Forsyth, N.

Serveur académique lausannois

DOI 10.1515/anglia-2014-0045Gabor Ittzés and Miklós Péti (eds.). Milton Through the Centuries. Budapest:Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary / L’HarmattanPublishing, 2012, 337 pp., £ 28.00.Conference volumes are often rather spotty, but the papers published in thisone are of almost uninterruptedly high quality. It derives from a conference heldat the Protestant university of Károli Gáspár in Budapest in the Milton centenaryyear of 2008. Many of the contributors are Hungarian, but a range of well-known international scholars from the UK, France and the USA also respondedto the invitation. Its organizers write that they set out to assess the current stateof Milton’s reputation and they succeed in various ways. One approach is thatsignaled by Joseph Wittreich in the course of his own argument in favor of avisionary rather than physical journey in the wilderness of “Paradise Regained”:the recent impulse, he says, has been “to embrace Milton as both an author offissured texts and as a poet of ‘uncertainties’” (20–21). These uncertainties “re-peatedly destabilize a text” because “a radical hermeneutic undermines Milton’ssupposed allegiance to the traditional theological commonplaces. Milton is in-tent on delivering us from established systems of thought”. This kind of ap-proach has political implications, and accounts in part for contemporary interestin Milton, but it is often extended, as here, to all aspects of his work in bothprose and poetry. Another essay gives the late Marshall Grossman what turnedout to be a last chance to extend his widely canvassed argument that Miltonintended the 1671 volume to be read as a whole, not as two separate poems,“Samson Agonistes” and “Paradise Regained”. “Samson’s direct progress from‘rouzing motions’ to direct action under the Law” is transcended by “Jesus’pause after his baptism to discover the nature of his Messianic mission throughreasoned debate” (4). Thus, the new covenant supersedes the old.These well-known scholars are surrounded here by younger, less estab-lished critics, several from non-anglophone cultures including the host nation.A few are illustrated, either by fine line-drawings, like the essay on the shape ofMilton’s universe (with a brief digression on Escher); or by splendid reproduc-tions exploring landscape in the background of Adam and Eve in, or expelledfrom, the Earthly Paradise; representations of Tobias and the Angel; or contrast-ing Medina’s illustrations with William Blake’s; or studying the widespread im-pact both in book illustration and painting, of the scene of the blind Miltondictating to his daughters.Neil Forsyth, Université de Lausanne, E-Mail: neil.forsyth@unil.chAnglia 2014, 132 (2): 1–3Contemporary readers are not always ‘destabilizing’ Milton. Many oldercritics are also, it turns out, still being read and used: thus, in a couple of pageson the uses of place, Chia-Yin Huang manages to refer to Allan H. Gilbert, Wal-ter Clyde Burry, Marjorie Nicholson, John B. Broadbent and Irene Samuel, aswell as more contemporary writers such as Michael Lieb, Regina Schwartz orNigel Smith. Other contributors here make similar use of earlier generations,and this is not simply what often happens when scholars present papers writtenfar from up-to-date libraries of the Anglophone world. Some fine essays areabout the difference between bliss and joy (Mimi Fenton), about prayer (TiborFabiny, one of the hosts), about the body and its senses, recent turns towardallegorical readings, about Milton’s use of his rhetorical training, about the roleof the ‘arguments’ added to the 1668 reissue of “Paradise Lost”, or about theproblem of God’s absolute monarchy in a poem written by an anti-monarchist:it turns out, God’s is not really an absolute monarchy since he repeatedly bindshimself by covenant.Other essays extend the range of Milton studies. Thus, one sets out to re-deem Milton’s early “Fair Infant” elegy by comparing it with other poems of theperiod that also display extensive use of myth; another contributor, the distin-guished Warren Chernaik, discovers interesting affinities with Traherne; anotherdoes so with Crashaw (and thus a reason why “The Passions” is only a fragmentwhich ends with the question: “In what deep anguish / Didst thou languish, /What springs of sweat, and blood did drown thee?”), while another (one of thekeynote speakers, Agnes Péter from Eötvös Loránd University) explains howHungarian interest in Milton was originally sparked by the Reformed Protestantmovement, especially in Transylvania. More generally, she explores what Miltonhas meant to Hungarian cultural memory: one Hungarian critic, for example,maintained that “Satan illustrates the thesis that Romanticism is the product ofProtestantism” (185). Another well-known critic, Angelica Duran, explores Mil-ton’s Spanish as well as global reputation; Marlene Edelstein studies Comus inthe eighteenth century while Joan Blythe writes about Chateaubriand, Milton’sFrench translator, and his increasing revulsion at Napoleon-Satan. The mainconference organizer, Miklós Péti, has a fine essay on the ‘Homeric spirit’ in“Paradise Lost”, and there are many other riches for the reader to unearth –Milton read in the light of René Girard, Eden as the site of some Fowlesian ‘god-games’, naked innocence in Milton and the visual arts with some surprising useof the terminology of clothing (though only one angel, Michael, as he ap-proaches in Book 11, is actually dressed).The cover design reproduces part of the electroplated Milton Shield fromthe Budapest Museum of Applied Arts, of which the original, created for theInternational Exhibition held in Paris in 1867, is in the Victoria and Albert Mu-2  Reviewsseum in London. This remarkable shield is worked in silver, steel and gold, andrepresents scenes from Paradise Lost. I would have welcomed some discussionof how this piece ended up in a Budapest museum, but otherwise it is hard tofind fault with this beautifully produced book.Reviews  3

Gabor Ittzés and Miklós Péti (eds.). Milton Through the Centuries. Budapest: Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary / L'Harmattan Publishing, 2012, 337 p.

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Gabor Ittzés and Miklós Péti (eds.). Milton Through the Centuries. Budapest: Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary / L'Harmattan Publishing, 2012, 337 p.

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