Karen L. Edwards, Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry
in Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), xiii
+ 265pp, ISBN 0521643597
Although the question of Milton’s interest in the scientific debates of his
day has been broached elsewhere, Karen L. Edwards is the first to
highlight the full extent of Milton’s debt and contribution to experimental
science in the seventeenth century and, in particular, to his imaginative
and creative engagements with the natural world. In a writer so
intellectually bold as Milton, it would indeed be surprising if he were not
to have participated in the crucial debate of how to read the book of
knowledge. As Edwards contends, ‘Milton would have considered it the
duty of a writer of epic to embrace all the learning of his day, even if
some of it was in the process of being discredited and some of it was still
highly speculative.’
In the introductory chapter to Milton and the Natural World,
Edwards situates her work within the contexts afforded by Milton studies
and by recent work in the history and philosophy of science. Adopting
Bourdieu’s notion of a ‘lag’, during which a population takes time to
recognise and respond to a changed epistemological condition, Edwards
deftly side-steps the interpretative paralysis of a Foucauldian model of
discontinuity and rupture, and is able both to acknowledge competing
discourses and fissures in Milton’s text and to appreciate the ways in
which Milton utilises Renaissance poetics in order to assimilate, reconcile
and reorder his heterogeneous material.
The rest of Milton and the Natural World is divided into two parts.
In the first part, Edwards sets out the interpretative strategies available to
Milton and his seventeenth-century readers when set the task of
understanding the book of the world. On the one hand is the symbolic or
analogic hermeneutic that produced an encyclopaedic stock of plant lore
from antiquity to the earlier Renaissance; on other hand is the experiential
reading strategy developed by advocates of the ‘new science,’ by writers
such as Thomas Browne, Robert Boyle, John Evelyn and Robert Hooke.
Both reading strategies are present in Paradise Lost, Edwards argues, but
it is the latter, with its close relationship to Protestant devotional
practices, which Milton adopts as the dominant voice in his work: ‘there
is a controlling discourse in Milton's fusing of the old and new
philosophies, and it is the latter, I will argue. Milton is on this side of
modernity.’ The fabulous and simply erroneous lore so wittily debunked
in Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica appears in Paradise Lost
not because Milton believed it to be true, Edwards argues, but insofar as
it is shown to constitute a misreading of the natural world.
Perhaps the most important aspect of Milton and the Natural World
is to show the ways in which the experimentalism of Milton's natural
philosophy was informed by and in turn helped inform, his poetics. ‘To
find “science” in Paradise Lost,’Edwards contends, ‘it is necessary to
look very closely at the way the poetry works.’ In the second part of her
book, therefore, Edwards examines the ways in which Milton treats
specific aspects of the natural world, both flora and fauna, from the
fantastic (the amphisbaena, the griffin, the azure rose) to the
commonplace (the plane tree, lemon balm, the ant and bee) and to the
contested area in-between. In so doing, Edwards herself expertly moves
between a wide range of sources, including herbals, bestiaries, atlases,
curiosity cabinets, travel narratives, botanical gardens and menageries, to
show the varieties of knowledge that Milton and his contemporaries
brought to their readings of the natural world and to poetry. By closely
examining Milton’s use of sources and the interpretative decisions he
encourages in his readers, Edwards is able to show how poetics and
science work together to create an experience of uncertainty that is
characteristic of the ‘new science’: ‘the poem consistently makes
available new representational possibilities suggested by the experimental
philosophy, and it does so with excitement, wit, and creative relish. What
I see as the mark of experimentalism upon the poem’s depiction of a
creature is this: the necessity for a reader’s imaginative engagement in the
process of making meaning. This is, in part, because experimentalism in
the mid-seventeenth century tends to open areas of scientific uncertainty
which are poetically liberating.’ This interpretative uncertainty has
perhaps not yet been fully acknowledged among historians of early
modern science.
As well as bringing fresh insights to familiar passages from
Paradise Lost, Edwards makes important contributions to a number of
other topics: her readings of Thomas Browne, Robert Hooke—whose
Micrographia (1665) is represented in a number of illustrations—and Du
Bartas are particularly memorable. Edwards’s enthusiasm for her
material is infectious, and through a combination of insightful close
reading and confident analyses of wider historical and theoretical issues,
she has produced a work which is entirely consonant with the spirit and
strategy of Paradise Lost. Written with grace and clarity, Edwards’s
work is an education for the twenty-first-century reader. She writes:
‘Milton has so written the book of the world that its creatures, too, ask for
and respond to continual re-reading and re-thinking. They disclose new
beauty and new intricacy each time they are revisited.’ The same can be
said for Milton and the Natural World.
Jayne Archer
University of Warwick