Milton’s Sonnet XVIII (‘On the Late Massacre in Piedmont’) propounds a familiar opposition between the ‘pure’ religion of Protestants and a corrupt Catholicism obsessed with material objects and images (‘stocks and stones’). Yet this ostensibly anti-Catholic poem veers brazenly and repeatedly into the language of relic veneration. Beginning with the poignant spectacle of the Waldensians’ bones scattered on the mountainsides, the sonnet goes on to weaponize human remains and grants them sacred force in the form of ‘martyred blood and ashes’ to be sprinkled over Italy. This chapter explores historical, confessional, and literary contexts for Sonnet XVIII’s surprising investment in human remains, both as objects arousing pity and as capable of a kind of material efficacy. Milton’s poem is situated within an extensive tradition of English Protestant poets and preachers, including Michael Drayton, John Donne, and Richard Crashaw, who had wrestled with the question of relics and the problem of scattered bones.

This chapter explores the reception of the visible legacy of sixteenth-century image-breaking in the years surrounding the English Civil War. For all its violence, the iconoclasm of the early Reformation never succeeded in banishing all superstitious images from English churches and cathedrals. In many places of worship, reminders of the old religion survived into the seventeenth century in the form of defaced carvings, headless statuettes, damaged picture windows and partially razed memorial brasses. Rightly or wrongly, seventeenth-century observers came to associate Reformation iconoclasm with a strategy of instructive defacement, intended to preserve visible examples of Catholic superstition marked with the imprint of reforming zeal. The Laudian reornamentation of English churches in the 1620s and 1630s led many puritans to conclude that the strategy of defacement had been a failure, and to call for a new wave of more thorough-going iconoclasm. Yet others, including John Milton, continued to embrace selective defacement as a model for coping with both literary and material idols.

Poly-Olbion (1612/22), the collaborative work of the poet Michael Drayton, the legal scholar John Selden, and the engraver William Hole, ranks among the most remarkable literary productions of early modern England, and arguably among the most important. An ambitious and idiosyncratic survey of the history, topography, and ecology of England and Wales – ranging in its preoccupations from the supernatural conception of Merlin to the curious habits of beavers, and from celebrations of martial glory to laments over the diminishment of woodlands – the book seems determined to pack all of national and natural history between its covers. In the course of thirty songs, Drayton's Muse traverses a varying landscape in which personified rivers, hills, and forests sing of past glories and disasters, pursuing local and regional rivalries whilst propounding – implicitly and explicitly – an idiosyncratic and heterogeneous vision of Britain. For all its variety, the poem is as remarkable for what it leaves out as for what it contains; among its notable omissions are the name of King James I, the entire country of Scotland, and any concession to the tastes of a Jacobean reading public whose ignorance Drayton never tires of lambasting.

This is the first ever volume of essays on Poly-Olbion, and a reflection of the work's increasing prominence in scholarship on the literature and culture of early modern England. With its dual focus on England and Wales and its British rhetoric and ambitions, the poem has long been central to critical studies of early modern nationhood and nationalism. In the last decade it has also assumed a central place in discussions of pre-modern approaches to ecological sustainability and environmental degradation. Recent scholarship on the history of the book and early modern paratexts has provided the ground for a fresh appreciation of Poly-Olbion's busy, multivocal mise-en-page. This collection of essays on Poly-Olbion reflects the extent to which Drayton's preoccupations have become our own.

POLY-OLBION IN ITS TIME

However much it may seem to speak to twenty-first-century concerns, Poly-Olbion, like any literary work, is a product of its time. Yet the ‘time’ of the poem is unusually difficult to pin down. Drayton's pursuit of what he ultimately came to describe as ‘This strange Herculean toyle’ (30.342) extended over a period of at least twenty-five years, possibly a good deal longer.

No reader of Poly-Olbion can be oblivious to the tensions between the poet Michael Drayton and his annotator, John Selden. Indeed, one of the poem’s slightly guilty pleasures lies in watching Selden, with unimpeachable erudition and (almost) unfailing courtesy, dismantle the legends of British antiquity that Drayton celebrates in so many of the early songs. Yet to read the interplay between poet and commentator as a confrontation between cherished medieval myth and new historical scholarship would be to over-simplify each writer's position, and also to misidentify the fundamental stakes of their debate. Although Drayton and Selden do disagree about the history of ancient Britain, especially in the millennium before Caesar’s arrival, neither is deaf to the other's arguments. The final stages of composition before the publication of the first part of Poly-Olbion gave each writer the opportunity to hone his own position and perspective in response to his interlocutor's case. Ultimately, as I shall argue here, the dialogue between Drayton and Selden is less concerned with the facts of British antiquity than with the shape of historical and prehistoric time, and with the question of how those in the present can properly value a past about which they know next to nothing.

If, as some critics have argued, Selden's annotations fatally undermine a central plank of Drayton's poetic project, the poet himself seems blithely unconcerned by the damage. In the preface to Poly-Olbion, Drayton gives no indication of awareness that his witty young annotator has different views on British history than his own. Although he has blistering words for those who fail to value the antiquities of their own country, he seems complacent in counselling readers to turn to ‘the Illustration of this learned Gentleman, my friend, to explaine every hard matter of history, that, lying farre from the way of common reading, may (without question) seem difficult unto thee’ (p. vi*). Yet even in his own address to the reader, Selden signals that he will not acquiesce in upholding many of the poem's central historical themes, in particular those traditions concerning British antiquity derived from the writings of Geoffrey of Monmouth.