Abstracts.(Critical Essay)

David Ainsworth, Spiritual Reading in Milton's Eikonoklastes

This essay argues that Milton's Eikonoklastes succeeds as an educative polemic, though not as a piece of political propaganda. In Eikonoklastes, Milton advances a strenuous and suspicious mode of reading Charles I, which seeks variance between the king's words and his deeds. Furthermore, Milton includes his readers in the process of demolishing Eikon Basilike. This essay examines Milton's process of spiritual reading and argues that Eikonoklastes attacks the very idea of uncritical reading. Milton successfully presents a critical process guided by the spirit within as a preferable alternative to the unquestioning acceptance of a comforting civil and spiritual servility.

Roberta Albrecht, Alchemical Augmentation and Primordial Fire in Donne's "The Dissolution"

Jay Arnold Levine's interpretation of "The Dissolution" is still among the best, especially as it treats the purpose of alchemy in the poem. He argues that Donne's theme of impotence defines an opus gone awry, proving the problem of the poem as a case of excessive female moisture overwhelming male fire. This study examines certain other codes from occult doctrine, showing how Heraclitus's principle of primordial fire informs the poem. As the "road up" and/or the "road down" to fire, the male and female accomplish the miracle of the phoenix--born by fire, resolved by fire, refusing to die.

Raymond A. Anselment, Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Sources of Alice Thornton's Life

When the Surtees Society published the only edition of Alice Thornton's autobiography, it omitted and restructured parts of this seventeenth-century gentry woman's self-representation. One of the three manuscripts available to the Victorian editor has since disappeared, but the others, now owned by a private collector, provide a significant corrective to the published version. An analysis of the editorial changes that limit Thornton's intent reveals the complex dimensions of this domestic and spiritual memoir. The manuscripts redefine a conventional concern with divine deliverance in their author's affirmation of her faith and family, a validation of personal integrity and divine mercy that further affirms her importance among early modern women writers.

Laurie Ellinghausen, Literary Property and the Single Woman in Isabella Whitney's A Sweet Nosgay