It is 1683, and the Convocation of the University of Oxford issues its “Judgment and Decree” listing works that are disagreeable not only to holy scriptures but also to the king. The order identifies “repugnant” and “pernicious books” that members of university are prohibited from reading and that must be handed over to officials for destruction.
It is 2025, and as I read this account, opening Nicholas McDowell’s Poet of a Revolution: The Making of John Milton (2019), I am haunted by not only the context of over 10,000 book bans across US public school systems but also the guidance my own university is circulating advising individuals of their rights and potential responses should US federal immigration agents enter campus under new Immigration and Customs Enforcement directives and proposed deportation policies. I’m struck by McDowell’s choice to open on a university scene and to set John Milton’s “Revolution” first and foremost on a campus. This framing makes the content feel instantly current and intimate to me. Though the English Civil War is not a perfect cognate for our present moment, I cannot help but read the echoes in McDowell’s biography of Milton, “the minor poet who became notorious as a prose polemicist and apologist for king-killers before he became renowned as the writer of the greatest narrative poem in English” (p. 8). As McDowell reminds us, students seeking to graduate after studying at Cambridge—such as Milton did but John Donne did not—were required to acknowledge complete dominion of Charles I, “the King’s Majesty under God” (p. 1). As scholars continue to analyze the subtle or structural examples of similar compelled allegiances throughout history, I don’t have to search very far to locate current overt uses of such loyalty oaths.
McDowell, Nicholas. The Making of John Milton: Poet of Revolution. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton Univ. Press, 2020. Pp. xviii + 494. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-691-15469-5.
Poet of a Revolution presents Milton’s intellectual journey in the context of wider political events that led to civil war in seventeenth-century England. Evidenced by archival finds and textual analysis, the book is not a light read. It aims no less than to provide an account of how schoolboy Milton developed into the person, poet, and polemicist who most biographers treat as always-already radical. A “remarkable,” “superb book” and “massive achievement,” as it is blurbed, Poet of a Revolution is one of the many standout publications that were printed and promoted during the COVID-19 pandemic. It arrived to the Rice University offices of SEL Studies in Literature 1500–1900 only to be shelved, awaiting postponed or potential reviewers during lockdown and the aftermath.
It is 2020, and as many academic offices have transitioned to remote workflows, humanities scholars across the world are setting boundaries on the creep of overwork and under- or non-compensation. Scholarly publications continue to face difficulties securing work, arranging peer review, and publicizing issues, all of which become appreciably more difficult in the absence of funding. Scholars, committees, and departments fight against the underresourcing and defunding, if not closure, of humanities programs within and beyond the United States. We are going to have to continue looking for spaces that foster and fund critical research, education, and conversation.
Scholarly journals such as SEL continue to be one such space, sustained by institutions and people who can contribute their funds, research, time, and collegiality. Academic publications generally in the United States can to some extent shelter content from government interference, internet trolling, and public dispute so frequently experienced by more accessible, public-facing media. Subscription models and institutional logins, not to mention the exclusionary effects of scholarly language, create additional barriers to non-academic intrusion and, frankly, interest. There remains some amount of intellectual freedom in avenues of academic print media, which we should celebrate. At the same time, the audience for traditional scholarly communication is increasingly shrinking, in no small part due to the winnowing of stable academic careers that support research engagement. One metaphor of scholarly communication is that of the parlor or party from rhetorician Kenneth Burke; it represents the idea of one arriving late to a party, listening to conversations in process, and then after a time, jumping into the flow of the conversations. Unfortunately, this metaphor looks very different when no one can afford to attend.
It is 2025, and at SEL we are seeking to meet this moment with all the tools at our disposal. While committed to continuing production on journal issues that present critical, field-leading, researched thinking on British literature and literary history between 1500 and 1900, we are also interested in fostering and sharing the aspects of studying literature that diverge from the traditional sizes, shapes, and approaches of the scholarly article. And we are interested in sharing this work outside the standard logins and timelines of the quarterly issue.
With those aims in mind, we welcome you to Marginalia, the partner publication of SEL. Here we will seek to find a home for the ideas and discussions that cannot fit into the pages of our journal—the notes on the margins of our production, the conversations that run over the edges. Posts will include short-form essays on the work of studying literature, ruminations on journeys and deviations in the archive, and reviews of texts not yet or not substantially covered in the issues of SEL.
We begin with two book reviews, covering texts that, like McDowell’s Poet of a Revolution, fell in the gap of conversation as a result of pandemic delays. We choose to approach this gap as a rich opportunity: just as barriers to access provide both exclusion and protection, gaps allow elision, expansion, and subversion. The gap, the gutter, and the margin are all critical sites of meaning making, and SEL aims to share this space and its offerings with you, our readers. We hope you enjoy our first reviews, penned by SEL’s own undergraduate assistant, a student at Rice University, Landry Wood, and one of our Hobby Editorial Assistants, DaQuon Wilson. Please subscribe to our site and stay tuned for more from SEL’s Marginalia.
Kelly McKisson, Managing Editor
Amy Kahrmann Huseby, Executive Editor
Cover image: From the Archive of the British Library, 9504.ff.7 vol.II page 70.