| Abstract | In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Harold Weber Harold Weber teaches literature of the Restoration and eighteenth century at the University of Alabama. This essay is part of a project tentatively entitled "Literary Monuments: Memory, Gender, and Print in England, 1650-1750," which deals with the challenges presented to classical models of memory and authorship by the new technologies of print reproduction and distribution. Notes I want to thank Elizabeth Meese, Maaja Stewart, James Taaffe, and Ron Tumelson for help with this essay. I am also grateful to the audiences at a University of Alabama colloquium, and a panel on "Regicide, Restoration, Rewriting" at the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, for their questions and comments. 1. "To Rouse" was written in January of 1647, although published for the first time only in 1673 (see note 5). A Second Defence was published in May 1654 and composed after the publication of Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum, Adversus Parricidas Anglicanos in 1652. For Samson Agonistes I have provided the date of publication. As for the vexed question of its date of composition, I agree with Michael Lieb's conclusion that "despite all the debate concerning such matters, I still do not think it possible to know conclusively either when the work was written or what the immediate occasion of its composition was" (227). Unless new evidence comes to light, a definitive answer to these questions seems unlikely. Nonetheless, I find most compelling the arguments that place Samson Agonistes late in Milton's career, composed after Paradise Lost. Mary Ann Radzinowicz (387-407) and Ann Baynes Coiro ("Fable and Old Song") are most persuasive here, particularly the latter's argument that the poem's "evocative recall" of Milton's earlier works represents a deliberate parody on his part, rather than evidence for an early date of composition (124). As my essay will make clear, I believe that the political and cultural tensions of the poem place it near the end of Milton's career. 2. A less ironic demonstration of the privileging of military virtue can be seen in Samson Lennard's translation of Peter Charron's Of Wisdome: Three Bookes: "For to some and the greater part this qualitie [nobilitie] is militarie, to others it is politike, literarie of those that are wise,... But the militarie hath the aduantage aboue the rest: for besides the seruice which it yeeldeth to the weale-publike as the rest do, it is painfull, laborious, dangerous; whereby it is accounted more worthy and commendable" (210). 3. In Toward Samson Agonistes, Mary Ann Radzinowicz discusses the importance of "the individual act of bearing witness" (164) in Milton's prose; see particularly 145-66. 4. Translations from the ode are those of Merritt Hughes in his edition of Milton. All references to Milton's poetry are to this edition, while all references to Milton's prose are to the Yale edition of The Complete Prose Works of John Milton. 5. For a brief history of the ode—which was published only in the 1673 second edition of Poems Upon Several Occasions—see Douglas Bush, J.E. Shaw, and A. Bartlett Giamatti. For an extended critical account of the poem see Stella P. Revard, chap. 8. 6. On the use of Latin as a "truth-language" see Benedict Anderson. He emphasizes the way in which Latin functioned as "the media through which the great global communities of the past were imagined" (21). Further, he insists that its use contained "an impulse largely foreign to nationalism" (22). 7. For the history of the library at Oxford I have depended on Ian Philip and Harris Francis Fletcher. For the history of the library in England see Alan Stewart and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr., as well as Jennifer Summit. The latter in particular calls our attention to the reinvention of the library by Protestant reformers: With the Dissolution of the Monasteries came the dispersal and widescale destruction of the monastic libraries, which had housed the bulk of England's textual heritage. When, in the Reformation's wake, Protestant collectors sought to recover the books formerly owned by the monastic libraries, they did so in an effort to preserve the nation's past...
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