Milton's Warring Angels: A Study of Critical Engagement.

William Kolbrener, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. $54.95. ISBN: 05-215-8104-4.

Renaissance scholars of a certain age may recall being attracted to the field in part because of a few brilliant books on the mythological tradition by, for example, Don Cameron Allen, Edgar Wind, and Jean Seznec. Works such as these introduced the student to that distinctive brew of Neoplatonic philosophy and classical myth offering, it seemed, the most vital contextual frame for the study of Renaissance literature. The authors, moreover, especially Allen, were fascinating figures themselves, writing with an enthusiasm that betrayed a desire to be continuators, not just detached scholars, of the traditions of recondite wisdom. The effect was at once seductive and comical: one entered somewhat ironically into the nostalgic spirit of the Renaissance mythographers the better to understand the poetic fascination of the culture described. That was when the Renaissance was the Renaissance, a cultural movement effecting a rebirth of classical antiquity in often grossly distorted and hence vital forms. With the turn to sociology in what we now call early modern studies there has been a shift of attention from the past to the future, one accompanied by a nostalgia for the present that we feel upon venturing into the past. Then we had nostalgia for nostalgia; now we have nostalgia for the now.

Two books on Milton reveal this change well, William Kolbrener's forward-looking account of the debate between authority and rebellion in Milton criticism and John Mulryan's study of Milton's indebtedness to mythography as practiced in continental humanism. Kolbrener's warring angels are the satanic and angelic parties in Milton criticism, the Empsons and the Lewises or, more recently, the "grand whig" Stanley Fish and scholars such as John Rumrich who (with nostalgia for the now) reinstate "a satanic Milton more suitable to the assumptions which inform post-modem critical practices" (109). Kolbrener's point is that the opposite camps in Milton criticism force each other to take up positions that depend for their coherency on what they oppose, thus failing to take into account a Milton who can hold apparent opposites together, rigorous opposites being, we are assured, artifacts of Enlightenment reason: "the oppositions instated in the historiography of the Enlightenment West (in which mythos and logos, reason and authority are antithetically opposed) inform a criticism where extremes are continually celebrated or condemned, and set polemically against one another" (109). More interesting insights lurk in the shadows of such erroneous platitudes, for example, that in Milton's account of creation in De Doctrina Christiana and Paradise Lost, "ontology gives way to a perspectivism which parallels the 'epistemological method' of Milton's scriptural herrneneutics" (93). The author has not been served well by a profession that favors exaggerated deference over independent thought: there is scarcely a paragraph in which quotations from at least three critics are not crowded together, as if left to carry the argument on their own. As a result, Kolbrener's more original insights have to be fit in wherever they can and left undeveloped. They give us reason, however, to expect more independent work in the future.

Miltonists generally would prefer to think of the poet using the materials helpfully described by John Mulryan, an acknowledged expert on Renaissance mythography, at most to refresh his memory of the classical originals. For the encyclopedic, allegorizing treatises on the images of the classical gods are not unlike the scriptural catenas and indices Milton called "loitering gear." But Mulryan makes a strong claim for Milton's interest in such works and for their presence in the very texture of the poet's thought and expression. Complementing the holistic treatment of myth he discerns in the Italian mythographers - one of his most original claims - Mulryan eschews the tendency of earlier scholarship to take a simplistic view of the sources: either the author read them, and they count, or he didn't, and they don't. Passages and patterns in several handbooks are reviewed and then multiple connections - always surprising, often convincing - are drawn to Milton's writings. Instead of traditional source study we have something more akin to the practices of cultural theory: a fine web of themes is elucidated for the purpose of showing the even more complex interpretative culture surrounding the poet and informing his work, often unconsciously. Some of Milton's more exalted conceptions are thus shown to be partly indebted to materials of surprisingly humble intellectual stature (290, 297).

Mulryan's approach, influenced as it is by early modern studies of the last decade, is at once more modest and more sophisticated in the way it advances its claims. But if interest is to be revived in this aspect of Renaissance culture it will be necessary, I think, to reopen the philosophical perspective on the status of the image that was taken by some of the older scholarship in the field, notably in the work of Robert Klein. In the mean time, one lesson we might take away from this valuable book is that if we are interested in how the Renaissance conditioned modernity we would do well to pay more attention to academic popular culture, for that is what mythography, at once learned and intellectually unsophisticated, was a manifestation of. The profusion in our time of handbooks of theory and dictionaries of critical terms (not to mention, as David Quint has recently observed, the pointless citations of Lacan in even the most conservative books) are not far removed from the assumption of Renaissance esotericism: hidden wisdom is possessed by any discourse that captures the signs of that wisdom.

GORDON TESKEY Cornell University