This rich volume continues a conversation about early modern English politics and culture pioneered by British historians Patrick Collinson and Quentin Skinner in the 1980s and developed over the past two decades in English literary study through work by Richard Helgerson, David Norbrook, and by editors David Loewenstein, Paul Stevens, and others, including many of the contributors to this volume. The book also breaks new ground in contributing to definitions and discussions of nationhood, as it situates Milton in relation to “the process of national formation and self-determination during the tumultuous changes that unsettled seventeenth-century England” (5). The stated purpose is to demonstrate “the value of Milton to the study of nations and nationalism” and to explore “from multiple critical perspectives, the importance of the ‘nation’ as a powerful imaginative construct and category in understanding Milton's writings in prose and verse” (9). Taken as a whole, it situates Milton among the interrelated religious, secular, social, and economic impulses that propelled mid-seventeenth-century England. The result is a series of analyses of the conflicting impulses that surrounded the emerging definitions of liberty and other national values that remain central to the self-definitions of English-speaking nations.

The essay titles give a clear picture of this book's sweep. In addition to listing them, I will describe briefly four essays that happen to be useful to my own work, though all the essays are worth attentive reading. Part 1, “The Majesty of a Free People,” contains essays by David Loewenstein on “Milton's Nationalism and the English Revolution: Strains and Contradictions”; Andrew Hadfield on “Milton and the Struggle for the Representation of the Nation: Reading Paradise Lost through Eikonoklastes,” in which he sees the Son in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained as a republican hero; and Warren Chernaik on “Victory's Crest: Milton, the English Nation, and Cromwell,” contextualizing Milton's shift from praising Cromwell to rejecting military conquest (in his epics).

Part 2, “Nationhood, the English Church, and Nonconformity,” contains essays by Achsah Guibbory, “Israel and English Protestant Nationalism: ‘Fast Sermons’ during the English Revolution,” in which she contrasts the Puritan search for a visible church with Milton's insistence on the invisible church consisting of individual consciences; Joad Raymond, “Look Homeward Angel: Guardian Angels and Nationhood in Seventeenth-Century England”; and Andrew Escobedo, “The Invisible Nation: Church State and Schism in Milton's England,” in which he extends Milton's preference for the invisible over visible church to the idea of the nation. Part 3, “Ethnicity and International Relations,” offers essays by Thomas Corns, “Milton and the Limitations of Englishness,” where he argues that nationalism is increasingly subordinate to Milton's other interests and beliefs; John Kerrigan, “The Anglo-Scoto-Dutch Triangle: Milton and Marvell to 1660,” showing how the Commonwealth poets responded to contemporary international relations; Victoria Kahn, “Disappointed Nationalism: Milton in the Context of Seventeenth-Century Debates about the Nation-State”; and Paul Stevens, “How Milton's Nationalism Works: Globalization and the Possibility of Positive Nationalism,” an elegant argument for the aesthetic importance and ongoing relevance of Milton's nationalism. Part 4, “Milton's Nationalism and Its Discontents: Gender, Luxury, Slavery,” presents essays by Willy Maley, “That Fatal Boadicea: Depicting Women in Milton's History of Britain, 1670,” an analysis of Milton's anxious distrust of female rule; Laura Lunger Knoppers, “Consuming Nations: Milton and Luxury,” which centers Milton's view of the nation on physical realities and tempers the volume's dependence on theories of “imagined communities”; and Mary Nyquist, “Slavery, Resistance, and Nation in Milton and Locke,” which disaggregates the theoretical slavery of the free citizen by a tyrant from the actual practices of the seventeenth-century Atlantic slave trade. Part 5, “The Nationalization of Milton,” concludes the book and consists of just one three-part essay, Nicholas Von Maltzahn's “Milton: Nation and Reception.”

Loewenstein's essay traces Milton's nationalism through the “strains and contradictions” of his time and his own polemical roles. As the editors had done in the introduction, Loewenstein uses Benedict Anderson's theory in Imagined Communities (1983) to suggest that Milton saw nationhood as “not simply a political entity” but “a state of mind, and an intellectual and imaginative creation conceived in language” (39). In “The Second Defense” Milton hopefully seized the opportunity to “write” England into its full transformation from realm to republican nation. But the eloquent optimism of Areopagitica and the imaginative construction in “The Second Defense,” Loewenstein argues, migrate to a disillusioned vision of meritocratic oligarchy in “Readie and Easie Way.” In the end, Milton “became more of a conflicted and dissenting patriot … than a fervent or consistent nationalist” (43).

Joad reminds us that in Milton's time “the land was still enchanted” and “the landscape … full of invisible meanings and spiritual beings” (162). Joad argues that Milton believes in “angelic guardianship” and that the “angel” urged to “look homeward” in Lycidas is an emblem of England's nationhood as the new Israel. Although attached to place, “Milton's sense of Englishness is not an ethnic one” but “is founded upon a notion of civility rather than race” (157), and the angel's providential “commission extends (at least) over Britain and effects protection rather than exclusion; the problem to which he is the solution concerns internal corruption rather than national boundaries” (161). For Milton, Joad concludes, it may be true that “one's country is wherever it is well with one; but that does not mean that it is just anywhere” (163).

Kahn reviews the theory of nationhood developed over the twentieth century by Hobsbawm, Gellner, and Anderson, who all attribute the construction of “the nation” to the eighteenth century. Kahn posits that their disbelief in early modern nationalism may be an inability to see that “dynastic nationalism coexisted with other forms” (252). She uses Filmer's relatively unfamiliar discourse, The Originall of Government, in which he lambasts together Hobbes, Milton, and Grotius, to argue that “Hobbes and Milton are not as antithetical as they might seem.” In particular, in the seventeenth century, “the late sixteenth-century sense of nation as equivalent to the king and parliament, or to the English people conceived as the repository of sovereignty, is supplemented by the new discourse of the law of nature and of nations” (254). Kahn sees the tension between kinds of nationhood and the equality of nations in international law infusing the dispute between Milton's Samson and Dalila, where issues of voluntary association, servility, and the distinction between pious nation and power-seeking states provide a subtext to the personal encounter (261–62, 264, 266).

Von Maltzahn's concluding essay lays out some uses made of Milton by subsequent readers and poets as they defined English nationalism and the supposedly benevolent purposes of British imperialism. Milton's blank verse model, an important part of his poetics of liberty, became “the Patriot signature of Country Whig poets in the later 1720s and 1730s” (429), despite the general preference for rhymed couplets. The separation of church and state essential to Milton's nationalism does not infuse the new imperialist vision, however, and his signature epic blank verse finds itself in service to a Hobbesian vision of unified church and state. Von Maltzahn cites Alexander Pope's plans for a blank-verse “Brutus,” glorifying an England bent on “extending benevolence, & polishing & teaching Nations [Pope],” for which, Von Maltzahn notes, “state religion was vital” (431). This complex reception of Milton as a national icon makes a fitting conclusion to the issues of Milton and nationalism variously explored by the other contributors.