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Samson's Cords
Imposing Oaths in Milton, Marvell, and Butler
Alex Garganigo (Author)
9781487500986
Hardback, published 2 May 2018
352 pages
23.5 x 16.1 x 2.6 cm, 0.67 kg
"Samson’s Cords is a sophisticated, learned, and thoughtful book based on wide reading and deep thinking." "Garganigo’s work certainly increases our understanding of the literature of Milton, Marvell, and Butler, and for those who specialize in their study, Samson’s Cords is well worth a read." "The dialogic nature of Samson’s Cords will make it the go-to book for people interested in any and all issues surrounding the oath: perjury, censorship, cursing, equivocation, casuistry, office, loyalty, promise, and ethics. There is much here as well for early modernists working on Butler, Marvell, and Milton, as Garganigo provides new, innovative, and restorative readings of all three, reminding readers how important literary poetics continues to be within the ethically focused historical scholarship of the last several years."
In seventeenth-century Britain every debate about loyalty oaths invoked the biblical Samson. Samson’s Cords argues that these loyalty tests became an unprecedentedly pervasive feature of life in Restoration England and that writers of satire and epic had no choice but to respond. Alex Garganigo examines the radically different responses of John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and Samuel Butler to the existential crises caused by this explosion of loyalty oaths. After early support, all three developed serious reservations, confronting the irony that while oaths often exclude and destroy, they also include and create. Tackling issues such as performance, ritual, religion, secularization, gender, swearing, republicanism, and citizenship, Garganigo offers original readings of Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland, The Rehearsal Transpros’d, and Hudibras.
1. Samson’s Cords in Restoration England 2. Conjuring Oaths and Identities in Hudibras 3. Testing the Tests in The Rehearsal Transpros’d 4. An Horatian Oath: the Horatian Ode, Secularism, and Toleration 5. Samson’s Cords: Imposing Oaths in Eikonoklastes and Samson Agonistes 6. Paradise Lost I: God’s Swearing By Himself 7. Paradise Lost II: Of Apples, Oaths, and Women