Eastern Imaginings: Milton's Moscovia and Beyond

Abstract

A Brief History of Moscovia is regarded as a minor, slightly odd composition within the Milton canon. Mostly completed before his total blindness in 1652, it stands in an awkward relationship to his other works, being largely composed of extracts from previous writers. This essay considers Milton's selection of factual content as well as his subtle deviations, at times, from his sources’ wording. Milton takes us on a journey beginning with exterior landscapes and moves to graphic anthropological details, in the final chapters shifting from geography to history. All these elements gradually accrue moral emphases, producing not a neutral account but an ethical critique in terms familiar from other Miltonic works, with some patriotic bias. Using R. D. Bedford's superb essay as the starting point, it explores Milton's language at the juncture of statement and evocation. Approaching nearer to the Far Eastern frontier with Cathay, one enters a mysterious realm. Here, the exotic and oriental fire Milton's descriptive imagination. In this combination of knowledge-based detail, moral energy and imaginative and poetic suggestion, Moscovia is in some ways a typically Miltonic work.

Notes

I should like to express my gratitude to Professor Warren Chernaik and Dr Joseph Shub for their advice and suggestions in the writing of this essay.

1 A Brief History of Moscovia is the printer's title, but in his preface added in 1670, Milton refers to the text as Moscovia, the title I will use in this essay.

2 R. D. Bedford, “Milton's Journeys North: A Brief History of Moscovia and Paradise Lost. Renaissance Studies 7.1 (1993): 80.

3 Milton, Prolusion 3, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 1.246; hereafter cited as CPW.

4 Milton, Moscovia, in CPW, vol. 8, ed. George B. Parks, 474–75.

5 Milton may have considered other such works on other countries, with Moscovia being the first. Some editors suggest that even this work may be incomplete. See Bedford, “Milton's Journeys North.”

6 George B. Parks, Yale editor of Moscovia, notes that Milton's claim exaggerates his effort of drawing on two sources only and a combined total of about 1,200 pages (458).

7 See Parks for a discussion of the possible time of composition (454–64).

8 Robert Ralston Cawley, Milton's Literary Craftsmanship: A Study of A Brief History of Moscovia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941), vii.

9 John B. Gleason, “The Nature of Milton's Moscovia,” Studies in Philology 61.4 (1964): 640.

10 Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1598–1600) is a work in three volumes, of which the first includes accounts of English travellers to Russia from the mid-sixteenth century. Samuel Purchas's Purchas His Pilgrimes (4 vols.; 1625) contains reports on Russia in volume 3, including Giles Fletcher's Of the Russe Common Wealth (originally printed in 1591), a trusted early geographical model.

11 The contrast of city (court) and country (pastoral) is a central theme in Shakespeare's As You Like It, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest.

12 For another example, see Chancelor's (ambassador to the Queen) encounter with the fishermen in Saint Nicholas (526).

13 Hakluyt is the source (483 n. 39).

14 This passage is consistent with Milton's attacks on extravagant courtiers and luxuries in his later political pamphlets and late poems.

15 Lloyd E. Berry, “Giles Fletcher, the Elder, and Milton's A Brief History of Moscovia,” The Review of English Studies 11.42 (1960): 151.

16 This sensuous description is reminiscent of passages in Paradise Lost, as, for example, Satan's (and the reader's) first encounter with Paradise (PL 4.156ff). Bedford also discusses parallels with Paradise Lost in “Milton's Journeys North.”