Catherine Gimelli Martin's previous scholarship has illuminated Milton's poetry by establishing connections to the thought of Francis Bacon and to the larger field of early modern science. In editing this volume, she has brilliantly advanced that project. The diversity of the assembled essays is evidence of the extraordinary richness of the topic. It is after all not so much a single topic as a set of related ones, and this volume takes up an enormous range of issues including experimental method, astronomy, cosmology, chemistry, and medicine. One effect of reading the collection all the way through—which means traveling down a succession of different, sometimes intersecting, pathways through early modern intellectual life—is a grateful, excited sense of how much ground remains to be covered.

In Part 1, “Bacon and the Royal Society Baconians,” Martin and Pavneet Aulakh investigate different aspects of Milton's Baconian inheritance. Martin's essay brings this issue into focus by drawing a careful contrast between Paradise Lost and Abraham Cowley's Davideis. She refutes recent arguments against Milton's Baconianism and shows that Milton's engagement with that tradition is serious, subtle, and committed, though revisionary. Cowley, she argues, is a different story: “more of a theoretical Hobbesian than a ‘true’ Baconian empiricist” (20). Ultimately, the modernity of Paradise Lost is credited to its commitment to Baconian curiosity, while Cowley's “sadly uncurious epic” ends up looking like a failure (47). This essay, which ranges widely, exploring other aspects of Milton and Cowley's (and Bacon's) bodies of work, develops a fine-grained account of what it means to be a committed Baconian in the seventeenth century (42). Aulakh's essay is another creative contribution to a Baconian interpretation of Milton's art. It demonstrates the importance in Paradise Lost of Bacon's “fundamental redefinition of value”—of, that is, his insistence on the apparently trivial or ordinary as “a sense-enhancing prosthetic useful for contemplating matters high” (53, 55). For both Bacon and Milton, Aulakh successfully demonstrates, it is comparison or similitude that instrumentalizes the mundane as a means of access to otherwise elusive phenomena. Of particular value here is Aulakh's discussion of the connection, in Paradise Lost, between the transvaluation of the ordinary world represented by the figure of Christ and the epistemically-oriented elevation of the same in Bacon's experimental program.

The remainder of this second section continues to raise provocative questions about Milton's conception of the cosmos. John Rumrich's essay considers the poet's investment in freedom of will alongside Albert Einstein's seemingly contrary belief in a determinist universe. The neatness of the contrast is deceptive, however; the essay makes these thinkers look more alike than one would expect. For despite Milton's insistence on the indeterminacy of things, which he understands as the basis of human freedom, that commitment is difficult to sustain. Rumrich ponders Milton's struggle with those moments in Scripture where God seems himself to make sinners commit their sins, and he highlights the importance in Paradise Lost of the tension between human liberty and the reach of God's agency. God's foreknowledge of what people are going to do does not make him responsible for what they do, Milton insists, and yet, for Rumrich, “the pervasive shaping power of his [God's] eternal providence” ultimately undermines the clarity of that distinction (118). Even when chance seems distinctly unassimilable to providence, Rumrich argues, things are murky. Satan is rescued from the abyss by a “tumultuous cloud,” but this image of explosive force belongs to the figural and literal pattern that links Satan with gunpowder, so that what looks like sheer contingency might in fact be obscurely reflective of God's elaborately ramifying agency: out here in the disordered reaches of the universe, seemingly beyond God's jurisdiction, chaotic phenomena are somehow not beyond good and evil but instead obscure participants in the drama of their interplay. Webster's essay, which I praised above for its subtle understanding of Milton's Galileo, returns from this comparative perspective to the decided focus on Milton's intellectual-historical moment that defines most of the contributions to the volume. It considers Milton's approach to the question of the plurality of worlds, arguing that his vision of a universe in which human beings are no longer the taken-for-granted center of things in fact gives rise to a new form of human centrality: in place of earth or humankind, it is now the individual observer, however situated, whose relationship to God's expansive creation matters most. Webster sees this emphasis as an important continuity between Milton and Galileo, who takes “his own individual self” rather than “the earth in general” as “the focal point from which he observes and contemplates the heavens” (138). She also shows that Milton recognizes the importance of this continuity and thus evokes Galileo to suggest the primacy of the embodied individuality of the observer, an insight that orients several illuminating interpretations of passages from the poem. Marisa Bruce's essay, the only one in the book that is primarily concerned with an author other than Milton, also considers the question of the plurality of worlds, now in connection with Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone, which, she suggests, is a probable source for some of Milton's speculations. She provides an insightful discussion of “extraterrestrial theology”—in particular, the question of whether souls have been or need to be saved on other planets—across a wide range of thinkers, including William of Vorilong and Tommaso Campanella, who take seriously the possibility that Christ's sacrifice redeems extraterrestrial sin, and Isaac La Peyrère, who does not explicitly consider the question of extraterrestrial life but explores similar soteriological questions in advancing an argument that not all human life was descended from Adam and that sin is imputed generally to humankind without it needing to be transmitted through genetic inheritance (152). This debate provides an intellectual context for Bruce's insightful discussion of Godwin's science fiction as theological fiction.

Part 3, “Chemistry and Physiology, Vitalist Matter and the Passions,” can be read as a sequence of linked reflections on Milton's monism. Charlotte Nicholls discovers a new approach to an interpretive issue that has been interestingly discussed before by scholars such as John Rogers: the relationship, in Paradise Lost, between God's sovereign decrees and natural laws, which can be construed as an equation, a tension, or, to amplify this last possibility, a problem. “If Milton's is indeed a coherently monist universe,” Nicholls writes, “the gap between the voluntarist God of the prohibition and the rationalist or radical universe in which the fruit is toxic must be closed” (168). Attempting to close that gap, she makes the thought-provoking argument that the fruit is not just a symbol but is also “materially efficacious” (168). Examining Milton's physiology in connection with contemporary theories in chymical medicine, she points out that Milton shares with Francis Glisson a vision of a “subliming body” in which corporeal spirits transform into each other and in which—here is the unusual conviction they share—there is no break between the corporeal and the rational, which helps explain why “a putrid febrile fermentation started by the fruit” can have such far-reaching consequences (169). In the aftermath of Adam and Eve's transgression, Nicholls writes, “the contagious fire has left deposits in a film over the eyes, darkening their sight, but the darkening of the mind, like the other effects of the Fall, also has a basis in the physiology of fever” (179). Leah S. Marcus's essay is likewise interested in medicine, but here the focus is the Paracelsian tradition and especially its promotion of homeopathic remedies. This is the only essay in the collection that is centered on one of Milton's works other than Paradise Lost (though it does glance at the epic): Marcus's project is to think through possible resources in Paracelsian theory for the interpretation of Samson Agonistes. She argues that Samson's “three visitors, Manoa, Dalila, and Harapha, each present him with a different set of threats from the outside that corresponds with specific passions that dominate his own mind. In each case, the encounter functions homeopathically, in the Paracelsian manner, to expel them and free him from the passions' hold upon him” (199). Ultimately, she argues that this sequence of exposures produces catharsis—for Samson, for the Chorus, and for readers. There are moments in this discussion where I am unsure about the tightness of the connection to Paracelsus: is “learn[ing] to be good by … encountering and fending off external evils” genuinely recognizable as a homeopathically curative exposure in a distinctly Paracelsian sense (197)? Marcus anticipates this kind of question, and she is careful not to overstate her case: the argument is explicitly not for the direct influence of Paracelsian thought on Milton but for the value of an exploratory juxtaposition, which does indeed make for a perceptive discussion of Samson Agonistes. In the final essay in the collection, Stephen Fallon identifies commonalities between the anti-dualisms of Milton and Isaac Newton: both men affirm a corporeal soul and the idea of animate matter more generally. There is no argument here for influence, but Fallon discusses Milton and Newton's similar intellectual worlds: similarities in educational background and social networks contextualize their shared philosophical commitments. Fallon's lucid essay is also sensitive to significant differences between his protagonists: “Each emphasizes God's unfettered activity, but where Milton stresses the freedom of God's will, Newton stresses God's unlimited power” (229). Fallon sums up what is for me most intriguing about his argument with the following formulation: “To see the ways in which Newton, the banisher of poetry, articulates a world very like the world of Paradise Lost, is to free oneself from the illusion that what is important in Newton is what in hindsight has seemed to be the creation of our modern, largely mechanistic worldview” (228).

It is on this question—of the relationship between the early modern past and the late modern present—that I would like to end. For Fallon's observation affirms the value of the careful historicism his essay beautifully exemplifies: the vitalist Newton is lost to us, along with the intellectual world that enabled his Miltonic vision (if I can put it that way), if we do not spend more time with the dead, get to know them through their still-living words, and cut through received narratives about how things were. This collection, like much of the most exciting work in early modern literary studies today, provides ample evidence of how generative such a project can be—in this case, renewing our sense of what Milton thought, said, and did by recovering his relationship to the intellectual projects, scientific practices, theories of nature, and conceptions of God that shaped his life and work. With an eye on this goal, Martin's Introduction rightly rejects simplistic oppositions between old animisms and new mechanisms, between old religiosities and new rationalities, encouraging us to examine the past on its own terms. Yet the book's very title signals an interest in “the new,” and Martin's Introduction is called “Encountering the Modern.” The diversity of the contributions ensures that their shared investment is not this or that specific context (Baconianism, say) but a certain “modernity” that encompasses the many distinct intellectual developments they ponder. The contrast deserves some reflection: this self-consciously modernizing collection is in fact much more invested in protecting the past from anachronism, ensuring that it is not distorted by late modern premises, than it is in developing answers to the question it implicitly poses about what makes Milton “modern.” There are of course good reasons to be cautious here: I am not advocating anti-historicism—and certainly not a return to teleology. What I want instead to say is that this collection's circling of the problem of modernity activates my own desire for versions of literary history that insist on articulating the seventeenth century with what follows it—that coherently narrate the passage from then to now. To name this desire for large-scale historical narrative—for clear lines of causal development, for periodizing arguments without over-firm demarcations, for explanations of the persistence of the past in the present that go significantly beyond the gestural or thematic—is not at all to critique this volume but to identify one place the conversation might go next. If we have found ourselves talking about modernity without quite talking about modernity—if we have rejected both complacent faith in progress and conservative nostalgia but remain invested in connecting the past to the present—perhaps we can look forward to new, thoughtful, trans-historical (not ahistorical, but period-spanning) approaches. This goal is a tall order in literary studies, requiring as it does the combination of vastly different scales of analysis, the coordination of long-term processes and textual particulars, but one good point of departure is this imaginative collection of forward-looking feats of contextualization.

凯瑟琳·吉梅利·马丁 (Catherine Gimelli Martin) 之前的奖学金通过与弗朗西斯·培根 (Francis Bacon) 的思想和早期现代科学的更广泛领域建立联系，阐明了弥尔顿的诗歌。在编辑这本书时，她出色地推进了那个项目。汇集的论文的多样性证明了该主题的异常丰富。它毕竟不是一个单一的主题，而是一组相关的主题，而且这本书涉及的问题范围很广，包括实验方法、天文学、宇宙学、化学和医学。从头到尾阅读该系列的一个效果——这意味着沿着一系列不同的、有时是交叉的、早期现代知识生活的路径——是一种感激、兴奋的感觉，即有多少领域有待覆盖。

在第 1 部分“培根和皇家学会培根派”中，Martin 和 Pavneet Aulakh 调查了弥尔顿对培根派继承的不同方面。Martin 的文章通过对Paradise Lost和 Abraham Cowley 的Davideis进行仔细对比，使这个问题成为焦点。她驳斥了最近反对弥尔顿的培根主义的论点，并表明弥尔顿对这一传统的参与是严肃的、微妙的、坚定的，尽管是修正的。她认为，考利是一个不同的故事：“更多的是理论上的霍布斯主义者，而不是'真正的'培根经验主义者”（20）。最终，失乐园的现代性归功于其对培根式好奇心的承诺，而考利的“可悲的缺乏好奇心的史诗”最终看起来像一个失败 (47)。这篇文章范围广泛，探讨了弥尔顿和考利（以及培根）作品的其他方面，对 17 世纪坚定的培根主义者的意义进行了细致的描述 (42)。奥拉克的文章是对弥尔顿艺术的培根式解释的又一创造性贡献。它证明了《失乐园》的重要性培根的“对价值的根本性重新定义”——也就是说，他坚持将表面上微不足道或平凡的事物视为“一种有助于思考高尚事物的感觉增强假肢”(53, 55)。对于培根和弥尔顿，奥拉克成功地证明了，正是比较或相似将平凡的事物工具化，作为进入其他难以捉摸的现象的一种手段。这里特别有价值的是 Aulakh 在《失乐园》中对基督形象所代表的普通世界的重估与培根实验计划中以认识论为导向的提升之间的联系的讨论。

第二部分的其余部分继续对弥尔顿的宇宙观提出挑衅性的问题。约翰·鲁姆里奇 (John Rumrich) 的文章考虑了诗人对意志自由的投入，以及阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦 (Albert Einstein) 对决定论宇宙的看似相反的信念。然而，对比的整洁是具有欺骗性的。这篇文章使这些思想家看起来比人们想象的更相似。因为尽管弥尔顿坚持事物的不确定性，他将其理解为人类自由的基础，但这种承诺很难维持。拉姆里奇思考弥尔顿与圣经中上帝似乎亲自使罪人犯罪的那些时刻的斗争，他强调了《失乐园》中的重要性人类自由与上帝代理权范围之间的紧张关系。弥尔顿坚持认为，上帝对人们将要做什么的预知并不能使他对他们所做的事情负责，然而，对于鲁姆里奇来说，“他[上帝]永恒天意的普遍塑造力量”最终破坏了这种区别的清晰性（118 ). Rumrich 认为，即使偶然性似乎明显无法与天意相提并论，事情也很模糊。撒旦被“乌云”从深渊中救出，但这种爆炸力的形象属于将撒旦与火药联系起来的比喻和字面模式，因此看起来纯粹的偶然性实际上可能模糊地反映了上帝精心设计的分支机构：在宇宙混乱的地方，似乎超出了上帝的管辖范围，混乱现象在某种程度上并没有超越善与恶，而是掩盖了他们相互作用的戏剧中的参与者。韦伯斯特的文章，我在上面称赞它对弥尔顿的伽利略的微妙理解，从这个比较的角度回到了对弥尔顿的思想历史时刻的明确关注，这个时刻定义了该卷的大部分贡献。它考虑了弥尔顿解决世界多元性问题的方法，认为他对人类不再是事物理所当然的中心的宇宙的看法实际上产生了一种新的人类中心形式：在适当的地方在地球或人类中，现在是个人观察者，无论身处何地，他们与上帝广阔的创造的关系最重要。韦伯斯特认为这种强调是弥尔顿和伽利略之间的重要连续性，他把“他自己”而不是“一般的地球”作为“他观察和思考天堂的焦点”（138）。她还表明，弥尔顿认识到这种连续性的重要性，从而唤起伽利略建议观察者体现个性的首要地位，这种洞察力引导了对这首诗的几个有启发性的解释。玛丽莎·布鲁斯 (Marisa Bruce) 的文章是书中唯一一篇主要关注弥尔顿以外的作者的文章，也考虑了世界的多元性问题，现在与弗朗西斯·戈德温 (Francis Godwin) 的文章相关联 她还表明，弥尔顿认识到这种连续性的重要性，从而唤起伽利略建议观察者体现个性的首要地位，这种洞察力引导了对这首诗的几个有启发性的解释。玛丽莎·布鲁斯 (Marisa Bruce) 的文章是书中唯一一篇主要关注弥尔顿以外的作者的文章，也考虑了世界的多元性问题，现在与弗朗西斯·戈德温 (Francis Godwin) 的文章相关联 她还表明，弥尔顿认识到这种连续性的重要性，从而唤起伽利略建议观察者体现个性的首要地位，这种洞察力引导了对这首诗的几个有启发性的解释。玛丽莎·布鲁斯 (Marisa Bruce) 的文章是书中唯一一篇主要关注弥尔顿以外的作者的文章，也考虑了世界的多元性问题，现在与弗朗西斯·戈德温 (Francis Godwin) 的文章相关联月亮中的男人，她建议，这可能是米尔顿某些推测的来源。她对“外星神学”进行了深刻的讨论——特别是灵魂是否已经或需要在其他星球上得救的问题——讨论范围广泛的思想家，包括 Vorilong 的 William of Vorilong 和 Tommaso Campanella，他们认真对待这种可能性基督的牺牲赎回了地外的罪恶，艾萨克·拉佩雷 (Isaac La Peyrère) 没有明确考虑地外生命的问题，而是探讨了类似的救赎论问题，提出了一个论点，即并非所有人类生命都是亚当的后裔，没有它，罪通常会归咎于人类需要通过基因遗传传递 (152)。这场辩论为布鲁斯对戈德温的深刻讨论提供了知识背景

第 3 部分，“化学和生理学，生命论的物质和激情”，可以理解为对弥尔顿一元论的一系列相互关联的反思。夏洛特尼科尔斯发现了一种解释问题的新方法，这个问题之前曾被约翰罗杰斯等学者有趣地讨论过：关系，在失乐园，在上帝的主权法令和自然法则之间，这可以被解释为一个等式，一种张力，或者，为了放大最后一种可能性，一个问题。“如果弥尔顿的世界确实是一个连贯的一元论宇宙，”尼科尔斯写道，“那么必须弥合禁止的唯意志论上帝与水果有毒的理性主义或激进宇宙之间的鸿沟”（168）。为了弥补这一差距，她提出了发人深省的论点，即水果不仅是一种象征，而且“具有物质功效” (168)。结合当代化学医学理论考察弥尔顿的生理学，她指出，弥尔顿与弗朗西斯·格里森 (Francis Glisson) 分享了一个“升华身体”的愿景，在这个身体中，肉体精神相互转化，并且——这是他们共同的不同寻常的信念——在肉体和理性之间没有断裂，这有助于解释为什么“由水果引起的腐烂发热发酵”会产生如此深远的影响 (169)。在亚当和夏娃犯罪之后，尼科尔斯写道，“传染性的火在眼睛上留下了一层薄膜，使他们的视线变暗，但头脑变暗，就像堕落的其他影响一样，也有一个基础发烧的生理学”（179）。Leah S. Marcus 的文章同样对医学感兴趣，但这里的重点是 Paracelsian 传统，尤其是它对顺势疗法的推广。失乐园（虽然它确实扫了一眼史诗）：马库斯的项目是通过 Paracelsian 理论中的可能资源来思考Samson Agonistes. 她争辩说参孙的“三位访客，Manoa、Dalila 和 Harapha，每个人都向他提出了一系列不同的来自外部的威胁，这些威胁与支配他自己思想的特定激情相对应。在每一种情况下，相遇都以帕拉塞尔式的方式顺势疗法地发挥作用，以驱除它们并使他摆脱对他的激情控制”（199）。最终，她争辩说，这一系列的曝光产生了宣泄——对参孙、对合唱团和对读者。在这个讨论中的某些时刻，我不确定与 Paracelsus 的联系是否紧密：“通过……学习 [ing] 成为好人……遇到和抵御外部邪恶”在明显的 Paracelsian 意义上真正被认为是一种顺势疗法治疗暴露（ 197)? Marcus 预料到了这种问题，她小心翼翼地不夸大她的情况：参孙激动剂. 在该文集的最后一篇文章中，斯蒂芬·法伦 (Stephen Fallon) 确定了弥尔顿和艾萨克·牛顿的反二元论之间的共性：两人都更普遍地肯定有肉体的灵魂和有生命的物质的想法。这里没有影响力的争论，但法伦讨论了弥尔顿和牛顿相似的知识世界：教育背景和社交网络的相似性将他们共同的哲学承诺置于背景之中。法伦清晰的文章也对他的主角之间的显着差异很敏感：“每个人都强调上帝的无拘无束的活动，但弥尔顿强调上帝意志的自由，而牛顿则强调上帝的无限力量”（229）。法伦用以下公式总结了他的论点中对我来说最有趣的地方：“看看牛顿，诗歌的驱逐者，失乐园，是为了让自己摆脱这样一种幻想，即牛顿的重要之处在于事后看来似乎是我们现代的、主要是机械论的世界观的创造”（228）。

我想在这个问题上——早期现代的过去和晚期现代的现在之间的关系——结束。因为法伦的观察肯定了谨慎的历史主义的价值，他的文章很好地举例说明了：如果我们不花更多的时间，我们就会失去生命力论者牛顿，连同使他的弥尔顿式愿景成为可能的知识界（如果我可以这样说的话）与死者在一起，通过他们还活着的话语来了解他们，并通过接受的关于事情是怎样的叙述来了解他们。与当今早期现代文学研究中许多最激动人心的作品一样，这本合集提供了充分的证据证明这样一个项目可以产生多大的影响——在这种情况下，通过恢复弥尔顿与他与智力项目、科学实践、自然理论，以及塑造他的生活和工作的上帝观念。着眼于这一目标，马丁的导言正确地拒绝了旧万物有灵论与新机制之间、旧宗教信仰与新理性之间的简单对立，鼓励我们以自己的方式审视过去。然而，这本书的标题本身就表明了对“新事物”的兴趣，而马丁的导言被称为“遭遇现代”。贡献的多样性确保他们的共同投资不是这个或那个特定的背景（比如培根主义），而是某种“现代性”，它涵盖了他们思考的许多不同的智力发展。这种对比值得反思：这个有意识的现代化系列实际上更注重保护过去不受时代错误的影响，确保它不被晚期现代前提扭曲，而不是在为它隐含地提出的关于是什么使弥尔顿“现代”的问题提供答案。这里当然有充分的理由保持谨慎：我不是在提倡反历史主义——当然也不是回到目的论。相反，我想说的是，这本合集对现代性问题的盘旋激发了我自己对文学史版本的渴望，这些版本坚持将 17 世纪与其之后的事物联系起来——连贯地叙述从那时到现在的过程。说出这种对大规模历史叙事的渴望——对因果发展的清晰线索，对没有过度坚定分界的论证的分期，因为对过去在现在的持续存在的解释远远超出了手势或主题——根本不是要批评这本书，而是要确定谈话接下来可能会去的地方。如果我们发现自己在谈论现代性时并没有完全谈论现代性——如果我们拒绝了对进步的自满信念和保守的怀旧情绪，而是继续致力于将过去与现在联系起来——也许我们可以期待新的、深思熟虑的、跨历史的（不是非历史的，而是跨时期的）方法。这一目标在文学研究中是一项艰巨的任务，因为它需要将截然不同的分析尺度结合起来，协调长期过程和文本细节，但一个很好的出发点是这个富有想象力的前瞻性壮举的集合情境化。