The Communion of the Book: Milton and the Humanist Revolution in ReadingDavidWilliams. Montreal: <scp>McGill</scp>‐Queens <scp>UP</scp>, 2022. xxiv+502pp.<scp>ISBN</scp> 13: 9780228014690. $104.00 (cloth).

David Williams's The Communion of the Book is an unusual monograph in the best of senses. In essence a history of the rise of Western modernity as told through the actions of readers, the book is part intellectual history, part media studies, and part literary analysis, both a gentle lament for the impending eclipse of “a culture historically shaped by print” (xxii) and an elegant example of the critical reading practices that Williams sees as having been central to that culture. In this second role the book makes its most interesting contributions to the field of early modern studies as it traces a wide and often circuitous route from the methodological principles and practices of the early Italian humanists through to their intellectual fulfilment in John Milton's late seventeenth-century writings, The History of Britain (1670) and Paradise Regain'd to which is added Samson Agonistes (1671), the latter a book in which, for Williams, “the key lessons of the humanist revolution in reading are starkly dramatized” (23). In between, we are treated to an interconnected set of case studies focused on the various kinds of reading that in Williams's view gave rise to the modern mind: philological, sacramental, juridical, historiographical, and classical. Indeed, Williams's claim that these particular modes of reading helped shape modern consciousness is more than mere metaphor. The Communication of the Book is framed in part as a response to evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich's theory—itself rooted in recent studies in the field of neuroscience—that the increase of literacy in the regions surrounding Martin Luther's hometown of Wittenburg in the sixteenth century produced psychological changes in the human brain that led to the development of our current WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) society. Williams accepts Henrich's premise but adds to it the caveat, worked out over the course of his subsequent study, that it was not just any form of literacy that ushered in what we have come to describe as the modern era but, rather, a particular kind of reading practiced and developed by humanist scholars and their early modern successors. As he puts it in his Introduction, the first generation of Italian humanists “managed to change history” by “hunting down copies of lost texts from antiquity, by translating older, more authoritative copies of existing works, by emending corrupted texts and annotating variants, and by using philological methods to resituate these texts in the historical context where they were produced” (11-12). Moreover—and perhaps more importantly—these reading practices coupled with the invention of print and the introduction of paper books, “progressively transformed Western psychology,” “revolutionizing religion in the sixteenth century and sparking a political revolution in the following century” (19), thereby changing the future as well. A weighty book both literally and figuratively (the page count comes in at just over 500 when including the index), Williams takes his time when leading us through the various readerly “actes and monuments” of early modernity's intellectual martyrs. Included in these acts are those of the more usual suspects, John Foxe, John Lilburne, and John Milton, but also those of less-studied figures such as Anne Askew, Alice Driver, and Edmund Ludlow, the last of whom receives attention as a historian rather than for his better known work as a parliamentary figure. A similar kind of rebalancing characterizes Williams's reading of the humanist genealogy behind these figures as he fills out Jacob Burckhardt's writerly-oriented account of the Renaissance by restoring to view the comparative and corrective reading practices of humanist historians such as Leonardo Bruni and Lorenzo Valla as equally, if not more, crucial to the theological and political revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the end of this story stands Milton, refreshingly positioned here as reader rather than author, a shift that is appropriately reflected in Williams's decision to set aside discussion of the narrator-heavy Paradise Lost in favor of the “slender volume” of Paradise Regain'd to which is added Samson Agonistes (1671), a significant textual pairing that Williams describes with characteristically sharp perception as having “arriv[ed] near the close of a long and complicated epoch to expose the lasting tensions of a Renaissance that had in fact enabled—simultaneously—secular and religious forms of humanism in the same authors” (23). Williams's introductory chapter sets the stage for this story by reorienting the standard forward-looking view of the Renaissance, positioning it instead as a reactionary movement against a late-medieval church culture characterized by decadence and corruption, one in need of textual as well as spiritual correction. “Fuelled by a sense of moral rot at the heart of Christendom,” the early generations of humanist scholars that are the focus of Williams's study were “forced … to resort to the methods of ancient scholiasts in order to correct misreadings and brazen forgeries of major texts in the Western tradition, not least the Hebrew and Greek scriptures, Roman and native law, Roman and Holy Roman history, and ancient Greek literature” (11). And it was in the process of “correcting cultural falsehoods,” that they also forged a “statecraft of their own imagining,” one in which these same readerly values—collation, translation, correction, contextualization—were “recreat[ed] and affirm[ed],” thereby paving the way for modern democracy (12). Chapter 1 performs a similar perspectival shift with respect to the “decades-old dispute among historians of ‘print culture’”—represented here in its most polarized form by the work of Elizabeth Eisenstein and Adrian Johns, respectively—which asks whether the drivers of knowledge are primarily technological (printing press) or social (human agents making use of technology to meet their own particular ends). While Williams sides more closely with Eisenstein's big picture, a “macro-analysis” view than he does Johns's temporally and generically myopic one (35), he nevertheless shifts the impetus for change away from the technology of the printing press itself, locating it instead in an earlier generation of manuscript readers whose philological practices preceded the invention of print even as they were ultimately aided in their goals by its development. Subsequent chapters explore both the practical and ideological aspects of this humanist style of philology. Chapter 2 reads the Protestant Reformation as a product of the transition from a manuscript culture to a culture of the paper book, considered both as a distinct form of readerly technology and as a new form of sacred text. As Williams sees it, where the medieval church had absorbed the ritual blood sacrifice of its pagan antecedent into the medium of the manuscript Bible—written on vellum, bound in hide, and kissed, touched, and worshiped as the Word made flesh—for Erasmus and his followers it is the text itself that becomes the sacred object (logos) and the interpretation of this text (sermos) the means through which one enters into communion with Christ. For this new generation of readers, the postlapsarian divorce of word and object meant that all texts were subject to error, and thus subject to critique and revision; for them, as Williams puts it, “the Word became philology.” And it was their humanist translations of Scripture, rather than those ritually reproduced in the manuscript codex, that with the invention of paper were able to spread to a wide variety of people and classes, initiating a readerly revolution that was in its first generation religious and in its second political. Chapters 3 and 4 provide a case study for this argument in the example of John Foxe's Actes and Monuments, presented here as a series of “courtroom dramas” (167) in which a set of distinctly humanist martyrs defend themselves through readerly acts of scriptural indexing and collation, serving as both model and material for a faithful community of readers hors de texte. This section ends with a reading of Paradise Regained as a kind of “Fifth Gospel” in which Jesus is the exemplary Foxean martyr, reliant upon “that which scripture doth teach me” as he spars with Satan in his own courtroom drama in the wilderness (197). Chapter 5 maintains a focus on the courtroom as a readerly space, but pivots from the sacramental to the juridical as Williams here offers up a compelling case for John Lilburne as a would-be Foxean martyr, someone who consciously modeled his public performances on Foxe's courtroom style of narration so as to make “a performative link between religious and political revolution” (234). While the main conceptual thrust of Williams's argument here is to show how Lilburne's ahistorical evocation of a pre-Norman, “mythical[ly] continu[ous]” common law laid bare the contradictions of an early modern English legal system ripe for humanist revision (261), Milton scholars might find equally interesting his esoteric argument that Lilburne's casting of himself as Samson in this courtroom drama prefigures (and perhaps inspires) Milton's own dramatic study of juridical reading practices in the historically reflective Restoration era piece, Samson Agonistes. Samson Agonistes continues to be the implied subject of the remaining chapters even as Williams meanders en route through a careful study of the historiographic practices of Petrarch, Bruni, and Valla before turning to those of Milton and his contemporaries in preparation for his reading of the play. Pointing to the editorial Omissa to the 1671 edition, in which we are asked to collate and correct the text as part of the experience of reading it, Williams makes the argument that this is a work in which readers are forced to become textual “collaborators”: “Whatever we make of Samson's final act, we are now required to take responsibility for how we read” (301). Rising to the challenge Williams identifies here, in Chapter 6 he takes us through his own textual “collation” as he reads Milton's History of Britain (1670) in tandem with Edmund Ludlow's The Memoirs (1698-99) as a means of establishing a historiographic approach appropriate to Samson's dramatically ironic structure. Chapter 7 balances this mode of historiography against the “indexical reading” practices embraced by Milton and his fellow humanists by setting Samson in dialogue with the Euripidean tragedies Heracles, Hippolytus, Medea, and The Bacchae. The interpretive pay-off of this textual indexing comes in the form of a metatextual argument in which Williams uses his own humanistic reading practices to make his case for Samson as a play that sets the faulty interpretive practices of its “internal witnesses” against those of the ideal humanist reader, one better equipped than they “to negotiate the differences that still persist between ‘regenerationist’ and ‘revisionist’ readers of the poem, and that would help to differentiate the ‘true’ God from an arbitrary, ‘barbarian’ one” (426). Scholars familiar with the critical history of Milton's work might find Williams's readings of his late texts more thorough than novel as he takes us somewhat programmatically through the mechanics of Jesus-as-reader's temptation at the hands of Satan in Paradise Regained, followed by an analysis of how Milton presents his readers with a similar philological challenge in Samson Agonistes. Indeed, to this reader, Williams's careful preparatory contextualization proved more interesting than the sections directly on Milton's literary works. But this is perhaps part of his point, as the real thrust of Williams's argument in The Communion of the Book is that it was a particular kind of reading—namely, the kind practiced by the figures included in his study, among whom Milton stands as exemplar—that enabled the cultural shift that we identify with Western modernity, and it is precisely this kind of reading that Williams practices when coming at two of Milton's less loved and more contested works. For all that it may lack in argumentative spark, Williams's positioning of Jesus as a model of humanist reading practices—an individual given “no more help” from God “than any of us would have apart from what we read in scripture” (199)—offers an affirming vision to readers inhabiting the informational wilderness of “today's world of social media” (11), while the bipartisan nature of his reading of Samson Agonistes's ironic undercutting of its own internal arguments makes a compelling case for the interpretive benefit—as well as the interpretive pleasure—of the kind of careful, critical, and contextualized reading described and demonstrated throughout his study. Our first duty must be to reread those books that did inspire an unprecedented culture of choice and freedom of religion, of impersonal laws and equal justice, of radical notions of historical change and cultural evolution, and of new social goods of equality and democracy, where self-government had to be rooted in the governance of the self before it could grow outward into the state. Readers of Milton will no doubt hear echoes of his own views in this sentiment—as indeed they will throughout Williams's study—making it an especially fit conclusion to a book that is by design both informative and inspiring.

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