Many recent studies of literary history in the English revolutionary (or Civil War) period maintain a double focus on the traditional literary canon, especially Milton, and on the developing print culture with its less canonical but revelatory, quirky writers. Giuseppina Iacono Lobo in Writing Conscience and the Nation in Revolutionary England follows this model, ending with Milton, after chapters on Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, Margaret Fell, Thomas Hobbes, and Lucy Hutchinson. Through this historical narrative, Lobo shows that the discourse of the conscience in the mid-seventeenth century opened up new ways for people to experience the nation of England with one another, a communal emphasis she derives from the Latin verb conscire, to know with.

The variety of authors and subjects in the five pre-Milton chapters mimics for Lobo the intricate structures of power in the period. She initially moves by contrast from Charles I to Cromwell, who takes the reins of government from the executed king. Against Cromwell, chapters 3 and 4 highlight two dissenters to the protectorate, Fell and Hobbes, who represent the perspectives of Quakers and contemporary royalist political theorists more generally. Chapters 5 and 6 then examine two contrasting rejoinders to the English regicide, both oblique but clearly responsive to the whirling politics of the 1640s through the 1660s. If the putative memoirs of John Hutchinson prove (cunningly) unclear in their position regarding the regicide in part because they were constructed by his wife Lucy, Milton’s Paradise Lost provides a similarly attenuated response to the revolution, hedging its politics within poetic analogy. Yet Lobo argues that Milton in this late poem addresses politics, and she puts it on a continuum with his earlier, politically embattled defenses of the regicide, Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes.

This last chapter on Milton proves the most wide-ranging, though perhaps less innovative than the chapters on the women authors, Fell and Hutchinson. Whereas in the earlier chapters Lobo examines the narrow slices of time around the main texts of her analysis, whether the archival letters of Fell or Hobbes’s Leviathan, in the Milton chapter she connects texts from different stages of his career, starting with his first prose treatise Of Reformation (1641) and focusing on Paradise Lost, published twenty-six years later. Many monographs cover Milton’s prose and poetry in separate chapters, and, indeed, Lobo in this chapter reworks material from two earlier (unacknowledged) publications. Yet in this chapter, the longest, Lobo shows most persuasively the centrality of the conscience in conceiving of the English nation: having failed in prose to persuade England to embrace the freedom of conscience, Milton switches genres but not topics, continuing to investigate conscience as it relates to the nation.

Even more than the final chapter, the introduction engages the expansive history of the conscience, anchoring the study in the Reformation example of Martin Luther, featured on the dust jacket in a contemporary nude, heroic pose, guiding the woman Conscience to Christ. Lobo briefly reaches back still further to the etymological roots of conscientia in the Greek New Testament (syneidesis), before springing ahead to the important English example of Henry VIII, who like Luther broke with the church of Rome because of his conscience.

By treating a varied slate of writers, Lobo connects her larger argument—regarding the centrality of the conscience to the communal experience of the nation in revolutionary England—to several other discussions such as those regarding the regicide, Quakers, and particular authors from Hutchinson to Milton. Of these writers, only Milton is traditionally included in significant selections in literary anthologies. Hobbes and Hutchinson appear more often and in more substantial selections, but Charles I, Cromwell, and Fell remain more often the subjects of historians. It is to Lobo’s credit that she reads all these authors carefully and integrates them persuasively into her larger (but ever concise) argument. I defer to professional historians to judge the merits of the book in that broader field, but within the narrower field of literary history, as in literary criticism, this book succeeds at the challenging task of merging historical and literary evidence.