More than twenty-five years have elapsed since the publication of the prize-winning volume Milton in Italy: Contexts, Images, Contradictions, ed. Mario A. Di Cesare (1991). Time would seem ripe therefore for a reappraisal of this dimension of Milton’s life and corpus. The present work goes some way toward filling at least part of this gap. Commendable for its breadth, it discusses Milton’s Italian journey, his anti-Catholicism, the role of grace and justification in Paradise Lost, neo-Platonism in his early Latin and English verse, his potential debt to Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura, the Italian context of his neo-Roman politics, and the possible relationship between Samson Agonistes and Italian oratorio. Perhaps the greatest strengths of the study reside in its careful contextualization of Milton’s work and, in particular, its perceptive reading of Milton’s appropriation of Sarpi.

But where the contributors to Di Cesare’s volume signaled the complexity and ambiguity attendant upon Milton’s literary and biographical relations with Italy, Martin presents an argument that is tainted by overstatement, factual error, and simplistic readings, e.g., “Milton’s entirely happy stay in Italy” (2); “his journey was entirely enjoyable” (22). Unfortunately, this is compounded by basic errors and misconceptions. Milton’s Latin gunpowder poems (pertaining to his Cambridge years) are twice referred to as “school boy poems” (32; 82). Crucially, the analysis of his Italian journey (chapter 2) states, without evidence, that Cardinal Barberini “invit[ed] him [Milton] to an early comic opera” (49), and that Giovanni Salzilli was a physician (61). And other viewpoints are certainly open to question, such as the belief that “[t]he Diodatis as a whole explain Milton’s easy entrance into Florence’s most select societies” (54) or the huge assumption that “Milton’s independent mention of Allessandro Cherubini … suggests that he stopped in Siena to meet him after leaving Florence for Rome” (245).

In a daring refutation of the accepted belief that Milton’s Italian sonnets were composed prior to his travels, Martin fails to convince that they are the product of his Italian sojourn. Her cursory discussion of the Latin poetry pertaining to that period does not take account of some of the most basic critical findings. Thus discussion of the Leonora epigrams completely overlooks the contemporary Italian encomiastic vogue in her honor; the “twin cups” gifted by Manso to Milton and described in Epitaphium Damonis are regarded as “evidently two works by Tasso (or perhaps one by Marino)” (75), when in all probability, as De Filippis convincingly argued over eighty years ago, they constituted Manso’s own Poesie Nomiche (1635) and Erocallia (1628) (Michele De Filippis, “Milton and Manso: Cups or Books?,” PMLA 51 [1936]: 745–56). De Filippis does not occur in the bibliography. And even when secondary critics are cited, their arguments seem willfully distorted: that Haan provided “evidence” that the poem Milton read before the Accademia degli Svogliati was Naturam Non Pati Senium (78); that Haan “shows that Francini and Dati also knew two other Latin Prolusions by Milton” (78). This is simply untrue.

Martin’s own critical methodology is naïve in its recourse to outdated terminology such as source and influence, passim. Linguistically too, the study falls short. Discussion of primary texts (both Italian and Latin) are from translations only. In a book on Milton’s Italy, I counted just one quotation in the original Italian. And failure to engage with original Latin results in misreadings, e.g., that Milton “refers to himself as Salsilli’s ‘foster-son [alumnus] in London’” (56). In the original Latin Milton describes himself as alumnus … Londini (9), “a foster-son of London” (not of Salzilli).

There is evidence too of lack of revision, reflected in missing bibliographical entries. Mentioned in the notes but not included in the bibliography are Hollander 2011 (43), Griffin (43), and Duran (44). And typographical errors abound. I cite just some: “recommend” for “recommended” (20), “Flamini” for “Flaminio” (25), “include” for “includes” (35), “written England” for “written in England” (66), “about relationship” for “about his relationship” (68), “to be properly be termed” (101), “Calgary” for “Calvary” (148) (!), “Schwartz’s” for “Schwartz” (179), “Milton’s” for “Milton” (191), “results the Church” (207), “many” for “mainly” (213). The final impression is of an ambitious and initially promising study that lets itself down for the aforementioned reasons.