Milton's Italy

Anglo-Italian Literature, Travel, and Connections in Seventeenth-Century England

Catherine Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317208297
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book joins a growing trend toward transnational literary studies and revives a venerable tradition of Anglo-Italian scholarship centering on John Milton. Correcting misperceptions that have diminished the international dimensions of his life and work, it broadly surveys Milton's Italianate studies, travels, poetics, politics, and religious convictions. While his debts to Machiavelli and other classical republicans are often noted, few contemporary critics have explored the Italian sources of his anti-papal, anti-episcopal, and anti-formalist religious outlook. Relying on Milton's own testimony, this book explores its roots in Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and that great "Venetian enemy of the pope, " Paolo Sarpi, thereby correcting a recent tendency to make native English contexts dominate his development. This tendency is partly due to a mistaken belief that Italy was in steep decline during and after Milton's travels of 1638-1639, the period immediately before he produced his prose critiques of the English Church, its canon law, and its censorship. Yet these were also fundamentally "Italian" issues that he skillfully adapted to meet contemporary English needs, a practice enabled by his extraordinarily positive experience of the Italian language, cities, academies, and music, the latter of which ultimately influenced Milton's "operatic" drama, Samson Agonistes. Besides republicanism and theology (radical doctrines of free grace and free will), equally strong influences treated here include Italian Neoplatonism, cosmology, and romance epic. By making these traditions his own, Milton became what John Steadman once described as an "Italianate Englishman" whose classical "literary tastes and critical orientation…were…to a considerable extent" molded by Italian critics (1976), a view that is fully credited and updated here.

1 The Canonical Milton and the Myth of Italy

Problems of Paradigm, Fact, and Interpretation

He therefore that keeps peace with me, neer or remote, of whatsoever Nation, is to mee as farr as all civil and human offices an Englishman and a neighbour: but if an Englishman forgetting all Laws, human, civil, and religious, offend again life and liberty, … he is no better then … a Heathen.

—John Milton, Tenure of Kings and Magistrates

Italianate Englishman … [as] an epithet admirably fits his literary tastes and critical orientation, which were prevailingly classical and Italian. Moreover, to a considerable extent he [Milton] tended to see the classics themselves through Italian eyes.

—John Steadman, Epic and Tragic Structure in Paradise Lost

John Steadman’s just assessment of Milton’s relationship to Italian culture is complicated by many long-enduring biases, some conscious, many others unconsciously inherited from the work of earlier Renaissance scholars. Many eminent late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century historians believed that Italy was in steep decline during the late Renaissance and early modern period, although virtually all recognized its deep impact on Tudor and even early Stuart England. Throughout the sixteenth century, Italian philosophy, fashions, architecture, humanist pedagogy, and literature were all eagerly imported and imitated by English students and travelers, while the great Tudor princes and noblemen employed its finest artists, sculptors, and scholars. At the same time, many Italian merchants, educators, and courtiers permanently emigrated to England and strongly influenced its standards of taste. The nature and extent of their impact were thus studied by such prominent scholar-critics as Jacob Burckhardt, John Addington Symonds, Benedetto Croce, George Santayana, Erich Auerbach, Frances Yates, and John Freccero, all of whom made enduring contributions. Yet some aspects of their studies were questionable, particularly their now discredited practice of drawing an overly firm line between Italy’s early influence on England and its supposedly negative or negligible impact on the later Stuart and revolutionary eras. During this time, many believed that the Protestant reformers’ nationalistic and apocalyptic expectations (some actually borrowed from Italy) turned them inward, utterly rejecting the Italian Counter-Reformation and intensifying English xenophobia. This familiar and largely inaccurate myth of Italy’s waning prestige has so often been repeated in both popular and literary cultures that, like the parallel distortions of “Whig history,” many of its assumptions remain long after its supposed demise.

The more popular version of the myth commonly traces the “rise of Western man” geographically from southern to northern Europe and then westward to America.¹ Temporally, a linear arrow ascends from the high Middle Ages and early Italian Renaissance to the Protestant Reformation, directly or indirectly leading to the rise of modern science, technology, and democracy. All three forms of progress result from discarding the superstitions and inhibitions of traditional Roman Catholicism, advances which Milton is rightly seen as furthering. Yet modern specialists tell a far more complex and less familiar story: Protestantism did not simply supplant the Counter-Reformation but remained closely intertwined with it throughout the seventeenth century and beyond. Long after Luther, not just Italian art and music but even Italy’s science, religion, and philosophy positively influenced both the Continent and the Americas, which in many places remained relatively backward. Thus by now, the greatly over-simplified account of modernity belongs mainly to mass market historians, as do many subtler variations of the myth such as “American exceptionalism,” the inevitable rise of secularism, and the Protestant “demystification” of nature, although some have proved more persistent than others.² For like most myths, these accounts are partially factual: the industrial revolution did transform northern Europe and America far earlier and more thoroughly than it did the south, although most economic historians now believe that the key factor was not secularization but fewer barriers to trade, investment, and invention in the newer parts of the West. In any case, these transformations were far from complete in the seventeenth century, and even the wars of religion failed to seal Europe’s national borders. Referring to the later Renaissance and Reformation, Constance Furey’s warning is therefore critical: the

Religious Republic of Letters … has a story we cannot hear properly when we listen with ears cocked expectantly for a secular finale. Instead of pursuing rational detachment through dispassionate interactions in service to society stripped of the sacred, the people in this Religious Republic of Letters created affective, activist friendships

and transnational, ecumenical methods of scholarship commonly committed to “the quest for transcendence, the desire for salvation, and the longing for God.”³

Furey’s far more nuanced picture is widely accepted but older and especially unspoken assumptions remain surprisingly tenacious, as does the nineteenth-century habit of minimizing non-native influences. No one any longer concurs with Lewis Einstein’s opinion that even at their height, Italian influences were limited to “formal models and external decoration.” J. Ross Murray varied his sentiment only slightly when he said that “The ‘Italianate’ polish which sometimes obscured our authors’ native worth was only superficial … varnish” on “plain British oak,” which produced “the glorious workmanship,” “noble thoughts and musical strains” of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. Alistair Fox shows that this “Anglo-American sense of cultural superiority” has indeed receded but hardly without a trace.⁴ Other factors include changing fashions: fifty or sixty years ago critics positioned Milton firmly within the Italian literary tradition, but their work was generally overlooked as greater attention focused on his place in the English revolution and its religious and political impact on his thought. Studies of British imperialism and colonialism additionally placed him in a “narrative of incipient nationalism” due to his nearly lifelong defenses of the English republic and national character. Yet as Joad Raymond objects, these narratives somewhat inaccurately situate Milton “in a tradition of blood and soil nationalism” at a time when “a coherent notion of the nation-state” did not yet exist. As the first epigraph above indicates, he himself distinguishes not “between the English and the foreigner so much as between the civilized and the uncivilized,” and he located the epitome of civility in Italy.⁵ As he haughtily informs the Protestant minister Alexander More, “I knew beforehand that Italy was not, as you [More] think, a refuge or asylum for criminals, but rather the lodging-place of humanitas and all the arts of civilization, and so I found it” (CPW 4.1:609).

Milton’s rebuke targeted the wrong culprit but rightly expresses the simultaneously “Italianate” and internationalist stance of his entire Second Defence. To further what Bacon calls “man’s estate,” he appeals to the broadest possible idea of “human empire,” placing “no article ‘the’ before human empire” because, unlike the original Roman Empire or any modern equivalent that “wields power by extracting tribute from the ruled,” it seeks an international “command of knowledge and powers … mak[ing] ‘all things possible’ … regardless of political boundaries.”⁶ Milton’s life, works, and thought all occupy a largely unbounded political sphere as new as Bacon and as old as Dante, whose universal human empire still preoccupied many of the Italian academicians he encountered in Florence and the other Italian city states. Their humanist discussions included many contemporary issues of politics and religion (CPW 2:537−8) that gave him a lifelong membership in the republic of letters described both by Furey and Milton’s nephew. Edward Phillips proudly relates how his uncle’s deep admiration for their “humanity and civility” established a long “correspondence and perpetual friendship” with Florentines who “caressed him with all the honors and civilities imaginable,” and presumably recommended him to other scholars in the Italian cities (Hughes 1028). He was well prepared for this reception by his studies in Italian literature and religion ranging from Dante to Savonarola and the Waldenses of northern Italy. To the latter, he dedicated his only poem in praise of religious martyrdom, while to Tasso he dedicated his hope to one day sing “the victorious agonies of Martyrs and Saints” (CPW 1:817; cf. n. 112−13, and 1:814). He finally completed this goal in penning his late biblical tragedy, Samson Agonistes, a choice partly dictated by his long hostility to the English bishop martyrs (CPW 1:533−9) praised by John Foxe and his followers.⁷

Milton’s identification with Italy was unusual but hardly as unique or as brief as “literary nationalists” like Einstein decreed; he limited Italian influence to the era of Erasmus and his friends, Sir Thomas More and John Colet, who founded Milton’s preparatory academy, St. Paul’s School. This era ended with Spenser’s death in 1599, after which Einstein describes it being thoroughly absorbed and transformed by brilliant poets and scholars closer to home.⁸ Yet a wide range of seventeenth-century reformers from Andrew Marvell and James Harrington were just as attracted to the writings and example of the Italian republics as Milton himself, while scientific reformers like John Evelyn pursued Italy’s recent astronomical, musical, and technological discoveries.⁹ Even in religion many English Protestants were drawn to Dante, Petrarch, Pico della Mirandola, and Paolo Sarpi, central players in the scheme of history popularized by Matthias Flacius, John Foxe, and their successors. The political theorists and polemicists commonly linked Dante both to Marsilius of Padua and to English reformers ranging from Ockham to Wyclif. Moreover, as Nick Havely shows, even though Milton’s era has been called the “century without Dante,” he was hailed with Petrarch and Boccaccio as a great language reformer not just in Sidney’s 1595 Apology but by James Howell roughly sixty years later. Howell further developed the tradition that both the English and romance languages were transformed by the four Italian “crowns,” Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Ariosto, a commonplace repeated by Dryden. Harrington directly quotes Dante in his “Allegorie of the Fourth Booke,” while like Milton himself, Thomas Stanley defined true nobility in Dante’s terms. This tradition continued in the eighteenth century if somewhat in reverse, as Italian critics compared Dante to Milton and Edward Young.¹⁰

Eric Cochrane traces the myth of Italy’s abrupt decline in prestige to the “Galileo affair,” to this day a symbol of the Counter-Reformation Church’s unjust triumph over modern science. Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) ironically contributes to this tradition, although his case against the Church is hardly as sweeping as the decline theorists claim. More to the point, it is a highly polemic case meant to discourage the English state and church from becoming as intellectually inhibiting as the Inquisition. Unfortunately, this attempt failed and press freedom would not be secured until well after Milton’s death, while full religious toleration would not be established until the nineteenth century. All across Europe, in fact, national churches persecuted innovators just as cruelly as the Pope punished Galileo, or more so, as Calvin’s burning of Michael Servetus in Geneva illustrates. In Italy, however, the Church’s trial of Galileo actually backfired. Both at home and abroad it made “the Society of Jesus … a symbol for intellectual mediocrity and duplicity,” and identified the Catholic Church with many of the anti-scientific, regressive tendencies of European culture. Hence, “Catholic apologists right down to the time of Agostino Gemelli [1878−1959] and even Emmanuel Mounier [1905−50]” repeatedly lamented “‘it’s too bad, but …’ and ‘if only,’” when in reality Galileo was not defeated nor could Calvin or Luther be cleared of deep hostility to the “new astronomy.” Protestant apol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Abbreviations and Note on Texts
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Ad Fontes: Milton’s Italian “Originals” and Dreams of Continental Fame
• 1 The Canonical Milton and the Myth of Italy: Problems of Paradigm, Fact, and Interpretation
• 2 Beyond the Alps: Milton’s Journey and Its Anglo-Italian Context
• 3 Defining Anti-Popery, Qualifying Milton’s Anti-Catholicism: Proto-Protestant Reformers, Trent, and Beyond
• 4 Amazing Grace: Milton’s Mediation of Reformed and Roman Catholic Doctrine
• 5 The Republic of Letters and the Furors of Inspiration: Neoplatonism in Milton’s Early Latin and English Verse
• 6 Beauty’s Powerful Glance: The Legacy of Beatrice and Laura
• 7 The Italian Context of Milton’s Neo-Roman Politics
• 8 Milton’s Italianate Epic: From Dante to the Romance Poets in Paradise Lost
• 9 The Tragic Music of Samson Agonistes in the Age of Monteverdi
• Bibliography
• Index