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Science and Structure in Milton's Doctrine of Divorce
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
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The scientific and pseudo-scientific lore in Milton's prose, like that in his poetry, is impressive for its bulk and its conventionality. What may at first seem recondite information is anticipated repeatedly in such vernacular encyclopedias and common handbooks as Bartholomew's De Proprietatibus Rerum (c. 1230), Stephen Batman's Batman vppon Bartholome (1582), Peter de la Primaudaye's The French Academie (1618), and John Swan's Speculum Mundi (1643). The range is tremendous: astronomy, astrology, herbal, animal, and lapidary lore, physiology, medical lore—all are drawn upon in their customary associations for illustration, argument, invective, and the other devices of controversial prose. Medical and anatomical allusions recur with great frequency. Anyone writing about the ills of the body politic, as Milton did, will make the expected comparisons with human disease; but the emphasis in Of Reformation and Eikonoklastes on fevers, flesh and skin diseases, insanity, and other ailments goes beyond the casual to the insistent and the directive. In Eikonoklastes and the Defences, for example, the stress falls upon disease and distortion rather than remedy : distemper, palsy, abortion, false pregnancy, and miscarriage. In these Milton is arguing more against an opponent than for an idea, and the morbid associations are part of his strategy.
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References
1 For studies of encyclopedic science in Milton's prose and poetry, see the writer's “Milton and the Encyclopedias of Science,” SP, xxxix (1942), 303-327; “Cosmological Lore in Milton,” ELH, ix (1942), 198-223; “Milton and Medical Lore,” Bull. of the Hist. of Medicine, xiii (1943), 158-184, esp. p. 183. The 1535 printing of Bartholomew and the Batman, La Primaudaye, and Swan as indicated above are quoted here as significant evidence of the scientific provenience of Milton's material.
2 The Renaissance cross-fertilization of rhetoric and logic and poetic has been richly documented in recent years, most notably by Rosemond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago, 1947). A familiar example of Renaissance awareness of the fusion is in Defence of Poesie, where Sidney remarks that he should be “pounded for straying from poetry to oratory; but that both have such an affinity in this wordish consideration.” See Allan Gilbert's note to the passage, Literary Criticism, Plato to Dryden (New York, 1940), p. 455.
3 Merritt Y. Hughes, ed. John Milton: Prose Selections (New York, 1947), pp. 206-207, cites passages from Daniel's Musophilus and Vaughan's To his Books as poetic expressions akin to Milton's famous definition.
4 The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank A. Patterson et al. (New York, 1931-38), iii' ii, 368, 419, 402. See further allegorizing in the passage, p. 418, on the “twofold Seminary or stock in nature.” Poetic implications of the Eros-Anteros myth have been traced from the Phaedrus forward by Robert V. Merrill, “Eros and An teros,” Speculum, xix (1945), 265-284. See also Hughes, op. cit., p. 190. Evion Owen, “Milton and Selden on Divorce,” SP, xliii (1946), 237, remarks the myth in the lines contributed by Selden to William Browne's pastorals, but does not urge the parallel.
5 Cf. Thomas Hartley's statement, Pref. to his transl. of H. A. Rommen, The Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy (St. Louis, 1948), p. viii: “In fact, the church and its theologians have always viewed human nature, man's natural faculties and their objects, the natural law—in a word, the natural order—as indispensable sources for determining the proper lines of human conduct which, with the aid of divine grace and with supernatural equipment, man must follow in his quest of his supernatural goal.” Owen (see n. 4), p. 356, shows that Milton's practical conclusions were similar to Selden's but that Milton did not use De Jure Naturali in this pamphlet because his views of Christian liberty and of marriage were different from Selden's.
6 “Christian Liberty in Milton's Divorce Pamphlets,” MLR, xxxv (1940), 160.
7 William Empson, “Emotion in Words Again,” KR, x (1948), 579-601, points out that the word “all,” which occurs 612 times in P. L., appears in nearly every scene of emotional pressure. Josephine Miles, Major Adjectives in English Poetry from Wyatt to Auden, Univ. of Calif. Pubs. in Eng., xii, iii (Berkeley, 1946), 317, finds “heaven” the most frequently recurring important word in Milton's poetry (600 times). Her reliance upon the inadequate Bradshaw concordance and her special criteria and methods perhaps account for the discrepancy. She is less interested than Empson in analyzing the significant structural functions of words in particular scenes and lines. But both these studies suggest a concern with recurrent words in total effect comparable to the concern of the present paper.
8 Works, iii, 482, 496, 499, 476, 458. Cf.: “To forbid divorce compulsively, is not only against nature, but against law” (p. 501).
9 P. L. vi.176.
10 Op. cit., pp. 251-280, and esp. Appendix R, pp. 422-423.
11 Cf. the poetic use of this astronomical commonplace about “saving appearances” in P. L. viii.82. Prutenic tables are the astronomical computations of 1551 based on the De Revolutionibus Orbium of Copernicus by Erasmus Reinhold and named for his patron Duke Albrecht of Prussia. See Allan Gilbert, “Milton and Galileo,” SP, xix (1922), 156, and Francis R. Johnson, Astronomical Thought in Renaissance England (Baltimore, 1937), pp. 111-112.
12 Batman, p. 139v, in his chapter on light mentions that the sunbeam cannot be defiled. Bacon in Novum Organon and Peter Sterry also remark it; see V. de S. Pinto, Peter Sterry, Platonist and Puritan (London, 1934), p. 150.
13 The encyclopedias and other scientific treatises are of course full of this astronomical and astrological lore. Milton is using crasis, apogœum, and homogeneal in their technical senses. For other astronomical allusions, see in context “fals and dazling fires” (434); “Chaos ... worlds diameter multiply'd” (442); “load-starre” (493); “firmament” (506).
14 For other allusions of this type, see in context “blind and Serpentine body” (368) ; “borrow'd garb,” “blind side” (401); “polluted skirt” (446); “remorseles obscurity,” “native lustre” (494).
15 Note that “influence” retains its Latin force and thus contributes to the sense of movement here.
16 La Primaudaye's discussion, p. 530, “Of the humours ioyned with the blood and of their vessels,” reads like a gloss on this passage: “Now when these veines are stopt, dangerous diseases follow thereupon, chiefly when this happeneth to the first veine whereof I spake euen now. For when the liuer is not purged, his whole office is hindered, and it selfe decayeth by little and little, by retayning still the excrements thereof from whence the vapours ascending vp to the braine trouble it very much, and cause it to fall into very strange & foolish conceiptes.”
17 For other allusions of this kind, see in context “[no]man should be shut up incurably under a worse evill” (392); “if it happen that nature hath stopt or extinguisht the veins of sensuality” (393) ; “veille ... body impenetrable” (395) ; “hazardous and accidentall doore of mariage to shut upon us like the gate of death” (461) ; “chains ... curb ... canon bit” (486); “ill-knotted mariage” (492); “Gordian difficulties” (494).
18 This famous fish appears also in Eikonoklastes (Works, v, 218). Descriptions of its power are to be found in dozens of Renaissance scientific books, among them Bartholomew, p. clxxvv; Batman, p. 119v; John Maplet, A Greene Forest (London, 1567), p. 143; La Primaudaye, p. 783; Swan, pp. 375-376.
19 Milton combines here two common illustrations of futility, the rope of sand and the occupation of Ocnus, both of which he uses elsewhere. In Tetrachordon (Works, iv, 97) he says that compelling incompatibles into one flesh is as vain as trying “to weav a garment of drie sand.” In the Third Prolusion (Works, xii, 169) “cunning quibblers,” will have “this appropriate punishment inflicted: that they shall twist ropes in hell with the famous Ocnus.” In First Defence (Works, vii, 475) : “This man twists conclusions as Ocnus does ropes in Hell; which are but to be eaten by asses.” The rope of sand was well known fromlegends about the tasks Michael Scot set his devil; see Herbert's “The Collar” and T. O. Mabbott's explanation, Explicator, iii (1944), 12; F. T. Palgrave, ed. The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott (London, 1928), p. 499, n. 19; and J. Wood Brown, The Life and Legend of Michael Scot (Edinburgh, 1897), p. 218. Ocnus twisted ropes of straw; Renaissance writers knew the story from the 35th book of Pliny's Natural History or the 4th elegy of Propertius; see Propertius, ed. H. E. Butler (Cambridge, 1930), p. 283 and note, p. 357.
20 Hughes, p. 163, notes the bold use of the Minerva myth in P. L. n.757-758. Bartholomew, p. lxxiiiir, and Batman, p. 74r, in their Chapter “Of a mydwyfe,” say that she “wassheth awaye the blode of the chyld, and baynyth hym with shalte and hony, to drye up the humours, and to comforte his lymmes and membres.”
21 In their chapter “Of heed ache, and of the causes and sygnes thereof,” Bartholomew, pp. lxxxvv-r, and Batman, pp. 86v-87r, describe “an ache and an euyll, that phisycyens call Emigranea,” which is one of those that come “of some cause, that is within ... as of the stomak.” Their chapter “Of gydines” (pp. lxxxviiv-lxxxviiir, 89r,) assigns the cause to “to moche plentie of humours [which] ... meue in the heed with ventosyte that comyth up fro the body, or fro the stomak to the brayne.”
22 Several of the scientific figures are mixed. Some are uncomplicated by subtlety; e.g.: “when human frailty surcharg'd, is at such a losse, charity ought to venture much, and use bold physick, lest an over-tost faith endanger to shipwrack” (p. 400). In others, the effect, as above, is clearly satiric; e.g.: “But how among the drove of Custom and Prejudice this will be relisht, by such whose capacity, since their youth run ahead into the easie creek of a system or a Medulla, sayls there at will under the blown physiogonomy of their unlabour'd rudiments, for them, what their tast will be, I have also surety sufficient, from the entire league that hath bin ever between formal ignorance and grave obstinacie” (377-378).
23 For other anatomical and medical allusions, see in context “joynt or sinew” (369) ; “peevish madnesse” (373) ; “lifegiving remedies of Moses” (385) ; “cure ... complexion ... melancholy” (391); “wast away ... under a secret affliction” (392); “impetuous nerve” (394); “spirituall contagion” (407); “noysomnesse or disfigurement of body” (419); “weak pulse” (431); “rigorous knife” (450); “cordiall and exhilarating cup of solace” (461); “hand of Justice rot off” (474); “hard spleen ... sanguine” (484); “bitter water ... curse of rottennesse and tympany” (488); “misbegott'n infants” (505). Where gloss is necessary, these allusions can be explained from the medical sections of the encyclopedias. On the passage, “his will like a hard spleen draws faster then his understanding can well sanguifie,” see Bartholomew, p. lviir; Batman, p. 58r; La Primaudaye, pp. 358, 530, 422-425, 440-446.
24 See the discussion in René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York, 1949), pp. 190-218, for the best recent account of this progression.
25 The use of “signifies” and “lectures” in the singular, common enough as a grammatical construction, is none the less an explicit statement of the identity Milton makes between divine law and natural law. Compare Adam's conclusion, P. L. x.815-816: “both Death and I / Am found Eternal”; and the explication in “Adam's Soliloquy in Book x,” CE, x (1949), 369.
26 La Primaudaye is particularly theological; Swan arranges his scientific information as an hexameron. See Louis B. Wright's chapter “The Strange World of Science,” Middle Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill, 1935), pp. 549-602, esp. p. 555: “Compilers of encyclopedias always assured their readers that a study of the physical world and of man in his mental and physical aspects revealed profitable lessons of God's will.”