I'm an Associate Professor of English at Texas Tech University, where I teach courses on British Renaissance Literature (1500-1700). My particular focus is on poetry, poetics, and the history of literary traditions, especially with respect to Milton and Shakespeare.
During the tumultuous years of the English Revolution and Restoration, national crises like civil wars and the execution of the king convinced Englishmen that the end of the world was not only inevitable but imminent. National Reckonings shows how this widespread eschatological expectation shaped nationalist thinking in the seventeenth century. Imagining what Christ's return would mean for England's body politic, a wide range of poets, philosophers, and other writers—including Milton, Hobbes, Winstanley, and Thomas and Henry Vaughan,—used anticipation of the Last Judgment to both disrupt existing ideas of the nation and generate new ones.
Ryan Hackenbracht contends that nationalism, consequently, was not merely a horizontal relationship between citizens and their sovereign but a vertical one that pitted the nation against the shortly expected kingdom of God. The Last Judgment was the site at which these two imagined communities, England and ecclesia (the universal church), would collide. Harnessing the imaginative space afforded by literature, writers measured the shortcomings of an imperfect and finite nation against the divine standard of a perfect and universal community. In writing the nation into end-times prophecies, such works as Paradise Lost and Leviathan offered contemporary readers an opportunity to participate in the cosmic drama of the world's end and experience reckoning while there was still time to alter its outcome.
Milton, Materialism, and Embodiment: "One first matter all", 2017
In Paradise Lost, Milton reinvents walking as a physical register
for the growth or decline of a ... more In Paradise Lost, Milton reinvents walking as a physical register for the growth or decline of a character's self-knowledge. Milton uses types of peripatetic motion--walking, striding, srumbling migrating, and tracing--to thematize internal conficts of free will and obedience to God. In the garden of Eden, walking teaches Adam and Eve about their God-given roles. After the Fall, walking it the means by which they learn about their new, fallen state. While walking brings Adam and Eve self-knowledge, for Satan, Sin, and Death, a sinful style of walking perpetuates their habits of self-deception. By performing forbidden motions, the unholy trinity distance themselves from God and bury truths they would just as soon forget.
Virgil’s Georgics was a source of pacifistic thinking for Erasmus, More, and Vives, who used figu... more Virgil’s Georgics was a source of pacifistic thinking for Erasmus, More, and Vives, who used figurative readings of the poem to reinforce their notions about the incompatibility of war and Christian society. In doing so, they furthered an interpretive tradition begun by Mancinelli, Valeriano, Landino, and other humanists of the Quattrocento, who were intrigued by the poem’s political potential. In the Enchiridion, Querela Pacis, Utopia, and de Concordia et Discordia, the Georgics functioned as a heuristic for thinking through current events and critiquing violence within Christendom. From soils to trees to cattle and bees, Virgil’s poem supplied Erasmus, More, and Vives with diverse tools for deflating militaristic ideology and imagining alternatives to the status quo. At a time when late scholastics were debating the finer points of iustum bellum, the humanists were moving the discussion into an entirely new direction, using Virgil to envision the abolition of war between Christian...
My objective in this article is to explore the parable of the talents contextually in relation to... more My objective in this article is to explore the parable of the talents contextually in relation to the prelacy controversy of the 1640s and rhetorically as Milton’s device for describing the labor of reformation. I emphasize the parable’s significance as an allegory of
ultimate judgment at a time when Milton and others believed themselves to
be living at the end of history. The idea of reckoning in the parable evoked
belief in the Last Judgment as a historical event that was soon to burst into
the saeculum of human experience. Milton’s early works present a pattern
in which he employs the parable to navigate crises and to remind himself
and others of imminent judgment. This eschatological expectation is evident
in Elegy III in obitum Præsulis Wintoniensis (composed 1626), in Milton’s “Letter to a friend” (composed ca. 1633), in The Reason of Church-Government (1642), and in
Sonnet 19 “When I consider how my light is spent.” I suggest a political
and nonbiographical reading of the sonnet, in which readers are compelled
to identify with the poetic speaker and reflect upon their own labors of reformation
in the final days before judgment.
review of Steven N. Zwicker, ed. John Dryden: Selected Writings, 21st-Century Oxford Authors. Oxf... more review of Steven N. Zwicker, ed. John Dryden: Selected Writings, 21st-Century Oxford Authors. Oxford UP, 2020.
Review of Anthony Milton, ed. The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume I: Reformation and Identi... more Review of Anthony Milton, ed. The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume I: Reformation and Identity, c. 1520-1662. Oxford UP, 2017.
This paper shows how Surrey creates a funerary setting in "Wyatt
Resteth Here" to lament not onl... more This paper shows how Surrey creates a funerary setting in "Wyatt
Resteth Here" to lament not only the passing of a friend, poet, and statesman
but the English qualities that he represented — namely, the virtue of character
that for Surrey defines an Englishman. I suggest that in the poem, what begins
as an imagined funeral service for Wyatt becomes a funeral service for the
death of English virtue, which has suffered under Henry's tyranny. When
assessing Surrey's play with liturgy, I share David Cressy's perspective that "early
modern culture was not only highly ritualized but ritually creative, supporting
a blend of continuity, adaption, and reinvention."'" Surrey's poem capitalizes
on popular interest in the proper commemoration of the dead, which had
been quickened anew in the 1520s and 30s by the reformist movement and
debates between Sir Thomas More, William Tyndale, and other writers over
the nature of death, purgatory, and Christian community. As Surrey assesses
the current state of England, he identifies a crisis of national value and identity.
Consequently, the elegy forces the English reader to confront two difficult
questions: If we as a nation are no longer defined by our virtue, then by what
are we defined? If Wyatt's death marks the end of a Golden Age of virtue, then
into what foreboding future are we headed? By the poem's conclusion, it is the
reader and the English nation who are to be mourned, rather than the faithful
departed Wyatt.
I would like to suggest that far from stifling literary innovation,
political propaganda in fact... more I would like to suggest that far from stifling literary innovation,
political propaganda in fact catalyzes it, and that during
the Anglo-Dutch wars propagandistic portrayals of the nation
engendered generic innovation and stylistic experimentation. In
a crucial historical moment, when England was on the verge of
becoming a global maritime power, competition with the nation’s
main economic rival, the Dutch Republic, over the North Sea herring
fishery propelled English writers to new creative heights in
the development of what we might call aesthetics of the state.14
For case studies, I consider two propagandistic texts—Andrew
Marvell’s “The Character of Holland” (1652–53) and John Dryden’s
Amboyna: or, the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants
(1673)—whose literary merit as works of great generic ingenuity
has gone unremarked. As we shall see, the propagandistic agendas
driving “The Character of Holland” and Amboyna encouraged Marvell
and Dryden to reinvent the formal constitution of the genres
in which they wrote. Refitted as vessels for political propaganda,
epic and tragedy offered these writers an opportunity to pour old
wine into new wineskins, so to speak, and rethink how literature
488 Commercial Fishing Propaganda during the Anglo-Dutch Wars
might be made to remake the nation and how the reinvention of
the nation, in turn, might remake literature.
Papers of The Bibliographical Society of Canada, 2015
review of Douglas D. C. Chambers and David Galbraith, eds. The Letterbooks of John Evelyn, Volume... more review of Douglas D. C. Chambers and David Galbraith, eds. The Letterbooks of John Evelyn, Volumes I and II. U of Toronto P, 2014.
A broader understanding of how Asimov borrows from Paradise
Lost uncovers the Miltonic character... more A broader understanding of how Asimov borrows from Paradise
Lost uncovers the Miltonic character of mid-twentieth-century
mainstream science fiction. As a science fiction pioneer and
professor of biochemistry, Asimov was responsible for much of
our modern thinking about robots — a fact noted by the Oxford
English Dictionary, which credits him with having coined the
term “robotics.” Asimov’s notion of a robot revolution is still a
powerful imaginary in modern American culture. It is evident in
films like Blade Runner, the Battlestar Galactica franchise (1978–
80, 2003–09), the Terminator franchise (1984–2015), The Matrix
(1999), and I, Robot (2004), which may owe to Paradise Lost by
way of Asimov their anxieties of a creation overpowering its creators.
Milton’s influence on science fiction is far-reaching, and on
the page and the screen, we catch glimpses of the infernal crew,
who first dared to think, “Our puissance is our own, our own right
hand / Shall teach us highest deeds, by proof to try / Who is our
equal” (PL 5.864–66).
Identities in Early Modern English Writing: Religion, Gender, Nation, 2014
This chapter explores the relationship between eschatology, national identity,
and sovereignty i... more This chapter explores the relationship between eschatology, national identity,
and sovereignty in the English edition of Leviathan. I suggest that the
notion of divine judgement is an essential component of Hobbes’s political
philosophy and that attention to what Hobbes is doing with it changes the way
we understand his sovereign and what it means to reign as such. I will consider
how Hobbes searches for what the seventeenth century called Hebraica veritas,
how his notion of ‘ruling’ as ‘judging’ is rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures, how
he manipulates Jewish history to narrate sovereignty’s origin, and how he continually
postpones the historical outcome of that narrative: the Last Judgement
and the inception of Christ’s supreme sovereignty. I show how Hobbesian
eschatology as presented in Leviathan depends upon reciprocity of political
value. Hobbes projects value onto that which is spiritual and otherworldly—
Christ returning to Judgement—only to return value to that which is temporal
and mundane: the rule of human sovereigns on Earth in the present. That
reciprocity has important implications for England as the ‘sceptred isle’—as
the great sea beast, leviathan, powerful and secure in its majestic ocean home.
Hobbes suggests England has the potential to adopt an ideal government and
to become the Leviathan, despite its current revolution.
John Milton wrote “Elegia Tertia in Obitum Praesulis Wintoniensis”
during his first term at Chri... more John Milton wrote “Elegia Tertia in Obitum Praesulis Wintoniensis”
during his first term at Christ’s College in the fall or winter of
1626.1 In the preceding year, London was wracked by one of the most
severe outbreaks of plague in the seventeenth century. The final death
toll reached 35,417 in the city and 68,596 nationwide, and numerous
“trailer epidemics” in 1626 drove the numbers still higher.2 Studying
at Cambridge only sixty miles away, Milton was acutely aware of the
devastation that the plague caused in the city and the country. Cedric
Brown claims that in Elegy III Milton presents a vision of national unification
amid widespread distress through an encounter with England’s
favorite minister, the recently deceased Lancelot Andrewes.
During the tumultuous years of the English Revolution and Restoration, national crises like civil wars and the execution of the king convinced Englishmen that the end of the world was not only inevitable but imminent. National Reckonings shows how this widespread eschatological expectation shaped nationalist thinking in the seventeenth century. Imagining what Christ's return would mean for England's body politic, a wide range of poets, philosophers, and other writers—including Milton, Hobbes, Winstanley, and Thomas and Henry Vaughan,—used anticipation of the Last Judgment to both disrupt existing ideas of the nation and generate new ones.
Ryan Hackenbracht contends that nationalism, consequently, was not merely a horizontal relationship between citizens and their sovereign but a vertical one that pitted the nation against the shortly expected kingdom of God. The Last Judgment was the site at which these two imagined communities, England and ecclesia (the universal church), would collide. Harnessing the imaginative space afforded by literature, writers measured the shortcomings of an imperfect and finite nation against the divine standard of a perfect and universal community. In writing the nation into end-times prophecies, such works as Paradise Lost and Leviathan offered contemporary readers an opportunity to participate in the cosmic drama of the world's end and experience reckoning while there was still time to alter its outcome.
Milton, Materialism, and Embodiment: "One first matter all", 2017
In Paradise Lost, Milton reinvents walking as a physical register
for the growth or decline of a ... more In Paradise Lost, Milton reinvents walking as a physical register for the growth or decline of a character's self-knowledge. Milton uses types of peripatetic motion--walking, striding, srumbling migrating, and tracing--to thematize internal conficts of free will and obedience to God. In the garden of Eden, walking teaches Adam and Eve about their God-given roles. After the Fall, walking it the means by which they learn about their new, fallen state. While walking brings Adam and Eve self-knowledge, for Satan, Sin, and Death, a sinful style of walking perpetuates their habits of self-deception. By performing forbidden motions, the unholy trinity distance themselves from God and bury truths they would just as soon forget.
Virgil’s Georgics was a source of pacifistic thinking for Erasmus, More, and Vives, who used figu... more Virgil’s Georgics was a source of pacifistic thinking for Erasmus, More, and Vives, who used figurative readings of the poem to reinforce their notions about the incompatibility of war and Christian society. In doing so, they furthered an interpretive tradition begun by Mancinelli, Valeriano, Landino, and other humanists of the Quattrocento, who were intrigued by the poem’s political potential. In the Enchiridion, Querela Pacis, Utopia, and de Concordia et Discordia, the Georgics functioned as a heuristic for thinking through current events and critiquing violence within Christendom. From soils to trees to cattle and bees, Virgil’s poem supplied Erasmus, More, and Vives with diverse tools for deflating militaristic ideology and imagining alternatives to the status quo. At a time when late scholastics were debating the finer points of iustum bellum, the humanists were moving the discussion into an entirely new direction, using Virgil to envision the abolition of war between Christian...
My objective in this article is to explore the parable of the talents contextually in relation to... more My objective in this article is to explore the parable of the talents contextually in relation to the prelacy controversy of the 1640s and rhetorically as Milton’s device for describing the labor of reformation. I emphasize the parable’s significance as an allegory of
ultimate judgment at a time when Milton and others believed themselves to
be living at the end of history. The idea of reckoning in the parable evoked
belief in the Last Judgment as a historical event that was soon to burst into
the saeculum of human experience. Milton’s early works present a pattern
in which he employs the parable to navigate crises and to remind himself
and others of imminent judgment. This eschatological expectation is evident
in Elegy III in obitum Præsulis Wintoniensis (composed 1626), in Milton’s “Letter to a friend” (composed ca. 1633), in The Reason of Church-Government (1642), and in
Sonnet 19 “When I consider how my light is spent.” I suggest a political
and nonbiographical reading of the sonnet, in which readers are compelled
to identify with the poetic speaker and reflect upon their own labors of reformation
in the final days before judgment.
review of Steven N. Zwicker, ed. John Dryden: Selected Writings, 21st-Century Oxford Authors. Oxf... more review of Steven N. Zwicker, ed. John Dryden: Selected Writings, 21st-Century Oxford Authors. Oxford UP, 2020.
Review of Anthony Milton, ed. The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume I: Reformation and Identi... more Review of Anthony Milton, ed. The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume I: Reformation and Identity, c. 1520-1662. Oxford UP, 2017.
This paper shows how Surrey creates a funerary setting in "Wyatt
Resteth Here" to lament not onl... more This paper shows how Surrey creates a funerary setting in "Wyatt
Resteth Here" to lament not only the passing of a friend, poet, and statesman
but the English qualities that he represented — namely, the virtue of character
that for Surrey defines an Englishman. I suggest that in the poem, what begins
as an imagined funeral service for Wyatt becomes a funeral service for the
death of English virtue, which has suffered under Henry's tyranny. When
assessing Surrey's play with liturgy, I share David Cressy's perspective that "early
modern culture was not only highly ritualized but ritually creative, supporting
a blend of continuity, adaption, and reinvention."'" Surrey's poem capitalizes
on popular interest in the proper commemoration of the dead, which had
been quickened anew in the 1520s and 30s by the reformist movement and
debates between Sir Thomas More, William Tyndale, and other writers over
the nature of death, purgatory, and Christian community. As Surrey assesses
the current state of England, he identifies a crisis of national value and identity.
Consequently, the elegy forces the English reader to confront two difficult
questions: If we as a nation are no longer defined by our virtue, then by what
are we defined? If Wyatt's death marks the end of a Golden Age of virtue, then
into what foreboding future are we headed? By the poem's conclusion, it is the
reader and the English nation who are to be mourned, rather than the faithful
departed Wyatt.
I would like to suggest that far from stifling literary innovation,
political propaganda in fact... more I would like to suggest that far from stifling literary innovation,
political propaganda in fact catalyzes it, and that during
the Anglo-Dutch wars propagandistic portrayals of the nation
engendered generic innovation and stylistic experimentation. In
a crucial historical moment, when England was on the verge of
becoming a global maritime power, competition with the nation’s
main economic rival, the Dutch Republic, over the North Sea herring
fishery propelled English writers to new creative heights in
the development of what we might call aesthetics of the state.14
For case studies, I consider two propagandistic texts—Andrew
Marvell’s “The Character of Holland” (1652–53) and John Dryden’s
Amboyna: or, the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants
(1673)—whose literary merit as works of great generic ingenuity
has gone unremarked. As we shall see, the propagandistic agendas
driving “The Character of Holland” and Amboyna encouraged Marvell
and Dryden to reinvent the formal constitution of the genres
in which they wrote. Refitted as vessels for political propaganda,
epic and tragedy offered these writers an opportunity to pour old
wine into new wineskins, so to speak, and rethink how literature
488 Commercial Fishing Propaganda during the Anglo-Dutch Wars
might be made to remake the nation and how the reinvention of
the nation, in turn, might remake literature.
Papers of The Bibliographical Society of Canada, 2015
review of Douglas D. C. Chambers and David Galbraith, eds. The Letterbooks of John Evelyn, Volume... more review of Douglas D. C. Chambers and David Galbraith, eds. The Letterbooks of John Evelyn, Volumes I and II. U of Toronto P, 2014.
A broader understanding of how Asimov borrows from Paradise
Lost uncovers the Miltonic character... more A broader understanding of how Asimov borrows from Paradise
Lost uncovers the Miltonic character of mid-twentieth-century
mainstream science fiction. As a science fiction pioneer and
professor of biochemistry, Asimov was responsible for much of
our modern thinking about robots — a fact noted by the Oxford
English Dictionary, which credits him with having coined the
term “robotics.” Asimov’s notion of a robot revolution is still a
powerful imaginary in modern American culture. It is evident in
films like Blade Runner, the Battlestar Galactica franchise (1978–
80, 2003–09), the Terminator franchise (1984–2015), The Matrix
(1999), and I, Robot (2004), which may owe to Paradise Lost by
way of Asimov their anxieties of a creation overpowering its creators.
Milton’s influence on science fiction is far-reaching, and on
the page and the screen, we catch glimpses of the infernal crew,
who first dared to think, “Our puissance is our own, our own right
hand / Shall teach us highest deeds, by proof to try / Who is our
equal” (PL 5.864–66).
Identities in Early Modern English Writing: Religion, Gender, Nation, 2014
This chapter explores the relationship between eschatology, national identity,
and sovereignty i... more This chapter explores the relationship between eschatology, national identity,
and sovereignty in the English edition of Leviathan. I suggest that the
notion of divine judgement is an essential component of Hobbes’s political
philosophy and that attention to what Hobbes is doing with it changes the way
we understand his sovereign and what it means to reign as such. I will consider
how Hobbes searches for what the seventeenth century called Hebraica veritas,
how his notion of ‘ruling’ as ‘judging’ is rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures, how
he manipulates Jewish history to narrate sovereignty’s origin, and how he continually
postpones the historical outcome of that narrative: the Last Judgement
and the inception of Christ’s supreme sovereignty. I show how Hobbesian
eschatology as presented in Leviathan depends upon reciprocity of political
value. Hobbes projects value onto that which is spiritual and otherworldly—
Christ returning to Judgement—only to return value to that which is temporal
and mundane: the rule of human sovereigns on Earth in the present. That
reciprocity has important implications for England as the ‘sceptred isle’—as
the great sea beast, leviathan, powerful and secure in its majestic ocean home.
Hobbes suggests England has the potential to adopt an ideal government and
to become the Leviathan, despite its current revolution.
John Milton wrote “Elegia Tertia in Obitum Praesulis Wintoniensis”
during his first term at Chri... more John Milton wrote “Elegia Tertia in Obitum Praesulis Wintoniensis”
during his first term at Christ’s College in the fall or winter of
1626.1 In the preceding year, London was wracked by one of the most
severe outbreaks of plague in the seventeenth century. The final death
toll reached 35,417 in the city and 68,596 nationwide, and numerous
“trailer epidemics” in 1626 drove the numbers still higher.2 Studying
at Cambridge only sixty miles away, Milton was acutely aware of the
devastation that the plague caused in the city and the country. Cedric
Brown claims that in Elegy III Milton presents a vision of national unification
amid widespread distress through an encounter with England’s
favorite minister, the recently deceased Lancelot Andrewes.
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During the tumultuous years of the English Revolution and Restoration, national crises like civil wars and the execution of the king convinced Englishmen that the end of the world was not only inevitable but imminent. National Reckonings shows how this widespread eschatological expectation shaped nationalist thinking in the seventeenth century. Imagining what Christ's return would mean for England's body politic, a wide range of poets, philosophers, and other writers—including Milton, Hobbes, Winstanley, and Thomas and Henry Vaughan,—used anticipation of the Last Judgment to both disrupt existing ideas of the nation and generate new ones.
Ryan Hackenbracht contends that nationalism, consequently, was not merely a horizontal relationship between citizens and their sovereign but a vertical one that pitted the nation against the shortly expected kingdom of God. The Last Judgment was the site at which these two imagined communities, England and ecclesia (the universal church), would collide. Harnessing the imaginative space afforded by literature, writers measured the shortcomings of an imperfect and finite nation against the divine standard of a perfect and universal community. In writing the nation into end-times prophecies, such works as Paradise Lost and Leviathan offered contemporary readers an opportunity to participate in the cosmic drama of the world's end and experience reckoning while there was still time to alter its outcome.
for the growth or decline of a character's self-knowledge. Milton uses
types of peripatetic motion--walking, striding, srumbling migrating, and tracing--to thematize internal conficts of free will and obedience
to God. In the garden of Eden, walking teaches Adam and Eve
about their God-given roles. After the Fall, walking it the means by
which they learn about their new, fallen state. While walking brings
Adam and Eve self-knowledge, for Satan, Sin, and Death, a sinful
style of walking perpetuates their habits of self-deception. By performing forbidden motions, the unholy trinity distance themselves
from God and bury truths they would just as soon forget.
ultimate judgment at a time when Milton and others believed themselves to
be living at the end of history. The idea of reckoning in the parable evoked
belief in the Last Judgment as a historical event that was soon to burst into
the saeculum of human experience. Milton’s early works present a pattern
in which he employs the parable to navigate crises and to remind himself
and others of imminent judgment. This eschatological expectation is evident
in Elegy III in obitum Præsulis Wintoniensis (composed 1626), in Milton’s “Letter to a friend” (composed ca. 1633), in The Reason of Church-Government (1642), and in
Sonnet 19 “When I consider how my light is spent.” I suggest a political
and nonbiographical reading of the sonnet, in which readers are compelled
to identify with the poetic speaker and reflect upon their own labors of reformation
in the final days before judgment.
Resteth Here" to lament not only the passing of a friend, poet, and statesman
but the English qualities that he represented — namely, the virtue of character
that for Surrey defines an Englishman. I suggest that in the poem, what begins
as an imagined funeral service for Wyatt becomes a funeral service for the
death of English virtue, which has suffered under Henry's tyranny. When
assessing Surrey's play with liturgy, I share David Cressy's perspective that "early
modern culture was not only highly ritualized but ritually creative, supporting
a blend of continuity, adaption, and reinvention."'" Surrey's poem capitalizes
on popular interest in the proper commemoration of the dead, which had
been quickened anew in the 1520s and 30s by the reformist movement and
debates between Sir Thomas More, William Tyndale, and other writers over
the nature of death, purgatory, and Christian community. As Surrey assesses
the current state of England, he identifies a crisis of national value and identity.
Consequently, the elegy forces the English reader to confront two difficult
questions: If we as a nation are no longer defined by our virtue, then by what
are we defined? If Wyatt's death marks the end of a Golden Age of virtue, then
into what foreboding future are we headed? By the poem's conclusion, it is the
reader and the English nation who are to be mourned, rather than the faithful
departed Wyatt.
political propaganda in fact catalyzes it, and that during
the Anglo-Dutch wars propagandistic portrayals of the nation
engendered generic innovation and stylistic experimentation. In
a crucial historical moment, when England was on the verge of
becoming a global maritime power, competition with the nation’s
main economic rival, the Dutch Republic, over the North Sea herring
fishery propelled English writers to new creative heights in
the development of what we might call aesthetics of the state.14
For case studies, I consider two propagandistic texts—Andrew
Marvell’s “The Character of Holland” (1652–53) and John Dryden’s
Amboyna: or, the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants
(1673)—whose literary merit as works of great generic ingenuity
has gone unremarked. As we shall see, the propagandistic agendas
driving “The Character of Holland” and Amboyna encouraged Marvell
and Dryden to reinvent the formal constitution of the genres
in which they wrote. Refitted as vessels for political propaganda,
epic and tragedy offered these writers an opportunity to pour old
wine into new wineskins, so to speak, and rethink how literature
488 Commercial Fishing Propaganda during the Anglo-Dutch Wars
might be made to remake the nation and how the reinvention of
the nation, in turn, might remake literature.
Lost uncovers the Miltonic character of mid-twentieth-century
mainstream science fiction. As a science fiction pioneer and
professor of biochemistry, Asimov was responsible for much of
our modern thinking about robots — a fact noted by the Oxford
English Dictionary, which credits him with having coined the
term “robotics.” Asimov’s notion of a robot revolution is still a
powerful imaginary in modern American culture. It is evident in
films like Blade Runner, the Battlestar Galactica franchise (1978–
80, 2003–09), the Terminator franchise (1984–2015), The Matrix
(1999), and I, Robot (2004), which may owe to Paradise Lost by
way of Asimov their anxieties of a creation overpowering its creators.
Milton’s influence on science fiction is far-reaching, and on
the page and the screen, we catch glimpses of the infernal crew,
who first dared to think, “Our puissance is our own, our own right
hand / Shall teach us highest deeds, by proof to try / Who is our
equal” (PL 5.864–66).
and sovereignty in the English edition of Leviathan. I suggest that the
notion of divine judgement is an essential component of Hobbes’s political
philosophy and that attention to what Hobbes is doing with it changes the way
we understand his sovereign and what it means to reign as such. I will consider
how Hobbes searches for what the seventeenth century called Hebraica veritas,
how his notion of ‘ruling’ as ‘judging’ is rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures, how
he manipulates Jewish history to narrate sovereignty’s origin, and how he continually
postpones the historical outcome of that narrative: the Last Judgement
and the inception of Christ’s supreme sovereignty. I show how Hobbesian
eschatology as presented in Leviathan depends upon reciprocity of political
value. Hobbes projects value onto that which is spiritual and otherworldly—
Christ returning to Judgement—only to return value to that which is temporal
and mundane: the rule of human sovereigns on Earth in the present. That
reciprocity has important implications for England as the ‘sceptred isle’—as
the great sea beast, leviathan, powerful and secure in its majestic ocean home.
Hobbes suggests England has the potential to adopt an ideal government and
to become the Leviathan, despite its current revolution.
during his first term at Christ’s College in the fall or winter of
1626.1 In the preceding year, London was wracked by one of the most
severe outbreaks of plague in the seventeenth century. The final death
toll reached 35,417 in the city and 68,596 nationwide, and numerous
“trailer epidemics” in 1626 drove the numbers still higher.2 Studying
at Cambridge only sixty miles away, Milton was acutely aware of the
devastation that the plague caused in the city and the country. Cedric
Brown claims that in Elegy III Milton presents a vision of national unification
amid widespread distress through an encounter with England’s
favorite minister, the recently deceased Lancelot Andrewes.
During the tumultuous years of the English Revolution and Restoration, national crises like civil wars and the execution of the king convinced Englishmen that the end of the world was not only inevitable but imminent. National Reckonings shows how this widespread eschatological expectation shaped nationalist thinking in the seventeenth century. Imagining what Christ's return would mean for England's body politic, a wide range of poets, philosophers, and other writers—including Milton, Hobbes, Winstanley, and Thomas and Henry Vaughan,—used anticipation of the Last Judgment to both disrupt existing ideas of the nation and generate new ones.
Ryan Hackenbracht contends that nationalism, consequently, was not merely a horizontal relationship between citizens and their sovereign but a vertical one that pitted the nation against the shortly expected kingdom of God. The Last Judgment was the site at which these two imagined communities, England and ecclesia (the universal church), would collide. Harnessing the imaginative space afforded by literature, writers measured the shortcomings of an imperfect and finite nation against the divine standard of a perfect and universal community. In writing the nation into end-times prophecies, such works as Paradise Lost and Leviathan offered contemporary readers an opportunity to participate in the cosmic drama of the world's end and experience reckoning while there was still time to alter its outcome.
for the growth or decline of a character's self-knowledge. Milton uses
types of peripatetic motion--walking, striding, srumbling migrating, and tracing--to thematize internal conficts of free will and obedience
to God. In the garden of Eden, walking teaches Adam and Eve
about their God-given roles. After the Fall, walking it the means by
which they learn about their new, fallen state. While walking brings
Adam and Eve self-knowledge, for Satan, Sin, and Death, a sinful
style of walking perpetuates their habits of self-deception. By performing forbidden motions, the unholy trinity distance themselves
from God and bury truths they would just as soon forget.
ultimate judgment at a time when Milton and others believed themselves to
be living at the end of history. The idea of reckoning in the parable evoked
belief in the Last Judgment as a historical event that was soon to burst into
the saeculum of human experience. Milton’s early works present a pattern
in which he employs the parable to navigate crises and to remind himself
and others of imminent judgment. This eschatological expectation is evident
in Elegy III in obitum Præsulis Wintoniensis (composed 1626), in Milton’s “Letter to a friend” (composed ca. 1633), in The Reason of Church-Government (1642), and in
Sonnet 19 “When I consider how my light is spent.” I suggest a political
and nonbiographical reading of the sonnet, in which readers are compelled
to identify with the poetic speaker and reflect upon their own labors of reformation
in the final days before judgment.
Resteth Here" to lament not only the passing of a friend, poet, and statesman
but the English qualities that he represented — namely, the virtue of character
that for Surrey defines an Englishman. I suggest that in the poem, what begins
as an imagined funeral service for Wyatt becomes a funeral service for the
death of English virtue, which has suffered under Henry's tyranny. When
assessing Surrey's play with liturgy, I share David Cressy's perspective that "early
modern culture was not only highly ritualized but ritually creative, supporting
a blend of continuity, adaption, and reinvention."'" Surrey's poem capitalizes
on popular interest in the proper commemoration of the dead, which had
been quickened anew in the 1520s and 30s by the reformist movement and
debates between Sir Thomas More, William Tyndale, and other writers over
the nature of death, purgatory, and Christian community. As Surrey assesses
the current state of England, he identifies a crisis of national value and identity.
Consequently, the elegy forces the English reader to confront two difficult
questions: If we as a nation are no longer defined by our virtue, then by what
are we defined? If Wyatt's death marks the end of a Golden Age of virtue, then
into what foreboding future are we headed? By the poem's conclusion, it is the
reader and the English nation who are to be mourned, rather than the faithful
departed Wyatt.
political propaganda in fact catalyzes it, and that during
the Anglo-Dutch wars propagandistic portrayals of the nation
engendered generic innovation and stylistic experimentation. In
a crucial historical moment, when England was on the verge of
becoming a global maritime power, competition with the nation’s
main economic rival, the Dutch Republic, over the North Sea herring
fishery propelled English writers to new creative heights in
the development of what we might call aesthetics of the state.14
For case studies, I consider two propagandistic texts—Andrew
Marvell’s “The Character of Holland” (1652–53) and John Dryden’s
Amboyna: or, the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants
(1673)—whose literary merit as works of great generic ingenuity
has gone unremarked. As we shall see, the propagandistic agendas
driving “The Character of Holland” and Amboyna encouraged Marvell
and Dryden to reinvent the formal constitution of the genres
in which they wrote. Refitted as vessels for political propaganda,
epic and tragedy offered these writers an opportunity to pour old
wine into new wineskins, so to speak, and rethink how literature
488 Commercial Fishing Propaganda during the Anglo-Dutch Wars
might be made to remake the nation and how the reinvention of
the nation, in turn, might remake literature.
Lost uncovers the Miltonic character of mid-twentieth-century
mainstream science fiction. As a science fiction pioneer and
professor of biochemistry, Asimov was responsible for much of
our modern thinking about robots — a fact noted by the Oxford
English Dictionary, which credits him with having coined the
term “robotics.” Asimov’s notion of a robot revolution is still a
powerful imaginary in modern American culture. It is evident in
films like Blade Runner, the Battlestar Galactica franchise (1978–
80, 2003–09), the Terminator franchise (1984–2015), The Matrix
(1999), and I, Robot (2004), which may owe to Paradise Lost by
way of Asimov their anxieties of a creation overpowering its creators.
Milton’s influence on science fiction is far-reaching, and on
the page and the screen, we catch glimpses of the infernal crew,
who first dared to think, “Our puissance is our own, our own right
hand / Shall teach us highest deeds, by proof to try / Who is our
equal” (PL 5.864–66).
and sovereignty in the English edition of Leviathan. I suggest that the
notion of divine judgement is an essential component of Hobbes’s political
philosophy and that attention to what Hobbes is doing with it changes the way
we understand his sovereign and what it means to reign as such. I will consider
how Hobbes searches for what the seventeenth century called Hebraica veritas,
how his notion of ‘ruling’ as ‘judging’ is rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures, how
he manipulates Jewish history to narrate sovereignty’s origin, and how he continually
postpones the historical outcome of that narrative: the Last Judgement
and the inception of Christ’s supreme sovereignty. I show how Hobbesian
eschatology as presented in Leviathan depends upon reciprocity of political
value. Hobbes projects value onto that which is spiritual and otherworldly—
Christ returning to Judgement—only to return value to that which is temporal
and mundane: the rule of human sovereigns on Earth in the present. That
reciprocity has important implications for England as the ‘sceptred isle’—as
the great sea beast, leviathan, powerful and secure in its majestic ocean home.
Hobbes suggests England has the potential to adopt an ideal government and
to become the Leviathan, despite its current revolution.
during his first term at Christ’s College in the fall or winter of
1626.1 In the preceding year, London was wracked by one of the most
severe outbreaks of plague in the seventeenth century. The final death
toll reached 35,417 in the city and 68,596 nationwide, and numerous
“trailer epidemics” in 1626 drove the numbers still higher.2 Studying
at Cambridge only sixty miles away, Milton was acutely aware of the
devastation that the plague caused in the city and the country. Cedric
Brown claims that in Elegy III Milton presents a vision of national unification
amid widespread distress through an encounter with England’s
favorite minister, the recently deceased Lancelot Andrewes.