Cultural Engineering of the Poetic Parental Instinct :: Areopagitica John Milton Poetry Essays

Cultural Engineering of the Poetic Parental Instinct It seems that biological genetic engineering is not a contained threat; in the last decade it seems to have spilled significantly into cultural and literary studies. In Renaissance studies, this trend becomes evident in Richard A. Goldthwaithe's Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy: 1300-1600 (1993) and especially in Lisa Jardine's Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (1996). These "new histories" of "worldly and wealthy" Renaissance attempt to present consumerism and Thatcherism as the moving spirit of Renaissance society and art. Considering the mere fact that less than 5% of the population could have afforded art, this search for Thatcherite "motions" in Renaissance society and culture seems to correlate, in its result, to what T. S. Eliot defines as artists' search for new emotions in art. Unfortunately, this trend of engineering the cultural history can be observed, albeit in a slightly different form, also in the studies of individual authors and their works, and J ohn Milton and his Areopagitica are no exception. One of the reasons for this trend in Milton studies and this particular pamphlet can be sought in the over-saturation of Areopagitica criticism dealing, to a great extent, with various aspects of authorial intention and textual authority. This particular strain seems to have been brought to the point of absurdity in Paul M. Dowling's Polite Wisdom: Heathen Rhetoric in Milton's "Areopagitica" (1995), a book from which one can conclude, in contrast to earlier criticism (Barker, Kendrick, Belsey), that Milton's main intention for his pamphlet was to be understood at two levels—as suggested in Dowling's title— and to defend simply the freedom of philosophic speech. As D. F. McKenzie has noted, recently there has been a shift of scholarly interest in Milton's Areopagitica from "questions of authorial intention and textual authority to those of textual dissemination and readership" (Miller 26). While this distancing from the authorial intention has resulted in some illuminating works about the world of printing, Renaissance economy, censorship and public sphere (Miller, Sherman, Norbrook), it has also produced some curious side-effects because the critics cannot avoid, in their final analysis, touching upon the authorial intention in the light of their newly made discoveries. Thus, Stephen B. Dobranski suggests that, since Areopagitica is about books, "the reading of the text should begin (but not, of course, end) by placing the pamphlet within the world of printing"