Milton’s Modernities offers rigorous new thinking about Milton’s work and his status as an author, both in his historical moment and in the period that has followed. The collection’s eleven essays, as well as its introduction and afterword, explore how theories of modernity can bring new understanding to Milton’s texts and how the author’s work can help us interrogate the concept of modernity. This volume is diverse in style and intellectually demanding, and will be particularly useful for scholars working at the intersection of literature and philosophy.

In this fine collection, a range of expert scholars invite us to consider Milton’s relationship to modernity. James Nohrenberg considers how Paradise Lost can help us think about issues of periodization, while Ryan Netzley and Jennifer Tole explore Milton’s insights into temporality more broadly. Readers interested in classical and modern philosophers will find contributors offering rich material on Lucretius (Jessie Hock), Kant (Sanford Budick), Spinoza (Christopher Kendrick), and Hegel (Russ Leo). Feisal G. Mohamed contributes an insightful essay on Milton’s relationship to republicanism, and Lee Morrissey incisively asks what Samson Agonistes can tell us about the changing political valences of the tragic genre. Gordon Teskey’s standout essay reacts to ideas from Stanley Fish and Marshall McLuhan to argue for a reading of Paradise Lost as “a long, winding and warping surface of sound” (294). The final essay in the volume takes a different tack, as Wendy Furhman-Adams examines twentieth-century illustrations of Milton’s work to discuss how visual art reinterprets the poet’s work for the era in which it is received.

The strength of this volume lies in the diverse lines of inquiry represented by the contributions. It is noteworthy that readers looking for engagement with Milton’s prose will find little of that here. However, as Sharon Achinstein notes in her afterword, “the emphasis on poetry is not a weakness of the volume but a right judgment of where Milton’s most sustained philosophical work is taking place” (350). As it ranges across the major poems, the volume attends to differences in genre. For example, Satan offers an example of a deeply modern figure in the epic tradition while Samson offers such a figure for the tragic genre. In pairing the poetry with thinking from such a wide group of philosophers, this collection sets the stage for a reinvigorated philosophical turn in Milton studies while also emphasizing the richness of the author’s imaginative literature for exploring the history of ideas.

In the introduction, the editors state that their “aim is not simply to declare Milton’s modernity, but to be alert to how reading Milton, of itself and through the eyes of key thinkers, can contribute to the salutary ways in which familiar narratives about the modern are currently being challenged” (17). Milton’s Modernities thus joins recent volumes that look at Milton’s resonance in subsequent cultures and with later intellectual frameworks. For example, Feisal G. Mohamed’s Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism (2011) and Reginald A. Wilburn’s Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt: Appropriating Milton in Early African American Literature (2014) speak to political and religious resonances of Milton’s texts on later sociocultural contexts. The recent collections Milton Now: Alternative Approaches and Contexts (ed. Catharine Gray and Erin Murphy [2014]) and Queer Milton (ed. David Orvis [forthcoming]) testify to the value of applying newer critical methodologies to the author’s work. Following in the vein of these twenty-first-century volumes while also contributing to long-standing scholarly discussions, Milton’s Modernities is a welcome addition to the increasingly expanding and intellectually exciting body of scholarship on the work of John Milton.