Mammon's Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton.(Book Review)

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-JUL-05

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COPYRIGHT 2005 Modern Humanities Research Association

Mammon's Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton. By BLAIR HOXBY. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2003. xii+320 pp. 30 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-300-09378-0.

Mammon's Music is a work of considerable originality, which casts new light on Milton and some of his contemporaries by juxtaposing literary texts with economic treatises and pamphlets of the seventeenth century. The title suggests a certain ambivalence. To the Puritan moralist Milton, the siren song of material gain represents a temptation to be resolutely resisted. And yet, as Blair Hoxby shows convincingly, images of trade and its circulation resonate throughout Milton's writings, associated both with ideas of empire and with freedom...

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