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A major new edition of Milton’s selected works of prose, including his political and doctrinal writings and the famous Areopagitica
John Milton was celebrated and denounced in his own time both as a poet and as a polemicist. Today he is remembered first and foremost for his poetry, but his great epic Paradise Lost was published very late in his life, in 1667, and in his own time most readers more readily recognized Milton as a writer of prose. This superbly annotated new book is an authoritative edition of Milton’s major prose works, including Of Education, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, and the Divorce tracts, as well as the famous 1644 polemical tract opposing licensing and censorship, Areopagitica.
For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
- Sales Rank: #892268 in Books
- Published on: 2016-01-26
- Released on: 2016-01-26
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.80" h x .90" w x 5.20" l, .45 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 384 pages
Review
“An engaging, accessible, and reliable introduction to Milton’s prose . . . Sprightly, purposeful, and crisp [with a] deft and lucid introduction . . . The editorial apparatus is economical but pertinent. . . . [The] notes are always relevant and reliable.” —Milton Quarterly
About the Author
John Milton (1608–1674) was born in London and studied at the University of Cambridge. Thereafter he spent some years in private study, visiting France and Italy in the late 1630s. Upon his return to a nation now in political crisis, he devoted himself to teaching and to the publication of a series of increasingly radical pamphlets on religious and political liberty, including defenses of divorce, a free press, and the right of a people to depose and execute a tyrannical king. After the Restoration he was politically muzzled, but in this period he published his mature poetic masterpieces, including Paradise Lost (1667).
William Poole (editor) is a tutorial fellow at New College, Oxford. He has published widely in the areas of early-modern literary, intellectual, and scientific history.
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0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Many things have luckily changed since 1644
By Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
This document is a “classic” document in its field of the freedom of expression.
First we need to push aside arguments that are no longer valid to assess the pamphlet. It was actually written and published to protest against another pamphlet about divorce (the author’s own personal problem then) that had been “censored” in other words refused for registration and licensing. Thus does not permit any evaluation of the pamphlet.
We also have to push aside the connection of the title with the people Milton knew or quoted in his pamphlet. He quotes Lord Brooke, actually known as a poet under the name of Fulke Greville, and this person was connected to a group of poets known as the Areopagus. This group was for a reform of poetry in England, and in English, supposedly on the model of the French Pléïade of Pierre de Ronsart. It was composed of Edmund Spenser, Gabriel Harvey (aka Archangel Gabriel), Edward Dyer, Sir Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville Lord Brooke.
I will not enter the debate dating from the beginning of the 20th century between Howard Maynadier, “The Areopagus of Sidney and Spenser” in The Modern Language Review, Vol. 4, No. 3 (April 1909), pp. 289-301, published by the Modern Humanities Research Association, available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/3713225, accessed August 11, 2016, on one hand, and Edward Fulton, “Spenser, Sidney, and the Areopagus” in Modern Language Notes, Vol. 31, No. 6 (June 1916), pp. 372-374, published by The Johns Hopkins University Press, available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/2915729, accessed August 11, 2016. The former negates the existence of this group known as the Areopagus, whereas the latter insists on the close and friendly relations between the various members of that group, particularly Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney.
Both should have insisted on the fact that this let’s say informal group of closely related people was the antechamber or the crucible in which the school of poetry known as the Metaphysical Poets came to life with John Donne among the leading few who have reached us. This is essential because it determines the style of John Milton’s pamphlet, and along with the style the fact that we can consider his reasoning as defective not in the conclusions but in the arguments that are “metaphysical” that is to say witty, brilliant in learnedness, trying to build the whole pamphlet around allusions, more or less explicit, to ancient and biblical cultures. The style and the reasoning are in many ways surprising to a modern mind for whom comparing or just using ellipses between various elements cannot be considered as proof or evidence, or even a simple demonstration.
To conclude on that point, John Milton does not refer to this group known as the Areopagus but to Greece:
“Thus the books of Protagoras were by the judges of Areopagus commanded to be burnt, and himself banished [from] the territory for a discourse begun with his confessing not to know WHETHER THERE WERE GODS, OR WHETHER NOT.”
The title of the pamphlet is thus derived from this censoring practice that, by the way, John Milton approves. He repeats several times that his opposition to censoring should never concern and benefit “either blasphemous and atheistical, or libelous” writings or authors This clearly expels from the benefit of the freedom of expression any text that rejects the existence of God or that derides religion which is assimilated to blasphemous writings on one hand, hence the religious side of discussions, thinking and expressing oneself, to which you have to add the political side covered by the term “libelous.” This excludes by principle any religious writing that could be considered as popish, i.e. Catholic in spirit or in actual reference. In modern terms this exclusion reduces this freedom of expression to only those who stand within the pale of the Reformation, brothers within the Reformation who demonstrate their “Unity of Spirit” and their “Bond of Peace.” In modern terms this would be considered rather fundamentalistic. But within the Puritan context of England in the 17th century this can be considered as rather tolerant.
In fact and furthermore we could add that the style is very often extremely humble towards the Puritans in Parliament, both the Commons and the Lords. He even knows some are going to say it is flattery and he justifies himself by saying 1- it is praise; 2- it is based on real facts; 3- no flattery is intended. This is not a real syllogism but only an accumulative set of three assertions: the third one could be seen as the conclusion of the first two, but it is not. We do not have flattery in the following circumstances:
"First, when that only is praised which is solidly worth praise[;] next, when greatest likelihoods are brought that such things are truly and really in those persons to whom they are ascribed[;] the other, when he who praises, by showing that such his actual persuasion is of whom he writes, can demonstrate that he flatters not.”
That accumulative way of thinking is systematic.
The target of the paomphlet is the Ordinance we have just presented, and along with the Ordinance, the two houses of Parliament, the Commons and the Lords, who have passed this Ordinance, but also the committee of censors that he calls the committee of twenty.
His first argument against it is that it is the going back to the Star Chamber practices of the kind that had been terminated by a decision of Parliament, hence to go back to censorship that had been abolished by Parliament. Along that line he alludes to the instating of registration, without ever using the word copyright, in 1557 in order to reimpose Catholicism in England. He forgets to say it was kept by Elizabeth this time to control and ban anything Catholic. By only alluding to these facts he can easily concentrate on the Star Chamber under the Stuarts and on more distant roots identified as the Spanish Inquisition at the end of the 15th century and the imprimatur imposed after the invention of the printing press, hence at the end of the 15th century too. He can thus identify any censorship with Catholicism and knowing that the Stuarts and Elizabeth were not Catholic he identify the Catholic chuch with what he calls “prelaty” which is the government of the church or religion by prelates in a hierarchical system, a system that has been kept by the Anglican Church. This is rather simple. The roots of censorship are a lot more general than the Catholic Church and a lot deeper in time than the 15th century. Before printing; for example in Medieval Europe copying was the main activity of monasteries and as such only Catholic monks could take part in this activity, which meant in many ways censorship of course. Censorship comes from the necessity, the need, the impulse of human society to control its resources, its means, its actions, and its general services and needs. And such a stance goes back to the emergence of humanity some 300,000 years ago in Africa. Homo Sapiens by inventing language became a power and control species in which those who commanded language, particularly memorial language and spiritual language, were naturally able to control their social groups, the minds of the people.
That could have enabled him to widen his discourse on the liberating dimension of this movement he identifies in England towards the freedom of expression based on the freedom of thought. And in spite of this limit he is able to refer to Wycliffe as the basic reformed thinker in Christian Europe who can be seen as the father of all Reformation schools of thinking, itself seen as the liberation of the minds of people, the discovery of truth and its reconstruction.
That’s where we come across the idea that knowledge has to be built, constructed by man because knowledge was smashed and scattered all over (no precision about when and by whom though we may think by God himself) and man – note he always considers knowledge and the collecting of knowledge from a masculine point of view though Truth and Virtue are systematically feminine as if man could only desire feminine entities – has to search the world for the pieces and bring them together and re-assemble them The comparison with Osiris and Isis is weak here because it is a completely different religious heathen context that would be considered as pagan by anyone in the 17th century, including England who was at the time engaged in colonizing the Carolinas and Virginia ruthlessly, at least for the native pagan American Indians who were not considered as human beings, Pocahontas being a rare exception in those days, a sort of alibi who provided John Rolfe with the method to grow and cure tobacco when she converted (under duress) and married the English pioneer who was in actual facts a plain colonizer.
But this constructive approach is today perfectly understandable though John Milton in his Puritan world attibutes this psychological genesis of man to the decision of God to provide this man with the freedom to choose, hence the responsibility to be good or bad, which means also the responsibility to cope with divine and human punishment for bad decisions and choices. He goes one step further when he explains that God has created man with the mind that enables him to search the world, recognize what is true or false, assemble the true elements together and build a knowledge that is characterized by some “elegant symmetry” that is to say some pleasing look that satisfies man’s search for equilibrium, harmony, etc. We could consider many of these elements as quite pertinent as for man’s psychogenesis and the psychogenesis of human knowledge. Of course he does not take into account the role of language since for him language is part of the creation of God that God gave man along with “the gift of reason” and the freedom to choose.
For Milton this has one consequence: thinking, speaking and printing have to be absolutely free because otherwise habits, customs, “laziness (of a licensing church)” and conformity, homogenization and uniformizing are the results of the absence of confrontation of ideas, within the pale of Reformed religion of course. This is probably the most important argument against censorship and for the freedom of expression: minds have to be free in order to be creative and investigative.
But instead of concentrating on this argument that is by far rich enough to write a pamphlet he too often reduce his thinking by using authority arguments: Athens, Lacedaemon, Rome and the Romans, Moses, Daniel, Paul, Dionysus Alexandrinus, Plato, Francis Bacon, Lord Brooke, Galileo, Isis-Osiris, Zwingli and Calvin, Wycliffe, Janus, Micaiah and Ahab, and many other arguments of the sort that are not attributed to someone or some identified situation. To explore these references we would need many pages especially since Milton does not give any real references to what he alludes to. Quoting was not standard in those days and using some text or fact without any reference was not considered as plagiarism but just borrowing, though it definitely was plagiarism. .
In fact this pamphlet in modern times would not go through even for students because it is built from too many unidentified and non-referenced borrowings, because the structure is neither clear nor coherent and because the main arguments could be reduced to four or five and developed in logical and psychological terms, not to speak of the very courteous tone and style directed at the Puritans in power, both Commons and Lords, hence Parliament as a whole, which implies that he does not step one single toe out of the reformed vision of God and His creation. It is very similar to René Descartes explaining that his scientific work in physics and astronomy reveals the elegance, symmetry and order in the universe, which proves the existence of a reasoning supreme being behind this creation, hence of God. The 17th century was not a century ready to liberate itself from any compulsory reference to God. The only freedom they had was to change affiliation (which was also dangerous) or to enter theological discussions on various points within the established fiath of the church you affiliated yourself to.
Then the main interest is to show the battle around freedom of speech and freedom of thought in England in the 17th century, a battle that is both political and intellectual: political to reject the absolute conception of monarchy and the King under the Stuarts; intellectual to keep the debate of ideas in all sorts of domains alive, vivid and even visionary for the sake of the nation, intellectuals, all preaching clergy and in the end everyone since this freedom of thought and expression enables society to change and improve towards a better integration in God’s plans for the future. The reference to God has to be pushed aside in today’s world to have a wider conception: freedom of thought and expression is necessary for intellectuals and scientists to remain creative and responsive to the real needs of humanity, for all educators to be able to open up their students to looking for the truth and trying to improve their lives and their ethics, and for all human beings to be able to follow change, and even at times precede it in real life and the material world.
Religion is another level that can be added by individuals for various personal, social, cultural or heritage reasons, any religion of course, and research, knowledge, education can be built on these religions in the same perspective of freedom of thought and expression, the faith in God being another motivation for those who accept it. This implies this God is in phase with John Milton’s: a God of intellectual endeavor, ethical improvement and sharing with all people around in a spirit of tpolerance and peace, not because we are all members of the same church but because we are all members of the human species.
This keeps a good dose of modernity to this text, in spite of the difficult language of it.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By Tyler Curtain
Better than Cats.
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