Cold War Milton

Abstract

Careful analysis of the historical context in which the first (1953) volume of Yale's magisterial edition of Milton's prose works, ‘Yale I,’ was produced reveals how the Milton it represents was shaped by current events – specifically, how Cold War developments threatened editor Don Wolfe's very American vision of what a liberal society should be. The exhaustive historical detail provided in Yale I's textual apparatus, its introduction and notes, not only portrays the political turmoil of seventeenth-century England but also represents Milton as a fierce opponent of political dangers clearly perceived as similar to those rampant in Cold War America – dangers such as McCarthyite anti-Communism, the rise of the defence-driven research university, and the ascendancy of that institution's favourite form of literary studies, the New Criticism. Ironically, Wolfe's presentism safeguarded historicist interest in Milton, inoculating Milton studies not only against the de-historicizing drive of New Criticism but also against the later innovations of the New Historicism.

“Is this our boasted constitution? Is this our liberty?”: Reading Milton in Ireland

“…The liberal packaging of Milton, which is not only encomiastic but anachronistic in the way that it often overlooks the nuances and limits of Milton's ideas of tolerance, freedom, and liberty, was reinforced in the middle decades of the 20th century. This is reflected in the Yale editions of his prose works, the general editor of which celebrated Milton initially as a spokesperson for anti‐fascist democratic ideals at a time when they were under threat in Europe from Nazi Germany, and, later, as a bastion of civil and religious liberties that stood entirely at odds with the aggressive anti‐communist policies of McCarthyism that sought to persecute any and all forms of political dissent or nonconformity (Achinstein, ; McDowell, ). In revolutionary France, similarly, Milton's theories of civil and religious liberty were introduced through translations and adaptations of Areopagitica (1644) and A Defence of the People of England (1695 edition) to address topical issues ranging from the freedom of the press to the execution of a king after due legal process, while in the figure of Satan revolutionaries identified a voice of opposition to despotism (e.g., Shawcross, ; Tournu, ).…”