Research Article| August 01 1998 The Empty Garden: the Subject of Late Milton; Milton and the Revolutionary Reader Ashraf H. A. Rushdy,The Empty Garden: the Subject of Late Milton(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992) xvii + 515 pp.Sharon AchinsteinMilton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994) xv + 272 pp. Elizabeth Skerpan Wheeler Elizabeth Skerpan Wheeler Department of English, Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas 78666, USA. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1998) 16 (3): 339–346. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.3.339 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Elizabeth Skerpan Wheeler; The Empty Garden: the Subject of Late Milton; Milton and the Revolutionary Reader. Rhetorica 1 August 1998; 16 (3): 339–346. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.3.339 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search Copyright 1998, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1998 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviews 339 preachers' macaronic compositions, recently well-documented by Siegfried Wenzel. All ingeniously augment the means of sharing Christian wisdom among the laity. Georgiana Donavin Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, The Empty Garden: the Subject of Late Milton (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992) xvii + 515 pp. Sharon Achinstein Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994) xv + 272 pp. Hardly any student of modem American politics would fail to agree that the mass media—specifically television—play a key role in structuring political discourse. Whether or not individual politicians and their media representatives actually formally study mass communication, all know the forms, demands, and constraints of television. Failure to master the medium usually results in failure to win an election or carry the day in a discussion of public policy. Further, the medium creates a series of expectations in viewers, expectations that must be met or consciously manipulated and subverted by any political writer or speaker. Now, imagine reading a scholarly book on modem political discourse that may mention television but does not examine its characteristics as a medium or the viewing habits or demographics of the audience, and yet claims to study "media". Such is frequently the situation in current studies of the literature, politics, and political discourse of seventeenth-century England. The word "rhetoric" often appears in titles, and indeed in authors' arguments, but, on inspection, a reader hoping to find discussion of the ars bene dicendi as an epistemic approach to structuring political language will be disappointed. Too often "rhetoric" simply becomes a synonym for "language" or "trope", rather than a means of inquiry into the workings of argument. 340 RHETORICA The reasons for scholarly attention to political language in the period are manifest. The century claims what for many historians is the first modern revolution, complete with a nascent public sphere, people beginning to perceive themselves as public actors, and, most importantly, a free press that empowered both. It claims many writers engaged in pamphleteering who at any time would rank with the best in the language, from William Prynne and John Lilbume to Thomas Hobbes and John Milton. Milton's stature as a poet guarantees attention to his political prose and to the politics of his great poems. Moreover, without question, the educational practice of the century, beginning in the grammar school, was relentlessly rhetorical. Rhetoric thus saturated seventeenth-century writers and readers as much as television does the modern political nation. The period is thus ripe for rhetorical analysis. I examine here two recent exemplars of Milton studies that illustrate the gulf between "rhetorical study" and knowledge of rhetoric that pervades current seventeenth-century scholarship. Both books have been extensively, and largely favorably, reviewed in reputable journals. One received the James Holly Hanford Award from the Milton Society of America as the best book on Milton published in 1994. Both are learned and engaging, and both offer valuable insights into Milton's work. But the arguments of both are compromised by the writers' apparent unfamiliarity with the entire field of the history of rhetoric. In one case, the author's knowledge of rhetoric is limited; in the other, the author lacks any comprehension of rhetorical theory, principle, or practice. My purpose here is to highlight the ways in which this blind spot affects the theses of these two otherwise powerful books, and to call attention to two recent studies of other periods that admirably achieve, through their grasp of rhetoric, what the Miltonists attempt. In The Empty Garden, Ashraf H. A. Rushdy offers a study of the Jesus of Paradise Regained as founder of a religious culture that offers a "new way of knowing and a new way of being" (xi) through self-knowledge gained by "reading", broadly defined as interpreting both the written word and the "text" of the world. Through his creation of Jesus, and his contrast of that Jesus to the Samson of the companion work Samson Agonistes, Milton becomes Reviews 341 a powerful cultural critic, ultimately arguing that the relationship between self-knowledge and self-representation may best be negotiated through politics. As Rushdy makes abundantly clear in his first chapter, "'Confronting the Subject: The Art of...