Milton, history, and context

Much of our discussion this week revolved around the role of historical context and the past in scholarship and interpretation. Each article pondered the relationship between current methodologies/analyses and the past—can we move beyond it, as in Best’s discussion of Morrison; does it hold any usefulness, as in Jameson and other postmodern thought; has it been appropriated to serve other ends, as Dillon suggests? And how do critical methodologies travel across genres and through time?

I’ve chosen a text that heavily relies on invocations of past practice to make an argument for current action. Milton’s rhetorical process in “Areopagitica” seems to rely on an assumption that examples or morals can be drawn from past contexts, even ones considerably different than early modern England. He seems to be doing exactly what Best and Dillon disapprove of (and what we disapproved of in Patterson and Dillon): reading the past selectively to suit his own ends. Early in the pamphlet, he returns to the greatest of authorities, ancient Greece. To defend the absence of censorship in England, he reminds the Parliament that the ancient Greeks pretty much left authors and thinkers alone, except those that were “either blasphemous or libelous” (720). In the span of two paragraphs, he cites or references 15 classical scholars. Following the appeal to ancient Greek practices comes an appeal to the ancient Romans, who also only burned blasphemy or libel, and then a brief jaunt through the Holy Roman Empire until Milton comes to the quintessential example of early modern personae non grata: the Catholic church. Essentially, he points out that many of the popes censored and restricted not only heresy, but anything they didn’t like, the logical conclusion being that if the English Parliament wishes to avoid association with popery, they will avoid licensure (724).

On one hand, this strategy represents a belief in the authority of history and a correct interpretation of that history that contemporary scholars would be aghast at; on the other hand, Milton’s grab bag of examples resembles the historical pastiche that Jameson describes as that which “can only ‘represent’ our ideas and stereotypes about the past (which thereby at once becomes ‘pop history’)” (25). The mediation of the past through time and Milton’s own interpretation has the effect of reducing his examples to a collection of pop history—at least to contemporary readers. To Milton, the past retained an authority that could be used to guide present action—the “ethical relation to the past” that Best refers to (454).

However, Milton’s text also enters the discussion of the limits of context and our relationship to the past, and he seems to be aware of the fact that contexts do matter (as per Patterson, “modern” ideas were not strictly limited to the past 200 years). One example in particular demonstrates this. Milton cites Plato’s Laws as setting out rather strict suggestions for censorship of poets and scholars. Aware of the implications of this fact, Milton quickly adds “but that Plato meant this law peculiarly to that commonwealth which he had imagined, and to no other, is evident” (731). This course of action never actually materialized, says Milton, and so here we have the past invoked but deemed irrelevant to a certain goal. Moreover, Milton seems to understand that Plato’s writings need to be understood within their context and are always partially tied to their moment. Perhaps Milton, like Patterson’s reading of Chaucer, is exploring an approach to the past that remains conscious of its existence and effects but is mindful of the presence of a barrier between our interpretations and the reality of the past.