Milton's Words approaches John Milton in both an old and a new way, focusing on his genius with words: keywords - the keys to a text or a theory; words of sexual avoidance and distress; words of abuse; words of privilege because 'Scripture'; big learned words; and cunning little words, easily overlooked. After a short account of Milton's life as a writer, Patterson guides us through most of the poetry and polemical prose, all too often kept in separate compartments. She shows how new challenges and crises required shifts in vocabulary, as well as changes in Milton's views.  What do Milton's words look like when we acknowledge their freight of personal and political history; when we track them from text to text; when we consider not only the big, important, learned words but also the very small ones, such as 'perhaps', which Milton deployed with consummate skill at some crucial moments in both poetry and prose, or the phrase 'he who', which replicates the Latinate 'ille qui', but to which Milton gives a psychological twist; when we consider not only word frequency, but infrequency, uniqueness or near uniqueness, as a signal of Milton's interest in a word; when we tackle these issues in the Latin texts for which there is not, as yet, a concordance; when we consider the possibility that certain words gain or lose value for Milton as he proceeds through his writer's life, and that certain words become keywords to a particular text, as 'book' becomes to Areopagitica; when we reconsider the question of Milton's coinages not from the stern legalistic perspective as to whether he should have made them, but why he needed them? No one person could complete all these tasks, and nobody would wish to read a book that appeared to have completed them. Understanding Milton's words is, and should remain, a work in progress.  But close attention to Milton's words is not all that this book offers. It tells a slightly different story about Milton himself than the ones we have been used to. Starting with an abbreviated 'writer's life', it explains the shape of Milton's writing career, the life-long tension between his literary ambitions and the pressure of exhilarating political circumstances. The Milton you will find here walked no straight path from his Cambridge degree to the epic he had been talking of writing when he was still at university, but instead cut his teeth as a writer in an entirely different field, political controversy. The effect on his vocabulary of his campaign to reform his country's church government and its divorce laws was galvanic, not least because he had to reconstitute his own image from that of a shy and bookish person to that of a crusader. He discovered that he enjoyed not only verbal conflict, but also mudslinging, and rude words became part of his arsenal in his very first prose tract. 'Marriage' and 'divorce', on the other hand, became loaded words for Milton for personal reasons, and he developed a new set of verbal resources, which Patterson calls 'words of avoidance', to help him tackle the subject. He never got over the experience of writing the divorce tracts. It was still on his mind when at the end of his life he revised his Latin treatise on theology, De Doctrina Christiana.  Then, for about a decade, he was called upon to justify the Long Parliament's execution of Charles I, which forced him to come to terms with the political keywords of his generation, words such as 'king', 'liberty', 'tyranny', and 'the people'. When the republican experiment collapsed on the death of Oliver Cromwell, after one last brave salvo against the restoration of the monarchy Milton retired back into the role of private intellectual and poet. This we all know; but because the poetry and the prose have been segregated for so long, and still tend to be read as separate enterprises, we have not tended to track Milton's favorite political words into the great poems, where, as we perhaps unwillingly will see, they change their valence. In general, though it is impossible to do justice to all of Milton's feats of word use and arrangement, this book will tell a complete tale of Milton the man; his psychological trajectory as well as that more formal notion, his 'character'; his mistakes as well as his masterpieces.

Milton's Words

Literature & Fiction

Patterson, Annabel

World Literature

Oxford University Press

Reading Holinshed's Chronicles

Reading Holinshed's Chronicles is the first major study of the greatest of the Elizabethan chronicles. Holinshed's Chronicles—a massive history of England, Scotland, and Ireland—has been traditionally read as the source material for many of Shakespeare's plays or as an archaic form of history-writing. Annabel Patterson insists that the Chronicles be read in their own right as an important and inventive cultural history. Although we know it by the name of Raphael Holinshed, editor and major compiler of the 1577 edition, the Chronicles was the work of a group, a collaboration between antiquarians, clergymen, members of parliament, poets, publishers, and booksellers. Through a detailed reading, Patterson argues that the Chronicles convey rich insights into the way the Elizabethan middle class understood their society. Responding to the crisis of disunity which resulted from the Reformation, the authors of the Chronicles embodied and encouraged an ideal of justice, what we would now call liberalism, that extended beyond the writing of history into the realms of politics, law, economics, citizenship, class, and gender. Also, since the second edition of 1587 was called in by the Privy Council and revised under supervision, the work constitutes an important test case for the history of early modern censorship. An essential book for all students of Tudor history and literature, Reading Holinshed's Chronicles brings into full view a long misunderstood masterpiece of sixteenth-century English culture.

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Reading Holinshed's Chronicles is the first major study of the greatest of the Elizabethan chronicles. Holinshed's Chronicles—a massive history of England, Scotland, and Ireland—has been traditionally read as the source material for many of Shakespeare's plays or as an archaic form of history-writing. Annabel Patterson insists that the Chronicles be read in their own right as an important and inventive cultural history. Although we know it by the name of Raphael Holinshed, editor and major compiler of the 1577 edition, the Chronicles was the work of a group, a collaboration between antiquarians, clergymen, members of parliament, poets, publishers, and booksellers. Through a detailed reading, Patterson argues that the Chronicles convey rich insights into the way the Elizabethan middle class understood their society. Responding to the crisis of disunity which resulted from the Reformation, the authors of the Chronicles embodied and encouraged an ideal of justice, what we would now call liberalism, that extended beyond the writing of history into the realms of politics, law, economics, citizenship, class, and gender. Also, since the second edition of 1587 was called in by the Privy Council and revised under supervision, the work constitutes an important test case for the history of early modern censorship. An essential book for all students of Tudor history and literature, Reading Holinshed's Chronicles brings into full view a long misunderstood masterpiece of sixteenth-century English culture.

Annabel Patterson explores the effects of censorship on both writing and reading in early modern England, drawing analogies and connections with France during the same period.

Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England

British & Irish

Univ of Wisconsin Pr

Is history driven more by principle or interest? Are ideas of historical progress obsolete? Is it unforgivable to change one’s mind or political allegiance? Did the eighteenth century really exchange the civilizing force of commercial advantage for political conflict? In this new account of liberal thought from its roots in seventeenth-century English thinking to the end of the eighteenth century, Annabel Patterson tackles these important historiographical questions. She rescues the term “whig” from the low regard attached to it; denies the primacy of self-interest in the political struggles of Georgian England; and argues that while Whigs may have strayed from liberal principles on occasion (nobody’s perfect), nevertheless many were true progressives. In a series of case studies, mainly from the reign of George III, Patterson examines or re-examines the careers of such prominent individuals as John Almon, Edmund Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Erskine, and, at the end of the century, William Wordsworth. She also addresses a host of secondary characters, reshaping our thinking about both well-known and lesser figures of the time. Tracking a coherent, sustained, and adaptable liberalism throughout the eighteenth century, Patterson overturns common assumptions of political, cultural, and art historians. The author delivers fresh insights into the careers of those who called themselves Whigs, their place in British political thought, and the crucial ramifications of this thinking in the American political arena.

Nobody's Perfect: A New Whig Interpretation of History

History

Europe

Yale University Press

Charles II’s first and most important parliament sat for eighteen years without a general election, earning itself the sobriquet “Long.” In 1661 this parliament began in eager compliance with the new king. Gradually disillusioned by Charles’s maneuvers, however, its members came to demand more control of the economy, religion, and foreign policy, starting a struggle that led to the Exclusion crisis. This lively book is the first full study of this Restoration Parliament. Using parliamentary diaries, newsletters, memoirs, letters from members of parliament, scofflaw pamphlets, and the king’s own speeches, Annabel Patterson describes this second Long Parliament in an innovative and challenging way, stressing that how its records were kept and circulated is an important part of the story. Because the parliamentary debates of this age were jealously guarded from public knowledge, unofficial sources of information flourished. Often these are more candid or colorful than official records. Eighteenth-century historians, especially if Whiggish, recycled many of them for posterity. The book, therefore, not only recovers a crucial period of parliamentary history, one that helps to explain the Glorious Revolution, it also opens a discussion about historiographical method.

The Long Parliament of Charles II

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Reading Between the Lines

Annabel Patterson tackles the hottest topic in literary studies today - `the Great Books debate - providing a superbly formulated moderate stance between the Western canon's radical oppponents and its zealous protectors.

Reference

Routledge

Annabel Patterson tackles the hottest topic in literary studies today - the `Great Books Debate' and the question of teaching the canon of English literature. Her superbly formulated moderate stance will be a welcome attribute to the debate.

Patterson follows the fortunes of Virgil’s Eclogues from the Middle Ages to our own century. She argues that Virgilian pastoral spoke to the intellectuals of each place and time of their own condition. The study reinspects our standard system of periodization in literary and art history and challenges some of the current premises of modernism.

Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry

University of California Press

While the term "liberalism" was not applied to political thought or political parties in England until the late eighteenth century, the author argues that its central ideas were formulated by seventeenth-century English writers in defiance of their society's norms, and then transmitted to the American colonies. In this study Annabel Patterson is particularly concerned with the means and agents of transmission, and with those who sought to ensure that the liberal canon would be preserved, dispersed and republished.

Early Modern Liberalism (Ideas in Context, Series Number 48)

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

Cambridge University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Patterson, Annabel. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Patterson, Annabel

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Patterson, Annabel. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Milton's Words

Reading Holinshed's Chronicles

Reading Holinshed's Chronicles

Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England

Nobody's Perfect: A New Whig Interpretation of History

The Long Parliament of Charles II

Reading Between the Lines

Reading Between the Lines

Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry

Early Modern Liberalism (Ideas in Context, Series Number 48)