Imperfect Sense: The Predicament of Milton's Irony. By Victoria Silver. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001. Pp. xiv + 409. $49.50.

Until now, the fullest statement of Milton's relation to the theology of the continental reformers, especially Luther, has been Georgia Christopher's Milton and the Science of the Saints (1982). Victoria Silver's Imperfect Sense: The Predicament of Milton's Irony engages many of the same aspects of Lutheran theology-especially Luther's notion that believers wrestle with revelation to "make" the deity (facere Deum), "not in the substance of God" but in relation to themselves. Both Christopher and Silver call upon Luther to illuminate the presence in Paradise Lost of what Christopher called an "evangelical irony" whereby the poet uses literary methods to deepen readers' relationship to the divine Word. Christopher argued that the Word's meanings-initially bare and doctrinal in Book 3-unfold as a revelation of divine love in the world of the poem through the various interpretations of God's speech (by Satan, steadfast angels, blind poet, Adam and Eve, creation, and history). Silver agrees that religious knowledge "behaves like a practice or a stance instead of a doctrine" (p. 50).

Joan S. Bennett
University of Delaware