Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.3 (2000) 397-413 [Access article in PDF] Betwixt Two Ages Cast: Milton, Johnson, and the English Renaissance Jack Lynch To judge by the most visible institutional mechanisms of literary periodization --the anthology, the history of literature, and the survey course--John Milton has come unstuck in time. The Norton Anthology of English Literature prints its excerpts from Paradise Lost under the rubric "The Early Seventeenth Century (1603-1660)" along with Jonson and Bacon, not under "The Restoration and Eighteenth Century (1660-1785)" alongside Dryden and Bunyan. 1 Milton gets a chapter to himself in volume five of the Oxford History of English Literature, English Literature in the Early Seventeenth Century 1600-1660, not in volume six, English Literature of the Late Seventeenth Century. 2 And Stanford Uni-versity's two-part survey of English masterpieces puts Milton in English 10 ("Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and their Contemporaries") rather than English 11 ("From the Enlightenment to the Modern Period"). But his most important work appeared in 1667, the same year as Dryden's Annus Mirabilis and Sprat's History of the Royal Society, works now invariably consigned to the latter of the two periods. Milton is almost univerally accorded the title of the last great writer of the English Renaissance, while his contemporaries stand at the beginning of what we clumsily call the "long eighteenth century." 3The situation is not new; it began neither with the Norton Anthology nor the Oxford History. As long ago as 1853 Hippolyte Taine placed Milton in book II [End Page 397] of his History of English Literature, "The Renaissance," rather than in book III, "The Classic Age." 4 But Taine was not the originator of this habit; he was only an inheritor of older paradigms. In fact a search for the causes of this treatment of the seventeenth century would take us back to the seventeenth century itself, only a few years after the publication of Paradise Lost, and into the eighteenth, when Milton's epic took its central place in the English canon.To remark upon this peculiar violation of strict chronology in English literary history is not necessarily to quarrel with it; it may well be that specialists in the English Renaissance have more interesting things to say about it than do those in the eighteenth century. But Milton's treatment at the hands of literary historians deserves attention, for it takes us straight to the heart of questions of literary periodization. Because eras make sense only in relation to one another, periodization is never entirely disinterested. Periods are imposed in retrospect in an attempt to extract the most useful or satisfying narrative out of the events of the past, and it is therefore inevitable that they should serve the cultural needs of the present.Some of the most enduring acts of periodization come out of cultural movements which divide themselves from their immediate predecessors, dividing us from them, now from then. Thomas Vogler observes that "the perennial goal of historical thought can be seen to be a mode of self-definition in the form of a narrative in which a 'modernity' defines itself over against a past perceived as essentially different." 5 As Peter Bürger points out, periodization inevitably, if sometimes indirectly, results in "the construction of the present." 6 This invocation or creation of an ever-new sense of now (along with its resulting creation of a series of thens) amounts to a declaration of modernity.Perhaps the most important such declaration of modernity came when the Florentine humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries traded the classical and Christian models of six ages or four monarchies for a new three-term model, one with three great ages: ancient, middle, and modern. 7 Francesco Petrarca is a central figure in this transformation: for him, defining modernity meant first discovering or inventing a post-classical Dark Age against which to measure the brightness of modern enlightenment.Petrarch never gave a definitive account of a modern world, though by allying himself...