Chapter 5, ‘Politics and the Workplace’, concludes the study (save a short epilogue)by examining the role of education in the transfer of power between generations. Thesmooth continuation of gerontocracies, England included, depended on careful men-torship of youths not yet prepared to assume high public offices. Once again, thedrama reveals the disastrous political results when this cooperation is lacking. In achapter full of original insights, the section on Coriolanus shines as an example of howreading through the prism of old age can produce novel interpretations. Whereasmany critics perceive Coriolanus’ mother as something of a monster, Taunton viewsVolumnia quite favourably as an educator who embodies many of the masculinequalities valued by the ancients, ‘one of the few examples in the drama of the periodof a woman elder shaping policy and influencing public events’ (153–54). Her gender-bending public performance of the ‘classical model of masculine old age’ (157) pro-vides one of this study’s striking examples of the contrast between what old age wassupposed to be like, according to sermon and manual, and the forms it could assumeregardless, onstage and in the imagination. Nina Taunton reveals all these manifesta-tions of old age as competing fictions – indispensable ones for scholars committed tobetter understanding early modern experiences of growing and being old.

Anthony EllisWestern Michigan University, Kalamazoo

David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (eds.), Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’sEngland. Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 2008. xii + 470 pp. $80.00/£50.00, ISBN: 978-0802089359 (hb).

Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England is an awkward title, as though the editorswere anxious about allowing the topic of ‘Milton and nationalism’ to dominate acollection of essays which is for all intents and purposes about Milton and nationalism.Presumably the title is designed to reflect the hesitancy, or carefulness, of the editorsand contributors about how exactly to describe Milton’s relation to notions, both earlymodern and modern, of nationalism and national identity. The editors are quick topoint out that not only is Milton’s ‘relation to the nation . . . highly conflicted,strained, and volatile’ (4) but that the most influential theorists of nationalism ‘haveposited that nations and nationalism are largely the product of the second half of theeighteenth century . . . and therefore they analyze nationalism as basically a modernphenomenon’ (7). We are back in that thorny area of the anachronism of ‘isms’ –radicalism, liberalism, feminism and republicanism are among the others that havebeen much discussed in relation to Milton in recent years.

The editors acknowledge Colin Kidd’s powerfully argued position in British IdentitiesBefore Nationalism (1999) that nationalism is a modern invention and should not beconfused with early modern ‘national consciousness’, but position their volume in(subdued) opposition to Kidd: ‘Most of the essays in this volume challenge [Kidd’s]thesis in one way or another, although see Joad Raymond’s essay below’ (17–18 n. 15).

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Given that Raymond’s essay (to which we shall return) is the only one of the fourteento question explicitly the value of the premise that we can identify Milton with an earlymodern form of nationalism which anticipates (in some ways) the modern sort, it is infact the odd one out (although the subtle piece by Thomas N. Corns does not entirelyfollow the line either), and this might have been an even more substantial collectionif wider and stronger dissent from its guiding principles had been sought and assimi-lated. (There are no historians here: all the contributors are from literature depart-ments in Britain, North America and Canada. The focus is consequently more on‘Milton’s England’ than on ‘Early Modern Nationalism’.)

As it is, many of the historically oriented literary scholars one would expect to be ina volume such as this are here – including Andrew Hadfield, Achsah Guibbory, JohnKerrigan, Victoria Kahn, Willy Maley, Laura Knoppers and Nicholas Von Maltzahn –and they are in broad agreement about how to approach Milton’s ideas of nation: theiressays are characteristically well written and attentive to details of historical and bio-graphical context, even as they seek to extend the concept of nationalism back to theearly modern. In this respect the treatment of ‘nationalism’ is reminiscent of thearguments in recent years that the origins of the Habermasian ‘public sphere’ shouldbe traced back to the mid-seventeenth century. Virtually every piece, including the firstparagraph of the introduction, quotes Milton’s (Latin) letter of August 1666 to PeterHeimbach: ‘after having allured me by her lovely name, [patriotism] has almostexpatriated me, as it were . . . one’s Patria is wherever it is well with him.’ It is charac-teristic of Milton to think of himself as having been forced out of a community by dintof his superior virtue: as Loewenstein and Stevens note, there is an echo here ofMilton’s insistence that he had been unable to pursue a clerical career because he hadbeen ‘Church-outed by the Prelates’. The Heimbach letter both questions the extentof Milton’s attachment to England and Englishness, at least by the Restoration, andalso emphasizes, although nobody in the volume makes this point explicitly, thatMilton, from at least his time at Cambridge, always preferred to position himself as theoutsider, excluded from a community by his greater wisdom and morality. This psy-chological quirk and rhetorical preference creates notable tensions when Milton actsas official propagandist for the Commonwealth and Protectorate governments, writingon behalf firstly of a regime that was unpopular with the people it claimed to embody,and secondly of a regime about which he himself had serious misgivings over itsleanings towards monarchical forms of tyranny. Did Milton the official propagandistfeel justified because he felt he was speaking on behalf of a nation, or rather becausehe felt he was the last virtuous witness of a corrupt nation?

These are questions that surely have different answers depending on when inMilton’s life and career we ask them. David Loewenstein’s opening piece, ‘Milton’sNationalism and the English Revolution: Strains and Contradictions’, offers a fluent ifrather predictable trot through the prose from Of Reformation (1641) to the History ofBritain (1670). Hadfield’s ‘Reading Paradise Lost through Eikonoklastes’ is cogent andclear but, as the title makes explicit, it takes the questionable route of reading the epicpoem in the terms of the prose tract published eighteen years earlier and so risks thecharge of anachronism in its very premise. Nonetheless Hadfield’s conclusion that the‘early books of Paradise Lost provide us with models of the true and false nation’ is

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persuasive. Warren Chernaik considers Milton’s ambivalent representations of Crom-well in the long third essay: again this is a fluent and engaging piece but with fewsurprises.

The second group of three essays treats more specific themes: Guibbory explores theidentification of England with Israel as elect nation in the ‘Fast Sermons’ (an under-used resource) of the early 1640s; Andrew Escobedo examines the Congregationalistdoctrine of the ‘invisible church’ of the elect, which he sees as embodying a notion ofthe Christian nation within, and usually opposed to, the apparatus of the nation state.Although Escobedo does not make the point, Milton’s separation of church and stateimportantly distinguishes him from republicans like Marchamont Nedham, an enthu-siastic Erastian and consequently more of a convincing apologist for the nation state,republican or Cromwellian, than Milton. Raymond’s argument is a complex one, builton dense analysis of the transformation of Lycidas into ‘the Genius of the Shore’ at theend of the elegy. Showing how Milton and other Protestants rather surprisingly sub-scribed to the traditional belief in local guardian angels, Raymond goes on to arguethat ‘the local guardian angel presents a substitute, or a metonym, for a missing notionof nationhood’ (160) – and he is categorical that we can only talk of nationalism inrelation to the nation-state, and that a theory of the nation-state is simply not there inMilton’s England. There is not space to summarize fully the intriguing twists and turnsof Raymond’s argument here: but, while it is not always clear that the considerablematerial on guardian angels in the opening half of the essay is directly relevant to theargument about nationhood in conclusion, this is the most provocative and originalessay in the collection and usefully disrupts what was threatening to become a rathersmooth consensus.

The third group of essays, ‘Ethnicity and National Relations’, maintains the highertempo, although readers coming to Kerrigan’s essay with anticipation of his charac-teristic originality will be disappointed if they have a copy of his Archipelagic English(2008): the essay on ‘The Anglo-Scottish-Dutch Triangle: Milton and Marvell to 1660’is taken verbatim from that book. In this section the authors look outside the limits ofEngland, and, in the case of Corns’s essay, outside the ‘Limitations of Englishness’. AsCorns wisely points out, in his History of Britain (1670) Milton ‘subordinates anyconcern with national identity to his recurrent and pervasive values of anticlericalismand, widely defined, antimonarchism and republicanism’ (211). In suggesting thatMilton was more concerned with a pan-European republic of letters than with Englishethnicity, Corns comes to a similar conclusion to Raymond, if less explicitly: ‘[Milton’s]hero is not his people but civility itself’ (158).

Paul Stevens’s essay, ‘How Milton’s Nationalism Works’, is distinctive in the collec-tion in its restlessness with historicism and willingness to read Milton through ‘presen-tist’ concerns, specifically the post-9/11 world and the process of global capitalism. Inthe process Stevens makes an eloquent case for the relevance and utility of literarycriticism in a world in which the increasing degree of preference of state governmentsfor applied science threatens the place of the humanities. Part Four deals with specifictopics in relation to Milton’s representations of nation: the place of women (Maley),luxury (Knoppers) and slavery (Mary Nyquist). Von Maltzahn’s final, long essay pro-vides a fitting and impressive conclusion, exploring the appropriation of Paradise Lost

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for a poetics of the sublime in the early eighteenth century and showing how ‘thenationalist adoption of his blank verse overran one of Milton’s most passionately heldbeliefs, the separation of church and state’ (405). The argument is unexpected butpowerful, and combines, as such an essay should, an appreciation of poetic form withilluminating insights into the changing contexts of the politics of culture. Early ModernNationalism and Milton’s England may not, as that uncomfortable title indicates, quiteadd up to the sum of its parts, but the unevenness itself gives a sense of a valuableongoing discussion. Certainly several of the essays are sufficiently strong to make it oneof the better collections published on Milton in the last decade.

Nicholas McDowellUniversity of Exeter

Jyotsna G. Singh (ed.), A Companion to the Global Renaissance. English Literature andCulture in the Era of Expansion. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. xviii + 400 pp. and 18illus. ISBN: 978-1405154765 (hb).

In the renowned Armada Portrait (c. 1588), commemorating the triumph of QueenElizabeth’s English navy over the threat of the Spanish Armada, the queen’s right handrests lightly upon a terrestrial globe. Her fingers cover the new world of the Americasas an indication of her country’s proud imperialist and colonialist spirit. This allegori-cal visual gesture deftly blends together several of the key political implications of latesixteenth-century concepts of geography, commerce and empire-building. In JyotsnaG. Singh’s impressively wide-ranging A Companion to the Global Renaissance – which bearsthe Armada Portrait by George Gower on its dust jacket – twenty-one essays by expertscholars explore four currently dominant areas of investigation related to this dynamicsense of early modern English expansionism: ‘Mapping the Global’, ‘Contact Zones’,‘Networks of Exchange: Traveling Objects’ and ‘The Globe Staged’. A distinctivestrength of this collection lies in its constructive emphasis upon viewing the openingup of the known world at this period from more than just the usual predominantlyEurocentric perspective. In Singh’s own introductory essay, for example, the ArmadaPortrait is usefully compared to the allegorical portrait (c. 1618) of the Mughalemperor, Jahangir, who is represented embracing the Persian monarch, Shah Abbas,with both figures standing upon a globe which, it has been suggested, projects thepredominantly western-European geographical perspectives introduced to the Mughalcourt by the English ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe. From the second half of thesixteenth century onwards, it became increasingly important for ambitious rulers,courtiers, seafarers, writers and artists to define themselves not only within the contextof their domestic dominions but also to consider how their personal achievementswere to be projected within an aggressively expanding global framework.

Within the first of the four broad categorizations noted above, ‘Mapping the Global’,a wide range of historical, theoretical and conceptual paradigms are brought to bearon such diverse texts as Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (Daniel Vitkus), contemporarytravel narratives (Crystal Bartolovich), Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (John Archer) and the

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