Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism (review)
Thomas Jefferson’s 1786 celebration of Milton’s rejection of the bondage of rhyme, using these eighteenth-century readers to contextualize the political nature of Miltonic education. The intervening discussion placing Milton’s radical humanist education in relation to both the English Civil War and the Restoration is solid and insightful, though a bit unwieldy. It ends with a reading that extends the historical reach of Milton’s famous comment about the bondage of rhyme in his note on the verse of Paradise Lost. Though this interesting point underscores the political project of Milton’s epic, Festa does not make its relevance to education clear. Chapter 4 reaffirms the radical inwardness of Paradise Lost through a consideration of learning and teaching. Discussing both the educational scenes represented within the poem, primarily Adam’s encounters with Raphael, Michael, and God, as well as the poem itself as an educational scene, Festa argues that “learning how to be, in Miltonic education, means remembering what is already within the human mind and spirit through the mediation of the messiah” (156). Thus, Festa reads the epic as exploring the revolutionary potential of education Milton described in his prose. The most compelling and original thread in this book is not Milton’s reading process, his Christian Hebraism, his radical humanism, or the “inward archives” of Paradise Lost, but the common theme of temporality that Festa has identified in these disparate elements of Milton’s work. For this reason, the book would have benefited from a more traditional conclusion. The coda with which the study concludes sharply debunks a simplistic reading of Christ’s rejection of classical learning in Paradise Regained through both a close reading of the text and a note on the publishing history of the poem, which Jacob Tonson bound with Of Education. A fuller synthesis, however, of the issues of temporality at the heart of reading, writing, teaching, and preaching would have brought to the fore the most incisive elements of Festa’s rich discussion and focused his argument. Festa’s introduction contends that Stanley Fish’s classic argument about the pedagogical project of Paradise Lost is marred by its ahistorical understanding of the reader and its imprecise concept of education. With his careful recontextualization of Milton’s writing, Festa begins to help us solve these problems. The End of Learning provides a historically rigorous investigation of Miltonic education. ERIN MURPHY Boston University