This is a timely collection, insofar as it attempts to wed approaches characterizing recent studies of early modern embodiment to the study of Milton. Stephen Fallon’s Milton among the Philosophers (1991) and John Rogers’s The Matter of Revolution (1996) ostensibly initiated the conversation of Milton’s materialist philosophy, which the essays in this collection seek to advance by harmonizing early modernity with the new materialism of Deleuze, Jane Bennett, and others. Such harmonization, of course, subtends much early modern scholarship on embodiment, especially in studies of Shakespeare and his dramatic contemporaries. But as editors Kevin Donovan and Thomas Festa point out, Milton’s materialism is a unique hinge connecting early modern and contemporary brands of vitalism.

Some of the collection’s essays deftly tease out materialist subtleties and their epistemological implications in Paradise Lost. Lara Dodds, for example, demonstrates the manner in which Raphael’s blush in book 8 complicates the otherwise Homeric genealogy of angelic gesture. As “a physiological event, a social sign, and an instance of epic gesture,” Raphael’s rosy red smile “establishes the possibilities and the limits of shared understanding between humans and angels” (141). In her analysis of the phenomenology of smell in Eden, Lauren Shohet suggests that fragrance complicates the relationship between free will and foreknowledge in Milton’s theodicy. In a postlapsarian environment characterized by mediation and disguise, “the unmediated quality of smell links it strongly to a prelapsarian condition” (35). By focusing on the epic’s representations of sensory experience and movement, acute poetic readings like these forcefully assert the significance of seemingly minute details.

Other essays seek to enlarge the archive of scholarship on Milton’s materialism. Erin Murphy takes up the collection’s theoretical ambitions in her discussion of genealogy and queer kinship in Paradise Regained. Reading the brief epic alongside the work of Lee Edelman, Murphy argues that the poem’s depiction of the Christic family, defined not by reproduction but by consent, exists amid “a tangle of changing ideas about the political promise of reproductive futurity” in Stuart England (105). Critical theory is a welcome addition to the study of Milton and materialism, but a wealth of salient, understudied materials lies in the poet-theologian’s own corpus. Seth Herbst’s investigation of materialist music thus brings him into contact with the early poetry (the Nativity Ode, “At a Solemn Music”) as well as the late work (Paradise Regained, De Doctrina Christiana). By challenging Fallon’s claim that Milton’s monism emerges in the divorce tracts, Herbst pushes the materialism conversation forward mostly by looking backwards.

In the final section of the collection, John Rogers’s discussion of Milton’s presence in early Mormonism is a highlight. The account of Creation in De Doctrina and Raphael’s “one first matter all” speech in Paradise Lost influenced the materialist, polygamist theology of Orson Pratt, an overlooked figure in the development of the Church of Latter-day Saints. Rogers’s narration of the intellectual and ecclesiastical struggle between Orson, his brother Parley, and Brigham Young in the power vacuum created by Joseph Smith’s death is both sad and surprising, containing Miltonic resonances that uncannily illustrate life imitating art. Rogers helps bring the collection full circle by conveying the exigency of situating Milton in dialogue with more contemporary materialisms.

This collection ultimately succeeds in nuancing our understanding of Milton’s materialism, even if it falls a bit short of advancing the conversation as a whole. The collection’s limited scope helps explain this shortcoming; half of the essays focus on Paradise Lost, and on similar moments, at that (Raphael and Adam’s colloquy looms large). Paradise Regained, De Doctrina, and Areopagitica garner sustained attention, but the complete absence of Samson Agonistes, though not a flaw per se, is a bit surprising, as is the limited presence of the early poetry. The notion that the mature Milton was fully committed to heretical monism, though certainly debatable, speaks to the importance of investigating the materialism of the young Milton. Like the divorce tracts, the antiprelatical tracts—a treasure trove for materialist inquiry—are an instructive bridge between the young and mature poet-theologian. Regardless, Milton, Materialism, and Embodiment provides strong, diverse examples of approaches to future scholarship on Milton’s materialism, which will encourage readers to generate their own paradigms.