Milton and the English Revolution

by Christopher Hill

Book Overview

Remarkable reinterpretation of Milton and his poetry by one of the most famous historians of the 17th Century In this remarkable book Christopher Hill used the learning gathered in a lifetime's study... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140050663
• ISBN13: 9780140050660
• Release Date: January 1979
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Length: 541 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.

Customer Reviews

400th Anniversary Birthday Greetings- John Milton, Revolutionary and Poet

The name and work of the late British Marxist historian Christopher Hill should be fairly well known to readers of this space who follow my reviews on the subject of the 17th century English Revolution. That revolution has legitimately been described as the first one of the modern era and had profound repercussions, especially on the American Revolution and later events on this continent. Although Hill was an ardent Stalinist, seemingly to the end of his life, his works, since they were not as subjected to the conforming pressures of the Soviet political line that he adhered to, are less influenced by that distorting pressure. To our benefit. More importantly, along the way Professor Hill almost single-handedly brought to life the under- classes that formed the backbone of the plebeian efforts during that revolution. We would, surely, know far less about Fifth Monarchists, Brownists, Ranters, panters, Shakers, Quakers and fakers without the sharp eye of the good professor. All to the tune of, and in the spirit of that famous last line from John Milton's "Paradise Lost" about the locus of paradise, except instead of trying to explain the ways of god to man the professor has tried to explain ways of our earlier plebeian brothers and sisters to us. That said, on this the 400th Anniversary year of the birth of John Milton the great English revolutionary and poet it is fitting that the occasion be commemorated by a review of one of Professor Hill's major literary/historical works, "Milton and The English Revolution". Now with a figure like Milton, so central to the Western literary canon, it is, after 400 years of critique, entirely possible to analysis his life and work from a merely literary or religious point of view and "deep-six" his central role as a propagandist for Cromwell's republican English Commonwealth, as a defender of regicide in "The Tenure Of Kings and Magistrates" or as a man emerged in the various radical religious and political controversies of his day. The literary and political fight against such reductionism is, in fact, both the purpose of Hill's book and his core argument in order to take back the person of John Milton for the revolution. And along the way dispel the proposition that Milton was a cloistered "up-tight" Puritan exemplar, especially through his analysis of Milton's tracts on divorce and an examination of his career during the tumultuously 1640's. To this reviewer's mind Hill succeeds in the first task although I still have reservations in imagining the figure of a `rakish' John Milton on the second. As always in dealing with the controversies of the mid-17th in England it is best to have knowledge of the various religious controversies that were swirling through all classes as the showdown with the king, and more importantly, the theory of 'divine right' of kings and the heavy monarchical/church state apparatus based on it. Hill's main argument on this point is that Milton's known theological divergences from