Princeton University Press has a couple of long-running series that I buy whenever I spot them at a bookshop. Their Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers and the Lives of Great Religious Books are both full of interesting titles, beautifully printed and bound, and a combination of expected and unexpected that I find particularly satisfying. The Ancient Wisdom series are a kind of entry-level Loeb Classical Library. They are presented in their original languages with the translation on the facing page. Rather than being complete or lengthy works, they are selections focused on a particular topic and presented as a “how-to.”
For me they are great for a little light reading that still stirs my desire to learn. They also make fantastic gifts for young people, as they are essentially introductions to great thinkers structured around some practical competency. How to Have a Life features selections from Seneca and How to Drink selections from Renaissance humanist Vincent Obsopoeus. The tone of the translations is chatty and the presentation a pleasingly refined design.
The Lives of Great Religious Books selections are also wonderful. Each one purports to give a biography of a significant religious work, chronicling its composition, publication history, popular and critical reception, and status. The first one I found was Alan Jacobs’ The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography, which chronicled Thomas Cranmer’s intentions and challenges and then the long robust legacy of the defining text of Anglican practice. I was so inspired by it that I then put together a sort of book of common prayer for the classical school where I was teaching. After that I happily read the biographies of The Thomas Jefferson Bible (fascinating), the Book of Mormon (interesting and familiar, as I live in LDS territory), and Augustine’s Confessions (a weak entry in the series—more about Augustine than the life of his work).
Paradise Lost: A Biography is Jacobs’ second entry in the series and it is a credit both to Princeton’s series and to Jacobs’ bibliography. Jacobs’ great gift as an author and historian of ideas is his ability to stimulate interest in the works he discusses. He has a strong sense of scale and proportion which means that his description of an idea effectively communicates its place in the larger world, the proportion of its parts and features, and where to find an entry into an author’s thought or style. For me at least, this stimulates my intellectual appetite to fit an author, a book, or a concept, into my cognitive architecture.
From the preface, which addresses the obvious question “Is Paradise Lost even a religious book?” to the conclusion, which chronicles allusions, translations, and adaptations as well as a moderately extensive analysis of Milton’s influence on Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Jacobs offers just the right details and insights to send his reader back to Milton. In fact, about halfway through this book I went and found Paradise Lost: The Biblically Annotated Edition on my shelf and added it to my current TBR pile. I also grabbed Lewis’s Preface to Paradise Lost, added two more volumes from the Lives Great Religious Books series, and Steven Brust’s fantasy novel To Reign in Hell. I’ve read the poem many times, taught it on occasion, and discussed it at length in book clubs and among friends, and now I want to read it again.
The single chapter biography of Milton is deft. A complex man presented in context with telling detail and thoughtful evaluation. Milton lived through dramatic times and participated fully. Jacobs offers the necessary broad context for understanding Milton’s place in English history while also offering uncommon detail appropriate to the best of academic writing.
Likewise, his account of the poem’s composition recounts the popular legends around Milton’s process as well as some of the less well-known details. I did not know that Milton composed seasonally nor how many topics he considered for his epic before settling on Genesis chapter three.
The meat of the book, of course, is the chronicle of how Paradise Lost and John Milton have been interpreted and understood. I will not attempt to recount what Jacobs has already distilled, refined, and artfully arranged. Suffice it to say that, as we might expect, the reception of the poem has much to say about the receiver and only some to say about the poem and the poet. Milton’s greatness, strangeness, and magnificent art receive the kind praise and censure commensurate with their scale. Milton may displease, offend, or disrupt, but he rarely leaves a reader unmoved. Jacobs thoughtfully describes the comments, essays, responses, and art that Keats, Woolf, Johnson, Blake and many others have contributed to Milton criticism. Likewise, he carefully delineates the shifts in popular reception up to and including modern indifference.
Books give readers varying kinds of pleasure: the pleasure of being transported, the pleasure of being gracefully taught, the pleasure of familiarity. Jacobs gives a very special kind of doubled joy: a book that teaches you delightfully and then sends you on to other books to be delighted again and again.
Image Credit: Gustave Doré, Untitled (1866)
