Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana

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MILTON AND THE MANUSCRIPT OF D E D O C T R I N A C H R I S T I A N A

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Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana

G O R D O N C A M P B E L L, T H O M A S N. C O R N S, J O H N K . H A L E A N D F I O N A J. T W E E D I E

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York  Gordon Campbell, Thomas N. Corns, John K. Hale, and Fiona J. Tweedie 2007

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–929649–1 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Preface In August 1991 Professor William Hunter used the occasion of the Fourth International Milton Symposium, in Vancouver, to set out his view that the attribution of De Doctrina Christiana to John Milton was unsafe. Responses by Barbara Lewalski and John Shawcross on the same day initiated a debate which became the hottest topic in Milton studies. A substantial secondary literature has accumulated around the problem. In the first instance this was simply a debate about authorship. If, as is distinctly possible, Milton’s name was added to the manuscript long after his death, then the attribution needed hard evidence which must run well beyond the compatibility of the work with Milton’s other writings. Thomas Corns decided that the question was worthy of a serious investigation, and so conceived, convened and managed a research group to consider the issues surrounding the manuscript. That group consisted of the four authors of this volume together with David Holmes. John Hale, while preparing an edition of De Doctrina for the forthcoming Oxford edition of Milton’s complete works, is transcribing and, in collaboration with Donald Cullington, translating the treatise afresh. Fiona Tweedie, an applied statistician and stylometrist, developed mechanisms of stylistic analysis that soon transcended questions of authorship. The result of this collaborative endeavour is the fullest investigation of the manuscript ever undertaken. The work of the group has been presented in Birmingham (1994), Bangor (1995), Santa Barbara (1995), Rome (1995), Bergen (June 1996), Beaufort, South Carolina (2002), Tübingen (2002) and Otago (2005). In October 1996 we published a substantial electronic report, Milton and De Doctrina Christiana, a revised version of which was published in Milton Quarterly in 1997 as ‘The Provenance of De Doctrina Christiana’; we are grateful to Milton Quarterly’s editor (Edward Jones) and publisher (Blackwell) for permission to print an adapted form of this material in Chapter 2. Work published since then is listed in the bibliography.

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Preface

Our debts are manifold. The Arts and Humanities Research Board (now Research Council) funded our research with a generous grant. The Oxford Texts Archive gave us access to the material that we needed for comparative purposes. The Public Record Office (now the National Archives) gave us permission to reproduce parts of the manuscript, but the assistance of colleagues there extended far beyond formal permission: we had the manuscript unbound twice, and were allowed to use a lightbox in the PRO’s staff accommodation to examine the manuscript page by page. The PRO also produced for us, to a high specification, a digital image of the whole text. Individuals who have assisted us include Donald Cullington (whose strenuous and amicable collaboration included the supplying of data), Linda Jones (who kept the project running), Eva Thury (who made available to the group machine-readable copies of Milton’s Latin prose), Tim Cooper (for assistance with John Owen), Andrew McNeillie (who commissioned the volume and cheered us on) and the computing colleagues assembled at the meeting of the Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing (held in Glasgow in 2000), who generously advised on the standards and techniques for making and manipulating digital images. Within the Milton community, we have received signal assistance from Peter Beal, Roy Flannagan, the late William Hunter, Edward Jones, Barbara K. Lewalski, Michael Lieb, Annabel Patterson, John Rumrich, Paul Sellin and John Shawcross.

Contents List of Tables and Figures Citations and Abbreviations The Authors

viii ix xi

1. The Controversy

1

2. The History of the Manuscript

5

3. The Making of the Manuscript

39

4. Stylometric Analysis

69

5. The Theology of the Manuscript

89

6. The Latin Style

121

7. Conclusions

155

Bibliography Index

162 177

Tables and Figures Table 3.1. The incidence of watermarks, chapter by chapter, in the Picard section Table 4.1. Occurrences of coniugium, matrimonium and connubium in Chapter 10 Table 4.2. Occurrences of coniugium, matrimonium and connubium in De Doctrina Christiana, the Defences, and the Prolusiones

79

Figure 3.1. De Doctrina Christiana, pp. 308a and 308 Figure 3.2. De Doctrina Christiana, p. 205 Figure 3.3. De Doctrina Christiana, p. 205 (detail)

42 52 53

Figure 3.4. Figure 3.5. Figure 4.1. Figure 4.2. tiana

54 56 72

De Doctrina Christiana, p. 111 De Doctrina Christiana, pp. 597 and 620 Principal Components Analysis of three groups of texts Principal Components Analysis, including De Doctrina Chris-

Figure 4.3. Principal Components Analysis of sections of De Doctrina Christiana Figure 4.4. Principal Components Analysis, highlighting the characteristics of the epistle Figure 4.5. Principal Components Analysis, highlighting the characteristics of the sections on polygamy and divorce Figure 4.6. De Doctrina Christiana and the Defences (5,000-word segments) Figure 4.7. De Doctrina Christiana and the Defences (1,000-word segments) Figure 4.8. De Doctrina Christiana, Ames and Wollebius (5,000-word segments) (i) Figure 4.9. De Doctrina Christiana, Ames and Wollebius (1,000-word segments) Figure 4.10. De Doctrina Christiana, Ames and Wollebius (5,000-word segments) (ii)

49 79

74 75 77 80 84 85 86 87 88

Citations and Abbreviations Quotations from Milton’s works are taken from the Columbia edition of Milton’s works (abbreviated as CE), with the exception of Chapter 6, in which quotations from De Doctrina Christiana are taken from John Hale’s transcription of the manuscript. Translations come from a variety of sources, but are often those of the authors of this volume or, in the case of Chapter 6, from the translation of De Doctrina Christiana being undertaken by Donald Cullington and John Hale. Page references to De Doctrina are usually to the Columbia edition (even numbers designate the Latin text, odd numbers the English translation), but in Chapters 3 and 6 numbers refer to the pages of the manuscript. AL

Ars Logicae (Milton’s Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio, ad Petri Rami Methodum concinnata, 1672)

Bohn

John Milton (1848–53, 1878–83, 1901–9), Milton’s Prose Works, ed. J. A. St John (London)

CE

John Milton (1931–8) The Works of John Milton, gen. ed. F. A. Patterson, 18 vols in 21 (New York: Columbia University Press)

Darbishire

Helen Darbishire (1932), The Early Lives of Milton (London: Constable & Co.)

DDC

De Doctrina Christiana

JTB

The ‘Junius-Tremellius-Beza’ Bible; for details see Bibliography s.v. ‘Bible’, and p. 124

LR

J. Milton French (1949–58), The Life Records of John Milton, 5 vols (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press)

MQ

Milton Quarterly

MS

Milton Studies

x ODNB

Citations and Abbreviations Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

SEL

Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900

Yale

John Milton (1953–82), Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don. M. Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press)

The Authors Gordon Campbell, M.A., D.Phil., D.Litt., Dr h.c., F.R.Hist.S., F.R.G.S., F.R.A.S., is Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Leicester. His work on Milton includes a revised edition of W. R. Parker’s two-volume life of Milton (Oxford University Press), the entries on Milton and his circle for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, editions of Milton’s Complete Poems and Complete English Poems (Everyman), a compilation of the Miltonic life records in A Milton Chronology (Macmillan), a collaborative edition of the poems of Edward King (Milton’s Lycidas), and scores of articles in learned journals. In 2005 he was elected as the Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America. Gordon Campbell’s editorial work includes the founding editorship of Renaissance Studies (Oxford University Press), the general editorship of The Review of English Studies (Oxford University Press), the series editorship of Essays and Studies (Boydell and Brewer) and an edition of four plays by Ben Jonson (Oxford University Press). His most recent books are The Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance (2003), Renaissance Art and Architecture (Oxford University Press, 2004), The Grove Encyclopaedia of Decorative Art (2 vols, Oxford University Press, 2006) and The Grove Encyclopaedia of Classical Art and Architecture (2 vols, Oxford University Press, 2007). He is a former chairman of the English Association and of the Society for Renaissance Studies. Thomas Corns, M.A., D.Phil., F.R.Hist.S., F.E.A., is Professor of English and Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Wales, Bangor. His work on Milton includes The Development of Milton’s Prose Style (Clarendon, 1982), Milton’s Language (Blackwell, 1990), Regaining ‘Paradise Lost’ (Longman, 1994), John Milton: The Prose Works (Twayne, 1998), A Companion to Milton (Blackwell, 2001) and the forthcoming Milton Encyclopedia (under preparation for Yale University Press), of which he is editor-in-chief. He is secretary to the standing committee of the International Milton Symposium and

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The Authors

founder and co-convenor of the British Milton Seminar. His Companion to Milton won the Irene Samuel Prize of the Milton Society of America for books published in 2001, and in 2003 he was elected as the Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America. Thomas Corns’s editorial work includes The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry, Donne to Marvell (1993), The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I (CUP, 1999) and a collaborative scholarly edition (with David Loewenstein and Ann Hughes) of the complete works of Gerrard Winstanley (forthcoming, Oxford University Press). He is the author of Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Clarendon, 1992) and A History of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Blackwell, 2006). Thomas Corns and Gordon Campbell are general editors of the Oxford edition of Milton’s complete works, the first volumes of which will be published in 2008. John Hale, M.A., Ph.D., Litt.D., was until recently Associate Professor of English at the University of Otago. His work on Milton includes Milton’s Languages: The Impact of Multilingualism on Style (Cambridge University Press, 1997), an edition and translation of a substantial selection of Milton’s Latin Writings (Medieval and Renaissance Text Society, 1999), a book on Milton’s Cambridge University education, Milton’s Cambridge Latin 1625–1632 (Medieval and Renaissance Text Society, 2005), and a collection entitled Milton as Multilingual: Selected Essays, 1982–2004 (Dunedin: English Department of the University of Otago), in which Part Five comprises four new essays on De Doctrina. John Hale has published widely on Milton’s Latin, and is at present preparing a transcription and translation of the Miltonic De Doctrina Christiana manuscript for the Oxford edition of the complete works of Milton. Fiona Tweedie, B.Sc., Ph.D., is an independent scholar who has taught in the Department of Statistics at the University of Glasgow and the Department of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. She is at present undertaking a degree in theology. Her work on stylometrics has long focused on Milton’s Latin, and she has published a number of seminal articles on author identification.

1 The Controversy In November 1823 Robert Lemon the elder (see ODNB), Deputy Keeper of His Majesty’s State Papers, discovered a manuscript entitled De Doctrina Christiana in a cupboard in the Old State Paper Office in Whitehall. He attributed the treatise to the poet John Milton. The discovery was announced in mid-January, and on 29 March 1824 the matter was raised in the House of Commons, where an MP asked the Home Secretary about ‘a manuscript lately discovered … said to be the undoubted work of the immortal Milton’. Mr Peel replied that the manuscript ‘had been placed in competent hands, and would shortly be printed under the auspices of His Majesty’. When the treatise was published the attribution to Milton was widely accepted; the only dissenter was Thomas Burgess (ODNB), Bishop of Salisbury, who insisted that this Unitarian work could not possibly be the work of Milton. Eventually dissent faded, and the work came to be accepted as part of the Milton canon. The linking of the treatise to Paradise Lost was magisterially accomplished by Maurice Kelley in This Great Argument: A Study of Milton’s ‘De Doctrina Christiana’ as a Gloss upon ‘Paradise Lost’ (Princeton, 1941). There the matter rested until 1991, when William Hunter reopened the question of whether the attribution of the treatise to Milton was secure. Since then, the issue has dominated Milton studies. The manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana carries Milton’s name on its title page (IOANNES MILTONVS) and on the first page of the first book (IOANNIS MILTONI) and the initials ‘I.M.’ after the preface. The hand in which the name is twice written is not obviously that of Daniel Skinner, in whose hand this section is written, though it resembles a number of Skinner’s capital-letter writings scattered

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The Controversy

throughout the work (e.g. at the end). The initials more closely resemble his hand, and are circled in a way similar to one on the cancelled coda of the manuscript of the State Papers that was found with De Doctrina. It seems odd that Robert Lemon, who discovered the treatise, should not have mentioned the presence of Milton’s name when he prepared a document (now in SP 9/61/4) setting out his reasons for attributing the treatise to Milton. Milton’s name was on the State Papers as Iohannis Miltonii, with an H in the Christian name. The second I in the genitive inflexion was apparently added at a later date; this hypothesis is confirmed by the running title on the verso pages, which is Iohannis Miltoni. Lemon noticed the name on the State Papers, and guessed that the theological treatise might also be the work of Milton. He noted that the wrapper bore the address ‘Mr Skinner, Merchant’, whom he erroneously identified with Cyriack Skinner. There is compelling evidence that Milton’s name and (possibly) the initials may have been added in the nineteenth century. The words in both cases certainly are squeezed in above what would otherwise be the top line of text. They are mostly in block capitals so the handwriting defies much interpretation. However, when Lemon prepared some material to describe his discovery he had made an engraving of the title page which is now bound into Part 4 of SP 9/61; that engraving, which was subsequently published in Sumner’s edition of the Latin text, does not have the current first line with Milton’s name, suggesting that at least that name may have been inserted there sometime after the engraving was made, either by Sumner, its editor and translator (whose hand is often to be seen making corrections to the text), or else by Lemon. It is of course possible that the engraver blundered, but as the chief interest of the treatise is its attribution to Milton, it would seem bizarre to omit his name. In any case, the line on the title page is an afterthought. Skinner, perhaps wholly ingenuously as he prepared the manuscript for Elsevier, could have put it in; so, too, could Elsevier himself. If Milton’s name was a later addition, then, possibly, so too were the initials. Curiously, perhaps the best evidence for rejecting the authenticity of the names comes from Kelley, who observes, in another context, that Milton customarily represented himself in Latin as ‘Miltonius’, not ‘Miltonus’ (Kelley, 1986); here it is ‘Miltonus’ (‘Ioannes Miltonus Anglus’). On the title

The Controversy

3

pages of his Latin defences and his Ars Logica, we find only the genitive form, which in the defences is usually printed MILTONI, and on occasion, as in the revised edition of the first Defence, MiltonI (Shawcross, 1984, 259). The large terminal I is the Renaissance convention for ‘ii’; in this respect Renaissance practice differs from classical convention, in which contractions of the ‘ii’ case ending are optional and commonplace in second declension nouns in the genitive singular case. Milton’s acquaintances sometimes represented his name differently. In Poems (1645) the commendations heading the Latin poems variously style him ‘Miltonem’ (i.e. the accusative form of a third-declension noun) and ‘Miltonus’ (in Salvaggi’s commendation), which needs ‘Miltonum’ (accusative) to scan. In the Arnold album Milton wrote ‘Miltonus’ and then very clearly and somewhat clumsily corrected it to ‘Miltonius’. None of this constitutes evidence that the document is not Miltonic; however, it became clear that the presence of the name and initials of Milton could not usefully be regarded as evidence that Milton wrote the treatise. The Milton community was divided by the issue. Some responded with scholarly investigations, but others expressed unease about the motives of those who doubted Milton’s authorship, or appealed to the authority of great Miltonists who had assumed that the work was Milton’s. This book is on one level a response to the debate. We have concluded that if one adopts a nuanced sense of what constitutes authorship in a genre (that of systematic theology) with strict conventions that make many examples seem remarkably similar, then Milton may be said to be the author of the treatise. On another level, this book has gone far beyond the terms of the debate, in that we have used the occasion of the debate about authorship to consider issues such as the method of composition and the Latinity of the treatise. Our examination of the manuscript led us to doubt the accuracy of the transcription now in the Columbia edition, which is derived from Sumner’s original edition. The compositor of the original Cambridge edition worked directly from the manuscript rather than from an edited text, and although he did a good job, he could have done a better job had Sumner supplied him with proper materials. These considerations have led us to another project (which is now well advanced), that of a new

4

The Controversy

edition of De Doctrina which is being prepared by John Hale and Donald Cullington for a new Oxford edition of Milton’s collected works. In one sense, this book is an extended introduction to that edition.

2 The History of the Manuscript Documents relating to the progress of the De Doctrina manuscript from Milton’s desk to the State Paper Office have gradually come to light in the 180 years since the manuscript was discovered. This chapter is a narrative constructed from those documents, designed to show that the manuscript now in the National Archives in Kew is the same manuscript that Milton possessed when he died. Two smaller sections assemble data about the two principal scribes, Jeremie Picard and Daniel Skinner.

1. From Bunhill Fields to Kew The manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana was discovered in November 1823 by Robert Lemon the elder (see ODNB), Deputy Keeper of His Majesty’s State Papers, in a ‘press’ (that is, a large cupboard) in the Old State Paper Office in the Middle Treasury Gallery in Whitehall. Lemon’s delight at the discovery and his sense of his own heroic role are fully apparent in the manuscript reports which are bound together as Part 4 of the document, all of which is now preserved in the Public Record Office as SP 9/61. The manuscript was found in a bundle together with a collection of transcriptions of Milton’s State Papers (now SP 9/194), which are in the same hand as that responsible for the first part of De Doctrina Christiana. The treatise was wrapped in proof sheets of an Elsevier Horace and, together with the State Papers, was contained in a dark paper envelope addressed ‘To Mr. Skinner, Mercht.’ This Skinner is Daniel Skinner the elder, and the parcel was intended to be passed to Sir Joseph Williamson (ODNB), Secretary of State for the Northern Department. The proof sheets disappeared

6

The History of the Manuscript

long ago; the envelope has been misplaced more recently and was last seen in 1991. Lemon’s initial speculations about the status and origins of the manuscript showed evident and rather self-important enthusiasm but little accuracy. The merchant Skinner he identified as Cyriack, who was in fact not a merchant but a lawyer, and he plunged boldly into identifying the two principal amanuenses: the first part is in ‘a small beautiful Italian hand … supposed to be the writing of Mary … the remainder of the Manuscript is in a different hand, entirely being a small, strong, upright, character, much resembling the writings of Phillips, one of Milton’s Nephews’; the latter part contains numerous corrections, many in the hand responsible for the first part, and this leads Lemon to the comfortable surmise that it was ‘revised and corrected by Mary and Deborah Milton, from the dictation of their Father’ (SP 9/61/4, fols. 386v–387r). Shortly after the treatise was published in 1825 Lemon and Charles Sumner (ODNB) established that the scribe responsible for the first part of the treatise was not Cyriack Skinner, but rather Daniel Skinner the younger, son of the merchant and not, apparently, related to Cyriack. Lemon’s more sentimental conclusions were gradually unpicked during the nineteenth century by Sumner, Douglas Hamilton (1859), Samuel Leigh Sotheby (1861) and David Masson (1877–94), work later supplemented by M. M. Kleerkooper in 1914, by the which time about twenty documents relevant to the transmission of the De Doctrina and State Paper manuscripts had been discovered; several of these have had to be rediscovered for purposes of this study, as their location in the PRO was not always stated in the printed versions, and modern scholars have not been able to find them. More recently, John Shawcross listed some new documents in his Bibliography, and we have in turn been able to add more; no doubt more documents will eventually be unearthed. This collection of documents marks the movements of the manuscript from Skinner’s desk to Williamson’s press. What is certainly known is that SP 9/61 and SP 9/194 were placed in the State Papers Office by Sir Joseph Williamson, probably in 1677. The parcel containing the Milton documents was found amongst papers relating to the Popish Plots of 1677 and 1678; on top of the parcel lay the deposition of Titus Oates, signed and attested on 27


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September 1678. The list of those implicated by Oates in the Popish Plot of 1678 includes, teasingly, one ‘Mr Skinner, a Benedictine’; the following year Oates published his True Narrative of the Horrid Plot, in which he alleged that ‘Milton was a known frequenter of a Popish Club.’ The Benedictine was yet another Skinner, possibly Cyriack’s elder brother, and the Popish Club, if not mere mischief, may confuse Milton with his brother Christopher, who may indeed have converted to Catholicism (see ODNB). On 2 October 1674 Daniel Skinner had been elected to a minor fellowship at Trinity College Cambridge (‘Daniel Skinner juratus et admissus in socium minorem’; Trinity College Admissions and Admonitions, 1560–1759). Late in 1675, while resident in Cambridge, he passed the manuscripts of De Doctrina Christiana and letters of state to one Symon Heere, presumably a Dutch skipper, who delivered them to Daniel Elsevier, scion of the Elsevier publishing house and the firm’s principal link with English authors and booksellers (see van Eeghen). Elsevier decided to send the theological treatise to a reader, Phillipp van Limborch (i.e. Phillippus Limborchus), who was then professor at the Remonstrant College in Amsterdam. Many years later, on 3 March 1711, the elderly van Limborch explained to the German traveller Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach daß ihme ein Buchhändler ein Systema Theologie von Milton zu untersuchen gegeben, ob er es drucken solle. Er habe es ihm aber wiederrathen, weil der Arrianismus durch und durch auf das heftigste darinnen zu finden gewesen. Wo das Manuscript hergekommen, wisse er nicht. [ … that a publisher had given him a System of Theology by Milton to advise whether he should print it. He [van Limborch] had, however, counselled him against it because the strongest Arianism was to be found throughout it. Where the manuscript had come from he did not know.] (Uffenbach, 1754, III, 584–5)

A Remonstrant reader such as van Limborch would have been sympathetic to the Arminian aspects of the treatise, but Remonstrants were routinely accused of Arianism, and were sensitive about theological opinion that seemed sympathetic to Arian Christology. Elsevier decided to accept the advice of his reader (or, at least, he decided to reject the treatise—the judgement may as easily have been a commercial one which he chose to represent in more elevated terms), and he

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wrote to Skinner in Cambridge explaining that he was not prepared to publish either the theological treatise or the letters of state. This letter, which is now lost, did not reach Skinner, because he had already left Cambridge for London, where he had decided to seek the patronage of Samuel Pepys, whom he knew because his sister Mary Skinner was Pepys’s resident mistress. Skinner’s initial approach to Pepys was a long letter in florid Latin (incipit: Ornatissimo Spectato admodum ac Amplissimo Viro), which Pepys received on 5 July 1676. The Latin text has been printed in full by Hanford (1931) and Howarth (Pepys, 1932, 53–5), and we shall simply offer a précis: To Master Samuel Pepys, my best wishes for your health and happiness. Because you are an important adviser to the King and hence often pursued with petition, I have plucked up the courage to appeal to you, and hope that I may do so without causing offence. I must first explain my circumstances, my needs. I first experienced your favour through my sister; it is with mixed feelings that I seek it again, but I do need your help. I was seven years at Westminster School, then six at Cambridge (which was also your cradle), and was elected a fellow of Trinity College. However, that process being still incomplete after about four years, I am approaching all sorts of friends, so far without success. Will you please be my Maecenas? You know the losses sustained by my father, and his ill health. Help me to help him, by money or by preferment of any sort, so long as it involves writing. I invoke your own love of letters, most talented Sir; I invoke the memory of the Earl of Sandwich and his twin sons, my fellow-debtors; I invoke your generosity and my own indigence; and finally, I invoke the love which on one occasion you professed for my sister. I shall be eternally grateful. I remain your most dutiful petitioner Daniel Skinner PS You can see from the above my thinking about you, but if you will grant me an audience I shall open my mind to you more fully. (Bodleian MS Rawlinson A185, fols. 396–7)

The favour that Skinner initially enjoyed through his sister was a loan of £10 that features in subsequent correspondence. The pact of love for Daniel’s sister Mary may refer to her admission to Pepys’s household on the death of his wife, but the allusion cannot be interpreted with confidence, because the Latin is imprecise, perhaps deliberately so: the passage reminds Pepys of his involvement with Mary Skinner,


9

and of her parents’ mixed feelings about the arrangement, but the extent of the pressure being brought to bear upon Pepys cannot be judged with confidence. In all events, the letter seems to have had the desired effect, because on 24 July Pepys wrote to Sir Leoline Jenkins (see ODNB), the English plenipotentiary at the Congress of Nijmegen, conveying an humble request on behalf of an ingenious and every way hopeful young gentleman one Mr. Skinner son of a merchant of good quality and name in this City and my worthy friend, who has the ambicion and some encouragement (as I understand) to hope for a dependence on your Lordship in the Service of Mr. Chunley your Secretary: wherein what I have humbly to interpose is the telling your Excellency that being privy to every part of this Gentleman’s education, from his Father’s house through Westminster School to Trinity College in Cambridge, & the reputacion he has as well as what I personally know of his Sobriety, Parts and Learning, & particularly in his Latin Style, I have not in all my conversacion knowne any person set out better prepared for an admission to publick business, than I think him to be, and as such (as far as your Excellency shall have it before you) I pray he may be honoured with your Excellency’s favour to his pretences under this Character, as given by One who would no more bestow it undeserved, than he could deny it where it is soe due, as I think it to be in the Case of this gentleman; on whose behalfe I should with infinite satisfaceon and thankfulness owne any favour he shall be thought worthy of under your Lordship’s Patronage. (National Maritime Museum MS LBK8, p. 746)

‘Mr Chunley’ is Thomas Chudleigh, then Secretary to the Embassy (see ODNB). The elder Skinner may have been Pepys’s ‘worthy friend’, but he is never mentioned in the Diary. The letter of reference is a genre that accommodates exaggeration, but the slips in the Skinner section of the De Doctrina manuscript cast an odd light on Pepys’s choice of Skinner’s Latin style for particular commendation, because the mistakes, while fairly rare, seem to point to a limited competence in Latin rather than carelessness. Skinner’s Latin to Pepys, though florid and ambitious, contains small touches which would have been condemned by Milton or any purist. It is not clear how Skinner (and so Pepys) had heard that there was a vacancy in Chudleigh’s office, but Chudleigh had written to Williamson on 2/12 August requesting a second clerk to help with the treaty negotiations (SP 84/202, fol. 140). The date of this letter raises the possibility that Chudleigh’s

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letter to Williamson was prompted by his receipt of Pepys’s letter, and that the post had in some sense been reserved for Skinner. Jenkins replied to Pepys from Nijmegen on 9/19 August 1676, saying that he ‘had rather by effects when Mr Skinner comes, then by promises, lett you see the Regard I will have in every thing within my Power to your Recommending of him’ (Bodleian MS Rawlinson A185, fol. 204). Jenkins or Chudleigh wrote to Skinner offering him a post; the letter is lost, but Skinner recounts in his letter to Pepys of 9/19 November that ‘Heaven was soe propitious to me to cause a letter to be sent from Nimmeguen, to know whether I would embrace the opportunity of being under Mr Chudleigh secretary to the Embassy’. Skinner was, he assures Pepys, ‘noe sooner acquainted with this happy news, but I leap’t at it’. Skinner’s expectation of a post was never to be fulfilled, because the ship on which he departed for Nijmegen carried a letter recommending that Skinner not be given the post. This Claudius to Skinner’s Hamlet was Sir Joseph Williamson, the Secretary of State, whose ire had been aroused by the publication of Milton’s Literae Pseudo-Senatus by Peter and John Blaeu of Amsterdam, from copy supplied by Moses Pitt, the London printer, who had not been prepared to risk printing it in England. Skinner had not received Elsevier’s letter of rejection, so he still believed that Elsevier was planning to publish an edition of the letters of state from the copy that he had supplied, for which the Blaeu edition was an unwelcome competitor. He therefore decided to write to Williamson. Skinner’s letter is lost, but he gives a full account of it in his letter to Pepys of 9/19 November: Your worship may please to remember I once acquainted you with my having the works of Milton which he left behind him to me, which out of pure indiscretion, not dreaming any prejudice might accrue to me, I had agreed with a printer at Amsterdam to have ’um printed, which as good fortune would have it he has not printed one tittle of ’um. About a moneth agoe there creeps out into the world a little imperfect book of Miltons state letters, procur’d to be printed by one Pitts a bookseller in London, which he had bought of a poore fellow that had formerly surreptitiously gott ’um from Milton. These coming out soe slily and quite unknown to me, and when that I had the true more perfect copy, with many other papers, I made my addresses to Sir Joseph Williamson, to acquaint him that there was a book come out against his autority, that if his Honour conniv’d at that, he would


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please to grant me licence to print mine, if not, that he would either suppress that little book, or give me leave to put in the bottom of the Gazette that they were printing in Holland in a larger more compleat edition. Now Sir little thinking that Sir Joseph was such an enemy to the name of Milton, he told me he could countenance nothing of that mans writings. In his answer I acquiesc’d. a [sic] little wile after his Honour sends for me to know what papers I had of Miltons by me, and that I should obleige him if I would permitt ’um to his perusall, which very greedily I did, thinking it might prove advantagious to me. And finding upon this soe great an access to his Honour, I presented him with a Latine petitiory Epistle for some preferment, either under him or by his meanes. His Honour was pleas’d graciously to receive it, and in a most expressive manner to promise me any advancement that might lye in his power. During this, the opportunity of going to Nimmeguen happen’d, and the day before I went out of England I went to his Honour for some recommendations; He return’d me my papers with many thanks, and was pleas’d to give me a great deale of advice not to proceed in the printing of my papers at Amsterdam, that it would be an undoubted rubb in any preferment of mine, and this he said he spoke out of [m]ere kindness and affection to me. I return’d His Honour many humble thanks, and did expressively ensure him that assoone as I gott to Amsterdam (which I took in my way on purpose) I would resume my copyes and suppress ’um for ever which Sir I have done and have followed his Honours advice to every punctilio. yet [sic] Notwithstanding this his Honour was pleas’d (whether I shall term it unkindly or unnaturally) to dispatch a letter after me to my Lord Jenkings, to acquaint his Lordship that I was printing Miltons works and wished ’um to have a care of me in the Kings service, which has put a little stop to my being employ’d as yet, till I can write to England, procure soe much interest as to cleare Sir Joseph Williamsons jealousie of my being yet engag’d in the printing of these papers. Though my Lord Jenkings and Mr. Chudleigh are soe well satisfy’d, after my giving them a full account of the business, and bringing my copies with me to Nimmeguen, ready to dispose of ’um where Sir Joseph shall think fitt, that they seem as much concern[’d] at Sir Joseph’s letter as I doe, and have sent me here to Rotterdam at theire charge (soe kind they are) to remaine here, till I can write to England and they have an answer from Sir Joseph Williamson how that his Honour is satisfy’d, which they don’t at all question but he will be, when he shall heare what I have said and done. Now may it please your Worship having given you a full and true account of the whole affaire, seeing the fortune of a young man depends upon this small thing, either perpetuall ruine or a faire and happy way to future advancement, pray give me leave to begg of you, which I most humbly and submissively doe that you would please instantly to repaire

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to his honour Sir Joseph and acquaint him that I am soe far from printing anything from Miltons now, that I have ad amussim [exactly] followed his Honours advice, and upon due pensitation with my self have null’d and made void my contract with Elsevier at Amsterdam, have resum’d my copies to my self, and am ready to dispose of ’um where his Honour pleases, either into the hands of my Lord Jenkings, or into his own for better satisfaction, and am soe farr from ever procuring a line of Milton [to be] printed, that if his Honour pleases, he shall command my copies and all my other papers to the fire. And though I happen’d to be acquainted with Milton in his lifetime, (which out of mere love to learning I procur’d, and noe other concerns ever pass’d betwixt us but a great desire and ambition of some of his learning,) I am, and ever was soe farr from being in the least tainted with any of his principles, that I may boldly say, none has a greater honour and loyalty for his Majesty, more veneration for the Church of England, and love for his countrey, then I have. (Bodleian MS Rawlinson A185, fols. 271–4; see Hanford, 1931)

This long excerpt from an even longer letter raises almost as many questions as it answers. Skinner refers to his ‘having the works of Milton which he left behind him to me’, as if he had been some sort of literary executor. A letter now at Longleat, written after Skinner left for Holland early in November 1676 but before Williamson’s letter to Meredith of 19 January 1677, provides another perspective on Skinner’s status. The letter is neither addressed nor signed, but was found among the papers of Henry Coventry (see ODNB), Williamson’s predecessor as Secretary of State for the Northern Department and since 1674 his opposite number in the Southern Department, the post now known as Home Secretary. The letter was written by an anonymous informant and sent either to Coventry or to his secretary (and nephew), Henry Frederick Thynne: I am informed that since the death of Mr. Milton his Books have byn lookt over by one Mr. Skinner a scholar and a bold young man who has cull’d out what he thought fitt, & amongst the rest he has taken a manuscript of Mr. Milton’s written on the Civil & Ecclesiastical Government of the Kingdom which he is resolved to print and to that purpose is gone into Holland and intends to print it at Leyden (and at this present is either there or at Nemeguen) and then to bring and disperse the copys in England. (Longleat, Coventry Papers f.60)


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In this account, Skinner has simply ‘cull’d out what he thought fitt’. The manuscript on the civil and ecclesiastical government of the kingdom may be the Digression in Milton’s History of Britain, later published as Character of the Long Parliament (1681) by Henry Brome of London (see ODNB); on the other hand, the reference may be a garbled reference to the state papers and theological treatise that had been sent to Elsevier. Skinner’s letter describes the plan to print the letters of state, but is silent about the theological treatise that he had sent to Elsevier, admitting only that a Dutch printer had agreed to print works by Milton. Skinner also records that Williamson had asked permission to examine papers of Milton in his possession. Skinner was so flattered by this request that he composed another Latin epistle petitioning for preferment, and presented it to Sir Joseph; it is now lost. In due course Williamson ‘return’d me my papers with many thanks’. What were these papers? They probably included Milton’s poetical workbook (still in Trinity College; see Kelley, 1940b) and may have included the Commonplace Book (now in the British Library), the leaf containing ‘Surge, age surge’, ‘Ignavus satrapam’ and the theme on early rising (now in Austin, Texas) and Milton’s annotated copy of Euripides’ tragedies (now in the Bodleian; see Norbrook, 1995); these papers may also have included the Digression, though there are two other possibilities with respect to this manuscript: it may have been sent to Elsevier, if this is the work to which the Longleat letter refers, or it may have been retained (or copied) by Williamson, who could have passed it to Roger L’Estrange, who arranged for Brome to print it. Skinner’s letter also raises questions about his honesty. Elsevier’s letter to Skinner’s father of 9/19 February 1677 (of which more hereafter) makes it clear that the younger Skinner had left for Nijmegen without the manuscripts, but in the letter to Pepys Skinner claims to have carried the papers to Nijmegen. The simplest explanation for this anomaly is that Skinner was lying. Similarly, his Vicar-of-Bray allegiance to king and established church seems to be born of expediency rather than principle. But why had Skinner not collected the manuscripts from Elsevier in Amsterdam? Perhaps he was as devious as Williamson thought him to be, and still entertained plans for publication, if this could be achieved without damaging his own prospects. Perhaps Elsevier had not yet received the manuscript of De Doctrina

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back from van Limborch, or simply wanted to retain the manuscripts for commercial reasons, in the hope that publication would eventually be possible. Perhaps, as we shall argue below, consideration of security governed the actions of Elsevier and Skinner alike. It is possible that Skinner was as ingenuous or inept as he seems in his dealing with Williamson. Williamson evidently summoned him, and after interrogation Skinner wrote in his own hand and signed a statement dated 18 October 1676 in a scribal hand: That Mr Pitts Bookseller in Pauls Churchyard to the best of my remembrance about 4 or 5 moneths agoe told me he had mett withall and bought some of Mr Miltons papers, and that if I would procure an agreement betwixt him And Elseviere at Amsterdam (to whose care I had long before committed the true perfect copy of the state letters to be printed) he would communicate them to my perusall; If I would not, he would proceed his own way and make the best advantage of um; Soe that in all probability I not procuring Elsevieres concurrance with him, and ’tis impossible it should be otherwise, Mr Pitts has been the man by whose meanes this late imperfect surreptitious copy, has been publish’t. I attest This to be truth Dan: Skinner Oct. 18th. 1676 (PRO SP 29/386, fol. 96)

Williamson hoped that he had successfully intimidated Skinner, but he remained preoccupied with the fate of the Miltonic state papers and was uncertain about the extent to which Skinner could be trusted. He seems not to have taken any action against Moses Pitt (ODNB). The Blaeu edition of the state papers had been published without any indication of printer, bookseller or place of publication, and shortly thereafter a similarly anonymous volume had been published by Eugène Fricx of Brussels. On 23 October/2 November John Ellis (ODNB), Jenkins’s secretary, wrote to Williamson from Nijmegen, enclosing a copy of ‘these Letters of Milton’s being newly come out of the press and printed hard by us’ (SP 84/202, fol. 375). Williamson seems to have promised to extend his patronage to Skinner, but on 31 October he wrote a devastating letter to Jenkins: I come casually to know that Mr. Chudleigh is takeing one Mr. Skinner, a young man of Cambridge to be his Secretary. The person is a very pretty


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young man, writes Latin very well, and a fine character. But he is most unfortunately fallen into an ugly business now freshly, he it seems being the party that hath put out Milton’s workes to be printed by the Elzevers in Holland, and among other papers his Letters of State written for the Usurpers, as their Latin Secretary. I have told the young man plainely what I thought of his mixeing with that sort of men, and how takeing such Pitch is, and that indeed till he had very well aired himself from such infectious a commerce, as the friendship of Milton is, he could not be at all proper to touch any degree in the King’s service. And I pray your Excellency to say so much to Mr. Chudleigh, if you please, to prevent his making so ill a step. (Bodleian MS Rawlinson A352, pp. 277–8; copy in SP 103/88)

Again Skinner is said to write Latin very well, a judgement presumably based on the lost Latin epistle that Skinner composed for Williamson. Skinner had stopped in Amsterdam to see Elsevier before going on to Nijmegen, so Williamson’s letter preceded him. One wonders if, on reading it, Jenkins recalled that he had recently presided over the court that had considered Milton’s nuncupative will. Whatever he may have thought, he acted resolutely, packing Skinner off to Rotterdam to await the judgement of Williamson. Skinner’s interminable letter to Pepys is the product of his enforced idleness in Rotterdam. Jenkins replied to Williamson on 6/16 November: I have obeyed your orders relating to M. Skinner in the presence of my Lord Ambassador and I doubt not but Mr Chudleigh will himself give you his thanks for your Care of him, and of the Business in his hands. I was just sending you those unhappy Letters of Milton: but had heard nothing of what you were pleased to say of a new edition of those High Treasons, I will rather call them then works. If it be so, nothing can be so venemous, nothing so pernicious, for as ill ayre infects as the temper of the Body is more or lesse susceptible: so these works may have a different operation now from the worst they could have had when they first came out for then all mankind had not only a prejudice but a deep abhorrence for any thing that was said, or could be sayd in Defence of that Cause; a few villaines onely excepted that had their hands either in the Bloud of that Blessed Martyr or in the Rapines of those times. And I for my own part may truthfully say, I never read, nay refused to read Milton, when offer’d; and I doe remember ’twas the Abomination I had for the subject matter that would not allow me to satisfie my Curiosity in the Language: this speak[s] abstractedly from the obligation I thought myself

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under then (though there was none to take accompt of it) to doe by seditious Treasonable writing as the laws of England direct. I should not have mentioned my self … but there is a new generation … very well prepared to swallow the impudent assertions of Milton for undoubted History. I cannot hope of any great effect (as ’tis now with us) from a Proclamation against this book. But I should think there is Law enough … soundly at the King’s Bench than a proclamation grafted upon such an example in order to warn the subjects might possibly have some good effect. (SP 84/203, fols. 24–5)

Chudleigh wrote a similar letter on the same day, assuring Williamson that as soon as Skinner arrives here I will immediately take care to send him back again; and your Honour may be assurd I shall never think of entertayning any one whom I may know not to have your approbation. I had heard onely what was very well of him, and that Mr Secretary Pepys and others had given an extraordinary good character of him, but I had never heard the least syllable of his being guilty of what your Honour finds him or any way else (SP 84/203, fols. 16–17)

Pepys replied to Skinner on 17 November, addressing his letter to Skinner in Rotterdam. The letter is not in Pepys’s hand, but he asks Skinner in a postscript to ‘excuse me that being at this time a little out of order, I make use of another’s hand’. Perhaps ‘feeling out of order’ may have sharpened the severe tone of the letter: I have received your letter of the 9/19 instant, and shall leave to another time what might be reasonable for me to say (notwithstanding the modesty of your excuse for it) touching your leaving England without bidding me Adieu; upon an occacon wherein I had with so much designe of Friendship interested myself on your behalfe to my Lord Ambassador [Sir Leoline Jenkins] to whom I should never have thought it decent either for me or you to have let you gone without some fresh letters from me in acknowledgement of my obligation to him for his answer to my first (which I communicated to you) in your favour. This only I shall take the liberty at present to say, that had you thought fit to have seen me and imparted to me then, what necessity has driven you to doe now, I am apt to believe you would never have needed the asking that Office of Friendship from me now; which I have nevertheless heartily apply’d myselfe to the doing you, though without any present success.


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Know then that I noe sooner received your letter but in pursuance of the faithful friendship I bear you I betook myselfe to the visiting Sir J[oseph] W[illiamson] from whom I understood several interests to have been made to him, not only from my worthy friend your Father but from My Lady Peterborough [Penelope Mordaunt, Countess of Peterborough; see ODNB s.v. Mordaunt, Henry], & others on your behalfe: and had alsoe open’d to me by him many aggravating circumstances in your affaire, which you either forgot or thought fit to omit the mentioning to me; And yet I can assure you I do not see that what Sir J.W. has done or saith concerning you in the matter in question hath proceeded from anything else than a just reguard to His Majesty’s service, the Duty of his Place, and truely consistent with his utmost professions of kindness towards you, hee at this day expressing to me (with a sincerity which I cannot Doubt) not only a great esteem of your natural abilities and your studied acquirements, but a designe of contributing what his favour could doe towards the rendering the same under his Patronage advantageous to you. But in short I do not see but that notwithstanding what you say and what he has understood from Elzever himselfe to have been done by you towards his satisfaction, such apprehensions do still remain in him of the possible impressions which Mr Milton and his Writings may have wrought in you, as that I do not find him to be to be [sic] prevailed with for the absolving you presently of the crime which this inadvertency of yours has exposed you to the suspicion of; and yet I can as little say that I can find the least cause of charging him with any more unkindness towards you, than upon the like consideracons I think I should myselfe have had towards my owne Brother in the same Case; my opinion alsoe concurring with his that some time must be suffered to pass before you can reasonably look to have this unfortunate concernment of yours with Mr Milton and his Writings forgotten, or your innocence therein so cleared, as that you may recover Sir J.W.’s faire opinion concerning it; wishing only that since you are abroad you could find yourselfe in a condicon of passing so much time there, & in France, as might suffice for the making you Master of the French and Dutch Languages, which are with much more facility to be obtain’d abroad, and without which no man under any publick character can as the World goes support himselfe in any publick charge, either here, or in any Forreign Court; and this I in a special manner doe recommend to you, the rather from the consideracon of the much greater difficulty & dissatisfaction it will be of, for you to have them to learne when you should have them to use. Which from several intimacons which Sir J.W. was pleased to give me I doe in no wise doubt but you may have reasonable hopes of meeting with, so soon as some little time shall have cleared you of this unhappy jealousy & your improvement of the said time shall qualify you by these Languages for

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those employments, for which your other Learning and endowments have already so far prepared you. In which my endeavours of serving you then will I hope make some amends for that want of success which I have met with in my desires of doing it now. Which (among others) is one of the causes why I forbear at present to send any second Letter to my Lord Embassador touching this Affaire. (National Maritime Museum MS LBK8, p. 755)

This letter makes it clear that Skinner’s involvement with Milton’s papers raised in Williamson’s mind the suspicion that Skinner had committed a crime, in supplying copy for an edition of the state papers—either the Blaeu edition, with which Skinner had incriminated Pitt, or the edition promised in the mysterious publisher’s flyer which we discuss below. Skinner evidently decided not to pursue the matter with Pepys, who when asked about the matter by Jenkins replied with studied equanimity: As to that which your Lordship is pleased soe generously to revive the mention of to me touching Mr Skinner, neither have I heard more than once from him since his great misadventure; and, to say truth, I am apt to believe the young Gentleman is noe less out of countenance with himself towards me, than I am with myself towards your Lordship for the Trouble I offered at the giving you on his behalf. For which as well as on many other Scores, I am gotten into a lasting Debt to your Excellency … (National Maritime Museum MS LBK8, p. 801)

Skinner could not persuade Pepys to write again to Jenkins, but he did manage to enlist the support of Elsevier, who wrote to Williamson on 10/20 November: MONSIEUR,— Il y a environ un an que je suis convenu avec Monsieur Skinner d’imprimer les lettres de Milton et un autre manuscript en Theologie. Mais ayant receu les dits manuscripts, et y ayant trouvé des choses que je jugeois estre plus propres d’estre supprimer que divulger; j’ay pris resolution de n’imprimer n’y l’un n’y l’autre. J’avois escrit pour ce sujet à Monsieur Skinner a Cambridge; mais comm’il n’a pas esté au dit lieu depuis quelque temps, ma lettre ne luy estoit pas parvenue. Sur cela il est arrivé en cette ville, et a esté ravy d’entendre que je n’avois pas commencé d’imprimer les dits Traités, et il a repris ses manuscripts. Il m’a dit que vous avez esté informé Monsieur que je debvois imprimer tous les ouvrages de Milton ensemble. Je vous puis protester de n’y avoir jamais


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pensé, et que j’aurois horreur d’imprimer les Traités qu’il a fait pour la defense d’une si meschante et abominable cause. Outre qu’il ne seroit pas bien seant au fils de celuy qui a imprimé le premier Salmasii Defensionem Regiam, et qui auroit donné sa vie s’il eust pu sauver le feu Roy de glorieuse memoire, d’imprimer un livre si detesté de tous les honnestes geans. Je suis obligé de vous dire, Monsieur, que le Sieur Skinner me tesmoigna une tres grande joye de ce que je n’avois pas commencé l’impression des dits ouvrages, et me dit qu’il estoit d’intention, qu’en cas que le dit livre eust esté commencé, d’en achepter les feulles pour les supprimer, qu’il avoit pris une ferme resolution d’user en sorte des dits manuscripts qu’ils ne paroitroient jamais; et j’oserois vous en repondre, Monsieur, dans la forte resolution que je l’ay vu d’en user ainsy, et principalement depuis qu’il a eu l’honneur de vous avoir parlé, et que luy avez tesmoigné que ne seriez pas bien aise que les dits manuscripts parussent, et comm’ il attend de vous son advancement on ne doibt pas doubter qu’il ne tiene sa parole. Monsieur je ne puis finir la presente sans tesmoigner ma recognoissence pour les bontés qu’avez eu pour moy, lorsque j’estois à Londres, et je voudrois avoir occasion de vous pouvoir estre utile à quelque chose pour pouvoir montrer avec combien de respect je suis, Monsieur, Vostre tres humble et tres obeissant serviteur, Daniel Elsevier. D’Amsterdam, le 20me Novembre, 1676. P.S. J’oubliois de vous dire, Monsieur, que le Sieur Skinner ny moy n’avois aucune part à ce qui a paru depuis peu du dit Milton; et que je n’en avois jamais ouy parler que lorsque Monsieur Skinner me le dit icy. Il m’avoit bien mandé par cy devant qu’un certain libraire de Londres avoit eu quelques lettres de quelqu’un, qui les avoit derobé au feu Milton; mais ny luy ny moy n’avois eu aucune part à cette impression, de quoy je vous prie de vouloir estre persuadé. [SIR,— It is about a year since I agreed with Mr Skinner to print the Letters of Milton and another manuscript on Theology; but, having received the said manuscripts, and having found there things which I judged fitter to be suppressed than published, I resolved to print neither the one nor the other. I wrote to that effect to Mr Skinner at Cambridge; but, as he has not been there for some time, my letter did not reach him. Since then he has been in this town, and was delighted to hear that I have not begun to print the said treatises, and has taken back his papers. He told me that you were informed, Sir, that I was going to print all the works of Milton collectively. I can assure you that I never had such a thought,

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and that I should have a horror of printing the treatises which he made for the defence of so wicked and abominable a cause, even if it were not independently unbecoming for the son of him who first printed the Defensio Regia of Salmasius, and who would have given his life if he could have saved the late King of glorious memory, to print a book so detested by all honest people. I am bound to tell you, Sir, that Mr Skinner expressed to me very great joy over the fact that I had not begun the printing of the said works, and told me it was his intention, in case the said book had been begun, to buy up the sheets for the purpose of suppressing them, and that he had taken a firm resolution so to dispose of the said manuscripts that they should never appear; and I shall venture to be answerable to you, Sir, for the strong resolution I have seen in him so to dispose of them, and chiefly since he has had the honour to speak with you, and you have shown him that you would not be happy for the said manuscripts to appear; and, as he expects his advancement from you, one need not doubt that he will keep his word. Sir, I cannot conclude without expressing my acknowledgements for your goodness to me when I was in London; and I should desire to have occasion to be able to serve you in anything that would show with how much respect I am, Sir, Your very humble and very obedient servant, Daniel Elsevier P.S. I forgot to say, Sir, that neither Mr Skinner nor I had any part in what has appeared of the said Milton, and that I never heard tell of it till Mr Skinner told me here. He had indeed informed me before that a certain bookseller of London had received some letters from some one who had stolen them from the late Milton; but neither he nor I have had any connection with that publication, of which I pray you will be persuaded.] (SP 84/203, fols. 106–7)

This letter specifically mentions ‘un manuscript en Théologie’ as well as the letters of state, both of which Elsevier claims to have given to Skinner. Skinner had clearly persuaded Elsevier to endorse the falsehood that the papers had been returned, when in fact Elsevier had retained both manuscripts. Elsevier’s reminder that he was the son of the Elsevier who had published Salmasius’s Defensio Regia raises the question of the political allegiance of the Elsevier family. If they were indeed Orangists, then Skinner’s decision to approach this particular publishing house would seem to have been extraordinarily naive. ( There is a further possible discrepancy here in that Daniel was the son of Bonaventura, not Louis, to whom the publication is usually


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attributed; perhaps he stretches the truth in his grand comment to Williamson, though there are over a dozen early editions of the tract, mostly without the publishers’ names, and it is not inconceivable that Bonaventura was associated with one or more of them.) On 28 November Williamson again wrote to Nijmegen, this time responding to Chudleigh’s letter: I should have been very glad to have had in my eye any young youth, that I could have said had been fitt for you as a secretary. But indeed at present I have none such, I mean not exactly such as I could wish. And surely if the young man we last spoke of, I mean Mr. Skinner had French perfectly, and that he were a little aired from the ill name Mr. Milton’s friendship ought to leave upon one, there were not many more hopefull young men to be found of that rank. (Bodleian MS Rawlinson A352 p. 295; copy in SP 103/88)

Williamson had previously praised Skinner’s Latin, but this time he slights Skinner’s French, and the reminder of the tainting friendship with Milton is presumably a suggestion that Skinner is not yet employable. On 19 January 1677, Williamson wrote to Roger Meredith, Secretary to the Embassy to the United Provinces, chargé d’affaires during the protracted absences of the Ambassador, and Williamson’s principal information-gatherer on Dutch affairs: His Majestie is informed of a pernicious Booke, of that late Villain Milton’s, now about to be printed at Leyden, I am commanded to signify to you, that you immediately apply your selfe, to find out by the best means you may, if there be any such, who is the printer, and by what order he is sett on worke. There is one Skinner a young Scholar of Cambridge, that some time since did owne to have had such a thing in his intentions, but being made sensible, as he seemed to be, of the danger he ranne into, in haveing a hand in any such thing, he promised for ever to lay aside the thoughts of it, and even to give up his Copy. I know not whether this may be the same thing, and whether it came from his hand or some others. But you are to use what means possibly you can to find out, what there is of it true, to the end timely care may be taken for the preventing the thing by seizing the impression or otherwise. (SP 104/66, fol. 120)

The publisher may well be Elsevier, because, although some Elsevier books (such as the Defensio Regia) were published in Amsterdam, the

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firm was based in Leiden. But what was the pernicious book? And is it true that the king had taken a view of the matter? Meredith reacted with the urgency that Williamson required of all his subordinates. On 26 January/5 February he wrote that ‘I have also in pursuite of His Majesty’s command given to me by Your Honour concerning that book of Milton’s which is designed (as His Majesty is informed) to be printed at Leyden, begunne my endeavours to discover ye truth of it, of which I suppose I shall know to some effect by the next post’ (SP 84/204, fols. 97–8). On 30 January/9 February Meredith assured Williamson that ‘I have as yet no account of the inquiry I have begunne after Milton’s book, which I shall pursue with all diligence’ (SP 84/204, fols. 102–3). On 2/12 February he offered an excuse, blaming his agent: ‘The person whom I employ at Leyden about Milton’s book hath been out of the way so that I have not as yet any account of that inquiry’ (SP 84/204, fols. 108–9). By 16/26 February Meredith was blaming his bookseller: I cannot yet gett information of any worke of Milton’s about to be printed at Leyden; but I finde the herewith inclosed printed about three months since at Amsterdam, which by an unusuall forgetfullnesse of my bookseller came not till now to my knowledge. By what I could runne over of it this day I cannot judge whether it be the book His Majesty would have prevented, & presuming that since the time it hath been printed, it may have come directly from Amsterdam to your Honour’s hands I shall pursue my diligence to finde out whether any other be designed to be printed at Leyden. (SP 84/204, fols. 140–1)

This curious letter is replete with mysteries. Meredith has forwarded to Williamson a book by Milton printed three months previously in Amsterdam, but has been unable to find one in press in Leiden. He does not know, nor can we, whether this was the book that the king wished to suppress. The Blaeu edition of the letters of state was printed in Amsterdam, but does not admit to its provenance, which only recently has been established (Kelley, 1960). The answer may lie in what seems to be a printer’s flyer in the file that contains the Elsevier letters: Innotescat omnibus cum in Academiis, tum in Londino literatis, Bibliopolis etiam, siqui sint qui praeter solitum Latine sciunt, necnon exteris quibuscunq[ue]; Quod Literae JOANNIS MILTONI, Angli, interregni tempore scriptae, quas Bibliopola quidam Londinensis, secum habita consultatione


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quantam in rem famamque quantam imperfectissimum quid & indigestum ex operibus tanti Viri sibi pro certo cederet, nuper in lucem irrepi fecit (praeterquam quod a contemptissimo quodam & perobscuro preli quondam Curatore, qui parvam schedarum manum vel emendicaverit olim abs Authore, vel, quod verisimilius est, clam suppilaverit, perexiguo pretio fuerunt emptae) sunt misere mutilae, dimidiatae, deformes ex omni parte ruptoque ordine confusae, praefatiuncula spurca non minus quam infantissima dehonestate, caeterisq[ue]; dein a numerosioribus chartis nequiter arreptae: Quodq[ue]; vera Literarum exemplaria, locupletoria multum & auctiora, composita concinnius & digesta, typis elegantioribus excudenda sunt in Hollandia prelo commissa. Quae una cum Articulis Hispanicis, Portugallicis, Gallicis, Belgicis in ista rerum inclinatione nobiscum initis & percussis, pluribusque chartis Germanicis, Danicis, Suevicis scitissime scriptis, ne ex tam spuriis libri natalitiis, & ex tam vili praefatore laederetur Author, brevi possis, humanissime Lector, expectare. [Be it known to all the learned whether in the universities or in London, as well as to booksellers, if any there be with an unusually good command of Latin, and also to all foreigners whomsoever, That the letters of John Milton, Englishman, written at the time of the Interregnum, which a certain London bookseller, who has consulted only himself about how much something from amongst the works of so great a man, however imperfect and crude it might be, could be harvested for his profit and reputation, has lately brought creeping into the light, not to mention the fact that Milton’s Letters were bought up dirt cheap from some contemptible obscure fellow, once a press-minder, who got a small handful of pages from the author, either by begging them or more probably by secretly filching them: the pages are wretchedly maimed, halved, out of shape in all directions, and what’s more muddled out of their proper sequence, with a short preface that is foul and disgusting; and finally the pages have been criminally snatched out of the much more numerous whole collection of the papers; [Be it known, thirdly,] That the true copies of Milton’s Letters, much more trustworthy and ampler, arranged and edited more appropriately, have been sent to the press and are to be printed in more elegant types in Holland. Soon, most kind Reader, you can expect to see the Letters, along with the Spanish, Portuguese, French and Dutch treaties which were entered into with us and reached print form during that time of change [the Interregnum]; and along also with numerous German, Danish and Swedish papers, all being documents written with good understanding. This version is being brought out to prevent the Author suffering harm from such spurious birth-rites and such a worthless prefacer.] (SP 84/204, fol. 125)

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What is this document, and why is it in the State Papers Holland files? Hamilton (1859, p. 32), who first noticed the document, thought that it might be a copy of Elsevier’s prospectus which he had enclosed with his letter of 9/19 February to the elder Skinner (in the present binding it follows Elsevier’s letter). Masson (1877–94, VI, 796) assumed that Skinner had drafted it to be inserted in the London Gazette or sent to Elsevier for publication abroad. The Columbia editors thought that it was an advertisement issued by the Elseviers, and ‘regard the denunciation of the 1676 edition rather as a result of trade rivalry than anything else’ (CE, XVIII, 648). The Columbia editors could not have known that neither of the early editions was produced by Elsevier, but they are surely right to see it as a denunciation of a projected edition, but that edition could be Fricx’s or a planned Elsevier edition; if it was for Elsevier, the echoes of Skinner’s statement to Williamson suggest that Skinner may have been the author. Its presence amongst the state papers may constitute evidence that this was the document that so excited the wrath of both Williamson and the king. The flyer refers to several treaties that are no longer in the file returned to Williamson. Robert Fallon shrewdly notes that eleven of the thirteen letters missing from Skinner’s transcript but printed in Literae were written in 1652, the year in which English diplomats were negotiating treaties with Spain, Portugal, Denmark and the United Netherlands (Fallon, 1993, 225–8). The letters must have disappeared from Milton’s papers before Skinner undertook his transcription, but the treaties to which they refer seem to have been removed at a later stage. Milton was certainly involved with the Spanish treaty of November 1652 (see Fallon, 1993, 229–46), the Portuguese treaty negotiated in 1651 and 1652 (eventually ratified in May 1656) and the Dutch treaty published in July 1652 (see Miller, 1995, 196–269). Milton is not known to have worked on the commercial treaty signed with France in 1655, but he may have been involved with the military treaty signed in March 1657. Skinner presumably removed copies of these treaties from Milton’s papers and passed them to Elsevier, but either they were not returned by Elsevier or Williamson removed them before the letters of state and the theological treatise were consigned to the cupboard. Skinner, meanwhile, had moved on to Paris, where he wrote plaintively to Pepys on 28 January/7 February:


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Since my late and most unfortunate repulse at Nimmegue caus’d by the groundless and severe jealousies of Sir Jos: Williamson (for invocato Deo never had I the least thought of prejudicing either King or State, being infinitly loyall to one and mighty zealous for the other, all the concerns that ever I had for Milton or his works being risen from a foolish yet a plausible ambition to learning) being at Roterdam in expectation of returning into England, my father by his letters commanded me instantly to repaire to France, there to retire privatly and compleat my self in the French tongue …

Skinner explains that he hopes rapidly to become proficient in French, and, gushing obsequiously about his desire, on returning to England, that Pepys ‘be the first person whose hand I shall desire to kiss’, undertakes to write to Pepys in French ‘to give some testimony of my advancements’. He hopes in 6 moneths times to return to England with those advantages that few English Gentlemen here make in twelve, and withall to be more deserving of yours and Sir Jos: Williamsons favours, whom Pray Sir let me beg of you to certifye, that though ’twas his pleasure to shipwrack me in the very port of Nimmegue merely out of jealousye, I hope he will be soe compassionate as to give me another vessell when I come to London. assure him also that as for Milton or his works or papers I have done withall, and indeed never had had to doe with him, had not ambition to good literature made me covet his acquaintance. Pray tell him Sir that all his papers will be very suddenly in his hands assoon as the printer Elsevire at Amsterdam can find an opportunity of sending ‘um over, and that I am here indefatigably studying the french tongue only to render my self more capable of serving him and your good self. … (Bodleian MS Rawlinson A185, fols. 133–4)

Williamson, meanwhile, was losing his easily lost patience, and so turned to Dr Isaac Barrow (see ODNB), the Master of Trinity College, from which Skinner had absented himself. On 13 February Barrow wrote to his friend Dr George Seignior (a Fellow of Trinity) in London, enclosing a letter that was to be forwarded to Skinner. Barrow’s letter to Skinner is fierce: SIR, By order of a meeting you are injoined immediately, without delay upon the receiving this, to repair hither to the College; no further allowance to discontinue being granted to you; This you are to doe upon penalty of the Statute, which is expulsion from the College, if you disobey. We Doe also

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warn you, that if you shall publish any Writing mischievous to the Church or State, you will thence incurre a forfeiture of your interest here. I hope God will give you the wisedome and grace to take warning. So I rest, Your loving friend, Isaac Barrow Trin. Coll. Feb: 13, 1676–7 (SP 29/390, fols. 282–4)

The covering letter to Seignior apologizes ‘for the miscarriages of that wild young man’, Daniel Skinner (SP 29/390, fols. 280–1). Seignior took the letter for Skinner to Whitehall and gave it to William Bridgeman (ODNB), Williamson’s secretary, who forwarded it to William Perwich, English agent in Paris (and chargé d’affaires in the absence of the ambassador). Perwich presented Barrow’s letter to Skinner, and then reported back to Bridgeman: SIR,— I have delivered Dr. Barrow’s letter to Mr. Skinner before witness, as you desired. I found him much surprised, & yet at the same time slighting any constraining orders from the superior of his College or any benefit he expected thence, but as to Miltons workes he intended to have printed (though he saith that part which he had in MSS. are noe way to be objected against, either with regard to Royalty or Government) he hath desisted from causing them to be printed having left them in Holland; & that he intends notwithstanding the College summons to goe for Italy this summer. … (SP 78/142, fol. 15)

On 2 February Skinner’s father had written to Daniel Elsevier. His letter is lost, but Elsevier’s reply of 9/19 February survives, and it explicitly mentions the theological treatise: D’Amsterdam le 19me Febrier 1677. Monsieur L’honneur de la vostre du 2me de ce mois m’a esté bien rendue. Il est tres vray que j’ay receu par Symon Heere les deux manuscripts de Milton, à scavoir ses oeuvres en Theologie, et ses lettres ad Principes qui sont encore au mesme estat que je les ay receus, n’ayant pas trouvé a propos de les imprimer. Vous scaurez sans doubte que Monsieur vostre fils m’a fait l’honneur de me venir voir, qui fut fort satisfait quand il vit que je n’avois pas fait imprimer les dites uvres, et me pria de les envoyer par la 1re commodité à Nimwege a Monsieur le Secretaire de l’Ambassade. Mais comme il commença à geler devant que j’ay


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pu poursuivre ses ordres, et ayant depuis receu ordre de vostre dit fils de Paris, de vous les envoyer par la première commodité de navires; laquelle commission je ne manqueray pas d’effectuer, et les donneray, bien empacquetez, à Jacob Hendrix, qui sera le premier qui partira d’icy pour vostre ville. J’ay esté bien mary de ne pouvoir plutost executer ses ordres; mais la gelée, qui a duré icy plus de 3 mois, a empesché que les navires n’ont pu partir. A la demande de Monsieur vostre fils j’ay escrit une lettre a Monsieur Joseph Williamson, Secretaire d’Estat, par laquelle j’ay asseuré le dit seigneur que les dits livres estoient encore entre mes mains, que je n’avois nul dessein de les imprimer, et que Monsieur vostre fils les remettroit entre ses mains, etc. Ainsy Monsieur que vous n’avez nul sujet de vous mettr’ en peine de ce costé-la. Car, en premier lieu je suis seur [sûr] que Monsieur vostre fils n’a nulle intention de les faire imprimer; mais au contraire de les mettre entre les mains du seigneur cy dessus nommé; et que de mon costé, je ne les voudrois pas imprimer quand on me feroit present de 1,000 livres sterlings pour diverses raisons. Je vous prie de croire Monsieur, que les dits livres vous seront envoyez par Jacob Hendrincx, et vous seront addressés en son temps. Je vous offre mon service, et suis, de tout mon coeur, Monsieur, Vostre tres humble serviteur, Daniel Elsevier Amsterdam, 9/19 February 1677. [SIR, The honour of yours of the 2nd of this month has duly reached me. It is very true that I received by Symon Heere the two manuscripts of Milton, to wit his work on Theology and his Letters to Princes, which are still in the same state in which I received them, not having found it convenient to print them. You will know, doubtless, that Monsieur your son did me the honour to come to see me; he was greatly satisfied when he saw that I had not printed the said works, and begged me to send them by the first opportunity to Nimeguen to the Secretary of the Embassy. But it began to freeze before I could carry out his orders, and I have since received your son’s order from Paris to send them to you by the first shipping opportunity; which commission I will not fail to execute, and shall give them, well packed, to Jacob Hendrincx, who will be the first to leave here for your city. I have been much vexed at not being able to execute his orders sooner; but the frost, which has lasted here more than three months, has prevented the vessels from leaving. At the request of your son I wrote a letter to Sir Joseph Williamson, Secretary of State, in which I assured that gentleman that the said books were still in my hands, that I had no intention to print them, and that Monsieur your son would

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place them in his hands. Thus, Sir, you have no cause to trouble yourself on this account; for, in the first place, I am sure that your son has no intention to cause them to be printed, but on the contrary to place them in the hands of the gentleman above named, and, for my own part, I would not print them though one were to make me a present of £1,000 sterling, and this for various reasons. I pray you, Sir, to believe that the said books will be sent to you through Jacob Hendrincx, and will be forwarded to you at his leisure.] (SP 84/204, fols. 123–4)

The fragmentary Port Books of the period, some of which are deemed by the PRO to be unfit for inspection, seem not to record Hendrincx’s return, but an entry the previous year identifies his ship as the Golden Flounder (E 190/63/8, fol. 6). It is odd that Elsevier is prevented by frost from shipping the Milton manuscripts to Nijmegen (only 50 miles away by land) or London, but is able to send a letter, apparently by another hand, presumably one to which he would not entrust the manuscripts. Elsevier seems to have thought that a degree of security was appropriate in handling documents that had so irritated the English government, a government which, as earlier correspondence between Elsevier and Williamson over the importation of volumes of Grotius’s De Veritate Religionis Christianae demonstrates, could be helpful or obstructive when book imports were at issue. Elsevier was as good as his word, and on 6/16 March again wrote to Skinner’s father. The letter has a hole in the middle of the bottom third of the page, and we have leaned gratefully on Kleerkooper’s transcription and reconstruction made at the beginning of the last century, when a few more words were visible, though our text differs from his in a few details: La presente sera pour vous donner advis que la sepmaine passée je vous ay envoyé par Jacob Hendrixen (qui est le premier maitre de Navire qui soit party d’icy pour Londres aprés les gelées) les Manuscripts de Milton, a scavoir ses oevres en Theologie et ses Epistres, qui sont au mesme estat comme je les ay receu de Monsieur vostre fils. Quant Monsieur le secretaire d’Estat prendra la peine de les conferer avec les Epistres qui ont esté imprimer, il remarquera facilement la difference qu’il y a entre le manuscript et l’imprimé: car dans l’imprimé il y [a dive]rses lettres qui ne sont pas dans le [manusc]ript, et dans le manuscript [il y a] diverses qui ne sont pas dans l’impri[mé] … que l’ordre de lettres est … different. Ce que jay cru ne[cessaire?] … vous advertir afin que par … [p]uissiez prouver que Monsieur vostre fils en a bien usé et qu’il n’a aucunement contribué a cette edition.


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Si vous avez l’honneur de voir Monseign’ Williamson je vous supplie de luy offrir mes tres humbles respects et l’asseurer de ma part, que des oevres de Milton qui ont esté entre mes mains il n’en a jamais esté imprimé un Jota: mais que je les ay renvoyé, comme je les ay receus. Je vous baise les mains et suis de tout mon coeur Monsieur [Vos]tre tres humble serviteur Da[niel] Elsevier. Amsterdam 16me Mars [Sir, - The present will be to give you advice that last week I sent you by Jacob Hendrixen (who is the first skipper to leave from here for London after the frost) the Manuscripts of Milton, namely, his works on Theology and his Epistles, which are in the same state as I received them from Monsieur your son. If Monsieur the Secretary of State will take the trouble to compare them with the Epistles which have been printed, he will easily notice the difference there is between the manuscript and the printed text; for in the printed text there are various letters which are not in the manuscript and in the manuscript [there are] various that are not in the printed text … that the order of the letters is … different. Which I have thought necessary (?) … to warn you so that by … [you would be able to] prove that Monsieur your son has made a proper use of them, and that he has not at all contributed to this edition. If you have the honour of seeing Monseigneur Williamson, I beseech you to offer him my very humble respects, and to assure him on my behalf that of the works of Milton which have been in my hands, never an iota has been printed, that I have sent them back as I received them. I kiss your hands and am heartily, Sir, Your very humble servant, Daniel Elsevier] (SP 84/204, fols. 246–7)

The elder Skinner received the parcel that Elsevier had sent, and promptly took it, still in its wrapper, to Whitehall, where it was deposited in the press in which Lemon found it. Williamson no doubt felt that he had lodged another stake in the wandering spirit of that late villain Milton.

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In 1823 the parcel containing the two manuscripts was rediscovered, but the state papers were immediately forgotten, and lay unremarked until Douglas Hamilton printed sixteen of the letters in 1859. De Doctrina Christiana, however, was hailed as a new Miltonic document, the authenticity of which was accepted almost without demur. Thomas Burgess, the bishop of Salisbury, would seem to have been a lone dissenting voice from a scholarly consensus that SP 9/61 was indeed the theological work spoken of by Milton’s earliest biographers (Hunter, 1993). On 22 March 1826, shortly after the treatise was published, Lemon wrote to the translator Charles Sumner to communicate in excited tones a circumstance which I flatter myself will be gratifying to you, as it is to me. This afternoon, Mr. Lechmere, a gentleman in this office, (who is engaged in examining and arranging an immense collection of old miscellaneous papers) brought up to me a document which he had just accidentally found amongst them. It is an original letter from Daniel Elzevir to Sir Joseph Williamson, dated at Amsterdam in November 1676, in which he acquaints Sir Joseph that, about a year before, Mr. Skinner put into his hands a Collection of Letters, and a Treatise on Theology written by the deceased Milton, with directions to print them; but on examining the works, he (Elzevir) found many things in them which, in his opinion, had better be suppressed than divulged;—that he, in consequence, declined printing them, and that Mr. Skinner had lately been at Amsterdam, and expressed himself highly gratified that Elsevier had not commenced the printing of them—and then took away the manuscripts. It is not less singular than gratifying, that the discovery of this letter so completely confirms the conjectures we had previously formed respecting the Doctrina Christiana; and I think you will agree with me in opinion, that this is the only link wanting in the chain of evidence to prove the authenticity of this work, and that Milton was the undoubted author of it. (Bohn, 1878, IV, p. xxxvii)

The manuscript of De Doctrina was recovered in Whitehall, and its movements thereafter can be tracked, but not dated precisely. Sumner marked up the manuscript with pencil rather than undertaking a transcription, and so translated directly from the manuscript. He worked on the manuscript in his house in Windsor, and seems to have taken it with him to Nice, where he travelled to minister to the dying Lord Mount-Charles. He then sent the manuscript to Cambridge, where the compositor set the type directly from the manuscript.


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At one point he set the manuscript on some inky type, and left the reversed image of a few letters on the manuscript. Thereafter it returned to the Middle Treasury Gallery, and thence to the new record office on Chancery Lane; in December 1996 it was moved to what is now the National Archives at Kew. This account documents in detail the journey of the De Doctrina manuscript from Bunhill Fields (Milton’s last home) to Kew, and so shows beyond reasonable doubt that the manuscript on Milton’s desk is the same manuscript now in the National Archives.

2. Jeremie Picard While there is no doubt that Skinner’s hand writes the first 196 pages, it was only in 1923 that Hanford identified the early scribe, primarily responsible for pages 197–735, as Jeremie Picard. His conclusion was based on perceived similarities between this hand and the signature of Jeremie Picard which appears on two legal documents relating to Milton: the Maundy mortgage deed of 14 January 1658 now in the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia (MS 810/25) and the Foxcroft Excise Bond which Milton transferred to Cyriack Skinner on 5 May 1660. This latter document was lost to view after the Second World War, and emerged again in June 1995, when it was offered for sale by Christie’s in London. It failed to sell, but the document is reproduced in the sale catalogue. What Hanford had unaccountably failed to notice was that the entire endorsement of 5 May 1660 is in the hand of the early scribe of De Doctrina Christiana, Jeremie Picard. A number of other documents have been identified as showing the hand of Picard. His handwriting is identifiable in two entries in Milton’s family Bible (BL Add MS 32310), two entries in the Commonplace Book (BL Add MS 36354, pp. 188, 195), and the text of ‘Methought I saw my late espoused saint’ in the Trinity Manuscript (Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.5.5, p. 47). Others have been claimed. Masson’s identification of the hand in the Christoph Arnold album book, once accepted and then rejected by French, is plainly untenable on ocular inspection (BL Egerton 1324, fol. 85v; French, 1949–58, III, 104; V, 432; Miller, 1990b). Picard’s hand has been discerned in the paper prepared by William

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Towerson on the accounts relating to the relief of the Vaudois (SP 46/112, fol. 46), which would imply that he had been somehow connected with the English government. We cannot be completely confident that the document is in Picard’s hand: there are variations between the hands of the Towerson document and the De Doctrina manuscript, but Picard’s hand did vary enormously, and the hand of the Towerson document seems very close indeed to that on the Foxcroft excise bond. The entries in the Commonplace Book cannot be dated with confidence, though they are clearly late, but the other documents can all be dated in the period 1658 to 1660. The entries on the flyleaf of the family Bible record the death of Milton’s wife Katherine on 3 February 1658 and their infant daughter on 17 March 1658. If Milton’s ‘late espoused saint’ was Katherine, whose name was ‘pure as her mind’, then the entry in the Trinity manuscript must have been made in the same period. The Towerson document is dated 21 January 1656/7, the Maundy mortgage deed is dated 14 January 1658, and the endorsement on the Foxcroft bond is dated 5 May 1660. All of these dates are consonant with the hypothesis that Picard worked on the manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana between 1658 and 1660. There are two pieces of evidence that suggest that Picard may have become a patient at Bethlem Hospital long after he left Milton’s service. The earliest Admissions Book of Bethlem Hospital, which begins with a census in May 1683, records that a Jeremiah Piskard (not Pickard, pace William Elton) was admitted on 7 September 1700 and discharged two months later, on 4 November (Admissions Book, 1683–1701, p. 284). Evidence that this ‘Piskard’ was Milton’s Picard is contained in an account drafted in 1678 by the German traveller Adam Ebert, who recorded that he had seen ‘a secretary of the well-known Milton’ in Bethlem Hospital: Er was darinn ein Secretarius des Bekandten Miltons, so nichts als Stroh aus dem Bette darauff er lag ass; wenn er aber Frembden merckte wiess er jämmerlich mit dem Finger an die Stirne zubezeugen dass er an Vernunfft Mangel hätte; welches dem Peregrinant Wunder nahm dass ein Narr wüsste das er ein Narr wäre. er hätte einsmahls das Fenster eingeschlagen auch nicht eher ruhen gewolt biss man ihm Leim gebracht da er dann mit Papier in welchem er bisshero gelesen die Löcher zugeflicket.


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[In it was a secretary of the well-known Milton, who ate nothing but the straw of the bed on which he was lying. But when he noticed a stranger, he pointed miserably with his finger at his forehead in order to show that he lacked reason. It puzzled the traveller that a fool knew that he was a fool. Once he had smashed a window; also he had not been willing to rest until he had been brought glue so that he could patch the holes with the paper which he had been reading.] (Ebert, p. 69; see William Elton)

What evidence there is for Picard’s involvement with Milton and his circle suggests that he was employed by the republican state in its closing years and that he was associated with Milton in the late 1650s and early 1660s, after which he disappears from the records that have been discovered until his re-emergence in tragic circumstances at the end of the century. Of course, absence of evidence, in the old formula, is not evidence of absence. It would not be inconceivable, however, that Milton’s most active involvement with De Doctrina dated from the late 1650s, when Picard was known to be engaged on other affairs relating to him and probably to the political organizations with which he was associated. Indeed, at the Restoration, Milton may well have stopped working on the manuscript—perhaps because possibilities for publication had effectively evaporated, perhaps because of the need to secure his more sensitive papers in a clandestine location. Both state papers and treatise could have been seized if his study had been searched. The state papers would have been confiscated; the treatise could well have substantiated charges of heresy that would have been irresistible in court. It was about this time that his superior in the republican civil service, John Thurloe, was secreting his own papers in the false ceiling of his chambers in Lincoln’s Inn. Milton, we know, was trying to transfer and thus save government bonds; to do as much for his working manuscripts would have been a rational response to impending disaster. In the late 1660s and especially in the early 1670s, however, once his personal survival had become fairly certain, such measures could have been reversed.

3. Daniel Skinner Skinner in his letters to Pepys represents himself as being in some sense Milton’s unofficial literary executor. However, no life record

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connects him to Milton; we have only his ipse dixit. Moreover, that letter indicates a curious ambivalence about the claimed relationship. Pepys was himself a republican apostate and no doubt recognized the political message when Skinner claimed that learning rather than any political sympathy had drawn him to Milton. Besides his letters to his sister’s lover, from whom he is scrounging money, there is nothing else to connect him with Milton save the fact that he palpably did have access to at least some of Milton’s papers after his death. The evidence has been sympathetically interpreted by Parker, who regards him as indeed Milton’s last amanuensis, entrusted with a task beyond his experience and beyond the resources of his moral courage, yet he could as easily from the evidence be regarded as no more than a tomb-robber who somehow secured access to Milton’s papers. John Aubrey had noted that Milton’s widow had given ‘all his papers’ to one of his Phillips nephews, from whom, presumably, Skinner had acquired the ones that he tried to publish. The nephew, Aubrey explains, ‘lives neer the Maypole in the Strand’; the reference to the vast (134 ft) maypole that had been erected on the green beside St Mary le Strand in 1660 probably implies that the nephew was Edward Phillips, who was teaching in a school by the maypole. It remains unclear why it seemed appropriate for Phillips to hand the documents over to Daniel Skinner. Skinner’s first scribal involvement with the text may have amounted to no more than making a partial fair copy for the press and tidying up the remainder as best he could before sending off the document. Certainly it would be helpful if we were to know more about the history, and especially the early history, of Daniel Skinner. It is often asserted that he was a pupil of Milton, but the nature of his occasional slips in Latin, Greek and Hebrew renders this assumption suspect. In marked contrast to the virtually perfect Latin of the surviving portion of the Picard manuscript, Skinner’s fifteen chapters contain a light sprinkling of errors (all of which are corrected in the Columbia text). Sumner recorded 27 slips in Skinner, but only four in Picard’s much longer section. Sometimes Sumner’s corrections are added to the palimpsest: gratiae for Skinner’s gloriae (MS 28; CE, XIV, 102.22); cor autem for Skinner’s corruentum (MS 46; CE, XIV, 168.9); orare for Skinner’s errare (MS 66; CE, XIV, 236.22); coelorum for Skinner’s coecorum (MS 137; CE, XIV, 94.12). Many


35

such errors escaped Sumner’s pencil: nos for non, re for rex, iniquam for inquam, decere for docere, explorentur for explerentur and many similar instances, all of which suggest a modest command of Latin. Some repeated spelling mistakes, such as accomodans and seperatim, always corrected by Sumner, anticipate illiteracies of our own time. In Greek, Skinner confuses omicron and omega, muddles breathings and comes unstuck with the iota subscript. In Hebrew, Skinner wrote 27 words, always imitating the square forms of printed Hebrew rather than using a cursive. Three of the Hebrew words have no vowel points, and others garble vocalization in various ways: even the names of God are incorrectly vocalized (MS 13; CE, XIV, 40; MS 16; CE, XIV, 52). Leo Miller (1984) surveyed the evidence and concluded that the Skinner draft was probably ‘not begun until after Milton was dead’. Maurice Kelley had reached the same conclusion in 1941 (p. 56), based on his observation that there are no revisions in Skinner’s hand; the only changes are added phrases and minor corrections, which suggests that Skinner took the trouble to check his transcription. However, it is the case that no aspect of his conduct while the papers were in his possession suggests that he would have been selected for the task of seeing into print what the author of SP 9/61 calls ‘my best and richest possession’ (‘quibus melius et pretiosus nihil habeo’) (CE, XIV, 8–9). Skinner was about 23 years old and apparently something of a novice in dealing with Dutch presses—Elsevier, after all, held the manuscripts for many months, from an unknown date in 1675 to March 1677, without printing them. Milton knew others much better equipped for the purpose. Moreover, in the summer of 1674 Milton had had some distinct sense of his impending death, enough to have made, while bedfast, a nuncupative will in the presence of his brother. If immediate posthumous publication had been his aspiration, then he may well have been expected to take similar precautions at such strong intimations of his own mortality. Skinner’s problems with Trinity College continued to rumble. As early as 9 August 1675 Skinner had blotted his copybook with the College, and had been forced to apologize: Whereas I Daniel Skinner, Minor Fellow of the College, have to the great offence of the College, when I should have declaimed, thence taken occasion of misbehaving my selfe, in defaming a worthy Fellow of the College, Master

36


of Arts: I doe acknowledge that my fault, craving pardon of God, and of the College, and particularly of him upon whom I did reflect and I take this for a first admonition in order to expulsion. Dan Skinner (Cambridge, Trinity College Conclusion Book A, 30, second pagination)

When the time came for Skinner to supplicate for his MA and subscribe to the Three Articles, he was abroad, and others acted on his behalf. His supplicat is dated 30 January 1677 (Cambridge, University Archives, Supplicats 1676–7, No. 27), at which time Skinner was in Paris, and the undated subscription is signed on Skinner’s behalf by the Proctor (Cambridge, University Archives, Subscriptiones II, 438). Although Skinner had subscribed to the Articles in 1673–4 for his BA (Subscriptiones II, 370), the MA subscription signed on his behalf does not necessarily mean that he was prepared to be a Protestant loyal to the crown, because we do not know if Skinner had authorized the Proctor to sign on his behalf. Skinner’s Protestantism was soon to be called into question. On 29 March 1679 the Master and Seniors ordered ‘that Mr Skinner come home to the College to clear himself from suspicion of being a papist’. The usual cause of such suspicion was an unwillingness to sign the oath of supremacy, which was required for the degree of MA that was in turn expected of candidates for a major fellowship, but in Skinner’s case he had already received his MA (in 1677) and the puzzle is the delay in the election to a major fellowship. He may have been reluctant to sign the oath that was required for the fellowship, but it is not clear why he would hesitate to do so. Somehow the obstacles were overcome, and Skinner was elected to a major fellowship on 23 May 1679: Daniel Skinner juratus et admissus in Socium majorem (Admissions and Admonitions, 1560–1759, 58). Major fellows were normally elected annually from amongst the minor fellows, but for some unknown reason no major fellow had been elected since 1676. It is likely that Skinner was elected by a royal mandate organized by Williamson: such patronage is the usual explanation for fellowships conferred in the face of opposition from the Seniority; that said, the documentary evidence does not survive. Skinner did not stay in Cambridge. On 4 June 1679 he was issued with a passport, which describes him as ‘Mr Daniel Skinner


37

a protestant’ (SP 44/51, p. 252). It seems likely that he is ‘the young gentleman Mr Skinner’ who was in Barbados and Mevis (i.e. the modern-day Nevis) in 1680 and 1681: on 8 July 1680 Pepys added a postscript to a letter to his junior colleague William Howe in Barbados: ‘This young Man Mr Skinner, comes to look after some occasions of his Father in your Island In which if by your Advice you may bee in anywise aidfull to him, you will very much oblige mee’ (Bodleian MS Rawlinson A194, fol. 169v). If this Mr Skinner is Daniel, it would seem that his father was still trying to save his son from his folly. Howe reported on Skinner’s situation to Pepys on 15 June 1681, explaining that he had met Skinner on arrival and taken him to Edwin Stede (or Steed), Agent of the Royal Africa Company and Skinner’s prospective employer. Stede, however, was very unwilling to Concerne himself in it, or to Countenance Young Mr Skinner in any of his ffathers propositions; Upon which I told Mr Stede that If hee had noe Imployment for him that I would take care of him; And in Order to it I placed him with a ffreind of mine an Eminent practioner of the Law Liveing in the bridge towne upon Likeing; and that if hee did not like his residence there, that hee might bee with mee in the Country.

Skinner’s legal career did not last much longer than his abortive venture into slaving: a week later Howe returned to Bridgetown and discovered that Skinner was gon to Mevis in a Man of Warr that was bound from hence thither, and that Mr. Stede had taken Care with the Captain for his Passage. … I here hee is very well at Mevis and If I Can doe him any Service either here, or where hee is I shall for your sake doe it. (Bodleian MS Rawlinson A183, fols. 201–8)

Young Mr Skinner’s Christian name is never mentioned in this exchange of letters, but the description certainly fits Daniel. Howe had taken a year to reply to Pepys’s letter, and in the meantime Skinner had moved on from Mevis and returned to Trinity College, where his Protestantism was still in doubt. In an entry dated 28 March 1681 the Conclusion Book records That Daniell Skinner fellow of the College having received Communion at St Michael’s church yesterday, did in the presence of the Master and Seniors

38


take the oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy being required thereto by two Justices of the peace and Quorum (Cambridge, Trinity College Conclusion Book B, 155)

The phrase ‘and Quorum’ is part of the official title of justices, and does not refer to the Fellowship. The following year (1682) Skinner appears in Paris (claiming long residence in France as well as fluency in French), possibly working as a spy for a fellow Westmonasterian, the Jacobite Viscount Preston (ODNB s.v. Graham, Richard; Kelley, 1940a); the evidence of residence is a pair of letters (in elementary French) in the Preston papers dated 4 February and 19 November 1682 (BL Add MS 63766, fols. 10–11 and 95–6), and the evidence for spying is the seal on the second letter, which appears on other letters in the Preston papers from a spy in Lord Preston’s service. Thereafter Skinner disappears from the historical record.

3 The Making of the Manuscript SP 9/61 currently consists of four substantial manuscript volumes. The fourth contains miscellaneous material germane to the history of the document, including an account of its discovery, and reproductions of several passages. The work we now know as De Doctrina Christiana is divided among the first three volumes. Each leaf has been attached to a substantial stub and the binding has been effected by stitching through these stubs by conservators of the Public Record Office. Pages have been numbered consecutively in the hand of Daniel Skinner, and these page numbers are used throughout this account. In error, Skinner numbered two sequences 626–635; following the practice of Maurice Kelley, the second sequence is referred to as ‘626b–635b’. Page 308 is a fair copy of an extant cancelled page which Kelley calls ‘308a’, again a notation we follow.

1. Pages 1–182 These pages in the hand of Daniel Skinner include the Epistle and Book One, chapters 1 to 13. The leaves are probably from sheets of ‘demy’ measuring 48.2 cm by 38.2 cm, each folded in half and then cut along its longer dimension, and then folded in half again to produce dimensions of 19.1 cm by 24.1 cm. There is very little variation in page size. The paper is of good quality. In early modern paper-manufacture, a finishing agent, or ‘size’, was applied at a late stage to seal the paper to receive ink either from a pen or from a block of type. The paper of this section has been finished with a size appropriate for manuscript purposes, and there is little bleeding through and no evidence of excessive absorbency to ink, though the

40

The Making of the Manuscript

acidity of the ink when heavily applied has sometimes dissolved the paper. The paper is from a single source, and probably from moulds that closely resembled each other. Each sheet carried a watermark made up of a fleur-de-lis and a Maltese cross, with a counter-mark of the letters IHS (a monogram indicative of manufacture in a Catholic country) and a descending line that terminates in the letters WB. As the paper has been cut and folded, each leaf bears either a fleurde-lis (21 examples), a cross (22 examples), ‘WB’ (23 examples), or ‘IHS’ (24 examples). Of the 91 leaves in this section, 82 could have been uncut folios, leaving 9 leaves that are single sheets. We know this because of the sequence of watermarks, which discloses the maximum number of times the fleur-de-lis and cross and ‘IHS’ and ‘WB’ occur contiguously. Skinner evidently liked to work on folios, taking a sheet of paper, cutting it in half and making a little booklet of two leaves, four pages. Sometimes, however, he cut and used single leaves, formed by cutting those booklets a second time along the folio fold, perhaps because he needed a single leaf for correspondence. Chapters sometimes begin on the second leaf of what may have been a folio. See chapter 1 (Skinner pagination, p. 7), chapter 6 (p. ‘99), and chapter 7 (p. 111). Though the last page of the Epistle (p. 5) is followed by a blank verso (p. 6), which allows chapter 1 to begin on a recto page (p. 7), Skinner starts chapters 5 and 8 on verso pages (pp. 48, 126). Straightforwardly, Skinner seems to have started with a uniform stack of single-source paper, and to have transcribed into his own fair copy the opening section of the Picard manuscript, paying no particular attention to the preservation of the pagination and quiring of that source. There is some limited evidence that, as Skinner has numbered this section through, he numbered each page as he began it (rather than adding the numbering afterwards): he misses the occasional page (p. 168—numbering supplied in pencil, probably by Sumner); more significantly, he would seem to have first begun what is now p. 56 as p. 49, putting the number at the top of the page, setting it aside, and then, after writing pp. 49–52, beginning p. 53 on the folio on which he started p. 49, but with the folio turned upside-down. This is also quite strong evidence that he usually worked on folios of two


41

leaves. Leaves for pp. 49/50 and 51/52 bear contiguous halves of the watermark; leaves for pp. 53/54 and pp. 55/56 bear contiguous halves of the counter-mark.

2. Pages 183–96, 308 and 308a The document in its present form rather disguises the quiring we have established for pages 1–182, in that each leaf has been mounted separately on a thick paper stub, and these in turn have been stitched into a stout cloth cover, labelled ‘Part One’. A similar procedure has been adopted for pages 183–‘461c’ (Kelley’s notation), which make up ‘Part Two’, and pages 462–735, Book Two of the treatise, which make up ‘Part Three’. The pages which make up Part One do not include all of Skinner’s transcription, but they do include all the leaves measuring 24.1 cm by 19.1 cm. Presumably that was a factor in determining how the document was to be divided for binding. Part Two ends with the end of Book One, and Part Three contains all of Book Two. Skinner transcribed only one chapter more, chapter 14, which starts the ‘Part Two’ section of the document. As he did so, significantly, he changed paper, using leaves and folios cut not from demy sheets, but from the size of paper known as ‘pot’. This produced pages of approximately 20 cm by 15 cm, which falls within the range of dimensions of the pages in Jeremie Picard’s hand. That he did so facilitates the binding of chapter 14 with the rest of Part Two. In our earlier publication on De Doctrina Christiana we represented Skinner as starting the transcription to produce a complete fair copy ready for the press but abandoning the process when he found it to be rather too much like hard work (Campbell et al., 1997, 91); we now regard this argument as untenable. If he had intended, as he started chapter 14, to keep on going, there would have been no need to change paper. Indeed, the seven leaves that make up chapter 14 seem of inferior stock from the paper which he had used up to this point. They bear only one watermark (a small crown on pp. 195/196), and the paper seems finished with a size that has allowed the ink to be absorbed excessively into it. Though of lighter colour than the paper of the Picard section, it is dingier than the paper Skinner used for pages 1–182. We may conjecture that, at least by the time he

42


Figure 3.1. De Doctrina Christiana, pp. 308a and 308

concluded Part One, he had concluded that most of the rest of the document would pass without transcription, and therefore that he was planning to stop copying before Part Two was complete. This in turn supports a further conjecture. We have only one instance where both Skinner’s new transcription and Picard’s original


43

Figure 3.1. (continued)

are extant, page 308 and the page Kelley calls ‘308a’, though it is numbered in pencil ‘307A’ on the manuscript (Figure 3.1). Skinner’s motivation in transcribing the page plainly originates in the densely amended characteristics of Picard’s page. It seems probable that the opening chapter of Part Two may have presented confusingly

44


foul papers inappropriate for submission to any publisher, let alone one of Elsevier’s standing. We may probably dismiss the reductive alternative—that Skinner had run out of the good paper and was scratching around; historically, fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, have not manifested that order of indigence. Moreover, the life records established in our earlier account suggest a young man obsessed with making a good impression, however speciously. Skinner’s fair copy of page 308 shows in its top left corner two numbers, both in Skinner’s hand, ‘308’ and a cancelled ‘4’. Skinner evidently reproduced Picard’s original numbers, indicating that, when he rewrote the page, he was working on it in its fascicule form (below), and that he rewrote the page at some time before he numbered through the whole manuscript, which he had done as he went along in the opening section in his own fair copy. If these conjectures are sound, they lend some weight to the view that others have advanced, that Skinner transcribed the pages that he did because they had more alterations requiring incorporation than in the general run of the Picard pages which he did not transcribe. The manuscript of Book One, when it came to him, may well have resembled the welter of unassimilated revisions that we find on p. ‘308a’.

3. Pages 197–308a, 309–548, 553–70, 575–735 The pages which Skinner subsequently numbered 197 to 735, the last page, are almost entirely in the hand of Jeremy Picard. They contain, besides frequent deletions, additional material, in the form of correction and additions, added both interlineally and in the wide left-hand margins, where they usually run parallel to the left-hand edge of the page. Skinner’s role in the process of revising the Picard section was to tidy up revisions in other hands in order to make the manuscript more serviceable to the press. To this end, he pasted along six margins paper strips which seem to contain a fair copy of corrections inserted marginally by Picard (pages 206, 247, 350, 353, 362, 472). As noted, he recopied one page completely (his page 308), and pages 571–4, which seem to have been part of an unwatermarked but conspicuously smaller-than-usual folio, are also in his hand. Pages 549 to 552, in


45

a hand attributed by Kelley to ‘Amanuensis A’, are also on smaller, unwatermarked paper and appear to have been, before conservation work, the two leaves of a folio. The remaining pages, which constitute 276 leaves (281 minus three leaves from Skinner and two leaves apparently by Amanuensis A) in Picard’s hand, show considerable variation. They contain paper manifesting a number of watermarks in a range of sizes. The number of lines of text per page varies considerably. Moreover, there is strong evidence from the quiring and from other indicators of an unusual and highly disciplined mode of working on the part of the amanuensis and, we may confidently postulate, on the part of the author.

4. Working in fascicules Within the Picard section each chapter evidently was written as a separate fascicule. The most straightforward evidence is in Picard’s original numbering of the pages. In the top left-hand corner of nearly every page in this section there is a page number which relates to its place in the chapter. Picard numbers through each chapter, beginning the first page with ‘1’. Skinner usually simply cancelled this number and wrote in his own pagination, through-numbered from the start of the manuscript, though sometimes, if Picard’s page number contained a figure that occurred in Skinner’s sequence, he preferred to incorporate it. Picard’s system of pagination would have been singularly problematic if the whole manuscript were gathered in a single working document, since, as one looked at a ‘page 4’ one could not straightaway tell exactly which chapter it was in, nor would it be possible to find a chapter within the series by reference to its page number. The system would only be practicable if the author could specify the chapter, which could then be located as a physically separate part of the working manuscript. There are three further indicators. There are distinct differences in coloration between the first and subsequent recto pages of chapters. The ink on the first page sometimes seems a different colour, which may be attributable to differences in exposure to daylight. Since the manuscript while in Skinner’s possession and in the hands of Elsevier was consolidated into one document, though perhaps subdivided,

46


and since it did not see the light of day incarcerated in Williamson’s ‘press’, the likeliest occasion for such differential exposure would have been while the author was working on it. Again, the first and last pages of chapters are sometimes dingier, as if stained with the sweat and dirt of human hands. Secondly, as we noted above, that Skinner initially regarded the manuscript as a series of fascicules is clear from the one case where we have both his cancellans (p. 308 in Skinner’s pagination) and Picard’s cancellandum (numbered p. 308a by Kelley). Skinner received and worked on the manuscript in units determined by the structure of chapters in which Picard and Milton had organized the project, only through-numbering at a later stage. The strongest evidence comes from the quiring. Every chapter starts on a recto page, which is on the first leaf of what was probably still, as Picard worked on it, a folio. The evidence is incontrovertible in those places where that first folio carries a watermark. On nineteen occasions, the first and second leaves of a chapter carry watermarks that suggest the leaves were part of a single folio (Book One, chapters 16, 17, 20, 22, 23, 24, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33; Book Two, chapters 2, 3, 5, 9, 11, 17). Whenever a chapter begins with a leaf without a watermark, the following leaf is always without one too, except for the opening leaf of Book One, chapter 26, which is anomalous in several other respects. Finally, there is the evidence provided by those leaves which are single sheets, rather than parts of folios. We have identified nine of these. Two are in Book One, chapter 26; one of these is Skinner’s cancellans. The remaining seven are all the final leaf of chapters where evidently Picard has needed more paper, but not a whole folio of it (Book One, chapters 27 and 32; Book Two, chapters 1, 4, 11, 14 and 15). If Picard had not been intent on preserving the structural distinctions between chapters, he could—as Skinner did in his section—simply have begun the following chapters on the second leaves of the folio. Of course, Skinner for his part was starting at the beginning and copying straight through; Picard’s way of working means that, at the outset, chapters could be produced in an order that is not sequential and that, in the process of subsequent revision, chapters could be worked and reworked without disrupting the pagination of the adjacent parts of the text.


47

Recognizing that Picard worked in fascicules answers perhaps the most challenging commonsense objection to Milton’s authorship: how could a blind man write a book with 8,000 citations? The answer is: by working in a disciplined and orderly fashion that mitigated his disability. Milton could have worked and reworked his thesis, chapter by chapter; selecting on Milton’s direction a fascicule from his shelves, any helper capable of reading Latin could have read to him, over and again, the fairly short chapters, which could be held in memory long enough to allow revision, addition and reorganization. Moreover, as Milton contemplated the biblical text, either in silent recollection or read by others, and as he heard the texts of Wolleb and Ames and others, he could have directed any moderately educated helper to the chapter where, thus prompted, he may have wished to make an adjustment. There is some evidence that he adopted an analogous way of working in the composition of Paradise Lost (below).

5. Picard’s paper: watermarks and dimensions Paper was generally supplied in packets of 240 or 250 sheets; from each of those Picard could have written 2,000 pages, enough to transcribe the whole manuscript two and a half times over, had the way of working been as straightforward as that adopted by Skinner. However, the variety of different paper stock used in the manuscript points towards a more complex picture. The 282 leaves that make up the Picard section contain five of which Picard was not the primary scribe (three attributed to Skinner, two to Amanuensis A). Picard’s way of working was to cut down sheets of ‘pot’ size paper (originally about 39.6 cm by 30 cm, but see the next section for a discussion of variations) into two pieces of about 19.8 cm by 30 cm, folded in turn to produce folios with pages measuring 19.8 cm by 15 cm. Countermarks do not seem to occur on the paper stocks he drew on, and so only half the folios would be expected to carry watermarks. In fact watermarks are found on less than half of the leaves (131 out of 277 original Picard leaves); possibly he also used a few sheets of paper with no watermarks—possibly we have missed some watermarks in the stubs on which the pages are now mounted or else we have not discerned them in the thick and often densely written paper.

48

The Making of the Manuscript Picard has used paper with the following watermarks:

• • • • •

•

• • •

a wheel (W) a coat of arms, ending with crossed sticks with circles on the end; an asymmetrical crest, and a pointed scutcheon (A) a coat of arms, ending with crossed sticks with circles on the end; an asymmetrical crest, and a pointed double scutcheon (B) a coat of arms, ending with crossed sticks with circles on the end; a symmetrical crest, and a pointed double scutcheon (C) a coat of arms, ending with crossed sticks with circles on the end; a more elaborate symmetrical crest, and a pointed double scutcheon (D) a coat of arms, ending with crossed sticks with circles on the end; a more elaborate symmetrical crest, the top of which contains a heart shape and a pointed double scutcheon (E) very similar to E, but the top of the crest is distorted out of true symmetry (E2) a fleur-de-lis with a small crown (FdLC) an indistinct coat of arms (I).

E and E2 may be the same watermark, distinguished by a degradation in the wire frame used in manufacture; they could alternatively be from matched emblems on a double frame (Gaskell, 1972, 65). Table 3.1 analyses the incidence of watermarks chapter by chapter. It is immediately evident that the pattern is much simpler in the chapters from Book One, chapter 28 to the end. With very few exceptions, Picard has used sheets from a source distinguished by watermark E. The exceptions are: • • •

in Book One, chapters 29 and 30, which have leaves bearing the very similar mark E2 in Book One, chapter 32, where the final leaf, a single sheet, bears watermark I in Book Two, chapter 6, where an unusually small folio marked with the crown and fleur-de-lis and another, equally small folio, quite probably from the same sheet, make up the eighth page of the chapter


49

Table 3.1. The incidence of watermarks, chapter by chapter, in the Picard section

Book 1 Ch. 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 Book 2 Ch. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 1 2

W

A

∗ ∗

∗

B

C

∗

∗ ∗

D

E

E2

FdLC

none1

I

?2

∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗

∗

∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗

∗

∗

∗ ∗

∗ ∗ ∗

∗

∗

∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗

All the leaves in these chapters are without watermarks. At least one leaf in this chapter contains a watermark but it is indistinguishable.

∗

∗

50 •

The Making of the Manuscript in Book Two, chapter 11, where the final leaf, a single sheet, carries an uncertain watermark, perhaps B, perhaps E.

Interestingly, Picard seems to have rather improvised when he needed only a single sheet, as if reluctant to spoil a fresh folio. Taken with an account especially of line density and paper size, this information yields significant insights into exactly how Picard worked (see below). Book One, chapters 15 to 27 often have mixed paper stock within them. The obvious hypothesis is that some folios have been recopied and substituted during Picard’s period of involvement with the project. But we need to look at the other variables. Kelley notes that ‘the leaves comprising pages 1–182 measure approximately 71/2 by 91/2 inches; the remainder approximately 57/8 by 73/4’ (Kelley, in Yale, VI, 11). In the case of the Picard section, however, the diversity is somewhat greater than can be accommodated by the notion of approximation. As was formerly a common practice of the Public Record Office, the conservators responsible for the present binding of the manuscript favoured a system in which pages are not precisely aligned but staggered. When the manuscript is bound, the discrepancies in page size are difficult to discern; unlike Kelley, we also had access to it cut from its binding, in which state the differences are plainly apparent. The height of the pages varies from 18 cm for the leaf pages 358/359 (among others) to 21 cm for the whole of Book One, chapter 31 (again, among others). Sometimes a whole chapter will be conspicuously short (for example, Book Two, chapter 6: 18 cm). But on other occasions there will be variation within chapters. Book Two, chapter 4 has leaves, in sequence, of 19.3 cm, 19.3 cm, 20.5 cm, 20.5 cm, 19 cm and 19 cm. Differences in page size helpfully point to substitution of pages where there are no watermarks or too few to indicate mixed paper stock.

6. The hands of Picard and others Many pages of the Picard section contain material that has been added to the fair copy, sometimes interlineally, sometimes in marginal addenda, which are linked to the fair copy by a series of flag characters: an asterisk or the like alongside the note, tying it to a corresponding


51

asterisk in the body of the text. Much of the additional material is in Picard’s hand. But there are other additions in the hands of perhaps casual amanuenses, who have not been identified. Kelley, whose account (Yale, VI, ch. 5 and Appendix) remains invaluable for the study of this aspect of the manuscript, identifies as A, B, M, N, C, O and R amanuenses each responsible for at least two entries, and as many as eleven other hands responsible for just one addition or correction each. We used the digitized version of the manuscript to juxtapose some of the larger additions of the major amanuenses, to check that they are indeed as numerous as Kelley affirms; in our view, he is correct in distinguishing these hands, a remarkable accomplishment. None of these amanuenses has been identified. Once he demonstrated the complexity of hands, Kelley boldly postulated a history of the manuscript. Where there are two marginal additions, it is reasonable to assume that the one nearest the body of the text was written first. Certainly, no matter whose the hand, a single marginal addition nearly always is written tight against the body of the text. Mainly using the sequences of marginal additions, Kelley concludes that A and M worked on the treatise earlier than B and N, who in turn preceded C and O. He surmises that Picard finished his work and that the others then in turn carried forward the process of revision. There are three objections to this hypothesis. First, the evidence base is slight. There are few examples of multiple marginal additions in a plurality of hands. Second, what we know from the early lives suggests that Milton lived and worked within a supportive network of friends, pupils and relations, who helped him by reading and note-taking (see below, ‘The early lives and De Doctrina Christiana’). A and C, M and O may well have known and served Milton as occasional amanuenses over a protracted period; the order of their occurrence within the manuscript may be merely fortuitous. Finally, and most crucially for understanding the making of the manuscript, Kelley underestimates the iterative involvement of Picard in the production of the manuscript. Picard was a professional scribe (above, Chapter 2); the other hands are probably those of gentlemen amateurs and perhaps on occasion we see the poorly formed hand of a younger assistant. As a professional scribe, Picard had a versatility and high competence unmatched by the other scribes of the manuscript, including Skinner,

52


Figure 3.2. De Doctrina Christiana, p. 205


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Figure 3.3. De Doctrina Christiana, p. 205 (detail)

and scribal complexities occur between sections of the work in his own hand. Early modern scribes could produce manuscripts which in graphic terms were more sophisticated and indeed attractive than most contemporary printed books (see Beal, 1998, passim). Like other professionals of his day, he had at least three ‘fonts’, corresponding to roman, italic and bold. Consider the example of page 205 (Figures 3.2 and 3.3). The larger letters are used for emphasis. The proof texts appear in a smaller, more italic hand. Some of the capitals are carefully and elaborately embellished, in a way that must have offered no utility for the blind man who presumably paid Picard for his work, though it may have imparted an impression of finish, of completeness. However, this is not a manuscript prepared for submission to the press. Indeed, when Skinner transcribed Picard, distinctions of size, corresponding to bold (large), roman (middling) and italic (small), are persistently eroded (see, for example, Figure 3.4, which reproduces page 111). Crucially, Picard’s most ambitious scribal style occurs in those sections which are most heavily supplemented, as in page 308a (Figure 3.1), which, beneath the welter of accretions, shows a full range of Picard’s scribal styles.

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Figure 3.4. De Doctrina Christiana, p. 111


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Picard did not get round to recopying 308a; that fell to Skinner as he tidied the manuscript up for the press. Typically, however, when margins and interlineal space became full of additions, Picard produced a new copy. Since he and Milton were working in fascicules and since sometimes individual pages or leaves had become overfraught within fascicules which were generally only lightly amended, Picard extracted individual leaves and replaced them. Hence, the presence of leaves bearing different watermarks and leaves of different sizes within otherwise regular fascicules. But to replace a leaf he needed to ensure that it began and ended where the cancelland did. If additional material is to be incorporated then necessarily the number of lines per page had to increase, which is exactly what we find. Thus, Picard’s work on the manuscript is, in effect, stratified. The base level is an attractive, scribally accomplished fair copy of an earlier manuscript, the condition of which we can only guess at. The middle stratum is piecemeal substitution for leaves that have been filled with additional material. The upper stratum approximates to a new Picard fair copy of a different kind, more appropriate for eventual submission to the press. Whole chapters, particularly towards the end of Book Two, belong to this stratum. The general appearance of each page is very different from, for example, page 308a. Figure 3.5 reproduces two such pages, one from the beginning of a fascicule, the other one of its inner pages, from Book Two, chapter 9, ‘Of the First Kind of Special Virtues Connected with Man’s Duty Towards Himself’. As in Skinner’s pages, there is very little elaboration. No capitals, except for the curiously revised title, are embellished, and even there only in restrained fashion. There is no large script, and the representation of proof texts and exposition is as lightly differentiated as in the work of Skinner’s hand. We have good evidence that the whole chapter was recopied at one time, since there is no attempt to make its conclusion coterminus with a leaf. It finishes halfway down a recto page. Its verso, however, is blank and unnumbered: even where whole chapters have been recopied, the physical division in chapter-length fascicules has not been compromised. So may we conclude that some chapters, such as this one, are indeed finished: recopied in an appropriately plain hand, all addenda incorporated unambiguously, ready for the press? Picard has used, it seems, a single paper stock: the leaves either have no watermark or else

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Figure 3.5. De Doctrina Christiana, pp. 597 and 620


Figure 3.5. (Continued)

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the watermark we have called ‘arms type E’, and there are continuities of chainmarks between watermarked and unwatermarked leaves, indicating that they have come from the same sheets of paper. Picard has cut the leaves quite neatly and there is little variation in size. Yet even in this chapter there are hands other than Picard’s adding the odd reference, inserting an occasional phrase. More decisive still is the evidence of the broad margin. Throughout the Picard section—and in clear contrast with Skinner’s fair copy—each page carries a broad left margin. Picard, who also worked as a government scribe, in this follows a convention of the early modern civil service, which at the drafting stage allowed space for comments, corrections and additions. It remains a convention of the British civil service to this day. Its utility in the case of Milton’s treatise is obvious; primarily it is the site for major additions to the text. Its retention in upper stratum chapters suggests that, for Milton, perhaps the last word on each topic was still to be written. Consideration of an almost adjacent chapter, Book Two, chapter 7, ‘Of the Time for Divine Worship, with a Consideration of the Sabbath, the Lord’s Day, and Religious Festivals’, is instructive. Its opening and closing pages seem to be a fair copy in the unembellished scribal style of chapter 9, and closely resemble that chapter in terms of the size of the leaves and the paper stock. Yet in between we find much smaller leaves, covering pages 575–8. (Unhelpfully, they have no watermarks.) Despite being two centimetres shorter, they carry more lines per page than the opening and closing leaves—indicating that these are substitute pages into which additional material has been incorporated. More remarkably still, pages 571–4 are in Skinner’s hand. As in the case of page 308a, he presumably found pages so overfraught with additional material that they required recopying to make them serviceable for the printer. Skinner’s pages are singularly densely written as he has striven to incorporate all the newer material while closing the last of these pages where its corresponding and cancelled Picard page, no longer extant, must have finished. All the evidence points to Picard’s protracted involvement with Milton’s working manuscript. He it was who provided the original, scribally embellished fair copy, which was the basis for further revisions, and he continued to work for Milton, rewriting individual leaves to incorporate the material which was added, and for some


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sections producing a scribally simpler fair copy, of a kind which would have been appropriate for the press, but on which Milton (and Picard) evidently continued to work.

7. The early lives and De Doctrina Christiana Five early lives of Milton are extant, written by younger contemporaries in the last two decades of the seventeenth century: 1. John Aubrey, ‘Minutes of the Life of Mr John Milton’ (manuscript; ?c.1681) 2. Cyriack Skinner (attrib.), ‘The Life of Mr. John Milton’ (manuscript; n.d., but on internal evidence dated betweeen 1676 and 1691 (Parker, 1996, I, xiii); sometimes termed ‘the anonymous biography’; formerly attributed to John Phillips) 3. Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses … to which is added The Fasti or Annals of the said University (London, 1691) 4. Edward Phillips (ed.), Letters of State, Written by Mr. John Milton … To which is added, An Account of his Life (London, 1694) 5. John Toland (ed.), A Complete Collection of the Historical, Political and Miscellaneous Works of John Milton … To which is prefix’d the life of the author (Amsterdam, 1698). To these five lives, which were edited by Helen Darbishire (1932), we may usefully add the autobiographical History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood. All reflect a fascination with the coping strategies developed by Milton in his blindness, and, although they often contain inaccuracies and sometimes are contradictory, together they offer a rich account of the milieu in which De Doctrina Christiana and Paradise Lost were produced. John Aubrey’s notes remark upon Milton’s ‘very good memory’, aided by ‘his excellent method of thinking and disposing’ (Darbishire, 4). To a degree that seemed distinctive, the blind Milton had developed his natural faculties and his ways of working to compensate for his disability. ‘Method’ had acquired already its modern meaning of ‘orderliness’, though it retained a technical resonance as a ‘branch of Logic or Rhetoric which teaches how to arrange thoughts and topics for investigation, exposition, or literary composition’ (OED,

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s.v. ‘Method’, sigs. 4 and 7). Both significations are pertinent to the working practices we have identified in the manuscript. Aubrey’s notes suggest a household in which Milton had regular, hired support, together with access to a wide range of potential helpers. At about 4.30 a.m. ‘his man’, presumably an educated servant paid to act as secretary and amanuensis, came to him to read the Hebrew Bible, after which ‘he contemplated’. Work began in earnest at 7.00 a.m.: ‘his man came to him again & then read to him and wrote till dinner [i.e. midday]: the writing was as much as the reading’ (Darbishire, 6). Aubrey’s account hints at a much-frequented household, in which educated men strove to seek and enjoy Milton’s company: ‘He was visited much by learned: more then he did desire’ (Darbishire, 6). Many could have been trusted to take down the odd note and insert an amendment to a working manuscript. Aubrey lists in his ‘Catalog[u]s Librorum’ ‘13. Idea Theologiae in MS in ye hands of Mr Skinner a merchant’s sonne in Marke Lane’ (Darbishire, 9). Anthony Wood misidentified this person as ‘Cyr[iack] Skinner’ (Darbishire, 47). However, the merchant of Mark Lane was father, not to Cyriack, but to Daniel Skinner and to Mary, mistress of Samuel Pepys (ODNB, s.v. Pepys, Samuel). As we shall see, by 1677, some four years before Aubrey handed his notes to Wood (Darbishire, xii), the manuscript had passed finally from Daniel Skinner’s possession. Aubrey had access, too, to the manuscript account now usually attributed to Cyriack Skinner. Cyriack depicts Milton’s heroic transcendence of his disability: ‘Nor did his Darkness discourage or disable him from prosecuting, with the help of Amanuenses, the former design of his calmer Studies’ (Darbishire, 28). His recollection, however, is in detail evidently erroneous: ‘It was now that hee began that laborious work of amassing out of all the Classic Authors, both in Prose and Verse, a Latin Thesaurus to the emendation of that done by Stephanus; Also the composing Paradise Lost And the framing a Body of Divinity out of the Bible: All which, notwithstanding the several Calamities befalling him in his fortunes, hee finish’d after the Restoration’ (Darbishire, 29). The Thesaurus was never finished. His nephew, Edward Phillips, offers a partial correction: ‘the papers after his death were so discomposed and deficient, that it could not be made fit for the Press;


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However, what there was of it, was made use of for another Dictionary’ (Darbishire, 72). Since Phillips may well have been the person appropriating Milton’s work in the process of compiling his own Latin dictionary and primer, he writes with some authority. The volumes were ‘apparently published’ in 1684 under the titles Enchiridion linguae Latinae, or, A Compendious Latin Dictionary and Speculum linguae Latinae, or, A Succinct and New Method. It would seem that neither is extant (ODNB, s.v. ‘Phillips, Edward’) If Skinner erred about one project, he may as well have been similarly ignorant or forgetful about the fate of another. The early lives cannot be invoked as evidence for or against the contention that Milton’s theological treatise was a completed work. In the early lives, what we know as De Doctrina Christiana was termed ‘a Body of Divinity’ (Skinner), ‘a Tractate’ and a ‘System of Divinity’ (Phillips), and an ‘Idea Theologiae’ (Wood and Aubrey), which suggests that Milton and his circle variously referred to it in these ways. (We see nothing contradictory among these terms, which are roughly synonymous.) In turn this lends weight to the suggestion that the Augustinian title of the treatise was attributed posthumously (Campbell, 1997, 161). Cyriack Skinner further suggests how deeply Milton was committed to the formal study of theology. No sabbatarian, he nevertheless confined his Sunday labours to Bible study and engagement with the commentary tradition (Darbishire, 33). Skinner also widens the range of potential scribal assistants available to him: ‘The Youths that hee instructed from time to time servd him often as Amanuenses, & some elderly persons were glad for the benefit of his learned Conversation, to perform that Office’ (Darbishire, 33). Edward Phillips, too, depicts Milton as a celebrity courted by many eager to render service: ‘though he had daily about him one or other to Read to him, some persons of Man’s Estate, who of their own accord greedily catch’d at the opportunity of being his Readers, that they might as well reap the benefit of what they Read to him, as oblige him by the benefit of their reading; others of younger years sent by their Parents to the same end’ (Darbishire, 77). Readers, of course, may readily become writers. Phillips’s is the fullest account of how Paradise Lost was put together, about which, as a principal aide, he again writes with authority: ‘for some years, as I went from time to time, to Visit him,

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in a Parcel of Ten, Twenty, or Thirty Verses at a Time, which being Written by whatever hand came next, might possibly want Correction as to the Orthography and Pointing’ (Darbishire, 73). In the case of Paradise Lost, Milton used the services of any of a number of informal scribes who happened to be available at the time he wished to dictate. Thereafter, Phillips, who understood properly his intentions and his preferences in terms of accidentals, set the working manuscript into order. Such a way of working is consonant with the emendations by multiple hands, which we find in the manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana, and with the role of Picard in tidying up the manuscript from time to time. Thomas Ellwood (ODNB), an eminent Quaker and editor of George Fox’s Journal, in old age recalled the experience of trading assistance for exposure to the generously shared learning of the blind Milton, as in the early 1660s he sat for consecutive afternoons over some time in the poet’s dining room. Ellwood provides the only anecdotal evidence that at least Paradise Lost enjoyed some limited manuscript circulation among his admirers (LR, IV, 367–9, 417). John Toland (born 1670) obviously had experienced no direct familiarity with Milton. However, we know from him that Milton’s notoriety ensured that even Paradise Lost was subject to particularly close scrutiny by its licenser, ‘who, among other frivolous Exceptions, would needs suppress the whole Poem for imaginary Treason’ (Darbishire, 180), a view he had based on a quite nuanced reading of lines 544–9 of Book I. Of course, those close to Milton had a good sense of quite how destructive a wide disclosure of some of his works would have proved. Cyriack Skinner plainly thought the manuscript of the theological treatise ‘never was printed’ because of its heterodoxy (Darbishire, 31). If the censor had hesitated at passing the epic, the prose work at best would have been suppressed and at worst would have provided the basis for a charge of heresy or blasphemy.

8. De Doctrina Christiana and the manuscript of Paradise Lost, Book I A fair copy in an unknown hand, the surviving manuscript from which Book I of Paradise Lost was set, provides a fascinating point


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of comparison with SP 9/61. Its provenance seems straightforward. The initial licence for Paradise Lost specified publication by Samuel Simmons (ODNB s.v. Simmons, Matthew), to whom the copyright belonged. Simmons sold this on to Brabazon Aylmer (ODNB) early in the 1680s. In 1683 Aylmer sold half of his rights in the epic to Jacob Tonson (ODNB), and the remaining half in 1691 (LR, V, 264, 290). Along with the copyright, Tonson acquired and retained the manuscript of the epic, or at least of its first book, perhaps because it contained on the verso of its blank front cover the imprimatur of Thomas Tomkyns (ODNB), domestic chaplain to Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury (p. ix). As such, it constituted a legal document, indemnifying the publisher from prosecution, and thus could have been worth retaining in the case of a text by a notorious regicide, which had already attracted the licenser’s close attention. In 1931 the manuscript (which is now in the J. Pierpont Morgan Library in New York) was edited by Helen Darbishire as The Manuscript of Milton’s Paradise Lost Book I. The manuscript has two principal interests for the study of De Doctrina Christiana. First, it shows the state of a manuscript committed by the blind Milton, in his own lifetime, to the press. This is a very straightforward document. There are occasional corrections, inserted by Edward Phillips, who was, as we noted, principally responsible for keeping the working manuscript in order. But no uncertainties would have confronted its compositors. There are no marginal corrections or additions. The manuscript contrasts sharply with the condition of much of the Picard section of De Doctrina Christiana, and provides some circumstantial evidence that the theological treatise had not been made ready for the press before Milton’s death. Secondly, the manuscript of Book I provides a further example of Milton’s assembly of a substantial text in fascicules. The seventeen leaves of the carefully fair-copied text have a front and back leaf ‘differing from the rest in size and texture’ and forming ‘a covering sheet folded over the text’ (The Manuscript of Milton’s Paradise Lost Book I, p. xv). Crucially, the copy ends midway down the recto of the last leaf of the text. The scribe did not start Book II, presumably reserving that for a second discrete fascicule. This is, in effect, a pamphlet, much like those into which the theological treatise was

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divided. As such, this working practice broadly conforms with what we know of the physical structure of SP 9/61.

9. The epistle The introductory section of the treatise, which functions as an epistle to the reader, describes, albeit rather vaguely, the processes by which the text was produced. Milton explains that, once his study of the testaments in their original languages had reached a level of linguistic competence, he turned to some of the shorter systematic accounts of theology: Theologorum Systemata aliquot breviora (CE, XIV, 4). Following those examples, he started a sort of theological commonplace book, which collected biblical texts under certain heads. At that point, he says, he moved to more voluminous and controversial treatises, none of which satisfied him. So, drawing on the Bible alone (solo Dei verbo; CE, XIV, 6), he compiled his own treatise of systematic theology, explicitly as an aid to his own faith, always to have it to hand (ad manum mihi esset). Milton stresses that this project was not originally intended for dissemination and that it was the product of protracted research over several years, which largely took the form of adding more proof texts. As he puts it, ‘I have chosen … to fill my pages even to redundance with quotations from Scripture, that so as little space as possible might be left for my own words’ (CE, XIV, 11). Some of the pages in the Picard section show that process in action, as interlineally and marginally new proof texts are added in support of arguments already established and substantiated in the body of Milton’s text. Studies of De Doctrina Christiana make much of Milton’s allusion to the treatise as ‘my best and richest possession’ (melius aut pretiosius nihil habeo; CE, XIV, 9, 8; John Carey translates the phrase as ‘my dearest and best possession’—Yale, VI, 121). Throughout the epistle, Milton discusses the treatise as a private possession, precious as an aid to his own faith. That is its value to him and for him. However, the phrase occurs in the context of a decision, which he is explaining, to ‘communicate the result of my inquiries to the world at large’ (CE, XIV, 9). Presumably he means by press publication, rather than manuscript circulation. He offers his work as possibly useful to other Christian searchers after truth, but he stresses the obligations of the


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users to test the evidence and to ‘cultivate truth’ for themselves (CE, XIV, 15). This is not a mere rehearsal of the modesty topos typical of early modern front matter; rather it rests at the core of his beliefs. The epistle apparently shows Milton hastening his work to the press, though as he wrote it, much of the manuscript needed at least some tidying up and he was probably still adding proof texts and making further revisions. Does it give some hints as to when publication was intended? Three historical contexts are (once more vaguely) suggested. After he had worked on the treatise for several years, he saw ‘that the strongholds of the reformed religion were sufficiently fortified, as far as it was in danger from the Papists’ (CE, XIV, 7). Given the facile Puritan habit of equating Laudianism and the Caroline church with Catholicism, we may postulate a date sometime after the mid- to late 1640s for Milton’s new enthusiasm for the project. If Milton is thinking of the larger and real challenge posed by the Catholic Counter-Reformation across Europe, it may be pertinent that the Thirty Years War, usually perceived in England as a war of religion, had ended in 1648. Milton writes, too, about his concerns lest he be branded a heretic, though he does so as though that anxiety was substantially in the past. The Presbyterian heresiographers’ assault on the alleged outrages of independents and radical sectaries had largely petered out by the late 1640s, though heresy-hunting revived in the early 1650s as the new establishment harried Ranters and Quakers. Most striking, Milton writes in a spirit of benevolent optimism, as though expecting that his heterodoxies would have a fair hearing from readers who would be free to consider and perhaps adopt them. Such a spirit was not to be found in the grim world of Restoration dissenters. But it accords well with that transient mood of optimism that manifested itself in Milton’s Treatise of Civil Power and The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings, both published in 1659 at a time when radical change once more seemed possible. Indeed, William Riley Parker perceived in the first of these tracts an attempt to prepare the ground for Milton’s heterodox theological treatise by educating ‘England’s leaders’ to all have ‘more toleration of differing opinions than even Oliver had advocated’ (Parker, 1968, I, 518). Its discussion of the name and nature of heresy and the use of the term in apostolic times parallels quite closely what Milton has to say in the epistle (CE, XIV, 10–15; Yale, VII, revised edition, 248–50).

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10. An unfinished treatise The manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana is a palimpsest, the lowest layer of which is a fair copy of the treatise prepared by Jeremie Picard. There are structural indications that Picard’s revisions were broken off before he had finished the task, probably at the Restoration. The view that the treatise is unfinished has been proposed by Campbell (1976) and disputed by Kelley (1989). That argument centred on the last five chapters (29–33) of Book One, which Kelley conceded ‘have some organisational difficulties’. Kelley insisted that the treatise is complete, in the sense that its contents are all present in the manuscript, but conceded that it is unfinished, in the sense that ‘it offers an alert copy editor a rich field in which to work’. It would seem that the treatise, like Paradise Lost, once stood in ten parts. There are cancelled divisions into ten parts in what seems to be Skinner’s hand. In his scheme, I.25 ended with the words ‘Quartae partis finis’, which has, like Skinner’s other part divisions, been deleted. At the end of I.22, however, the words ‘Finis Quartae Partis’ appear in another hand, one which has not been identified. Kelley’s view is that this second entry is the fossil of an earlier division of the treatise ‘and that other evidence of this fact has been lost’ (Kelley, 1973, 37 n. 4). Ten-part treatises were not unusual, and included those of Dudley Fenner and Thomas Cartwright (see Chapter 5). In the surviving ten-part scheme, chapters 29–33 of Book One constitute Part Six, which concludes with the phrase ‘Finis Libri Primi’ (not deleted) followed by ‘et sextae partis’ (deleted). The second organizational principle is that of Ramist dichotomies. In 1941 Kelley observed (p. 195) that De Doctrina is organized according to the principles set out in Milton’s Artis Logicae, but did not elaborate. The argument was first set out in a Ph.D. thesis submitted to Princeton in 1941 by H. F. Irwin, who may have been Kelley’s student. Irwin produced a Ramist chart (between pp. 68 and 69) for De Doctrina of a sort that is familiar from the theological treatises of Ames (Amesius, 1649, 25 pages of charts), Wolleb (Wollebius, 1626, 9 pages), Cartwright (1611, a chart for each chapter) and Alsted (1611, 6 charts). Milton’s transitions enabled him to plot the entire treatise, except for chapters 29–33 of Book One. Irwin’s chart is complete


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save for these five chapters. In 1946 A. J. Th. Eisenring also produced a Ramistic chart (pp. 108–9), and once again chapters 29–33 are omitted. Kelley acknowledges that there is a problem, and proposes a solution: The primary difficulty with part 6 results from the presence of chapter 30, of the holy scripture, between a two-chapter discussion of the church: chapter 29, of the visible church, and chapter 31, of particular churches, which begins with an imperfect transition linking it to chapter 29. Remove chapter 30 from its present position, place it after chapter 32, of church discipline, supply it with a transition such as ‘The rule by which all things taught by the ministers and done by the people should be measured is the Holy Scripture,’ and the organizational error is remedied. Thirty one follows its linked chapter 29, and the new transition of 30 links it to 29, 30, 32. (p. 44)

If only life were so simple. The organizational assistance that Kelley offers is ingenious, and, had the treatise been completed, his may indeed have been the preferred solution. The analogy with Ames’s Medulla suggests another possible solution: Ames distinguishes between ministers who are extraordinarius (chapter 33) and those who are ordinarius (chapter 35); the intervening chapter, on the Holy Scriptures, is an extension of the discussion of ‘extraordinary’ ministers, a term which had been defined in the previous chapter: ‘extraordinarij ministri fuerunt Prophetae, Apostoli, & Evangelistae’. De Doctrina adopts Ames’s definitions as well as his dichotomies, and so the definition of Holy Scripture in I.30 as ‘SCRIPTA prophetarum, apostolorum, evangelistarum’ would seem to imply a plan to tie the material on the Scriptures to the discussion of ‘extraordinary’ ministers of the visible church. We cannot be certain about which solution might have been adopted, because none was adopted. There is a more considerable problem with the final chapter of Book One of De Doctrina, on the final judgement and complete glorification. This chapter was the normal subject of the final chapter of the first book of early modern systematic theologies, but the means by which it is connected to earlier material varies considerably. Ames treats perfect glorification as the third variant of the manner by which the application of redemption by the new covenant is administered; Wolleb makes it the fourth part of that portion of the special providence of God which is applicable

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to humankind; Cartwright treats it as the last part of that portion of the office of Christ which pertains to his kingdom; Fenner treats it as the second part of Christ’s office. These schemes all bear a close resemblance to the organizational principles of De Doctrina, but none is sufficiently close to allow an inference of how the final chapter might have been integrated into the Ramist principles of the reorganized treatise. Parker was quite right to say that the treatise was ‘essentially complete’ in 1660, ‘at least in first draft’ (p. 1056), but first drafts are not finished treatises. Kelley’s recognition that many details needed to be resolved is summarized in his slightly exasperated note on the conclusion of DDC I.11 , where Milton undertakes to discuss the distinction between mortal and venial sin elsewhere: Kelley writes ‘I fail to find this promised discussion’ (Yale, VI, 392 n. 40). That is because it does not exist, because the treatise is unfinished.

4 Stylometric Analysis 1. Stylometric methodologies Taking its primary objective as the testing of its provenance, our stylometric analysis of De Doctrina Christiana systematically compared it with Milton’s undisputed oeuvre of neo-Latin prose and with the Protestant tradition of neo-Latin systematic theology. The use of statistics to investigate problems of authorship brings objectivity into an area where subjective response and disputed questions of interpretation may otherwise prevail. Moreover, stylometry has had its palpable successes in the field of authorship attribution as more discriminating methods have developed (for a useful review of techniques that have been applied to questions of attribution, see Holmes, 1994). The techniques adopted in this study accord with two major trends in recent stylometry. They depend, first, on the incidence of words which appear frequently. Secondly, they reflect the relatively recent realization that multivariate methods are generally more effective than univariate ones. Milton’s writing in both English and Latin and, more generally, texts in neo-Latin have received little interrogation from stylometry, though Thomas Corns’s studies of Milton’s style (Corns, 1982 and 1990) were in part computer-aided. The sole investigation in recent times into Milton’s vernacular writing has yielded a new confidence in the traditional attribution to Milton of the ‘Postscript’ to Smectymnuus’s Answer to a Booke, Entituled, An Humble Remonstrance (see Hoover and Corns, 2004). Latin texts on the whole have received less attention than Greek ones, probably because of stylometric endeavour in New Testament Studies. Apart from our own, the only comparable

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Stylometric Analysis

account of neo-Latin writing of which we are aware is K. P. Hubka’s study (Hubka, 1985) of a suspected fragment by Johannes Comenius.

2. The structure of the study: first phase In order to determine the relationship between the undisputed Milton canon and De Doctrina Christiana it is important to have work of undisputed provenance by other authors for comparison. Genre poses a considerable technical challenge to the design of this investigation. It has long been recognized that genre is a variable which impacts on aspects of style, but nowhere in the undisputed Milton canon is there another Latin exercise in systematic theology. The most extensive and least problematic Miltonic texts to set in comparison with De Doctrina Christiana are his Latin Defences, in that (unlike the Prolusiones) they are mature works, and (unlike Ars Logicae) they are not reworkings of earlier texts by other writers. In assembling our control texts, we sought out examples both of systematic theology and of polemical tracts which are situationally analogous to the Defences, in order that we could investigate and model the impact of genre on stylometrically analysed variables in seventeenth-century neo-Latin. Nine control texts were identified, from which samples of around 3,000 words were drawn and transcribed into a machine-readable form. The following three systematic and six polemical texts were used: • • • • • • • • •

William Ames, Medulla Theologica, editio novissima (Amsterdam, 1649) Johan Wollebius, Compendium Theologicae Christianae (Amsterdam, 1654) Richard Baxter, Methodus Theologicae Christianae (1681) George Bate, Elenchus Motuum nuperorum in Angli (London, 1649) Eikon Basilike, trans. John Earle ( The Hague, 1649) William Prynne, Guilhelmi Prynn Angli Fulcimentum Gladii Christianorum Regum, Principium, & Magistratuum (Basel, 1649) Anon., Tragicum Theatrum Actorum, et Casuum Tragicorum Londini (Amsterdam, 1649) Salmasius, Defensio Regia pro Carolo I (Leiden and Amsterdam, 1649) Tom May, Historiae Parliamenti Angliae Breviarum (London, 1650).


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In selecting these texts, we observed two principles: that there should be both systematic theology and polemical clusters, and that neoLatin of both English and continental European provenance should be included. ( The ways in which mother-tongue influences neo-Latin practice, so far as we are aware, remain unexplored; however, it seemed a wise precaution to safeguard against this potential variable.) We also included samples taken from the neo-Latin publications of Francis Bacon, drawn from texts held and supplied by the Oxford Text Archive. A very large sample of De Doctrina Christiana was assembled. Minimal pre-processing was carried out; ampersands were converted to ‘et’, hyphenations were reformatted and quotations were removed. The last procedure reduced the electronic sample De Doctrina Christiana by about one third, leaving approximately 60,000 words. In the case of the Defences, diacritic marks were present. While these diacritics may distinguish between declinable and indeclinable homonyms (Steenbakkers, 1994), their absence in the other texts means that we were unable to take advantage of this information. The texts were processed using the Oxford Concordance Program which resulted in word lists and their frequency in the texts. The resulting information was analysed using a technique pioneered by Burrows (1987, 1989, 1992), which examines the fifty most commonly occurring words using a statistical technique called Principal Components Analysis. As the name implies, Principal Components Analysis, or PCA, is concerned with identifying the most important elements, or components, of the information held in the data. This enables the researcher to view the data as a 2- or 3-dimensional scatter plot. This plot preserves the maximum information possible that is being held in the dimensions of, in our case, the 50 variables being considered. The information itself is determined by a method known as ‘eigen-analysis’. Technical details of PCA are available in many statistical textbooks (e.g. Manly, 1994). The problem that we were dealing with was hierarchical in nature. In order to establish the validity of our chosen technique for investigating the provenance of De Doctrina Christiana, we needed first to establish that it could distinguish texts by known authors. Secondly we had to negotiate and mitigate the problems imposed by the variety of genres involved in this investigation. We needed to be able to distinguish

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between texts in polemic and theological genres and to identify a genre ‘shift’ between them. We had to consider the relationship between De Doctrina Christiana and the Defences. Finally, in the event, it became clear that the internal consistency of De Doctrina Christiana merited careful investigation.

3. Milton in comparison with others The graph shown in Figure 4.1 is the result from a Principal Components Analysis of three groups of texts. The points marked 1.1–1.9 represent samples from Milton’s Defensio Prima; 2.1–2.5, samples from the Defensio Secunda and S.1–S.5 samples from Pro Se Defensio. B.1–B.11 are samples of neo-Latin text by Bacon and the 9 remaining three-letter codes indicate the control texts listed above. It is clear that the Milton Defences are clustered together and, while mixed, generally move chronologically from right to left. The Milton texts are all on the negative side of the first principal component 8 Wol 6

PC 2

Bax Ele

Eik

Wen

2 Sal

Ame

1.4 2.3 1.6 1.8 1.2 1.5 0 2.4 2.1 S.3 2.21.9 1.3 1.7 S.1 S.4S.5 S.2 1.1 −2 2.5 −4 −4

May

Pry

4

−2

B.10 B.11 B.9 B.4

0

2 PC 1

B.5 B.1 B.2 B.3 B.6 4 6

Figure 4.1. Principal Components Analysis of three groups of texts

8


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represented by the horizontal axis, and around the zero point on the second principal component or vertical axis. Lower on the vertical axis, to the right of the control samples, but still fairly compact are the Bacon samples, again grouped, with the possible exception of sample B.4. The control samples are generally in the upper centre area of the plot. Positive scores on the horizontal axis are associated with high levels of usage of et and in. Milton uses et more sparingly than the control texts or Bacon, while negative scores are associated with high usages of quid, tam and te. The far-left positioning of the Pro Se Defensio can be accounted for in the high number of occurrences of second-person pronouns. On the vertical axis, high numbers are associated with ab and nec, while low numbers are associated with atque and neque. The Wolleb sample (‘Wol’), which appears to the right and above all the other samples, is distinguished by a relatively high score for et —36.14 occurrences per 1,000 words, no occurrences of neque and a high use of nec (9.8 per mille). This graph indicates that the Milton and Bacon samples are internally consistent and distinguishable from each other and from texts by other authors. From this we conclude that this method of analysis would be suitable for investigating the provenance of De Doctrina Christiana.

4. Milton in comparison with the control texts Having determined the suitability of this method of analysis we added the De Doctrina Christiana samples to the analysis. ( The Bacon samples are no longer considered since their purpose was to test the robustness of the methodology in identifying multiple samples from a single known author.) The resulting PCA plot is shown in Figure 4.2. It can be seen that the Milton samples are to the left of the zero line and roughly central vertically. The De Doctrina Christiana samples, C.1 to C.10, are in the lower left of the graph, while the control samples are generally towards the right, with the systematic controls in the lower half of the plot. There would appear to be a split between the genres under consideration; the theological texts are all below the zero line and the polemic samples, with the exception of a few samples from the Defensio Prima, are above the zero line. The polemic controls are distinguished by their high use of et and in, while est, not surprisingly along with deo and dei,

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Stylometric Analysis 6

Eik

4

Pry Sal 2.4

Wen May Ele

PC 2

2

S.3 2.5S.4 2.3 S.5 2.2 1.1 1.9 S.1 2.1 S.2 1.2 0 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.4 1.8

Bax C.8

−2

1.3 C.1 C.9C.2 C.3 C.4

−4

Wol

Ame C.10

C.6 C.7

C.5 −6

−4

−2

0

2

4

6

8

10

PC 1

Figure 4.2. Principal Components Analysis, including De Doctrina Christiana

separate the theological texts. The Defences are characterized by their high usage of quid and tam as well as quidem. It is also of interest that the samples obtained from De Doctrina Christiana seem to fall into two separate groups, one including C.1–C.5 and C.9, the other with C.6–C.8 and C.10. The text is not as homogeneous as the Defence texts.

5. The Defences in comparison with De Doctrina Christiana In order to make a preliminary investigation into the internal consistency of De Doctrina Christiana the text was split into chapters (1–27 and Epistle, E) and compared with the Defences (M). This allows us to identify chapters that exhibit a style closest to that of the undisputedly canonical works. We also checked for stylometrically determinate distinctions between the Picard and Skinner sections of the MS. The resulting graph is shown in Figure 4.3. It can be seen that the Milton Defences samples are generally to the left of the zero point on the first principal component, with the


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8 11

6 4

PC 2

2

8 27

M M M M M M MM M M M M M M M M M M

0 −2

4

−4

22

25 5 6

7

1

10

−6 −8

3 −6

−4

−2

0

2

4

6

8

PC 1

Figure 4.3. Principal Components Analysis of sections of De Doctrina Christiana

exception of one, the eighth sample from Defensio Prima. The De Doctrina Christiana samples are all to the right of the zero point on the first principal component and are all to the right of all of the samples from the Defences. Turning to the second principal component represented by the vertical axis, it is clear that the Milton Defences samples are quite homogeneous; they are all found between −2 and 2 on this axis, while Chapters I.3 and I.11 of De Doctrina Christiana are at extreme ends of this axis. Chapter 3 has much higher rates of quod (9.1 per mille, compared with 4.8 per mille in Chapter 11) and non (26.4 per mille versus 8.8 per mille), and much lower rates of et (17.3 per mille versus 38.1 per mille) and etiam (2.7 per mille versus 7 per mille) than Chapter 11. The wide spread of the first eleven chapters, in comparison with the remaining chapters shown on this graph, indicates that there is no consistent difference between the Picard and Skinner sections of the MS (that is, there is no stylometric evidence to distinguish the sections of the treatise transcribed by Skinner from the parts still primarily in the hand

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of Picard). There is no evidence that Skinner made any sustained editorial intervention in the amendment or adjustment of Milton’s style, nor any justification for decoupling the sections in any way in terms of their provenance.

6. The epistle It has been remarked elsewhere (see Corns, 1997, passim) that Milton as a prose writer, from his early Prolusiones onwards, frequently invests considerable skill in the captatio benevolentiae of his readers, in securing their sympathy through the production of an engaging image of the author and of the purposefulness of his objectives. Other examples include the opening address to Parliament in Areopagitica or in The Readie and Easie Way, or the careful self-representation of Milton as republican champion in the opening paragraphs of Eikonoklastes. The epistle to De Doctrina shares some rhetorical analogies to such Miltonic engagements of audience support, and thus by its nature it commends itself to separate consideration from general chapters of De Doctrina Christiana. Here we have a section in which the author is writing in the same expansive vein that we find in the polemical prose, shaping readers’ perceptions of himself, establishing a voice and a values system, and arguing without frequent resort to proof texts. The concerns posed by differences of genre are here at their slightest. When the data obtained from the epistle (E) are plotted on our chart, shown in Figure 4.4, it is clear that this section of text lies close to the core of Miltonic practice; the sample is well over to the left of the plot, and only slightly below the Defences samples. Stylometrically, Milton’s authorship is overwhelming probable. Barbara Lewalski, in her reply to William Hunter (Lewalski, 1992), quotes extensively from the epistle to indicate parallels between canonical texts and De Doctrina Christiana (pp. 147–8), and then asks the reader to consider the persona projected by the epistle (pp. 152–3). She concludes, ‘As I encounter this persona, … I can only call him—John Milton’, a conclusion with which, with respect to the epistle, we most certainly concur. However, the epistle also constitutes the clearest example of some parts of De Doctrina Christiana seeming much more Miltonic than


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8 11

6 4

PC 2

2

M M M M M M MM M M M M

0 −2

8 27

M MM M M

E

4

−4

22

25

M 5 6

7

1

10

−6 −8

3 −6

−4

−2

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4

6

8

PC 1

Figure 4.4. Principal Components Analysis, highlighting the characteristics of the epistle

others. Some other sections exhibit stylometric features less certainly his. Even within a chapter, we encounter a range of linguistic preferences that raise questions about a simple attribution of the whole text to Milton. We turned to consider the case of Book One, chapter 10, ‘Of the Special Government of Man before the Fall, including the institutions of the Sabbath and of Marriage’ (CE, XV, 112–78). Hunter had noted its internal heterogeneity in his initial paper questioning the provenance of De Doctrina Christiana. In the discussion on why the work had not been published he observed, ‘The assumption has been that he did not [publish it] because it was incomplete, but it is essentially finished except perhaps in its discussion of marriage’ (Hunter, 1992). In his reply, Shawcross expanded on this point, noting that much of the chapter discuss[es its subject matter] in a style and brevity that fits with Chapters IX and XI. … But then comes the prolix discussion of marriage that would have got x’d out as disunified and even incoherent (as unplanned and unprepared for), were it a freshman composition paper. … If the author was not Milton,

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he certainly fell into the same kind of prolixity and special pleading that Milton exhibited in Tetrachordon. (Shawcross, 1992)

The point is further taken up by Hunter (in a paper in private circulation) where he considers the chapter in detail. He proposes an alternative hypothesis: that Milton did indeed write sections of chapter 10, which were then inserted into the document, evidence of which was hidden by the fair copy made by Skinner. Shawcross describes the discussion on marriage as ‘disunified’ and ‘incoherent’ (Shawcross, 1992, p. 161). Hunter develops this to examine all of the subjects treated in the chapter. Of the pages that make up chapter 10 (112–78), marriage is treated from pages 120.5 to 122.6, at which point a discussion of polygamy intrudes until 150.18. The discussion of marriage is then resumed until divorce is discussed from 154.22 to the end of the chapter. Hunter provides two strands of reasoning for this particular break-up of chapter 10, one lexical, the other textual. The former argument prompted us to a stylometric comparison of the four parts he distinguishes. The lexical reasoning centres on the use of two synonyms for marriage: coniugium (or conjugium) and matrimonium. Table 4.1 illustrates their use (including variant spellings and inflected forms) in chapter 10. It is clear that matrimonium only occurs in the sections pertaining to polygamy and divorce while coniugium appears across the chapter, in every section. Hunter, who noticed this distinction, concludes that we are witnessing the word choice of two different authors who can be clearly distinguished in this way. Milton indeed could have written the section on divorce which someone appended to the discussion of marriage already written by the author of the rest of the treatise. He freely interchanged ‘coniugium’ and ‘matrimonium’; the other term employed is ‘connubium’, which occurs only once. In contrast, the supposed other author, who wrote what Hunter conceives as the Ur-text, favoured only coniugium. We have widened the investigation to include all of De Doctrina Christiana, the Defences, and the Prolusiones. The emerging picture is even more remarkable than Hunter’s account would anticipate, as Table 4.2 shows. Quite simply, Milton in his undisputed works does not use coniugium but does use matrimonium; the pattern is clear. It is tempting to argue that it is wholly consonant with this pattern of usage to


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Table 4.1. Occurrences of coniugium, matrimonium and connubium in chapter 10

Introduction Marriage Polygamy Divorce

coniugium

matrimonium

2 16 4 15

0 0 4 17

connubium 0 0 1 0

Table 4.2. Occurrences of coniugium, matrimonium and connubium in De Doctrina Christiana, the Defences, and the Prolusiones

CE,vol. XIV CE,vol. XV CE, vol. XVI CE, vol. XVII Def. Prima Def. Secunda Def. Pro Se Prolusiones

coniugium

matrimonium

0 37 3 1 0 0 0 0

0 21 3 2 2 1 4 1

connubium 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0

hypothesize that the sections of chapter 10 which eschew matrimonium and always use coniugium are not by the author of the Defences or the Prolusiones. However, we have noted earlier the advantages currently recognized in a multivariate methodology over a univariate one (which, in effect, this account of alternative lexical items is). Nevertheless, once more we have an indication of a stylometric inconsistency to be investigated. The practice of Ames and Wolleb is further instructive. In the full text of the former’s Medulla Theologica we find, variously inflected, 16 examples of coniugium (including its alternative spelling), 3 of matrimonium, and none of connubium; in the latter’s Compendium Theologicae Christianae, 46 examples of coniugium, 1 of matrimonium, and 2 of connubium. Evidently, in the technical language of those writers most influential on the tradition of systematic theology in English Protestantism, matrimonium is scarcely used; Milton outside the tract never uses coniugium.

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Stylometric Analysis 8 11

6 4

PC 2

2 0

M

M M M M M M MM M M M

8 27

M MM M M

−2

4

6R

7

1

D

−6 −8

5

P 10

−4

22

25

M

3 −6

−4

−2

0

2

4

6

8

PC 1

Figure 4.5. Principal Components Analysis, highlighting the characteristics of the sections on polygamy and divorce

An obvious next step was the multivariate analysis and comparison of the constituent sections of chapter 10 as identified by Hunter. The marriage section and the introduction were combined into sample R. The position of the three sections in relation to the other chapters of De Doctrina Christiana is shown in Figure 4.5. It is clear that the divorce section (D) moves to the left, towards Milton’s Defences, while the polygamy (P) section moves slightly upwards and the remainder (R) moves much further over, towards the main body of chapters. Once more, here at the level of a single chapter, some parts seem more Miltonic than others.

7. Interim conclusions The stylometric analysis so far established that some parts of De Doctrina Christiana approximate very closely to Milton’s practice in his Latin Defences. However, as we considered the treatise, chapter


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by chapter, it showed greater internal diversity than in the rest of his Latin prose oeuvre. Even within a chapter, some sections more closely resembled typical Miltonic practice than others. To extend Shawcross’s analogy with modern academic practice, were a student’s essay to show the kinds of diversity manifest in Book One, chapter 10, one would suspect plagiarism. But that modern analogy is of limited value. Early modern concepts of authorship and of intellectual property differed from those of our own age. Within the Milton canon, the case of Joannis Miltoni Angli, Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio, ad Petri Rami Methodum concinnata (London, 1672) (‘A fuller institution of the Art of Logic, arranged after the method of Peter Ramus, by John Milton, an Englishman’—CE, XI, vii) is pertinent. What purports to be Milton’s own commentary on Ramus draws heavily on George Downame’s Commentarii in P. Rami … Dialecticam (1601, fifth edition 1616; it is uncertain which edition Milton used (see Yale, VIII, 186)). The researches of Francine Lusignan have shown that approximately 82 per cent of the first book of Milton’s work and 73 per cent in the second book is taken without acknowledgement from Downame. Milton in effect was editing Downame’s commentary, in the process removing nonclassical Latin texts from the examples used and adding some classical ones (Lusignan, 1974, pp. 166–91, 200). Milton sometimes takes his text of Ramus from Downame, though sometimes he resorts to the original, but, Walter J. Ong concludes, ‘it is by no means always possible to tell directly … what is from Ramus and what is not’. Moreover, text taken from Downame ‘is normally neither put in italics nor identified as Downame’s in any way at all. Milton, in other words, simply appropriates much of Downame’s text as though it were his own’, resulting in what Ong calls a ‘potpourri’ (Yale, VIII, 185, 188). Does the stylometry, then, suggest that De Doctrina Christiana is another such potpourri of other men’s writing, overlaid with a surface of Miltonic additions and amendments? Certainly, debts to Wolleb and Ames have often been noted in the editorial tradition, and the new edition in preparation under the editorship of John Hale will identify many more. What we identify in Book One, chapter 10 is an account of quite diverse subject matter. On some points, particularly the opening remarks on the nature and function of marriage, the conclusions are

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substantially in accord with the mainstream of Protestant thinking. On divorce and on polygamy, however, the theology is wholly heterodox. Rather than postulate a plurality of authors, we could consider an alternative hypothesis: namely, when Milton says pretty much the same as previous Protestant systematic theologians, he does so in a discourse close to, and indeed perhaps synthesized from, what he found in that tradition; when he writes against the tradition, when what he has to say stands outside the views of Ames and Wolleb (and others), the stylometry suggests he does so in a style that is closer to that of the Defences. But interpreting the evidence requires a better understanding of the practices in early modern systematic theology in neo-Latin, and that imperative informed the second phase of our investigation.

8. The second phase: variability analysis The next and final phase of our analysis is an account of the internal variability of De Doctrina Christiana, Milton’s Latin Defences, and the systematic theological treatises of Ames and Wolleb, in which we attempted to achieve a degree of rigour unprecendented in the stylometric study of heterogeneity. We adapted the methodology developed by E. K. Tse, F. J. Tweedie and B. D. Frischer for investigation into the composite authorship of the Historia Augusta. Tse’s group focused on the incidence of seven function words as variables that could differentiate members of the composite authorship. The statistical method relied on van Valen’s test. This uses the median rate of occurrence of each word within a group (that is, in the case of a stylometric analysis, a text) and considers deviations from that median in subsets or segments of that group. Each text segment receives a value which is a measure of distance from the median values of the whole text. A high value indicates that the segment is far from the median for the whole text, and a low value indicates that the text segment is close to the median. These figures can then be compared using t-test or ANOVA methods for the comparison of means. Texts whose values are significantly higher than other texts are evidently significantly more variable. Tse et al. used just seven function words. We opted to consider about a hundred of the words most common across the three groups of


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texts (that is: De Doctrina Christiana; the Defences; and the theological treatises of Wolleb and Ames). The list was arrived at systematically. All the words in the texts were enumerated and files created of each word and the number of times it appears in each text. These figures were also standardized to the number of occurrences per 10,000 words of text. Several criteria were used to establish the most common words across the range of texts. The first ordering only considered the theology control texts (that is, Ames and Wolleb). The second took an average of all the theological texts (Ames, Wolleb, plus De Doctrina Christiana). The third drew on all the texts, and the fourth drew on all the texts except De Doctrina Christiana. These four approaches produced some minor changes in the order of the most frequent words. Numerals (arabic and roman) were removed, as were place markers which had been used in the electronic transcription to indicate Greek words, quotations and biblical references. A list of 104 words was thus derived (though for most of the analysis, only the first 100 were drawn on). It will be noted that for these purposes the inflected forms of some words appear as separate lexical items: a ab ac ad atque aut autem cap christi christo christum christus cum de dei deo deum deus dicitur ecclesia ecclesiae ejus enim eo erat esse est et etiam ex fidei fuit habet hac haec hic hinc hoc hominis homo hujus id idem igitur iis illa illud in inter ipsa ipse ita modo natura nec neque nihil nisi nobis non nos omnes omnia omnibus peccatum per potest pro proprie qua quae quam quamvis quasi qui quia quibus quid quidem quo quoad quod quoque ratio ratione se sed seu si sic sine sit spiritus sua sunt tamen tanquam tantum te tu tum ut vel vero

All seven function words considered by Tse et al. in their analysis of the Historia Augusta are included in the list. To ensure that the results are not influenced by the selected size of the segments, a complex procedure was adopted. We analysed the data segmented into sample sizes of 5,000, 4,000, 3,000, 2,000, 1,000 and 500 words. We adopted two approaches to segmentation. In the case of the first, subsequent segments of text started at the end of the previous segment (that is, for each text, the first segment stretched from the first word to the five thousandth word; the second from the five thousand and first word to the ten thousandth word; and so on). In the second case, subsequent segments of text began halfway through the previous segment, allowing for an overlap of half of the

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text in each segment (that is, the first segment ran from the first word to the 5,000th; the second from the 2,501st word to the 7,500th word; the third from the 5,001st word to the 10,000th word; and so on). The analysis also adopted an exhaustive methodology in selecting the words to be studied within the segments. To ensure that word choice did not influence our results, the list of 104 words was divided into sections of 10, 25, 50 and 75 words (in the process, effectively reducing the number of words considered to 100). Results were thus produced for the following subsets of the word list: 1–10, 11–20, 21–30, 31–40, 41–50, 51–60, 61–70, 71–80, 81–90, 91–100 1–25, 26–50, 51–75, 76–100 1–50, 51–100 1–100 The results of a representative selection of the results of this enquiry are consolidated into boxplots (Figures 4.6–10). The data 5,000 words

3.0

4

first50 4.0 5.0

second50 5 6 7

6.0

8

5,000 words

cd

dp

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cd

5,000 words

dp

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first75 6 7

first100 7 8

8

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9

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5,000 words

cd

dp

ds

sd

cd

dp

ds

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Figure 4.6. De Doctrina Christiana and the Defences (5,000-word segments)


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1,000 words

4

4

6

first50 8

second50 6 8 10

10

12

1,000 words

cd

dp

ds

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ds

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first75 8 10

first100 10 12

12

14

1,000 words

cd

dp

ds

sd

cd

dp

ds

sd

Figure 4.7. De Doctrina Christiana and the Defences (1,000-word segments)

points in the box represent text segments, rather than words. The individual variability of each word is summed to give the figure for each text segment. A point high up on the plot—the scale is to the left—indicates that that segment of text is relatively far from the ‘average’ text segment for that particular text. The plot for each text is sectioned into quartiles, and 50 per cent of the segments into which the text has been analysed fall within the central box section. The horizontal line across each box separates the second and third quartiles. The 25 per cent of text segments most remote from the average for that text are at the top of the plot; these are represented by the T shape protruding from the top of the box. The 25% closest to the average are in the bottom section; these are represented by the inverted T shape protruding from the bottom of the box. A text is more variable internally (that is, less consistent in its use of the common words we are investigating), if its boxplot is higher up the graph. If the boxplot is squat, then that would indicate that the text

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Stylometric Analysis 5,000 words

4

5

first50 6 7

8

second50 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

5,000 words

ames

cd

wolleb

ames

wolleb

5,000 words

first75 5 6 7 8 9 10

first100 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

5,000 words

cd

ames

cd

wolleb

ames

cd

wolleb

Figure 4.8. De Doctrina Christiana, Ames and Wollebius (5000-word segments) (i)

segments were ‘equally variable’, that is, the different samples generally differed about the same amount from the ‘average’. An elongated boxplot would indicate that some samples were more extremely variable, and others much closer to the ‘average’ text segment for that particular text. The circles mark outliers (that is, single values much higher or lower than the rest of the values for that particular text). The scale is a function that is summative of relative divergence of each of our list of words from median rate of incidence within each text. The results show that in almost all cases De Doctrina Christiana is significantly more variable internally than the Defences. This confirms a major finding of the first phase of the stylometric analysis (Figures 4.6 and 4.7). However, on some of the tests, De Doctrina Christiana emerges as no more heterogeneous internally than the theological treatises of Ames and Wolleb (Figures 4.8 and 4.9). On other tests it emerges as markedly less diverse internally (Figure 4.10).


4

6

second50

first50 8 10 6

8 10 12 14

1,000 words

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ames

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wolleb

ames

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first100

first75 10 12 8

6

6

8 10 12 14 16

1,000 words

14

1,000 words

cd

ames

cd

wolleb

ames

cd

wolleb

Figure 4.9. De Doctrina Christiana, Ames and Wollebius (1,000-word segments)

9. Systematic theology and stylometric diversity De Doctrina Christiana opens with the acknowledgement that this treatise comes at the end of a very full tradition of Protestant systematic theology, and Milton describes his own relationship to that tradition in the course of the epistle (see Chapter 3, pp. 64–5). It has long been acknowledged that the text of De Doctrina Christiana draws on and incorporates passages from that tradition, and particularly from the writings of Ames and Wolleb. The last part of our stylometric analysis sets the partially appropriative processes used in De Doctrina Christiana in the context of the practices of Ames and Wolleb themselves. Evidently, their treatises are at least as stylometrically diverse internally. We may reasonably surmise that these influential precursors have drawn heavily on the Protestant tradition of systematic theology as they found it; they, too, have absorbed, for the most part without acknowledgement, what others

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Stylometric Analysis 5,000 words 7 6 3

1 2

4

5

fourth25

5 6 3 4

tenth10

7

8

5,000 words

ames

cd

wolleb

ames

5,000 words

first100 ames

cd

wolleb

wolleb

6 7 8 9 10 11 12

last75

5 6 7 8 9 10

5,000 words

cd

ames

cd

wolleb

Figure 4.10. De Doctrina Christiana, Ames and Wollebius (5,000-word segments) (ii)

before them had written. Indeed, over most of the range of the analysis, Ames’s and Wolleb’s texts are more diverse internally than De Doctrina Christiana. Arguably, we see there, more clearly than in the analogues, the characteristic stylistic preferences of the author. Since the stylometry points to Milton’s near certain involvement in some sections of the text, we may postulate his authorship (or perhaps ‘authorship’) of the whole, given that this is a genre in which the work of others is silently appropriated. Moreover, that Milton is more stylometrically distinctive than Ames and Wolleb suggests a closer attention to fashioning the style, which points in turn to the validity and purpose of examining the Latinity of De Doctrina Christiana.

5 The Theology of the Manuscript The discovery of the manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana in 1823 apparently gave substance to the view, occasionally articulated earlier (see Bauman, 1987), that Milton was a heretic far from the mainstream of Protestant theology. Students of Milton elucidated the heresies in the treatise and then set about finding comparably heterodox strains in his poetry, especially Paradise Lost. The assumptions embedded in this process are very considerable: it is assumed that there was a mainstream Reformation theology from which it was possible to depart; it is assumed that Milton held consistent and unchanging views throughout his life or throughout long periods of his life; it is assumed that views articulated through the prism of systematic theology are sufficiently independent of that genre to be discerned in other forms of writing. None of these contentions is entirely false, but none can survive scholarly scrutiny.

1. Theological consensus The theology of the first generation of reformers was never unified, but rather divided into Lutheran, Calvinist and Zwinglian streams. In the theological cauldron of the sixteenth century many other schools of theology emerged, and soon there were radical groups centred on individual doctrines (Anabaptists, Calixines, Unitarians) and national churches with increasingly distinctive theological traditions, including those of the Church of England. As the century progressed, the theology of these groups developed and occasioned fractures. The Lutherans are a case in point: the Gneiso-Lutherans accused the Philippist Lutherans of covert Calvinism in their doctrine

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The Theology of the Manuscript

of the eucharist and of covert Roman Catholicism in their soteriology; the latter issues led to controversies about synergism, Majorism and Osiandrism. Splits proliferated until the Formula of Concord was agreed in 1577, and thereafter there was a body of doctrine that might be construed as Lutheran orthodoxy. The relative stability of Lutheran doctrine was the achievement of Johann Gerhard, whose vast Loci theologici (9 vols in 10, 1610–22) was accorded canonical status as the authoritative embodiment of Lutheran orthodoxy. The Calvinist churches never achieved such stability, despite the standing of Calvin’s Institutes (1536) and the widespread adoption of the Second Helvetic Convention (1566). The Huguenots of France were Calvinist in theology, and in 1622 Calvinism became the state religion of the Dutch republic. In the German lands, the Calvinist ‘Reformed Church’ (as opposed to the Lutheran ‘Evangelical Church’) triumphed in the Palatinate, in Brandenburg and in Transylvania. In England some elements of Calvinism may be discerned in the Thirty-Nine Articles, but the true inheritors of Calvinism, in modes of thought as much as in theology, were numbered amongst the theological radicals of the mid-seventeenth century.

2. The stability of Milton’s views There has long been a tendency to assume that the views of the mature Milton are inscribed in potentia in the writings of his youth, which has led students of the radical political views of Milton in the 1650s to construct a youthful radical Milton. The trajectory of this argument extends even to the creation of a Puritan household in which Milton grew up. The idea of Milton as a young radical is difficult to sustain. His parents attended a Laudian chapel-of-ease while living in Hammersmith, and Milton was happy to be moved by stained-glass windows and the figure of a nun in ‘Il Penseroso’. In 1634 he accepted the commission to write a masque, a genre firmly associated with the court; scholars who read Comus as a Puritan work have proposed interpretations that see the masque as subversive, but such ex post facto constructions pay too little regard to the ideological implications of the genre itself. Similarly, little that can be gleaned


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from Milton’s early writings adumbrates his later theology. On the Trinity, for example, the young Milton was happy to praise the ‘trinal unity’ of the godhead in the Nativity Ode (1629) and to invoke the ‘tri-personall Godhead’ in Of Reformation (1641). Similarly, the radical Arminianism of Milton’s maturity is rather different from the sacramental Arminianism of his youth (see below, p. 113–17). One of the points at which it is possible to discern Milton’s theological sympathies around the time when we have argued that he was probably writing De Doctrina occurs in his letter of 1 August 1657 to Richard Jones, a former pupil (on whom see ODNB), who was then in Saumur. Milton expresses his pleasure that Jones has so quickly reached a place where you can enjoy cultured leisure and the society of learned men. … So long as you remain there, you will be in harbour; elsewhere you will have to beware the Syrtes, the Rocks and the Song of the Sirens.

The theological dock of this safe harbour was the Saumur Academy, which had been founded in 1599–1600. Its members attempted to reconcile the orthodoxy proclaimed by the Synod of Dort with biblical precepts. Moïse Amyraut formulated the theory of hypothetical universalism and was tried for heresy at the Protestant Synod of Alençon, but managed to emerge uncondemned. Amyraut’s colleagues included Louis Cappel (1585–1658), a Hebraist who declared the vowel points of the Old Testament to be the work of men rather than God, and Josué de la Place (1596–1656), who opposed the Calvinist notion of imputation as immediate and mechanical. Such perspectives all find echoes in De Doctrina Christiana. The Calvinist reaction to Saumur included attacks on behalf of Calvinist orthodoxy by Pierre du Moulin, his brother-in-law André Rivet at Leiden, and the three authors of the Consensus Helveticus (1675), Johann Heinrich Heidegger of Zurich, François Turrettini of Geneva and Lucas Gernler of Basel, which affirmed three central Calvinist doctrines: the literal inspiration of the Hebrew Old Testament, dots and all, the limited atonement, and immediate imputation. Perhaps it is not too fanciful to see in Milton’s metaphor a depiction

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of Saumur as safe from the quicksands of Roman Catholicism, the rocks of Calvinism and the Sirens’ song of Lutheranism.

3. The force of genre The theology of De Doctrina is for the most part unexceptionable, but on a small number of doctrines, some central (e.g. Christology), some peripheral (e.g. the creation) and some immensely contentious in the seventeenth century (e.g. mortalism), Milton adopts minority positions that seem at odds with his other writings. The genre of systematic theology, or systematics, is usefully distinguished from cognate genres such as biblical theology (which arises out of the exegetical tradition), dogmatic theology, practical theology, historical theology and modern genres such as political theology and process theology. The form was adumbrated in scholastic works such as Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, and at the Reformation was carried a stage further in treatises such as Melanchthon’s Loci Communes and Calvin’s Institutes. The distinctive form of Protestant systematic theology in the seventeenth century arises out of its methodology: it begins not with biblical texts, but rather with a method based on the logic of Petrus Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée). Essentially this method consisted of classifying propositions in order of generality. One began with a general proposition such as ‘logic is an art’ and worked gradually towards the specific rules of logic. In practice this process meant proceeding through a ramifying system of dichotomies. Whereas in a sporting tournament at the quarter final stage 8 teams play each other in pairs to become 4, 2 and then 1 (the winner), the method of Ramus worked in exactly the opposite direction, from the one to the many, so Ramist charts look like mirrors of those used to monitor the progress of tournaments. The method, which was deemed to be applicable to all disciplines, enabled the student of any body of knowledge to classify and memorise its principles. Its proponents argued that the method was useful for the professional work of ministers, physicians, orators, mathematicians and lawyers (MacIlmaine, 1574, 13–14) and also extended to archery, good posture and ‘even in the managing of your horse’ (Wotton, 1626, sigs A2v–A3r). John Eliot, the ‘Indian Apostle’, thought Ramus so important for an understanding of the Bible that in 1672 he


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produced an interlinear English and Algonquian edition of Ramus’ Dialecticae called (in the English title) The Logical Primer: some logical notions to initiate the Indians in the knowledge of the rule of reason. Theology was one of the disciplines on which the method was brought to bear. George Lawson, a detractor of the methodology, observed in his Theo-Politica (1657) that ‘many School-men, and some Modern Authors of Theological Systems, following the rules of the great Philosopher, have attempted to reduce the Doctrine contained in God’s Book, into the form of an Art or Science (as some use to speak)’. He goes on to explain (pp. 12–13) that these modern authors ‘tell us, that the Scriptures represent God to us 1. As to be known: And, 2. As to be worshipped: And so make the Parts of this Divine Doctrine to be 1. Knowledge 2. The Worship of God: And this hath much affinity with that Distribution of Theologie, into Faith and Obedience.’ This is a succinct account of how Milton and his fellow systematic theologians proceeded. Given that they were using the same method, it is perhaps not surprising that their ordonnances are in many respects similar. Indeed, the curiosity is the ways in which Milton differs from his contemporaries. In the preface to De Doctrina Milton explained that he prepared to write the treatise by ‘going diligently through a few of the shorter systems of divines’. Students of Milton have long followed Edward Phillips (Darbishire, 61) in recognizing that the most important cognate treatises are those of William Ames and Johan Wolleb. To those we might usefully add a selection of the names of other theologians who treated theology as an art based on logic: Thomas Cartwright, Dudley Fenner, William Perkins, Amandus Polanus, Lucas Trelcatius, Johann Gerhard, Johann-Heinrich Alsted, Theodorus Beza, Johannes Piscator and Ramus himself. These prominent theologians were not the only theological exponents of the methodology, but they are representative of both its uniformity and its diversity. William Ames is a typical figure in this distinctively Protestant tradition. Driven from Cambridge by his opposition to ceremonialism,

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Ames settled in the Netherlands, where his Calvinist polemics made him acclaimed as the ‘Hammer of the Arminians’ (see Keith Sprunger in ODNB). At the University of Franeker, in Friesland, he deployed his Ramist methodology (which he called technometria or technologia) to organize the curriculum; his essays on methodology, and those of his Franeker students, were collected in his Philosophemata (1643). He brought this method to bear on theology in Medulla SS theologiae, which appeared in a short version in 1623 and an expanded edition in 1627. It was Ames’s practice in his Ramist treatises to include a chart that set out schematically the dichotomous structure of the book, and the Medulla is no exception. In the English translation of 1643, the chart occupies 25 pages. The structure is the same as Milton’s: Book I concerns faith, Book II observance. Within this framework Ames was able to champion Calvinist doctrine and traditional Trinitarianism, so his position is not always the same as Milton’s; that said, the similarity of approach means that their words are often similar, and there is much about which they agree. Johan Wolleb is perhaps the most important influence on Milton’s treatise. He was a Swiss Calvinist who was professor of theology in his native city of Basel. In 1626 he published the first of many editions (see bibliography) of his Compendium theologiae Christianae. Like Ames’s treatise, it opens with Ramist charts which, as the title page of Alexander Ross’s abridged translation explains, are ‘for the help of weak Memories’. The theology of the treatise is Calvinist, and there are eccentricities, such as Wolleb’s insistence that creation was partly out of nothing and partly out of matter. In The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates Milton had described Thomas Cartwright and Dudley Fenner as ‘two of the Lernedest’ of English divines (Yale, III, 248). Cartwright was an arch-Calvinist and proto-Presbyterian. His systematic theology, which seems to be utterly unknown (and even escaped the learned gaze of Patrick Collinson in his fine ODNB account), is called in its first edition Christian Religion: substantiallie, methodicallie, plainlie and profitabllie treatised (London, 1611) and in the revised second edition (which we have used) A Treatise of Christian Religion, or the whole body and substance of divinitie (London, 1616); the Latin original seems not to have survived. The treatise begins with the usual charts and proceeds with the usual bifurcations, but is unusual in its catechistic questions and


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answers and in its incorporation of the Decalogue and the Lord’s Prayer; the latter innovation was later to be adopted by Wolleb, but not by Milton. The editor of the second edition (‘W[illiam] B[radshaw]’, on whom see ODNB) uses his preface to grumble about the earlier, unauthorized edition, which he faults because of its failure to deploy Cartwright’s ‘method’. In order to honour that ‘which the necessitie of the method which he propounded did require’, he shifts the discussion of Scripture ‘into a more fit place’ within the context of man’s renovation—which is where it is placed in systematic theologies in the Ramist tradition. It seems that the editor has reordered a treatise that anticipated the usual format of seventeenth-century systematic theologies into one that conforms to that format. If Cartwright was a proto-Ramist, his protégé Dudley Fenner was a rigorous champion of Ramus, whose method permeated all his writings (see ODNB). Fenner was a Calvinist and a passionate opponent of episcopacy. In common with several other systematic theologians, including Milton, he published a treatise on logic, the first section (only 17 pages long) of The Artes of Logicke and Rethorike, which seems to have been printed in Middelburg (where he had succeeded Cartwright as chaplain to the English colony) in 1584; this was an exposition of the Ramist method applied to subjects such as the godly household and (like Wolleb) the Lord’s Prayer. The following year he published Sacra theologia, sive, Veritas quae est secundum pietatem (Geneva, 1585, 1586, 1604). Although it is divided into ten books instead of the usual two, it is nonetheless structured according to the rules of the one true method (ad unicae & verae methodi leges descripta), a mantra that appears on the title pages of many books; the entire work is concerned with a methodical examination of Christian doctrine, so it is the equivalent of the first book of other treatises in the tradition, including Milton’s. Each chapter is prefaced with an explanatory chart. Other English treatises could be adduced, such as the Armilla Aurea (1590) of William Perkins (ODNB), which exercised considerable influence on the tradition, notably through Ames’s treatise (both were members of the Ramist clique that held sway at Christ’s College for decades). The treatise has two features that differentiate it from others: it ends with eight chapters on the damnation of the reprobate, the dark side of double predestination, and, alone of all treatises in

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the tradition, it closes the dichotomies at the end of the treatise by reversing the process of bifurcation. The systematic theologians on the continent do not deviate significantly from this tradition of structures based on logic. The Partitiones theologicae (1599) of the Basel Calvinist Amandus Polanus (von Polansdorf) was immensely influential. Like Milton’s treatise, it contains notions that in some circles would be thought eccentric, such as his advocacy of private confession, either to God or to a man (and if to a man, either a friend or a minister); Laud encouraged private confession, but this was not a common Protestant view. Like Fenner and Milton, Polanus wrote a Ramist treatise on logic. His Logicae libri duo (second edition, n.p., 1593) was declared by Thomas Granger (ODNB) to be a new branch of Ramist logic (Granger, 1620, sig. A4v), and the little-known Theologicall Logicke (1625) of John Terry (ODNB) announces that ‘the Logick places which I follow … are delivered by Petrus Ramus … [and] the exemplifying of Logick places I have taken from Amandus Polanus’. Polanus discusses the same subjects as Milton, in approximately the same order, although some variation occurs at the end of Book I, which is the same point (as argued by Campbell, 1976, and disputed by Kelley, 1989) at which the logical transitions in De Doctrina seem to have been left in a transitional stage between one plan and another. Many other continental theologians could be adduced. Johann Gerhard’s ten-volume Loci theologici proceeds entirely through dichotomies; it deals (like Cartwright’s treatise) only with faith. Johann-Heinrich Alsted (on whom see Hotson, 2000), the tutor of Comenius, published a logic book that aspired to reconcile the Aristotelians and the Ramists, and the quasi-Ramist Methodus SS Theologiae, the chiliasm of which is of interest to the student of Milton’s theology. Théodore de Bèze, Calvin’s successor at Geneva, was a friend of Ramus and a theologian respected by Milton; he never wrote a full-scale systematic theology, but his Theses theologicae uses the normal Ramist method. Jean Calvin had died too young to produce a Ramist treatise, but that omission was remedied by Johannes Piscator, professor of theology at Herborn and editor of many works by Ramus, who produced a methodized abridgement of the Institutes called Aphorismi doctrinæ Christianæ. Finally, it should be noted that Ramus himself had planned to write a theological treatise dealing with


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the ‘doctrine’ and ‘discipline’. The surviving fragment was published by his friends as Commentariorum de religione Christiana, which has sections on faith, the law, prayer and the sacraments; the dichotomous structure which the work would have displayed had Ramus completed it is not evident in this fragment, so, ironically, Ramus was the author of a non-Ramistic theological treatise. These treatises characterize the principal features of the genre of De Doctrina. Many are written by authors who have also written on logic, and all are concerned with method and with memory. All proceed through the same repeated sequence: definition—binary division—consectary. All treat the same subjects under similar headings in approximately the same order, which runs from the definition of God to eschatology. In uncontentious areas, their phrasing is often remarkably similar, and they use the same proof texts, often from the Junius-Tremellius Bible. They sometimes deviate from each other in points of doctrine, but for the most part they resemble each other in the same way the books of Latin grammar published during the period seem endlessly to echo each other. The doctrinal oddities are in some cases (including Milton’s) related to points of logic set out in their treatises on logic. The unanswerable question is whether the beliefs arose out of the logic or the logic was shaped to support pre-existing beliefs. Milton insisted in his preface to Ars Logicae that theology should not intrude into logic (CE, XI, 6; Yale, VIII, 212), but he was content that logic inform theology. The influence of logic and theology extended to both organization and theological precept. Milton designed his ‘methodical tractate’ with a view to establishing his faith and assisting his memory. It is memory that leads him to organize evidence that is scattered throughout the Bible into a compact body organized under headings. The case for doing so, he contends, rests on a divine command: The Apostle says, 2 Tim 1.13, ‘hold fast the form’, which the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews seems to have determined to adopt as the rule of his own conduct for teaching the heads of Christian doctrine in methodical arrangement. (DDC I.1; CE, XIV, 21)

Even the Apostle Paul is invoked to support the argument, on the grounds that he taught the Ephesians ‘an entire body of doctrine,

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formed according to a certain plan’, though the slimness of the evidence makes Milton concede that this ‘was probably not of great extent’ (DDC I.1; CE, XIV, 23). In Milton’s case, and in that of his fellow systematic theologians, the extent is very considerable indeed, and the result is hundreds of bifurcating distributions. Perhaps, as Thomas Fuller suggested, the natural correlative of the Ramist method is the carp: All I will add of carps is this, that Ramus himself doth not so much redound in Dichotomies as they do. Seeing no one bone is to be found in their body, which is not forked or divided into two parts at the end thereof. (Fuller, 1662, third pagination series, p. 98)

The individual points of doctrine are the flesh on the bones of the carp, and they too are shaped by the logic of Milton’s version of Ramus.

4. Antitrinitarianism The doctrine of the godhead now enshrined in Christian confessions of faith is, with the exception of Unitarians, resolutely trinitarian. The doctrine is, however, post-biblical, which means that there is no biblical constraint on elaborations of the doctrine. Trinitarianism in some form was widely accepted in seventeenth-century Europe, and most theologians would have agreed with Bunyan’s proclamation in The House of the Forest of Lebanon: The doctrine of the trinity! That is the substance, that is the ground and fundamental of all. For by this doctrine, and by this only, the man is made a Christian; and he that has not this doctrine, his profession is not worth a button.

Milton was one of many radical theologians who argued that the biblical evidence for the Trinity was very thin indeed. The remote origins of the Trinity can be found in the tricephalous gods of prehistoric Europe (see Pettazoni) and the triads of middle Platonism (see Kelly, 1977, 126–8). The idea of a triune god seems to have entered the Christian tradition through Theophilus of Antioch, the second-century theologian who is best known for having decided that Jesus must have been conceived on the first day of spring and


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therefore born on 25 December; that passage may be spurious, but Theophilus’s discerning of a divine triad (τρίας) of God and his word and his wisdom is genuine. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity rested centrally on the interpolated verse variously known as the Johannine Comma (in which ‘comma’ is used in the grammatical sense of ‘phrase’ and ‘Johannine’ refers to the First Epistle of John the Apostle) or the ‘Three Witnesses’, a medieval forgery still printed in many Bibles, and was supported by the instruction of Jesus to baptize ‘in the name’ (είς τὸ όνoμα) of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Matthew 28.19). Systematic theologians other than Milton grasped at this slight piece of evidence, speaking with one voice in noting that ‘name’ is singular, not plural (non in nominibus sed in nomine). As this evidence could not withstand scrutiny, medieval Christians produced evidence to support the doctrine (see Künstle, 1905). Some time in late antiquity a Christian read the verse that is now known as 1 John 5.8: ‘and there are three that bear witness in earth, the spirit, the water and the blood: and these three agree in one’. He clearly thought that he had found a proof text for the Trinity, and so wrote in the margin a gloss that must have said something like quoniam tres sunt, qui testamonium dant in caelo: Pater, Verbum, et Spiritus Sanctus; et hi tres unum sunt. This seemed like such a helpful gloss that by the ninth century it had slid from the margin into the text of the Bible. By the twelfth century it had been translated into Greek and, and so became part of the Bible, in which it now appears as 1 John 5.7: ‘for there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one’. The Comma was easy meat for Milton. He begins by observing mildly that ‘the orthodox view of the essential unity of the three persons of the Trinity finds its clearest expression in this verse’. He then explains that the verse is spurious, and that it does not appear in the Syriac, Arabic and Ethiopic versions (the latter two being gleaned from the Latin translations in Walton’s Biblia sacra polyglotta of 1654–7), nor in the majority of early Greek codices. Milton cites the verse from Beza’s translation of the Greek in the Junius-Tremellius Bible, as is his habit; the Comma is missing from the column containing Tremellius’s translation of the Syriac. Milton’s rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity occupies many polemical pages in De Doctrina, and also spills over into Paradise

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Lost, where the baptismal injunction of Jesus is stripped of its triadic formula, which is replaced by partisan remarks about the necessity of running water in baptism and about baptism being no more than a sign. Michael prophesies that Jesus will appear to his disciples and To them shall leave in charge To teach all nations what of them they learned And his salvation, them who shall believe Baptising in the profluent stream, the sign Of washing them from guilt of sin to life. Paradise Lost XII.439–43

Similarly, the allegory of Sin and Death in Book II contributes to a long tradition of Satanic trinities (see Hoogewerff, 1942–3) through its savage parody of the doctrine of the double procession of the Holy Spirit (see below for Milton’s pneumatology) in which the incestuous sexual union of Satan and his daughter Sin leads to the birth of Death; it seems possible that the arrow is aimed at the De Trinitate of Augustine, who had articulated the idea (apparently of his own invention) that the Holy Spirit was the embodiment of the mutual love of the Father and the Son. Milton was hardly alone in his antitrinitarianism, but his allies were not systematic theologians. Senior Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Zwinglians, Calvinists and Anglicans were united in their opposition, habitually decrying antitrinitarianism as the revival of an ancient heresy, and so castigating its proponents as Arians, Nestorians, Monarchians, Sabellians, Photinians, and Samosatenians. Advocates of antitrinitarianism included Anabaptists (e.g. the Swiss Ludwig Hätzer and the Netherlandish Adam Pastor), Spiritualists (e.g. the Netherlandish Johannes Campanus), the Neapolitan circle of Juan de Valdès (e.g. Girolamo Busale) and prominent figures such as Michael Servetus (whose De Trinitatis erroribus was a stepping-stone on the path to the stake) and Lelio and Fausto Sozzini (Socinus, the eponym of Socinianism). The principal centres of continental antitrinitarianism were Switzerland (especially the Italian expatriate community), Poland/Lithuania, Lower Hungary and Transylvania. In 1605 the Polish Unitarians, who had been led by Fausto Sozzini, issued the Racovian Catechism in a Polish version. Their college at Rakòw was suppressed in 1638 and all Socinians were expelled in


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1658. A Latin version sent to England with a dedication to James I was burnt in 1614. An English version by John Biddle (ODNB), published in Amsterdam in 1652, was, according to the diary of Lieuwe van Aitzema (Miller, 1990a), licensed by Milton; Parliament condemned the Catechism to the flames as ‘blasphemous, erroneous and scandalous’, but Milton appears to have been impenitent. Kelley rightly sees analogies with the Catechism in his annotation of the chapter on the Son in De Doctrina. The centre of antitrinitarianism eventually became Transylvania, which until their union in 1793 accommodated both an official Unitarian church and the unofficial church of the Polish exiles. In May 1655, when Cromwell wrote to György Rákóczi II, Prince of Transylvania, it was Milton who translated the letter that strengthened the diplomatic link between England and Transylvania. Within England, antitrinitarianism had been introduced by Bernardino Ochino (ODNB), pastor of the Italian church in London from 1547 to 1553 (and a noted advocate of polygamy), and in the late sixteenth century it was a capital offence; John Lewis, for example, was burnt in 1583 for antitrinitarianism. In Milton’s time antitrinitarianism was associated with the Hartlib circle (notably John Goodwin (ODNB)). Private sympathizers seem to have included Milton’s colleague Thomas May (ODNB), who was said by Aubrey to speak ‘slightingly of the Trinity’.

5. Christology With respect to the Son, Milton’s position in De Doctrina is that he is consubstantial with the Father but not co-essential: he shares the divine substance but has his own essence. The terms substantia and essentia have a complex history, as does the term persona, which Milton tends to avoid. In the Greek patristic tradition from which the theology of late antiquity emerged, a distinction was drawn between the substratum of the godhead, its single ousia (oύσίά), and its modes of existence, its three hypostaseis (ὺπoστάσεις). Ousia is properly translated into Latin as essentia, and hypostasis (plural hypostaseis) as substantia (or subsistentia). This clear distinction was soon muddied by a tendency to see the terms essentia and substantia as interchangeable.

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Augustine argued in De Trinitate that this confusion had become so widespread that it was best to acknowledge the conflation and to translate hypostasis as persona: in his view, therefore, one could say that the Trinity consisted of one essentia (or one substantia) and three personae. Subsequent usage followed the Vulgate in favouring substantia (the incorrect translation), so for centuries theologians recapitulated Tertullian in describing the Trinity as consisting of one substantia and three personae. At the Reformation, many (but not all) Protestants drew on the enhanced understanding of Greek to revert to the formula one essentia and three personae, but the distinction in usage did not reflect a different understanding of the doctrine; similarly, Protestants who wrote of one essentia and three substantiae (or subsistentiae) were making a linguistic point, not a theological one. Luther was content to see the terms as synonyms: usia, quod essentiam seu substanciam significat. The third term, persona, was a late arrival, though it carries with it echoes of Greek prosopon and Syriac parsopa. Although there may be precedents, the first well-known deployment of the term occurs in Beza’s translation of hypostasis as persona in his rendering of Hebrews 1.3 for his Latin New Testament. From there it travelled via the Geneva Bible to the Authorised Version of 1611, in which the Son is said to be ‘the express image of his [Father’s] person’. Milton yielded to the traditional translation of ousia as substantia, but adopted a minority position in translating hypostasis as essentia. He was, however, not alone, in that Tremellius had translated the Syriac qnoma as essentia in his New Testament, but the extent to which this position is unusual is muddled by the tendency of modern scholars to rely on Renaissance translations, which routinely translate essentia as ‘substance’ and substantia as ‘essence’, so that, for example, the declaration in Beza’s Tractationum theologicarum that unam esse divinam essentiam appears in Robert Fyll’s translation as ‘there is one onely dyvyne substaunce’. The position that Milton articulates in De Doctrina is driven in part by Tremellius’ rendering of the Syriac text of Hebrews 1.3, but also by the notion of ‘number’ articulated in Ars Logicae: Single things, or what are commonly called individuals, have form single and proper to themselves; certainly they differ in number among themselves, as no one denies. But what is differing in number among themselves except differing in single forms? For number, as Scaliger rightly says, is an


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affection following an essence; and never do they differ in number if not in essence—Here let the theologians awake—because if whatever things differ in number differ also in essence, but not in matter, necessarily they differ among themselves in forms, but not in common forms, therefore in proper ones.

Evigilent hic theologi. If the date of Ars Logicae (or of the interpolation of this phrase) could be established, it might be possible to chart the progress of Milton’s Christology. Father Ong tied Ars Logicae to Milton’s work as a teacher, and so thought it a work of the 1640s, speculating that the theological passages may have been added later (Yale, VIII, 146), but he errs in his assumption that Milton stopped teaching in 1647; in the mid–1650s, when he was engaged on the composition of De Doctrina, he was also teaching Richard Jones, and pupils of sorts continued to come to him after the Restoration; ‘the Youths that hee instructed from time to time’ (Skinner, in Darbishire, 33) included William Davenant, son of the dramatist. Whatever the date of Ars Logicae, it is clear that the logic informs the theology. In De Doctrina I.5 Milton explains that ‘since a numerical difference originates in difference of essence, those who are two numerically must also be two essentially’. The theological significance of this observation becomes apparent many pages later: It will be universally acknowledged that the Son now at least differs numerically from the Father; but that those who differ numerically must differ also in their proper essences, as the logicians express it, is too clear to be denied by anyone possessed of common reason. Hence it follows that the Father and Son differ in essence.

Elsewhere in the Ars Logicae, Milton seems to break his own rule against the intrusion of theology into logic, this time to defend his reading of a central antitrinitarian proof text. He sets out Aristotle’s four modal formulas (it is necessary, it is impossible, it is possible, it is contingent) and then declares a preference for Aristotle’s secondary modals (exclusives, exceptives and restrictives), which he deems ‘more important than the primary ones’. The theology emerges in his discussion of the exclusive: An exclusive is either of the subject or the predicate. An exclusive of the subject, when the sign of the exclusive is prefixed, excludes all other subjects from the predicate. But reason would in vain dictate this rule if certain modern logicians, among whom Keckermann may be named, are permitted

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at once to overturn it completely by producing a canon for the purpose. ‘The exclusive’, he says, ‘does not exclude the concomitants of the subject, as in the statement The Father alone is true God.’ Here, he says, ‘the concomitant is not excluded, namely the Son and the Holy Spirit’. But who does not see that this canon is provided for making sport of that abundantly clear passage John 17.3? (AL II.3; CE, XI, 313–15)

Bartholomäus Keckermann (on whom see Freedman) was the most important Reformed (i.e. Calvinist) to reject Ramus in favour of traditional Aristotelianism. Milton’s rejection of Keckermann’s Christology is grounded in his rejection of Keckermann’s anti-Ramist logic. How does Milton’s view accord with that of other early modern systematic theologians? The unanimous view of theologians such as Calvin, Zanchius, Musculus, Bucanus, Polanus, Ames and Wolleb was that the godhead consisted of one substantia in three personae. Milton avoided the trinitarian formulation, but if one takes his views on the Son and the Spirit together, he could be said to believe that the godhead consisted of one substantia in three essentiae. Such a formulation would, however, be deceptive, partly because it is triadic, but also because it implies a degree of equality and mutuality that was not part of Milton’s thinking. The Son was generated in time, and therefore is perpetual but not eternal, in that he had a beginning. Milton also denies the ubiquity of the human nature of the exalted Son, an unusual position that he shares with Bucanus (Guillaume du Buc), professor of theology at Lausanne who died before he could take up a post at Saumur. Again the origin of the position appears to lie in the Ars Logicae: discussing the ‘error of too many terms’, Milton constructs a syllogism: ‘the right hand of God is everywhere, the humanity of Christ sits at the right hand of God, therefore the humanity of Christ is everywhere’ (AL II.9; CE, XI, 377). The syllogism appears to be sound, but is in Milton’s view invalidated on the grounds that ‘right hand’ is used in two different senses. Similarly, in De Doctrina Milton lists the nine biblical references to Christ sitting on the right hand of God, and then adds, in line with his remarks in the Ars Logicae, that ‘the human nature of Christ, although exalted to


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a state of highest glory, exists nevertheless in one definite place, and has not, as some contend, the attribute of ubiquity’. Where does Milton’s Christology place him in relation to traditional antitrinitarian formulas? He shares with Arius the view that the Son was not eternal, but does not believe that the Son was created ex nihilo, insisting that the Son was begotten, not created. He opposes the view attributed to Nestorius that the Son consisted of two separate persons, insisting instead on a twofold nature: Natura duplex est: divina et humana (DDC I.14). Although the contention of the Monarchians that the Son did not have a separate subsistentia might seem to resemble Milton’s position, he could not have subscribed either to the views of the Adoptionist (or ‘Dynamic’) Monarchians such as Paul of Samosata, who limited the divinity of the Son to the influence of the Father on his human person and denied that he had a separate hypostasis, or to those of the Modalist Monarchians or Sabellians (also known as Patripassians, as they believed that the Father suffered along with the Son), who held that the godhead was only a succession of modes, whereas Milton believed that Son and Spirit were persons. And although Milton did not believe that the Son was eternal, he did not, like Photinus, deny his pre-existence, nor did he subscribe to an adoptionist Christology. The relationship with subordinationism is more problematical. The term originated in the nineteenth century, when it was used by German and English theologians to denote a tendency in certain theologians of late antiquity to deny the co-equality of the persons of the godhead (see, Marcus 1963). The umbrella of subordinationism was sufficiently capacious to accommodate the Christology both of church fathers such as Justin and Irenaeus, and of heretical groups such as the Arians and the Pneumatomachi (on whom see below). The Council of Constantinople in 381 was the first to affirm the formula of one God in three co-equal persons, and in clearing the way for that affirmation it condemned all Arian and Arianizing doctrines. In modern works that deal with theology and church history, this condemnation is described in terms of subordinationism, so the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, for example, declares that ‘subordinationism was condemned by the Council of Constantinople’. This theological shorthand gives the mistaken impression that subordinationism was a doctrine analogous

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to Arianism, when it was actually not a doctrine but a tendency within Arianism. In recent years, as John Rumrich has shrewdly observed (Dobranski and Rumrich, 1998, 80–1), subordinationism has been revived by Miltonists ranging from Hunter, Patrides and Adamson (1971) to Danielson (1982) with a view to claiming Milton for some form of orthodox Christianity. The question of whether the subordinationist elements in Milton’s Christology constitute an orthodoxy or a heterodoxy need not trouble students of midseventeenth-century England, where all shades of antitrinitarianism found proponents. Milton was defensive about his Christology, hence the preface to De Doctrina I.5 and the huge length of the chapter, but that was because he was distinguishing himself from other systematic theologians. In other circles throughout England and continental Europe, antitrinitarianism was alive and well.

6. Pneumatology The theology of the Holy Spirit has long been a battlefield. The late-fourth-century debate about the divinity of the Holy Spirit was to reverberate down through the centuries. As Gregory of Nazianzus explained in a sermon preached in 380, some thought the Spirit was God, but others argued that it was a force (ἐνέργεια) or a creature. The group of theologians known in its early stages as Pneumatomachi (spirit-fighters) and later as Macedonians denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit, but maintained (against the Arians) the full divinity of the Son. This debate culminated in the De Spirito Sancto of Basil the Great; Milton’s page references to this work are consistent with his having access to a copy of the Paris 1618 Opera. At the Council of Constantinople (381) the full divinity of the Holy Spirit was accepted and Macedonianism repudiated. Thereafter the most important treatment of the doctrine was Augustine’s De Trinitate. The Holy Spirit was deemed to have processed from God by spiration rather than generation, but the mode of procession became a matter of dispute in the ninth century. The eastern Church gradually adopted the doctrine of the single procession of the Holy Spirit, according to which the Spirit proceeded from a single font of divinity in the godhead. The western Church, on the other hand, adopted


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the doctrine of the double procession of the Holy Spirit, according to which spiration took the form of a joint procession from God the Father and the Son. The Latin term filioque (‘and [from] the Son’) was first added to the Creed (in which the Holy Spirit was thereafter said to have proceeded from the Father ‘and the Son’) at the Third Council of Toledo (589), and debate about the issue thereafter centred on this term. In England, the Thirty-Nine Articles incorporate the doctrine of the double procession of the Holy Spirit, a formulation that Milton never considers in any detail. In De Doctrina I.6 Milton argues that the Spirit (like the Son) is made of the substantia of God the Father but does not share the essentia (or hypostasis) of the Father. In his opening paragraph he explicitly denies the notion that the Spirit processed by spiration, declaring that it cannot be said on the basis of scripture whether it came to exist by generation or creation (nec generari dicitur, neque creari) and arguing that procession and emanation are irrelevant to the issue of the nature of the Holy Spirit. In some respects, Milton might be described as a latter-day Pneumatomachian. The relationship of his position to the pneumatology of Trinitarians can be seen in the closeness with which he tracks Wolleb. In dealing with arguments for the divinity of the Spirit, Milton says that it is usual (solet) to adduce a set of proof texts (Itaque spiritum sanctum esse Deum defendi solet, CE, XIV, 380). The order in which he takes the texts, from Acts 5.3–4 to Matthew 28.19 (CE, XIV, 390), tracks Wolleb’s order in Compendium Theologicae Christianae I.2.

7. Creation and creationism That the world was created by God was not a matter of debate. The points of contention concern the source material, the precise nature of the Son’s role, the relation of the act of creation to the advent of time, and the creation of the soul.

a. The source material In antiquity the Plotinian doctrine of emanationism, whereby an insentient absolute emanated progressively lower modalities of spirit (hypostaseis) from the One to the Intellect (nous) to the soul (psyche) to matter (hyle), was a casualty of the campaign against Gnosticism,

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and by the end of the second century had been displaced by the doctrine that the world was created by a sentient god out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo). Emanationism left a residue, however, in the Neoplatonic notion of creatio ex materia præexistente, which commended itself to church fathers such as Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria and was supported by a phrase in the Wisdom of Solomon (11.17) to the effect that the Almighty hand had ‘made the world of matter without form’. This view was absorbed into later patristic thinking through a compromise: if God made the world out of unformed matter, then at an earlier stage he had made that matter out of nothing. This two-stage creation was championed by a host of early-modern theologians, such as Lukas Trelcatius and Wolleb. The doctrine of the creation as set out in De Doctrina I.7 is coloured by Milton’s antitrinitarianism, inasmuch as the Son’s role is said to be secondary and the Spirit that brooded on the face of the waters is not deemed to have a separate persona. Milton’s fundamental disagreement is his rejection of creatio ex nihilo in favour of what he calls creatio ex Deo or a Deo. The preposition is important, because although critics sometimes allude to a Miltonic doctrine of creatio de Deo, the phrase is never used of the creation in De Doctrina; as Augustine explains in De natura boni, ‘from him’ (ex ipso) does not mean the same thing as ‘of him’ (de ipso). Milton’s position is essentially a return to that of Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria; in common with the Cambridge Platonists, Milton, in this instance as in his Christology, moved from Aristotelian Latin theology to Greek Platonic theology. The logic that carried him to this particular theological position is set out in Ars Logicae I.7, in which God is said to embrace all four causes (efficient, material, formal and final), and that creation must have a material cause, which must be God or nothing; it cannot be nothing, therefore it must be God. This position does not shut down the opposition as resolutely as Milton might have hoped, because some would argue that matter and form, as internal causes, constitute the thing itself. Milton therefore erects what is known in logic as a conditional syllogism: he begins with the premises that all things have four causes, and God is all four of those causes. He then states the conditional: if matter and form are considered as internal causes,


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then they are not causes, but effects. It must follow, he reasons, that either all things have two causes only, or God is not the cause of everything. Both parts of this disjunction are false, since they each deny the premises, therefore the conditional is false (one part of a disjunction must be true). Milton’s position rests on this logic (Campbell, 1979).

b. The role of the Son The world was created by the Father through the Son. The Son, as the Nicene Creed phrases it, is he through whom everything was made (per quem omnia facta sunt). The difficulty lies in the preposition per, which, in Milton’s view, signals a secondary cause. The basis of the argument lies, as is so often the case, in Ars Logicae: Instruments are … reckoned among the helping causes. … Instruments, however, do not act of themselves, but are used or help … . In this sense almost all helping and servant causes can be called instrumental … . [Secondary causes] depend on the first or prior causes, and each is a kind of effect. (AL I.4; CE, XI, 37–9)

This is the logic that drives the contention in De Doctrina that God the Father ‘comprehends within himself all lesser causes; whereas the Son is only him through [per] whom are all things; wherefore he is the less principal cause’ (DDC I.7; CE, XV, 9). The Son, therefore, is, in terms of Ars Logicae, ‘a kind of effect’.

c. The timing of the Creation It was a commonplace that the world was created in time (in tempore) or, as Augustine would have it, with time (cum tempore). Milton, this time driven by his Christology, begs to differ. He argues in De Doctrina I.5 that the decree whereby God begot the Son must precede the act of begetting, and the gap signals the advent of time. The creation of the world took place after the generation of the Son and probably after the fall of the angels, and so was an event embedded in time rather than the mark of its inception. Milton’s view that angels were also created at some period in time (DDC I.7; CE, XV, 33) but before the six days of creation was at odds with the usual view in systematic theologies, though it had patristic support: as Milton says in the Argument to Book I of Paradise Lost, ‘for that angels were

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long before this visible creation, was the opinion of many ancient fathers’.

d. The creation of the soul The term ‘creationism’ has two distinct meanings. It now refers to the anti-Darwinian stance of believers in the hexaemeric account of creation in Genesis (now updated as ‘intelligent design’), but in older theological usage it denotes the view that God creates fresh souls for human beings as they are born. The contrasting view, which is known as traducianism (from Latin tradux, ‘sprout’), maintains either that the soul is generated with the body or that (as Origen insisted) was pre-existent. Jerome was a creationist, Tertullian and other Latin fathers were traducianists, and Augustine was undecided. The distinction matters because it impinges on arguments about hamartology: hereditary sin is incompatible with creationism. Milton, in common with many early modern theologians, has it both ways: he believed that sin was common to all humans, but also that it is an act of the individual human will. On the issue of the generation of the soul he was a traducianist, in that he thought the soul was contained in all parts of the body, including semen, and that the souls of a man’s children were transmitted through their father’s semen and not created afresh with each conception or birth. This argument is driven by Milton’s logic, in which he says that, A subject is that to which something is adjoined … . A thing is said to serve as a subject either by receiving its attributes or preoccupying them. Whence subject can be divided into receiving subject, which the Greeks call δεκτικόν, and appropriating subject, which is commonly called ‘object’ because its attributes are appropriated. (AL I.10; CE, VI, 59–61; translation revised)

The same terminology is deployed in De Doctrina to support a traducianist position: Again, if sin be communicated by generation, and transmitted from father to son, it follows that what is the πρῶτoν δεκτικόν, or original subject of sin, namely the rational soul, must be propagated in the same manner … . If the soul be equally diffused throughout any given whole, and throughout every part of that whole, how can the human seed, the noblest and most intimate part of all the body, be imagined destitute and devoid of the soul of the


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parents, or at least of the father, when communicated to the son by the laws of generation? (DDC I.7; CE, XV, 47–9)

Milton’s hamartology is driven by his logic, but is also coloured by his anti-Galenic embryology, which also contributed to his mortalism (see below).

8. Soteriology The Protestant notion that salvation is secured sola fide, through faith rather than works, was first formulated by Luther, but it was not without patristic precedent: in Ambrosiaster’s much-quoted phrase, qui credit in Christum, salvus sit sine opera: sola fide gratis accipit remissionem peccatorum (‘a person who believes in Christ can be saved without works; by faith alone he receives the forgiveness of sins’). The difficulty for Protestants was that the biblical evidence was to some extent contradictory. The central problem was the Epistle of James, which declared that ‘by works a man is justified, and not by faith alone’ (2.24); Luther dealt with this inconvenience by casting doubt on the canonicity of the Epistle and by hardening Paul’s supportive statement in the Epistle to the Romans by inserting the word ‘alone’, so that Romans 3.28 became der Mensch gerecht werde ohne des Gesetzes Werke [allein] durch den Glauben (‘a man is justified by faith [alone] without the deeds of the law’). In Ars Logicae Milton follows Luther, in that his example of an ‘exceptive’, which is signalled by words such as ‘alone’, ‘only’, ‘merely’ (solus, tantum, duntaxat), is ‘Faith alone justifies’ (sola fides justificat; AL II.3; CE, XI, 315). In De Doctrina, Milton appears to take the standard line that justification is by faith alone (DDC I.4; CE, xiv, 123) but he adds that a saving faith cannot be devoid of works (DDC I.16; CE, xv, 339). In II.1, the logical basis of his position becomes apparent: he explains that, It is faith that justifies, not agreement with the Decalogue; and that which justifies can alone render any work good; none therefore of our works can be good, but by faith; hence faith is the essential form of good works, the definition of form being, that through which a thing is what it is (CE, XVII, 9)

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That final phrase, sic enim forma definitur, per quam res est id quod est, is restating one in Ars Logicae: forma est causa per quam res est id quod est (AL I.7; CE, XI, 58). Milton’s precise position can be discerned by a consideration of the two notions that lie at the heart of soteriology: the atonement, which is the means by which the godhead effects the salvation of a proportion of humans, and the doctrine of grace, which concerns the means by which humans secure salvation.

a. Atonement There were, broadly speaking, four competing doctrines of the atonement: the recapitulation, ransom, satisfaction and forensic theories. The first, which is particularly associated with Irenaeus, was that Jesus was the recapitulator generis humani, and so recapitulated in his person the entire human race; the race fell through Adam, and was subsequently redeemed by Jesus, the second Adam. The second, which had patristic support in both East and West, was the ransom theory, according to which the life of Jesus was paid as a ransom to Satan to pay for the sins of humankind; in the usual elaborations of this theory, Jesus was disguised by human flesh and so became a divine mousetrap (so Augustine) or fishhook (so Gregory the Great), and so Satan was defeated by the securing of the ransom. The third, which was memorably formulated by Anselm in Cur deus homo? (‘Why [did] God [become] man?’) was the theory of satisfaction, in which Jesus became man in order to pay the penalty due to God as reparation for the dishonour caused by the fall; the wrath of God was satisfied by the sacrifice of his Son. The fourth theory, which emerged at the Reformation, was the forensic theory, which drew on earlier theories and on juridical language in order to understand the atonement as a legal transaction, which was typically described as a contract or pact or the discharging of a debt. In this doctrine, which is sometimes known as the ‘penal-substitutionary’ theory, God the Father is the judge and Jesus is the advocate of fallen humankind who decides to bear the penalty on behalf of his client, so satisfying the requirement of an angry God for satisfaction and the necessity that humankind be punished for sin. This theory gained wide acceptance among Protestants, and, at a popular level, was responsible for the Protestant image of an angry God. At a theological level, questions left open for debate within the overall framework of the forensic


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theory included the issue of whether Jesus died for all sinners (universal atonement) or only for the elect (limited atonement), and the contention of the Socinians that the death of Jesus was exemplary rather than efficacious. Milton’s thinking on many doctrines developed throughout his life, but he always resolutely defended the forensic theory of the atonement: in ‘Upon the Circumcision’ the Son is said to have ‘satisfied’ the Father, ‘And the full wrath beside/Of vengeful justice bore for our excess’; similarly, Paradise Lost includes phrases such as ‘die he or justice must’ and ‘rigid satisfaction, death for death’. In De Doctrina Milton’s position is set out in I.16, ‘On the Ministry of Redemption’. The organization of the chapter follows a well-worn path: like Ames and Wolleb, for example, he divides the administration of redemption into humiliation and exaltation. Its theology, except for its position on mortalism (see below) and its Arminian inflections, is uncontentious.

b. Grace The notion of grace as the transformation of the fallen sinner on the initiative of God originates in Augustine’s writings against Pelagius. The necessity of grace was universally agreed, but its manner has been a matter of embittered debate since the fourth century. Problems arose with respect to the free will of humans (was grace irresistible?) and predestination (were some predestined to perpetual damnation?); the former remained unresolved for centuries, but the doctrine of reprobation (predestination to hell) was anathematized at the Second Council of Orange in 529. Augustine strove to preserve the freedom of the human will by distinguishing between prevenient grace, which was administered by God before conversion, and subsequent grace, which sustained the believer in the Christian life. He also distinguished sufficient grace (as in Milton’s ‘sufficient to have stood but free to fall’), which was a form of offer, and efficacious grace, which was irresistible. Thomas Aquinas added habitual grace and actual grace to the stew, and successors stirred in congruent grace, which is grace for the performance of good works; congruism lived on into the CounterReformation thanks to its Jesuit and Molinist champions, but Article XIII of the Thirty-Nine Articles denied the contention that works done before the act of justification ‘deserve grace of congruity’. The Reformers returned to variations on the Augustinian position, but

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Calvin hardened the doctrine by insisting on absolute predestination and the indefectibility of grace, whereas Augustine had been silent on the former and had argued that grace was not indefectible, because perseverance was requisite for salvation; his followers divided between hard-line supralapsarians (or ‘antelapsarians’), who argued that God decreed the election and reprobation of individual humans before the creation, and so before the fall, and moderate sublapsarians (or ‘infralapsarians’ or ‘postlapsarians’), who argued that God decided the fate of individual humans after the fall; Arminius, on the other hand, revived the ancient compromise between Augustine and Pelagius that had been proposed by John Cassian, who in the position known as semipelagianism accepted the Augustinian doctrine of original sin but rejected total depravity and the irresistibility of grace, insisting on the freedom of the human will. This Arminian-Cassian doctrine, which grew out of the sublapsarianism of the Netherlands, was adopted by the Laudian church in Caroline England (see Tyacke). In the Netherlands it was formulated in the Remonstrance of 1610; later proponents included Episcopius and Philipp van Limborch (who was asked by Elsevier to read De Doctrina; see page 7). This position should be distinguished from the synergism of Melanchthon, who argued that the Holy Spirit was the prime cause of the soterial act but that the human will could cooperate with the Spirit. These debates were further complicated by disagreement about the relation between grace and the sacraments: were the sacraments instruments of grace or symbols of grace? Where does the Milton of De Doctrina stand in relation to these arguments? As a genre, Protestant systematic theology was for the most part a Calvinist form, and Puritan theologians tended to argue strongly in favour of predestination while nonetheless insisting on the necessity of evangelism. Milton and a few Dutch Arminians swam against the Calvinist tide, but it is not clear when he began to do so. In the mid-1630s he was attending a Laudian chapelof-ease in Hammersmith, and seems to have been sympathetic to Laudian Arminianism, which was ceremonial and sacramental. The evidence lies in Comus, in which, as Thomas Corns has observed (Dobranski and Rumrich, 1998, 43–4), the Lady is freed through the sacramental intervention of Sabrina. Three years later, however, the anti-clericalism of ‘Lycidas’ would seem to imply that Milton


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had turned against the Laudian church and its priestly ceremonialism. There are several possible turning-points in 1637. In the public sphere, the trial of William Prynne, John Bastwick and Henry Burton (all in ODNB) in June may have disillusioned Milton. In the private sphere, the significant incident may have been the visitation of St Michael’s church in Horton in August 1637: the record of the visitation, recently discovered by Edward Jones (2003), shows that Milton’s father was required to lower his pew, and that the position of Sara Milton’s grave came under criticism. It is not inconceivable that a grieving family could be turned against the Laudian church by such an incident. In the early 1640s he was oddly silent about Laudian Arminianism in the antiprelatical tracts (Corns, in Dobranski and Rumrich, 1998, 42), despite the fact that criticism of Laudian Arminianism was almost universally present in such discourse. Silence is never a good basis for argument, but several possibilities present themselves: perhaps Arminianism was not a central issue in 1640–1, or perhaps Milton still felt some lingering allegiance to sacramental Arminianism, or perhaps the fact that his adversary Joseph Hall was not an Arminian rendered the issue irrelevant. By 1644, however, Milton was clearly struggling with the theology of grace. In Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce he linked Arminius with the Jesuits in ‘making God the author of sinne’, and in Areopagitica Arminius is said to have been ‘perverted’ (i.e. deflected from the truth of Calvinism) by reading a book that he had set out to confute. Despite this bluster, however, it is clear from Areopagitica that his notion of the freedom of the human will had already been affected by his reading of Remonstrant works, including the Opera of Arminius. Milton’s position in De Doctrina is remarkably independent. He had read Arminius and Simon Episcopius, but Stephan Curcellaeus’s ‘De Vocibus Trinitatis’ was not published till 1659, and the verbal parallels with De Doctrina reflect common sources rather than direct influence; the same is true of parallels with Philipp van Limborch’s later Institutiones theologiae christianae (1686), for which indebtedness would have had to flow the other way. Van Limborch had read De Doctrina, and had recommended that the work not be published because of its Arianism, but the account of his report says nothing about Arminianism.

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Once again it is the Ars Logicae that adumbrates and seems to shape the formulations of De Doctrina. Discussing the idea of fortune, Milton argues that ‘ignorance of causes has fabricated the name of fortune’. The causes of which humans are necessarily aware are those conceived in heaven, so Milton concludes that ‘fortune should be placed in heaven, but should be called by the different name of divine providence’. If the idea of necessity is conjoined to that of providence, then these heavenly causes should be called ‘fate’. Recognizing the problem that fate is antithetical to free will, Milton moves towards the argument that he was to develop in De Doctrina: certainly theology will discuss providence better than will logic. Yet this by the way: fate or the decree of God forces no one to do evil; and on the hypothesis of divine prescience all things are certain though not necessary. (AL I.5; CE, XI, 49–51)

In De Doctrina Milton sought to reconcile the providence of God with the freedom of the human will by arguing that the decrees of God that pertain to humans are all contingent. He considers the possibility that human actions are entirely controlled by God, and dismisses it on the grounds that ‘no other law of necessity can be admitted than what logic, or in other words, what sound reason teaches’ (DDC I.3; CE, XIV, 71). At the conclusion of a complex exploration of the issues, Milton offers a summary, explaining that although God has foreknowledge of all events, he has not decreed them all absolutely: lest the consequence should be that sin in general would be imputed to the Deity, and evil spirits and wicked men exempted from blame … . I will allow that future events which God has foreseen will happen certainly, but not of necessity. They will happen certainly, because the divine prescience cannot be deceived, but they will not happen necessarily, because prescience can have no influence on the object foreknown, inasmuch as it is only an intransitive action. (DDC I.3; CE, XIV, 85)

This logic leads Milton to the view that Adam fell through the exercising of his free will, and that predestination was God’s decision, taken before the fall, to elect to salvation those whom he knew were going to have a saving faith; in theological terms, this is general election rather than particular election. Thus far Milton recapitulates


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the Arminian position of Arminius, Episcopius, Curcellaeus and Limborchus. Where he differs is on the issue of reprobation, on which Arminians took a quasi-Calvinist line that resembles double predestination. Milton, by contrast, argues that reprobation ‘must not be attributed, like the election of grace, to the divine will alone’. Reprobation lies, he explains, ‘not so much in the divine will as in the obstinacy of [human] minds; nor is it the decree of God, but rather of the reprobates themselves, by their refusal to repent while it is in their power’ (DDC I.4; CE, XIV, 153–5). This position finds no antecedents in the theological traditions of English sacramental Arminians like Laud or Dutch Arminians, but there are analogies in the radical Arminianism of figures such as John Goodwin, and even Servetus. It also appears in Paradise Lost, in which Milton’s God articulates the doctrine: Some I have chosen of peculiar grace Elect above the rest; so is my will: The rest shall hear me call, and oft be warned Their sinful state, and to appease betimes The incensed Deity, while offered grace Invites. (Paradise Lost III.183–8)

9. Mortalism The disappearance of purgatory from the geography of Protestantism left an awkward gap between the death of the body and the last judgement. One response to this difficulty was the heresy known as mortalism, which had several variants. The belief that the soul dies with the body but is resurrected at the last judgement is known as thnetopsychism; the belief that the soul sleeps from the moment of death until the last judgement is known as psychopannychism (which was defended by Luther and Tyndale); the belief that the soul simply and permanently ceases to exist is known as annihilationism. All three theories were exclusively Protestant, in that they could not be reconciled with the Catholic doctrine of the intercession of saints, because sleeping or dead saints cannot intercede. At the Reformation, thnetopsychism and psychopannychism were roundly denounced by Calvin in his Psychopannychia (1542; English translation, London,

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1581), and the heresy of psychopannychism was one of the factors that led to the execution of Servetus. Mortalism was an ancient heresy (see Burns, 1972), and in the mid-seventeenth-century English context it was also a contemporary one, in that there were many mortalists amongst radical Anabaptists, and the Westminster Assembly condemned the doctrine. Maurice Kelley thought that Milton was a thnetopsychist (Yale, VI, 91–8), and Christopher Hill described him as a psychopannychist (Hill, 1977, 317–23). Both may be right, in that the latter term embraced both views (Williams, 1962, 582–3), but thnetopsychism more precisely corresponds to Milton’s terminology in De Doctrina I.13 (‘On the Death which is called the Death of the Body’). When Milton adopted this position is not clear. In line 8 of Sonnet XIV (‘When faith and love’), the good works of Catharine Thomason are said to have followed her up to joy and bliss forever; it is not clear how much theological pressure the line can bear, but it certainly seems to imply that she has already gone to heaven; the same might be said of Epitaphium Damonis, in which Diodati is said to have flown to the stars (ad astra). In the case of the dedication to Parliament of The Judgement of Martin Bucer (1644), Milton seems to assume that Bucer may be listening to the debate (‘And he, if our things heer below arrive him where he is, does not repent him … ’, Yale, II, 436). The mortalism of De Doctrina seems to be a 1650s position. Despite his conviction that the issue should be numbered amongst the adiaphora, he defends it pugnaciously: those who disagree do so because they haven’t given the matter enough thought. Again the origins of the doctrine seem to lie in the Ars Logicae, where in his discussion of the axiom Milton takes the phrase ‘the dead are not’ to mean that they do not exist (AL II.4; CE, XI, 37); in De Doctrina he takes the same approach with phrases such as ‘Joseph is not’ (Genesis 42.36) and Rachel’s children ‘were not’ ( Jeremiah 31.15; Matthew 2.18). Elsewhere in the Ars Logicae, Milton chooses to dispute Cicero’s contention that the spirit (animus) is immortal (AL II.11; CE, XI, 407–9). The argument in De Doctrina hinges on the understanding of biblical verses such as ‘I tell you truly today you will be with me in paradise’; in his exposition of the punctuation (in which he insists that there is no comma after ‘today’) and the meaning of ‘paradise’ (which Milton distinguishes from heaven), he is opposing


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Calvinist theologians such as Polanus but agreeing with Arminian theologians such as Curcellaeus. Milton calls in the support of Beza, but draws on his translation and notes in the Junius-Tremellius Bible rather than the contrary position set out in Theses theologicae.

10. Polygamy Polygamy was a subject that interested Milton for much of his life. In the late 1630s he had noted in his Commonplace Book the observation of Justin Martyr ‘that the polygamy of the ancient Jews was by no means forbidden’, and he later observed that ‘to forbidd Polygamy to all hath more obstinat rigor in it then wisdom’. In the History of Britain he referred to the ‘liberty not unnatural for one man to have many Wives’. He was not alone in this view, as Leo Miller showed in his John Milton among the Polygamophiles, but systematic theologians such as Ames and Wolleb roundly condemned polygamy. Milton’s insistence on the legality of polygamy in De Doctrina arises out of an apparently innocuous passage in his Ars Logicae. There is, he explains, no good reason Why in one related single thing there cannot be a multiplex relation to many correlated things; if there may be only one relation by number between two things, it should be considered as many times as there are correlatives; as many times of the father as there are sons; as many times of the son as there are parents, to wit father and mother; of the brother as many times as there are brothers and sisters.

The list does not include ‘as many times of the husband as there are wives’, but this is precisely the argument that is deployed in De Doctrina: In the same sense therefore as if a man has many sons, his paternal relationship towards them all is manifold, but towards each individually is single and complete in itself; by parity of reasoning, if a man has many wives, the relation which he bears to each will not be less perfect in itself, nor will the husband be less ‘one flesh’ with each of them than if he had only one wife.

Milton was not alone in his conclusion. Luther had condoned the bigamy of Philip of Hesse, various Anabaptists repudiated wives who refused to be rebaptized and took second wives, and notoriously John of Leiden and the Anabaptists of Münster practised godly

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polygamy. The issue of polygamy impinges on the wider debate about embryology (see Irwin, 1978). Milton, in common with radical advocates of polygamy, stressed the centrality of the male seed in procreation, a contention that affected both hamartology and Christology (because the mother of Jesus is reduced to an incubator for the divine seed); the alternative Galenic embryology accords a role to the mother that was theologically problematical.

6 The Latin Style The Latin style of De Doctrina Christiana has hardly begun to receive published description, examination or appreciation. This may be because the other issues which the treatise raises have always taken precedence over stylistic ones, even in times when Milton scholars read the work in its original Latin. So to read its Latin for its own sake and then write about it on the same footing is an unprecedented enterprise. The aim is, albeit belatedly, to identify stylistic issues; to describe and analyse the Latinity by a series of connected studies; and to appraise it by some of the relevant criteria, meaning among other ones the humanist norms and the ancients’ concept of pleasure. The 180 years since the work was first published do provide some starting-points for our enquiries, positive as well as negative. At its first reception, a Latin-reading intelligentsia was understandably more occupied with the theological substance than with the style: was the work orthodox, how did it relate to Paradise Lost, was it by Milton at all? That nobody till recent times thought its Latin unorthodox or unlike Milton’s has a bearing on the present state of debate. More recently, the first two questions preoccupied Arthur Sewell and Maurice Kelley. To Kelley in particular, whose monograph of 1941 and contributions to the Yale Milton volume VI remain essential tools for the study of Milton’s theology, the work seemed unorthodox and thus not unlike the epic, for Kelley saw both works as by an unorthodox Milton. In his Yale ‘Observations’ Kelley praised the Latin style for such local beauties or highlights as its imagery or its dialogic vociferation (pp. 103–6), before gliding back into further theological, substantive observations. The editors of the Yale edition,

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it has to be said, missed an opportunity to put the discussion of De Doctrina, style and all, onto a sounder basis: because that edition gives no Latin text, Kelley in his footnotes has to incorporate snippets of the original Latin when he needs or wants to make stylistic comments, and the passages of Wolleb which affect Milton’s text are not always given in their Latin. In sum, Kelley gives indications and promptings, and spasmodic raw material. Enter in 1991 William Hunter, who revived the idea that partly or wholly De Doctrina was not composed by Milton (see Hunter, 1998), and so initiated the debate that has led to this volume. He urged in addition that its Latin style should be examined to test the matter. And let the computer by statistics or stylometrics do the testing (as it had done triumphantly for the Epistle to the Hebrews or the Federalist papers). To put the Latin style at the forefront of the testing, even at a time when Milton’s Latin originals could be read by fewer of us, was bold and valuable and timely. On the other hand, findings have proved mainly negative, in the sense that to look for un-classical words and idioms such as the purist Milton would have died rather than use proved only that the style is not maverick, that its wordstock is classical, and that theological Latin in Milton’s time was so normatively classical that one theologian’s style often sounded much like another’s. This finding is not merely negative, however, because it impels us to go seeking how De Doctrina is using its classical Latin—how effectively, how rhetorically, and when and why and at what points it is exceptional. Moreover, the more particulars on which the treatise wields its Latin as Milton elsewhere does, the likelier it becomes that Milton is the author, at least at those points. More still, once the authorship question is solved or set aside, we find that a sizeable number of idiosyncrasies has accumulated, which benefit the purer or more disinterested pursuit of style. This, as we shall see, holds good for larger units of expression than the single-word monad of a lower-level stylometry. In the present study, then, the style is an end in itself; that is to say, not a tool for authentication or disauthentication, though of course style is viewed in its normal relation as a means to express ideas or convince readers. The study is based on the experience of reading the entire treatise in Latin in order to transcribe the manuscript, and on that basis to edit and translate the whole work for the first time since

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1825. To write about the style before the whole enterprise is complete is to risk new biases, but unusual ones. At any rate it is agreeable to report that the resultant close experiencing of the Latin style produces a sense of strong idiosyncrasies in it, and of unlooked-for pleasures. One further preliminary: yet another obstacle to stylistic study is the manifest discontinuity of the style. Some pieces are compiled from earlier theologians; the massive proportion of scriptural citation means almost half of it is in a quite different Latin; and the rest is interspersed, unevenly, with these non-Miltonic Latins. This lurching inhibits the reader who does wish to engage with the Latinity for its own sake. And yet the style contains within it both pleasure and enlightenment. In its own way, which we probe, it mingles the useful with the pleasurable. The ensuing analyses try to describe and classify the Latinity of the entire work; to identify and explore its distinctive strengths and weaknesses; and to suggest that largely the two are the same, locked, in Coleridge’s phrase, in a war-embrace. We shall analyse a number of ostensibly discrete aspects of Latin style. They move from the long-range to the close-up, then to a literary scrutiny of units both small and large. Their premise is that whatever consonance emerges from the diverse standpoints will catch the author’s idiosyncrasies (so long as a finding is not merely common practice or vacuous); and equally that what varies most within the 745 pages of the manuscript will tell us something about the work’s meaning as well as its style. The variations might, for example, evince development of purpose, or collaboration, or an architectonic intent, or something else. But in fact the studies cumulatively declare an impressive degree of consonance, and connection. So, first, we consider the range of the registers, identifying four main ones that comprise the essence of the experience of reading the whole work in its original Latin. Admittedly, the number four is not absolute, only convenient. Yet it is at least more precise than the categorizations of two earlier assessments: those of Henry Milman and of Kelley. Milman in 1827, reviewing the De Doctrina, sees its style as uniform, and to be distinguished from the ‘peculiar faults and peculiar beauties’ of Milton’s other prose. Kelley, as mentioned above and shown

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elsewhere (Hale, 2005), finds variety and vitality, but his account is preliminary and cursory, and he seems soon to lose interest in our topic. In any case the great ‘convenience’ seen in the fourfold categorization of registers is that it gives the wherewithal to work into the text, and a schema to modify and improve as we go.

1.1. The main registers The main registers discerned are: (A) a high oratorical register for the opening epistle, written Universis ecclesiis, ‘to all the churches’, which register reappears in the second preface composed for the long contentious chapter De Filio; (B) a plain-style register for routine matters of exposition, thus for definition, division into parts, and exegesis (the stating and organizing of a long series of theses); and (C) an argumentative register for opinions of Milton’s own, always proceeding by logical signposting and rising at times—within this register now—to an impassioned eristic or forensic. The fourth register is not a single register nor is it Milton’s, yet its inclusion is Milton’s choice, and it bulks as large as any of his three if not larger: this is (D) the late, non-classical Latin of Tremellius and Beza translating the Bible into Latin, as Geneva’s answer to Rome’s Vulgate. The translation was made by Tremellius for the Hebrew Testament and its Apocrypha, and for the Syriac of the New Testament; by Beza for its Greek; with notes and orchestration by Junius. Of its many editions we have used those available to us: Henry Midleton’s of 1585 online; the Dunedin Public Library’s of 1624; and Beza (only) in an edition of the mid-seventeenth century. In vocabulary and syntax and word-order, and in its biblical multiplicity of genres, this Bible markedly differs from the classicizing staple of De Doctrina (and of its sources and analogues, especially Ames and Wolleb). To put that another way, in their syntax and lexis alike the first three registers follow classical norms, with only rare exceptions. Variation between registers in syntax is readily seen if we look at word-order and sentence-length. The epistle (A) keeps to a noticeably Ciceronian word-order. Its sentence-length likewise echoes Cicero’s, in his works of persuasion rather than his philosophical ones, for the epistle is a reasoned plea. Sentences are seldom short; nothing

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is invertebrate when long. (The longest sentences are just below 100 words, the shortest barely below 40: the effect is of measured deliberation.) The speech-acts warm up, to rhetorical questioning. The pace or amplitude, too, resembles Cicero’s: the many doublets, to which English is inimical, seem particularly modelled on this habit of Cicero’s (see below, 5.2). It is a complete contrast, then, when we move out of the epistle and find that the plain-style (B) works by short sentences, in fact often verbless ones, just headings and captions; that it lacks figures like hyperbaton or chiasmus, or hendiadys or artful patterning of repetition, which were employed and enjoyed in the epistle; and that it uses parataxis as much as hypotaxis. Indeed, when hypotaxis supervenes on the parataxis or verbless labelling, that is one way we can suspect we are entering on the third register, (C), and as readers brace ourselves for a disputation or a lecture. This register is not signalled solely by hypotaxis, however, because another signal or symptom is the opposite, a sudden onset of short sentences: it often brings with it a question, or a series, or a sorites, or imperatives or a dialectical interrogation by ego or nos of a tu, or of a third-person majority view like Theologi or Papistae who will be refuted (this dialectical quality is singled out for commendation by Kelley, and discussed further in Hale, 2005). Nevertheless, whether the sentences are long or short, the tonal markers are unmistakable. Register (D), not being Milton’s, need not detain us except for points of contrast and local incorporation. The styles of Tremellius and Beza are literal, and faithful to those of the original Hebrew and Greek rather than to Latin; they work in the same fashion as the Vulgate and other renderings of scripture which forgo stylishness, even against personal inclination (vide Jerome; see ‘Latin Bibles’ in Hale, 2005; see also Norton, 1993). It should be noted that for the New Testament Milton mainly used Beza’s version from the Greek (rather than Tremellius’s version of the Syriac) for De Doctrina, except when he objects to its accuracy or tendentiousness (for which again see ‘Latin Bibles’). All of this observation needs proof, which examples next begin to supply. Much of it is unsurprising. For instance, one surely expects argumentation to declare itself by a more strenuous ordering

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of syntax, and by distinctive lengthiness or shortness of sentences. But still this is a matter of quality and of extent: in quality, of the impersonal austerity of theological discourse shattered by the irruption of personal pronouns; or in extent, of the extreme length or brevity to which the argument may compel the sentences as the battle waxes hot.

1.2. Examples of the registers Here is the longest sentence of the epistle (MS p. 4): Id denique ago, ut ex iis quae sive vetera sive nova attulisse censebor, pro eorum pondere ac momento, imo pro scripturarum potius autoritate quarum nituntur creberrimis testimoniis, intelligere omnes possint, quanti intersit religionis Christianae, concedi libertatem non excutiendae solum cuiusque doctrinae, palamque ventilandae, sed etiam de ea, prout cuique fide persuasum est, sentiendi atque etiam scribendi, sine qua libertate, religio nulla, Evangelium nullum est; sola vis viget; qua stare Christianam religionem, turpe et probrosum est: servitus adhuc durat; non legi, ut olim, divinae, sed, quod miserrimum est, humanae; vel verius ut dicam, inhumanae tyrannidi servienda. [Next, I intend to make everyone understand, from the arguments I shall be found to have advanced (whether old or new), by their weight and influence, but more by the authority of the scriptures on whose very frequent witness their arguments rely, just how crucial it is for the Christian religion that the freedom be granted not simply of probing every doctrine, and of winnowing it in public, but also of thinking and indeed writing about it, in accordance with each person’s belief. Without that liberty, there is no religion, there is no Gospel; violence alone prevails; but it is disgraceful and shameful that the Christian religion should stand upon violence: our slavery endures still; enslaved not as previously to divine law, but what is most wretched of all, to human law; or, to speak more accurately, we must be slaves to inhuman tyranny.]

The whole sentence (95 words) accumulates reasons why Milton must write, to a concluding effect which mingles earnest admonition with a picture of dire alternatives. All subsequent sentences of the epistle are shorter, as if urgently consequent upon this admonition. The suasive momentum and force of a periodic sentence are seen again in I. 5, when Milton, standing at the brink of his longest and most unorthodox chapter, De Filio, girds his loins by a further preface,

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which then rises to a long sentence, this time of 127 words. Both specimens are fine Latin. Meanwhile, wherever a serviceable prose states a humdrum exegesis, we read a plain style: Partes doctrinae Christianae duae sunt: Fides, seu Cognitio Dei, et charitas seu Dei cultus. Gen. 17. 1. Ambula coram me et esto integer. [The parts of Christian doctrine are two: Faith, or the knowledge of God, and love, or the worship of God. Genesis 17. 1 Walk in my sight and be perfect. (MS p. 8)]

This register is indistinguishable from that of other Ramist ‘systems’, which indeed Milton is sometimes quoting. From this bald defining Milton will repeatedly move into exposition, and often rise further, into reasoning or advocacy. As the opening of I.2 we read, Esse Deum, quanquam haud pauci sunt qui negent esse, dicit enim stultus in corde suo, non est Deus, Psal. 14.1. tot tamen clara indicia sui Deus in mente humana, tot per omnem penitus naturam sui vestigia impressit, ut ignorare Deum esse, nemo non insanus possit. [As to God’s existence, although there are many who would deny it, for the fool says in his heart, there is not a God, Ps. 14.1, God has imprinted so many clear signs of himself in the human mind, and so many traces of himself throughout all nature, that no sane person can be unaware of God’s existence.]

A commonplace exposition is supported by a standard proof text, but then becomes a strong maxim, which in turn is pressed to finality by a doubled double-negative, ignorare … nemo non insanus possit.

2. Transitions between the registers Consequently, register B and less often C can be indistinguishable from those of Milton’s sources; indeed he may be quoting them verbatim. Style will not tell us, in this register, whether Milton is compiling or composing. It becomes vital to perceive where the register changes, from this humdrum shared style to something more earnest or elevated or dashing. Transitions between registers,

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accordingly, may tell us more than the larger structures of registers themselves can, whether he is interrupting himself or Wolleb.

2.1. Examples of transition-passages The following two examples illustrate the two sorts of interruption. Florentissimas undiquaque reddit respub. Mandatorum Dei observatio: Lev. 26. per totum caput: fortunatas et opulentas et victrices gentium, Deut. 15. 4. 5. 6: et dominas gentium, v. 6, et cap. 26. 17. 18. 19: et insigne, cap. 28. 1. &c. Politicis etiam atque etiam legendum, cap. 29, et 4. Iudic, et 3. Psal. 33. 12. beata gens illa, cuius Iehova Deus est. Prov. 11. 11. benedictione rectorum effertur urbs. (II.17, MS p. 728, our emphasis) [Obedience to God’s commandments makes nations prosperous in every respect; see Lev. 26. It makes them fortunate, wealthy and victorious, Deut. 15. 4–6, and lords over other nations.; see Deut. 15.6 and 26.17–19, and particularly 28.1, etc.—a passage which politicians should read over and over again. See also Deut. 29 and 4; Judges 2 and 3; Psalm 33.12: blessed is the nation whose God is Jehovah; Prov. 11.11: a city is made to prosper by the blessing of the righteous. (Carey’s version, Yale, VII, 804, our emphasis)]

Certainly the opening thesis receives a full sentence, of seven words, and citations not quotations follow it up, in the routine fitful plain style. But the switching of viewpoint to polemical injunction is unmistakable, because word-positioning and the iterative adverbphrase and the concluding gerund-imperative combine to make it stand out; in fact, we would make the intrusiveness sharper than Carey does—‘Politicians, again and again, should read’ Deuteronomy chapter 29. The opinion-rich author’s presence is made overt. The stylistic transition marks the turning-aside. He does the same thing in Ars Logicae: ‘Here let the theologians take notice,’ when even more insisting on a personal view, in that case regarding the essence of the Son (see Chapter 5, pp. 101–6). Equally striking is the transition he makes within a passage from Wolleb. Whereas Wolleb sums up and mildly criticizes the Catholic view, Milton making the same point moves straight into derision. Here is Wolleb: Pontificiis aeque absurdum videtur nos aliena iustitia iustos fieri ac si quis alterius doctrina doctus videtur. Sed dispar est exemplorum ratio, cum homo homini non perinde unitus sit ut fideles Christi tanquam capiti suo. Ad haec

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Christi iustitiam sibi imputare nolunt cum non vereantur statuere hominum mortuorum et monachorum iustitiam sibi imputari. (Wolleb I.30, p. 156) [To Catholics it appears equally absurd that we are justified by another’s justice as that anyone seems learned through another’s learning. But the rationale of the two examples is unequal, since man has not been united with man in the same way that believers have with Christ as their head. Further, they are loath to impute Christ’s justice to themselves although they do not flinch from concluding that the justice of dead men and monks is imputed to them.]

The beginnings of scorn are heard in Wolleb’s alliterated mortuorum … monachorum, but sed and cum (‘although’ here) and ad haec remain quite placid conjunctions. Milton at first takes this over almost verbatim (only altering to sit coniunctus from Wolleb’s unitus sit, perhaps for instinctive stylistic reasons), but then Wolleb’s third sentence becomes Interim pro absurdo non habent quod est absurdissimum, mortuorum et monachorum iustitian aliis imputari (‘at the same time they do not realize the palpable absurdity of their own doctrine that the righteousness of the dead, or of monks, can be imputed to other people’, Yale, VI, 492). So whereas Wolleb more in sorrow than in anger states a difference of opinion between Catholics and Protestants, and points to an apparent inconsistency in the Catholic one (which imputes righteousness from dead souls and monks though not from Christ), Milton intensifies the whole step in the reasoning: Catholics talk of others’ absurdity, but their own position is ‘most absurd’. Here he speaks more in anger than in sorrow (but see below for the suggestion that Wolleb’s asperities elsewhere encouraged Milton’s). The word ‘absurd’ is heard three times instead of once now, and in a series which climaxes on its superlative. The register changes dramatically, into an act of possession, a surge of rhetorical scorn, a whole new tone of voice. One is reminded of times when Milton, again rendering other people’s words but this time in verse-translation, moves into a late surge of appropriating: see his rendering of Horace’s ode to ‘Pyrrha’, with Hale’s analysis (Hale, 1987). In De Doctrina, however, such rising of tone normally takes the form of magisterial dismissal: thus, arguing

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against necessitarian predestination, he shrinks the necessary down to [necessitas] illa … immutabilitatis aut praescientiae umbratica et externa, and even that is non admittenda (‘that shadowy and external [necessity] of immutability and prescience’ … ‘not to be allowed in’, MS p. 22). Shadowy, extrinsic, and inadmissible! By semantically swelling adjectives—a conceptual rather than verbal tricolon—the opposing view is thwacked.

2.2. Transition on a larger scale Register, then, has led us to ponder sorts of transition between registers: first, moments where the register noticeably rises, especially from dry exegesis to a more excitable argumentation; then, ones where an exegesis taken directly from a theological source is all of a sudden appropriated into the flow of disputation. Next to be considered are architectonic transitions, between ways of organizing a chapter. We have mentioned that I.5, De Filio, is so large and so important that Milton writes a new preface for it, in the heightened style of his opening epistle, with a central long sentence dominating. In the chapter itself the material starts off in the customary style, of definitions followed by citations (p. 49); but it is some time before the citations dominate, and this does not last. On p. 51 the needs of argumentation take over, and when citation does appear it is done with a new purpose, namely that each verse can be demonstrated at whatever length is needed to advocate Milton’s interpretation of it. We term this a ‘transition’ because it contrasts so emphatically with the method announced by the opening epistle, where the reliance ‘solely on scripture’ (ex sacris duntaxat libris) was announced as leading to an overflowing (redundare) of quotations from scripture (p. 4)—not for him the relegation of scripture into mere marginal reference-numbers. A better description than ‘transition’ would be ‘discontinuity’. Better still might be ‘reversal’, since the paramountcy of scripture, quantitative and qualitative alike, has been reversed into a paramountcy of argument and into analysis of pieces of evidence seriatim, in a sequence governed by logic or probability. Thus the relation and sequence and importance of the registers have been reversed. That in turn launches changed relations within (C), the register of argument. Now argument is the staple of style, no longer an incidental rising from the humdrum norm of definition or exposition, the author

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moves in the course of extended and urgent, not to say impassioned argumentation to small further rises, like small explosions of scorn or irritation. At MS p. 87, for instance, by detailed argument culminating in a burst of reductiones ad absurdum Milton has convinced himself so thoroughly as to declare that the opposite position leads to consequences which could not be held by ‘any sane person’, anyone (as we still say) compos mentis: quod pater et filius, relata cum sint, quae et ratione et re differunt, et iuxta leges oppositorum pater non sit filius, nec filius pater, si essentiae unius essent quod relatis impossibile est, sequeretur patrem esse filii filium, filium esse patris patrem: quod cuiusmodi sit quilibet mentis compos iudicato. (emphasis added) [Besides, since ‘father’ and ‘son’ are relational terms, differing both in logic and in fact, and since in accordance with the laws of opposites a father is not a son nor a son a father, then if the two were of a single essence (which is impossible for relationals) it would follow that the father was the son’s son, and the son the father’s father … Let anyone who is of sound mind judge what sort of a conclusion this is!]

He does not say that opponents are insane, only that all sane persons would concur with his own reductio; but the implication hangs in the air. The tone is strikingly personal, mixed from irritation, indignation and triumph. Since the opposition is not a named spokesperson like Salmasius or others in the Defences, who are always wrong anyway, and since the tone has become less than polite, one would guess that the tone is that of a ‘QED’ worked out in impassioned private composition, a moment of enthusiastic dictation in the study. In such transitions, then, stylistic considerations can pose and contribute to the largest questions, such as the author’s intentions regarding publication, and whether or not the work was finished. The epistle says the work is finished and ready to go forth, yet the method of I.5 contradicts the method proclaimed by the epistle as that of the ‘finished’ work.

3. Towards lexis Three smaller-scale forms of transition will bring us on to still more cellular units of style, those of lexis. We consider, first, moments

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where the wording and syntax of a citation are absorbed into the flow of a systematizing theological sentence; secondly, times when a printed biblical spelling is changed, to something which may at times be merely scribal but reveals more when there is reason to think the change authorial; and thirdly, verbal changes made to the manuscript in the Picard pages which indicate a stylistic revision as well as, or rather than, some addition or modification to content.

3.1. Assimilation of quoted material Routinely, the sense and syntax of scriptural quotation are assimilated to the sentence which is being composed. It is of course quite ordinary and natural to run the sense and syntax of a cited original into that of one’s own sentence when writing about it; and no different for any unreverential scholar to do this when the text is the Bible. Harris Fletcher long since examined instances of the practice in De Doctrina (Fletcher, 1929, ch. 3). It does still deserve notice here that Milton’s stance towards scripture is scholarly and pragmatic, in that the syntax of the treatise is governing that of the cited material: this is not imperious or colonialist in itself, but is at the least compatible with the appropriative and personalizing tendency of the higher two registers. The scholarly and pragmatic intention can be judged from these three examples. In the first (p. 64) he dares to bend Latin itself so as to get back closer to the Greek of John 6.38: τὸ θέλημα τοῦ πέμψαντὸς με, ‘the will of him who sent me’, is turned idiomatically by Beza, Tremellius and the Vulgate as voluntatem eius qui misit me. But Milton keeps the participle, which means that since Latin has no aorist participle matching πέμψαντὸς he is unidiomatically using the present participle which Latin does possess, mittentis. This is a small extreme of fidelity. In the second example, the key text of Philippians 2.6, Christ οὐχ ἁρπαγμὸν ἡγήσατο τὸ εἶναι ἴσα θεῷ was simplified and personalized by Beza into non duxit esse rapinam parem esse Deo, ‘to be equal with God’, neuter plural becoming masculine singular. Tremellius rendering the Syriac showed a more abstract way round: nequaquam per rapinam aestimasset illum ipsum quod esset aequalitas Dei (by no means insisted ‘that there be equality with God’). Milton goes back to the Greek, and is more literal than the others: rapinam non duxit hoc

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aequalia esse cum Deo (‘to be equal things with God’, Greek ἴσα). The equality exercises Milton’s mind again, but differently, at Paradise Lost III.306: ‘Equal to God, and equally enjoying/Godlike fruition’. This fidelity and scruple are seen in a third example, where Milton offers alternative translations of a word. MS p. 46 renders ’Εξομολογουμαίοοι (Matthew 11.25) as gloriam tibi tribuo, following Beza; Tremellius, and also the Vulgate, go the other way, confiteor tibi. On the second occasion, MS p. 96, Milton does not go his own way, nor make a choice, but has confiteor vel gratias ago tibi (emphasis added to ‘or’). It may be worth noting that his conjunction here is vel, which is Latin’s ‘or’ of permission or inclusion, opposite to aut, its exclusive ‘either … or else (but not both)’. In all three examples, then, a precise Latinity is helping Milton sort out God’s Greek within his own Latin. Precision blends into appropriativeness at times, as when he settles for the alternative he prefers, witness subsistentia vs. substantia, at the end of I.7 and his discussion of this contentious issue in I.5.

3.2. Spellings of names The spelling of Hebrew names in the citations simply varies with the practice of each JTB translator being cited; but what does it mean when the spelling within the commentary of the treatise differs from that of the citations? On p. 711 the MS reads, not ‘the Shunamite woman’ of the King James Version, nor yet JTB’s ‘Schunamitidem’, but the Latin or Greek or Vulgate ‘Sunamite’. Similarly the same page reads ‘Sareptana’, using the Lucan, Greek spelling for the ‘woman of Zarephath’ who saved Elijah. Since the names diverge from the JTB and occur within commentary not citation, might they indicate authorial pronunciation (dictation)? While there are other explanations, such as that for his own Latin the author just prefers the Roman or Greek form of Hebrew names, one does also recall Milton’s preference in Paradise Lost for the softer and simpler sibilant ‘S’ over Hebrew’s numerous noisy ones (‘… or if Sion’s hill/delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flowed …’; see Fowler’s note in Milton, 1968, and Hale, 2005, 118). Because Tremellius renders the sibilants faithfully and phonetically, they turn up in the citations. We could compare ‘Semahias’ in the commentary of MS 732 with JTB’s thunderous phonetic ‘Schemaahja’ and (different from both) the

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KJV’s half-way Shemaiah; or ‘Cananias’ (ibid.) with JTB ‘Chananias’ and KJV ‘Hananias’. Is it merely fanciful to detect in these discrepancies an aural transition from dictation to citation or back the other way, as aural moments in a presumed DDC think-tank or atelier?—a separation, too, between the dictée of commentary and the transcriptions by commissioned helpers working on their own? Is it unwarranted to note the absence of uniformity as an absence of any final overhauling revision? Taken together, such surmises are at any rate compatible with other kinds of evidence which point in these directions.

3.3. Evidence of stylistic change within scribal changes to the MS Whereas hundreds of the changes are corrections, and concern the scriptural quotations not the author’s own Latin, we find a few transitional moments of greater importance or magnitude, or of both, in which we may detect reconsideration of both style and content. On the page (308/308A in Kelley’s nomenclature; see pp. 42–3) which has fortunately survived both in Skinner’s recopying and the original messy version by Picard and others, the word potissimum is changed to duntaxat, writ very large as Israelitis Duntaxat (inserted above line with caret before ‘Duntaxat’). The intention is to tighten the argument, so that it is now no longer ‘Israel above all’ but ‘ONLY Israel’—duntaxat with a capital ‘D’ and in giant letters—for whom the Mosaic law was written as a code of precepts (multorum praeceptorum … scripta institutio). There will be more to say about duntaxat below, as stylistic fingerprint: here let the change of adverb mark a moment in the workshop where the argument was intensified, on a major point of theology, and of meditation on Paul in Romans, by the change of adverbs. Other small changes look more stylistic, little things which resemble the tiny adjustments of a James or a Keats, not altering the sense but improving the expression. Thus on p. 728 we read: ‘Paulus militari praesidio est [inserted above line with caret, replacing cancelled ‘est’ after ‘usus’] usus ad se tutandum; Act. 23. 17. adolescentem hunc adducito ad tribunum—. ’ (‘Paul availed himself of a military bodyguard, Acts 23.17: take this young man to the commander’, Yale, VI, 804). The MS at first read usus est, then the est was repositioned

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before its participle. Compare how Wolleb’s unitus est underwent similar repositioning to become Milton’s est coniunctus. Not least because these changes are insignificant as to meaning, they show a stylistic preference for the less usual word-order; possibly (without rising to figurative status as hyperbaton) as giving a fuller emphasis by positioning to the verbal idea than to its colourless auxiliary.

4. Lexis Two nearby details may also point to idiosyncrasy. The word given in dictionaries as undequaque (‘from whatsoever direction’) appears uncorrected in the MS at p. 728 as undiquaque, which points to a derivation from the adverb undique (‘from all directions’). It may be an uncorrected mistake, as one would hardly hear the difference in any reading-back, but the little pother about an unfamiliar word may also point to an authorial preference. To a different effect nearby, the confident competence of the dictating Milton is seen in MS p. 719, where quamvis replaces a cancelled licet. The change gains a more rhetorically pointed concessive; and symptomatically so, the triviality of the change confirming the tendency. One should, however, hesitate to detect idiosyncrasy within what strictly speaking is competence. We must always remember that Latin was virtually another mother-tongue to European intellectuals in Milton’s time.

4.1. Orthodoxy The point will bear emphasis before we go further. Intellectuals read many or even most of their books in Latin; they wrote and spoke in it; arguably, they thought in it. Naturally, then, they not only knew many more words than they actually used (as do we all), but had command of an enormous wordstock, deriving from life-occasions as well as from compositional decorum. Thus whenever the amazing variety and scope—and classicizing correctitude—of Milton’s lexis surpasses one’s own, it may signify nothing idiosyncratic, only an ease born from unbroken use and familiarity. Nor is it surprising to find unorthodox theology written in orthodox Latin: had not the Questione di Lingua, the poet’s dilemma whether to compose in the mother tongue rather than to the then wider auditory

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of Latin, been persistently debated in Latin? (See Hale, 2005, 2–6.) Certainly a prolonged computer-aided search for distinctive use of lexis produced almost nothing while it was seeking for unclassical words or unclassical senses of words. There is no point in taxing Milton for importing Greek theological words if Latin had no good equivalent. Indeed, his purist attitude is regularly seen in guarded phrases like ‘ut dicunt’, or ‘ut vulgo’ (‘as they say’, ‘in the common parlance’). He does this even when using the verb blasphemare, whose sense is self-evident, and which is found as Greek blasphemein as far back as Plato: presumably he cavils because as a verb (or noun) in Latin it occurs mainly in the Fathers and the Vulgate. The fact that Milton excuses himself for this tiny act of licence demonstrates the classical orthodoxy of his view and practice of style; for blasphemare incurs similar disapproval from Gerhardus Johannes Vossius (father of Milton’s opponent). G. J. Vossius wrote a whole book De vitiis sermonis et glossematis latino-barbaris (‘On faults of speech and words requiring explanation from barbarian Latin’): a sort of black-list, like the appendix to Littelton’s dictionary, with which Milton’s own lost thesaurus had some unknown connection. Sampling Vossius as a check on Milton’s orthodoxy, one finds they agree that bestialis is deplorable: Milton uses it, too, with an apologetic ‘ut vulgò’. They agree that persona means ‘person’ solely in a theological context, where says Vossius it is used ‘laxius’, laxly or too loosely. Their moments of divergence do not affect the main point. Milton uses philosophaster, with Greekish derogatory suffix as in ‘poetaster’: though Vossius would disapprove of this, Milton uses and enjoys the derogation in several works. Humanists licensed themselves to coin if it was done in accordance with the history and latent principles of word-formation in the language (compare the history of Milton’s surdeo, surdere (Dillon, 1987; cf. Hale, 2005, 108 and n. 5)). And though Milton writes seorsim where Vossius prefers seorsum, since this survives in the Bodleian library in Milton’s own hand (Bodleian MS Arch. Ge. 44; Fol. Vv in a copy of Colasterion; reproduced in Milton, 1998, 137) we can take Vossius with a pinch of salt. It is broad agreement, and shared orthodoxy, which make the chief impression. Thus when Parker (1996, 655–66 and 1167) records how Milton’s Latin ‘Thesaurus’ might have supplied material for later English dictionaries of Latin,

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we might suspect that what was supplied was not choice Latin words to use in one’s own composition but late and otherwise inferior words—a blacklist like that of Vossius. To take a different sort of neologism, does Milton use some regular words in less than regular senses? Only seldom. (Compare the case with ostensibly unsanctioned or Graecizing locutions mentioned above.) One such word is postliminio, classically an adverb meaning ‘[on] return from exile’ (MS p. 147). Perhaps relevantly, it was a frequent word in its English form in the 1650s (see OED), when many citizens returning from exile had to contest their property rights in law. Milton, however, uses the word to mean that a book of the Bible is ‘post-exilic’, and to discount its testimony for that reason: the prophet Malachi banned polygamy ‘late and postliminously’, which Milton disregards because if polygamy were an offence it would have been banned long before (but it wasn’t, so it isn’t, and Malachi doesn’t count). The application and its dismissiveness could surprise us in a work based ‘solely on scripture’, but the word itself is classical. Milton is unique as so far ascertained in making the word pejorative in this way. Is this one occasion when English usage affects his Latin? Only a prolonged searching, through more contemporary dictionaries than are available to us, could achieve finality in this whole matter of idiosyncratic lexis. So far, nonetheless, only a few idiosyncrasies emerge from our researches, in words or their application.

4.2. Syntactic marker-words as fingerprints We have already seen that idiosyncrasy may be found in sentencelength, and in word-order. Might we also locate it most of all at points where lexis merges into syntax? By this is meant that Milton wields an unusual array of Latin’s logical conjunctions, adverbs and particles: words like ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘though’, ‘besides’, ‘what if?’ ‘how else?’ ‘but if’ and many, many more. Whereas Greek possesses a colossal body of particles for conveying logical nuance and tone of voice, Latin has a less rich supply; but whether or not we should therefore impute something Greek to his use of Latin, Milton wields the full range of what Latin does supply. This usage is the hallmark of the argumentative register, (C), a signature or fingerprint of this style.

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To mix metaphors, the logical watchdog is always barking, always in tune, with great and appropriate variety. This fact has an accidental benefit for us, in that the logical direction-markers mostly have an invariant Latin form: as indeclinables, they show up more clearly and completely than inflected forms in computer-counting. The scores tell a clear story, once the most frequent words like ‘and’ or ‘but’ have been set aside. For that matter, Milton also wields many forms of ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘or’ and ‘as’, showing a stylish partiality for lengthened forms like veluti or uti for velut and ut. Another favourite may be Equidem, felt in its parts as classically (Zumpt, 1836, 278) to mean Ego quidem; ‘I indeed’, ‘here is my own view of this matter’. Consider some of his twoword, phrasal markers, since these make more impact—a more oral, disputational impact—than the ordinary singletons: quid quod, quod si, non nisi. Non nisi is also a litotes, of which favourite figure more below. Of some twenty occurrences none is within a citation. Two are added as authorial interpretation of a citation which was expressed more baldly: Paul speaks of being ‘sealed’, obsignati, whereas Milton (MS p. 32) says non nisi postea obsignati, ‘not unless subsequently sealed.’ And likewise at MS p. 183. He likes to alliterate the phrase into a third initial ‘n’, as in non nisi necessario (twice on MS p. 614). A superbly scornful specimen is non nisi nudius tertius (MS p. 118): [it is unlikely that God made his heaven] ‘only the day before yesterday’. Some general points need making here. Milton’s idiom is classical, therefore a liking for non nisi has no significance in itself. But its frequency begins to make it distinctive. What makes it more distinctive is the force he gives it, by positioning and by insistent combination with kindred emphasizing devices. We return to this below. Less frequent but differently intriguing is the pattern of usage for the phrase quid quod, because in the MS it appears also in the forms ‘quid quod;’, ‘quid? Quod’, ‘quid! Quod’ and ‘quid, quod’. These are all the same expression, being ellipsis for quid dicam de eo, quod, ‘what shall I say about the fact that?’ English translations, however, vary. They depend on what ‘this’ is and on the local shaping of the argument: Zumpt instances ‘nay’, ‘nay even’, ‘but now’ and ‘moreover’ (Zumpt, 1836, 517). It always adduces a new point, but the way the point impinges varies with the local logical muscle-work.

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Perhaps this variety helps to explain the variant punctuations in the MS. It is not mere scribal fluctuation, since all the spellings occur within the Skinner pages, and two within Picard’s. Sumner keeps all the MS punctuation, as if he had already seen that the varying pointing follows the varying nuances of this particular locution. Vigilent ergo interpretes! All three connecting phrases occur more frequently than among the theological sources and analogues; all three occur in Milton’s three Defences. Only Wolleb shows a similar pattern: he does not use quid quod, but for non nisi he approaches Milton’s score, and has a comparable liking for non nisi followed by a third initial ‘n’, especially inflexions of ‘necessari’. Since Wolleb uses quod si somewhat when attacking one of Milton’s favourite targets, the Papacy, might there be stylistic debt as well as affinity? We noticed Wolleb’s alliterative displeasure towards mortuos and monachos, and though Milton’s harshness of tone had developed beyond that of his sources, the materials and some tics were givens. One should not overstress them, since just as the stances are mainstream Protestant ones so the Latin expressions for them are standard humanist practice. Another revealing connective, combining logic with rhetoric, is quidni, which can be spelt in its parts as quid ni, and means ‘why not?’ within a rhetorical question (whereas cur non is a legitimate question, and requires an answer). Milton uses it at MS p. 74, though only the once. But it illustrates how De Doctrina abounds in rhetorical questions, interjections to an imagined interlocutor, rising (as Kelley noted) to an occasional sustained dialoguing by pronouns; especially tu, who is always wrong. Conjunctions and logical adverbs launch such passages of rhetoric, and mark them as such. The passages are many, characteristic and distinctive: always intense and insistent, they mark a habit of ratiocination, a tone of voice. Duntaxat, however, stands out within this company of logical marker-words. It stands out for frequency and distinctiveness and (as we shall argue) for emphatic loudness. As to frequency, while it is not uncommon in the JTB citations, Milton uses it over a hundred times. As to distinctiveness, it is hardly found at all in the theological congeners, though it makes a better showing in Milton’s own Defences, a corpus of comparable size. As to loudness, the case is made even better by examples than by incidence.

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First, something needs saying about the word itself and its meaning, for it was not a mainstream word in classical Latin prose, and may be unfamiliar. It means ‘only’, but more amply than that little English word suggests; ‘to the extent that’, ‘up to the point that’, ‘so far forth’. It is an adverb which verges into a conjunction, probably because it visibly comprises the conjunction dum and the verb-form taxat. It is sometimes spelt dumtaxat, which more clearly reveals its origin as dum + taxat, ‘as far as it holds, or extends’ (connected with tango, ‘touch’; cf. taxim, ‘little by little’); but in this form it is both less classical and less frequent in the De Doctrina. It is closely akin in form and function to dummodo, ‘provided that’, which Milton also uses but not as he adores duntaxat. Duntaxat occurs in Milton’s part of De Doctrina over a hundred times. It scarcely occurs in the analogous theologies, and his sources Ames and Wolleb. Its incidence exceeds Cicero’s. Nor is this just a matter of counting. The word figures in prominent and emphatic places, like the work’s title, and the epistle (twice). In a not especially contentious chapter, I.7, which initially argues the thesis that creation was from God and could not have been out of nothing (see Chapter 5, pp. 107–11), we read that all things exist ‘from, into, through and because of’ the Father (MS p. 112; Yale, VI, 302): they exist ‘only through’ the Son (filius duntaxat est per quem sunt omnia), so that the Son is their ‘less principal cause’ (causa igitur minus principalis). As in I.5 at great length the Son is subordinated, so here more swiftly duntaxat expresses his diminution. Similarly in a moment (MS p. 114) when the role of the third person of the Trinity in creation is discussed, the Spirit non alia tamen quam ministra duntaxat videtur fuisse, ‘only as a servant’ (in which the litotes non alia quam redoubles the limitation). A third instance is less emphatic, but therefore equally instinctive: matter was not formed imperfect (another double negative), ‘it merely received embellishment from the accession of forms’ (materia non erat … imperfecta, accessione duntaxat formarum … facta ornatior: MS pp. 116–17, Yale, VI, 308 and n. 33; CE, XV, 22, 16–18). For matters of argument, then, great and small alike, duntaxat comes routinely to Milton’s mind. Its force and value for Milton are best seen in a passage where he not only uses it twice, but almost frenetically to engineer his

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climax. At MS p. 429, on ecclesiastical jurisdiction, he is concerned (characteristically enough, so he makes it a strong statement) to limit the power of the civil authorities over religious matters: in ditione ecclesiasticis tantum ecclesiae membra; idque in causis tantummodo ad religionem spectantibus, poenisque duntaxat ecclesicis, id est, duntaxat internis. (Carey: ‘But only members of the church are subject to ecclesiastical power, and that only in religious matters. Moreover they are liable to ecclesiastical punishment only, that is, punishment within the church’ (Yale, VI, 612)). The statement hinges on a succession of four limiting adverbs: tantum, tantummodo, duntaxat, duntaxat. Note that the first is strengthened by the longer and ampler second, but then that duntaxat caps both these. Note above all that duntaxat is repeated, though because of id est it did not need repetition at all. We are witnessing not only the reliance on the emphatic duntaxat as climax, repeated: the fourfold limitation shows us the thrust of much of the entire work—to limit. Just as beliefs are to come only from scripture, so in this insistent sentence the civil power is to stay out of the four areas of life which are rapidly set offlimits, by the ascending series of limiting adverbs, with the repeated duntaxat as clincher and climax. Style is crowding and cramping the opposition. It is no concidence that Milton likewise makes frequent use (33 occurrences) of tantummodo; for here is a linguistic fingerprint which points to the same stance or mind-set. One could track many another expression of limitation or diminution, like solum or tantum or non nisi, or the series of quod at MS p. 197, through to the same conclusion. There is to be only one solution to every problem. Logic as wielded will drive the reader to that solution. Usually a word or idea has only one meaning. Conversely, nothing but what this limiting logic allows is allowable. There is never any benefit of the doubt. However paradoxical it may seem in a theology which preaches freedom of the will, the reader is to be forced by logic into freedom; and the paradox is as endemic to the style as to the thought. The impact is accordingly negative after all, for the domain of faith and the scope of imagination and devotion are being circumscribed after all. A similar finding emerges when we consider how the treatise privileges litotes among the figures of thought and speech.

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5. Figures of speech and of thought, and finally tone Antiquity identified dozens of figures, and Milton had most of them at command. Drastic selection is unavoidable here. First, we show that litotes is rife and idiosyncratic. Secondly, from among his teeming patterns of repetition we choose the Ciceronian doublet, the amplitude sought by using two paired words where one would suffice. Imagery is the next figure examined because it transcends the schematic separation of style from substance: imagery does not embellish the thought; it is the thought. Fourth comes allusion, meaning not biblical but classical—pagan—allusion. Lastly, to move from figures to something more pervasive and governing, and so commence summations, we consider tone, or tone of voice.

5.1. Figures: litotes Litotes is emphasis by using a double negative. While it can sound absurd or coy to modern ears, that is merely its misuse. A litotes like ‘no mean performer’ thrives in modern English, and we know it means ‘a very good performer’, just as surely as we know that Paul was boasting himself to be a citizen of ‘no mean city’ (Tarsus in Cilicia: Acts 21.39, in the KJV). Still, in thinking about litotes as a distinctive part of Milton’s mentalité in De Doctrina we must guard against two further misunderstandings. First, litotes was frequent in the Latin and English of his own day, imbibed from Roman theory and practice. Secondly, we should not take notice of any and every Latin litotes, because Latin was by nature litotic: its colourless word for the colourless idea of ‘some’ was nonnulli, ‘not-none’, which had kindred forms like nonnumquam, ‘not-never’ for ‘sometimes’. Somewhat more energetically but still unremarkably, a synonym for ‘and’ was necnon et or necne, respectively ‘not-not-and’ and ‘nor not’. Clearly then litotes was at home in Latin, but ranged from these routine formations of general parlance all the way up to very individual, prolonged and inventive instances. It is these latter which need investigating in De Doctrina. Annabel Patterson’s paper on ‘Milton’s Negativity’ (Patterson, 2002) provided an admirable spur to the enquiry. It was admirable for examining litotes in work both early and late, Latin and English,

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in prose and in verse. Regarding the Second Defence in particular she argued that when Milton praises himself he does it by a large influx of litotes—13 negative constructions in 9 lines of Latin—whereas when he praises Cromwell he uses straight-out superlatives; and hence that something especially close to his inner self, and to selfdefence, finds readiest expression in litotes. There are other reasons why this should be so: Cromwell as head of state merits a higher style of eloquence than his defender does, and it is artistic to praise different objects differently, which in turn serves to remind us here that Register (C) gives Milton much room in which to wield figures. Nonetheless, Patterson’s address alerts our present enquiry to litotes in the selfhood of the same figure at key moments of De Doctrina. Numerically, for example, we find a similar reliance or infestation in the opening Epistle, which of course is presenting a self, the candid seeker after Protestant truth. Is this defensive again, or self-praising, or unripeness, or something else? One possibility is a connection to that archetypal Protestant cry, Luther’s reputed Ich kann nicht anders (‘I can do no other’; the final words of Luther’s testimony at the Diet of Worms, according to a contemporary tradition (not substantiated by the written record), which fact confirms the archetypal quality; see G. R. Elton, 1963, 51). In the Epistle at any rate it is most assuredly self-defensive and self-serving, though that is not the whole picture which emerges from considering the whole treatise nor this its idiosyncratic figure. Every paragraph of the Epistle has at least one litotes, and at the close we meet a bunch of them. In the body of the work, too, litotes is prevalent whenever the tonal temperature rises. To speak qualitatively, too, it tends to be found within the clinching closure of some portion of reasoning. Again and again, the double negative makes its appearance as strong understatement, as if so far from being merely ‘not unsuitable’ the reasoning is inferred by the reader (led along by style as well as logic) to be very suitable, if not indeed (going all the way, by readerly backswing) conceded to be the most suitable possible. And ‘conceded’ is the right word because this is Milton’s intended impact, to make even the most reluctant orthodox reader admit that the biblical evidence or logic compel assent to each newly unfolded unorthodoxy. Litotes, when well used, makes readers or hearers imagine further for themselves, perhaps

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further and further. At such times it works upon us as the most powerful, most involving of all the forms of strong understatement. It is working on us in De Doctrina, both ahead of the unorthodoxies in the Epistle and in the most dynamic of the chapters, like I.5 or I.10. A few specimens, mainly from the Epistle, must suffice here: we choose the Epistle as being composed in the most stylish of the registers, where litotes is especially at home. Listen how the last two paragraphs of the Epistle, its doublebarrelled envoi, close with litotes: alios fidei Christianae iudices … cum universa Protestantium ecclesia non agnosco, ‘I along with the entire Protestant church recognize no other arbiters’ than what is written in scripture. This is one possible echo of Luther’s ‘I can do no other.’ Its more individualistic follow-up hinges on a redoubled litotes: his mecum utimini, vel ne utimini quidem nisi fide non dubia … persuasi (‘use [these present writings] with me, or indeed do not use them unless I have persuaded you by the undoubtable fidelity of … scripture’). Next we take a more mundane instance, from I.10 about divorce: Christ said there should be ‘no divorce except because of adultery’, nisi propter adulterium id non licere—another litotes by non nisi. Then at once another, a nec … nisi: ‘Nor could Paul have allowed divorce on account of the departure of an unbeliever unless this [too] was a form of fornication’; Alioqui nec Paulus propter infidelis discessum concedere divortium potuisset nisi haec fornicationis quaedam species esset. The two litotes together are of course enforcing Milton’s insistence that fornicatio includes more causes than just physical adultery. If we reflect that he is thereby moving interpretation in a direction contrary to what Jesus is thought by orthodoxy to have said, we can agree that litotes is a not unhelpful figure! Now hear how litotes can join with other tools from Milton’s limitative repertoire (again, not a crucial passage, but just where the page fell open, MS pp. 59–60). After two virtual litotes, one attributable to Latin itself but the other solely Miltonic, a nimirum and a non magis … quam, we read certe de unitate consensus et testimonii itidem ut loco proximo citato, duntaxat hic agi ab Ioanne, siquidem Ioannis haec vere sunt, non vidit modo Erasmus, sed Beza vel invitus agnovit … A further virtual litotes here is non … modo,

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mild and idiomatic in itself, or is it? It is less innocently enlisting the Catholic Erasmus, as if to say, even he had to agree with me. And see how it is hedged, surrounded and enhanced by duntaxat (‘only about unity and consensus’); by siquidem (‘if John really wrote the verse’); and by ‘even’ Beza’s ‘unwilling’ concurrence. Style is shepherding the reader in the intended direction, with litotes (like a super-acute sheep-dog) well to the fore in the shepherding. Turning another page (to MS p. 61) we read, ‘[ … neque alio (a ‘no other’ locution again] postulamus … nisi demonstramus atque evincimus … uni duntaxat Deo …’. The style is the man, or at least it is the advocate, painting the reader into a corner. Rather than piling up instances, however, or adducing litotes at a major climax, we rest our case at this point; which is, that litotes works along with many other limitative conjunctions or adverbs or other locutions, cumulatively and incessantly in the passages of argumentation. To use a litotes to summarize the habit itself, the reader shall have no option but to concede what the author is urging. To expound this coerciveness of exposition has been somewhat less than gratifying. So let us turn with a more eager expectation, to observe our author mix instruction with pleasure when to the self-chosen task he harnesses such literary graces as reduplication, imagery, and literary allusion. Even to remember the existence of a Homer or Horace in this intense and disputative litotic penumbra is a relief, from ‘only’ and ‘even’ and ‘not unless’: we shall suggest that, in his own way, Milton himself thought so.

5.2. Figures: doublets as a pattern of repetition Many of Latin’s repertoire of figures of speech, based as usual on that of Greek, are patterns of repetition. The analysis which follows is based on the practice of Demosthenes in Greek as much as on Cicero’s Latin. (Cicero had studied in Athens, and often wrote in Greek.) Take the simple, but prominent and Ciceronian example of doublets, paired nouns or verbs or other parts of speech. They may look like using two or more words where one will do, but this is not so when the figure is properly handled. Think of Shakespeare’s effortless practice in this respect. In ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,’

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slings are not mere arrows by the time he has fused his double image in its defining genitive, making the whole an esemplastic hendiadys. In Latin, regardless, the rhetorical practice was discriminating. The chief forms taken were: two words for two separate things, a plural of separates and fixities; times when the first word is generic and the second specific, or they similarly represent a principle and then an application of it; and times when the two words are very close in meaning (with or without phonetic links such as alliteration or assonance). Doublets crowd in the Epistle. Take labore et lucubratione, which sounds otiose if translated ‘labour and toil’, but becomes more convincing when it is felt aurally how much more toilsome the second word is, to say aloud (as a six-syllable onomatopoeia, with four of the vowels sounding long); and carries real conviction when it is thereby recalled that lucubratione means ‘night-work’, ‘lamp-work’, ‘burning the midnight oil’. The closeness of the meaning of the pair of words does not start readers dozing, but enlivens their attention. In another instance, also from the Epistle, we read that religion duas taeterrimas pestes, servitutem ac metum, ex vita ac mente hominum eiiciat atque expellat (‘nothing can eject and expel slavery and fear, those twin loathsome pests, from human life and mind’). Here we meet two distinct pestilences, slavery and fear (and if we fuse them into hendiadys, that is our own mental act). So far so good; but any predilection for this reduplication can raise a tremor of doubt. Vita ac mente is rather less securely read as the second species, a shift from the wider to the more particular and vivid category. But exactly where the Latin should be strongest and most persuasive, in the verbs, coming too as final climax, one might well see eiiciat atque expellat, ‘throws out and drives out’, as too close to each other in meaning; a distinction without a difference. The phonetic patterns do not rescue the situation; style is becoming hysterical; rhetoric is felt as rhetoric. If it is the occupational hazard of writing about a rhetorical style that one has to point to its art and thus appear to commend it, it is equally true that one has to stay on guard, and use judgement to avoid being beguiled by so much expertise. Just as with Cicero, the marvellous fluency of this style and this writer can at times conceal an absence of sense, or crooked and self-interested reasoning. Yet such

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lapses, once heeded, only confirm the usual trust. They stabilize and strengthen the prevailing enthusiasm.

5.3. Figures: imagery The normal severity and functionality of the Latin means that the argument is seldom helped along by poetical flights or wondrous imagery. This fact contributes to the ‘closed’ quality of thought which for C. A. Patrides so contrasts with the theology of Paradise Lost (Patrides, 1967a; cf. Hale, 2005, 237). One place where imagery does raise the register and ennoble the enquiry itself comes at the outset when the Epistle enlists biblical imagery of water and purity to convey the author’s own pious motivation and to dwell on the contrast with the centuries of corruption and staining. This unusually image-rich passage has a further image-theme: call it ‘inception’, the opening paragraph’s little run of ineunte, coepta est, and incoepto, and onwards into Coepi igitur Adolescens on MS p. 2. The Reformation has begun and slowed down: let the author then ‘begin’ his own contribution or personal Credo now (see also Hale, 2005, ch. 17, ‘Notes’). In the main body of the text, we can see the transparent, elevated and impersonal positive of biblical imagery alongside its corollary, the negative of Milton’s own caustic or scorning imagery. On MS p. 75 we meet the latter at some length, then in a briefer contrasting burst the former. The metaphorical words are underlined, to show how the negative ones gather through a series of strong verbs like an avalanche, incorporating as it rolls onwards a disdainful rhyming and a climaxing two-word verb-phrase; after which (in an unusual form of chiasmus) the first positive is a six-word image of slaking thirst with the true and pure water, supported by a more numerous but less developed series of supporting images, of clarity and light. Et fides certe ea est, in re praesertim cum primis credenda, quae non ex locis aliud agentibus, lectione etiam nonnunquam varia atque sensu dubiis, unde exprimi et quasi extorqueri, non ex articulis aut particulis aucupio quodam captari, non ex ambiguis aut obscuris quasi pythia responsa erui, sed ex clarissimis fontibus pleno ore hauriri debeat. Haec enim est evangelii prae lege praestantia, haec aperta simplicitas, haec vera lux et promissa doctrinae perspicuitas.

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Here is Donald Cullington’s splendid vigorous rendering: And surely trust, especially in a principal article of faith, is such that it ought not to be squeezed out and, as it were, torn out of passages dealing with another point—sometimes doubtful ones too, because of a variant reading and meaning—it ought not to be chased after with some bird-trap out of articles and particles, it ought not to be dug out of ambiguities, or else obscurities—like the Delphic oracle’s answers [the adjective pythia refers to the cult-title of Apollo at Delphi, where he killed the serpent Python]—but quaffed by the mouthful out of the clearest springs. For this is the gospel’s advantage over the law, this is its obvious simplicity, this is its true light and its promised transparency of doctrine.

‘Quaffed’, translating hauriri: the strong simple word mimes the relief of drinking pure water after being fobbed off for so long with inferior substitutes. The onomatopoeia of the image, this first of the positive ones, is matched by the syntax, in that the complicated preceding syntax of the negatives now resolves into a short, transparent main clause. To repeat, the force often resides in the verbs, strong in idea and positioning. The derogatory imaging is more inventive, personal, and an important part of the rhetorical weaponry. Note how Milton reinforces his disdain by the ‘jingling sound of like endings’ at articulis aut particulis: rhyme is too easy to be a beauty in an inflected language, but for that very reason suits the opposite speech-act, of a gleeful and scathing dismissal.

5.4. Figures: allusion If all so far has struck our own reader as plodding and over-particular, or as general and impressionistic, or as tendentiously and ungraciously making out the author’s inferred stylistic ‘personality’ to be unattractive—for we have shown him at times to be grinding, grudging, importunate, overbearing, opinionated and in fact oppressively coercive in the name of freedom, guilty, in Evelyn Tribble’s phrase, of ‘slippage between explanation and coercion’ (Tribble, 1993, 17)—then now for some welcome news. First, the style is always purposive, functional, be it drab or neutral or logical or eristic or suasive. Secondly, the Latinity has clarity and force to its credit, even if this is taken at times to a hectoring

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excess. Thirdly, it can be enjoyed for its command, its exercising with felt muscular force of colossal resources of lexis, idiom and periodic sweep. Fourthly, it must be admired as a sustained feat of endurance and focus, accumulating to a perverse grandeur. But lastly, it contains within itself, widely spaced out among the functionality, and relieving the too frequent asperities, some local figures which beget a true delight. They deserve to be anthologized. Foremost among these special effects or beauties of eloquence stand the literary allusions. By literary allusions is meant, not the constitutive biblical citations (though these themselves can have the sharp cogency of corroborative jewels, with all the supervening pleasure of meeting them in the splendid unfamiliar Latin of Tremellius), and certainly not the rare moments when a rival theologian or scholar is actually quoted before being put on the rack and disproved. We mean the classical, pagan allusions. When assembled, they comprise a fascinating company. Taken individually, and locally as one reads, they diversify and enliven, and sometimes transform, the experience of consecutive reading. Two further preliminaries are needed before we survey the allusions, then probe the longest and most decisive of them. First, it might be thought strange or even a breach of presumed decorum that Milton should strengthen a theology drawn ‘from the sacred writings alone’ by any pagan testimony. But other theologians of his ilk did so, and freely: for example, John Owen. Milton’s allusions are actually fewer, and more commanding or strategic than Owen’s. It is quality, not mere presence or number, which characterizes and distinguishes the allusion-practices of De Doctrina. Secondly, the issue of how a Christian writer should, or should not, draw upon pagan literature as testimony extends very much wider than this question of allusion. Here, it must suffice to say that Paul himself had used Greek authors and their authority, and that this was well known to Milton and his age. The issue was how, not whether, to use them. A natural option was to use them as supporting evidence, the evidence of disinterested because ex hypothesi unilluminated pagans: allusion was adminicular. Rhetorically stronger, however, would be the times where a believer could overcome a fellow-believer’s error

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by showing that even unbelievers knew better than this. It makes a powerful, shaming a fortiori argument, an ineluctable ad hominem. This is precisely how Milton adduces Homer, as climax of his chapter on predestination (I.4, MS pp. 25–48). The lengthy chapter, on a favourite topic, closes with the testimony of Homer. Accusant enim revera Deum, tametsi id vehementer negant: et ab Homero etiam ethnico egregie redarguuntur, Odyss. I. 7. Αὐτῶν γὰρ σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὄλοντο

which is then rendered into Latin, a literal word-by-word construal—not at all Milton’s usual practice, so the needs of faithful clarity are uppermost—: Suis enim ipsorum flagitiis perierunt. c Et rursus, inducta Iovis persona: Lib. I. 32 [reference added by Sumner]. ’`Ω πόποι, οἷον δή νυ θεοὺς βροτοὶ αἰτιόωνται ἐξ ἡμέων γάρ φασι κάκ’ ἔμμεναι· οἱ δὲ καὶ αὐτοὶ σφῇσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὑπὲρ μόρον ἄλγε’ ἔχουσιν Papae, ut scilicet Deos, mortales accusant! Ex nobis enim dicunt mala esse: illi vero ipsi Suismet flagitiis, praeter fatum, dolores patiuntur.

[For they actually accuse God, although they strenuously deny it; and they are superbly confuted even by pagan Homer, Odyssey 1.7: For by their own personal outrages they perished.]

And again, when the character of Jupiter has been brought in (MS p. 48): Oh dear! how indeed mortals reproach Gods! For they say that evils come out of us, yet they themselves By their own outrages suffer sorrows beyond fate.

The extended allusion could elicit extended comment here, but perhaps it will do to select only Homero etiam ethnico egregie redarguuntur, ‘Even the pagan Homer’ can supply us with an outstanding refutation. The placement, and the fact that both are favourite words of this logician at an eristic climax, show many usual features of the register working together with the unprecedented reliance on bilingual and extended allusion to make this a resounding conclusion, to a topic

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which, like Christology, was the defining theological issue of Milton’s lifetime. This issue defined Dutch politics for a century, as much as the issue of Christ’s nature had once defined those of Byzantium. Other passages from ethnici which contribute to the argument are: Homer (again), Euripides and Horace (several from each), Ovid, Virgil, Aristotle and Thucydides, Plutarch (MS p. 35). The poets are all among Milton’s greatest favourites. We notice that Euripides is called on both for linguistic witness, on Greek plurals, and for support of a main original theme, mortalism. The secular historian Thucydides is quoted regarding divine justice, as first of a little clustering of allusions: Thucydides, Virgil, Ovid are gathered on page 165. Overall, though, Greeks outnumber Romans. Aristotle, though seldom quoted, underlies passages regarding physics and metaphysics as well as the soul, and the Nicomachean Ethics grounds the whole classification of virtues and their opposites in Book Two. We are being tacitly assured that there was plenty more where all this came from, but that—again in contrast to Owen—a generic austerity is in control.

5.5. Tone ‘Tone’ can seem an elusive, and subjectively perceived, element of style. Nonetheless it is not one to be avoided, for at least four reasons. First, as with imagery but more widely in this case, to confront it can usefully fuse style with content, and helps us summarize as we near the conclusion. Secondly, to consider tone moves us towards recurrent or larger units of sense, that is, towards a concluding overview. Thirdly, we have implied several central things about tone in the preceding more focused studies, which in moving from larger to smaller structures then back again have implied both variety and consistency of tone. Lastly, tone connotes tone of voice; the sense of the speaking persona of an energetic personality within all the would-be logical rhetoric of this advocatorial, gladiatorial Milton. Repeatedly one seems to hear the dictating voice, eagerly addressing a problem or flattening an opponent. Tone cannot be left out: it is precisely what gets under the reader’s skin, and what remains in the memory. The constant subjectivity which many readers have remarked in Milton’s other work permeates De Doctrina, and with a peculiar power.

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One more example must suffice. MS p. 411 shows this voice in appeal to first principle, followed by scorn and rebuke; that is, the polar tones of theological black-and-white. Etenim si moralis duntaxat et civilis gratitudo cogenda non est, quanto minus ab evangelica vis omnis et coactio remotissima esse debet? quemadmodum et in evangelio annuntiando pecuniae ratio quàm minime debet versari; Act. 8. 20, pecunia tua tecum pereat, qui domum Dei existimaris pecuniis acquiri. Quod si emere evangelium est nefas, quanto magis nefarium est vendere? O vos ergo exigua fide quorum incredulam vocem saepius audivi, si ecclesiasticos tollis reditus, actum est de evangelio. Immo verò si vi et pecunia stat Christiana religio atque fulcitur, quid est quamobrem non aeque ac Turcarum religio suspecta esse videatur?

In the appropriately spirited version of John Carey, If, then, mere [duntaxat] moral and civil gratitude is not to be enforced, how much more [advocatorial steering] ought gratitude for the gospel [to] be freed from every trace of force or constraint? Similarly, monetary considerations should weigh least of all with anyone who preaches the gospel; Acts 8. 20: may your money perish with you, because you thought you could buy God’s gift with money. If it is wicked to buy the gospel, it must be much more wicked to sell it [an a fortiori, bringing Milton closer and closer to his target]. O you of little faith, [quoting Jesus, enlisting Jesus’ tone] whose incredulous [maybe ‘disbelieving’ or ‘misbelieving’ would be a better rendering] voices I have often heard exclaiming ‘If you take away ecclesiastical revenues, you destroy the gospel’ [or ‘it’s all up with the gospel,’ actum est de evangelio]—what I say is that if the Christian religion is based upon and supported by violence and money, why should it be thought any more worthy of respect than the mohanmedanism? (Yale, VI, 597–8)

The use of Cicero’s famous or infamous clausula esse videatur shows that the rhetorical temperature here keeps on rising, to a resounding Ciceronian close. So of course does the direct borrowing of Jesus’ plainer words ‘O ye of little faith’ in the preceding sentence. All the features of the style are co-operating to the would-be ineluctable conclusion. This tone is felt as a zealot’s urgency in all the most idiosyncratic passages and chapters, in fact intermittently throughout. It compels us to agree; it is forcing us to be free; reason is used like a cosh.

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6.1. Roman and humanist views of style Roman writers had much to say about style, and their ideas about it were heeded by the humanists, including Milton. They discussed style personally, in the sense that they held that the style was the man. Quintilian thought Thucydides densus et brevis et semper instans sibi, and the normative Cicero like Quintilian as quoted thinks in adjectives in order to describe style. We have been doing this from time to time in these descriptions, and shall conclude on the same principle. Secondly, the humanists placed great weight on Horace as an arbiter of taste, who said omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci. Horace said this in didactic verse, and its obvious application is to that. Yet the dictum was extended to other sorts of verse, less self-evidently useful than Virgil on bee-keeping, and to prose, which certainly figured as useful on Milton’s school syllabus (Varro on farming, Manilius on astrology) but would teach all the better for supplying the pleasures of good prose. Accordingly, while recognising how useful Milton seeks to be, we have dwelt more on communicative pleasures, the force and guile and amplitude of the advocacy, at his best moments well contrasting with the systematic plainness of the expositions. That is to say, Horace’s admonition has steered our own observations towards relishing the force and urgency of Milton’s Latin style, where he makes his readers feel them as pleasures which assist conviction in the reader of De Doctrina. To locate and share those pleasures of style is not perhaps to become any more convinced of the theological edifice, since in engaging with the rhetoric and enjoying its pleasures one also notices where the style protests too much; but it does help one to understand the edifice better, its builder and how he built.

6.2. Conclusions: the reading-experience To read the whole of De Doctrina in sequence in its Latin is a rare experience, ‘rare’ alas in more than one sense; but to read it for its Latin may well be unique. Hence these remarks have brought the ostensibly peripheral concept of pleasure into the assessment, because the work has a persuasive intent upon the reader, which relies on the arts of rhetoric to please as well as on those of logic

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to convince, and because it is almost impossible to engage with that intent from an English translation, be it never so elegant or faithful, or both. The pleasure involved is not unmixed, because (as demonstrated) the style is very often neither neutral nor humdrum nor dull, but intensely personal—absorbing and exciting, tiresome and tendentious by turns. As also demonstrated, at whatever risk of becoming too technical or piecemeal, the Latin is constantly impressive. Milton has at his command the fullest resources of Latin, and the other languages of scripture. The resultant authority is enhanced, moment by moment, from his expressive and eristic skills as a Latinist, practised in many modes and their registers; for these give pleasure, no matter whether they appear arcane and repugnant from outside. In his austere, disciplined, always-focused way, he plays an enormous fugue on his Latin organ. To speak candidly of the reading experience, and of engaging with the style, there is no getting past the sheer size of the text: what Samuel Johnson said of Paradise Lost, that no one ever wished it longer, would have been better said of De Doctrina. And yet, like the more mathematical of the keyboard works of J. S. Bach, the co-operating scope and style of De Doctrina give us the pleasure, besides local ones, of the austerely monumental. Thus we can appreciate the longest of the periodic sentences as like the sound of the 32-foot pipes. Though neither beautiful nor subtle nor winsome, they do have force. Like De Doctrina as a whole, they make the ground shake.

7 Conclusions 1. The history of the manuscript firmly ties it to a Miltonic provenance The transmission of the manuscript from the unpublished papers of the late John Milton to the cupboard where it was rediscovered is traceable in its near entirety. Jeremie Picard, the scribe primarily responsible for the manuscript as it came into the hands of Daniel Skinner, is associated with Milton as the amanuensis of several documents from the period 1658 to 1660. The early lives attest that at least some of Milton’s papers came into the hands of one of his Phillips nephews, though whether John or Edward remains uncertain. From those biographers we know that Milton wrote a systematic theology, which was unpublished at his death; though it is never called De Doctrina Christiana, the terms used for it are not incompatible with that text. We do not know how Daniel Skinner came to acquire the manuscript, together with a manuscript of the state papers, but that he had them, that he worked on them to prepare them for the press, and that he attempted to have them published in the United Provinces are facts established beyond contradiction, as is his surrender of them to Sir Joseph Williamson in response to a moderate application of personal pressure. The stages in which Williamson pursued the documents and his own certainty that they were of Miltonic provenance are evident from his letter books.

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2. The physical condition of the manuscript shows clear evidence of how the blind Milton worked on so challenging a project How could a blind man produce a document as rich in biblical citation as De Doctrina Christiana? The evidence of the manuscript gives a good insight into his working practices. We have established that the manuscript originated in a scribally accomplished fair copy, in Picard’s hand, of an earlier version. At that stage, it was divided into physically distinct fascicules, each containing a chapter, and it retained that structure through the complex process of revision. The whole text was still in fascicules when it came into Skinner’s possession, though he or another may have bundled together groups of consecutive chapters, presumably for convenience in handling them and perhaps to assist the printers for whom they were intended. By working on fascicules, Milton broke the intellectual structure down into sections in which a combination of his good memory and his support network of family, friends and pupils could allow him to work on it, chapter by chapter, through the process of revision. Both the good memory and the support network are attested by his early biographers, who all anticipate their readers’ interest in how he managed to write once he had lost his sight. Edward Phillips’s account of his ways of working as he composed Paradise Lost describes the casual use of passing scribes combined with a consolidating role for Phillips himself in pulling the manuscript into shape. Such a procedure, with Picard in Phillips’s role, would be compatible with our analysis of the physical state of the manuscript.

3. The manuscript is that of a work-in-progress; at Milton’s death it was not ready for submission to the press There is strong evidence to suggest that Skinner recopied the opening sections of the manuscript because they were in no condition to pass them to a press. We know that he had identified the opening sections as particularly problematic and that he had intended they should receive this special attention. We may therefore surmise that, as a whole, they presented the kinds of problems posed by page 308, for which we have both Skinner’s cancellans and Picard’s cancellandum,

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the latter showing some deletions and numerous additions, mainly of biblical quotations. We have established that sections which are almost certainly late fair copies by Picard made to incorporate such material have themselves been further amended. Like the rest of the Picard section, they have wide left-hand margins of a kind useful to the process of adding further biblical material. Comparison with the manuscript of Paradise Lost, Book One, is instructive. This is the only extant manuscript of a work by Milton from which a printed version was taken directly. It is clean fair copy, carrying a small number of unambiguous scribal amendments, which are in a hand known to be that of his nephew Edward Phillips, an amanuensis trusted by Milton to oversee the production of the poem for the press.

4. There is no evidence that Milton worked on the manuscript after the Restoration; the text is more likely to have been brought to its present condition at or around 1660 No document connects Milton and Picard after 1660, nor have any of the minor hands been identified as amanuenses associated with Milton after that date. Throughout the early modern period, successive regimes habitually confiscated and examined the papers of suspected transgressors. Much of the case against William Laud rested on William Prynne’s account of his personal papers. The practice continued through the reign of Charles II. James Harrington’s papers were confiscated when he was arrested in late 1662. Algernon Sidney and some of the victims of the Popish Plot were incriminated by papers found in their possession. At the Restoration, as we noted, Milton’s former boss, John Thurloe, hid his own papers so successfully that they were not recovered until the reign of William III. Milton, exempt from pardon until well after the Restoration, given his notoriety, would have been uncharacteristically reckless to have kept with him his most sensitive documents, especially one that could with facility be used to convict him of heresy and perhaps blasphemy. The subsequent history of De Doctrina Christiana and the state papers shows that at the least they would have been confiscated and suppressed, their eventual fate once Skinner had surrendered them.

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Furthermore, the content of De Doctrina Christiana and especially the tone and spirit of the Epistle strongly suggest a date in the very late 1650s. The manuscript is plainly the work of a heterodox and radical thinker, a figure much like the Milton we meet in his vernacular pamphlets of the closing years of the English republic, when he variously argued for a wide toleration of unorthodox religious belief, supported the establishment of an untithed clergy, and implied endorsement of the Quaker style of mission and worship. Not till 1673 did Milton again write explicitly about issues of religious observance and practice, in Of True Religion, Haeresie, Schism, Toleration, And what best means may be us’d against the growth of Popery (London). By then his priorities had shifted towards a broad, tolerant and widely inclusive version of English Protestantism, which, following the proto-whig agenda of the times, sought to play up how much common ground was shared by English Protestants and to marginalize controversial differences of doctrine. While Of True Religion certainly reiterates the precedence of ‘the Word of God only’ (Yale, VIII, 420), it argues, not for one particular interpretation (that is, Milton’s own), but for a coexistence of conflicting opinion, even in key areas of doctrine, such as soteriology. The nature and spirit of English dissent shifted significantly in the decade and a half that followed the Restoration, as appeasement or resistance or quietism or edgy compliance variously gave way to the confidence and oppositionalism of the proto-whigs; no doubt, ideologically, Milton also moved. Paradise Lost, which has often been seen as the text most illuminated by De Doctrina Christiana, falls roughly half way between our postulated dating for the cessation of work on the treatise and the publication of Of True Religion, in which case theological inconsistencies between De Doctrina and Paradise Lost are explicable in terms of the different phases in Milton’s thought which they occupy.

5. De Doctrina Christiana shows an expert command of Latin, of a higher order than that to be found in other treatises on systematic theology. This accords with the mastery of the medium in the Latin defences Though Milton’s treatise draws on the work of others, incorporating their writing into his own without attribution, the shaping hand

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is present pervasively, producing a Latin discourse modulated to the varying exigencies of the exposition. The Latinity shows the discrimination in Milton’s choice of vocabulary as he shifts his style to meet the needs of powerful argumentation, passages of sustained and elegant elevation and the persuasive captatio benevolentiae of the opening epistle.

6. The stylometric analysis suggests that disparities with the Latin Defences and internal stylometric variability are explicable in genre terms. Stylometric analysis does not contradict the arguments for a Miltonic provenance, though it does suggest that the notion of ‘authorship’ needs some reconsideration in the context of neo-Latin technical prose in the early modern period Initial stylometric analysis of the treatise both confirmed Milton’s involvement in its production and identified a level of internal inconsistency that seemed to point towards a collective authorship or else towards a Miltonic appropriation of early texts into his own, perhaps in a way analogous to his practice in producing the Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio. However, comparison with the closely influential systematic theologies of Wolleb and Ames illuminated the appropriative character of this genre. They, like Milton, write within a mature tradition, and their own treatises show greater stylometric diversity than Milton’s does. To be the author of a systematic theology is to absorb into one’s work the writing of others and to make it one’s own by changing key arguments, by adding different biblical texts, and by supplementing the exposition with some wholly new writing. Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana is at least as much his work as Wolleb’s or Ames’s treatises belong to the writers to which they are, uncontestedly, ascribed.

7. The theology of De Doctrina Christiana is characteristic of the theology of other treatises in the same genre Seventeenth-century systematic theology is the handmaiden of Ramist logic. This common source in Ramus creates striking similarities in

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the organization of these treatises, because all proceed through a recurring sequence of definition—binary division—consectary, and all proceed from God to eschatology. In uncontentious areas, their phrasing is often remarkably similar, and they use the same proof texts, often from the same Junius-Tremellius Bible. In matters of theological difference, however, the similarity is more apparent than real; theologians working within the genre sometimes cite the same proof texts in roughly the same order and often from the same Bible (J unius-Tremellius), but their purpose is sometimes to dissent from their predecessors, as is often the case with Milton. Many also wrote works of Ramist logic, and the relationship between the logic and the theology sometimes extends to content; this is certainly the case with Milton, who turns to his logic whenever he needs to support a controversial position. Many of these theological positions seem to be adumbrated in the Ars Logicae, but because the date of that work is not known, it is difficult to be confident about the point at which Milton’s theological thinking began to extend to minority positions. Even if, as Walter Ong suggests, the Ars Logicae was written in the mid-1640s, he cannot be right in assuming that major revisions would not have been possible ‘because the technicalities, massive quotations and cross-references would seem to make visual access to the text imperative for extensive modifications’ (Yale, VIII, 146). Such modifications are abundantly present in the manuscript of De Doctrina, which is replete with technicalities, massive quotations and cross-references; in the theological treatise it was Milton’s system of fascicules that enabled him to revise the treatise, and it seems altogether likely that if the manuscript of Ars Logicae were to be found, it would, like De Doctrina, be divided into fascicules. In short, the two works are synergistic, so it is possible that the origins of Milton’s radical doctrines lie in his logic, but it is equally possible that his logic was revised to support those same doctrines. Seventeenth-century Protestantism, at the relatively rarified level of systematic theology, is inherently diverse, fissiparous and often quirkily heterodox. Many systematic theologians who are respected for their orthodoxy accommodate within their treatises a few ideas that represent either a minority view or a personal opinion. Milton, like his fellow systematizers, overwhelmingly agrees with received opinion but occasionally champions a minority or personal opinion.

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In recent centuries Christians of most stripes (the notable exception being the Unitarians) have been trinitarians, so Milton’s antitrinitarianism has been regarded as a heresy. In a seventeenth-century context, however, antitrinitarianism was widespread in England and throughout continental Europe, so Milton was in multitudinous company in challenging the doctrine. It is now difficult to understand the extent to which the genre of systematic theology sanctioned a wide variety of minority opinions, because the treatises are locked in a language that most scholars cannot read. In that context scholars have naturally turned to vernacular controversial theology, of which the most stimulating writers in mid-seventeenth-century England were the more extreme sectaries, and have seen them as Milton’s confrères. It is true that Milton sometimes articulates radical theological opinions, but it is also the case that within the generic context of Latin systematic theology he is no more radical than many other theologians, and for the most part his opinions are part of the theological mainstream. This combination of local heterodoxy and general compliance with mainstream Protestantism can be paralleled among other exponents of systematic theology.

8. De Doctrina Christiana rightfully belongs in the Milton canon Its powerful argumentation, its undeferential perspective on key issues in Christian belief, and its robust yet flexible expression are worthy of their author. But, since it was abandoned while still a work-in-progress, probably half a decade before the completion of Paradise Lost, its value as a guide to the interpretation of the epic is limited, and the evidence it offers in that context should be used with appropriate circumspection. Seen as a text of the late 1650s, it points, perhaps, to a different lost paradise, that of a republican England that could have been characterized by a genuinely broad toleration, where no orthodoxy would go untested, where all would worship according to their own inner conviction, and none need fear the tithing priest and his ally, the persecuting magistrate.

Bibliography (1) (2) (3) (4)

Manuscripts Printed books before 1800 Editions since 1800 Books and articles since 1800

(1) Manuscripts Beckenham, Kent, Bethlem Royal Hospital Archives and Museum Admissions Book, 1683–1701 Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.5.5 (Milton’s poetical workbook) Admissions and Admonitions, 1560–1759 The Master’s Old Conclusion Book, 1607–75 (Conclusion Book A) Conclusion Book, 1646–1811 (Conclusion Book B) Cambridge, University Archives Subscriptiones II (29 September 1637–10 October 1691) Supplicats 1674–5, 1675–6, 1676–7 London, British Library Add MS 32310 (Milton’s family Bible) Add MS 36354 (Milton’s Commonplace Book) Add MS 63766 (Preston Papers XV, Letters from France, 1682–6) Egerton MS 1324 (Christoph Arnold’s Album Amicorum). London, National Maritime Museum MS LBK8, p. 746 (letter from Pepys to Jenkins, 24 July 1676) MS LBK8, p. 755 (letter from Pepys to Skinner, 17 November 1676) MS LBK8, p. 801 (letter from Pepys to Jenkins, 16 July 1677) London, Public Record Office E 190/63/8 (Searcher’s Port Book, London, Overseas Outwards, Christmas 1675–Christmas 1676) SP 9/61 (Parts 1–3 of the MS of De Doctrina Christiana; Part 4 is a portfolio of related documents) SP 9/194 (Milton’s state papers) SP 29/386, fol. 96 (Skinner’s testimony of 18 October 1676) SP 29/390, fols. 280–1 (Isaac Barrow’s letter of 13 February 1676/7 to George Seignior)

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Index Adoptionist Monarchians 105 Aitzema, Lieuwe van 101 Alsted, Johann-Heinrich 66, 96 Ames, William 66, 67, 70, 79, 82, 83, 88, 93, 104, 113, 119, 140 Amanuenses 51 Ambrosiaster 111 Amyraut, Moïse 91 Anabaptists 89, 100, 118, 119 Anselm 112 Antitrinitarianism 98–101 Aquinas, Thomas 92, 113 Arianism 7, 106, 115 Arians 100, 105, 106 Aristotle 103, 151 Arius 105 Arminianism 91,114, 115, 117 Antelapsarians 114 Atonement 112–13 Aubrey, John 34, 59, 60, 101 Augustine 102, 106, 108, 109, 110, 112, 114 Authorised Version 102, 133 Bacon, Francis 71, 73 Barbados 37 Barrow, Dr Isaac 25 Basil the Great 106 Bastwick, John 115 Bate, George 70 Baxter, Richard 70 Bethlem Hospital 32 Beza 96, 102, 119, 124, 125, 132, 133, 145 Biddle, John 101 Blaeu, Peter, and John 10, 18 Bradshaw, William 95 Bridgeman, William 26 Bucanus 104 Bucer, Martin 118 Bunhill Fields 31 Bunyan, John 98

Burrows, John 71 Burgess, Thomas 1 Burton, Henry 115 Busale, Girolamo 100 Calixines 89 Calvin, Jean 90, 92, 96, 104, 114, 117 Calvinism 89, 92 Cambridge Platonists 108 Campanus, Johannes 100 Campbell, Gordon 66 Cappel, Louis 91 Carey, John 128, 152 Cartwright, Thomas 66, 68, 93, 94, 95 Cassian, John 114 Charles II 157 Christ’s College 95 Christology 7, 92, 101–06, 120 Christoph Arnold album book 31 Chudleigh, Thomas 9, 16, 21 Cicero 118, 124, 125, 130, 145, 152, 153 Clement of Alexandria 108 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 123 Collinson, Patrick 94 Comenius, Johannes 70 Congress of Nijmegen 9, 10, 21, 28 Corns, Thomas 69, 114 Council of Constantinople 105 Council of Toledo, Third 107 Counter-Reformation 65 Coventry, Henry 12 Creation and Creationism 92, 107–11 Cromwell, Oliver 101 Cullington, Donald 4, 148 Curcellaeus, Stephanus 115, 117, 119 Danielson, Dennis 106 Davenant, William 103 Demosthenes 145 Diodati, Charles 118 Downame, George 81

178 Eliot, John 92 Ellis, John 14 Ellwood, Thomas 59, 62 Elsevier, Daniel 2, 5, 7, 13, 15, 18, 20, 26, 28, 30, 35 Emanationism 107, 108 Embryology 111, 120 Episcopius, Simon 114, 115, 117 Erasmus, Desiderius 145 Euripides 13, 151 Fenner, Dudley 66, 93, 94, 95, 96 Fletcher, Harris 132 Formula of Concord 90 Fox, George 62 Fricx, Eugene 14, 24 Frischer, B.D. 82 Fyll, Robert 102 Geneva Bible 102 Gerhard, Johann 90, 96 Gernler, Lucas 91 Gneiso-Lutherans 89 Gnosticism 107 Goodwin, John 101, 117 Grace 113–17 Gregory of Nazianzus 106 Gregory the Great 112 Grotius, Hugo 28 Hale, John 4, 81 Hall, Joseph 115 Hamilton, Douglas 6, 30 Hammersmith 90, 114 Hamartology 110, 111, 120 Harrington, James 157 Hartlib circle 101 Hatzer, Ludwig 100 Heere, Symon 7 Heidegger, Johann Heinrich 91 Hill, Christopher 118 Historia Augusta 82 Homer 150, 151 Hoover, David 69 Horace 129, 151, 153 Horton 115 Hubka, K.P. 70 Hunter, William v, 76, 78, 80, 106, 122

Index Infralapsarians 114 Intelligent design 110 Irenaeus 105, 112 Irwin, H. F. 66 Jenkins, Sir Leoline 9, 10, 14, 18 Jerome 110, 125 Johannine Comma 99 John of Leiden 119 John the Apostle 99 Johnson, Samuel 154 Jones, Edward 115 Jones, Richard 91, 103 Junius-Tremellius Bible 97, 99, 119, 159, 160 Justin Martyr 108 Keckerman, Bartolomäus 104 Kelley, Maurice 1, 2, 35, 43, 51, 65, 67,118, 121, 123 Kew 31 Kleerkooper, M. M. 6, 28 Latin defences 3 Laud, William 157 Laudianism 65, 114 Lawson, George 93 Lemon, Robert 1, 2, 5, 29 L’Estrange, Roger 13 Lewalski, Barbara 76 Lewis, John 101 Limborch, Phillipp van 7, 14, 114, 115, 117 Lincoln’s Inn 33 Lusignan, Francine 81 Luther, Martin 111, 117, 119 Lutherans 89, 92 Macedonianism 106 Macedonians 106 Majorism 90 Manilius 153 Masson, David 6, 24 May, Tom 70, 101 Melanchthon, Philipp 92, 114 Meredith, Roger 12, 21, 22 Mevis 37 Middle Treasury Gallery 5, 31

Index Middleton, Henry 124 Miller, Leo 35, 119 Milman, Henry 123 Milton, Deborah 6 Milton, John Ars Logicae 3, 8, 81, 97, 103, 104, 109, 110, 112, 116, 118,119,128, 159, 160 Artis Loigcae Plenior Instituto (see Ars Logicae) Areopagitica 115 Colasterion 136 Commonplace Book 31, 32 Comus 90, 114 Defences 3, 74, 79, 80, 82, 83, 86 Defensio Prima 3, 72, 73 Defensio Secunda 72 Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce 115 Epitaphium Damonis 118 History of Britain 119 ‘Il Penseroso’ 90 Judgement of Martin Bucer, The 118 Letters of state (see Literae Pseudo-Senatus) Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings, The 65 Literae Pseudo-Senatus 10, 22, 24 ‘Lycidas’ 114 Nativity Ode 91 Of Reformation 91, Of True Religion 158 Paradise Lost 61, 62, 89,100,109, 113, 121, 133, 154, 156, 157, 158, 161 Pro Se Defensio 72 Prolusiones 76, 79 Sonnet XIV (‘When faith and love’) 118 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, The 94 Treatise of Civil Power 65 ‘Upon the Circumcision’ 113 Milton, John snr 115 Milton, Katherine 32 Milton, Mary 6 Milton, Sara 115 Modalist Monarchians 105 Monarchians 100, 105

179 Mortalism 92, 117–19 Moulin, Pierre du 91 Munster 119 Musculus 104 Nestorians 100 Nestorius 105 Nicene Creed 109 Oates, Titus 6 Ochino, Bernard 101 Old State Paper Office 1, 5 Ong, Walter J. 81, 103 Osiandrism 90 Ovid 151 Owen, John 149, 151 Oxford Text Archive 71 Parker, William Riley 65, 68, 136 Pastor, Adam 100 Patripassians 105 Patrides, C.A. 106, 147 Patterson, Annabel 142 Paul of Samosata 105 Peel, Robert 1 Pelagius 113 Pepys, Samuel 9, 10, 13, 15, 18, 24, 25, 33, 37 Perkins, William 93, 95 Perwich, William 26 Philippist Lutherans 89 Philip of Hesse 119 Phillips, Edward 34, 59, 60, 61, 93, 155, 156, 157 Phillips, John 155 Photinians 100 Photinus 105 Picard, Jeremy 31–3, 42, 44, 66, 75, 139, 155, 156, 157 Piscator, Johannes 93, 96 Pitt, Moses 10 Plato 136 Platonism 98 Plutarch 151 Pneumatology 106–7 Pneumatomachi 105, 106, 107 Polanus, Amandus 93, 96, 104, 119 Polygamy 119–20

180 Popish Plot 157 Postlapsarians 114 Prynne, William 70, 115, 157 Psychopannychism 117, 118 Public Record Office 39 Quakers 65 Quintilian 153 Racovian Catechism 100–01 Rakoczi, Gyorgy 101 Rakow 100 Ramus, Petrus 81, 92, 93, 96, 97, 159 Ranters 65 Remonstrants 7 Rivet, Andrè Roman Catholicism 92 Rotterdam 15, 16 Royal Africa Company 37 Rumrich, John 106 Sabellians 100, 105 Salmasius 20, 70 Samosatenians 100 Saumur 91, 104 Saumur Academy 91 Second Council of Orange 113 Seignior, Dr George 25, 26 Servetus, Michael 100, 117, 118 Sewell, Arthur 121 Shakespeare, William 145 Shawcross, John 6, 77, 78 Sidney, Algernon 157 Skinner, Cyriack 6, 59, 60, 61, 62 Skinner, Daniel the younger 1, 7, 15, 16, 34, 37, 39, 40, 75, 78, 134, 139, 155, 156 Skinner, Daniel the elder 5, 24, 29 Skinner, Mary 8 Socinians 100, 113 Soteriology 111–17 Sotheby, Samuel Leigh 6 Sozzini, Lelio and Fausto 100 State Papers 2 Stede, Edwin 37 Sumner, Charles 2, 6, 30, 139 Supralapsarians 114

Index Synod of Alençon 91 Synod of Dort 91 Tertullian 102, 110 Theophilus of Antioch 98 Thirty-Nine Articles, The 90, 107, 113 Thirty Years War 65 Thnetopsychism 117 Thomason, Catharine 118 Thucydides 151, 153 Thurloe, John 33, 157 Thynne, Henry Frederick 12 Toland, John 59, 62 Towerson, William 32 Traducianism 110 Transylvania 101 Trelcatius, Lucas 93 Tremellius, Immanuel 99, 102, 124, 125, 132, 133, 149 Tribble, Evelyn 148 Trinitarianism 94 Trinity College Cambridge 7, 25, 35, 37 Tyndale, William 117 Trinity Manuscript 31, 32 Tse, E.K. 82 Turrettini, François Tweedie, F. J. 82 Uffenbach, Zacharias Conrad von 7 Unitarians 89, 100 Varro 153 Virgil 151 Vossius, Gerhardus Johannes 136, 137 Vulgate, the 102, 125, 132, 136 William III 157 Williamson, Sir Joseph 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 30, 155 Westminster Abbey 118 Wolleb, Johan 66, 70, 73, 79, 83, 88, 93, 94, 95, 104, 107, 113, 119, 122, 128, 129, 135, 139, 140 Wood, Anthony 59 Zanchius, Hieronymous 104 Zumpt, C. G. 138

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Milton and the Rabbis

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Milton and the Idea of the Fall

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La Doctrina Secreta De Los Rosacruces

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Milton And The Rhetoric Of Zeal

Milton and the Hermeneutic Journey

Doctrina De Los Doce Apostoles (didache)

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The Cheim Manuscript

The Godwulf Manuscript

The Godwulf Manuscript

Milton and Republicanism

Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana

La Doctrina De Ameghino

Doctrina De Los Apostoles (doctrina Apostolorum)

Apuntes De Doctrina Española

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Doctrina Nacional

Milton and the Rabbis

Milton and the Rabbis

Milton and the Rabbis

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Milton and the Jews

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Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript

Milton And The Rhetoric Of Zeal

Milton and the Hermeneutic Journey

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The Godwulf Manuscript

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