Some Miltonists have never come to terms with Milton's Puritanism. How could the greatest of English poets, a man of sublime culture and learning, be associated with a movement so narrow, so uncouth? Yet the evidence for Milton's (radical) Puritanism is hard to gainsay. From 1641 onwards he aligned himself with ‘root and branch’ reform of the Church, repudiating episcopacy and Prayer Book before going on to reject infant baptism and state Churches. He embraced extemporary prayer, congregationalist ecclesiology and free grace theology. In Eikonoklastes, he depicted Caroline anti-Puritanism as a ‘war against the Church’, and launched an unmistakably Puritan attack on the king's liturgical piety. Like his godly friends, Sir Henry Vane Jr, Roger Williams and the regicide John Bradshaw, he saw the hand of Providence behind the ‘miraculous’ victories of the New Model Army.

The title of Catherine Gimelli Martin's book suggests that Milton was ‘among the Puritans’. The subtitle reveals a different agenda: The case for historical revisionism. Martin wants to initiate divorce proceedings between Milton and the Puritans and she relentlessly prosecutes her case against Puritanism as an unfit spouse. Martin's Milton is never really ‘among the Puritans’; on point after point, he is against them. He shares little in common with Cromwell and Bunyan, Quakers and ‘Bible republicans’, doctrinaire disciplinarians in thrall to a voluntarist God and spiritist enthusiasm. Instead, he is ‘closer to the Arminians, Latitudinarians, Baconians and neo-Roman republicans’ (p. 21). He belongs among the carefree ‘religious liberals’ who champion humanist enquiry, natural philosophy, arts and culture. Like them, he is imbued with the spirit of Francis Bacon and Richard Hooker, of Great Tew and the scientific circles around Hartlib, Wilkins and Boyle. Milton, we are told, ‘ended his life closer to [Jeremy] Taylor than to Quakers like Penn’ (p. 207). Quite how this squares with Taylor's vitriol against Restoration Dissenters or Milton's friendship with the Quaker Thomas Ellwood is not explained. But Martin is determined to tame Milton, to create a ‘moderate’ shorn of Puritan fierceness.

Pulling this off involves many sleights of hand. The book is replete with caricatures, false dichotomies, straw men, non-sequiturs, qualifications and special pleading. Whenever it suits her case, for example, Martin flips back and forth between moderate and radical Puritans. At one moment the godly are defined as rigid defenders of Calvinist orthodoxy, clerical authority, religious coercion and agonistic predestinarian piety. Elsewhere, they are redefined as anti-intellectual enthusiasts with a taste for magic and the esoteric. Either way, Milton is always against the Puritans. Intra-Puritan debates are consistently reframed as debates between the godly and their critics; the dynamic and contested nature of the Puritan tradition is thoroughly obscured.

The bulk of the book is devoted to identifying non-Puritan features of Milton's major works. This is a not a difficult task, and in chapter after chapter Martin has many suggestive things to say about various aspects of Milton's thought. But for the most part, this does little to advance her central argument – the case against Milton's Puritanism. No serious scholar claims that Puritanism is the key to unlocking all the riches of Milton's writing. But in denying it, Martin sets herself at odds with a long line of eminent Miltonists – from Dom Wolfe to Nigel Smith – who have recognised that without his radical Puritanism we will not be able to make sense of the anti-prelatical tracts, Eikonoklastes, the 1659 pamphlets, Samson Agonistes, portions of Paradise Lost, and certain chapters of De doctrina. On these works and passages, Martin is particularly weak. Her chapter on Samson, for example, pronounces that Milton ‘utterly lacked the apocalyptic “temper”’ (p. 280), but it does little to address (let alone refute) the arguments of scholars like Loewenstein and Worden who present the drama as a bitter reflection on the failure of the Puritan Revolution.

Milton among the Puritans has already been hailed by some literary scholars as ‘irrefutable’ and ‘an instant classic’. Others are likely to be more sceptical. The author invokes revisionist historiography in her assault on the Whiggish paradigm of ‘Puritanism and liberty’, but she appears to think that revisionism relegated the godly to the ‘rear-guard’ of the Parliamentarian revolt (p. 31). In fact, revisionists like Russell, Morrill, Lamont and Worden did not doubt that the godly were the shock troops of the revolution, nor did they doubt Milton's radical commitment to the Puritan cause of further reformation. The book is marred by other dubious claims and factual inaccuracies: Zwingli is described as Calvin's successor (p. 99); the Reformed seminary at Saumur is identified as ‘the home of the French Enlightenment’ (p. 101); the First Bishops' War is misdated to 1641 (p. 54); Hobbes and Clarendon are said to have ‘minimized the Puritan role’ in the Revolution (p. 11); and George Fox is coupled with John Owen as a worshipper of ‘a Calvinist deity’ (p. 280). If only Martin had resisted the temptation to push her case so hard. There is a serious discussion to be had about Milton's Puritanism. He did have a strained relationship with the godly clergy; he never refers to a classic Puritan conversion experience; and the level of his participation in London's godly subculture is far from clear. But to flatly deny his Puritanism, to align him instead with Anglicans like Jeremy Taylor, is to render significant portions of his work inexplicable.

Martin mentions ‘Milton's failure to focus on Christ's suffering and death’ (p. 72), and this great lacuna in his writing is the subject of Erin Henriksen's stimulating monograph. Unlike Martin, Henriksen recognises the depth of Milton's Reformed Protestantism. She argues that his iconoclasm was both destructive and creative. Rejecting Catholic veneration of Christ's crucified body, he was forced to craft ‘an alternative passion’ (p. 10). Milton shifted attention from Christ's physical torment onto his self-emptying incarnation, his temptations in the wilderness, his mental agonies of Gethsemane, and his submission to the Father. Henriksen sets Milton against the grand backcloth of the Christian visual tradition, arguing that Protestants were in some respects returning to the conventions of early Christian art, which had not lingered on Christ's physical torment. It also situates the poet alongside contemporaries like Donne and Herbert, showing that they too were engaged in the project of reforming Christian poetics. For the most part her argument is persuasive, though she does not wrestle with recent historical scholarship qualifying ‘the Protestant preference for texts over images’ (p. 63). The book would be stronger had the author considered other types of evidence. She might have appealed to Philip Benedict's study of art collectors in Metz, which shows that Calvinists bought nativity paintings but eschewed depictions of the crucifixion. Conversely, she might have discussed Lucas Cranach's famous painting and woodcut, Law and grace (1529), in which a Lutheran preacher points towards the crucified Christ whose blood sprays upon the believing sinner. Of course, no Calvinist church would have commissioned Cranach's altarpiece, and visualisation of Christ's sufferings (in the manner of Ignatius Loyola) was not a hallmark of Puritan piety. But the crucifixion looms larger in Protestant devotional works than it does in Milton's verse, and the book could offer a stronger account of the Reformed atonement theology articulated in Paradise Lost. Finally, in siding with those who see Milton's Samson as a ‘counter-type’ to Milton's Christ, the author ignores the contextual evidence that others have supplied for reading the drama as an oppositional statement during the Restoration. Historians will learn from this thought-provoking study, though it suggests that the fences between disciplines remain high.