In his recent book, Todd Butler offers a careful and intriguing exploration of the epistemology of the early modern imagination. Using the noncanonical political writings of Sir Francis Bacon, William Davenant, Aurelian Townshend, John Milton, and Thomas Hobbes, Butler's study argues a seventeenth-century definition of the imagination that understands the term as both a philosophical, almost scientific, synaptic moment connecting reason and the bodily senses but also as a political tool through which one might “both assert and undermine reason's dictates” (13). The imagination connects reason to the senses, but it is also what allows us to imagine, or be persuaded toward, new possibilities—whether it be the subject's relationship to the Eucharist or a crowd's reaction to King Charles's progress. Butler writes, “Within the individual mind the imagination acts as both subordinate messenger and its own source of authority,” but in situations in which the imagination becomes clouded by outside influences, the subject ceases to recognize when its decisions are no longer its own (54). Butler locates multiple interpretations of imagination to understand how powerful men—or, rather, the intellectuals around them—actually employed the rituals of display in order to maintain power. While all very interesting, what separates Butler's work from previous scholarship is that he documents how each of the above-mentioned thinkers confronts the ethical weight associated with harnessing this tool in order to further a political agenda. “Imagination” becomes not just a catchword; in understanding its complexity in early modern political rhetoric, modern scholars can reimagine their understanding of mid-seventeenth-century politics.

Butler's argument unfolds in four engaging chapters, including a substantial introduction that locates early modern England's concern with imagination both in ancient texts, specifically, Plato's The Republic and Laws and Aristotle's De Anima, and in the moral philosophy of earlier Continental humanists, such as Gianfrancesco Pico and Pierre Charron, before finally considering the theological writings of William Tyndale, John Calvin, and John Hooper. While Butler's primary concern is with the Caroline period and England's civil wars, chapter 1, “Bacon and the Prudential Imagination,” provides a context for the larger conversation by first reading the works of Bacon. Of Bacon's De Argumentis and Sylva Sylvarum, Butler writes, “At the core of the imagination's power then is the ability to win belief, to secure the minds of others not through careful deliberation but through means attentive to human psychology” (44). The imagination, verbal images that remain true to the matter they represent, “become intimately associated with human desires, which act not only as potentially destabilizing forces in an individual or society but also as the very means by which regulative authority may be enforced and maintained” (19). Bacon's vocabulary sets the stage for the later chapters.

Chapter 2, “The ‘Immaginacy’ of the Caroline Court Masque,” begins with a standard reading of aesthetics in the court tradition, drawing interesting parallels between the masques, court functions, Charles's actual movements through the city, and the ways London's judicial system marked men's bodies—specifically, the body of William Prynne. Yet the most interesting portion of this chapter comes toward the end, when Butler reads Davenant's masque Britannia Triumphans (1638) as something not panegyric but a performance that illustrates the monarch's inability to control his subject's imaginations, as demonstrated by the character Action. In Britannia, a “lack of royal control over the imagination has resulted in a court fundamentally isolated from its subjects, who seek to fulfill their desires through deceitful artifice rather than principled obedience” (88). Davenant's masque is a highly politicized and scandalous criticism of Charles and his court. If Charles's Eikon Basilikon in part responds to the content of Davenant's critique, then Milton's Eikonoklastes takes up where the Caroline masque never could. Reading the psychology behind Milton's response to Charles, Butler writes, Milton “recogniz[es] the king's attempts at personal rule as an arrogation of reason's authority that results in the transformation of parliament into an imagination charged solely with representing the decisions of the king to an intemperate populace. Gone is the dynamism … that characterized the Baconian model of the healthy mind” (134). Milton understood the Royalist perversion of imagination as the cause of the sickness affecting the body politic. Butler's final chapter, “Imagining the Body Politic,” reads Hobbes's Leviathan in response to Milton's critique of Royalists’ rhetoric of persuasion. For Hobbes, the burden of thinking allows men to conceive of the past and to project a future based on what they know. The healthy body politic finds definition through correctly situated imaginations.

In the end, Butler's compelling book makes the reader better aware of how early modern rhetoricians, politicians, and playwrights understood and manipulated a population's imagination. If Butler's work were to be expanded, it would move its historical contextualization beyond biography. Specifically, it would investigate how London's larger population of workers and merchants responded to the state's use of the imagination. In all, this book will make readers further recognize and think about moments of realization or decision making not grounded in reason. Speaking of Bacon's The New Atlantis, Butler describes the Atlantian philosophers' ability to approach the sacred pillar as one that begins with reason, but the story turns, and the “text reads more like a sudden illumination than a considered investigation, an instance where reason can bring human beings only so far before the imagination completes the mental circuit and impresses the key to the mystery—the need for prayer—in a moment of inspiration that drops the philosopher to his knees” (27).