtedly enjoy the authority of knowledge and power … but the interpretive and moral authority of these fi ­ gures is more problematic,” as appears most forcefully in “Dionysus’ invocation of Zeus’s will in the finale of Bacchae,” where Cadmus challenges the god in an “argumentative stichomythia” that “is not paralleled in any other” divine epilogue in the Euripidean corpus; “only here is the god challenged face to face” (188–9).

33093_Williams.indd 415

2022-09-01 16:54

416

The Communion of the Book

Acropolis at the annual Festival of Dionysus. And yet, even the Leader of the god’s own devotees expresses human pity of a sort that only the hardest of hearts could withhold at the awful sight of the bloodied head of Pentheus in the hands of his mother. At the same time, the choral Leader leaves no doubt that audiences should fear, and fear greatly, the fate of erring human beings in the face of this implacable divinity who rules (and is ruled) by the worst of “human passions.” If the Chorus “shares with the audience the status of survivor,” as Mastronarde (97) remarks, they are nonetheless likely to feel immune from the catastrophe in a way that citizens of the ruined city are not. They are not exempt, however, from questions about justice. The Bacchae could not be more ironical in its portrait of this absolute power that has just overtaken the royal House of Cadmus. In this light, Euripides may best be read as something of a kindred spirit to sceptical humanists of the Renaissance like Petrarch, Valla, and Erasmus.106 But if the original audience survived the catastrophe, they were not identified with, or even rendered complicitous in, that terrifyingly inhuman power portrayed on the stage of the Great Dionysia. As Mastronarde defines their position, “the audience” of a Euripidean tragedy “feels itself separate from and superior to the chorus, for the audience knows (in most cases at least) the inevitable outcome of the plot, … and knows that the chorus speaks from a partial and limited perspective” (Art, 99). Since the chorus of bacchantes is also Asiatic – without ties of family, community, or history to the polis – the saving grace of their performance is the fact that it is a Theban action that is represented, and not enacted, on an Athenian stage. Still, as the audience gazes down upon the scene of devastation where Cadmus and Agave exit the stage on their separate ways into exile, they are likely to feel a human stirring of pity for these protagonists of ancient Boeotia, even as they feel a sudden frisson of fear where they now sit in the Great Dionysia. One crucial difference, of course, in the relative dénouements of The Bacchae and Samson Agonistes is that no god appears in the latter, either in disguise or in revelation, as he does in the destruction of Pentheus and the House of Cadmus. Nor is there a voice from heaven, like the 106 As Mastronarde elaborates the point of such scepticism: “The technique Euripides has adopted here is consonant with the shift of sympathies over the course of the play and with the tragic dilemma it presents – one must both acknowledge Dionysius’ divinity and recognize the god’s potential for cruel violence and amoral excess” (189).

33093_Williams.indd 416

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 417

one heard audibly at the outset of Paradise Regain’d, nor flights of angels at the end, as occurs in the dénouement of the brief epic. So, what is there to help the reader, much less the protagonist, resolve the thorny issue of biblical prophecy? Angels had appeared to Samson’s mother at the beginning of Judges, but not to Samson at the end of the biblical story or in the dramatic poem. And it is the devastating silence of heaven that still tortures Samson long after being shorn “Like a tame Weather, all my precious fleece” (538), and then left in the “prison of myself,” no longer able to fulfill his promise as the “great Deliverer” (40) of Israel. “O wherefore,” he initially laments, “was my birth from Heaven foretold / Twice by an angel” (23–4), if all that now remains to him is “To grind in Brazen Fetters under task … / Put to the labour of a Beast” (35, 37). In view of the absence of God or angels or other heavenly messengers, it is tempting, not just for Samson, but also for readers of Milton, to assign a heaven-sent significance to those “rouzing motions in me which dispose,” as Samson says on leaving the stage, “To something extraordinary my thoughts” (1382–3). What is even more extraordinary, however, is the similarity in plot between Samson’s initial refusal to attend the Festival of Dagon, and Pentheus’s reluctance to join Dionysus on Mt Cithaeron. Yet, much like Samson, Pentheus has a sudden change of heart, going to the Bacchic rites not in military armour with his troops as he had initially intended, but wearing a dress to spy on the adoring bacchantes. “Would you like to see them sitting on the mountain?” Dionysus asks casually, and Pentheus impulsively replies, “I would pay a lot of gold to see that sight” (811–12). It is that sudden, almost inexplicable peripeteia, or reversal in the plot, which brings about the catastrophe. Like Heracles, Pentheus shows himself to be the very epitome of a “fractured” consciousness, and thus of a deeply disconcerting moral ambiguity. And God’s continuing absence in Milton’s poem only deepens the ambiguity. Without a god to guide us, we are left as silent readers to determine Milton’s meaning in creating such a striking parallel between Pentheus’s initial resistance and Samson’s refusal to let the Philistines “make a game of my calamities,” or “shew them feats, and play before thir god, / The worst of all indignities, yet on me / Joyn’d with extream contempt” (1331, 1340–2). To the Chorus, however, Samson represents more than a fear of lost honour, since he remains deeply ­conscious of his “Consecrated gift,” and the sin of “prostituting holy

33093_Williams.indd 417

2022-09-01 16:54

418

The Communion of the Book

things to Idols” (1354, 1358), which would literally mean “venturing to displease / God for the fear of Man … which in his jealousie / Shall never, ­unrepented, find forgiveness” (1373–6). Still, Samson does not doubt “that he may dispense with me or thee / Present in Temples at some Idolatrous Rites / For some important cause” (1377–9). The question is how to decide what is truly divine and what is distinct in events from divine dispensation. Does Samson really receive a special dispensation for “some important cause”? Or do his “rouzing motions” more closely resemble those of Pentheus deciding of a sudden to go up on the mountain to ogle the bacchantes? Stiblinus’s commentary on The Bacchae, with which Milton was unquestionably familiar,107 stresses the danger of impiety, particularly its civic danger, in this context, for the Theban polis in Euripides’s drama: “The poet, therefore, with this play, in which Pentheus suffers punishment for his stupid obstinance and impiety, wished to exhort the men of his age to cultivate piety: when this is neglected, in its place come impiety, heedlessness, self-will and other diseases of the same type which subvert republics.”108 While Milton seems to have read The Bacchae as political commentary in its linking of religious and civic virtues, it is not clear exactly how he read “Euripides via the lens of Stiblinus’ commentaries” (Crawforth, 243). While Stiblinus praises the pious zeal of the bacchantes, he does so only to make us “blush in shame at our own folly and think it requires atonement, we who, though enticed with such great rewards, neglect (or wish to see extinguished) the true religion, consecrated with the blood of Christ, handed down from heaven.”109 If Milton did follow this “pious” interpretation that Pentheus and his city-state perished because of the ruler’s lack of piety, he likely did so for reasons other than the Catholic humanist’s conventional proposal of profaning “consecrated blood.” Samson does not doubt that his own attendance at the feast of the fish-tailed Dagon would be impious. We know that he is forbidden by the written Law of God to look upon “any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath,

107 As Crawforth remarks, “Atkins and Kelley note 100 instances in which Milton’s annotations draw upon this material, documenting his use of the work of all four scholars, Brodaeus, Canterus, Portus, and” most of all, “Stiblinus” (242). 108 “Praefatio Gaspari Stiblini in Euripidis Bacchae,” trans. Bowers. 109 Stiblinus’ Prefaces, trans. Bowers.

33093_Williams.indd 418

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 419

or that is in the water under the earth” (Exodus 20:4). Worse yet, Samson’s “heroic” death will make him the venerated idol (something else he doesn’t know) of a cultic remembrance that Manoa envisions for his son next to that “Monument” he will construct “With all his Trophies hung” (1726) [1736]. Manoa even proclaims: “The Virgins also shall on feastful days / Visit his Tomb with flowers, only bewailing / His lot unfortunate in nuptial choice” (1731–3) [1741–3]. The whole speech is a crushingly ironic echo of Euripides’s Hippolytus,110 in which the goddess Artemis prescribes due honours for her devotee at the shrine she means to found in Trozen, decreeing that “unmarried girls” will cut their hair and Hippolytus will enjoy a lasting “harvest” of their “tears” as they “cherish” his memory, together with “the ­memory of Phaedra’s love” for him (1421–9). There is no good way to explain this scene, other than to say that Manoa founds a pagan cult of the very sort featured in a dozen tragedies by Euripides.111 While Samson does not know as much, Milton undoubtedly expected his Euripidean reader to do so. On every count, Samson’s attendance at Dagon’s feast appears unlawful, as he thrice declares himself in his pious response to the Officer’s bidding.112 Why else is his concern for the Law so pointedly and ­frequently stressed, unless to raise grave doubts about his impulsive decision to participate in the cultus of Dagon? He then aligns himself with the irreverent Pentheus as much as with the chaste Hippolytus. It was such impiety that first prompted the god to lead Pentheus into the “trap” (804–5) of cultic practice on Mt Cithaeron. It was also the youth’s fascination with the maenads that drew him to his destruction, not to mention the ruin of the polis over which he rules. In the stark light of Pentheus’s tragedy, it appears that the role of Milton’s Chorus, and the  judgments they offer on the nature and significance of the

110 See Hardie, “Fama and Milton,” 556–8. 111 See Mastronarde, Art, on cultic etiologies (184). “This practice,” he explains, “­carries on an important traditional aspect of Greek public poetry: the acknowledgment and explication of origins in a way that reassures the community of its rootedness in a common past and of the weight of its shared beliefs and rituals” (183). 112 Samson’s repeated emphasis on his reading of the Law is the loose thread that readers are invited to pull in remembrance of this sharp “exposure to evaluation” of human and divine actions alike, a dramatic trait “that is quintessentially Eurpidean” (Mastronarde, Art, 191), but that is evidently an article of faith as well for Renaissance humanists.

33093_Williams.indd 419

2022-09-01 16:54

420

The Communion of the Book

catastrophe – which Samson calls “some important cause” – are also the best guide we possess to measure Milton’s achievement. Firstly, it is no accident that Milton’s Chorus, like that of The Bacchae, is first to hear (along with Manoa) the Messenger’s traumatized account113 of the catastrophe. Milton’s listening Chorus thereby creates another haunting – and hauntingly ironic – echo of its Euripidean ancestor. For, like the Chorus of The Bacchae, their response to the Hebrew Messenger’s narrative is chillingly bloodthirsty: “O dearly-bought revenge, yet glorious!” Moreover, the frenzied madness of the bacchantes who tore Pentheus limb from limb echoes in the ferocity of their choral exultation: “Living or dying thou hast fulfill’d / The work for which thou wast foretold / to Israel” (1651–3) [1661–3]. Singing in excelsis Deo, the Chorus renders the God of Israel indistinguishable from the amoral deities of Greek religion, the same ones whom Socrates, to his misfortune, had critiqued. This “Socratic” form of ironic critique sounds more loudly still as the Hebrew Chorus ends its “barbarian song” (Bacchae, 1034) in a gleeful body count of those who are murdered at another cultic site: “in death conjoin’d / Thee with thy slaughter’d foes in number more / Then all thy life had slain before” (1656–8) [1666–8]. The Semi-Chorus thus enact what they are about to accuse Dagon’s followers of doing, of “Chaunting their Idol, and preferring / Before our living Dread who dwells / In Silo his bright Sanctuary” (1662–4) [1672–4]. Rather than hymn the virtues of a righteous deity, the Semi-Chorus praises a god of pure power, swelling to a frenzy of jubiliation in their epic gloating: Among them he a spirit of phrenzie sent, Who hurt thir minds, And urg’d them on with mad desire To call in hast for thir destroyer; They only set on sport and play Unweetingly importun’d Thir own destruction to come speedy upon them. (1665–71) [1675–81]

113 Wood, Exiled, similarly remarks that “[t]he messenger blunders in, shocked, a­ lmost hysterical, imprisoned in a claustrophobic revulsion” (50).

33093_Williams.indd 420

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 421

This “spirit of phrenzie” also induces a further frenzy of rejoicing in the Hebrew Chorus that begins to sound unnervingly like the frenzy of a Cavalier Parliament to punish Non-Conformists and Dissenters,114 much less the Greek mother and her troop of bacchantes in that ­profoundly haunting scene from Euripides.115 Nor should we overlook the Greek Messenger’s sharp reproof to the Attic Chorus: “But this, your exultation in disaster – it is not right” (1040). Ironically, the “biblical” Chorus’s version of the “great Deliverer” appears to make Samson a Hebrew equivalent of Pentheus, self-destroyed by his own fractured consciousness, or what might be termed a cryptic split in his character. Milton goes Euripides one better, however, in multiplying the ironies of the Chorus’s “barbarian song.” Here, the celebrated images of Samson’s poetic rebirth as a “Dragon”116 and a “Phoenix”117 become chillingly ironic in their crazed jubilation, more excessive even than the “phrenzie” of the first Semi-Chorus: “His fierie vertue rouz’d / From under ashes into sudden flame, / And as an ev’ning Dragon came / Assailant on the perched roosts” (1680–3) [1690–3].118 But Samson, Wittreich insists, acted “impulsively, without reflection on liberation and deliverance and without regard for the authority of inspiration such as is displayed by Gideon in another of the inset n ­ arratives of the Book of Judges” (Interpreting, 355). It is an apt, if somewhat limited judgment, orphaned from its classical counterpart. In classical terms, of course, Thebes was pointedly founded on the site where Cadmus slew the dragon and, at Athena’s behest, sowed the

114 See chapter 4 above, 193; and chapter 6 above, 326–7. 115 Compare Kelley, “Milton’s Euripidean,” 149. 116 Milton’s “ev’ning Dragon” recalls Ovid’s story of Cadmus slaying the dragon: “It glared down on the whole wide wood as huge, / If all its size were seen, as in the sky / The Snake that separates the two bright Bears” (Met. 3.43–45). The epic simile of that evening sky and Cadmus’s discovery at sunset of the dragon feasting on his slain men are both contained in that compressed allusion. See Ovid: Metamorphoses, 3.28–95. 117 Its pairing with the “ev’ning Dragon” makes the “Phoenix” an improbable allusion to the resurrected Christ, more likely recalling the “crop of men in mail” (Melville, 54) who sprang up from Cadmus’s sowing of “the serpent’s teeth” in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 3. 118 Conversely, Hale, Milton’s Languages, concludes that this speech demonstrates why “the marvel is permanent. Its effects will last; so will its fame; which will itself uphold the effects, upon ‘Israel.’ Manoa’s speech, following, confirms the victory. So does the closing chorus, moving (as we have said) from deciphering the meaning in ‘this great event’ to its emotional, spiritual benefits” (192).

33093_Williams.indd 421

2022-09-01 16:54

422

The Communion of the Book

dragon’s teeth, out of which sprang up five armed warriors. Euripides’s Chorus openly, ecstatically pays reverence to this gory myth in its penultimate song: “Let us dance to the glory of Bacchus, / dance to the death of Pentheus, / the death of the spawn of the dragon!” (1153–5). Cadmus also recalls this founding myth of the city in his grieving speech to his daughter about his lost dynasty: “Now I must go, a banished and ­dishonored man – / I, Cadmus the great, who sowed the soldiery / of Thebes and harvested a great harvest” (1313–15). Finally, as the bloody myth drains away, we are left with hardly more than the achingly human sorrow of a bereft parent: “My son, / dearest to me of all men,” Cadmus mourns, “never again will your hand touch my chin; / no more, child, will you hug me and call me / ‘Grandfather,’ and say, ‘Who is wronging you?’” (1315–16, 1318–20) The disaster is as complete and final a catastrophe as it will prove to be in Milton’s tragedy. Not complete in its ironies, however, as Manoa’s final speech demonstrates: “Nothing is here for tears,” he avers, since Samson’s ­catastrophic act has brought “To himself and Fathers house eternal fame” (1711, 1707). In view of the grieving “father” Cadmus, we need to recall what Homer’s epic hero Achilles had yet to learn from old Priam, the father of his slain enemy at the end of Iliad: that death is the real enemy, and that nothing, least of all fame, can compensate for our common end. In his insistence, however, that “Samson hath quit himself / Like Samson, and heroicly hath finish’d / A life heroic, on his Enemies / Fully reveng’d,” and “hath left them years of mourning” (1699–1702) [1709–12], Manoa makes himself a grotesque foil to the grief-stricken Priam (much less Cadmus), an aged father nearing death himself, who now “sat huddled / at the feet of Achilleus and wept close for manslaughtering Hektor. / And Achilleus wept now for his own father, now again / for Patroklos” (Iliad, 24:509–12). The grief of the Achaean protagonist reconfirms the power of the cultural system that Achilles’s story had challenged, but has also helped to renew, supplying final proof of the vital, and still flexible, resources of oral culture. But Manoa’s misreading of his son’s death as another instance of the hero’s epic glory in traditional culture redeems ­nothing; it only heightens the tragic irony of the poem, as Samson’s father tries to turn tragedy into an epic victory. And the ironies continue to abound in the choral ode that completes the tragedy: “All is best, though we oft doubt” (1735) [1745]. As Hannah Crawforth comments, “The long prehistory of these words,” in view of

33093_Williams.indd 422

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 423

Euripides’s repeated conclusions,119 “take on new resonance at this moment of political frustration for Milton; their repetition here with the hollow resonance of rhyme serves to undercut the very sentiment they express” (254). The best that these words can hope to express, of course, is faith in the continuity of a providential order that seems ­lacking in the event and is unlikely to be realized any time soon. At worst, what they more likely express in the context of the poem’s first printing has more to do with the failure of the Restoration establishment to recognize its own moral failings. For what ensues in the closing chapters of the Book of Judges is neither a rebirth of Israel nor the liberty of its people, but merely more idol worship, rape, and intertribal war, leading to the destruction of the tribe of Benjamin, and the disappearance “from history” of the tribe of Dan.120 As Joseph Wittreich sums up this blatantly ironic conclusion to the biblical story, “[W]e know from the Book of Judges that Samson has brought no freedom at all, and we learn this too from Paradise Regained: ‘Should I of these the liberty regard, / … Of Bethel and of Dan? No, let them serve / Thir enemies … (III.427–32)’” (Interpreting, 357). Worse yet, a sobering refrain tolls like a death knell in the final chapters of Judges: “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (21:25). It is the final and enduring judgment of the biblical compilers of Judges. It is also a judgment that casts terminal doubt on the “regenerationist” reading of Samson’s “rouzing motions,” since “right in his own eyes” is an apt characterization of the blind Samson’s final act in the theatre of Dagon. Now, the shocking misreading of events by Milton’s “Restoration” Chorus begins to sound almost like a preview of the comic ironies of Voltaire’s Candide in the next century. In one of the more stunning ironies of the poem, the Chorus misrepresents Foxe’s assurance of a loving providence in The Actes and Monuments, to celebrate instead a vengeful deity, “who unexpectedly returns / And to his faithful Champion hath in place / Bore witness gloriously” (1740–2) [1750–2]. Now, even God the Father is dragooned to bear witness to the heroic “martyr” of the ode, rather than the 119 The choric recessional in Euripidean tragedies from Medea to The Bacchae repeats this deeply ironic, and profoundly troubling assurance of “All is best”: “And what was most expected / has not been accomplished. / But god has found his way / for what no man expected” (The Bacchae, 1390–3). Divine knowledge and human understanding in these plays are utterly incommensurate with one another. 120 Wittreich, Shifting, 247.

33093_Williams.indd 423

2022-09-01 16:54

424

The Communion of the Book

“martyr” acting as a witness to God’s truth. Not that the Chorus would have had occasion to read what Milton wrote about martyrdom in Eikonoklastes (1649), or to ponder, as Milton’s readers are obliged to do, his printed critique of Charles I as a false martyr. “Martyrs bear ­witness to the truth, not to themselves,” the polemicist had written of the portrait of the royal martyr in Eikon Basilike. “If I beare witness of my self, saith Christ, my witness is not true.”121 What the ode has to say about God’s “faithful Champion” and his bearing “witness gloriously” to the triumphant return of the established order, with its complacent ­self-mythologizing, could even pass as a sardonic critique of royalist jubilation, such as that of Edward Hyde, whose own scornful gloating was preserved for posterity in his posthumous History of the Rebellion ­(1702–04).122 At the individual level, the ode also becomes a token of the “original sin” of self-mythologizing in a pamphlet like A Worke of the Beast, with its dark reminder of the part it played in Lilburne’s tragedy, as well as the larger tragedy of the Revolution. For his part, the Hebrew Samson has exchanged a reading of the Law, with its pious observance of the Commandments, for the “rouzing motions” of another tragic self-mythologizing. And the giddy “oral” Chorus repeats those “rouzing motions” by hymning “the death of the spawn of the dragon” (Bacchae, 1155). Ultimately, there remains only the katharsis to be sung in the last lines of the poem for those who prefer to “view,” rather than to read and comprehend, the devastating ironies of this “Euripidean” tragedy that they have just witnessed. It is still possible, as internal “viewers” of the action will claim, to have gained a “new acquist / Of true experience from this great event / With peace and consolation hath dismist, / And calm of mind all passion spent” (1745–8) [1755–8]. And yet, the most famous words ever written in English about “tragic effect,” and the sort of “catharsis” produced by tragedy, are rendered more luminous still by the all-embracing irony of the concluding ode. The reader who now recalls the sweeping arguments of Joseph Henrich with which this book began is likely to find in the story of the fall of the House of Cadmus an ancient precursor of the anthropologist’s stimulating theories about the dissolution of kin-based institutions, even though these were dissolved long ago in ancient Thebes, without 121 Milton, Eikonoklastes, cpw 3:575. 122 See, for example, the closing pages of the final chapter, “Restoration,” in Hyde’s History of the Rebellion, 418–24.

33093_Williams.indd 424

2022-09-01 16:54



Milton’s Euripidean Tragedy 425

benefit of Church marriage laws. The point remains the same: reading those Greek tragedies during the Renaissance served to rewire Western brains, sparking new forms of analytic thinking, religious individualism, impartial justice, and democratic politics. The final effect, like that of Petrarch’s Latin epic123 Africa and its rupturing of the myth of continuity in the self-styled Holy Roman Empire, was an epochal break from the past. Yet Milton’s ideal was to be found, not as with Petrarch in the founding of Rome and its first century of empire, but in the democratic Athens of Euripides in the Great Dionysia. Contemporary readers of “the sort of Dramatic Poem which is call’d a Tragedy” had been trained from grammar school to understand the ironies of Euripidean tragedy. The modern reader can be forgiven for needing a reminder from classical studies about the fundamentally ironic nature of Euripidean tragedy – that it “depends for its effect on an ambiguity about, or oscillation between, two contradictory i­ mpressions: that all that happened had to be and could not have been avoided, and that somehow the disaster was, or should have been, avoidable” (Mastronarde, 188). This oscillating ambiguity is the final imprint of Euripidean tragedy on Milton’s poem. For the ironic method of these two great tragic poets requires readers to reconcile “two contradictory impressions” – think of the impressions of “regenerationists” and “­revisionists” – as they “oscillate” between the dialectical poles of irony to establish a more stable ground of interpretation. In such fashion, a genuinely “revolutionary subject formation” should still be possible from a discontinuous reading of Milton’s dramatic poem. But such a formation does not seem to have taken place in the tragic hero himself, and it most certainly has not occurred among internal witnesses to events of the poem. It requires, rather, the indexical reading of “skilfull and laborious gatherers” to carry on the requisite collation of Milton’s dramatic poem with those texts from classical antiquity that he had bookmarked for us, those Attic models that are 123 I do find it odd that Margaret King’s only reference to the epic genre in “A Return” is to the Portuguese poet Luís Vaz de Camões’s The Lusiads (1572), an epic of empire that uses Virgilian antiquity to extol more recent heroic acts, where “humanism is married to imperialism in a grand celebration of conquest and power” (26). Ignoring the republican epic Africa, which Petrarch left incomplete, King also avoids Milton’s patently Christian epic in Paradise Regain’d and sidesteps David Norbrook’s reading (1999) of Paradise Lost as a classically republican epic (see herein, 248n39), created on the model not of the Renaissance Africa but Lucan’s heroic elegy for the Republic in De bello civili (65 ce).

33093_Williams.indd 425

2022-09-01 16:54

426

The Communion of the Book

urgently required to negotiate the differences that still persist between “regenerationist” and “revisionist” readers of the poem, and that would help to differentiate the “true” God from an arbitrary, “barbarian” one. These are rather troubling differences, in fact, that have their modern counterparts in more literal-minded readers of Milton’s “scriptural” text, and more liberal, if not necessarily secular-minded, readers of his Euripidean ironies. And even then, perhaps, the most that can be said with absolute certainty is that here is the greatest “Greek” tragedy to be written since 406 bce, the year of Euripides’s death.

33093_Williams.indd 426

2022-09-01 16:54

8

The Communion of the Book: A Dialectic of Presence and Absence

By now, the reader should have a reasonable grasp of Joseph Henrich’s argument with which this book began, that it was a culture of reading, and thus of mass literacy, that literally rewired the brains of Western people and, in the process, sparked the beginnings of the early modern world. But it will also be clear that Henrich’s grand idea remains ­radically incomplete without a better understanding of the sort of reading that sparked that cultural revolution. Basic reliance on the doctrine of sola scriptura, or scripture reading alone, might be sufficient for salvation; but it is insufficient to explain how new marriage policies transformed an intensive kin-based culture into an atomized world of readers willing to think for themselves. Our first duty must be to reread those books that did inspire an unprecedented culture of choice1 and freedom of religion, of impersonal laws and equal justice, of radical notions of historical change and cultural evolution, and of new social goods of equality and democracy, where self-government had to be rooted in the governance of the self before it could grow outward into the state. And any history of that cultural revolution in reading would still be almost certainly stillborn without access to seminal works by Petrarch, Bruni, Valla, Reuchlin, Erasmus, Foxe, and Milton. In their several humanist modes of reading, each one of them repeatedly unmasks the “Fake News” of cultural continuity, from the medieval pretense that the Holy Roman Empire was a continuation of the ancient 1 Henrich identifies the Church’s restriction of “cousin marriage” in the Middle Ages as the beginning of a new culture of choice, based on a woman’s consent. But it was reading that made religious belonging a question of personal choice rather than a matter of infant baptism, and reading that also made political legitimacy a matter of popular consent.

33093_Williams.indd 427

2022-09-01 16:54

428

The Communion of the Book

Roman Empire to the doctrine that the Latin Vulgate did not deviate one iota from the Greek and Hebrew scriptures; or from the legal fi ­ ction that the Common Law of England had existed from time immemorial to the biblical fiction that Samson was a true type of Christ. Such a recognition was in fact aimed at freeing the present era from bondage to a counterfeit past, so making historical difference the essential hallmark of early modern identity. Ultimately, it is Milton’s reading of three full centuries of humanist discourse that gives us the most insight into this new psychology. Far from retreating from politics after the failure of the English Revolution, Milton’s last poems reveal a total engagement with the here and now. Indeed, his last great works are heroic, as well as heroically memorable, for the depth of their engagement with the Restored Church and State – his brief epic concerning the former, his dramatic poem the latter. Far from expressing quietism, Paradise Regain’d vigorously ­challenges traditional understandings of religious communion and communal belonging. Like his very human Jesus who goes alone into a wilderness of devilish antagonism, Milton challenges his readers to affirm their solidarity with other English readers by responding to the Adversary’s trials with a recognition of their own place in the story. In brief, the example of “Our Saviour” leaves room for each and every vernacular reader to step into the pages of the Book, to commune with bygone communities martyred for their faith in the Word, though choosing to live, not die, by that truth.2 For, as Erasmus had affirmed, “these books restore Christ to us,” allowing us to “be transformed into” his Word.3 Moreover, it was the humanist martyrologist John Foxe who taught English readers where to look for God’s presence, and how to live in the Book, even in the face of imminent death. The discovery of God’s presence in the written word is the real end of trial in Paradise Regain’d, culminating in that momentous instant on the spire of the temple as Jesus answers, “[A]lso it is written, / Tempt not the Lord thy God,” and astoundingly, even unwittingly, is transformed by the Word he has just quoted. 2 A shared faith in the communion of the Book leads quite naturally from the idea of an “invisible church” to an “invisible nation” of readers rendered visible in print. In other words, it has little to do with the royal image of Britannia, Camden’s legend of the Virgin Queen as the embodiment of an “Elect Nation” (Haller, 230–8), and more to do with the Book/ book enabling readers to imagine such a community of national belonging. 3 Paraclesis, ed. Sider, 422.

33093_Williams.indd 428

2022-09-01 16:54



A Dialectic of Presence and Absence 429

The experience of reading Jesus reading scripture is designed to evoke an unexpected sense of Real Presence, particularly to Restoration Dissenters who were discriminated against by heavy fines and imprisonment. It was also designed, however, to remind Dissenters of their heroic forebears in The Actes and Monuments, and to teach such readers how to find their place in another story with a different ending. You are not alone, the page whispers to every reader in English, inviting each and all to join a new fellowship of national belonging. So, the nation itself becomes another “Real Presence” in this communion of the book. Something similar is available to readers of Samson Agonistes, though more by their experience of absence than of presence. As Samson laments, “Light the prime work of God to me is extinct, / And all her various objects of delight / Annull’d” (70–2). Blind in body and bereft in spirit, he feels the absence of that “light” as the total absence of “thou great Word.” In his high apostrophe to Light, Samson expostulates: “O first created Beam, and thou great Word, / Let there be light, and light was over all; / Why am I thus bereav’d thy prime decree?” (83–5). In the anguish of his cry, “O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon” (80), we feel along our very nerve endings his despondency at the eclipse of that Word. For Samson has been left in a world where angels no longer appear with a “Promise” of the miraculous birth – that ­thrilling prophecy “that I / Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver” (38–9). But it is more than his own lost promise that grieves the “great Deliverer”; he suffers the deafening silence of Heaven in a world lacking any sign of divine presence. As Abraham Stoll observes, it is this absence of “the angel of Judges 13” that shows “what Samson’s disenchanted world lacks: the certainty that Samson is operating with the authority of divine will, and the cognitive means for understanding events as part of Providence” (282). This total absence of enchantment is the blight of Samson’s life, and the clear antithesis of the assurance given by the angels to Jesus at the end of Paradise Regain’d, triumphantly affirming his unity with the Father. And yet the agony of Samson’s defeat is not meant to bring the reader of this poem to despair, but rather to a sense of shared responsibility for that failure. John Lilburne, one of the first Samsons of the English Commonwealth, was brought low by a similar error; and yet many English republicans would misunderstand and repeat that same result. Still, the English Republic continued to exist as an absent – because virtual – presence to any reader attuned to the dialectic of presence

33093_Williams.indd 429

2022-09-01 16:54

430

The Communion of the Book

and absence in Milton’s last poems. Each work is tellingly defined by its opposite, moving through contradiction to transcend negation or nullity. From the outset of his story, Jesus has already surpassed his youthful ambition of national liberation;4 instead, he now seeks “Redemption for [all] mankind,” “E’re I the promis’d Kingdom can attain” (pr 1.265–6). Samson, by contrast, yearns to be the “great Deliverer” of his nation; but that nation, though erring and still in bondage, fails yet again to recognize itself in his tragic history, contrary to the Athenians of old who could see themselves writ large in the tragic discoveries of Euripides’s Agave and Cadmus, Heracles and Theseus and the rest. Between these two “Deliverers” – Jesus and Samson – the nation waits in eclipse, unless or until it is brought into existence by latter-day humanist readers. In all three of his Restoration poems, Milton remains invested in humanist acts of gathering a “fit audience … though few”5 into a community of readers who, informed by right reason and a proper hermeneutics, will read aright, and reading “in their glory move” to “wipe the tears for ever from” a grieving nation’s “eyes.”6 Amid the darkest clouds of the Restoration, N.H. Keeble finds exactly this type of silver lining in the experience of the failed English Republic. As he puts it, “political defeat was the condition of cultural achievement.”7 This well sums up the experience of defeat for Milton, whose greatest poems grew out of his own tragic experience of defeat. But what stands out in his paradigmatic achievement is equally well expressed in another useful apophthegm: the only solution to the failure of the Good Old Cause was always cultural, not political. For it was only from reading, and not from an act of Parliament or political declaration, that an “invisble nation” of readers could be forged, at least initially. As David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens acknowledge in their introduction to Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England (2008), literary scholars have been slow to follow the lead of cultural historians like Benedict Anderson. His Imagined Communities had already shifted several decades ago the study of nationalism towards exploration of the cultural roots of nationalism as the ground of political flowering. But now, “Anderson’s analysis of the nation as an ‘imagined political community,’ 4 5 6 7

33093_Williams.indd 430

See the discussion in my chapter 4: 199–202. Paradise Lost 3.31. “Lycidas,” ll. 181–2, Riverside Milton, 107. Keeble, The Literary Culture, 22.

2022-09-01 16:54



A Dialectic of Presence and Absence 431

one ‘conceived in language, not in blood’ (149),” combined with an even broader notion of “nationality and nationalism as ‘cultural ­artefacts’” (4), has latterly “enabled literary scholars to make a contribution to political science uniquely adapted to their skills in analysing verbal and aesthetic representations.”8 But, as Loewenstein and Stevens also remind us, other “early modern scholars” have, for a variety of reasons, “pushed the roots of English nationalism back earlier, finding important evidence for the nation itself as an artificial and literary construct v­ ariously shaped by writers in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury England” (7). In this book, I have taken as my brief those cultural roots of early modernism and nationalism, not so much from the cultural ground of medieval institutions as from the late medieval manuscript-humanists and early print-humanists, leading to a full and final flowering in the poetry of Milton. I have found it rewarding to explore Joseph Henrich’s startling idea that reading rewired the brains of Western Europeans, likely more than he realizes through a new form of sacrament, where both communion and community were linked, but also performed, in novel ways through revolutionary forms of reading. Indeed, it was this experience of the Real Presence through a sacramental mode of r­ eading that was instrumental in transforming older forms of religious belonging into a new form of political community. But if it was this technology of printing on paper that rendered such a communion possible in Church and State alike, it was still these readers of the printed page who truly changed the world. And their several modes of reading would transform the ways in which people henceforth congregated in novel forms of religious and political community. As their own creative “actes” of reading cultural “monuments” generated the formation of new communities, other modes of reading further reshaped the world in a variety of ways that only a mass distribution of print would make it ­possible to realize. As I essayed to show in chapter 4, the reading acts of his deeply human Jesus allowed Milton to portray him in Paradise Regain’d as attempting to locate himself in specific scenes from the Law and the Prophets, steadfastly resisting the Adversary’s temptations to mistrust God’s will, or deviate from the script, until he became that Word, subsumed as if by

8 Early Modern Nationalism, ed. Loewenstein and Stevens, 7.

33093_Williams.indd 431

2022-09-01 16:54

432

The Communion of the Book

accident into those very texts that the trials of the Tempter forced him to recall and to relive. An implicit reversal of the orthodox theology of the “Word made flesh” now led to a very different sense of the flesh made Word,9 whether in Erasmus or Foxe or Paradise Regain’d, where the Real Presence of the deity no longer required a Latin Mass to be performed by a sacerdotal hierarchy but was experienced rather by readers of the vernacular Book. If this meant sola scriptura to Luther, to Foxe it also meant the “Actes” of the new “apostles” as well as those of the first gospels. More and various readers became increasingly engaged in rival modes of civic as well as religious communion, each choosing their own community. So, the experience was not unique to Milton’s Jesus who became the human “Son of God” through reading; it was ­available to any English reader who learned to live in the Word, whether in the Acts of the Apostles or Foxe’s Actes and Monuments or Paradise Regain’d. In Foxe’s work, especially, we find the presence of plain folk in personal possession of the vernacular scriptures who have dispensed with sacerdotal ritual and religious hierarchy, finding another ­community in the invisible – absent, that is, if yet present – communion of readers of English. Foxe’s martyrology, as John King maintains, first revealed “an invisible church of ‘true’ believers” that was already present in England “prior to the Reformation.”10 The qualified presence of this “invisible church” was still a necessary fiction, since Roman Catholics scoffed at Foxe’s claims in the first edition of The Actes and Monuments, pointedly asking, “Where was your church fifty years ago?” Or “Where was your church before Luther?” (113). As King shows, Foxe’s response was “to incorporate hundreds of pages” into a much-expanded edition in 1570 “of documentation concerning the first millennium of the Christian era.” The result was a luminous précis of Eusebius’s Historia ecclesiastica ­(324–25 ce) detailing a hidden ecclesia that had survived from the age of the Apostles. Driven underground by the imperial persecutions of the Caesars and forced to exist as a shadowy presence, this “invisible church” also chose to remain hidden after the capture of the institution by Constantine and his imperial Roman Church.  9 The “flesh made Word” has literally materialized in Stanislas Dehaene’s discovery of a “letterbox” developed in the left occipito-temporal region of the literate brain of humans. See discussion above in my “Prolegomenon,” vii–x. 10 King, Foxe’s, 260.

33093_Williams.indd 432

2022-09-01 16:54



A Dialectic of Presence and Absence 433

Well before the advent of print, this sort of invisible church reappeared among the Cathars11 of le Midi in France (eleventh to thirteenth ­ century), the Lollards in England (late fourteenth and early ­fifteenth century), and Hussites in Bohemia and Moravia (fifteenth century) – the latter memorialized in sermons and manuscripts of their oral-scribal culture following their brutal suppression.12 Only in the age of print was that enduring, if still invisible, church rendered fully visible by scholars and local historians such as John Foxe in England, and Jean Crespin (ca 1520–72) in Geneva who trumpeted the martyrdoms of the French Huguenots (Histoire des martyrs, 1554; Actes des martyrs, 1564).13 So, Christ and his martyrs were now made present to readers of print – made even more present, as Erasmus would say, than if they had been present in the flesh. As the Dutch humanist expressed this startling, and startlingly simple, idea, “these books restore Christ” (and his martyrs) “to us so completely and so vividly that you would see him [and them] less clearly should you behold him standing before your very eyes.”14 By admiring, desiring, living, and dying into the living spirit (or mind), wrote Erasmus, that dwells inwardly in readers of the written words of Christ, they would also “be transformed into” those words. The “invisible” Church thus became a visible and tangible ­communion of the Book whose fellowship, though widely separated by time and space, was finally rendered visible by means of mass literacy and the upstart medium of print. Richard Helgerson has argued something similar, claiming that The Actes and Monuments disclosed the unnoticed presence of the invisible 11 Along the A9 autoroute leading south through Languedoc from Béziers (site of the bloody massacre of 1209 that killed upwards of 20,000 men, women, and children) to the Pyrenees, a brown highway sign of the French Ministry of Culture declares, “Vous entrez dans le pays Cathare”  – the latter now an absent presence, although the Cathar Museum in Mazamet preserves a material history of these so-called heretics of the High Middle Ages (denominated Albigensians by the Church) who had rejected a formal priesthood and ecclesiastical sacraments. Although they were philosophical dualists, they lived by the Christian scriptures written in Occitan that each Cathar family possessed and read; and encouraged vernacular literacy as well as gender equality. These medieval apostles of the “primitive” Church managed for more than a century to withstand bloody papal and royal crusades against them, until the fall of their last mountain stronghold in 1244 ce. 12 Fudge, “Zelivsky’s Head,” 111–32. 13 Crespin’s renaming of his “History of the Martyrs” the “Actes of the Martyrs,” a year after the first edition of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments was published in 1563, suggests a mutual influence between the two works. 14 Erasmus, Paraclesis, ed. Sider, 422.

33093_Williams.indd 433

2022-09-01 16:54

434

The Communion of the Book

nation of English readers: “The ‘invisible church’ of Foxe … is just such an imagined community. Its members are readers who imagine themselves in invisible fellowship with thousands of other readers, particularly with those who encounter the word in the same vernacular translation.”15 But this “imagined community,” or invisible nation of readers, was also naturalized by a host of previous readers of scripture in English who had first accepted martyrdom by refusing to kneel to a Catholic monarch or bow to a “universal” Church. In such fashion, these same readers begot the national Church, their martyrologies preserving a Church apart, and eventually creating a separate identity. What is more, a selfdetermining nation of readers was able in time to proclaim, without hesitation, “No bishop, no king.” As Milton also did, and Lilburne, too – even if the latter did claim, after his political defeat, to prefer King Charles to King Oliver.16 In that sense, the “invisible Nation” – or ­print-mediated community – was a natural sibling of the “invisible Church,” each existing in the shadow of a medieval system of monarchy that recognized subjects though not citizens, and an ecclesiastical hierarchy that forgave penitents but not communicants of the book. In another valuable contribution to Loewenstein and Stevens’s book on Milton and English nationalism, Andrew Escobedo describes the “invisible nation” as a seventeenth-century outgrowth of the sixteenthcentury ideology of an “invisible church.” As he draws the line directly from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Escobedo declares, “We perceive the nation in our mind’s eye. As Milton put it in 1644, ‘Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation.’”17 Explaining the process by which nations spring imaginatively into being, Escobedo follows Michael Herzfeld in unveiling the hidden presence of “Anderson’s imagined community” by means of print, but still placing “it in dialectical relation with institutions of the state. As a product of cultural intimacy, the nation needs the state as the impersonal other against which it defines itself” (175). In this sense, the nation then had first to be imagined, as much an artifact as the book itself was an artifice, essentially a cultural presence waiting to be revealed to itself. And writers like Milton “would develop” and refine that 15 Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 266. 16 Lilburne, To all the Affectors and Approvers in England (17 July 1649), 8; An Impeachment of High Treason Against Oliver Cromwell (10 August 1649), 8. 17 Escobedo, “The Invisible Nation,” 174.

33093_Williams.indd 434

2022-09-01 16:54



A Dialectic of Presence and Absence 435

lingering “opposition between state and nation vis-à-vis the doctrine of the visible and invisible church” (181). My larger debts are to the work, of course, of Joseph Henrich, but also to the pioneering scholarship of James Turner, James Kearney, Robert D. Sider, John N. King, and last, but not least, Benedict Anderson. If I have saved my debt to the author of Imagined Communities for last, it is because Anderson’s argument needs careful and serious emendment on the idea of religious community, a concept that he had limited to the “great sacral cultures” of “Christendom,” Confucianism, Buddhism, and “the Islamic Ummah.” In the case of Christendom, Anderson assumes that the older system of religion was immediately displaced by modern political communities that were only rendered possible by the decline of “the medium of a sacred language.”18 What this post-­ Enlightenment history of “the Origins of Nationalism” ignores, however, is the rise of both the ancient Greek and biblical Hebrew as much more “truth-ful” replacements for Latin as a “sacred” language, and the ­subsequent rise of an “invisible church” finding its communion in ­sacramental reading, and existing in tandem with an “invisible nation,” each waiting to be realized in print. From Paradise Lost to the “poems of 1671,” Milton’s books are largely given to his own historic search for a “fit audience” that would bring the nation into being through such modes of sacramental and historico-juridical reading. Fundamentally, Anderson assumed that communities of people who do not know each other, who live in different circumstances and widely differing geographies, need to share more than ethnicity or language to realize their real political communion. Despite Adrian Johns’s scorn for the idea “that nationalism developed thanks to the stabilization of laws and languages,” an argument he says was originated by Elizabeth Eisenstein and was “developed more thoroughly by Anderson in Imagined Communities,”19 I find no reason to assume with him that the nation itself is a simulacrum of Hobbes’s imagined Leviathan, a polity brought into being for the sole purpose of enforcing laws and defending

18 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 12–13. By holding to Burckhardt’s model of the state as a secular work of art, Anderson can omit the step of recovering the bible’s original languages, and ignore the need of reading it sacramentally. But both steps explain why ­religion and nationalism have always been more than just distant cousins. 19 Johns, The Nature of the Book, 11, 11n10.

33093_Williams.indd 435

2022-09-01 16:54

436

The Communion of the Book

property.20 Rather, Anderson’s nation is still an invisible communion, or “community in anonymity” (36), a cultural fiction predicated on an “imagined” fellowship among unseen – because physically absent – ­fellows. Hence, “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (6). What is so well portrayed in this form of civic communion is the “imagined linkage” (33) derived from two forms of print-shaped “imagining which first flowered in Europe in the eighteenth century: the novel and the newspaper” (Anderson, Imagined, 24–5). The first cultural fruits of print’s flowering were for Anderson new or changed “apprehensions of time” (22). For the novel, like the newspaper, had created a new sense of time that was no longer vertical – directed towards eternity – but horizontal, “transverse, cross-time,” in the way it was “marked not by prefiguring and fulfilment, but by temporal coincidence, and m ­ easured by clock and calendar” (24). In effect, Anderson credits the local reportage of eighteenth-century newspapers and the aesthetics of nineteenth-century realist novels with having created a unique awareness of us, here and now. By his lights, such imagining had not been available to previous cultural systems, such as the “religiously imagined community,” which had depended on a sacred script or “truth-language” like “Church Latin, Qur’anic Arabic, or Examination Chinese” (14) to make its members feel the “simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present” (24). The older cultural system of “the dynastic realm” had always been organized “around a high centre,” its “legitimacy deriv[ing] from divinity, not from populations” (19). What the novel and newspaper supposedly substituted in their place was the powerful image of “a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time.” Here, Anderson says, “is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history” (26). Thus, the “decline of sacred communities, languages, and lineages” (22), hastened by new media forms, fed a slow growth of the popularly ­governed nation. While my thinking about the nation continues to be shaped by Anderson’s pioneering work, I share the concerns of other scholars of

20 See my chapter 1: 38–42.

33093_Williams.indd 436

2022-09-01 16:54



A Dialectic of Presence and Absence 437

early modern nationalism who find its historical origins in the sixteenth, not the eighteenth, century. Richard Helgerson, among others,21 has explored a variety of competing discourses of nationalism in the Elizabethan era, while Victoria Kahn22 posits this “late sixteenth-century sense of nation” to have been “supplemented” and transformed “by the new discourse of the law of nature and of nations” growing out of Hugo Grotius’s On the Law of War and Peace (1625). Conversely, Anderson’s secular bias toward the Enlightenment ­origins of nationalism both ignores and excludes the religious martyrologies of Foxe and the “sacred” poetry of Milton from nation-building ­functions of the novel. It also shrinks “the Commonwealth of the Puritans” to one passing comment about “new reading publics” having emerged from the “coalition between Protestantism and print-­ capitalism,” that soon made “cheap popular editions” (40) widely available. But the seventeenth-century earthquake that shook the ­dynastic realm of the Stuart kings and led to a short-lived English republic had already shaken the “sacred community” of conservative Presbyterians like Denzil Hollis and Sir Philip Stapleton of the “Rump” Parliament, as well as nominally republican Puritans like Oliver Cromwell and his son-in-law Henry Ireton. In the resulting struggle of various factions for power, the Revolution was fatally compromised. The political result was not a healthy English Republic but another Tower of Babel, the point of Milton’s reference to a “mightie Hunter” in book 12 of Paradise Lost, where the archangel Michael envisions an English Nimrod like Cromwell, “whom like Ambition joyns / with him or under him to tyrannize.”23 In consequence, Milton reminds us of our pressing need to reread and rethink republican history, as well as the political evolution of English law, through the lens of both a ­humanist jurisprudence and a humanist historiography. Throughout this book, I have portrayed that political earthquake as a tectonic shift produced by what Henrich terms a new culture of “Lutheran” reading, but which is more accurately represented, I think,

21 Among these others, I single out Greenfeld, Nationalism (1992); Kahn, Wayward Contracts (2004); Stevens, “How Milton’s Nationalism,” 273–301; Stevens, “Milton and National Identity,” 342–63; and Stevens, “Milton’s ‘Renunciation,’” 363–92. 22 Kahn, “Disappointed Nationalism,” 249–72. 23 Paradise Lost 12.39–9; see also Mercurius Politicus 98 (22 April 1652): 1538, to which issue Milton likely contributed, even after having been sacked as the newsbook’s licenser.

33093_Williams.indd 437

2022-09-01 16:54

438

The Communion of the Book

as a revolutionary mode of sacramental reading spawned by Erasmus; a new mode of historiographical reading inspired by Bruni; and a unique mode of juridical reading pioneered by Guillaume Budé. Each of these modes of reading would pose an existential threat to the twinned ­ideologies of universal Christendom and sacral monarchy, what Anderson called “the dynastic realm” (19). But, as I have shown ­elsewhere, a “religious” poem like Paradise Lost was just as capable as a prose novel of engendering a sense of us, here and now in narrative form where time was not in the least “empty” in Anderson’s sense. Sacredly charged or not, the temporalities of Paradise Lost were still evocative of us, here and now in the “republican” speeches of Satan that parsed Milton’s revolutionary tract The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates; in the ­doubled images of Lucifer-Cromwell in Paradise Lost, drawn from the flood of Leveller pamphlets and Marchamont Nedham’s newsbooks; in the “Grand Consult’s” hellish restaging of the Army’s constitutional debates at Putney in the autumn of 1647; in the colloquy in Heaven where God challenges the Son to resist the totalitarian politics of Calvin’s imagined paradise; and not least, in the poem’s initial ­portrait of Adam and Eve, so memorably evocative of Lilburne’s image of the paradisal couple in his postscript to Free-Mans Freedome.24 Even God’s public forms of address in Paradise Lost evolve in a significantly ­republican direction, starting from the language of an absolute monarch and ­moving, ­ultimately, toward the “People” in “assembly,”25 giving readers an uncanny sense of “temporal coincidence” in both the English Republic and in “eternity.” Above all, those created beings (both angelic and human) who were first freed from the divine substance by a liberal deity in Paradise Lost were left free at their creation to interpret the divine word for themselves, and to claim their familial rights expressed in it.26 Every character in Paradise Lost, that is to say, is dramatically situated in the position of a reader within the poem, much as Jesus in Paradise Regain’d and Samson and the Chorus are cast in the role of readers in both works. More specifically in Paradise Lost, the pervasive presence of liberal language in almost every book of the poem recalls a host of Leveller writings, as well as the weekly newsbooks of that wittily ironic Leveller sympathizer 24 Lilburne, Free-Mans Freedome Vindicated (23 June 1646), 11. See above, 276–7. 25 For God’s changing modes of address, see Milton’s Leveller God, 166, 300, 308, 325. 26 See chapter 9, “God and Matter,” in Milton’s Leveller God, 231–48.

33093_Williams.indd 438

2022-09-01 16:54



A Dialectic of Presence and Absence 439

and friend to John Milton, the English Ovid, Marchamont Nedham. So extensive revision is required of Anderson’s notion that the nation had to be imagined in terms of “empty, homogeneous time,” and even then, only after the era of “sacred communities” had supposedly ended. This was the basis of my claim in the “Introduction” to Milton’s Leveller God, that the poet’s “audience” was, and is still “called on to perform the same action that the narrative performs – of gathering a community of silent readers into a new community of equals mediated by the Word” (27).27 Much the same thing is true of Milton’s last two poems. Satan’s confusion in Paradise Regain’d, over “what Kingdom, / Real or Allegoric” the Son’s political acts of reading may “portend” (4.389–90) is most telling, since he knows that martyrdom to the truth of the Book is not going to end in state power, at least not any time soon. Indeed, it is the virtual presence of such a “kingdom” that he fails to grasp, together with the levelling nature of the Incarnation that remains beyond the ken of a former Prince of Angels. While Helgerson cautions that the “imagined community” of readers need not “coincide with the state” (266) to be “real,” there is a deeper doubt in Satan’s question about the “other speaking” of allegory, a doubt related to his refusal to believe that the Word could also speak the world into being. In a poem where Jesus becomes “the Word of the Father” through right-reading of the Book, as well as a pattern for Foxe’s novel mode of civic communion, it is difficult to distinguish between “Real” and “Allegoric,” particularly when the poem’s internal readers extend such forms of “other speaking” in their own acts of reading. But it is because the Real Presence of “the Word” had now shifted location in the change of medium from oral Mass to printed Book that both the Church and State were forced to evolve toward the modern world (if in varying degrees) over the last seven centuries. What began as an “imaginary communion” grew in time into “imagined communities” made up of several types of readers, each with a unique and ground-breaking mode of reading. In this emergent form of “mass

27 In his omnibus review, Lowell Gallagher remarks of Milton’s Leveller God that the book “shows how John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments supplied Milton with ‘the definitive print model of how readers can be gathered – in their own acts of “laborious gathering” – into a “Leveller” community of equals’” (261–2), a recognition that appeared to invite an expanded argument along these lines. If not, a belated mea culpa.

33093_Williams.indd 439

2022-09-01 16:54

440

The Communion of the Book

communication,” the “older, hierarchical oral culture” was now “superseded by the thoughtways and values of a modern democratic culture mediated by the printed word.”28 Simply put, the invention of the disruptive new technology of printing began, in this sacramental mode of reading encouraged by Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, to underwrite a new and revolutionary culture of religious choice and doctrinal freedom. And participants in this “imagined community” increasingly demanded the freedom to choose their rulers, as well as their religion.29 Similarly, new ways of reading history, whether in Milton’s History of Britain or in Samson Agonistes, created a haunting sense of the nation’s tragedy in the collapse of the English Revolution. Whereas a sacramental reading of the trials of Foxe’s martyrs, and of Milton’s Jesus, was predicated on the “Real Presence” through internalization of the reading practices of the Son, Milton’s humanist reading of British history did not point to recovery, but to the tragedy of another “Roman” republic. Likewise, his classical reading of the biblical Samson was predicated, through a mode of Euripidean irony, on absence, allowing both for dramatic distance and for ironic detachment from the tragic hero. But what survives the biting ironies of Samson and the corrosive effects of his failure, as opposed to the immediacy of the Word in the brief epic, is the absent presence of the nation itself. Much as astronomers have learned, or developed tools, to read the dimming of light from a distant star as evidence of an invisible, yet still present transiting planet, readers of Samson’s tragedy are asked to detect the nation’s occluded presence in the blaze of his demise. Samson may have lost the “Divine Light” that is only reaching us now; but no reader needs to share in Samson’s ­blindness. Although the ironies of his tragedy keep the “invisible nation” at a distance, that distance can still be closed by careful reading, and through acceptance of the hero’s failures as potentially our own, thus redeeming the failure of others to locate their place in the narrative by finding a place for ourselves. Much as Athenian audiences of Bacchae were left to absorb the lost presence of the polis in the tragedy of Cadmus and the catastrophe of Thebes, readers of Samson Agonistes are left to detect new and other worlds hidden in the fall of the Republic, and to recognize the shadow of the nation yet waiting in the eclipse.

28 See Milton’s Leveller God, 471n39. 29 See Henrich, 332–59. He and I are in full agreement on this key point.

33093_Williams.indd 440

2022-09-01 16:54



A Dialectic of Presence and Absence 441

In sum, a “novel” theology of the flesh made Word, and a Euripidean tragedy of the nation’s “Deliverer” continue, through a dialectic of absence and presence, to animate this broader “imagined community” of English-language readers. And so, on one continent or another, in widely distant times and places, readers would eventually come to ­recognize the unseen presence of the nation inviting them to commune as one.

33093_Williams.indd 441

2022-09-01 16:54

33093_Williams.indd 442

2022-09-01 16:54

Works Cited

Achinstein, Sharon. Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. – Milton and the Revolutionary Reader. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. – “Samson Agonistes and the Drama of Dissent.” Milton Studies 33 (1996): 133–58. Adams, Matthew. Teaching Classics in English Schools, 1500–1840. Newcastle, uk: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015. Amer, Karim, and Jehane Drefous. The Great Hack. Produced by The Othrs: 2019. Distributed by Netflix, 2019. Andersen, Jennifer, and Elizabeth Sauer. “Current Trends in the History of Reading.” Books and Readers in Early Modern England, Material Studies. Ed. Andersen and Sauer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. 1–20 Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 1983. rev. ed. London & New York: Verso, 1991. Anderson, Janna Quitney, and Lee Rainie. “Millennials Will Benefit and Suffer due to Their Hyperconnected Lives.” Imagining the Internet, V. Pew Research, 29 February 2012. 1–36. Accessed 14 March 2022. https:// www.pewresearch.org/internet/2012/02/29/millennials-will-benefitand-suffer-due-to-their-hyperconnected-lives-2/. Anderson, Thomas P., and Ryan Netzley, “Introduction.” Acts of Reading: Interpretations, Reading Practices, and the Idea of the Book in John Foxe’s ‘Actes and Monuments.’ Ed. Anderson and Netzley. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010. 11–30. Anonymous. “Certaine Observations Upon the Tryall of Leiut. Col, John Lilburne.” 1 December 1649: 1–18. Accessed 13 May 2021. ProQuest.

33093_Williams.indd 443

2022-09-01 16:54

444

Works Cited

Anonymous. Regal Tyrannie discovered. 6 January 1647: 1–108. ProQuest. Anonymous. Vox Plebis. 19 November 1646: 1–68. ProQuest. Arcadi, James M. “Recent Philosophical Work on the Doctrine of the Eucharist.” Philosophy Compass 11, no. 7 (2016): 402–12. Accessed 26 June 2021. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12334. Aristotle. On Poetics. Trans. Seth Benardete and Michael Davis. South Bend, Indiana: St Augustine’s Press, 2002. – Poetics. Trans. with introduction by Anthony Kenny. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1962. Bale, Henry. The Firste Examinacion of the worthy seruant of God, Mastres Anne Askew. 1546. Accessed 16 June 2019. http://eebo.chadwyck.com.uml. idm.oclc.org. Barker, Francis. The Culture of Violence: Tragedy and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1993. Baron, Sabrina A. “Licensing Readers, Licensing Authorities in Seventeenth-Century England.” Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies. Ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. 217–42. Berman, Harold J. Law and Revolution, II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformation on the Western Legal Tradition. Cambridge, ma & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. Bilton, Nick. “Trump’s Biggest Lie? The Size of His Twitter Following.” Vanity Fair, 4 August 2016. Accessed 1 October 2021. http://www. vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/trumps-biggest-lie-the-size-of-histwitter-following. Bingham, Jonathan. “Erasmus and Holbein, a 17th Century Printer’s ­Ill-Executed Gift to Us.” 9 May 2017. Rare Books Curator, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah. Accessed 1 May 2021. https://openbook.lib.utah.edu/?s=erasmus&search=Go. Black, Robert. “Benedetto Accolti and the Beginnings of Humanist Historiography.” English Historical Review 96, no. 378 (1981): 36–58. Blair, Ann. “Managing Information.” The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book. Ed. James Raven. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 169–94. Bodet, Gerald P. “Sir Edward Coke’s Third Institutes: A Primer for Treason Defendants.” University of Toronto Law Journal 20, no. 4 (1970): 469–77.

33093_Williams.indd 444

2022-09-01 16:54



Works Cited 445

Boswell, Jackson Campbell. A Catalogue of the Remains of John Milton’s Library and an Annotated Reconstruction of Milton’s Library and Ancillary Readings. New York & London: Garland, 1975. Brailsford, H.N. The Levellers and the English Revolution. Ed. Christopher Hill. London: Cresset Press, 1961. Bredin, Hugh. “Roman Jakobson on Metaphor and Metonymy.” Philosophy and Literature 8, no. 1 (1984): 89–103. Accessed 19 May 2021. https:// doi.org/10.1353/phl.1984.0056. Breitenberg, Mark. “The Flesh Made Word: Foxe’s ‘Acts and Monuments.’” Renaissance and Reformation 13, no. 3 (1989): 381–407. Brett, G.S. A History of Psychology, vol. 2: Medieval and Early Modern Period. London: G. Allen, 1921. Brinton, Crane. The Anatomy of Revolution. New York: W. Norton, 1938. Bruni, Leonardo. History of the Florentine People (1442). Vol. 1. Edited and translated by James Hankins. Cambridge: The I Tatti Renasissance Library, Harvard University Press, 2001. – “Oration for the Funeral of Nanni Strozzi.” Florentine Political Writings from Petrarch to Machiavelli. Ed. Mark Jurdjevic, Natasha Piano, and John P. McCormick. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 135–40. Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. 1860. Trans. S.G.C. Middlemore, 1878. Mineola, ny: Dover, 2010. Buringh, Eltjo, and Jan Luiten van Zanden. “Charting the ‘Rise of the West’: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe: A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries.” Journal of  Economic History 69, no. 2 (2009): 409–45. Buxton, William J. “The Rise of McLuhanism, the Loss of Innis-Sense: Rethinking the Origins of the Toronto School of Communication.” Canadian Journal of Communication 37 (2012): 577–93. Byrne, Philippa. “More Than Roman Salt: Sallust, Caesar and Cato in Early Thirteenth-Century Moral Thought.” Ceræa: An Australian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 5 (2018): 1–26. Cable, Lana. “Licensing Metaphor: Parker, Marvell, and the Debate over Conscience.” Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies. Ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. 243–60. Calvin, John. “Short Treatise on the Holy Supper of Our Lord Jesus Christ.” Tracts and Treatises on the Doctrine and Worship of the Church. Vol. 2.

33093_Williams.indd 445

2022-09-01 16:54

446

Works Cited

Trans. Henry Beveridge. Grand Rapids, mi: William B. Eerdmann Company, 1958. – The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Vol. 2. Trans. Henry Beveridge. Peabody, ma: Hendrickson, 2008. Campbell, Gordon. A Milton Chronology. Basingstoke, Hampshire, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997. Carey, John. Milton. London: Evans Brothers, 1969. – “A Work in Praise of Terrorism? September 11 and Samson Agonistes.” Times Literary Supplement, 6 September 2002, 15–16. Carlyle, Thomas. Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches with Elucidations. Vol. 2. 1845. Rpt. London: Chapman and Hall, 1897. Cave, Terence. The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. Celenza, Christopher S. “Lorenzo Valla’s Radical Philology: The ‘Preface’ to the Annotations to the New Testament in Context.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42, no. 2 (2012): 365–94. Accessed 8 October 2021. https://doi10.1215/10829636-1571912. – Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer. London: Reaktion Books, 2017. – “Petrarch, Latin, and Italian Renaissance Latinity.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35, no. 3 (2005): 509–36. Charles I, King of England. “The Full proceedings of the High Court of Justice against King Charles.” London: Shears, 1654. 1–110. Accessed 27 January 2021. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/ A40615.0001.001?view=toc. Clanchy, M.T. From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307. 2nd. ed. Oxford & Cambridge, uk: Blackwell, 1993. Clark, Donald L. John Milton at St. Paul’s School: A Study of Ancient Rhetoric in English Renaissance Education. 1948. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964. Clement, Richard W. “Medieval and Renaissance Book Production.” 1997. Library Faculty & Staff Publications. Paper 10. 1–25. Utah State University Libraries. Accessed 26 May 2021. https://digitalcommons. usu.edu/lib_pubs/10. Clements, Robert J. “Literary Theory and Criticism in Scaliger’s ‘Poemata.’” Studies in Philology 51, no. 4 (1954): 561–84. Accessed 9 June 2021. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4173114. Coke, Sir Edward. The Reports of Sir Edward Coke. Vol. 4. Ed. John Henry Thomas and John Farquhar Fraser. London: J. Butterworth & Son, 1826.

33093_Williams.indd 446

2022-09-01 16:54



Works Cited 447

Collard, C. “J.J. Scaliger’s Euripidean Marginalia.” Classical Quarterly 24, no. 2 (1974): 242–9. Accessed 9 June 2021. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/638485. Comparetti, Domenico. Vergil in the Middle Ages. Trans. E.F.M. Benecke. London: Swan Sonnenschein; New York: MacMillan, 1895. Conley, Thomas M. “No Way to Pick a Fight: A Note on J.C. Scaliger’s First Oratio Contra Erasmum.” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 26, no. 3 (2008): 255–65. Accessed 9 June 2021. https://www.jstor.org/­ stable/10.1525/rh.2008.26.3.255. Connell, William J. “Italian Renaissance Historical Narrative.” Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. 3: 1400–1800. Ed. José Rabasa et al. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 347–63. Coogan, Robert. “Petrarch’s Liber sine nomine and a Vision of Rome in the Reformation.” Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 7, no. 1(1983): 1–12. Accessed 14 October 2021. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/43444396. Copenhaver, Brian P. “Valla Our Contemporary: Philosophy and Philology.” Journal of the History of Ideas 66, no. 4 (2005): 507–25. Accessed 8 August 2020. jstor, www.jstor.org/stable/3654345. Covington, Sarah. “Foxe’s Villainous Tribunals: Reading the Judicial Examinations in Actes and Monuments.” Acts of Reading: Interpretations, Reading Practices, and the Idea of the Book in John Foxe’s “Actes and Monuments.” Ed. Thomas P. Anderson and Ryan Netzley. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010. 176–207. Crawforth, Hannah. “The Politics of Greek Tragedy in Samson Agonistes.” The Seventeenth Century 31, no. 2 (2016): 239–69. Accessed 6 August 2019. https://doi10.1080/0268117X.2016.1193286. Crostini, Barbara. “Byzantium.” The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book. Ed. James Raven. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 54–83. Cummings, Brian. “Erasmus, Sacred Literature, and Literary Theory.” Erasmus on Literature. Ed. Mark Vessey. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. 48–62. Darbishire, Helen. The Early Lives of Milton. Ed. with Introduction by Helen Darbishire. 1932. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965. Davidson, Hilda Ellis. The Lost Beliefs of Northern Europe. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Dehaene, Stanislas. Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read. 2009. New York: Penguin, 2010.

33093_Williams.indd 447

2022-09-01 16:54

448

Works Cited

Deheane, Stanislas; Laurent Cohen, José Morais, and Régine Kolinsky. “Illiterate to Literate: Behavioural and Cerebral Changes Induced by Reading Acquisition.” Nature Reviews: Neuroscience 16, no. 4 (2015): ­234–44. Accessed 23 February 2021. https://www.nature.com/ reviews/neuro. Deibert, Ronald J. Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. den Haan, Annet. “Valla on Biblical Scholarship: Metadiscourse at the Court of Nicholas V.” Renæssanceforum of the Nordic Journal of Renaissance Studies 11 (2016): 23–39. Accessed 14 October 2021. https://www. renaessanceforum.dk. Dobranski, Stephen. Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. – “Text and Context for Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes.” Altering Eyes: New Perspectives on ‘Samson Agonistes.’ Ed. Mark R. Kelley and Joseph Wittreich. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2002. 30–53. Durant, David M., and Tony Horava. “The Future of Reading and Academic Libraries.” Libraries and the Academy 15, no. 1 (January 2015): 5–27. Accessed 24 March 2022. https://doi:10.1353/pla.2015.0013. Durkheim, Émile. Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: le système totemique en Australie. Paris: Alcan, 1912. Eden, Kathy. “The Parable of Sincere and Sophistical Discourse in the Ratio.” Erasmus on Literature. Ed. Mark Vessey. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. 93–107. – The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Eisenstein, Elizabeth. “ahr Forum: Reply.” American Historical Review 107, no. 1 (2002): 126–8. – The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. – “An Unacknowledged Revolution Revisited.” American Historical Review 107, no. 1 (2002): 87–105. Eisner, Martin. “In the Labyrinth of the Library: Petrarch’s Cicero, Dante’s Virgil, and the Historiography of the Renaissance.” Renaissance Quarterly 67, no. 3 (2014): 755–90. Accessed 11 June 2021. https:// www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/678774.

33093_Williams.indd 448

2022-09-01 16:54



Works Cited 449

Ellis, Erik Z.D. “Petrarch’s Africa I–IV: A Translation and Commentary.” ma thesis. Baylor University, 2007. Accessed 2 August 2021. http://hdl. handle.net/2104/5144. Encyclopedia Britannica. Online edition. Accessed 4 June 2019. https:// www. britannica.com/topic/Huguenot. Erasmus, Desiderius. “Annotations on the New Testament.” Erasmus on the New Testament. Ed. Robert D. Sider. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. 198–288. – Collected Works of Erasmus. Vols. 25–6. Ed. J.K. Sowards. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. – Collected Works of Erasmus. Vol. 27. Ed. A.H.T. Levi. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986. – Collected Works of Erasmus. Vol. 61: Patristic Scholarship: The Edition of St. Jerome. Trans. and annotated by James F. Brady and John C. Olin. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. – Collected Works of Erasmus, Literary and Educational Writings. Vols. 3 & 4. Ed. J.K. Sowards. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985. – Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 595 to 841; 1517 to 1518. Collected Works of Erasmus. Vol. 5. Trans. R.A.B. Mynors and D.F.S. Thomason. Annotated by Peter G. Bietenholz. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. – Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1802 to 1925, March–December 1527. Collected Works of Erasmus. Vol. 13. Trans. Charles Fantazzi. Annotated by James K. Farge. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. – De ratione studii (1511); On the Method of Study. Trans. Brian McGregor. The Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and Educational Writings 2, Vol. 24. Ed. Craig R. Thompson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978. – Enchiridion, Collected Works of Erasmus: Spiritualia. Vol. 66. Ed. John W. O’Malley. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. – “Paraclesis.” Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 41: The New Testament Scholarship of Erasmus: An Introduction with Erasmus’ Prefaces and Ancillary Writings. Ed. Robert D. Sider. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. – “Paraphrase on the Gospels and Acts.” Erasmus on the New Testament. Ed. Robert D. Sider. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. 72–145. – “The Philosophy of Christ.” Erasmus on the New Testament. Ed. Robert D.Sider. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. 23–37. – “The Ratio verae theologiae.” Erasmus on Literature. Ed. Mark Vessey from the translation of Robert D. Sider. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. 114–246.

33093_Williams.indd 449

2022-09-01 16:54

450

Works Cited

Escobedo, Andrew. “The Invisible Nation: Church, State, and Schism in Milton’s England.” Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England. Ed. David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. 173–201. Eucharisticum Mysterium: Instruction on Eucharistic Worship. Accessed 14 January 2021. https://adoremus.org/1967/05/ eucharisticum-mysterium/. Euripides. The Bacchae. Trans. William Arrowsmith. Euripides V, 3rd. ed. Ed. Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Moss. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. – Heracles. Trans. William Arrowsmith. Euripides III. Ed. David Greene and Richmond Lattimore. 3rd. edition. Ed. Mark Griffith & Glenn W. Most. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. – Hippolytus. Trans. by Richmond Lattimore. Euripides I. Ed. Mark Griffith, Glenn W. Most, David Grene, and Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. – Medea. Trans. by Richmond Lattimore. Euripides I. Ed. Mark Griffith, Glenn W. Most, David Grene, and Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. – The Suppliant Women. Trans. Frank William Jones. Euripides III. Ed. Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin. L’Apparition du livre. Paris, 1958. Trans. David Gerard. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, ­1450–1800. London: New Left Books, 1976. Festa, Thomas. The End of Learning: Milton and Education. New York & London: Routledge, 2006. Finegan, Jack. Encountering New Testament Manuscripts: A Working Introduction to Textual Criticism. Grand Rapids, mi: Eerdmans, 1974. Firth, Charles Harding. “Lilburne, John.” Dictionary of National Biography, 1885–1900, vol. 33: 245–6. Firth, Joseph et al., “The ‘Online Brain’: How the Internet May Be Changing Our Cognition.” World Psychiatry 18, no. 2 (2019): 119–29. Accessed 2 October 2021. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ full/10.1002/wps.20617. Fischer, Steven Roger. A History of Reading. 2003. New edition. London, uk: Reaktion Books, 2019. Fisher, John. The English Works of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. Collected by John E.B. Mayor for the Early English Text Society. Extra Series 27.

33093_Williams.indd 450

2022-09-01 16:54



Works Cited 451

London: N. Trübner, 1876. 388–428. Accessed 29 May 2019. https:// books.google.ca. Fitzgerald, Robert, trans. Aeneid: Virgil. New York: Vintage, 1985. Flannagan, Roy, ed. The Riverside Milton. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Ford, Philip. “Homer in the French Renaissance.” Renaissance Quarterly 59, no.1 (2008): 1–28. Accessed 8 June 2021. https://www.jstor.org/­ stable/10.1353/ren.2008.0150. Fox, George. “A Declaration from the Harmless & Innocent People of God, called quakers” (21 Day of the 11 Month, 1660), 1–8. Accessed 27 November 2021. ProQuest. Foxe, John. The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online [tamo] (1563); 2nd ed. (1570); 3rd. ed. (1576); 4th ed. (1583): hri Online Publication, Sheffield, 2011. Accessed 17 June 2019. https://www.johnfoxe.org. Foxley, Rachel. “Freedom of Conscience and the Agreements of the People.” The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution. Ed. Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon. Basingstoke Hampshire, uk and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 117–28. Fryde, Edmund. “The Beginnings of Italian Humanist Historiography: The ‘New Cicero’ of Leonardo Bruni.” English Historical Review 95, no. 376 (July 1980): 533–52. https://www-jstor-org.uml.idm.oclc.org/ stable/568056. Fudge, Thomas A. “Zelivsky’s Head: Memory and New Martyrs among the Hussites.” The Bohemian Reformation and Religious Practice, vol. 6: Papers from the Sixth International Symposium on the Bohemian Reformation and Religious Practice. Prague: Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, 2007. 111–32. Accessed 10 March 2021. http://www.brrp. org/proceedings/brrp6/fudge.pdf. Fulton, Thomas. Historical Milton: Manuscript, Print, and Political Culture in Revolutionary England. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. Gagné, Renaud, and Marianne Govers Hopman. “Introduction.” Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy. Ed. Gagné and Hopman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 1–34. Gallagher, Lowell. “Recent Studies in the English Renaissance.” Studies in English Literature 58, no. 1 (2018): 219–77. García-Valdecasas, Miguel. “Psychology and Mind in Aquinas.” History of Psychiatry 16, no. 3 (2011): 292–310. 10.1177/0957154X05051920.

33093_Williams.indd 451

2022-09-01 16:54

452

Works Cited

hal Id: hal-00570823. Accessed 3 March 2022. https://hal.archives-­ ouvertes.fr/hal-00570823. Garner, Roberta. “Jacob Burckhardt as a Theorist of Modernity: Reading the Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy.” Sociological Theory 8, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 48–57. Accessed 26 January 2022. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/202194. Gentles, Ian. “The Agreements of the People and Their Political Contexts, 1647–1649.” The Putney Debates. Ed. Michael Mendle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 148–74. – “The New Model Army and the Constitutional Crisis of the Late 1640s.” The Agreements of the People. Ed. Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon. Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 139–62. Gerrish, B.A. Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993. Gibb, M.A. John Lilburne The Leveller: A Christian Democrat. London: Lindsay Drummond, 1947. Gibson, Edmund. “The Life of Sir Henry Spelman, Kt.” Oxford: Awnsham & John Churchill, 1698. Accessed 14 May 2020. ProQuest. Goering, Joseph. “The Scholastic Turn (1100–1500): Penitential Theology and Law in the Schools.” A New History of Penance. Ed. Abigail Firey. Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2008. 219–37. Grafton, Anthony. “Humanist Philologies: Texts, Antiquities, and Their Transformations in the Early Modern West.” World Philology. Ed. Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman, and Ku-Ming Kevin Chang. Cambridge, ma & London, uk: Harvard University Press, 2015. 154–77, 410–13. Graves, Michael P. Preaching the Inward Light: Early Quaker Rhetoric. Waco, tx: Baylor University Press, 2009. Green, Ian. Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. Greenberg, Janelle. “The Confessor’s Laws and the Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution.” English Historical Review 104, no. 412 (1989): 611–37. Accessed 16 January 2021. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/570378. Greenberg, Lynne A. “Dalila’s ‘feminine assaults’: The Gendering and Engendering of Crime in Samson Agonistes.” Altering Eyes: New Perspectives on ‘Samson Agonistes.’ Ed. Mark R. Kelley and Joseph Wittreich. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2002. 192–219.

33093_Williams.indd 452

2022-09-01 16:54



Works Cited 453

Greenfeld, Liah. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1992. Gregg, Pauline. Free-born John: A Biography of John Lilburne. London & Toronto: George G. Harrap, 1961. Gregory, Tobias. “The Political Messages of Samson Agonistes.” Studies in English Literature 50, no. 1 (2010): 175–203. Griffith, Mark, and Glenn W. Most. “Bacchae, The: Introduction.” Euripides V. Trans. William Arrowsmith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 13–18. – “How the Plays Were Originally Staged.” Euripides V, 3rd ed. Ed. Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 7–10. Hacken, Richard. “Worship of the Forest: An Historical Overview.” Academia Letters 1 (January 2022): 1–5. Accessed 2 February 2022. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL4643. Haigh, Christopher. English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Hainsworth, Peter, ed. and trans. The Essential Petrarch. Indianapolis/ Cambridge: Hackett, 2010. Hale, John K. “Milton’s Euripides Marginalia: Their Significance for Milton Studies.” Milton Studies 27 (1991): 23–35. – Milton’s Languages: The Impact of Multilingualism on Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Halkin, Léon-Ernest. Erasmus: A Critical Biography. Trans. John Tonkin. Oxford, uk & Cambridge, ma: Blackwell, 1993. Haller, William. The Elect Nation: The Meaning and Relevance of Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs.’ New York & Evanston: Harper & Row, 1963. Hamilton, Alistair. “Humanists and the Bible.” The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism. Ed. Jill Kraye. Cambridge University Press, 1996. 100–17. Hankins, James. “Introduction.” Leonardo Bruni, History of the Florentine People. Vol. 1. Edited and translated by Hankins. Cambridge: The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Harvard University Press, 2001. ix–xxi. – “Renaissance Humanism and Historiography Today.” Palgrave Advances in Renaissance Historiography. Ed. Jonathan Woolfson. Basingstoke, Hampshire & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 73–96. Hardie, Philip. “Fama in Milton: Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes.” Rumour and Renown: Representations of Fama in Western Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 542–69.

33093_Williams.indd 453

2022-09-01 16:54

454

Works Cited

Harrison, Peter. “‘I believe because it is absurd’: Christianity’s First Meme.” Aeon. 9 April 2018. https://aeon.co/ideas/i-believe-because-it-is-absurdchristianitys-first-meme. Havelock, Eric. Preface to Plato. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1963. Helgerson, Richard. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Henderson, Francis. “Drafting the Officers’ Agreement of the People, 1648–49: A Reappraisal.” The “Agreements of the People,” the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution. Ed. Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon. Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 163–94. Henrich, Joseph. The weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. Heyer, Paul, and David Crowley. “Introduction.” The Bias of Communication, 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. xxv–xxxvi. Hicks, Philip. “The Ancient Historians in Britain.” The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature. Vol. 3. Ed. David Hopkins and Charles Martindale. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 569–91. Hill, Christopher. The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries. 1984. Harmondsworth, Middlesex and New York: Penguin Books, 1985. Hobson, Nicholas M. et al. “The Psychology of Rituals: An Integrative Review and Process-Based Framework.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 20, no. 3 (2018): 260–84. Accessed 21 January 2021. https:// doi.org/10.1177%2F1088868317734944. Homer. Iliad. Translated by Richmond Lattimore, 1951. Chicago & London: Phoenix Edition, 1961. Houston, R.A. Literacy in Early Modern Europe: Culture and Education ­1500–1800. London & New York: Longman, 1988. Huizinga, Johan. Erasmus and the Age of Reformation. 1924. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1984. Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon. History of the Rebellion. 1702–04. Selected and edited with introduction and notes by Paul Seaward. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Hyma, Albert. The Life of Desiderius Erasmus. Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1972. Innis, Harold. The Bias of Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951.

33093_Williams.indd 454

2022-09-01 16:54



Works Cited 455

– Empire and Communications. Oxford: Clarendon, 1950. Jackson, Richard A. “Elective Kingship and Consensus Populi in SixteenthCentury France.” Journal of Modern History 44, no. 2 (1972): 155–71. Jakobson, Roman. “The Metaphoric and the Metonymic Poles.” Fundamentals of Language, 2nd rev. ed. Ed. Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle. 1956. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1971. 90–6. James, Leonie. “‘I was no “master of this work” but a servant to it’? William Laud, Charles I and the Making of Scottish Ecclesiastical Policy, 1634–6.” Historical Research 90, no. 249 (2017): 506–25. Accessed 1 July 2019. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2281.12184. Jenkins, Hugh. “Shrugging Off the Norman Yoke: Milton’s History of Britain and the Levellers.” English Literary Renaissance 29, no. 3 (1999): 306–25. Johns, Adrian. “How to Acknowledge a Revolution.” American Historical Review 107, no. 1 (2002): 106–25. – The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Kahn, Victoria. “Disappointed Nationalism: Milton in the Context of Seventeenth-Century Debates about the Nation-State.” Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England. Ed. David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens. University of Toronto Press, 2008. 249–72. – Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2004. Kallendorf, Craig, ed. Landmark Essays on Rhetoric and Literature. Vol. 16. London: Taylor and Francis, 1999. Kearney, James. The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Keeble, N.H. The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. – The Restoration: England in the 1660s. Oxford & Malden, ma: Blackwell, 2002. Kelley, Donald R. “Civil Science in the Renaissance: Jurisprudence Italian Style.” The Historical Journal 22, no. 4 (1979): 777–94. Accessed 25 September 2020. jstor. www.jstor.org/stable/2638687. – Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970. Kelley, Mark R. “Milton’s Euripidean Poetics of Lament.” Altering Eyes: New Perspectives on ‘Samson Agonistes.’ Ed. Mark R. Kelley and Joseph Wittreich. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2002. 132–67.

33093_Williams.indd 455

2022-09-01 16:54

456

Works Cited

Kelley, Maurice, ed. The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 6: Christian Doctrine. Trans. John Carey. New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1973. (cpw 6) Kelley, Maurice, and Samuel D. Atkins. “Milton’s Annotations of Euripides.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 60, no. 4 (1961): 680–7. Kerrigan, William. “The Irrational Coherence of Samson Agonistes.” Milton Studies 22 (1986): 217–32. Kilgour, Maggie. “Odd Couplings: Hercules and Oedipus in Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes.” Milton Studies 56 (2015): 75–113. King, John N. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. – “Guides to Reading Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.” Huntington Library Quarterly 68, nos. 1–2 (2005): 133–50. – “‘The Light of Printing’: William Tyndale, John Foxe, John Day, and Early Modern Print Culture.” Renaissance Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2001): 52–85. – “Reading Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.” Acts of Reading: Interpretations, Reading Practices, and the Idea of the Book in John Foxe’s ‘Actes and Monuments.’ Ed. Thomas P. Anderson and Ryan Netzley. Newark: U of Delaware Press, 2010. 119–35. – “Reception of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs by Eighteenth Century Readers.” anq 21, no. 2 (2008): 45–52. King, Margaret L. “A Return to the Ancient World?” The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350–1750. Vol. 2. Ed. Hamish Scott. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 3–28. Knecht, R.J. The French Wars of Religion 1559–1598. 3rd ed. Harlow, England: Longman, 2010. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. “General Introduction.” The Complete Works of John Milton, vol. 2: The 1671 Poems: ‘Paradise Regain’d’ and ‘Samson Agonistes.’ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. xix–lxxiv. – “Headnote.” The Complete Works of John Milton, vol. 2: The 1671 Poems: ‘Paradise Regain’d’ and ‘Samson Agonistes.’ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. lxxxviii–cxiv. – Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1994. – “Paradise Regained and the Politics of Martyrdom.” Modern Philology 90, no. 2 (1992): 200–19. Korpman, Matthew J. “Dan Shall Judge: The Danites and Iron Age Israel’s Connection with the Denyen Sea People.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 44, no. 3 (2020): 490–9.

33093_Williams.indd 456

2022-09-01 16:54



Works Cited 457

Krans, Jan. “Erasmus and the Text of Revelation 22:19: A Critique of Thomas Holland’s Crowned with Glory.” A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism (2011): 1–19. Accessed 3 July 2020. http://www.reltech.org/ TC/v16/Krans2011.pdf. Krouse, F. Michael. Milton’s Samson and the Christian Tradition. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press for University of Cincinnati, 1949. Kuester, Martin. Milton’s Prudent Ambiguities: Words and Signs in His Poetry and Prose. Lanham, md: University Press of America, 2009. Ledo, Jorge. “The Recovery of Freedom of Speech in the Culture of Humanists and the Communicative Origins of the Reformation.” Traditio 74 (2019): 375–422. Accessed 15 March 2021. https:// doi10.1017/tdo.2019.15. Lee, Nathaniel. Lucius Junius Brutus, Father of His Country: A Tragedy. 1681. London: G. Cawthorn, 1796. Leonard, John. “Saving the Walls: The Historical Accuracy of Milton’s Sonnet 8.” Milton Quarterly 32, no. 1 (1998): 1–6. Accessed 7 August 2019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24464961. Lewalski, Barbara K. The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography. Rev. ed. Oxford, uk, and Malden, ma: Blackwell, 2002. Lilburne, John. An Anatomy of the Lords Tyranny (9 November 1646): 1–23. – The Charters of London (18 December 1646): 1–68. – The Christian Mans Triall (12 March 1638). 1–22. Accessed 26 November 2021. ProQuest. – The Copy of a Letter (9 August 1645): 1–20. – The Engagement Vindicated and Explained (22 January 1650): 1–8. – Englands Birth-Right Justified (October 1645): 1–46. ProQuest. – Foundations of Freedom or An Agreement of the People, Proposed as a Rule for ­future Government in the Establishment of a firm and lasting peace” (10 December 1648): 1–15. – The Free-Mans Freedome Vindicated (19 June 1646): 1–12. ProQuest. – “Grand Plea of Lieut. Col. John Lilburne, Prerogative Prisoner in the Tower of London” (20 October 1647): 1–16. ProQuest. – An Impeachment of High Treason against Oliver Cromwel (10 August 1649): 1–68. – The Innocent Man’s second-Proffer, Made unto his present Adversaries (22 October 1649). Single sheet. ProQuest. – ionahs Cry out of the Whales belly (26 July 1647): 1–15. ProQuest. – The Juglers Discovered (28 September 1647): 1–12. ProQuest.

33093_Williams.indd 457

2022-09-01 16:54

458

Works Cited

– Just Defence of John Lilburn, Against such as charge him with Turbulency of Spirit (25 August 1653): 1–34. – The Just Mans Justification (10 June 1646): 1–22. ProQuest. – The Legal Fundamental Liberties of the People of England (8 June 1649). 2nd ed. (4 August 1649): 1–51. ProQuest. – Londons Liberty in Chains discovered (2 November 1646): 1–72. ProQuest. – The Oppressed mans importunate and mournfull cryes to be brought to the Barre of Iustice (28 April 1648): 1–8. – The Oppressed Mans Oppressions Declared (30 January 1647): 1–39. – The Resolved Mans Resolution (24 May 1647): 1–39. ProQuest. – The Resurrection of John Lilburne Now a Prisoner in Dover Castle (21 May 1656): 1–22. ProQuest. – Strength out of Weaknesse (30 September 1649): 1–25. – To all the Affectors and Approvers in England (17 July 1649): 1–8. – To the Hon[ble] the House of Commons now Assembled in the high Court of Parliament. 1646. Single sheet. – A True relation of the materiall passages of Lieut.Col. John Lilburnes sufferings (13 February 1646): 1–11. – Truths Victory Over Tyrants and Tyranny, Being the tryall of that Worthy Assertor of his Countreys Freedoms, Lieftenant Colonell john lilburne,­Guildhall London, Octob. 26 (16 November 1649): 1–28. ProQuest. – The Upright Mans Vindication (1 August 1653): 1–34. ProQuest. – A Worke of the Beast (18 April 1638): 1–31. ProQuest. – A Worke of the Beast, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam, 1641): 17–39. ProQuest. Lilburne, John, et al. The Picture of the Councel of State (11 April 1649): 1–24. ProQuest. Livy [Titus Livius]. Ab urbe condita libri [Books from the Founding of the City], 2.1. Trans. George Baker, The Legendary History of Rome. New York: R. Worthington,1883. Lockyer, Roger. James VI and I. London: Longman, 1998. Loewenstein, David. Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. – Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. – “The Revenge of the Saint: Radical Religion and Politics in Samson Agonistes.” Milton Studies 33 (1996): 159–80. Loewenstein, David, and Paul Stevens, eds. Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.

33093_Williams.indd 458

2022-09-01 16:54



Works Cited 459

Low, Anthony. The Blaze of Noon: A Reading of Samson Agonistes. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974. Lubac, Henri Cardinal de, S.J., Corpus Mysticum: L’Eucharistie et l’Église au Moyen Âge, 2nd ed. Paris: Aubier, 1949; Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages: Historical Survey. Trans. Gemma Simmonds, with Richard Price and Christopher Stephens. Ed. Laurence Paul Hemming and Susan Frank Parsons. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Lucan. The Civil War (Pharsalia). Translated by J.D. Duff. Loeb Classical Library 220. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1928. Ludlow, Edmund. The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894. Ed. with intro. by Charles Harding Firth. Rpt. in Scholar Select: Franklin Classics, 1982. Luther, Martin. Three Treatises. Ed. Charles M. Jacobs. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press,1947. Luther’s Works, vol. 37: Word and Sacrament. Ed. Robert H. Fischer. General Editor: Helmut T. Lehmann. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1961. Lyon, Gregory B. “Baudouin, Flacius, and the Plan for the Magdeburg Centuries.” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 2 (2003): 253–72. MacCallum, Hugh. Milton and the Sons of God: The Divine Image in Milton’s Epic Poetry. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986. MacDonald, Alan R. “James VI and I, the Church of Scotland, and British Ecclesiastical Convergence.” Historical Journal 48, no. 4 (2005): 885–903. MacLeod, Alistair. No Great Mischief. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1999. MacMillan, Margaret. War: How Conflict Shaped Us. New York: Random House, 2020. Madrigal, Alexis C. “The ‘Platform’ Excuse Is Dying.” Atlantic (11 June 2019). Accessed 31 August 2020. https://www.theatlantic. com/technology/archive/2019/06/facebook-and-youtubesplatform-excuse-dying/591466/. Maddison, R.E. “‘The King’s Cabinet Opened’: A Case Study in Pamphlet History.” Notes and Queries 211 (1966): 2–9. Mains, Brian, and Anthony Tuck, eds. Royal Grammar School, Newcastle upon Tyne: A History of the School in Its Community. London: Oriel Press, 1986. Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

33093_Williams.indd 459

2022-09-01 16:54

460

Works Cited

Marchesi, Simone. “Petrarch’s Philological Epic.” Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works. Ed. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 113–30. Margalith, Othniel. “The Legends of Samson/Heracles.” Vetus Testamentum 37, no. 1 (1987): 63–70. Accessed 19 March 2021. https://www.jstor. org/stable/1517811?seq=1. Margolis, Oren. “The Quattrocento Charlemagne: Franco-Florentine Relations and the Politics of an Icon.” The Charlemagne Legend in Medieval Latin Texts. Ed. William J. Purkis and Matthew Gabriele. Cambridge, uk: D.S. Brewer, 2016. 203–30. Marvin, Carolyn, and David W. Ingle. “Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64, no. 4 (1996): 767–80. Accessed 25 January 2021. https://doi. org/10.1093/jaarel/LXIV.4.767. Mascetti, Yaakov. “The Bible in the Renaissance-Scholarship in the Middle East.” Liber Annus 67 (2017): 219–235. Accessed 8 March 2021. https:// www.academia.edu/36108386/. Masson, David. The Life of John Milton, vol. 1: 1608–39. 1875. Gloucester, ma: Peter Smith, 1965. Mastronarde, Donald J. The Art of Euripides: Dramatic Technique and Social Context. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. – “Stiblinus’ Prefaces and Arguments on Euripides (1562).” Accessed 13 October 2020. https://ucbclassics.dreamhosters.com/djm/stiblinus/ stiblinusMain.html. Mazzotti, Giuseppe F. “Petrarch’s Epistolary Epic.” Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works. Ed. Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 309–19. McCarthy, B. Eugene. “Defoe, Milton, and Heresy.” Milton Newsletter 3, no. 4  (1969): 71–3. McDonald, Henry. “A Long Day’s Dying: Tragic Ambiguity in Samson Agonistes.” Milton Studies 27 (1991): 263–83. McDonnell, Kilian. John Calvin, the Church, and the Eucharist. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1967. McDowell, Nicholas. “Milton’s Euripides and the Superior Rationality of the Heathen.” Seventeenth Century 31, no. 2 (2016): 215–37. Accessed 6 August 2019. https://doi10.1080/0268117X.2016.1193288. McKenzie, D.F., and Maureen Bell. A Chronology and Calendar of Documents Relating to the London Book Trade 1641–1700, vol. 1: 1641–1670. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

33093_Williams.indd 460

2022-09-01 16:54



Works Cited 461

McLaughlin, M.L. “Humanist Concepts of Renaissance and Middle Ages in the Tre- and Quattrocento.” Renaissance Studies 2, no. 2 (1988): ­131–42. Accessed 23 July 2021. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24409389. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962. – Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. McMullen, Janet L. “Metaphors and Morality: Are Digital Media Epistemologically Compatible with Moral Socialization?” Accessed 31 January 2022. Academia.edu. https://www.academia.edu/12070813/. Mead, Christopher. “Mass Communication: The Eucharist and Authorship in Early Modern England.” PhD diss. University of California, Berkeley, 2015. Meyrowitz, Joshua. “Media Evolution and Cultural Change.” Handbook of Cultural Sociology. Ed. John Hall, Laura Grindstaff, and Ming-Cheng Lo. Abingdon, uk: Routledge, 2010. 52–63. Miller, Leo. “Milton’s Quarrel with Chappell: A Suggested Reconstruction.” Milton Quarterly 14, no. 3 (1980): 77–87. – “Some Inferences from Milton’s Hebrew.” Milton Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1984): 41–6. Miller, Peter N. “The ‘Antiquarianization’ of Biblical Scholarship and the London Polyglot Bible (1653–57).” Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 3 (2001): 463–82. Accessed 19 July 2021. https://jstor.org/ stable/3654151. Milton, John. Animadversions (1641). Preface by Rudolph Kirk. Notes by Rudolf Kirk, assisted by William P. Baker. The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 1: 1624–1642. Ed. Don M. Wolfe. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1953. 653–735. (cpw 1) – Areopagitica (1644). The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 2: ­1643–48. Ed. Ernest Sirluck. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959. 485-570. (cpw 2) – Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 3: 1648–1649. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1962. (cpw 3) – Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 6: Christian Doctrine. Ed. Maurice Kelley. Trans. John Carey. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973. (cpw  6) – A Defense of the English People (1651). The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 4.i: 1650–1655. Ed. Don M. Wolfe. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1966. (cpw 4.i)

33093_Williams.indd 461

2022-09-01 16:54

462

Works Cited

– The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 2nd. ed. (1644). Ed. Ernest Sirluck. cpw 2: 220–356. – Eikonoklastes (1649). cpw 3: 337–601. – The History of Britain (1670). The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 5.i: 1648–1671. Ed. French Fogle. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1971. (cpw 5.1) – “On the New Forcers of Conscience.” The Riverside Milton. Ed. Roy Flannagan. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. 265–6. – Of Reformation (1641). Preface and Notes by Don M. Wolfe and William Alfred. cpw 1:514–617. – Paradise Lost (1667). The Riverside Milton. Ed. Roy Flannagan. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. 349–710. – Paradise Regain’d (1670), in The Complete Works of John Milton, vol. 2: The 1671 Poems: ‘Paradise Regain’d’ and ‘Samson Agonistes.’ Ed. Laura Lungar Knoppers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 3–64. – The Reason of Church Government (1641). Preface and Notes by Ralph A. Haug. cpw 1:736–861. – Samson Agonistes (1670), in The Complete Works of John Milton. Vol. 2. Ed. Laura Lungar Knoppers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 65–158. – The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), cpw 3: 190–336. Mohamed, Feisal G. “Confronting Religious Violence: Milton’s Samson Agonistes.” pmla 120, no. 2 (2005): 327–40. – “Memorial, Performance, and Tragic Action in Samson Agonistes.” A New Companion to Milton. Ed. Thomas N. Corns. Chichester, uk: John Wiley & Sons, 2016. 493–502. Mommsen, Theodor E. “Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark Ages.’” Speculum 17, no. 2 (1942): 226–42. Accessed 22 July 2021. https://www. jstor.org/stable/2856364. Montgomery, H.C. “Some Later Uses of the Greek Tragic Chorus.” Classical Journal 38, no. 3 (1942): 148–60. Mueller, Janet. “The Figure and the Ground: Samson as Hero of London Nonconformity, 1662–1667.” Milton and the Terms of Liberty. Ed. Graham Parry and Joad Raymond. Cambridge: D. Brewer, 2002. 137–62. Müller, Lothar. Weiße Magie. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2012. Trans. Jessica Spengler. White Magic: The Age of Paper. Cambridge, uk: Polity Press, 2014. Mynors, R.A.B., and D.F.S. Thomason, eds. The Correspondence of Erasmus, vol. 5: Letters 595 to 841; 1517 to 1518. Trans. by Mynors and Thomason.

33093_Williams.indd 462

2022-09-01 16:54



Works Cited 463

Annotated by Peter G. Bietenholz. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. Nauert, Charles G. Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Nedham, Marchamont. Mercurius Britanicus, no. 108 (8 December 1645): 953–9. – Mercurius Politicus 98 (22 April 1652): 1537–52. Newton, Casey. “Everything You Need to Know about Section 230.” The Verge (29 December 2020). Accessed 6 January 2021. https://www. theverge.com/21273768/section-230-explained-internet-speechlaw-definition-guide-free-moderation. Newton, Thomas. “The Life of Milton.” The Poetical Works of John Milton. With notes of various authors, vol. 1 (1761). The poetical works of John Milton. With notes of various authors. By Thomas Newton, D.D. in three volumes. Volume 1. London, MDCCLXI. [1761]. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale. University of Manitoba. 6 August 2019. Norbrook, David. “Euripides, Milton, and Christian Doctrine.” Milton Quarterly 29, no. 2 (1995): 37–41. – Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. O’Malley, John W, ed. Enchiridion, Collected Works of Erasmus: Spiritualia. Vol. 66. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1992. Ong, Walter J., S.J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London & New York: Methuen, 1982. Orosius: Seven Books of History against the Pagans. Trans. with introd. by A.T. Fear. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010. Overton, Richard, with William Walwyn. A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens (7 July 1646): 1–20. ProQuest. Overty, Joanne Filippone. “The Cost of Doing Scribal Business: Prices of Manuscript Books in England, 1300–1483.” Book History 11 (2008): 1–32. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30227411. Ovid: Metamorphoses. Trans. A.D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Owen, Sue. “‘Partial tyrants’ and ‘Freeborn People’ in Lucius Junius Brutus.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 31, no. 3 (1991): 463–82. Parker, William Riley. Milton: A Biography. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968.

33093_Williams.indd 463

2022-09-01 16:54

464

Works Cited

– Milton’s Debt to Greek Tragedy in ‘Samson Agonistes.’ 1937. Hamden, CT & London: Archon Books, 1963. Partee, Charles. The Theology of John Calvin. Louisville & London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. Peacey, Jason. “The People of the Agreements: The Levellers, Civil War Radicalism and Political Participation.” The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution. Ed. Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon. Basingstoke, Hampshire, uk, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 50–75. Pepys, Samuel. Pepys’s Diary. Vol. 2. Selected and edited by Robert Latham. London: The Folio Society, 1996. Peters, Kate. Print Culture and the Early Quakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Petrarca, Francesco. Epistolae Familiares. The Essential Petrarch. Ed. and trans. with Introduction by Peter Hainsworth. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 2010. – “Petrarch’s Africa I–IV: A Translation and Commentary.” Trans. Erik Z.D. Ellis. ma thesis. Baylor University, 2007. Accessed 2 August 2021. http:// hdl.handle.net/2104/5144. – “Poems from the Canzoniere, Part I.” The Essential Petrarch. Phillips, Edward. “The Life of Mr. John Milton.” The Early Lives of Milton. Edited with Introduction by Helen Darbishire. 1932. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965. 17–34. Pocock, J.G.A. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1957. Pollard, Tanya. “Greek Playbooks and Dramatic Forms in Early Modern England.” Formal Matters: Reading the Materials of English Renaissance Literature. Ed. Allison K. Deutermann and András Kiséry. Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 2013. 99–123. Poulet, Georges. “Phenomenology of Reading.” Contemporary Literary Criticism: Modernism through Poststructuralism. Ed. Robert Con Davis. New York & London: Longman, 1986. 350–62. Price, David H. Johannes Reuchlin and the Campaign to Destroy Jewish Books. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Prosser, Peter E. “Church History’s Biggest Hoax: Renaissance Scholarship Proved Fatal for One of the Medieval Papacy’s Favorite Claims.” Christian History (November 2001): 35.

33093_Williams.indd 464

2022-09-01 16:54



Works Cited 465

Ptacek, Melissa. “Durkheim’s Two Theories of Sacrifice: Ritual, Social Change and Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse.” Durkheimian Studies / Études Durkheimiennes 21 (2015): 75–96. Accessed 25 January 2021. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26356653. Radzinowicz, Mary Ann. “The Distinctive Tragedy of Samson Agonistes.” Milton Studies 17 (1983): 249–80. – Toward Samson Agonistes: The Growth of Milton’s Mind. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1978. Rajan, Balachandra. “To Which Is Added Samson Agonistes.” The Prison and the Pinnacle. Ed. B. Rajan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973. 82–110. Raven, James, and Goran Proot. “Renaissance and Reformation.” The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book. Ed. James Raven. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 137–68. Rees, John. The Leveller Revolution: Radical Political Organization in England, 1640–1650. London and New York: Verso, 2016. Regn, Gerhard, and Bernhard Huss. “Petrarch’s Rome: The History of the Africa and the Renaissance Project.” Modern Language Notes 124, no. 1 (2009): 86–102. Accessed 25 July 2021. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/29734482. Reist, Kathrin. “Writing the Relic, Fetishising the Written: John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.” Reformation & Renaissance Review 12, nos. 2–3 (2010): 283–305. Revard, Stella P. “The Politics of Milton’s Hercules.” Milton Studies 32 (1995): 217–45. Roberts, Colin H., and T.C. Skeat. The Birth of the Codex. London: Published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press, 1983. Robinson, James H. Readings in European History. Boston & London: Ginn, 1904. Robson, Eleanor. “The Ancient World.” The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book. Ed. James Raven. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 26–53. Rodgers, C.P. “Humanism, History and the Common Law.” Journal of Legal History 6, no. 2 (1985): 129–56. Accessed 8 July 2020. https:// doi10.1080/01440368508530834. Rogers, John. “The Secret of Samson Agonistes.” Milton Studies 33 (1996): 111–32. Rowe, Christopher. “The New Library of Babel? Borges, Digitisation and the Myth of the Universal Library.” First Monday 18, no. 2

33093_Williams.indd 465

2022-09-01 16:54

466

Works Cited

(4 February 2013): 1–9. Accessed 25 March 2022. http://firstmonday. org/ojs/index.php/fm/rt/printerFriendly/3237/3416. Rudrum, Alan. “Milton Scholarship and the Agon over Samson Agonistes.” Literature Compass 1 (2004): 1–24. Rummel, Erika. “The Reception of Erasmus’ Adages in Sixteenth-Century England.” Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 18, no. 2 (1994): 19–30. Accessed 22 December 2020. jstor. www.jstor.org/ stable/43444899. Rumrich, John P. “Samson and the Excluded Middle.” Altering Eyes: New Perspectives on ‘Samson Agonistes.’ Ed. Mark R. Kelley and Joseph Wittreich. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2002. 307–32. Rundle, David. “La Redécouverte des Manuscrits.” Encyclopédie pour une Histoire Nouvelle de l’Europe. Accessed 5 May 2020. https://ehne.fr/­ article/humanisme-europeen/heritages-culturels-de-leurope/ la-redecouverte-des-manuscrits. – “Medieval Western Europe.” The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book. Ed. James Raven. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 113–36. Rust, Jennifer R. “Reforming the Mystical Body: From Mass to Martyr in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments.” English Literary History 80, no. 3 (2013): 627–59. Salmasius, Defensio Regia (1649). The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 4: 1650–1655, Part 2. Ed. Don M. Wolfe. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966. Samuel, Irene. “Samson Agonistes as Tragedy.” Calm of Mind: Tercentennial Essays on ‘Paradise Regained’ and ‘Samson Agonistes.’ Ed. Joseph Anthony Wittreich. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971. 235–57. Sasse, Hermann. This Is My Body: Luther’s Contention for the Real Presence in the Sacrament of the Altar. 1959. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2001. Schnapp, Jeffrey T. “Books Transformed.” The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book. Ed. James Raven. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 369–93. Seaberg, R.B. “The Norman Conquest and the Common Law: The Levellers and the Argument from Continuity.” Historical Review 24, no. 4 (1981): 791–806. Shawcross, John T. “The Genres of Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes: The Wisdom of their Joint Publication.” Milton Studies 17 (1983): 225–48.

33093_Williams.indd 466

2022-09-01 16:54



Works Cited 467

– “Misreading Milton.” Milton Studies 33 (1996): 181–203. Sheridan, Mark. “Placing Interpretation, Ancient and Modern, in a Historical Perspective,” 1–37. Accessed 23 September 2021. https://www.academia.edu/24754774/Placing_Interpretation_Ancient_ and_Modern_in_a_Historical_Perspective. Shuger, Debora Kuller. The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity. Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1994. Sider, Robert D. “Introduction.” Erasmus on the New Testament. Ed. Robert D. Sider. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. 3–22. – “Paraclesis, or ‘The Philosophy of Christ.’” Erasmus on the New Testament. 23–37. – “Preface.” The New Testament Scholarship of Erasmus: An Introduction with Erasmus’ Prefaces and Ancillary Writings. Ed. Robert D. Sider. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. Sirluck, Ernest, ed. Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 2: 1643–48. New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1959. (cpw 2). – “The History of Licensing,” cpw 2: 153–70. Sloane, Thomas O. “The Disintegration of Humanist Rhetoric.” Landmark Essays on Rhetoric and Literature. Vol. 16. Ed. Craig Kallendorf. London: Taylor and Francis, 2017. 146–66. – Donne, Milton, and the End of Humanist Rhetoric. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Small, Gary, and Gigi Vorgan. iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Human Mind. 2008. New York: Harper, 2009. Small, Gary W., Teena D. Moody, Prabha Siddarth, and Susan Y. Brookheimer. “Your Brain on Google: Patterns of Cerebral Activation During Internet Searching.” American Journal of Geriatric Psychology 17, no. 2 (February 2009): 116-26. Accessed 1 February 2022. https://doi. org/10.1097/JGP.0b013e3181953a02. Smalley, Beryl. “Sallust in the Middle Ages.” Classical Influences on European Culture A.D. 500 to 1500. Ed. R.R. Bolgar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. 165–76. The Speeches and Prayers of some of the Late King’s Judges. (1660). ProQuest. Stallybrass, Peter. “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible.” Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies. Ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. 42–79.

33093_Williams.indd 467

2022-09-01 16:54

468

Works Cited

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Lorenzo Valla,” rev. version 22 May 2017. Accessed 8 August 2020. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ lorenzo-valla/#LifWor. Stein, Arnold. Heroic Knowledge: An Interpretation of ‘Paradise Regained’ and ‘Samson Agonistes.’ Hamden, ct: Archon Books, 1965. Stevens, Paul. “How Milton’s Nationalism Works: Globalization and the Possibilities of Positive Nationalism.” Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England. Ed. David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. 273–301. – “Milton and National Identity.” The Oxford Handbook of Milton. Ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 342–63. – “Milton’s ‘Renunciation’ of Cromwell: The Problem of Raleigh’s ‘Cabinet-Council.’” Modern Philology 98, no. 3 (2001): 363–92. Stiblinus, Gasparus. “In Medeam Praefatio.” Trans. Michelangelo Macchiarella. Accessed 14 October 2020. https://ucbclassics. dreamhosters.com/djm/stiblinus/stiblinusMedea.html. – “Praefatio et Argumentum Gaspari Stiblini, in Hippolytum.” Ed. Donald Mastronarde. Accessed 14 October 2020. https:// ucbclassics.dreamhosters.com/djm/stiblinus/stiblinusHippolytus.html. – “Praefatio Gaspari Stiblini in Euripidis Bacchae.” Trans. Meghan Bowers. Stiblinus’ Prefaces and Arguments on Euripides (1562). Ed. Donald Mastronarde. Accessed 15 October 2020. https://ucbclassics. dreamhosters.com/djm/stiblinus/stiblinusBacchae.html. Stoll, Abraham. “Milton Stages Cherbury: Revelation and Polytheism in Samson Agonistes.” Altering Eyes: New Perspectives on ‘Samson Agonistes.’ Ed. Mark R. Kelley and Joseph Wittreich. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2002. 281–306 Suetonius 1: “The Life of Augustus.” Trans. J.C. Rolfe. Loeb Classical Library 31. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1914. Accessed 13 August 2021. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/ Texts/Suetonius/12Caesars/Augustus*.html#23. Sullivan, Margaret. “This Was the Week America Lost the War on Misinformation.” Washington Post, 30 July 2020. Accessed 23 August 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/thiswas-the-week-america-lost-the-war-on-misinformation/2020/07/30/ d8359e2e-d257-11ea-9038-af089b63ac21_story.html.

33093_Williams.indd 468

2022-09-01 16:54



Works Cited 469

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. 1726. Ed. Louis A. Landa. Boston: Riverside Press, 1960. Swift, Laura. “Conflicting Identities in the Euripidean Chorus.” Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy. Ed. R. Gagné and M.G. Hopman. Cambridge University Press, 2013. 130–54. Sypniewski, Holly M., and Anne MacMaster. “Double Motivation and the Ambiguity of ‘Ungodly Deeds’: Euripides’s ‘Medea’ and Milton’s ‘Samson Agonistes.’” Milton Quarterly 44, no. 3 (2010): 145–67. Tacitus. The Annals of Imperial Rome. Trans. Michael Grant, 1956. London: Folio Society, 2006. Taft, Barbara. “From Reading to Whitehall: Ireton’s Journey.” The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers and the English State. Ed. Michael Mendle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 175–93. Terchetti, Mario. “Regicide or Tyrannicide? The ‘Assassination’ of Charles I in the Controversy between Milton and Salmasius, with a Comparative Analysis of the Two Trials (1649 and 1660).” Études épistémè: Revue de ­littérature et de civilisation 15 (2009): 101–16. Accessed 27 January 2021. https://doi.org/10.4000/episteme.709. Thurloe State Papers, xxvii (4 June [July], 1655). Accessed 25 August 2017. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/thurloe-papers/vol3/pp498-513#h30020. Timberlake, P.W. “Milton and Euripides.” Essays in Dramatic Literature. Ed. Hardin Craig. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1935. 315–40. Turner, James. Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014. Valla, Lorenzo. Elegantarium Latinae Linguae. Apud Seb. Gryphium, 1556. Warburg Institute Library, University of London. Accessed 10 August 2020. https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/pdf/nah3375b2640013.pdf. Varley, Frederick John. Oliver Cromwell’s Latter End. London: Chapman & Hall, 1939. Vernon, Elliot. “‘A Firme and Present Peace; Upon Grounds of Common Right and Freedome’: The Debate on the Agreements of the People and the Crisis of the Constitution, 1647–49.” The Agreements of the People. Ed. Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon. Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 195–217. Vessey, Mark. “Introduction.” Erasmus on Literature: His Ratio of 1518/1519. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. 3–15.

33093_Williams.indd 469

2022-09-01 16:54

470

Works Cited

– “The Ratio in Erasmus’ Life and Work to 1519.” Erasmus on Literature. 21–47. Virgil, vol. 1: Aeneid 1–6. Trans. H. Rushton Fairclough. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1940. von Maltzahn, Nicholas. Milton’s ‘History of Britain’: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Vosoughi, Soroush; Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral, “The Spread of True and False News Online.” Science 359 (9 March 2018): 1146–51. Accessed 28 November 2020. https://doi10.1126/science.aap9559. Waite, P.B. “The Struggle of Prerogative and Common Law in the Reign of James I.” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science / Revue ­canadienne d’Economique et de Science politique 25, no. 2 (1959): 144–52. Accessed 7 July 2020. http://www.jstor.com/stable/139057. Walwyn, William. Englands weeping spectacle, or The sad condition of Lieutenant Colonell John Lilburne (29 January 1648): 1–12 Walwyn, William, and Richard Overton. A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens (7 July 1646): 1–20. ProQuest. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 1905. Trans. Talcott Parsons and Anthony Giddens. London & Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1930. Wegener, W.J. “‘That the practice of arms is the most excellent declare the statues of valiant men’: the Luccan War and Florentine Political Ideology in Paintings by Uccello and Castagno.” Renaissance Studies 7, no. 2 (1993): 129–67. Accessed 30 March 2020. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/24412280. White, Graham. “Luther’s Views on Language.” Journal of Literature and Theology 3, no. 2 (1989): 188–218. Accessed 2 June 2021. https:// academic.oup.com/article/3/21/188/1101855. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Whitford, David M. “‘Erasmus Openeth the Way before Luther’: Revisiting Humanism’s Influence on ‘The Ninety-Five Theses’ and the Early Luther.” Church History and Religious Culture 96, no. 4 (2016): 516–40. Accessed 30 April 2021. jstor, www.jstor.org/stable/26382865. Williams, David. “Film and the Mechanization of Time in the Myth of the Great War Canon.” English Studies in Canada 41, nos. 2–3 (2015): 165–190. – Imagined Nations: Reflections on Media in Canadian Fiction. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003.

33093_Williams.indd 470

2022-09-01 16:54



Works Cited 471

– Media, Memory, and the First World War. Montreal & Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2009. – Milton’s Leveller God. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017. – “On Reading Darwin after Milton: Towards a Literary Ecology.” Canadian Ecologies beyond Environmentalism: Culture, Media, Art, Ethnicities. Ed. Alessandra Boller et al. Trier, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2020. 15–32. – “Spectres of Time: Seeing Ghosts in Will Bird’s And We Go On and Abel Gance’s J’accuse.” Canadian Literature 219 (2013): 113–30. Wither, George. Fides-Anglicana. Or, A Plea for the Publick-Faith of these Nations, Lately pawned, forfeited, and violated by some of their former Trustees. London, 1660. ProQuest. Witt, Ronald G. The Two Latin Cultures and the Foundation of Renaissance Humanism in Medieval Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Wittreich, Joseph. Interpreting Samson Agonistes. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1986. – Shifting Contexts: Reinterpreting Samson Agonistes. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2002. – “Still Nearly Anonymous: Christos Paschon.” Milton Quarterly 36, no. 3 (2002): 193–8. – “Thought Colliding with Thought.” Altering Eyes: New Perspectives on ‘Samson Agonistes.’ Ed. Mark R. Kelley and Joseph Wittreich. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2002. 98–131. Wolfe, Don M. “Repression and Resistance.” The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 1: 1624–42. New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1953. ­41–5. (cpw 1). Wood, Derek. Exiled from Light: Divine Law, Morality, and Violence in Milton’s ‘Samson Agonistes.’ Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Woodhouse, A.S.P., ed. Puritanism and Liberty: Being the Army Debates ­(1647–49) from The Clark Manuscripts with Supplementary Documents. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1938. – “The Tragic Effect in Samson Agonistes.” University of Toronto Quarterly 28 (1959): 205–23 Woolrych, Austin. “Dating Milton’s History of Britain.” Historical Journal 36, no. 4 (1993): 929–43.

33093_Williams.indd 471

2022-09-01 16:54

472

Works Cited

– “The Debates from the Perspective of the Army.” The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers and the English State. Ed. Michael Mendle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 53–78. Worden, Blair. “The Levellers in History and Memory, c. 1660–1960.” The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers and the English State. Ed. Michael Mendle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 256–82. – Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. – “Milton, Samson Agonistes, and the Restoration.” Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature, Drama, History. Ed. Gerald Maclean. Cambridge University Press, 1995. 111–36. Zanchin, Giorgio, and Monica Panetto. “The Recognition of the Remains of Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), (1304–1374).” Vesalius (December, 2010), Suppl: 34–40. pmid: 21657106. Accessed 22 October 2021. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21657106/.

33093_Williams.indd 472

2022-09-01 16:54

Index

Achinstein, Sharon, 237–8, 243n27, 261n72; English literacy on eve of Civil War, 71; Lilburne’s “­national” jury, 263; Lilburne’s use of Coke’s legal theories, ­261–2; print as “agent of change,” 245; print as new p ­ ublic sphere, 245–6, 259, 270, 281; Samson’s Restoration ­contexts, 354 Adams, Matthew: humanist ­curriculum at St Paul’s School, 54n75, 55 Aeschylus: chorus as conserver of oral tradition, 402–4; Prometheus Bound, 334, 339n82, 368, 388, 388n61 Alexandria, library of, 15–18, 47nn52–3, 124n30, 132, 295n129 Andersen, Jennifer, and Elizabeth Sauer, 14, 67; diversity of 17th-­ century reading practices, 56 Anderson, Benedict, xiv n8, 6; ­capitalism and Reformation, 76; ­decline of sacred languages, 435; nation conceived in cultural forms, 434–6; new apprehensions of time, 436–7; newspaper and novel, 437; print and ­vernaculars, 75

33093_Williams.indd 473

Anderson, J.Q., and L. Rainie: ­memory rewired as hyperlinks, xi n3 Anderson, Thomas P., and Ryan Netzley, 53; participatory readers in the early modern era, 48n57 Aquinas, Thomas, 46, 119, 143; on doctrine of sacraments, 71n2; on faculty psychology, 39n32 Arcadi, James M.: four main tenets of Eucharist, 71n2 Aristotle, 10, 375; contribution to ­faculty psychology, 39n32; complex tragic plots, 381; criticism of Euripidean chorus, 406; hamartia or “tragic flaw,” 362; medieval (Latin) Aristotle, 40–1, 50, 51n63, 52, 54, 66n114, 125, 254, 372; Oedipus Rex, 381; Poetics not printed until sixteenth century, 375n40; Politics, 288; primacy of plot in t­ ragedy, 376, 387; tragedy’s break from choral origins, 406n93; tragic effect, 387; tragic knowledge (anagnorisis), 317, 317n48, 355, 381, 383; tragic ­reversal (peripeteia), 317, 381; ­tragic unity, 341n90, 370 Askew, Anne: as Foxean martyr, 166; gender subversion of, 20,

2022-09-01 16:54

474

Index

183n45; heresy trial of, 174–83; indexical reading of, 176–82; use of metaphor, 20, 176–8, 182, 182n43, 183, 215; use of sermo Christi, 20, 178n40 Aubrey, John: Minutes of Life of John Milton, 122–3 Augustine of Hippo, 46, 130; analysis of Pauline tropes, 151; City of God, 304n19; Confessions, 61n91, 139; Secretum, 63n102; silent reading, 139; small acquaintance with Greek, 150 Augustus, Caesar, xv; battle of Actium, 36n27, 62, 62n98; ­246–7; loss of legions in Germania, 65, 65n110, 87, 87n47 Austin, J.L.: speech-act theory, 115n15, 189 Babylonian captivity: of Jews, 73, 123n28; of papacy, 4, 61–2, 61n94, 284 Bale, John, 164n11; Examination of Anne Askew, 174–5, 174n34 Bastwick, John: author of Letany, 235, 235n15; martyrdom of, 231 Berman, Harold: antinomianism and Peasant Revolt, 265–6; Bodin and absolute monarchy, 257n60; Christian foundations of Western law, 277n97; Commons’ abolition of lordly prerogative, 246n33; and English legal history, 262–6; German revolution of 16th century, 265; Justice Coke and “artificial” reason, 264n78; Luther’s rejection of Church ­hierarchy, 80–1; myth of common law’s continuity, 264–5, 273; ­prerogative courts, 230–1

33093_Williams.indd 474

Bèze (Beza), Théodore de: first ­rector of Genevan academy, 163; ­translation of Psalms, 79–80 Blair, Ann: print and indexical ­reading, 28; and information ­overload, 69n119 blood sacrifice, 86; Durkheim’s theory of, 88; in Church teachings, 88–92; in Teutoburg Forest, 87; metonymic relation to Mass, 89–90, 114–19; and parchment scriptures, 88–9, 92–3, 95–6, 104; relation to blood ties, 86n45, 90– 1; tribal psychology of, 86n44, 87n48, 88, 92 Bodin, Jean: and absolute monarchy, 256, 257n60; influence on James Stuart’s Trew Law, 262 Boniface (Wynfrid): bible as icon, ­88–9, 91, 91n66; chopping of Donar’s Oak, 87–8, 87n49, 87n51; founder of German book ­production, 91n64 Bonner, Bishop Edmund, 168; as ­forger of Askew’s confession, 175; as inquisitor, 169–70, 176, 193, 215; as metaphor-challenged, 170, 176, 193, 215; metonymic thinking of, 169n26, 177, 215n90 Bracciolini, Poggio, 7, 11, 33, 107; discovery of De rerum natura, 27; discovery of Institutio oratoria, 27n6, 53n69; literary wanderings amid Roman ruins, 59n84; objections to Valla’s biblical philology, 11n19, 59n84; student of Greek, 10 Bradshaw, John: appeal to ­impersonal law, 250–1; body ­exhumed and desecrated, 333; claim of elective monarchy, 249n45; Lilburne’s s­ olicitor

2022-09-01 16:54



Index 475

against Lords, 293n125; Milton’s friend, 294n126; presided over Lilburne’s interrogation, ­291–3; president of Council of State, 291; president of High Court of Justice, 248; rebuked by Charles I at his trial, 248 Breitenberg, Mark: Foxe’s Actes as open text, 190; martyr’s body made logos, 191 Browne, Sir Thomas: dangers of ­readerly enthusiasm, 38 Bruni, Leonardo: disciple of Salutati, 9–10; first modern historian, 11; funeral oration for Nanni Strozzi, 310; panegyric on Florentine ­republic, 10n13; as papal secretary, 10, 63; as scribal humanist, 11, 32, 59; secular historiography of, 8, 10–11, 11n16; student of Greek, 10, 307 Bruni, Leonardo, writings of – History of Florentine People, xv n12, 8; abruptness of Roman Empire’s end, 309–10; critical methods of, 306–8, 306n24; and Etruscan ­history, 304–5; falsity of Holy Roman Empire, 309n32; ­historiographical principles of, 11n16; as Livian h ­ istory, 305–6; modern ­periodization in, 309, 309n30; as philological history, 306–8; as r­ epublican history, ­304–5, 311n34; recovery after a “dark age,” 309n31, 310; ­resemblance to chronicle history, 312n37; Sallustian historiography of, 305, 307; second caesura of, 309–10; use of archival sources in, 307–8, 307n27; virtue of popular m ­ agistracy, 310, 311n34

33093_Williams.indd 475

Brutus, Lucius Junius: and impersonal law, 247; use of in English Exclusion Crisis, 248 Budé, Guillaume, 32, 78n28; ­anachronisms of Justinian law, 252–3; Annotations on 24 Books of Pandects, 252 Bunyan, John: imprisonment of, 194n62, 195 Burckhardt, Jacob, 4; corruption of medieval Church, 6, 9, 12; ­cultural nationalism of Italian humanists, 4–5, 6–7, 8, 15, 23, 58n80, 59nn83–4, 67, 110, 435n18; cult of fame, 8, 8n11; ­dismissal of Petrarch’s Africa, 59n85; humanism as a secular ­challenge to religion, 4–7, 58–9; ­inability of humanists to escape ­sacrament, 9, 12, 13n27, 14n30, 110, 145n84; modernizing effects of Renaissance, 5, 7–8, 10, 58n80; “nation” as cultural artifact, 6, 60, 435n18; Petrarch as modern man, 5, 7; poet as “­national herald,” 5–6; poet as template for State, 5–6; secular humanism, 6, 7, 8, 10, 13n27, 14n30, 58–9, 66; secular ­individualism, 5, 9, 14n30, 58n80; State as “a work of art,” 6–7, 6n9, 60, 69, 435n18 Burton, Henry, 233; martyrdom of, 231 Cable, Lana: metaphor’s “­world-making” power, 155 Calvin, John: attack on doctrine of Transubstantiation, 80–1; Brief Treatise on Last Supper, 78, 80; ­creation of Genevan Academy, 163; Huguenot Confession of

2022-09-01 16:54

476

Index

Faith, 79; Institutes, 78, 148n91; Mass as a “magical trick,” 81; ­reverence for Roman law, 253; Venerable Company of Pastors, 79 Casaubon, Méric: dangers of ­metaphor, 38, 46n50, 155n104; reading and the passions, 38 Cathar reformers, 100, 433, 433n11 Caxton, William: Golden Legend, 100 Celenza, Christopher S.: clan rivalries in Italian Renaissance, 84n41; Petrarch’s “Latinity,” 63– 4, 64n106; Petrarch’s philological methods, 15–17; Petrarch’s ­quarrel with Aristotelians, 52; Petrarch’s ­reconstruction of Livy, 15–17, 62n97, 123–4; Petrarch’s sense of exile as source of his “Italian-ness,” 60n86; Valla’s “Latinity,” 65, 65n107 Charlemagne: and myth of political continuity, 60, 308, 308n28 Charles I, King: claim to be defender of people’s liberties, 250; claim to martyr’s role, 246; coronation oath to uphold laws of Edward, 258; ­denial of elective monarchy, 250; Eikon Basilike, 259, 260; growth of episcopal powers in reign of, 230, 230nn5–6; harshness of Church courts, 230; King’s Cabinet Opened, 19n25; treason trial of, 264, 266–7 Charles II, King: broken promise to spare Vane, 196; Conventicle Act of 1664, 195; and Exclusion Crisis, 248; secret bargain to return his kingdoms to Rome, 196; Treaty of Dover, 195–6 Chrysoloras, Manuel: taught Greek in Florence, 10, 307 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 59n82; Ad Atticum, 113n8, 135, 136n67;

33093_Williams.indd 476

Epistolae ad Familiares, 54n70, 59; as model of Latin style, 34n21, 54n70, 136; rhetoric of intimacy, 113n8, 135–6, 136n67; Somnium Scipionis, 303n14 Cistercian Order: abbots ­democratically elected, 85 Clanchy, M.T.: Book of Hours, 66; on humanist elitism, 66, 106–7; rise of literacy in 12th century, 72, ­72nn9–10; obstacles to literacy, 72; warrior society’s oral “superiority,” 358n128 Clarendon Code, 195, 397; penalties for nonconformists, 195 Clarke, Deborah: Milton’s daughter reciting Euripides, 375 Clement V, Pope, 10n15, 61n94 Coke, Chief Justice Sir Edward: ­acceptance of absolute monarchy, 262; attempt to control prerogative courts, 250; authority of jury in criminal cases, 263; challenge to arbitrary power of James I, 280; common law and “ancient ­constitution,” 273; common-law precedents, 280; doctrine of “­artificial” reason, 264, 264n78; false continuity of common law, 20, 264; immemorial origins of common law, 21, 257–8, 262, 264, 273; Institutes, 254, 261, 261n72, 273, 276; laws of Edward and common law, 249–50, 249n45, 257, 258, 260, 264; subjection of monarch to common law, 256, 262; “­supremacy” of common law, 250 Colet, John: encouraged Greek ­studies, 54, 370; founder (with Erasmus) of St Paul’s School, 54; statutes of St Paul’s School, 54n75

2022-09-01 16:54



Index 477

common-law courts: procedures ­compared with prerogative courts, 230–1 communication, mode of: class ­origins of parchment codex, 94; cultural adaptation to changes in, 108, 128; domestication of paper products, 103–4; epochal changes in, xi, xiv–xv, 69, 69n120; ­levelling effects of paper, 104; mechanization of papermaking, 102–3; monopolies of, 35–6, 36n26, 37, 55, 55n76, 75–6, 76n20, 128; open codex vs closed roll, 94, 94nn77– 8; paper and l­etter sizing, 104; paper and ­vernacularization, 104; paper’s arrival in Italy, 102; paper’s effect on cultural psychology, 100–4; paper’s “erasure” of Word made flesh, 104; paper’s origin and transmission, 101–3; papermaking and mass readership, 105–11; and problem of distance, xiii; ritual enchantment vs private reading, 95; slave-class format of Christian codex, 94; ­system in crisis in Gutenberg era, 95– 100; twinning of print with paper, 92n70, 108. See also ­parchment codex Complutensian Polyglot Bible, 131n55 Connell, William J.: Bruni’s critical historiography, 303–4, 306–7; ­historiographical revolution of Renaissance, 301; Petrarch ­compared with Bruni, 309–10 Conventicle Act (1664), 195; (1670), 195 Covington, Sarah: courtroom as Foxean stage, 167; fabricated ­authority of Foxean examiners, 173; Foxe’s performative

33093_Williams.indd 477

play-texts, 168, 189, 233; gendered ­subversion of authority, 173n30; performative speech acts in Actes, 193–4 Cranmer, Archbishop Thomas: and Arian union of wills, 219–20; ­author of Book of Common Prayer, 204; skilled in Scholastic method, 186–7, 208; speaking in manner of scripture, 211n87, 218n95; trial of, 185–7, 211–14, 216–18, 219–20 Crawforth, Hannah: Euripides’s plays as “paeans to democracy,” 373n30; Hippolytus and Samson, 385; ironic prehistory of Manoa’s final words, 422–3; Milton’s annotations of Stephanus edition, 376; Milton’s direct use of Stiblinus, 418n107; “political” character of Stiblinus’s commentaries on Euripides, 380, 396; Stiblinus’s place in Stephanus edition, 371n19, 373n30 Crespin, Jean, 34; Actes des martyrs (1564), 433; Histoire des martyrs (1554), 34, 433; mutual influence on Foxe, 433n13; martyrs writing in blood, 168n23 Cromwell, Oliver, 194, 277n97, 316n47; as actor in Ludlow Memoirs, 319–26; body exhumed and desecrated, 333; “break them in pieces,” 290; conflict of M.P. Cromwell with Lt-General Cromwell, 267, 279; as conservative revolutionary, 269, 279; defeat of Agreement of People, 261, 266, 279–80, 289, 292–3, 361–2; ­dismissal of Nominated Assembly, 325; dissolution of Rump, 336; ­letter after victory at Dunbar, ­322–3; letter after victory at

2022-09-01 16:54

478

Index

Worcester, 323–4; as Lilburne’s ­jailer, 261, 293–4, 335–40; Lilburne’s “impeachment” of, 251; as Milton’s English “Nimrod,” 437; political coup of, 194, 251, 318, 323, 437; portrayed as miles gloriosus in Samson, 345–7 Crostini, Barbara: Christian codex as cultural critique, 94; Christian codex as icon, 142n79 Cujas, Jacques, 21, 252n51, 253, ­256–7, 262 Cummings, Brian, 42n39; Erasmian metaphor as translation, 153; Erasmian theology as literary ­interpretation, 45; Erasmus’s ­reader as own priest, 149 Cuthbert (Tunstall), Bishop of London: contemporary praise for Erasmus’s Adages, 32 Dante, 46, 61n92, 302n9; Divine Comedy as supersession of Virgil’s Aeneid, 60n89; on eternal character of Latin language, 127n43; salvific view of history, 302n11 Davidson, Hilda Ellis: blood sacrifice in pagan Europe, 86nn44–5; Germanic and Roman ­equivalencies, 87nn50–1; pagan and Christian cosmologies, 87nn52–3, 88n54, 88n56 Day, John, 122; image of immanent God, 159–60; publisher of Actes and patron of Foxe, 164; Tetragram­ maton vs Corpus Christi, 165–6 Dehaene, Stanislas: brain’s face-­ recognition area, viii–ix; brain’s letterbox area, viii, ix, 432n9; ­culture’s imprint on brain, ix–x; literacy and brain rewiring, vii, x;

33093_Williams.indd 478

neuronal recycling hypothesis, viii; reading as listening with one’s eyes, 141 Derrida, Jacques: hors du texte, 183; metaphysics of presence, 22n40, 98 digital book: epistemological ­continuity of, xvi; new ontology of, xvi digital media: cognitive effects of, xv–xviii, xviii n28, xix n31, xx, xx nn32–4, xxi, xxi n37; digital ­exteriorizing of memory, xx n32; digital “outering” of personality vs inwardness of reading, 142n79, 197n65; erosion of democratic legitimacy, xviii n26, xxi nn36–7; ex nihilo ontology of, xxi n35, 69n120; and the nation, xv–xvi. See also communication, mode of Dobranski, Stephen: early modern readers as active, 32n15, 46n49, 47n51; early modern readers as ­authors, 32n15, 47n51, 48n57; Lilburne’s “omissa,” 299n4; ­medieval four-fold reading, 46; Milton’s Omissa, 299–301, 300n5; Omissa and collaborative readers, 300, 301 Dominican Order, 125; anti-­ Semitism of, 161n8; campaign against Reuchlin, 74, 161; heresy threat against Erasmus, 161; plunging e­nrolments in theological faculties, 161; Scholastic outlook of, 18, 125 Driver, Alice: heresy trial of, 17, ­171–4; implied semiotics of, 171; metaphoric habits of mind, 173n29; social subversion of, 174n31, 235–6 Durkheim, Émile: social functions of blood sacrifice, 88

2022-09-01 16:54



Index 479

Eden, Kathy: Petrarch’s discovery of Cicero’s Ad Atticum, 135; Petrarch’s Epistulae ad Familiares as grammar school text, 54n70; rhetoric of intimacy, 113n8, 135, 135n64 Edward the Confessor: laws and Norman Conquest, 249, 249n45, 250, 257, 258, 264 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 12, 25; alliance of print with Christianity, 26; ­criticized for “techno-­ determinism,” 27n7, 30; critique of Adrian Johns, 33–5; defence of “print c­ ulture,” 28–9; economics of ­printing vs copying, 101n93; ­effects of print uniformity, 27–8, 35; ­effects of standardization, 27, 29; print and the nation-state, 435; print compared with scribal ­culture, 25–7; printing and ­authorship, 28–9; printing and cult of personality, 29; printing and permanent Renaissance, 26, 26n5; printing and textual corruption, 27; printshop as new site of knowledge production, 26; revolutionary return to Greek and Hebrew, 58 Elizabeth I, Queen: as English Constantine in Foxe’s Actes, 204– 5; excommunicated, 205; Foxe’s ­implicit criticisms of, 205–6; ­toleration in her Church courts, 229–30 English jurisprudence: common-law courts, 230–1, 235, 236, 250–1, 257–8; familial likenesses with European law, 257; fictional ­continuity of common law, 258; Magna Carta and common law, 255–6, 275; parochialism of, 251;

33093_Williams.indd 479

prerogative courts, 230–1, 235, 250, 256, 256n59, 273–4; Star Chamber, 19n25, 231, 232, 236, 237–8, 243, 244n28, 270, 293n125 Erasmus, Desiderius: and Aldus Manutius, 33, 132; animus towards Sorbonne, 52; attacks of “­barbarians” on “poetry,” 74n16; biblical hermeneutics of, 12n24, 43n41, 44–5, 138–9, 139n74, 186n53, 211; biblical philology of, 12, 19, 32–3, 53, 57–8, 65–6, 74–5, 112–13, 128–32, 129n48, 130n52, 131n53, 131n56; Christ on divorce, 43n43; Christology of, 89n59, 90n63, 131n54, 220n96; ­controversy over comma Johanneum, 130–1, 130n52, 131n53; and “Crabby Critics,” 153n97; d ­ edications to Archbishop Warham, 120n26, 129, 137, 371n21; discovery of Valla’s Annotations, 126; duties at Cambridge University, 113–14; ­encomium to Guillaume Budé, 252n48; expansion of print market, 106; faith in vernacular languages, 66, 107–8; founding of St Paul’s School, 54, 55, 370; as herald of Enlightenment, 70n1; ­hermeneutics of the heart, 133– 40; hindrance of flesh to seeing Christ, 148; humanist maxim “Ad fontes,” 17, 129, 133; identified forgery of comma Johanneum in English ­manuscript, 131n53; ­influence on Luther, 105, 105nn49–51; i­nwardness of r­eading, 135–8, 1 ­ 40–3; Jerome’s mistranslation of metanoia, 105, 105n102; letter to Leo X about

2022-09-01 16:54

480

Index

Novum instrumentum, 112n2; letter to William Warham, 129; literary qualities of scripture, 45, 149–50; memorial character of Eucharist, 82n38; multiple m ­ eanings of logos, 112n4; penchant for metaphor, 106, 149–55; Petrarch and rhetoric of intimacy, 113n8, 135– 9; philological ­principles of, 18– 19, 44–5, 131–2, 133n61; prebend granted by Archbishop Warham, 120n26; quarrel with Scholasticism, 18, ­52–3, 106, 106n106, 114, 125, 130, 139, 149–50, 152, 153n96, 161–2; and readerly agency, 145; reading as implied sacrament, ­140–9; rejection of ceremonialism, 82–3; rhetoric of intimacy, 113n8, 135–9; scripture as antique ­literature, 130; sermo as ­spontaneous speech, discourse, 112n4, 113; sermo-logos controversy, 112n4, 113nn5–6; on Socrates and Christ, 82; student of Alexander Hegius, 55, 133; support for v­ ernacular translation, 133, 143; transformative power of ­reading, 149–55, 153n97; weakening of doctrine of works, 105; writing as essence of mind, 146–7 Erasmus, Desiderius, writings of – Adagia, 32, 132; as critical source study, 33 – “Annotations on Matthew,” 43n43 – “Annotations on John,” 112n4, 113n6, 147n89 – Colloquies, 34, 42n39 – Confabulatio pia, 42n39, 149 – De copia, 42n39, 152 – De libero arbitrio voluntatis (On the Freedom of the Will): rejoinder to Luther, 82

33093_Williams.indd 480

– De recta pronuntiatione: letters from friends as absent presence, 137 – edition of Jerome, 33–4; mocking “­inspired” translation of, 18, 112n2; reading as conversation with, 137–8, 141 – Enchiridion militis christiani: anti-­ ceremonial, anti-works views of, 143–4; book as essence of mind, 147; Christ as “sermo,” speech, 144; emphasis on individual experience, 145; flesh as hindrance to “spirit,” 146; mind as “spirit,” 146; neglect of outward piety, 106, 142; Plato’s Timaeus, 146; privatizing of e­ xperience in reading, 144–5; r­ eading as encounter with Presence, 141 – In Praise of Folly, 34; bestseller, 106; as satire on Scholastic folly, 106, 125 – In Praise of Marriage, 34 – Novum instrumentum (1516), 34n20, 105, 105n99, 106, 132; ­conservative reaction to, 112n2, 130; fidelity to Greek original, 113; letter to Pope Leo X about motives for translation, 112n2; presence of Christ in Gospels, 141 – Novum testamentum (1519), 44; ­addition of Ratio verae theologiae, 139; translation of logos as sermo, 112, 112n2, 113n5 – Paraclesis: as polemic against ­institutional theology, 133; Christ’s mind in sermo, 141, 142– 3, 148; Christ’s presence in Gospels, 1 ­ 41–3, 148–9; hermeneutics of the heart, 133–6, 138–9; ­investment in culture of metaphor, 106; ­philosophy of Christ, 19, ­65–6, 106n106, 134; reading

2022-09-01 16:54



Index 481

as ­conversation, 136, 138; reading as transformation, 139, 153– 5, 211; reading vernacular scriptures, 107, 133, 134; rhetoric of intimacy, 137–8; social levelling of reading, 134; sermo Christi and becoming the Word, 152–5; theology of flesh made Word, 144–5, 149, 155n101 – Paraphrase on Matthew: God as ­reader of human heart, 139n74; memorial character of Eucharist, 82n38 – Paraphrases of Gospels, 34; metanoia as repentance, 105, 105nn101–2 – Paraphrases of Pauline Epistles, 34 – Ratio verae theologiae, 18; added to Novum testamentum (1519), 139; ­attack on Scholastics, 106n106, 150, 153n96; Augustine’s study of Pauline tropes, 150; comparison as master trope, 151–2; contextual reading of scripture, 43n43, 44–5; figurative character of language, 45n47, 150; hermeneutical method of, 44–5, 133n61, 138–40; m ­ etaphor and transformation, 19, 149–55; ­reading as transformation, 153; scripture’s use of metaphor, 153– 4; sermo Christi and parable, 152, 154; on silent reading, 139, 144, 149; theology and rhetoric, 150; translation as metaphoric, 153; types of comparison in, 152 – translations of Euripides, 34, 371n21 Eucharist: and corpus mysticum, 89, 90; degraded version of in nightly news, 92; four key tenets of, 71n2 Euripides, plays of – Andromache: failure of chorus to ­conserve tradition, 406

33093_Williams.indd 481

– Bacchae, The, 377, 406–18; beastly apotheosis of the god, 412; Chorus as instrument of irony, 22, 57, 406n93, 408–9, 411–12, 413–16, 420–2; Chorus’s momentary sympathy, 415–16; Chorus’s r­ elation to tradition, 405; danger of impiety to polis, 418; f­ ragmentary epilogue to, 414n104; humanizing effect of tragic ­knowledge, 414– 15; ironies of Dragon slaying, 413– 14, 421–2; messenger’s role in, 413, 421; Pentheus’s split personality, 409, 417, 421; peripeteia of, 418–19; as political commentary, 396, 418; portrayal of cultic origins, 407–8; tragic awakening in, 413–14; t­ ragedy of Theban polis, 419–20, 460–1 – Electra, 374 – Heracleidae, 374 – Heracles, 369; choric irony in, 382–3, 385; and civil war, 399; Heracles’s fractured consciousness, 377, 382, 393, 399, 401; irony of strength, 377; moral doubleness of, 378, 397; paradox of power, 398, 399; peripeteia in, 381; tragic awakening in, 387, 398 – Hippolytus, 369; chorus’s limited knowledge, 378, 404–5; and cultic fame, 386; irony of moral strength, 379; peripeteia in, 384; rashness of Theseus, 379, 384; tragic irony in, 383; and tragic ­effect, 387; tragic knowledge in, 384; tragic pity in, 387 – Ion: unreliability of chorus, 405–6 – Medea, 373, 377; chorus and oral tradition, 405; choric ironies in, 405; cultural critique in, 380n51; irony of choric recessional,

2022-09-01 16:54

482

Index

423n119; Medea and Milton’s Dalila, 391n66 – Suppliants, The, 373, 375, 392n68, 401, 401n80 Eusebius, 260n70; Historia ecclesiastica, 167–8, 198; précis of in Foxe’s 2nd ed., 432 Ficino, Marsilio: doctrine of soul’s ascent, 146; translator of Plato’s Dialogues, 51n65, 101n93; Platonic Academy of Florence, 51 Finegan, Jack: Christian preference for papyrus codex, 93–4; pagan preference for papyrus roll, 93 Firth, Charles: Bradshaw’s link to Lilburne, 293n125; Ludlow’s ­connection to Levellers, 321n55, 356n123; Ludlow’s pamphlet sources, 319; Ludlow’s reliability as witness, 319n53 Firth, Joseph: digital media and ­cognitive change, xix, xix nn29– 31, xx n32, xxi n37 Fischer, Steven Roger, A History of Reading, 41; absence of ­commentary in Aldine editions, 40–1; absence of interlinear glosses in printing, 29n10; active and ­passive readers, 15, 29n10, 64, 73; Alexander the Great’s reverence for Homer, 17n32; authority and readers in Middle Ages, 46n48, 50, 63, 75; Avignon’s papal library, 60n87; Book of Hours, 66n113, 144n82; Carolingian minuscule and silent reading, 104n97; ­dimensions of a Roman scroll, 123n29; Jewish veneration for ­written Word, 73, 120n24, 123n28; literacy in Roman antiquity, 18n20, 94; literacy rates in

33093_Williams.indd 482

Gothic culture, 91; literacy rates in Middle Ages, 77n24; literacy rates in 17th-­century England, 71, 71n4; literacy rates on eve of printing, 72, 72n8; medieval reading practices, 72n12, 74–5, 77, 93n71; monumental i­nscriptions and “presence,” 22n40; orientation of script to scroll length, 47n53; Petrarch as an a­ uctorial reader, 64; print access to knowledge “­unlimited,” 110; “­privatization” of reading in p ­ rinted works, 145; reading’s ­mediatory function, 66n113, 144n82; top-down book ­production in Middle Ages, 41; tradition of Torah reading as sacred act, 73 Fisher, Bishop John, 95–6, 113–23; codex as Body of Christ, 115–17; examination of Hitton for heresy, 120–1; indexical reading of Vulgate, 117–18; medium as the message, 96; metonymic practices of, 116; rejection of vernacular books, 117; support for Erasmus’s humanism, 113, 113n9, 114n10; use of anaphora, 115 Fogle, French: Foxe’s influence on Milton, 204 Fox, George, 267, 298; “Declaration of Friends to Charles II,” 351; ­defiance of Conventicle Act, 195; direct communication with God, 354; and Lamb’s War, 241–2, 271n87, 352; psychological ­inwardness, 197n66; rift in Quaker leadership, 353, 353n110 Foxe, John, 19–21, 34, 36, 44n45, 68; archival methods of, 121; and Catholic detractors, 174n31, 183n45, 432; corrector and

2022-09-01 16:54



Index 483

editor for Oporinus, 163; “divine gift” of printing, 36–7, 75n19, 206; English Eusebius, 67; Erasmus’s influence on Luther, 105n99; humanist heir of Erasmus, 19, 21; iconic woodcuts of, 99–100, 115–17, 184–5; ­influence on Milton, 68; levelling politics of, 228; Marian exile ­initially to Strasbourg, 163; ­pilgrimage to Erasmus’s birthplace, 163; print culture vs oral culture, 157; readerly engagement with his work, 99–100; r­emained in Basel after end of Marian exile, 164; taught readers how to step into the Word, 428; Tetragrammaton and the “Real Presence,” 159–60, 159n4, 164–6 Foxe, John, writings of – Actes: accessibility of successive ­editions, 187; and Arian union of wills, 219–20; Askew and title page, 183; Askew as a forensic reader, 179–80, 368; Askew locating ­herself in scripture, 180–1; Askew’s reading of Erasmus, 182n43; Askew’s use of Christ’s parables, 178; Bonner and the Nestorian heresy, 170; Bonner as metaphor-challenged, 170, 176– 7, 193; Bonner’s metonymic thinking, 177, 215n90; as a communal compilation, 166, 166n17; Constantine ­expunged from, 205; continuous and indexical reading within, 167, 178; contributions to revolutionary culture, 440; copy donated to Magdalen College, 187; Corpus Christi image and Bishop Fisher’s homily, 164; Cranmer’s Erasmian

33093_Williams.indd 483

hermeneutics, 186n53, 211; Cranmer’s fatal temptation, ­216–17; Cranmer’s martyrdom as model for Milton, 211, 217–18; Cranmer’s sermo Christi, 211n88, 218n95; critiques of Elizabeth I in, 205–6; Driver as Erasmian “­ploughman,” 20, 173–4, 280; Elizabeth I as another Solomon, 205; figurative vs literal meaning, 177, 186; formal structure of, 167, 167n21; four ­expanding editions of, 18, 67, 164; as a handbook for political revolution, 231; Hebrew Word as Real Presence, 165; heresy examinations in, 168–70, 171–4, 176–83, 189–90, 195, 198, 202, 211–12, 214, 218, 219–20; ­humanist methods of forgery d ­ etection in, 175; indexical reading of martyrs, 169, 176, 179–180, 181–2; inquisitors as metaphor-challenged, 170, 176, 178, 186–7, 215, 218; letters of martyrs collected in, 170–1, 174, 187, 218n93, 243; Luke’s Jesus and Foxe’s reader, 183; marginalia in copies of, 183n46, 184–5; metaphorical thinking of martyrs, 169, 170, 173n29, 176–8, 182, 182n43, 186n52; modelled on Eusebius, 198; nobility’s right to own Bibles, 175; Oxford Disputations, 185–6, 202–3, 214; Persecuted and Persecuting Churches, 164–5, 165n14; praise for printing press, 206, 206n80; preface “To learned reader,” 187; scenes of martyrs’ burning, 122, 165–6, 169–70, 174, 181–3, 213; Scholastic logic confuted, 170, 171–2, 186–7, 186n51; semiotics

2022-09-01 16:54

484

Index

of sacrament, 171; t­ hird-person narrative, 171; title page of, 157– 9, 164–6; as update to Acts of the Apostles, 208; written in blood, 168, 168n23 – Latin Book of Martyrs, 34, 164 – Latin drama Christus Triumphans, 164 François I, King: attempts to create Trilingual College, 78, 78n28; ban of books in France, 78 Froben, Johan: as humanist ­scholarprinter, 33–4, 132, 137, 163 Fulton, Thomas: dicing habits of ­common-placers, 31n13; Hobbes on moral knowledge, 49–50; Milton’s “Digression” and Lilburne’s “Petition,” 315; Milton’s disingenuous use of “people” in Tenure, 290; Milton on moral ­knowledge, 50; Milton’s program of political reading, 57, 283; Milton’s renunciation of former self, 295; strategies of irony in Milton’s Tenure, 288 Gagné, Renaud, and Marianne G. Hopman, 402; alien settings of Euripidean tragedy, 406n93; Greek drama as a “choral event,” 406n93; role of Attic chorus, 402–3, 403n85 Gardiner, Bishop Steven, 117n17; criticized by Foxe, 185, 207; ­criticized by Milton, 207 Gerrish, B.A.: Calvin’s sacramental Word, 80 Gibb, Mildred: biography of Lilburne, 232n10, 235n15, 244, 336, 338, 344 Gibbon, Col. Robert: letters to John Thurloe concerning Lilburne,

33093_Williams.indd 484

337–40; Lilburne’s gaoler on Isle of Jersey, 337; model for Philistian officer in Samson, 340–1 Great Dionysia, 365, 386n62, 407, 416, 425 Greenberg, Janelle, 249–50, 249nn45–6, 260 Gregg, Pauline, 337; Elizabeth Lilburne’s tensions with her ­husband, 342–5; Lilburne’s need of an audience, 344–5; Lilburne’s right to “writ of habeas corpus,” 337; Lilburne’s second capital trial, 350; reason for Lilburne’s offshore imprisonment, 337 Grindal, Archbishop Edmund: ­removal from office, 206 Gutenberg Bible, 26, 32, 73, 104 Hale, John: Milton’s annotations to Euripides, 371–2; Milton’s “­empathy” for Euripides, 374 Halkin, Léon-Ernest: Erasmus’s ­defence of the Mass, 82n38; Erasmus’s demystifying approach to Adagia, 32; Erasmus’s discovery of Valla’s Annotations, 128; François I’s invitation to Erasmus to head Trilingual College, 78n28 Haller, William, 159n4; Foxe’s ­dependence on Magdeburg Centuries, 164n11; Foxe’s detour to Erasmus’s birthplace, 163; Foxe’s English n ­ ationalism, 166n19, 428n2; Foxe’s use of Archbishop Parker’s library, 174n32 Hankins, James: Bruni compared to Gibbon, 8; Bruni’s conception of the modern, 8, 11n16; Bruni’s critical source study, 308; Bruni mentored by Salutati, 9–10; Bruni’s monument, 8; Bruni’s

2022-09-01 16:54



Index 485

republican sources, 304–5; Bruni’s s­ ecularization of history, 11n16; Bruni’s tripartite periodization, 309; Bruni’s vernacularizing i­mpulse, 134n63; Florence’s ­popular resistance, 311n34; humanist popularization of Greek and Hebrew, 75n18; Petrarch’s overturning of Christian ­triumphalism, 303–4; political ­turmoil of Bruni’s era, 10–11 Hardie, Philip: cult of fame in Hippolytus and Samson, 386; generic shift from tragedy to epic by Manoa and Chorus, 386; ironies of Samson, 387 Harrison, Maj.-Gen. Thomas, 196; martyrdom of, 330–2 Hegius, Alexander: headmaster of St Lebwin’s School, 55, 55n77; taught Erasmus Greek, 133 Helgerson, Richard: Elizabethan ­discourses of nationalism, 437; Foxe’s invisible Church, 433–4 Henrich, Joseph: Church and Roman patriarchal family, 86; clan ­psychology and identities, ix, ­­xii–xiii; communal ritual as ­solidarity-building, xiv; dissolution of kin-based networks, ix, 84–5, 424; historical norm of ­kin-based institutions, ix, xii, 84; holistic vs analytical brain processing, viii, ix, xiii, 85; impersonal law vs clan loyalties, 246–7, 340n83; individual choice vs clan loyalty, 85; inwardness of early modern psychology, 66, 135, 145n85, 197; literacy and ­modernity, vii–viii; Luther and sola scriptura, 81, 83; Lutheran ­revolt, xi, 13–14, 302; marriage

33093_Williams.indd 485

laws and modernity, vi, 84–5, 90, 109, 425, 427n1; medieval Church and Western psychology, 83–5; n ­ eurological effects of literacy, viii–ix, 108; proximity to Wittenberg and Reformation, vii, 77n26; ­reading circuitry lacking off-switch, x; relational law in China, 246–7; rise of medieval voluntary ­associations, 85, 135 Henry VIII, King: absolutist ­prerogative of, 259; doctrine of Transubstantiation, 176; Institution of the Christen Man, 175; Necessary Doctrine, 175; rejection of Luther’s justification by faith, 175–6 High Court of Justice: created by ­authority of Commons, 246; of open Court, 238; principle of law’s begetter, 250–1; published its p ­ roceedings against Charles I, 248; recourse to laws of Edward the Confessor, 258–9 Hill, Christopher: defence of revolutionary Samson, 357–8; Experience of Defeat, The, 334 historiography, humanist: critical methods of, 305–6, 306n24, 307– 8; eclipse of Biblical narrative in, 304; and human agency, 311–12; ­implications of structure, 309n31, 310, 313; influence of Sallust and Cicero on, 305, 307, 314–15; and philology, 308; questions of human justice in, 313; republican Rome as ideal, 302–4; as revival of classical forms, 301–2; ­revolutionary character of, 301; source comparison in, 307–8; ­tripartite structure of, 309; use of archival materials in, 307, 307n27

2022-09-01 16:54

486

Index

historiography, medieval: anachronism foreign to, 127, 127n42, 252; annals and divine agency, 312; ­bipartite structure of, 302–3; Christian triumphalism of, 303–4; chronicle’s lack of closure, 312; Orosius as model for, 304, 304n19; as succession of empires, 303 Hitton, Thomas, 120; first Henrician martyr, 122; heresy examination of, 121; image of fiery death, 122 Hobbes, Thomas, 34, 40, 40n35, 42n38, 49–50, 277; Leviathan, 40, 435 Hobson, Nicholas: ritual value of ­repetition, 113 Homer: Achilles and tragedy, 385; Achilles’s pity for bereaved father Priam, 422; Alexander the Great’s reverence for Iliad, 17n32; antiquity’s reverence for, 17; as ­expression of oral community, ­xiii–xiv; Iliad and threat of writing, xiv; writing and problem of ­distance, xiv Hotman, François, 21, 252, 256–7 Huguenot martyrs, 168n23, 433; Calvin forbidding armed resistance by, 360; doctrine of divided ­sovereignty, 257n60; and ­reformers, 79–80, 163 Huizinga, Johan, 33, 74n16; Erasmus’s Adagia, 32; Erasmus’s doubts about the sacraments, 82; Luther and majesty of God, 83 humanist reading: and birth of early modernity, 68–9; as culture of choosing, 432; encouraging ­empirical habits of mind, 41; ­exposing false continuity between Old and New Testament, 118, 143; falsity of continuous

33093_Williams.indd 486

common law, 21, 258, 264–5; falsity of Imperial continuity, 60, 258, 302n11, 425, 427; falsity of Vulgate’s continuity with Greek and Hebrew originals, 12, 18, 64, 75, 105n102, 112–13, 117n20, 121, 126–7, 129, 130–1, 160, 162, 428; and myth of cultural continuity, 427; as solvent of religious hierarchy, 41, 432, 434. See also Bruni; Erasmus; Foxe; Milton; Petrarch; Reuchlin; Valla Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion, 424 Innis, Harold, 71n6, 76n20, 92n68 Iser, Wolfgang: and reception theory, 52n68 Jakobson, Roman, 94–5; contiguity/ similarity disorder, 186n52, 215n90; metaphor and metonymy, 151–2, 152n95, 169n26; ­metonymic pole and “similarity ­disorder,” 48n55 James I, King: humiliations by Scottish Kirk, 229n1; part played in Scottish Canons (1636), 230nn4–5; relative toleration of Church courts, 230; Trew Law of Free Monarchy, 262 Jerome, St, 33–4; De viris illustribus, 302; eternal verbum of Vulgate, 113; faulty methods as translator, 64; mistranslation of metanoia, 105, 105n102 Johns, Adrian, 12; commonplace theories of reading in Renaissance, 31; Condorcet’s Êsquisse, 36–7; c­ ritique of Eisenstein’s “commonplacing,” 31; critique of Eisenstein’s metaphysics of print, 30; dangers

2022-09-01 16:54



Index 487

of metaphor, 38; disregard of two ­centuries of humanist printing, 36; Hobbsean nature of book, 40, 42; hostage to commonplaces about reading, 31–2; on reading and the passions, 38– 9, 39n31, 40n35; on regulating book trade, 37, 39n34, 40; Robert Hooke on fantsy in ­reading, 38; Scholastic theory of mind, 39; scorn for Foxe’s providential view of printing, 36; social conditions of knowledge, 24; Stationers’ Company and Mary Tudor, 36, 36n26; stereotypes of sectarian readers, 39, 42 Judaism: and Ezekiel’s “honey,” 120, 120n24; as a religion of the Book, 73, 123n28; preference for leather roll until ca 1000 ce, 93 Justinian, Emperor: Corpus Juris emended to suit later cultural ­conditions, 252 Kearney, James: Bishop Fisher’s metaphysical conceits, 116; ­dualist tensions of Word and book, 96; Erasmus’s theology of flesh made Word, 144–5; Luther’s “fall into writing,” 97; parchment codex as Word made flesh, 95–6; religion of the book, 71; sixteenth-century crisis in ­representation, 97 Keeble, N.H.: deficiencies of both Conventicle Acts (1664, 1670), 195; on largest religious ­persecution in English history, 195; political defeat and cultural achievement, 430 Kelley, Donald R.: Bartolist jurists’ ­respect for (Latin) Aristotle, 253; Scholastic dialectics as

33093_Williams.indd 487

r­ econciliation of contraries, 255; Scholastic law vs Mos Gallicus, 253–4 Kelley, Mark R.: Lilburne and Samson’s politics, 400–1; Thebes and dragon myth, 400 Kilgour, Maggie: on Heracles and Samson, 378, 381, 384, 397 King, John N., 99; caption to Foxe’s title page, 157; civic order of London aldermen, 188; communal reading of Actes, 188, 188n55; ­extracts from Foxe ­printed in 1640s and ’50s, 193; eyewitness “monuments,” 166–7; female r­ eaders of Foxe, 188n56; Foxe and the 1577 defeat of Church liberals, 206; Foxe as compiler of Actes, 166; Foxe as source of revolution, 193, 223; Foxe’s apology for vernacular text, 187; Foxe’s book at St Paul’s Cathedral, 188; Foxe’s expanded Church history in 2nd ed., 432; Foxe’s increasing radicalism, 206; Foxe’s invisible Church, 428n2, 432; Foxe’s woodcuts vs Caxton’s, 100; marginalia in copies of Actes, 183n46, 184–5; Marian martyrs and Lollards, 75n19, 206n80, 433; martyrs’ epistles as monuments, 170, 187; martyrs’ personal records of actes and deeds, 166–7; print runs of Actes, 187; Privy Council o ­ rder of 1570, 188 King, Margaret L.: dynastic marriage during Renaissance, 85n42; humanist epic of imperial e­ xpansion, 425n123; Petrarch and Cicero, 135; reading as form of presence, 135n65; Scholastic d ­ ialectic’s closed structure, 53; urban origins of humanism, 63n101

2022-09-01 16:54

488

Index

Knoppers, Laura Lunger: and Foucault, 330; Historicizing Milton, 330; Milton’s Errata, 299; Milton’s Jesus and royal martyr, 209; Milton’s renovation of classical epic, 200n73; rejection of drama in Paradise Regain’d, 209, 260n70; Restoration contexts of Samson, 354, 364; and Restoration Dissenters, 326–7; Speeches and Prayers, 330; theatre of power in Samson, 167n21 Lafayette, Marquis de, 268–9, 269n84 Lateran Council, Fourth, 1215: ­settlement of Eucharistic controversy, 71n2 Latimer, Hugh, 185, 203, 214, 239 Laud, Archbishop William: brought to the scaffold, 287; imprisonment of, 282; Scottish Canons of 1636, 230, 230nn5–6; as Star Chamber judge of Lilburne, 232, 236–8 Lee, Nathaniel: Lucius Junius Brutus, 248 Leo X, Pope, 313; condemnation of Luther, 73; licensed printing of Talmud, 160–1; ordered Luther’s writings burned, 265; patron of biblical philology, 161 Lewalski, Barbara, 290; date of Samson’s publication, 194; Milton’s Arianism in Paradise Regain’d, 198n68; Milton’s Sallustian ­historiography, 316; Milton’s Satan as a literalist, 215; reason why Samson not staged, 365n6; rejection of classical wisdom in pr , 216 Lilburne, Elizabeth: frustrated by ­husband’s contest with Cromwell,

33093_Williams.indd 488

342; heroic ride to save husband’s life, 343; humiliated by airing of marital difficulties, 342– 3; letter to Cromwell, 344; tempting of her husband, 342; visit to imprisoned husband in Dover Castle, 341 Lilburne, John: as advocate for “­freeborn men,” 266; alluded to in Milton’s Areopagitica, 373; ­annulling of Norman Conquest, 263; biography as model for Samson, 316, 336–50; biography as tragedy of the nation, 348, 434, 441; bitter quarrel with wife, ­344–5; captured in Civil War, 272; as Coke’s intellectual heir, 263; ­collapse of scaffold at 1649 trial, 349; common law as birthright, 262–3; as Commonwealth’s Samson, 429; compared to Restoration martyrs, 331, 334; ­compared to Samson and Heracles, 393, 401; contradictory ­revolutionary ideas of, 270–6; ­conversion to Quakerism, 347; as “deliverer” of nation, 339; display of martyr’s textual body, 245; ­educated at Royal Grammar School, 232, 232nn9–10; elected to Common Council of London, 266; exile in Low Countries, 336; ­extra-legal banishment of, 336; father-in-law’s tempting of, 339– 40; final absence from public stage, 348; fractured consciousness of, 295, 355, 401; judges as “cyphers,” 263, 263n77; letter of ­reconciliation with wife, 344; lost vocation in Jersey, 345; martyrology in tradition of Foxe, 237; mental state in Jersey prison, 338;

2022-09-01 16:54



Index 489

Parliamentary hearing into his ­sufferings, 244–5; performative role as barrister, 291–2; and the Petition of 1648, 315; publication of two Agreement(s) of People, 361– 2; as reader of Foxe, 233, 234–5, 238–40; renunciation of violence, 354; rigorous legalism of, 339– 40, 344; Samson-like impulsivity, 355, 360–2, 367, 379, 385; selfimage as nation’s “deliverer,” 339; as self-styled Samson, 278–80, 293, 381; stage role as “Freeborn John,” 266, 275, 350; on tragedy and self-­knowledge, 360–1; tragic flaw as politician, 277n101, 357, 361–2; treason trial of, first, 261– 4, 350; treason trial of, second, 350; use of Coke’s Institutes, 261; warden Gibbon’s letters to Cromwell, 337–8 Lilburne, John, writings of – Agreement of the People: three versions of, 289 – An Hue and Cry, 349 – Anatomy of the Lords Tyranny: moral case against Norman intruder, 274 – Certaine Observations: continuity of common law, 264 – Charters of London: reliance on Magna Carta, 275 – Christian Mans Triall, The: formal model in Foxe, 233; legal ­sophistication of, 235, 236–7; ­martyr-role of Foxean reader, ­233–4; as performative playscript, 233–7; self-portrait as barrister, 234; Star Chamber sentence on, 250–1; use of common law in a ­prerogative court, 235 – Discourse with Mr Hugh Peters, 349

33093_Williams.indd 489

– Englands New Chains, 261, 280; ­challenge to Council’s legality, 291 – Foundations of Freedom, 362; ­government by consent, 277 – Free-mans Freedome, 438; biblical law of primordial equality, 276–7 – Impeachment of High Treason, 349 – Innocent Mans second-Proffer, 280; ­sacramental dimensions of, 281 – Jonah’s Cry: agreement of Army and the People, 277; self-styled Samson, 279 – Juglers Discovered: self-styled Samson, 279 – Just Defence of John Lilburn, 400; ­self-mockery adapted from Nedham, 401n79 – Just Mans Justification: common law and Norman Yoke, 276, 276n94; majesty of the people, 288–9; ­refusal to kneel at Lords’s barre, 273 – Legal Fundamental Liberties, 233 – Londons Liberty in Chains: annual elections in ancient Rome, 274; self-styled Samson, 278 – Oppressed mans importunate cryes, 263 – Picture of Councel of State: and Agreement of People, 291–2; assertion of common-law principles, 291; a­ ssertion of liberty of speech, 291; challenge to Council of State’s legality, 291; examination by Council of State, 292–4; playing role of barrister-manqué, 291; ­posturing as Samson, 293; refusal to incriminate himself, 292–3 – Resolved Mans Resolution, 255–6; ­self-styled Samson, 278–9 – Resurrection of John Lilburne, 344; conversion to Quakerism, 347;

2022-09-01 16:54

490

Index

the “Light within,” 347–8, 351; ­renunciation of violence, 354 – Strength out of Weaknesse, 280; ­sacramental dimensions of, 281 – Truths Victory: as stage actor, 350; trial like a public reading of Ben Jonson’s plays, 349 – Upright Mans Vindication: alteration of affection for his wife, ­342–3; ­invitation to duel with Cromwell, 346; self-image as populist c­ hampion, 346 – Worke of the Beast, A, 234; apocalyptic themes of, 241–2; as audition for part in Foxe’s Book, 240–1; ­contradictions of self-portrait, ­242–3, 272; defiance of printing Order, 243–4; Foxean tropes in, 238–40, 270, 278–9; martyr ­writing in own blood, 243; performative play-text of pillory scene, 233–4; as reading of Revelation, 241–2; as self-­martyrology, 237 Lily, William: curricular reforms of, 54nn74–5; first Headmaster of St Paul’s School, 54 literacy rates: in ancient Rome, 18n20; in High Middle Ages, 77n24; in London at beginning of Civil Wars, 71; on eve of European printing, 72, 72n8 Livy, Titus, 304; Ab urbe condita, ­15–16, 62, 62n97, 123–4, 247, 305–6 Loewenstein, David, 287; attempted reconciliation of Poems of 1671, 297–8; contradictions of English revolutionaries, 261, 266–7; Elizabeth as another Constantine, 204–5; Foxe too conservative for Milton, 204; importance of Socrates to Milton’s Jesus, 210n85; Lilburne as radical saint,

33093_Williams.indd 490

346–7, ­362–3; Milton’s “Quaker” Christ, 196, 197n66, 354n112; Quakers’ menace to social order, 351–2; Samson and Restoration Dissenters, 326–7, 354 Lollard reformers, 75, 100, 166, 206n80, 433 Lubac, Henri de, S.J.: Corpus Mysticum, 191; reformation of Mass, 89 Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus): De bello civili (The Civil Wars), 248, 248n39, 308, 425n123 Ludlow, Edmund: connection to the Levellers, 356n123; eulogy for Henry Ireton, 323; nickname of “Levelling Ludlow,” 321, 321n55; parallels with Milton at Restoration, 327–8; Voyce from the Watch Tower, 326 Ludlow, Edmund, writings of – Memoirs (vol. 1): blindness of n ­ arrator, 323–4; as chronicle, 318; doubling of perspective in, 319, 326; factual reliability of, 319, 319n53; ironic misreading of Cromwell’s “Victory,” 324; narrator as English Oedipus, 326; narrator’s relation to Fate, 320, 325; refusal of Fleetwood’s ­temptation, 325; suspicions of Cromwell after Worcester, 324–6; tangled t­ emporalities of memoir, 319; as second sight, 320; as Sophoclean tragedy, 326; tragic failure to act, 324–5; tragic misreading of Cromwell, 321–6 Luther, Martin, vii; attachment to Real Presence, 83, 92, 110–11; burning of papal bull, 265; condemnation by Leo X, 73; dispute with Zwingli, 83, 111; divine right of all to read scriptures, 46n48; doctoral student of civil law, 265;

2022-09-01 16:54



Index 491

effect of name on title page, 29; Erasmus as Greek source text for German New Testament, 105; fall into language, 96–7, 97n82; fall into writing, 97, 97n85, 108; hostility to Talmudic studies, 162; lectures on Romans, 105n101; medieval habits of thought, 97n83; offered Chair of Hebrew to Reuchlin, 162; on ­divine law and human law, 265–6; ­patrimony of Roman law, 253; priesthood of all believers, 80–1, 81n34; protected by Elector of Saxony, 77; residual Scholasticism of, 96n81; scripture its own ­interpreter, 46; student of Reuchlin’s Hebrew grammar, 162 Luther, Martin, writings of – De servo arbitrio diatribe (Discourse on the Bondage of the Will), 82–3, 145 – German New Testament, 73, 105 – Lectures on Genesis, 96 – Ninety-Five Theses, 105 – To the Christian Nobility, 81n34 Machiavelli, Bernardo: indexer of Livy’s Decades, 28 Machiavelli, Niccolò: Discourses on Livy, 28, 288; history in future tense, 313; Istorie fiorentine, 17n12, 313; scathing judgment of Medici power, 313; subversive form of Istorie, 313 MacLeod, Alistair: No Great Mischief, xiv–xv Manchester, Earl of: Lilburne’s ­torturer, 269 Manetti, Giannozzo: as HebraistGraecist, 11; De dignitate et excellentia hominis, 11n20; influenced by Valla, 12n21; rejection of

33093_Williams.indd 491

word-for-word translation, 64n104; translator of Hebrew Psalter, 12n21 Manutius, Aldus: as humanist ­scholar-printer, 33; publisher of a Greek Aristotle, 40; publisher of Erasmus, 132; search for Hebrew print-type, 132; as “­student” of Erasmus, 33 Marchesi, Simone, 60n88; on Petrarch’s Africa, 61n91, 62n97, 302n9 Margolis, Oren: Bruni’s “fame” based on first book of History, 308n28; Bruni’s myth of Etruscan past, 306n25; Bruni’s rejection of Roman continuity, 309n32 Mascetti, Yaakov, 97, 140 Mastronarde, Donald J.: Aeschylean and Sophoclean chorus as ­representatives of oral tradition, 404; Aristotle’s criticism of Euripidean chorus for lack of ­integration, 406; Aristotle’s ­influence on Euripides’s reception, 375n40; cultic etiologies in Euripides, 419n111; dating of Stiblinus’s commentaries, 371n23; disappearance of chorus after Euripides, 408n97; epilogue gods in Euripides, 415n105; Euripidean audience’s knowledge superior to characters, 404–5, 408; Euripidean chorus as destabilizer of oral t­ radition, 404–6; Euripidean c­ horus as mediator in time and space, 403, 404; Euripides’s ­popularity in antiquity, 376n43; Euripides’s ­scepticism about Greek gods, 416n106; imbalance of divine and human knowledge in Euripides’s tragedies, 378, 408,

2022-09-01 16:54

492

Index

411; ironic nature of Euripidean tragedy, 411n103, 416; ironic ­portrait of cultic origins in The Bacchae, 407–8; missing two-thirds of Bacchae’s epilogue, 414n104; nakedness of divine power in Hippolytus, 407; oscillating ­ambiguity and irony of Euripidean tragedy, 425; poetics of Stiblinus and contemporaries, 379n50; philological commentaries of Stiblinus, 379n48; prologue gods in Euripides, 404–5; Stiblinus’s commentaries the earliest of Euripidean corpus, 371n20; ­surviving plays from Great Dionysia, 388n62 May, Thomas: translator of Lucan’s De bello civili (The Civil Wars), 248n39 McDonald, Henry: “fractured ­consciousness” of Euripidean ­protagonists, 355n118; moral ­duality of Heracles and Samson, 377–8 McDowell, Nicholas, 373, 374, 375, 396 McLuhan, Marshall, 92n68, 96; ­misleading views of Innis’s medium theory, 76n20; print “knocked off its pedestal,” 47n54; scholastic ­philosophy and orality, 47; socially regressive theories of, 76n20; “­tyranny” of visual sense, 71n6 McMullen, Janet L: digital media’s negative effects on cognition, xx, xx n33; on moral “wiring” of ­human brain, xxi medium change: cultural effects of switch from papyrus roll to codex, 93–6; four major communications revolutions, 69; psychological ­effects of move

33093_Williams.indd 492

from parchment to paper, 100–4; replacement of l­eather roll by papyrus codex, 93–4 Melanchthon, Philipp: inaugural ­lecture at Wittenberg, 162; protégé of Reuchlin, 162; reverence for Roman law, 253 Milton, John: allusions to Euripides, 374–5; annotations to Stephanus, 371, 418n108; citations from Erasmus, 224–5, 224n99; ­differences from Erasmus, 224; ­disdain for Scholasticism, 52–4; emendations of Stephanus’s Euripides, 372, 372n27; epigraphs from Euripides, 373–4; Erasmian hermeneutics of, 44–5; Greek ­studies at St Paul’s School, 370, 370n16; humanist poetics of moral choice, 50n61; humanist reading strategies of, 43–57, 68– 9; k ­ nowledge of Greek, 372–5; ­martyrdom of friends and ­associates, 196, 328–9; methods as a schoolmaster, 50–1; political ­sympathies with Foxe, 204–8; ­private reading after Cambridge, 48, 282, 371; Quaker friends of, 353–4; reader of Hebrew Bible, 48; reading as choosing, 49–50, 50n61; renunciation of violence, 356–60; as state licenser, 49n59, 437n23; Stiblinus’s commentaries on Euripides, 22n39; as St Paul’s schoolboy, 42–3, 42n39, 55, 188, 370; Word vs “Light within,” 348, 354–5 Milton, John, writings of – “Against Scholastic Philosophy,” ­51–2, 50n66; influence of Erasmus in, 52–3 – Animadversions: Foxean scorn for bishops, 207

2022-09-01 16:54



Index 493

– Areopagitica, 24; book as mind’s ­essence, 147; confidence in ­unfettered readers, 56; contrasted with Hobbes, 49–50; Dragon myth in, 400; liberation of talents, 373; liberty of printing, 287; nation in “mind’s eye,” 434; reason as “but choosing,” 50; relation of epigraph to Lilburne, 373n29; use of Lilburne’s language in, 373; w ­ innowing of Truth, 24n1, 49 – Commonplace Book: program of ­historical reading in, 57, 283, 283n112 – De doctrina Christiana: biblicism of, 355; Christology of, 45n46, 220n96; distinctions between ­literal and figurative language in ­scripture, 45n47; monist ­materialism of, 98; Spirit vs written authority of scripture, 355, 355n116 – Defensio Secunda, 283n112, 290, 313n47 – Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 43, 44–5; reader as laborious gatherer, 48, 48n57, 176, 425; reading ­strategies in, 45–6 – Eikonoklastes, 260, 357, 361; as ­response to King’s Book, 259; on true martyrs, 260, 424 – History of Britain, 301–18; and Bruni’s Germanic invasions, ­309–11; and Bruni’s periodization, 309–10; and Bruni’s source ­comparison, 308–9; Church ­history, 212, 339; human causation in, 311–12; as humanist ­historiography, 21, 311–12, 313; implied critique of Cromwell, ­314–15; influence of Machiavelli on, 313–14; limited justification

33093_Williams.indd 493

for war in, 360; Mt Badon and Naseby, 314; nation’s self-­ knowledge, 3 ­ 55–6; rejection of Trojan ­founding, 306; rejection of violence, 356–60; relation to Petrarch, 302–3; relation to Poems of 1671, 297, 360; Sallust as model, 314–16, 316n47; as tragedy of nation, 311, 317; use of Tacitus in, 305; William of Malmesbury, 309 – “Naturam non pati senium,” 372n26 – Of Education, 50, 51n62; faith in ­ordinary reader, 51 – Of Reformation: bishops at Last Judgment, 286–7, 294; bishops in early Church, 282, 283; Church history after Constantine, 204, 282, 284; elective office of bishops, 85n43, 284; Foxe’s martyred ­bishops, 203n77, 286; Foxean praise for printing, 206–7; Petrarchan view of Church, 282; Petrarchan view of history, 283; view of Constantine, 204; violence of anti-episcopal rhetoric, 286–7 – Paradise Lost: echoes of Reuchlin in, 99; English Republic in, 437– 8; ­evidence of Milton’s pacifism in, 359; Lilburne’s Free-Mans Freedome in, 438; mediated communications in Eden, 97n82, 98; Putney debates in, 438; sense of here and now in, 428, 436, 438; use of faculty p ­ sychology in, 39n33; use of Virgilian “direct ­address” in, 358, 358n126 – Paradise Regain’d: and “banquet” temptation, 219, 222; Arian union of wills in, 220, 223; Arianism of, 197–8, 198n68, 219–20; as ­courtroom drama, 198–9, 202, 209; Cranmer’s and Jesus’s ­inquisitors, 202–4; as dialectical

2022-09-01 16:54

494

Index

drama, 210, 210n84; Erasmian ­disciples in, 224; Jesus and oral knowledge, 201; Jesus and riddle of Sphinx, 222; Jesus as indexical reader, 200, 208, 221; Jesus as reader of Book of Job, 202, 210; Jesus as reader of Death of Socrates, 218; Jesus as reader of Law, 200, 227; Jesus as reader of Prophets, 200, 215–16; Jesus as reader of Virgil, 199–200, 202, 227n101; Jesus’s rejection of violence, ­199–200; Jesus’s use of metaphor, 214–15, 217, 217n92; limitations of Jesus’s knowledge, 201–2; as new revelation, 226–7, 297; oral culture of Jesus’s disciples, 224–5; oral knowledge of Mary, 201; Oxford Disputations as a model for plot, 202–4; as prequel to Foxe, 20–1, 68, 156; question of Presence in, 203, 223, 225–6, 227; the Real Presence and social levelling, 228; Satan as metaphor-challenged, 215–16, 217n92; Satan as Scholastic logician, 208, 210; Satan’s appropriation of Socrates, 210; and temptation of hope, ­216–18; and temptation of thrones, 215–17; and temptation of wisdom, 218–19 – Poems of 1671: continuing engagement with present, 436, 438; dating of, 194, 194n60; as dialectic of ­absence and presence, 22, 428–9; as dramas of choice, 23; as search for “fit audience,” 430; nation as absent presence in, 440 – Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, 290; and Commonplace Book, 57; Brutus and the English tyrant’s trial, 248n38 – Pro Se Defensio, 290, 335

33093_Williams.indd 494

– Reason of Church Government: Foxean critique of Bishop Gardiner, 207 – Samson Agonistes: absence of God in Samson’s world, 417; betrayals of Dalila and Elizabeth Lilburne, ­342–3; choric functions in Euripidean tragedy, 402–12; ­compared to Christ Suffering, 412n103; cultic “fame” in, 386– 92, 421n118, 422; Dalila legitimated by marriage, 341, 342n91; ­dramatic irony and Euripidean chorus, 412–15, 442–3, 445, ­449–51, 458–9, 464; dramatic irony and Miltonic chorus, 382– 5, 404–7, 411, 420–5; Euripidean messenger of, 382, 401, 412–13, 420; Euripidean plot types, ­375–87; Euripidean tragic effect in, 401–2, 413–17; Euripides and moral doubleness, 377–8, 397; and f­ orensic reading, 365–6, 368, 370; fractured consciousness of tragic hero in, 377–8, 382, 401, 409, 417, 421; frenzy of Chorus in The Bacchae, 412; frenzy of Chorus in Samson, 420–2; impiety as danger to the polis, 418; and indexical reading, 368–9, 388– 99, 401–26; ironic myth of Dragon, 421–2, 421n116; irony of choric r­ ecessionals, 423n119; irony of “rouzing motions,” 383, 385, ­393–4, 398, 401–2, 417–18, 423, 424; Lilburne’s life as a structural model for, 336–48; Lilburne’s lost vocation in Jersey, 344–5; Manoa as foil to Cadmus and Priam, 422; Manoa’s ironic “epic,” 386, 422; and Oedipus Rex or Oedipus Coloneus, 366, 368–9, 381, 388–90, 393, 397; peripeteia

2022-09-01 16:54



Index 495

in, 417; plot of Heracles, 377–8, 381–2, 387; plot of Hippolytus, 378–80, 383–7, 404–5; plot of Medea, 380–1, 405–6; plot from Judges, 377; political function of tragic discovery, 396–7, 425; Prometheus and Samson, 339n82, 368–9; Protectoral contexts for Samson, 334–6; reading vs viewing, 364, 365–6; “rouzing motions” and “Light within,” 347, 354–5; Samson and Heracles as split beings, 378, 382; Samson and Law, 340, 394–5, 418–20, 419n112; Samson and Lilburne as “deliverers,” 339, 346; Samson and Lilburne’s final absences, 348; Samson and Lilburne’s “giants,” 345–6; Samson and Lilburne’s legalism, 340, 344, 348n97, 351, 394, 418–20; Samson and Lilburne’s “own ­accord,” 362, 382–3, 385, 402; Samson and Lilburne’s tempting wives, 341–2; Samson’s parallels with Pentheus, 417–18; Samson’s Sophoclean visitors, 334; Sophoclean vs Euripidean endings, 389; sources of pity and fear in, 378, 383; tragic effect in, 370, 385, 387, 424; ­triumphalism in Samson and The Bacchae, 383, 424; why the drama not staged, 364–5, 365n6, 383, 387 – Sonnet 8, “When the assault,” 374–5 – Sonnet 11, “A book was writ,” 43–4 – Sonnet 12, “I did but prompt,” 43 – Sonnet 15, “Fairfax, whose name in arms,” 110 – Sonnet 17, “Vane, young in years,” 328–9 – Sonnet 23, “Methought I saw,” 375

33093_Williams.indd 495

– Tenure of Kings, 287; defence of ­tyrannicide, 259–60, 373–4, 396; parallels with Regall Tyrannie, 289 – Tetrachordon, 43, 48; epigraph from Euripides, 373–4 Milton, John, Sr: disinherited for Bible reading, 122–3 Mohamed, Feisal, 365–7; associations of tragedy and revolution, 296n132; Milton’s models for ­tragedy, 368–9; reader vs ­theatregoer, 366–7; revolutionary subject formation, 367, 399 Mommsen, Theodor, 3–4; and secular humanism, 58; Petrarch’s Roman culture, 302n10 Mos Gallicus, 252, 256–7; gulf ­between Roman and native law, 252–3; humanist jurisprudence of, 252 Mos Italicus, 253–6; medieval ­jurisprudence of, 253; Scholastic methods of, 254–5 Müller, Lothar: European papermaking, 101–4 Müntzer, Thomas: leader of German Peasant Revolt, 265–6, 278 Nauert, Charles: Erasmus and comma Johanneum, 130; Erasmus and grammar over theology, 150; Erasmus and individual ­experience, 142; Erasmus as ­biblical philologist, 131; Erasmus at Cambridge University, 113–14; forgery in Middle Ages, 40, 125; humanism and traditional beliefs, 41; humanism’s decline in 17th century, 56; Latin “Aristotle” and medieval authority, 41; moral choice as purpose of humanist learning, 50n60; Petrarch’s a­ ttacks on universities, 51, 125; Petrarch’s

2022-09-01 16:54

496

Index

discovery of historical discontinuity, 124; rise of philological truth, 74–5; Scholastic method contrasted with humanist methods, 125; Scholasticism and metaphysical certitude, 41; Valla and critique of Vulgate, 126; Valla and Donation of Constantine, 127; Valla’s biblical philology, 126–7 Nayler, James: and Christ’s entry to Jerusalem, 353; trial and ­punishment of, 353 Nedham, Marchamont: collaborator with Milton, 314, 437n23; editor of Mercurius Britanicus, 19n25; as English Machiavelli, 314; as English Ovid, 439; freemen by birth and “grace of Christ,” 277n99; King’s Cabinet Opened, 19n25; likely author of Regal Tyrannie Discovered, 289n116; of Mercurius Politicus, 338; newsbooks reflected in Paradise Lost, 438; reader of letters to Council of State, 338; of Vox Plebis, 277n99 newsbooks: 17th-century political ­effects of, xvii, 19n25 Ondaatje, Michael: The English Patient, x–xi, xiv Oporinus, Johannes, 174, 371n23; ­apprentice to printer Froben, 163; of Foxe’s Latin “Book of Martyrs,” 164; of Magdeburg Centuries, 163; professorship of Greek at Basel, 163; publisher of Foxe’s Christus ­triumphans, 164; return in 1542 ce to scholarly printing, 163; of Stiblinus’s Euripides, 371; of Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica, 34, 163n10 Origen: reading scripture through lens of pagan rhetoric, 150

33093_Williams.indd 496

Orosius: medieval historiography of, 304, 304n19 Ovid: Metamorphoses, 126, 200n74, 375, 421nn116–17 Oxford Disputations, 185; Cranmer parries Scholastic logic, 186, 186n51, 208, 211, 214, 216, 218, 219–20; Cranmer’s recantation and burning, 212–13; helped shape Actes and Monuments Bk 8, 202–3; trials of Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley, 185–6, 203 Oxford Illustrated History of the Book, 14, 24n2, 27nn6–7, 66n12, 69, 77n25, 91nn65–6, 93n72, 94, 100n91, 101, 102n95, 103n96, 142n79 parchment codex: economics of, 101, 103nn93,96; format ­preserved in incunabula, 109; oldest surviving Latin codex, 94n76; preparation of hides, 91; psychological fit with Christianity, 91, 94–6, 116–17; Roman poet Martial’s praise for, 94n75; ­slave-class medium, 94; slow ­replacement of papyrus roll, 95n79; stigma of, 104; superior writing surface of, 95n80; as Word made flesh, 91, 95–6, 100. See also communication, mode of Parker, Samuel: Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, 155 Parker, W.R., 340; Dalila as Milton’s most Euripidean character, 341n90; Dalila’s elevation from harlot to wife, 341; Milton and Greek tragedy, 368n11, 388–9, 388n61; on Oedipus Coloneus as model, 334n73, 389n63; Samson and plot of Prometheus, 339, 339n82

2022-09-01 16:54



Index 497

Parsons, Robert, S.J.: Foxe’s bitter ­detractor, 174n31, 183n45 Pennington, Isaac: Quaker friend of Milton, 197n66, 354, 354n12 Pepys, Samuel: threat of Quaker ­egalitarianism, 352–3 Petrarch, Francesco: as another Ennius, 60, 63; as cleric, 8, 58; as creative reader, 15, 17, 18, 63–4; and cult of fame, 6, 8n11; attacks on Scholasticism, 51–2, 54, 125, 128; attempts to learn Greek, 124n32; “Babylonian captivity” of Church, 4, 284–5; break with Christian historiography, 63, 304; as Christian poet, 59, 59n82; crowned poet laureate, 3n4, 29; cult of personality, 29; discovery of Cicero’s Ad Atticum, 54n70, 113n8, 135, 135n64, 136n97, 185; ­discovery of “dark age,” 3n1, 4, 43, 303; discovery of fixed distance from a­ ncients, 43n40; discovery of historical discontinuity, 33, 43, 124, 127, 283, 303; discovery of “Middle Age,” 3n2, 275; and eclipse of Bible in European historiography, 304; as embodiment of antiquity, 5; ­historiography compared to Bruni, 302–4; history as tragedy, 311n35, 317n49; intimacy of style, 22n40, 66, 135–7; lacking Greek and Hebrew, 124–5; letter to Cicero, 59, 136–7; letter to Urban V on Latin as basis of the social “order,” 64n106; letters to friends, 54n70; philological methods of, 11, 14–16, 123–4; reconstruction of Livy’s History, 15–17, 123–4; rejection of providential history, 302n11, 304n19; “Roman-ness” of, 60–3, 60n86, 302–3; scorn for myth of Holy Roman Empire, 63,

33093_Williams.indd 497

258, 302n11, 303n18; stilted letters of contemporaries, 137; view of Constantine, 304 Petrarch, Francesco, writings of – Africa, 3n2, 59; as culmination of De viris illustribus, 302n9; Brutus’s defeat of a tyrant, 247n35; dream of Scipio Africanus, 60–1, 303n14; exposed fiction of Holy Roman Empire, 61, 258, 303n18; history as tragedy in, 317n49; ­invocation to Christ in, 58n79; line of poetic succession in 9th book missing Dante and Virgil, 60n88, 61n92; and Livy’s Decades, 16–17, 61–2, 62n97, 123–4; Livy’s Scipio in, 62n97, 123; poet himself as Scipio, 61n92; as ­republican epic, 62, 302n12; ­reversal of Christian bipartite ­history, 3n2, 309; Scipio’s ­Christ-like virtue, 304n20; and Virgil’s Aeneid, 60, 60n89, 62, 62n98, 302n11, 303n14 – Canzoniere: scorn for “Babylonian Captivity” of Church, 61–2, 62n95 – De viris illustribus, 3n2, 64, 302; ­eschews non-Roman examples, 302n10; republican historiography of, 3n1, 302 – Epistulae ad Familiares, 3n2, 54n70, 59; rhetoric of intimacy adapted from Cicero, 136–7 – Invective on Ignorance, 52 – Livy’s Decades: first “complete” ­edition of, 15–17, 123–4 – Secretum: dialogue with Augustine, 63–4 Phillips, Edward: Milton’s ­defensiveness about Paradise Regain’d, 197 Pistoia, Cino da: opposition to Mos Gallicus, 253

2022-09-01 16:54

498

Index

Plato, writings of – Death of Socrates, The, 218 – Republic, The, 51 – Timaeus, 146 Plutarch: Parallel Lives, 17n32, 302 Pollard, Tanya: 16th-century interest in Aristotle’s newly printed Poetics, 375n40, 376n42 Poulet, Georges: reception theory of, 141n76, 155n101 prerogative courts: competitor with common-law courts, 256n59; Court of High Commission, 231, 238; Court of Star Chamber, 231, 232, 236, 237, 238; procedures ­unlike common-law courts, 230– 1; Romanist in character, 230. S ee also common-law courts Price, David, 73; pogrom of Jewish books, 73–4; Reuchlin’s anti-­ Scholasticism, 161–2; Reuchlin’s Hebrew scholarship, 160–1 Pride, Col. Thomas, 196, 251; body exhumed and desecrated, 333 Prideaux, Att. Gen. Edmund, 349; read Lilburne’s “plays” as evidence at his treason trial, 349 printing industry: alliance with humanism, 26; creation of cultural authority, 24, 28–9; cult of ­personality, 29; and early modern crisis, 69; effects of uniform ­pagination, 27; enabled indexical reading, 28; expansion of titles, 69, 76; preservative powers of, ­26–7, 33 Protestant Bible reading: and ­scripture’s formal sufficiency, 46; as bulwark of patriarchal authority, 77n23 Prynne, William: Histrio-Mastix, 231; Lame Giles his Haultings, 231; ­martyrdom of, 231

33093_Williams.indd 498

Putney Debates, 279, 289, 294, 323, 356, 356n122, 361, 438 Quakerism: rejection of oath of ­supremacy, 353; threat to social order, 351–5 Quakers, 195, 197, 327, 351; as ­heretical readers, 39; as public menace during Protectorate, 353 Quintilian, 44; Euripides as help to rhetoricians, 376n43; influence on Erasmus, 150, 153; Institutio ­oratoria, 27n6, 53n69, 150, 150n92 Rainsborough, Col. Thomas: on government by consent, 356; as tragic hero of Revolution, 332n69; on universal manhood suffrage, 361; visit to imprisoned Lilburne during Putney Debates, 361 Raven, James, 14, 109; Eisenstein’s “technological determinism,” 27n7; evidential problems of reading practices, 12; interaction of scribal and print culture, 24n2, 93n72; reading and revolution, 20n33 reception theory. See Iser, Wolfgang; Poulet, Georges Regal Tyrannnie Discovered: contract ­between sovereign and subject, 256; Lilburne disclaimed ­authorship of, 289; majesty of people, 289; M. Nedham likely ­author of, 289n116 Regn, Gerhard, and Bernhard Huss: Aeneid’s conception of history, 60n89; on Petrarch’s Africa, 60, 302n11, 317n49; Petrarch’s break with Christian historiography, 63; Petrarch’s crowning with a laurel wreath, 3n4; Petrarch’s ­reconstruction of Livy, 124

2022-09-01 16:54



Index 499

Reist, Kathrin: bodies made text in Foxe, 190; trope of relics in Actes and Monuments, 190 Restoration poetics: abhorrence of metaphor, 155–6 Reuchlin, Johannes, 48; biblical ­philology of, 58, 74, 107, 128, 161; campaign to save Jewish books, ­73–4, 161–2; De arte cabbalistica, 65; dedication to Leo X, 161; found ­errors in Vulgate translation, 75; Hebrew as God’s language, 97n85, 160; Hebrew grammar and lexicon of, 65; Jerome and the “Hebrew Truth,” 160; as life-long Catholic, 162; Luther as his “student,” 162; Miracle-Making Word, 99, 99n90; primacy of Hebrew bible, 160; quarrel with Scholastic ­philosophers, 160–1, 161n8; ­rabbinical scholarship of, 65; ­return to linguistic source, 48, ­57–8, 65, 160; sent Melanchthon in his stead to Wittenberg, 162 Revard, Stella, 378n46, 381n54, 382n55, 397; Heracles restorer of Athenian democracy, 398n75 Roberts, C.H., and T.C. Skeat, 92n70; Christian preference for codex form, 93, 93n94; difficulties of making good parchment, 95n79; excellence of parchment writing surface, 95n80; Martial’s praise for parchment codex, 94n75; ­openness of Christian codex, 94n77; o ­ rigins of Christian codex in Gospel of Mark, 93n74 Robson, Eleanor: paper’s origins in China, 101–2 Rodgers, C.P., 252, 256–7; ­common law as “wisdom of many

33093_Williams.indd 499

­ enerations,” 264; concept of g ­anachronism foreign to Middle Ages, 127n42; myth of “­immemorial” common law, 262 Royal Grammar School in Newcastle, 232, 232nn9–10 Rundle, David, 27n6, 91n65, 142n79; cost of paper in Bologna ca 1280 relative to parchment, 103n96; first Christian work ­inscribed on paper, 102n95; medieval book as icon, 91n66; medieval reading as c­ ommunal practice, 77n25; m ­ edieval reading as devotional, 66n112 Rust, Jennifer, 164; hierarchical vs communal bodies, 192; on Lubac’s Corpus Mysticum, 191–2 Sacred Congregation of Rites, 89; Eucharisticum Mysterium, 89–90 Sadler, John: elective monarchy and contractual government, 249n45 Sallust, Gaius, 305; Bellum Catilinae, 315–16; Bellum Jugurthinum, 316; value for medieval historians, 316n46 Salmasius (Claude de Saumaise): Defensio Regia Pro Carolo I, 289–90 Salutati, Coluccio, 7, 9–10; ­contribution to Greek language studies in Italian Renaissance, 10 Sassoferatto, Bartolus da, 153n96; ­opposition to Mos Gallicus, 253–4 Sauer, Elizabeth, 14–15; anxiety of early moderns in translating oral to written communications, 67; diversity of 17th-century reading practices, 56 Scaliger, J.C.: attack on Erasmus’s character, 34n21; personal ­preference for Seneca over Euripides, 372n24

2022-09-01 16:54

500

Index

Scaliger, J.J.: emendations of Euripides, 372n25 Schnapp, Jeffrey: the digital book, xviii, 23n35 Scholasticism: as culture of metonymy, 48n55, 152, 152n95, 154–5, 187; doctrine of decay, 10, 372, 372n26; dogmatic criteria of, 50; faculty psychology of, 39; and its humanist critics, 18, 47–8, 50–4, 66, 74, 78, 106, 119, 125–7, 128, 139, 152–3, 160–2, 170, 179, 186–7, 253–5; i­nfluence of Aristotle on, 51n63, 77n2; oral procedures of, 47–8; as residual influence on Luther, 96n81 Selden, John: laws of Edward and the common law, 250 Shakespeare, William: King Lear, 366, 368, 369 Shawcross, John, 296n130, 365n4 Shuger, Debora: Roman law in Holy Roman Empire, 253; Hotman’s Anti-Tribonianus, 256 Sider, Robert D.: communion of the Word, 66, 143; Erasmus and his critics, 34n20; Erasmus’s anti-­ Scholasticism, 106n106; Erasmus as a poet, 154; intimacy of ­ancients’ writings, 135–6, 143n80 Sidney, Algernon, 326; Court Maxims, 328 Small, Gary: digital media’s stunting of development in prefrontal ­cortex, xx–xxi, xx n34 social media: and political falsehood, xvii, xvii n24; parallels with ­manuscript culture, 11; political ­effects of, xviii–xx Sophocles, 40, 365, 382; chorus as conserver of oral tradition, 403–4; King Oedipus, 317, 368, 388–9;

33093_Williams.indd 500

Oedipus Coloneus, 326, 334n73, 388, 389n63; Women of Trachis, 381 Sorbonne, the: burning of Luther’s books, 73; Erasmus’s student life at, 52; first Index of Prohibited Books, 78 Speeches and Prayers: Foxean inclusion of epistolary evidence, 362; Foxean preservation of martyr’s voice, 362; Thomas Harrison’s Foxean tropes, 330–1; tropes ­repeated from Lilburne’s Worke of the Beast, 330–2 Spelman, Sir Henry, 21, 265; absence of feudal terms in Saxon law, 258; common law of Norman origin, 257–8; correspondence with Continental humanists, 257; taught himself Anglo-Saxon language, 258; Treatise on Feuds and Tenures, 21, 257; value of comparative legal studies, 258 Stallybrass, Peter, 47; bible and scrolls, 94n77, 144; codex and forensic reading, 180; codex and indexical reading, 47, 118; codex as “history of the bookmark,” 182, 367; codex as open form, 94n77; indexical reading of Askew, 176, 179, 180; indexical reading of Christian l­iturgy, 118, 181; properties of scroll and codex for reading, 167, 368; scroll reading as “reactionary” or retrograde, 144, 167, 180 Stephanus, Paulus: edition of Euripides, 371, 371n19, 372n27, 373, 373n30 Stiblinus, Gasparus, 22, 22n39, 371, 371n20; commentary on Bacchae, 22, 418; commentary on Hippolytus, 379, 384n56;

2022-09-01 16:54



Index 501

commentary on Medea, 380; concern with ­interpretation, 379n48; dangers of impiety in Bacchae, 418; ­dating of prefaces, 371n23; earliest ­assessment of Euripides’s oeuvre, 371n20; parallels with other commentators, 379n50; philological concerns of, 379n48; political aspects of Euripides’s plays, 373n30, 396, 418, 423; used in Milton’s ­annotations on Euripides, 418n107 Stoll, Abraham, 429; Samson’s “sense of heaven’s desertion,” 409n99 Streater, John, 35; court case a ­precedent for Lilburne’s potential release, 337, 337n77, 337n79 Suetonius: De viris illustribus, 302; De vita Caesarum, 65n110 Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver’s Travels, 70 Swift, Laura, 405–6 Sykes, George, 328; Life and Death of Sir Henry Vane the Younger, 329 Sypniewski, Holly M., and Anne MacMaster, 396; Euripidean tragedy as cultural critique, 380n51; Medea and Dalila as moral ­relativists, 391n66 Tacitus, Publius Cornelius, 308; Annals of Imperial Rome, 305; Germanic sacrifice of defeated Romans, 87 Theatre of Dionysus: design and ­staging in, 402–3 Trent, Council of: and CounterReformation, 162; Vulgate the “­authentic” Bible, 117n20, 162 Turner, James: Erasmus contra the Scholastics, 53; Erasmus’s ­philological methods, 18, 131–2; Petrarch’s philological methods,

33093_Williams.indd 501

16; reverence for Homer in ­antiquity, 17–18; rise of philology in Alexandria, 47n52, 124n30; Valla as forgery hunter, 128 Twitter: x, xviii n28, 23n41; ­algorithmic excuse, xviii; and ­conspiracy theories, xvi, xix; and direct governance, xviii; and “present-mindedness,” xv; claim to be a mere conduit, xvi–xvii; Trump’s “biggest lie,” xviii n27 Tyndale, William, 120–1; levelling ­figure of plowman, 173, 174n31, 228 Valla, Lorenzo, 11, 12; biblical ­philology of, 58, 58n77, 64, ­126–7; critical of Jerome’s Latin, 64, 127; critique of Bartolist ­jurists, 253–4; critique of Scholastics, 51n64, 58n78, ­125–6, 254; Dionysius the Areopagite, 128; Donation of Constantine, 127, 308; driver of expanding book market, 106; error of Jerome’s metanoia, 105n102, 127; forgery hunter, 33, 107, 125–6; humanism as multi-disciplinary program, 11n18; humanist requirement to learn ancient languages, 258; iconoclasm of, 253; influence on Erasmus, 33n17, 58n78, 105n102, 128; last great scribal humanist, 32; Latin and Christianity as coterminous, 64– 5; Latin as basis of social o ­ rder, 64; Latin as its own s­ acrament, 65n107; popularity among Northern humanists, 58n78; principle of linguistic change, 34, 127, 127n44; ­republican

2022-09-01 16:54

502

Index

grammar of, 63; ­sceptical humanism of, 106, 175, 416; as scribal humanist, 32, 59 Valla, Lorenzo, writings of – Annotations to the New Testament, 12n21, 64, 126, 128 – De elegantiae linguae Latinae, 63, 65n107, 106, 126 Vane, Sir Henry the Younger, 326; martyrdom of, 196, 328–9 Vernant, Jean-Paul: staging the ­tensions of Greek democracy in Great Dionysia, 403 Vessey, Mark, 18, 106n110 Virgil: Aeneid, xiv, 126, 308; Aeneid and Roman destiny, 60–1, 60n89, 62n98, 200, 200n72, 227n101, 302n11, 303n14; Aeneid and ­underworld, 199–200, 374; Aeneid 8 and shield of Aeneas, 62; Aeneid as history in future tense, xiv, 313, 314n39; Augustus and Actium in, 62n98; historical view attractive to Middle Ages, 60n89; as justification for Roman rule, 311n34; technique of direct ­address in, 358n126; as written epic, xiv–xv, 404n87 Walton, Bishop Brian: and London Polyglot Bible, 42n38 Walwyn, William, 276n94; on social contradictions of English­ ­revolutionaries, 267 Warham, Archbishop William: as English Maecenas, 129n49; ­examination of Thomas Hitton, 120–1; patron to Erasmus, 120n26, 129, 137–8, 371n21 Weber, Max, 58; The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 13n29

33093_Williams.indd 502

White, Hayden: annalistic history, 312; chronicles, 312; history as an allegory of temporality, 317; history as tragedy, 317; history ­representing structures of human time, 317 Wittreich, Joseph, 295n127, 341, 359n130; irrelevance of Oedipus Coloneus to Samson, 389n63; Gregory Nazianzen’s Christ Suffering, 412n103; Milton’s ­silences and omissions in Samson, 359n131; Samson as a Hebrew Goliath, 392n67; Samson contrasted with Gideon, 421; tribe of Dan’s disappearance from ­history, 423n19 Wood, Derek: Samson as a prisoner of written Law, 348n97; Samson’s ­continuing death wish, 390n64; traumatized Messenger of Samson, 420n113 Worden, Blair, 296n31; language of “Good Old Cause,” 326–7; ­language of Ludlow in Samson, 327–8, 329–30; language of Sidney in Samson, 328; language of Sykes regarding Sir Henry Vane in Samson, 328–9; on possible early draft of Samson, 327; Sykes on Vane as a biblical Samson, 328 Zenodotus of Ephesus, 15; first “standard” edition of Homer, 47n52; pioneered textual ­collation, 47n52 Zwingli, Ülrich, 77; “idolatry” of ­sacrament, 83; killed at Battle of Kappel, 83; Marburg Colloquy and dispute with Luther, 83, 111

2022-09-01 16:54