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Digital Milton
David Currell • Islam Issa
Editors
Digital Milton
Editors
David Currell Islam Issa
American University of Beirut Birmingham City University
Beirut, Lebanon Birmingham, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-90477-1 ISBN 978-3-319-90478-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90478-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018952371
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: “Pandemonium” by Andrew Kulman, reproduced with kind permission.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Mum and Dad
For Mama and Baba
Acknowledgments
The editors are grateful to all those who have made Digital Milton
possible.
David Currell was fortunate to study the history of textual media with
Bernard Muir and Milton with David Quint, two extraordinarily generous
teachers. Islam Issa has continued to benefit from all that he was taught by
Hugh Adlington.
The Birmingham City University Faculty of Arts, Design and Media’s
Research Investment Scheme bought time out for Islam Issa to work on
this project and funded the index, prepared by Nick de Somogyi. Special
thanks are due to Andrew Kehoe, as well as Gemma Moss, Tim Wall, and
Sarah Wood.
An Erasmus+ staff mobility exchange allowed the editors to spend valu-
able time working on this volume together in Beirut and Birmingham. We
are grateful to Peter Sjølyst-Jackson, Lucy Stubbs, Hala Dimechkie, and
Olga Safa for their support in making this possible.
We are also grateful to discussants and audiences at a Faculty of Arts
and Sciences Research Lunch, American University of Beirut (November
2016), and at the roundtable “Milton and the Digital Humanities,”
Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting in Chicago (March
2017), organized by David Ainsworth and also featuring Olin Bjork,
Thomas Luxon, and John Rumrich.
For advice and helpful suggestions at various stages of the project, our
thanks to three of the contributors in particular, Olin Bjork, Angelica
Duran, and Peter Herman, in addition to Paul Edmondson, Mario Hawat,
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
and David Wrisley. Iman Al Kaisy provided valuable editorial assistance.

We also thank the anonymous reviewer(s) for their highly constructive
comments.
Our editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Ben Doyle and Camille Davies,
have been a pleasure to work with, as has been the book’s production
manager, Vanipriya Manohar.
Andrew Kulman produced, with skill and generosity, original and dis-
tinctive art especially for the book’s cover. “Pandemonium” is the product
of conversations with the artist, followed by his work with carefully chosen
physical media. The image is a drypoint monoprint, produced on zinc and
tissue-wiped to create layers of tone. The artist notes that “this is a tradi-
tional method of intaglio printmaking and while referencing Gustave
Doré, it also reflects contemporary art practice.” Such innovative handling
of traditional media resonates with our conception of digital scholarship.
Family and friends are a constant source of love and support. We dedi-
cate this book to our parents.
Contents
1 Milton! Thou Shouldst Be Living in These Media 1

David Currell and Islam Issa
Part I Textual Remediations 25
2
The John Milton Reading Room and the Future of Digital
Pedagogy 27
Cordelia Zukerman
3 “Is There a Class in This Audiotext?” Paradise Lost

and the Multimodal Social Edition 47
Olin Bjork and John Rumrich
4 “Apt numbers”: On Line Citations of Paradise Lost 77

David Currell
Part II Scale, Space, and Sociality 109
5 Form and Computation: A Case Study 111

Anupam Basu
ix
x Contents
6 Mapping the Moralized Geography of Paradise Lost 129

Randa El Khatib and David Currell
7 “Still Paying, Still to Owe”: Credit, Community,

and Small Data in Shakespeare and Milton 153
Peter C. Herman
Part III New Audiences, Novel Engagements 179
8 The Online Revolution: Milton and the Internet

in the Middle East 181
Islam Issa
9 Digital Milton and Student Research 207

David Ainsworth
10 Milton for Millennials: Sponsoring Digital Creativity

through Milton Revealed 225
Hugh Macrae Richmond
11 Epilogue: Milton in the Digital Waves 245

Angelica Duran
Index 261
Notes on Contributors
David Ainsworth is Associate Professor of English at the University of

Alabama, USA, where he is also Assistant Chair of English and part of the
Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies. Ainsworth is co-organizer
of the Conference on John Milton and was the first Communications
Officer for the Milton Society of America. He works primarily on
Milton’s poetry and prose and on the Holy Spirit. In addition to his
first book, Milton and the Spiritual Reader (2008), he has published
articles in journals including Milton Quarterly and Studies in English
Literature. His second book will be Reading through the Spirit: Milton,
Music and Literary Interpretation.
Anupam Basu is Assistant Professor of English at Washington University
in St. Louis, USA. He was previously Washington University’s Mark
Steinberg Early Career Fellow in Digital Humanities. His work lies at the
intersection of literature and big data, drawing on emerging computa-
tional techniques to make vast digital archives of early modern print more
tractable for computational analysis. His work in this field has appeared in
numerous journals and edited collections.
Olin Bjork is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Houston-
Downtown, USA, where he teaches courses on technical communication,
digital media, and early modern literature. He was previously a Marion
L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Tech and Lecturer at Santa
Clara University. As a postgraduate student at the University of Texas at
Austin, he was Webmaster for the English Department, Assistant Director
of the Computer (now Digital) Writing and Research Lab, and a
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
c ollaborator on digital editions of Paradise Lost and Leaves of Grass. He

has published chapters in the collections Going Wireless and Digital
Humanities Pedagogy.
David Currell is Assistant Professor of English at the American University
of Beirut, Lebanon, where he teaches early modern poetry and drama. His
work, largely in the field of reception studies, has appeared in jour-
nals including Critical Survey and Shakespeare Survey, and collections
including Critical Insights: Macbeth and Fall Narratives. He co-edited a
special issue of English Studies on the topic Reading Milton through Islam
and is writing a book on Renaissance epic and satire.
Angelica Duran is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and
Religious Studies at Purdue University, USA. She is the editor of A Concise
Companion to Milton (2007, pbk and rev. 2011) and The King James Bible
across Borders and Centuries (2014), the co-editor of Mo Yan in Context:
Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller (2014) and Milton in Translation
(2017), and the author of The Age of Milton and the Scientific Revolution
(2007). She is on the Executive Committee (2012–21) of the Milton
Society of America, an Affiliated Organization of the Modern Language
Association, and the editorial board of Milton Quarterly.
Randa El Khatib is a Doctoral Researcher in English at the University of
Victoria, Canada. She also holds the position of Alliance of Humanities
Organizations Communications Fellow. She is the Special Projects
Coordinator at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, where she over-
sees the Open Knowledge Practicum and other projects. Working on
plays and epic poetry of the English Renaissance, her research focuses
on how space is represented in fictional and allegorical settings. She
is the project manager of the TopoText team that develops digital
mapping tools for humanities research at the American University of
Beirut.
Peter C. Herman is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at
San Diego State University, USA. His most recent books include
Destabilizing Milton: “Paradise Lost” and the Poetics of Incertitude (2005),
The New Milton Criticism (2012), co-edited with Elizabeth Sauer, and
MLA’s Approaches to Teaching volumes on Milton’s works. He is currently
working on the literature of terrorism, and his anthology, Critical Contexts:
Terrorism, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
xiii
Islam Issa is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Birmingham City

University, UK. His book Milton in the Arab-Muslim World (2016) won
the Milton Society of America’s “First Book” award. He is co-editor of
Milton in Translation (2017) and has published in journals including
Studies in English Literature and English Studies. A regular media con-
tributor, he has also written on Milton for such outlets as The Guardian
and Times Literary Supplement, and has been selected as a BBC New
Generation Thinker.
Hugh Macrae Richmond is Professor Emeritus of English at the
University of California, Berkeley, USA, directing its Shakespeare Program,
and producing the documentary Milton by Himself (Films for Humanities)
and recordings of performances of Comus and Paradise Lost (available on
YouTube). His books include The Christian Revolutionary: John Milton
(1974), John Milton’s Drama of “Paradise Lost” (1992), and Puritans and
Libertines (1981), as well as Shakespeare’s Political Plays (1967),
Shakespeare’s Sexual Comedy (1971), and Shakespeare’s Tragedies Reviewed
(2015). He has developed websites on Milton (Milton Revealed) and on
Shakespeare (Shakespeare’s Staging). He teaches courses on Milton and
Shakespeare for the UC Berkeley Osher Institute of Life-Long Learning.
John Rumrich is Professor of English at the University of Texas at
Austin, USA, where he teaches courses on Milton, Shakespeare, and early
modern poetry. An NEH fellow (1990–91) and editor of Texas Studies in
Literature and Language (1992–2007), he has been visiting professor
in China, France, Ireland, and South Africa. His publications include
Matter of Glory (1987), Milton Unbound (1996), various articles and
book chapters, the co-edited collections Milton and Heresy (1998) and
Immortality and the Body in the Age of Milton (2017), as well as the
Norton Critical Edition of Seventeenth Century Poetry (2005) and edi-
tions of Milton’s works for Modern Library.
Cordelia Zukerman is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the United
States Military Academy, West Point, USA. Her research, which centers on
the publication and reception of early modern English drama and poetry,
analyzes cultural constructions of readers and reading during times of
social and technological change. Her essays have appeared in Studies in
English Literature, Shakespeare Survey, and The History of European Ideas,
among others. She has also participated in collaborative projects in digital
pedagogy with colleagues from the University of Michigan. She is a for-
mer research assistant for The John Milton Reading Room.
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 Paradise Lost Audiotexts interface displaying modernized

text on both pages 52
Fig. 3.2 Paradise Lost Audiotexts digital interface displaying
modernized text with annotation 59
modernized and unmodernized text 60
modernized text with reader notes 61
Fig. 4.1 Lines of Paradise Lost quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary84
Fig. 4.2 Comparison of lines of Paradise Lost quoted in the 1st and 8th
editions of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations86
Fig. 5.1 “Recommendation engine” with Thomas Middleton’s
Michaelmas Term as “key text” 122
Fig. 5.2 “Recommendation engine” with Areopagitica as “key text” 122
Fig. 5.3 “Recommendation engine” with Paradise Regain’d…to which
is added Samson Agonistes as “key text” 123
Fig. 6.1 Map of biblical lands from the King James Bible (1612/13;
the edition of Milton’s family Bible). (Credit: Houghton
Library, Harvard University) 132
Fig. 6.2 “The Turkish Empire,” from John Speed, A Prospect of the
Most Famous Parts of the World (1626). (Credit: Maps &
Imagery Library, Special and Area Studies Collections, George
A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL) 140
Fig. 6.3 “A Map of the Moralized Geography of Paradise Lost”:
Georectified “Turkish Empire” map against shaded relief
projection142
xv
xvi List of Figures
Fig. 6.4 “A Map of the Moralized Geography of Paradise Lost”:

Georectified “Turkish Empire” map, zoomed view 143
Fig. 7.1 Visualization of Milton Sr.’s loan to John Downer 157
Fig. 7.2 Visualization of Milton Sr.’s reinvestment of John Downer’s
money158
Fig. 7.3 Visualization of Milton Sr.’s loan to Rose Downer 159
Fig. 7.4 Visualization of Milton Sr.’s loan to Edward Raymond (1) 160
Fig. 7.5 Visualization of Milton Sr.’s loan to Edward Raymond (2) 160
Fig. 7.6 Visualization of Milton Sr.’s loan to Edward Raymond after
litigation and the latter’s death 161
Fig. 7.7 Visualization of Shylock’s loan to Bassanio (1) 162
Fig. 7.10 Visualization of humanity’s debt in Paradise Lost169
Fig. 8.1 Non-personalized Google search for “Paradise Lost” in Arabic
(UK, March 2017). Google and the Google logo are
registered trademarks of Google Inc., used with permission 186
Fig. 8.2 Non-personalized Google search for “Paradise Lost” in Arabic
(Palestine, November 2017). Google and the Google logo are
Fig. 8.3 Non-personalized Google search for “John Milton” in Arabic
(Lebanon, September 2017). Google and the Google logo are
Fig. 8.4 Watermarked PDF of Hanna Aboud’s translation of Paradise
Lost (Credit: General Syrian Book Organization) 190
Fig. 8.5 Flag of the Syrian National Coalition 190
Fig. 8.6 Flag of the Syrian Arab Republic 191
Fig. 10.1 Terrance Lindall. The Gold Illuminated Paradise Lost Scroll 234
CHAPTER 1
Milton! Thou Shouldst Be Living

in These Media
David Currell and Islam Issa
Digital Milton presents new scholarship on John Milton that engages with
digital methods and digital media. That this scholarship fills a book is a
sign that Milton studies is participating in the digital turn. That this schol-
arship fills a book is a sign that relationships between media and platforms
are not (and are never) simple relationships of transition or substitution,
and a sign that humanists accord unique value to both print and digital
media while grappling with the urgent and compelling challenges to which
their simultaneity gives rise. Our hopes are that Milton should have
renewed life in digital media, that scholarship should have a vital role in
this metamorphosis, and that the results should enliven global literary
culture.
D. Currell (*)
I. Issa
© The Author(s) 2018 1

D. Currell, I. Issa (eds.), Digital Milton,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90478-8_1
2 D. CURRELL AND I. ISSA
Digital literary study is a rapidly changing field whose theories,

resources, methods, and institutional arrangements reflect this state of
dynamic flux. In that context, although this book aims to present the full
range of digital work on and with Milton, many of the contributions
within it are notable for their reflexivity and critical outlook towards this
digital moment and the histories leading to it, and are explicitly experi-
mental or exploratory in their orientation. The range spans all five illustra-
tive clusters of scholarly activity in the digital humanities (DH) presented
by Julia Thompson Klein in her mapping of kinds of work frequently asso-
ciated with that rubric.1 To identify just one example from each of Klein’s
clusters that is well represented in this volume: “electronic text production
and editing,” “computing practices in disciplines of the humanities and
arts,” “cultural impacts of the Internet and new media,” “design and pro-
duction,” and “new approaches to teaching and learning.” Our method-
ological openness is also an openness to methods yet uninvented, and so,
to a greater than usual extent, this book anticipates its own eclipse with
optimism. That said, the genealogical spirit animating many of these chap-
ters intimates longer durations, extending both into the past and into
durable futures of new connections and collaborations, fresh momentum
for existing projects, and sustainable trajectories for germinal ones.
The contributors represent a wide spectrum of academic experience,
from doctoral student to professor emeritus. Their range of institutional
and geographical locations is also broad. For some, digital literary studies
is already a primary scholarly identity. For others, this work is a first taste,
or even a “triall…by what is contrary.”2 While chapters have been written
and projects have been designed so as to speak directly to contemporary
Milton studies, the issues and approaches engaged are also crucially in
dialogue with early modern studies more broadly, textual and editorial
theory, media studies, the sociology of reading, curatorial practice, and the
teaching of literature.
“Books Are Not Absolutely Dead Things”3

Collections of Milton scholarship have rarely taken account of the digital.4
Likewise, collections in the digital humanities have rarely taken account of
Milton.5 This mutual blindness contrasts with the state of Shakespeare
studies,6 to such an extent that “the digital” begins to look like another
axis to add to Rachel Trubowitz’s sketch of the orthogonal orientations of
Shakespearean and Miltonic scholarship in recent decades.7 Where the
MILTON! THOU SHOULDST BE LIVING IN THESE MEDIA 3
decisive influence in the former domain has been “Greenblattian New

Historicism,” the governing paradigm of Milton studies has been
Cambridge School “contextualist historicism.”8 But “the rise of ‘big
data,’” Trubowitz continues, “has further exposed the limitations of tradi-
tional archives (among them the exclusive rare book collections at elite
libraries), on which the specificity of historicist interpretation was
grounded.”9 While the mass digitization that underpins “big data” prom-
ises to make work in book history, print culture, and the sociality of text
accessible to scholars physically remote from “traditional archives,” it does
so under conditions of mediation and representation that leave the physi-
cal archives indispensable. Shakespeareans’ comparative cosmopolitanism
across material and mediated scholarly worlds surely reflects the medial
confluence of theatre and print, as well as Shakespeare’s greater presence
in mass media and popular culture generally. Shakespeare also has an
unusual prominence within the long history (antedating the modern com-
puter) of quantitative stylistics, motivated by questions of authorship.
While scholars including Blaine Greteman and Whitney Anne Trettien
have published work at the intersection of Milton studies and digital liter-
ary studies, and while Milton has a presence in major digital projects like
Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, the academic imbrication of Milton and the
digital remains incipient.10 Another way to put this is to say that while we
are all digital Miltonists now, nobody is yet a Digital Miltonist.
To assert that we are all digital Miltonists now probably still has some
shock value, but part of this should be a shock of recognition. From com-
municating by email with colleagues and students, to searching online
databases for scholarly sources, downloading and reading articles on com-
puters or mobile devices, consulting facsimiles of seventeenth-century
texts on Early English Books Online, or performing a keyword search at The
John Milton Reading Room, the routines of academia have become digi-
tized. The scholarship and study of Milton’s works inevitably engage the
kinds of digital and computational technologies and electronic media that
have continuously reshaped culture over the last several decades. Yet a
digital revolution in the everyday practice of scholarship on a print author
sharpens the pointed question that Jerome McGann poses in A New
Republic of Letters: “What kinds of research and educational program can
integrate the preservation and study of these two radically different
media?”11 McGann’s own answer is “philology in a new key,” and scholars
of Renaissance literature should take timely advantage of their special col-
lective capacity to compose that answer.12
The nature and timeliness of Digital Milton also validate Lauren Klein
and Matthew Gold’s assessment in the 2016 edition of Debates in the
Digital Humanities, that “the challenges currently associated with the
digital humanities involve a shift from congregating in the big tent to
practicing DH at a field-specific level, where DH work confronts disciplin-
ary habits of mind.”13 The “big tent” has been a longstanding metaphor
in digital humanities circles.14 It is a reassuringly irenic image. It may
recall:
By living streams among the trees of life,

Pavillions numberless, and sudden reared,
Celestial tabernacles[.]15
What follows in Paradise Lost, of course, is a war in Heaven. It is as well to

acknowledge that a title like Digital Milton might also presage a drawing
of battle lines, recalling William Kolbrener’s figuration of Miltonists as
“warring angels.”16 Should we fear that Miltonists have been seduced,
and, the more to increase your wonder, with an Apple?17 Our contention
is that Miltonists’ “disciplinary habits of mind” (including philological
habits) are too important to leave out of conversations about digital schol-
arship or distant reading.
“Distant reading” is the term under which quantitative and computa-
tional approaches to literary studies have become widely known and widely
argued in the twenty-first century. The term was advanced by Franco
Moretti in a spirit of iconoclasm. Hitherto, he claimed, academic literary
criticism had been essentially “a theological exercise—very solemn treat-
ment of very few texts taken very seriously—whereas what we really need
is a little pact with the devil: we know how to read texts, now let’s learn
how not to read them.”18 Being of the devil’s party is generally more toler-
ated in Miltonic circles than elsewhere, and we have already stressed that,
in fundamental ways, the contemporary academy is already of the digital
party whether knowingly or not. But DH is more than distant reading.
The “Milton” of our title foregrounds the ongoing serious reading of
selected and prized texts (but not only those), while “Digital” is intended
to denote much more than the algorithmic processing, visualization, and
computational analysis characteristic of “macroanalytic” methods.19 More
than, but also those: it is necessary to take the measure of quantity.
McGann notes of the digital humanities that “both its promoters and
critics regard [it] as a set of replacement protocols for traditional humani-
ties scholarship.”20 Framed as a battle line, the situation may appear—to

both “sides”—as a zero-sum game, a mutually exclusive contest between
two cultures over cultural studies themselves. This reflex framing has roots
in C. P. Snow’s thesis of “the two cultures”—of letters and of science,
bisecting both academic and public life in mid-twentieth-century Britain—
with its frequently invoked observations concerning the mutual failures of
communication and recognition between the two domains.21 Recent
scholarship has helped to clarify that such a division between literature and
science was no part of Milton’s intellectual formation, while also valuably
complicating its application to his period altogether.22 Nevertheless, the
present-day stakes for disciplinary formations and future philologies are
high. While we lack space to unpack these issues here with the fullness that
they deserve, we wish to underline two specific and related problems
raised by critical voices internal and external to digital literary studies, one
regarding close reading, and one regarding the term “distant reading.”
Close reading: we moved quickly past Moretti’s “let’s learn how not to
read” in part because a vocational commitment to teaching those who wish
to be, but are not yet, among the “we” who “know how to read texts”
resiles from the idea. But if one is doing both, the polarity evaporates, or
else becomes newly productive. Anupam Basu’s accomplished performance
of “not reading” within this volume can facilitate closer navigations of the
reading space (in the sense of either the entire catalogue or the individual
formatted page) of early English books. Thinking with digital media and
tools will help us read Milton—or at worst drive us back to the stacks. But
this very point has also been staged as a critique: that digital humanities
accentuates a narrow canon because of the resources required to mount
major digital projects. In a 2012 survey of British DH centers, Andrew
Prescott identified preponderant engagement with “standard cultural
icons,” among whom the author of Eikonoklastes (1649)—an attempted
justification for executing Charles I—would presumably be numbered.23
This is a structural critique, based not simply on digital reflections of “tradi-
tional” curricula (which would include traditions of feminist, postcolonial,
and other kinds of critique), but also on the way in which the unevenness of
digitization risks accentuating or creating monoglot and Anglocentric
archives. Power hierarchies and differential access transect this field in ways
that threaten to reproduce and accelerate global and institutional forms of
political, economic, and cultural oppression or inequity.24 This issue comes
particularly to the fore in Islam Issa’s study of digital Milton in the Middle
East, and is further highlighted in Angelica Duran’s epilogue.
“Distant reading”: with Basu we reject “an artificial opposition between

‘distant’ and ‘close’ readings,” hyped in the academic and popular press
alike, in the awareness that these artificially opposed terms denote distinct
functions, whose separate intellectual and disciplinary integrity the critical
imagination is stimulated to bridge. Johanna Drucker helpfully clarifies
what “distant reading” typically designates within digital literary study and
argues that the expression is a misnomer:
Distant reading is the computational processing of textual information in

digital form. It relies on automated procedures whose design involves stra-
tegic human decisions about what to search for, count, match, analyze, and
then represent as outcomes in numeric or visual form….Processing is not
reading. It is literal, automatic, and repetitive. Reading is ideational, herme-
neutic, generative, and productive. Processing strives for accuracy, reading
for leniency or transformation. No text-analysis program weeps when it
reads the passages in Felix Salten’s Bambi in which Bambi’s mother dies.25
One would have to have a core of silicon to process the death of Little Nell
without laughing. As the chapters by David Ainsworth, Olin Bjork and
John Rumrich, Issa, and Cordelia Zukerman exemplify, this collection is
specially charged with concern for the mechanisms whereby the digital can
engender ideational, hermeneutic, generative, and productive encounters
with Milton. Even where they leverage algorithmic criticism or data visu-
alization, the stakes ultimately lie in those encounters.
The close/“distant” false dichotomy is partly a symptom of the wide-
spread treatment of Moretti and the Stanford Literary Lab, one of the
highest-profile practitioners and best-funded centers, as normative or even
representative of the digital humanities. It is a limitation of the first chap-
ter of Tom Eyers’ stimulating Speculative Formalism.26 Drucker’s history
of scholarly, poetic, and artistic practice, including the theoretical and
experimental work that, along with McGann and Bethany Nowviskie, she
pursued under the rubric of “speculative computing,” could productively
complement and complicate Eyers’ narrow critique of DH.27 An ethos of
speculative computing and a version of speculative formalism may in prac-
tice prove to be allies against any “new positivism.” David Currell’s chap-
ter on the Miltonic verse line proposes a confluence of critical formalism
and digital formats, while Basu’s algorithmic processing of the EEBO-
TCP explores how form, information, and format might be computed
through big data.
As Zukerman’s chapter relates, the desire to help human readers fully

enjoy the cognitive and affective richness of Milton’s poetry actuated the
editorial and design philosophies of The John Milton Reading Room, which
privileges accessibility while simultaneously hailing students as scholars-in-
training. The adaptive and accretive potential of digital editions, as well as
their ability to incorporate and mediate facsimiles, features of original for-
mat, or old spellings, can also begin to address Blair Worden’s lament that
“embalming” Milton “in modern editions, often volumes of high and
invaluable scholarship, distances them, through no fault of the editors, from
the ephemeral context of debate and publication to which much of their
writing originally belonged.”28 Worden’s phrasing deliberately inverts cus-
tomary temporal valences: for him, it is the “modern” that is associated
with taxidermy or the tomb, cut off from the lively ephemerality of history.
However, a modern “multimodal social edition” as conceived by Bjork and
Rumrich elevates speech, debate, comment, and community into important
textual critical principles—principles that also lie at the heart of Ainsworth’s
Edifice Project. Modern technology may be the means to new life.
The subjunctive of the previous sentence, however, aims to temper fac-
ile triumphalism. For a start, if (as Milton claimed) books are not entirely
dead things, hyperlinks frequently are.29 The meaning of “life” needs
examination. Whitney Anne Trettien invokes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818)—a literary meditation on life and technology featuring a crucial
scene of Miltonic reading—in a recent study of Areopagitica and the ques-
tions of textual life and death that it poses.30 Trettien’s analysis of online
print-on-demand (POD) books uses Areopagitica as a case study for the
“undead” products of this recent publishing phenomenon, whereby (per-
haps unreliably) scanned or otherwise digitized editions of uncopyrighted
material are printed on spec when a customer places an online order. The
virtual transaction brings material being to such artifacts as “Edward
Arber, English Reprints Jhon Milton Areopagitica (BiblioLife, 2011).”
One should say brings material being back, as this book is the materializa-
tion of the virtualization of an earlier material text: a volume in a
nineteenth-century popular reprint series with its own peculiar typograph-
ical ideology. Jhon Milton Areopagitica is therefore a digitally mediated
“re-reprint” (albeit with a newly generated and garbled title). Trettien
likens these products to Frankenstein’s monster and to zombies—soulless
reanimations rolling off printers with uncanny mechanistic momentum. In
view of the acronym, one could invoke another horror touchstone,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), and imagine these publications as
“POD people” threatening to repopulate the local library. Whether or not

one agrees that the “evident artificiality of POD reprints invites a produc-
tive skepticism of textual editing,” it is surely essential to follow Trettien
in moving beyond disdain to evaluate critically “the strange novelty and
print/digital hybridity of Milton’s POD monsters” and “welcome them as
an opportunity to foreground the mediated nature of all historical texts—
indeed, of the notion of ‘textuality’ itself.”31 This imperative animates the
present book.
Histories of Digital Milton

The historicist instinct that Trubowitz sees embedded in modern Milton
studies might in and of itself offer some welcome amelioration of “the
digital community’s increasingly attenuated historical sense.”32 Some
chapters in this book (notably those by Basu, Bjork and Rumich, Currell,
Duran, Randa El Khatib and Currell, Peter C. Herman, and Issa) shuttle
between the digital present and Milton’s historical context in order to
rethink genealogies of reading, composition, publication, format, or geog-
raphy. Several more (notably those by Ainsworth, Bjork and Rumich,
Hugh Macrae Richmond, and Zukerman) include a complementary kind
of historical purview, giving an account of the development of a specific
digital Milton project within its intellectual and institutional context. In
aggregate, they begin to compose a picture of digital Milton studies as an
evolving field, of which some other major strands and precursors may be
conveniently considered here.
The electronic encoding of Miltonic texts was inaugurated by the late
Joseph Raben of Queens College, CUNY, who was also founding editor
of the journal Computers and the Humanities in 1966. As noted by Currell
in the final section of Chap. 4, Raben’s digitization work underpinned a
computational analysis of Milton’s influence on Percy Bysshe Shelley and
remains the basis of the Project Gutenberg text of Paradise Lost.33
On the other side of the Atlantic, computational approaches to Milton
were pioneered by Thomas N. Corns in his doctoral dissertation during the
1970s, and informed his books The Development of Milton’s Prose Style and
Milton’s Language.34 Corns was concerned primarily with “historical stylis-
tics,” the comparative study of Milton’s prose or poetic style in relation to
that of other writers of the period.35 His findings on Milton’s style have criti-
cal implications, such as suggesting a change in Milton’s mood and outlook
at certain key moments—for example, after Charles I’s execution in 1649,
which validated Milton’s role as statesman. Corns also makes pragmatic

assertions: that much of Milton’s prose style resembles that of his contem-
poraries. But most importantly, such research demonstrated that there is no
longer an excuse for rash impressionism about phraseology or word usage.
Corns was additionally part of the team, also comprising Gordon
Campbell, John Hale, and Fiona Tweedie, that conducted the highest-
profile computational stylometric study of Milton to date, an investigation
of the provenance and authorship of the De Doctrina Christiana manu-
script. Stylometric comparison against other Latin texts by Milton helped
illuminate its Miltonic character and settle the authorship controversy in
favor of a Miltonic provenance, while also suggesting “that the notion of
‘authorship’ needs some reconsideration in the context of neo-Latin tech-
nical prose in the early modern period.”36
This result was published in book form on the cusp of the quatercente-
nary of Milton’s birth. That year, 2008, saw several exhibitions and initia-
tives celebrating the poet’s life and works. The varying degrees to which
these have left online traces perhaps reflects a moment within, rather than
after, the decisive turn—immensely enriching for visual culture and art
scholarship—on the part of galleries and museums towards open-access
digitization and multimedia supplementation of collections and exhibi-
tions. Digitized materials made available as part of the Morgan Library’s
exhibition “John Milton’s Paradise Lost,” which ran from October 2008
to January 2009, include high-resolution scans of the 33 folio pages of the
Morgan’s manuscript of Book 1 that can be consulted on the Library’s
website.37 A noteworthy born-digital project that coincided with the qua-
tercentenary is Darkness Visible, a web resource for the study of Paradise
Lost that is the outcome of collaborative work among students at Christ’s
College, Cambridge.38 Thoughtfully designed with both the affordances
of online publication and a student audience in mind, the site includes a
section on “Milton and the Arts,” and a guide to research and quotation
using online materials. Contributor notes in the form of discussions of a
favorite Miltonic passage lend a personal touch to a collegial enterprise.
The quality and accessibility of digitization are among the most impor-
tant issues confronting the humanities. Massive digitization and data-
mining initiatives are taking place, but too often without adequate
scholarly oversight or even input. Aspirant data monopolists such as
Alphabet Inc. (the corporate parent of Google) engage rapaciously in
what has been aptly termed “primitive digital accumulation,” and the
admixture of good and evil contained in the promised fruits, such as
Google Books, would trouble Psyche.39 In this context, independent,

open-source initiatives are to be applauded. Between 2011 and 2014,
John Geraghty scanned and uploaded to the open-access Internet Archive
several early editions of Milton (and others), including two copies of the
1674 Paradise Lost, Richard Bentley’s 1732 edition, and a 1736 edition of
Paulo Rolli’s Paradiso perduto, the first Italian translation of the epic.40
Finally, for more than a quarter century scholars have been able to ben-
efit from a dedicated listserv, “Milton-L,” founded by list owner Kevin
J. T. Creamer “in 1991 with the support of Roy Flannagan and Louis
Schwartz.”41 The transformation wrought by email is so complete that it
can easily escape attention, but the maintenance of the discussion list
archives (2003–present) makes available a unique record of scholarly com-
munication concerning Milton.42 News and announcements from the sep-
tuagenarian Milton Society of America also reach members through the
medium of email, and are posted on the organization’s recently refur-
bished website.43
Digital Milton: Scope and Structure

Digital Milton is divided into three parts. The first, “Textual Remediations,”
concentrates on the theoretical and practical implications of re-editing or
re-presenting Milton’s works in digital media. The second, “Scale, Space,
and Sociality,” engages prominent strands of current digital literary stud-
ies: computation at scale, the geospatial humanities, and network analysis.
The third, “New Audiences, Novel Engagements,” considers the specific
ways in which digital environments affect and facilitate diverse readerships’
initial encounters with Milton in contexts of differential access and his
reputation for difficulty. Several themes cut across all sections: a dialectic
between visualization and close reading, scholarly editing and editorial
theory, multimodal and multimedia affordances, media history, social
media, and pedagogy—particularly the teaching of students encountering
Milton for the first time. While attention to developing and reconceiving
practices of sustained, interpretive close reading is central to many chap-
ters, in Herman’s chapter alone is a fresh reading the principal critical
product. This is unusual for a collection on Milton. We see this atypical
feature as primarily attributable to this collection’s being the first of its
kind, and therefore inviting special attention to contextual second-order
disciplinary issues, as well as to the presentation and explanation of materi-
als and methods.
Cordelia Zukerman opens the volume with a critically and personally

informed account of the most comprehensive and most utilized online
edition of Milton, The John Milton Reading Room. Drawing on interviews
with its editor and developer, Thomas H. Luxon, and the experiences of
those, like herself, who worked on the project, Zukerman contextualizes
the design of the site in terms of the philosophy of interactivity, debates
over modernization, and a citational imperative that aims to produce for
the online edition a similar sense of connectedness to that possessed by a
print edition in a library: as a node in a virtual web of works that expand,
explain, and expound its contents. Outward-directed hyperlinking distin-
guishes the Reading Room from more typically insular online editions,
embodying its optimism regarding the quality, adequacy, and sustainabil-
ity of the web as a scholarly environment. From Andrew Marvell on, few
Miltonists have thanked John Dryden for tagging Milton’s points in
rhyme; every Miltonist owes Luxon a debt immense for tagging them in
markup language.44
Alternative editorial visions have been formed and implemented. In
fact, by itself, “vision” is too limited a word for Olin Bjork and John
Rumrich’s audiotext edition of Paradise Lost, Books 1, 2, and 9. Citing
Milton’s composition of the epic through dictation, the archangel
Michael’s transition at the beginning of Book 12 from presentation to oral
relation, and Adam’s reception from the visual to the aural, Bjork and
Rumich make the case for a digitally assisted multimodal pedagogy of the
text, while addressing the theoretical context and the design choices they
made in developing their edition. Ambitious in its marshalling of the affor-
dances of a digital environment, the Paradise Lost Audiotexts project can
be used in several distinct modes, choosing to emphasize format, editorial
annotation, or—in a design choice reflecting theories of the social text and
anticipating the “social” character of Web 2.0—user annotation.
David Currell also considers digital media as a platform for social tex-
tual practices in discussing the remediation of Paradise Lost through
Twitter. His discussion of the line-by-line tweeting of Charles Reid’s
“Milton Bot Flock” follows a wider consideration of Paradise Lost as a
lineated text, divisible into discrete, enumerable verse lines. Foregrounding
lineation goes against the grain of Milton’s prefatory note on “The Verse”
and the normative reception of Paradise Lost through linear reading, but
underpins the way that matter from the epic appears in reference works
including the Oxford English Dictionary and Oxford Dictionary of
Quotations. Contextualizing the compilation of these works in terms of
commonplacing and consultation reading, two textual practices thor-

oughly familiar in Milton’s time, Currell mines their digital editions for an
experiment in visualizing the lines of Paradise Lost that each of these refer-
ence works cites, a technique that might be extended to larger and more
diverse corpora, including social media. Lineation and remediation are
vectors of textual “deformance,” a concept carried through other formal-
ist approaches represented in this volume.
Where Currell thinks form at the level of the verse line, Anupam Basu
thinks form at the largest scale. In the collection’s most computationally
sophisticated contribution, Basu effects the coup of simultaneously “read-
ing” two billion words and zero words. His chapter begins with an author-
itative and accessible overview of the digitization of early modern print
texts through Early English Books Online (EEBO, a commercial facsimile
database) and the Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership
(EEBO-TCP, a public text-encoding initiative) and the intellectual issues
associated with working at scale upon such materials. Typical text-analytic
work representative of the present computational turn in literary studies
treats texts as idealized linguistic artifacts—a disciplinary inheritance from
computational linguistics that analyzes text as a stream of language or
“bag of words.” Familiar computational work addressing the archives of
print culture as linguistic corpora therefore jettisons a great deal of
information, including information about format. What traction, asks

Basu, can such methods have upon form, the root of “information” and of
“format”? Alert to an under-theorization of form in digital work, Basu
introduces both recent and foundational formalist work in literary studies
that stresses form as the enabling condition of literature—constraint as
affordance—preparatory to an algorithmic resituating of selected Miltonic
texts within the multidimensional space of EEBO as viewed through the
lens of format.
By addressing Paradise Lost in light of the geospatial turn in the human-
ities, Randa El Khatib and David Currell build on important critical work
on Milton and geography by such scholars as Michael Murrin, Morgan
Ng, and Elizabeth Sauer. This “building” is literal, taking the form of an
interactive online map that tracks the place names in Paradise Lost. This
project was designed and developed not simply to geolocate Milton’s myr-
iad references, but also to impinge on important interpretive issues by
organizing the visualization in terms of the epic’s layered geographical
imaginary, spanning biblical, classical, and contemporaneous temporali-
ties. The map additionally allows the plotting of the epic in terms of its
spatial “moralization”: by examining each geographical reference in its

poetic context and assigning to it a positive, negative, or neutral moral
valence, this tool aims to provoke fresh consideration of Milton’s making
of the world as a space of moral contestation.
While El Khatib and Currell move from close reading to visualization,
Peter C. Herman’s study of early modern relations of indebtedness uses
visualization as a spark for novel readings. Although early modern writers
on debt showered usury in conventional opprobrium, Herman reads debt
as the creation of social networks, ramified in space and persisting through
time. Debt is a circulation that—conditional upon repayment—can con-
stitute a virtuous circle. This social function of debt remains out of mind,
however, so long as the respective networks remain out of sight. By recon-
structing and visualizing specific debt networks in which Milton’s father
was embedded, Herman establishes within the poet’s domestic experience
a form of economic relation influentially represented across early modern
literature. Further application of these visualizations facilitates Herman’s
reading of Shylock’s bond in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice as a
creditable but thwarted effort to connect networks. In Paradise Lost, by
contrast, the unrepayable debt felt by Satan—“still paying, still to owe”
(4.53)—is symptomatic of God as the kind of usurer who gave money-
lending a bad name. In characteristically provocative fashion, Herman
redeems the idea of debt as a potential social good in Shakespeare, but he
makes Milton’s God irredeemable.
Islam Issa analyzes Milton’s relationship to “online revolution” in con-
temporary Middle East and North Africa (MENA). This expression evokes
the expanding participation in digital media in the context of revolution-
ary social movements across the MENA region since 2011. Issa proposes
the relevance of Milton’s poetry and thought to these conditions of politi-
cal and religious upheaval, and investigates both digital and print materials
and practices through which English- and Arabic-reading students are
able to access Milton. Issa’s study of the Arab book market, the dissemina-
tion of Arabic translations of Paradise Lost, online forums to which Arab
students post, and the evidence of predictive text in Google’s search
engine yields the striking conclusion that Paradise Lost is, for Arabic read-
ers, “becoming, materially, a de facto online text,” whose principal format
is not the codex but the PDF. While a rise in Internet penetration and
English proficiency promises to create many new readers of Milton, ten-
sions between Miltonic texts and state censorship apparatus, and problem-
atic secondary resources for Arabic readers and students in some MENA
countries, constrain a potentially revolutionary Miltonic readership.
David Ainsworth offers an engaging narrative of the pedagogical prin-

ciples underpinning, and the educational experiences that have grown out
of, his Edifice Project. This long-term teaching endeavor, which takes its
name from Milton’s Of Education, seeks to address the widely felt chal-
lenge of introducing undergraduate readers inexperienced in Renaissance
literature to Paradise Lost. By assembling a repository of successful student
work, Ainsworth has crafted a resource within which students can conduct
research framed in terms of dialogue among peers. One of the most grati-
fying outcomes of this program has been the enrichment of face-to-face
engagement in the classroom, including through visits from former
student-scholars whose work supports the Edifice. Ainsworth’s discovery
of a productive dialectic between presence and virtuality—the fact that a
website and invitation to engage in digital scholarship, far from substitut-
ing for bricks-and-mortar classroom learning, deeply enhance it—undoes
any simplistic traditional/digital division in the field of pedagogy.
Hugh Macrae Richmond begins his chapter with a glance back at six
decades of academic engagement with Milton that fed into the creation of
the collaborative website Milton Revealed. It is a multimodal and multi-
media revelation: theatre, music, dance, painting, video games, fiction,
criticism, audio, visual, audio-visual, and in the case of some Comus-
inspired material, audio-visual-historical-pastoral. The place of A Masque
Presented at Ludlow Castle and especially its enchanter protagonist in
popular culture is one of the notable revelations of Richmond’s curatorial
labors. From this material diversity emerges a suggestive homology among
three dyads: the user of Milton Revealed and the editorial work that condi-
tions their independent navigation of the site, the player of The Talos
Principle and the “Milton” within its game-world that directs the player’s
exploration, and finally the reader of Paradise Lost and the poetics of
choice through which the poet Milton brings a literary readership to
engage the new scientific culture of early modernity.
Angelica Duran begins her epilogue, likewise reflective of a career-long
engagement with Milton scholarship across multiple media and modes,
with a literary experience that virtually conjoined the aural and visual: the
oral reading by the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry awardee Tyehimba Jess
of his sonnet “When I consider how my light is spent,” at the 2017 Annual
Dinner and Meeting of the Milton Society of America, a poem whose
intertexts included both Milton’s sonnet of the same title and footage of
racially charged police brutality of Frankie Taylor published online. This
moment affords a just illustration of how the digital age restages Miltonic
questions about the afterlives of texts and the present lives of people,
including the question of to whom the wish for present life—at this hour,
in these media—is extended.
Notes
1. Julia Thompson Klein, Interdisciplining Digital Humanities: Boundary
Work in an Emerging Field (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2015), 2.
2. John Milton, Areopagitica (1644), in The Complete Prose Works of John
Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1953–82), 2: 515.
3. Milton, Areopagitica, in Complete Prose Works, 2: 492.
4. Exceptions include Laura Lunger Knoppers and Gregory M. Colón
Semenza, eds., Milton in Popular Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2006), containing Bruno Lessard, “The Environment, the Body, and the
Digital Fallen Angel in Simon Biggs’s Pandaemonium,” 213–24, and
Thomas H. Luxon, “Milton and the Web,” 225–36; and Peter C. Herman,
ed., Approaches to Teaching Milton’s Paradise Lost, 2nd ed. (New York:
Modern Language Association, 2012), containing Peter C. Herman,
“Audiovisual and Online Aids,” 9–11, and Thomas H. Luxon, “The John
Milton Reading Room: Teaching Paradise Lost with an Online Edition,”
189–91.
5. For an exception, see David L. Hoover’s chapter in the 2016 Debates in the
Digital Humanities, which rebuts the framing and example (concerning
Areopagitica) used by Stanley Fish in a New York Times piece that endeav-
ored to cloister Milton from digital literary studies. David L. Hoover,
“Argument, Evidence, and the Limits of Digital Literary Studies,” in
Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Lauren F. Klein and Matthew
K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016) <dhdebates.
gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/71>. Accessed 15 December 2017.
6. See, for example, Alan Galey and Ray Siemens, eds., “Reinventing Digital
Shakespeare,” spec. issue of Shakespeare 4, no. 3 (2008); Hugh Craig and
Arthur F. Kinney, eds., Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of
Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Thomas
Dipiero and Devoney Looser, eds., “The Digital Turn,” spec. issue of
Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 13, no. 4 (2013); Christie Carson
and Peter Kirwan, eds., Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining
Scholarship and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014);
Brett D. Hirsch and Hugh Craig, eds. “Digital Shakespeares,” spec. issue
of The Shakespearean International Yearbook 14 (2014); Laura Estill,
Diane K. Jakacki, and Michael Ullyot, eds., Early Modern Studies after the
Digital Turn (Toronto: Iter Press, 2016); Hugh Craig and Brett Greatley-
Hirsch, eds., Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama: Beyond Authorship
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); and a projected special
issue of the journal Humanities on “Shakespeare and Digital Humanities.”
7. Rachel Trubowitz, “Introduction,” in Milton and the Politics of
Periodization, ed. Rachel Trubowitz, spec. issue of MLQ 78, no. 3 (2017):
291–99 (291).
8. Trubowitz, “Introduction,” 291.
9. Trubowitz, “Introduction,” 292. See also in this connection Tom Eyers’
provocative but reductive positing of digital humanities (dubbed “The
New Positivism”) and Greenblattian New Historicism as secret intellectual
bedfellows, at least in their model of history, against both of which he
stages a return to formalism and deconstruction in Speculative Formalism:
Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 2017), 42–48.
10. Blaine Greteman, “Milton and the Early Modern Social Network: The Case
of the Epitaphium Damonis,” Milton Quarterly 49, no. 2 (2015): 79–95;
Whitney Anne Trettien, “A Deep History of Electronic Textuality: The Case
of English Reprints Jhon Milton Areopagitica,” Digital Humanities Quarterly
7, no. 1 (2013), <digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000150/000150.
html>. Accessed 17 November 2017; Christopher Warren et al., Six Degrees
of Francis Bacon (2017), Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, <sixde-
greesoffrancisbacon.com>. Accessed 1 December 2017. See also Daniel
Shore, Cyberformalism: Histories of Linguistic Forms in the Digital Archive
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), which appeared as the
current collection entered production.
11. Jerome McGann, A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the
Age of Digital Reproduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2014), 4.
12. Jerome McGann, “Philology in a New Key,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 2
(2013): 327–46.
13. “Digital Humanities: The Expanded Field,” in Debates in the Digital
Humanities, ed. Lauren F. Klein and Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2016) <dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/2>.
Accessed 15 December 2017.
14. In a keynote lecture reprinted as the preface to a major DH anthology, Ray
Siemens elaborates upon the kinds of recurrent conversations within and
about the DH community’s “Big Tent”: “Here, we talk about remediating
old worlds and extant material artifacts, we talk about working with new
ones that are created with the technologies we use, and we talk about
embracing enlarging scope, privileging diversity within that embrace and
privileging public outreach and engagement. Here we talk also about
founding inclusive networks, bringing us together, encouraging us to col-

laborate, building method-centered communities of many kinds, and orga-
nizing at various levels to achieve common goals” (“Preface: Communities
of Practice, the Methodological Commons, and Digital Self-Determination
in the Humanities,” in Doing Digital Humanities: Practice, Training,
Research, edited by Constance Crompton, Richard J. Lane, and Ray
Siemens [London: Routledge, 2016], xxi-xxxiii [xxii–xxiii]).
15. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alistair Fowler, 2nd ed. (Harlow, UK:
Longman, 1997), 5.652–54. Quotations of Paradise Lost in this chapter
are from this edition.
16. William Kolbrener, Milton’s Warring Angels: A Study of Critical
Engagements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
17. We share culpability for this pun with Ernest B. Gilman, who activated it as
early as the 1990s, in an engaging early discussion of Milton and hypertext:
“Nor is my title completely frivolous, as I hope to show in the end when I
give in to the temptation of the Apple” (Ernest B. Gilman, “Milton and
the Mac: ‘Inwrought with figures dim,’” in So Rich a Tapestry: The Sister
Arts and Cultural Studies, ed. Ann Hurley and Kate Greenspan (Lewisburg,
PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995), 336–55 (336).
18. Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review, n.s.
1 (2000): 54–68 (57). On Moretti’s rhetoric, see Matthew Wickman,
“Theology Still?” PMLA 132, no. 3 (2017): 674–80.
19. On distant reading and macroanalysis, see Franco Moretti, Distant Reading
(London: Verso, 2014); Matthew L. Jockers, Macroanalysis: Digital
Methods and Literary History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013);
and the pamphlet publications of the Stanford Literary Laboratory, avail-
able at <litlab.stanford.edu/pamphlets>. Accessed 1 January 2018.
20. McGann, New Republic, 4. The passage continues helpfully: “But the work
of the humanist scholar has not changed with the advent of digital devices.
It is still to preserve, to monitor, to investigate, and to augment our cul-
tural life and inheritance. That simple truth is why, as we seek to exploit
electronic environments, we want to think about them in traditional philo-
logical terms” (4).
21. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures: and A Second Look (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1964). This text includes Snow’s 1959 Rede Lecture
(first published in the same year) as well as his reflections and clarifications
based on its reception. Snow first used the title for a 1956 New Statesman
essay.
22. As Rachel Trubowitz puts it towards the conclusion of her study of Milton’s
and Isaac Newton’s conception of both poetry and mathematics as intel-
lectual means towards spiritual insight, “The clean break between science
and poetry that we date to this historically specific moment thus might not
be as unsullied as we have been accustomed to believe. This is not a negli-

gible issue since our still-very-sturdy sense of this clean break makes any
attempt to compare Milton and Newton seem to be impossible” (“Reading
Milton and Newton in the Radical Reformation: Poetry, Mathematics, and
Religion.” ELH 84, no. 1 [2017]: 33–62 [55]). For Milton’s intellectual
and poetic involvement in the scientific zeitgeist, see also Joanna Picciotto,
Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2010); Dennis Danielson, Paradise Lost and the
Cosmological Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014);
Claire Preston, The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century
England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 18; and the closing sec-
tion of Hugh Macrae Richmond’s Chap. 10. Milton’s own projected
reformed course of studies, set out in his Of Education (1644), militated
against over-specialization, albeit rhetoric and poetry crowned a curricu-
lum that incorporated “Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, and Geography
with a generall compact of Physicks,” as well as “the instrumental science
of Trigonometry” and exposure to topics in engineering and natural history
at an earlier stage (Complete Prose Works, 2: 391–92).
23. See Klein, Interdisciplining, 31.
24. David Golumbia, “Death of a Discipline,” differences: A Journal of Feminist
Cultural Studies 25, no. 1 (2014): 156–76.
25. Johanna Drucker, “Why Distant Reading Isn’t,” PMLA 132, no. 3 (2017):
628–35 (629–30).
26. Eyers, Speculative Formalism, 42–48.
27. See Johanna Drucker, SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative
Computing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
28. Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John
Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007), 1.
29. McGann admonishes: “Nor does anyone have a good idea about how
online scholarly works will be sustained beyond a twenty-year horizon.
And while that may be an entrepreneur’s horizon, it is not a scholar’s. We
don’t have the necessary knowledge” (New Republic, 27). We take some
heart from the fact that, as Zukerman notes in Chap. 2, The John Milton
Reading Room, begun in 1996, has passed that horizon. Moreover, as so
often in considering the new intertwinings of print and digital, intimations
of mortality cut both ways. McGann dryly notes in his acknowledgments
that an early version of the very chapter that addresses the sustainability of
work in digital environments, and of the environments themselves, is “still
available freely online” while “the print-on-demand version became inac-
cessible when Rice University Press went out of business” (232).
30. Trettien, “Deep History,” ¶1, 14.
31. Trettien, “Deep History,” ¶26, 28.

32. McGann, New Republic, 14.
33. See Joseph Raben, “A Computer-Aided Study of Literary Influence:
Milton to Shelley,” in Literary Data Processing Conference Proceedings, ed.
Jess B. Bessinger, Jr., Stephen M. Parrish, and Harry F. Arader (New York:
Modern Language Association, 1964), 230–74.
34. Thomas N. Corns, The Development of Milton’s Prose Style (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1982); and Milton’s Language (Oxford: Blackwell,
1990).
35. Corns, Milton’s Prose Style, xi.
36. Gordon Campbell, Thomas N. Corns, John K. Hale, and Fiona J. Tweedie,
Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007), 159.
37. “John Milton’s Paradise Lost” (2008), The Morgan Library and
Museum, <themorgan.org/collection/John-Miltons-Paradise-Lost>.
38. Katharine Fletcher, et al., eds., Darkness Visible, Christ’s College,
Cambridge University (2008–), <darknessvisible.christs.cam.ac.uk/index.
html>. Accessed 1 December 2017.
39. Cf. Milton, Areopagitica, in Complete Prose Works 2: 514. For a salutary
discussion of some of these issues that includes an illuminating case study of
“bibliodiversity” within library holdings, erased through their replacement
by unitary digital scans, see Andrew Stauffer, “My Old Sweethearts: On
Digitization and the Future of the Print Record,” in Debates in the Digital
Humanities, ed. Lauren F. Klein and Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2016) <dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/
text/70>. Accessed 15 December 2017. On Google Books and the Google
Books Settlement, see McGann, New Republic, 133–34. On Google’s
influence upon knowledge production, see, indicatively, Brody Mullins and
Jack Nicas, “Paying Professors: Inside Google’s Academic Influence
Campaign,” The Wall Street Journal, 14 July 2017; and Jonathan Taplin,
“Google’s Disturbing Influence over Think Tanks,” The New York Times,
30 August 2017. For the notion of “primitive digital accumulation,” see
Brian A. Brown, “Primitive Digital Accumulation: Privacy, Social Networks,
and Biopolitical Exploitation,” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics,
Culture, and Society 25, no. 3 (2013): 385–403.
40. Geraghty’s 32 scanned documents are most conveniently accessed via an
advanced search on the string “John Geraghty” within the “creator” field
on the Internet Archive <archive.org>. Accessed 1 December 2017.
41. Kevin J. T. Creamer, “About,” John Milton: The Milton-L Home Page
(2007–) <johnmilton.org/about>. Accessed 1 December 2017. The
home page migrated to its present site from The Milton-L Home Page
(1991–2009) <facultystaff.richmond.edu/~creamer/milton>, at which
earlier posts and links (not all functional) remain available (accessed 1
December 2017).
42. “The Milton-L Archives” (2003–), University of Richmond, <lists.rich-
mond.edu/pipermail/milton-l>. Accessed 1 December 2017.
43. The Milton Society of America (2018), CUNY Academic Commons, <mil-
tonsociety.commons.gc.cuny.edu>. Accessed 1 January 2018.
44. Compare Marvell’s “On Paradise Lost,” printed in the second edition of
Milton’s poem: “While the town-Bayes writes all the while and spells, /
And like a pack-horse tires without his bells: / Their fancies like our bushy-
points appear, / The poets tag them, we for fashion wear” (ll. 47–50,
quoted from Paradise Lost, ed. Fowler, 54). “Bayes” is an allusive hit at the
laureate Dryden, whose unperformed operatic adaptation of Paradise Lost
used rhyming couplets.
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PART I
Textual Remediations
CHAPTER 2
The John Milton Reading Room

and the Future of Digital Pedagogy
Cordelia Zukerman
In 1996, years before the term “digital humanities” had any currency,
Thomas H. Luxon, a professor at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire,
had an idea for a new teaching edition of Paradise Lost.1 Since his students
often felt “hopelessly unlearned” in the face of John Milton’s extensive
and varied textual allusions, Luxon thought of teaching his Milton course
in the campus library, where he could send student runners to retrieve
books from the stacks when the need arose during class discussion.2 As he
considered this idea, he realized he could achieve the same effect by using
virtual runners in virtual stacks: by developing an online edition of Paradise
Lost containing hyperlinks and annotations that would allow students to
engage productively with Milton’s allusions. Luxon soon began construct-
ing a website, which he named The John Milton Reading Room, a name
that suggests a space in which people come together to find and read
books. Now past its 20th year, the Milton Reading Room, which aims to
put all of Milton’s works online, has existed for almost as long as the mod-
ern Internet itself—and, like the Internet, has developed over time. As one
of the most comprehensive digital editions of an early modern author’s
C. Zukerman (*)
© The Author(s) 2018 27

D. Currell, I. Issa (eds.), Digital Milton,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90478-8_2
28 C. ZUKERMAN
works and the only born-digital edition of Milton’s works, the Milton
Reading Room can show us how much Milton studies has to gain by
embracing the digital age.
Two important factors made it possible to create the Milton Reading
Room as a born-digital edition. First, Luxon believed that the problem he
sought to answer—how to make Milton’s allusions accessible for stu-
dents—could be solved more effectively through digital tools than any
other available resources. Second, Luxon’s institution, Dartmouth
College, was one of the premier university campuses for academic comput-
ing.3 Luxon was therefore in a privileged—and, in 1996, relatively rare—
position not only to imagine the possibilities for a digital edition of Milton,
but also to realize them. Luxon partnered with Sarah Horton, an instruc-
tional designer at Dartmouth’s Department of Academic Computing, to
design the site; since then, he has worked regularly with collaborators from
the Dartmouth computing community to update it.4 From its inception,
the Milton Reading Room’s editorial apparatus has aimed to show, rather
than tell. As Luxon has written, “Instead of snowing students with refer-
ences to things they have never read, the Milton Reading Room’s annota-
tions take them to the relevant texts and allow them to read enough to
begin drawing conclusions and forging research plans.”5 This process of
pointing students to resources rather than telling them what they are sup-
posed to find there is, Luxon asserts, the immense benefit of an online
edition of a text.6 The Milton Reading Room uses its digital platform to
encourage readers to think of themselves not as passive receivers of infor-
mation, but as active users of the site and its many research tools and
hyperlinks—as “Authors to themselves in all / Both what they judge and
what they choose” (Paradise Lost 3.122–23).7 In this way, the site encour-
ages readers at all levels to participate productively in Milton scholarship.
In recent years, scholarly conversations about digital editing have often
centered on the changing role of the reader in the new digital environ-
ment. A key feature of born-digital texts, as Patrick Sahle articulates, is
that they “can not be printed without a loss of information and/or func-
tionality.”8 This shift from the “two-dimensional space of the ‘page’” to a
more complex series of digital paths creates the possibility for a non-linear
reading experience.9 Some scholars believe that digital formats therefore
“impel[] new reading habits.”10 Others go so far as to claim that “digital
media” may “initiate a new kind of literacy.”11 This change happens, as
Daniel Apollon, Claire Bélisle, and Philippe Régnier assert, because digital
THE JOHN MILTON READING ROOM 29
texts “position[]…readers as users who are organizing their paths in the

texts and thus increasingly becoming actors of their reading itinerary.”12
The Milton Reading Room came about because Luxon wanted a more
dynamic interaction between reader and text, in which the reader could
move—with a single click—from Milton’s works to the works Milton
alludes to, and back and forth, in an individualized path of discovery. In
emphasizing the reader’s agency and process, the Milton Reading Room
reveals how born-digital editions reshape not only the reading experience,
but also the relationship between pedagogy and scholarship. By changing
how students think about their agency as scholars in training, the Milton
Reading Room invites them to direct their own experience in ways that
mimic and even replace the guiding role of editors and instructors.13
Central to the Milton Reading Room’s philosophy is that students at all
levels can pursue research that actively contributes to professional schol-
arly conversations. This is not always an expectation among editors of
Milton’s works, who tend to distinguish between different kinds of read-
ing audiences. These audiences largely fall into two categories: specialists,
understood to be advanced readers engaged in scholarly research, and
generalists, understood to be readers engaged in pleasure reading, study,
or elementary research. Scholars and editors distinguish between these
audiences because Milton’s works are challenging not only in their den-
sity, complexity, and learnedness, but also because of changes in the
English language that make early modern spelling, punctuation, capital-
ization, and use of italics potentially alienating to readers unfamiliar with
such forms.
Some editors insist that the alienation twenty-first-century readers feel
when encountering early modern orthographical forms reduces their
enjoyment or understanding of Milton’s works. John Creaser, for exam-
ple, insists on the importance of a strong editorial hand to make choices
that, he believes, allow “the general student of literature” to read and
understand the text without unnecessary complications.14 In his essay on
editing Lycidas, Creaser writes that “experienced editors know far more
about their texts than do almost all their readers. It is their duty, as far as
possible, to present readers with what is meaningful rather than distract
with what is meaningless.”15 Creaser’s emphasis on the editor as gate-
keeper, identifying signal and noise, aims to reduce the amount of poten-
tially unnecessary work the reader puts into the reading experience.
30 C. ZUKERMAN
Others, however, see early modern orthographical forms as an intrinsic

part of the content of Milton’s works. Unlike Shakespeare’s works, which
exist in multiple, often inconsistent editions, Milton’s are generally consis-
tent. Many editors therefore believe that readers lose texture and some-
times substance if they cannot engage with the text in its original forms.
Some even see value in the readerly alienation an unmodernized text
inspires: Roy Flannagan, for example, argues that it is important to retain
Milton’s work in its original forms “in order to emphasize its difference
and distance from our own usage.”16 Others believe that alienation is a
small price to pay for the benefit of exercising critical analysis. On editing
De Doctrina Christiana, John Hale writes of his decision to place different
early versions of the manuscript side by side: “Let readers see, for example,
where the rhetorical punctuation has misdivided the sense or where a mis-
take might be a mishearing, by an amanuensis.”17 Similarly, Stephen
Dobranski argues that “Modern readers of Milton should…[be able to]
peruse the evidence that modernising editors often silently consult.
Specialist readers in particular, rather than ceding their authority to an edi-
tor, can make new discoveries by determining for themselves whether a
specific spelling, case change or punctuation appears meaningful.”18
Dobranski implies that specialists have more incentive to engage with the
original text because they are the types of readers who want to exercise
critical judgment. He also implies that different readers want different
things from a text, depending on the type and extent of analytic work they
expect to put into the reading experience.
Similar debates shape conversations about teaching Milton, often cen-
tering on whether to consider students specialists in training or general
readers. In the second edition of the Modern Language Association’s
Approaches to Teaching Milton’s Paradise Lost (2012), Peter Herman dem-
onstrates that modernization is a central issue for instructors deciding on
a teaching text, and that a “survey made available by the MLA to instruc-
tors likely to teach Milton showed that” there is no clear consensus on the
best new teaching edition of Milton.19 He adds that “the favorite remains
Complete Poems and Major Prose, edited by Merritt Y. Hughes, first pub-
lished in 1957, and now available in a reprint edition published by
Hackett.”20 That so many instructors prefer the Hughes edition, despite
its significantly outdated scholarship, suggests that a good teaching edi-
tion has the potential to have “A gentle wafting to immortal Life”
(Paradise Lost 12.435) if it can be updated usefully. As Herman lists and
describes the editions of Milton’s works available to instructors, he notes,
among other things, each edition’s level and type of modernization; the
quality, content, and ease of reading footnotes; the selection of texts
within collected editions; and the price of each edition. Each text emerges
as having certain benefits and certain drawbacks. It would seem that an
ideal teaching text of Milton’s works would invite those who wanted to
engage in specialized study to do so, while offering resources to those who
might feel overwhelmed by the varied challenges posed by the text.
Herman’s overview of available editions contains no such printed edition,
since printed texts cannot easily operate with this kind of duality.
Editors of early modern works have sought in recent years to develop
new methods for presenting duality or multiplicity in scholarly and teach-
ing texts.21 Most acknowledge, however, that doing so in print has its
drawbacks—most often in readability or price. While some use side-by-side
presentation or extensive annotations, these choices can muddle a reading
and teaching text. Dobranski has articulated the challenges of these
approaches by calling for an edition of Milton that points readers to
important moments for critical engagement without overwhelming them:
“If good editing, like a musical accompaniment, ought to enhance with-
out overpowering, to render intelligible without calling attention to itself,
then modern editors must not emend or annotate a text so intrusively that
it becomes distorted or cluttered.”22 Unable to conceive of a print text
that would accomplish these goals, he advocates “exploring new forms of
online publication.”23 Digital editions allow for ambiguity to a far greater
extent than printed texts: with a digital edition, an ambiguous word or
moment can be both/and, rather than either/or.
Indeed, digital editions make it possible to achieve editorial formats
that were only previously possible in theory.24 Experimental digital proj-
ects, such as Bernice W. Kliman’s online Enfolded Hamlet, Jesús Tronch’s
proposed “hypertextual, multilingual” edition of Hamlet, or Marina
Buzzoni’s multiframe visualization of the “two major witnesses” of the
Old Saxon poem Hêliand, enable new options for viewing multiple textual
variants and translations side by side.25 Such projects show how editors are
embracing the opportunities offered by digital formats to allow readers to
engage productively with different kinds of ambiguity. As Terje Hillesund
and Claire Bélisle assert, “The flexibility of digital texts, such as in digital
scholarly editions, also allows users to constantly rearrange text, use mul-
tiple windows and multiple media, bring in external resources, and manip-
ulate the appearances of the text, such as the layout and font properties.”26
This helps readers become active participants in the reading experience,
32 C. ZUKERMAN
calling on their critical judgment. Introducing the volume Digital Critical

Editions, Daniel Apollon, Claire Bélisle, and Philippe Régnier claim that
“a digital online critical edition may introduce a strong notion of transfer
of power from the producer to the user or reader.”27
In some cases, power transfers from editor to reader not just at the
moment of reading, but also at the moment of textual creation—the
actual writing and coding of the digital text. Open-source technology
allows general readers to contribute as collaborators on digital editions,
and a number of projects in recent years have experimented with crowd-
sourcing the editing process through this technology.28 Because of the
nearly limitless possibilities for digital formats, theorists caution those
seeking to create a digital edition to remain true to their conceptual
objectives by following editorial as opposed to technological demands.29
Indeed, some scholars of digital editing have asserted that the “digital
revolution” does not necessarily imply an entirely new way of thinking,
but rather the “introduction of more efficient tools.”30 In some senses,
the most experimental projects—projects that call upon readers’ critical
judgment not only in reading texts but also in creating them—remind us
that there is still an important role for a textual editor.31 It is crucial, in
our excitement about new digital possibilities, not to lose sight of the
value of “editorial judgment.”32
The Milton Reading Room, which significantly predates Dobranski’s
call for a useful digital edition of Milton, as well as most theories of digital
editing, seeks to maintain a balance between activating the reader’s critical
judgment and providing a consistent editorial presence. Luxon controls
the site “from the bottom up,” learning all the necessary coding to edit it
from the back end while also conceiving of larger conceptual issues from
the front end.33 This, he claims, is crucial for the site’s continued develop-
ment: projects for which the conceptual originator does not know how to
code tend to become hopelessly outdated as an early design team moves
on to other projects or grant money runs out.34 While Luxon does not
allow reader-users to access the site’s code, he has created an interactive
community through a public Facebook group, also called “The John
Milton Reading Room,” where he shares information about new research,
new annotations, and other additions to the Milton Reading Room web-
site to the group’s over 200 members, while soliciting feedback on the site
and on his own research. Members of the Facebook group comment on
the Milton Reading Room site, offering corrections to typos and sugges-
tions for new annotations. In this way, reader-users have some editorial
input if they choose, but are not asked to construct the reading text them-
selves. The primary objective of the Milton Reading Room is to help
reader-users discover and pursue avenues for further research, and its
design is compatible with that objective.
In keeping with his philosophy that students should be considered spe-
cialists in training, Luxon uses a light editorial touch when it comes to
modernization: he aligns each text placed on the site with a specific early
modern edition of Milton’s works—spelling, punctuation, and all.35
Creaser has argued that such a choice minimizes the editor’s role and
makes the reading process more difficult for students.36 However, Luxon’s
edition follows the theory—seconded by Dobranski—that students strug-
gle with Milton’s textual allusions far more than they struggle with early
modern spelling and punctuation.37 Therefore, rather than focusing on
modernization and textual variants, Luxon provides an editorial apparatus
that encourages students and scholars alike to read Milton’s works criti-
cally and engage widely with his varied allusions.
In its formatting and annotations, the Milton Reading Room achieves a
textual apparatus that print texts simply cannot. Luxon initially conceived
it as a multipart format in which readers could just as easily read Milton’s
works straight through as they could find and read annotations along the
way. In its early years, the site was designed to have separate frames that
readers could scroll through at their own pace: one frame for Milton’s
works, and one for the annotations. Readers could click on a hyperlink in
Milton’s text, and the annotation frame would move to the corresponding
note. The site has since been redesigned as a single frame in JavaScript to
make it more aesthetically pleasing and more accessible on phones and
tablets, which now make up a significant portion of the user platforms.38
However, the principles remain the same: it is possible either to read
Milton’s text uninterrupted, or to click on any hyperlink to reveal the cor-
responding note in the otherwise empty space to the right of the text.
The Milton Reading Room solves the spelling question through a
design only possible on the Internet: readers can hover the cursor over
words to reveal elongations of abbreviated words such as “fall’n” and
“th’” and modernizations of archaic forms such as “beest,” “dost,” and
“durst” (Paradise Lost 1.84, 15, 84, 17, 49). This design allows Luxon to
retain the early modern orthography, with all its rhythms and resonances,
while also giving contemporary readers the tools to recognize every word.
The text can therefore reach different kinds of readers, ranging from spe-
cialist to beginning student: those who choose to ignore the modernizations
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
CONGESTION OF THE LIVER IN THE
HORSE.
Causes. Beside the general causes above mentioned, may be
specially named, musty, decomposed, and irritant fodders: those
which like green legumes, are easily fermented; and those which
contain stimulating volatile oils or carminative principles. They are
also especially exposed to such causes as severe and prolonged work
under a hot sun, the nervous atony which causes vaso-dilatation in a
hot climate, and such traumatisms as come from falls, kicks, goring,
and blows by shafts, poles and clubs. These especially induce active
congestion. The passive forms come mainly from obstruction in the
lungs, or heart (dilatation, right valvular insufficiency, pericarditis,
hydropericardium, myocarditis, fatty degeneration, endocarditis), or
in the posterior vena cava.
Lesions. The congested liver is enlarged and deeply colored with
blood. The weight of twenty to thirty pounds is often attained. While
the color is of a deep red throughout, there are spots of a still darker
hue indicating the seat of subcapsular or deeper seated hemorrhages.
The color varies according as the congestion is passive or active. In
the former the coloration is deeper in the centre of the acinus
(nutmeg liver) indicating congestion of the hepatic veins, while in the
latter the periphery of the acinus may be most deeply stained
implying congestion of the portal vein. The consistency of the organ
is diminished, and the more acute the attack the greater the friability.
In such cases there is a parboiled appearance indicating granular and
commencing fatty degeneration. Under the microscope the relative
distension of the intralobular, and interlobular veins and the hepatic
capillaries becomes more distinctly marked and the presence of
pigment and fatty granules and the lack of protoplasm and nuclei in
the hepatic cells indicate their progressive changes. When the
peripheral cells are pale from fatty granules the contrast between the
light margin and dark centre of the acinus, makes the mottled or
nutmeg aspect of the liver much more pronounced.
In old standing cases of passive congestion the liver may be the
seat of fibroid degeneration, extending from the capsule inward in
bands or trabeculæ, and giving to the organ a firm resistant character
(sclerosis, cirrhosis).
Symptoms. The symptoms are general and suggestive rather than
pathognomonic. There are dullness, prostration, unsteady walk,
pendent head, with occasional jerking, semi-closed eyes, redness of
the conjunctiva, slight colicy pains, arching of the loins, muscular
tremblings and decubitus on the left side rather than the right. The
more definite symptoms are tenderness on percussion with the
closed fist over the last ribs (the liver) especially on the right side,
increase of the area of hepatic percussion dullness (which may be
rendered valueless by a loaded colon), the presence of a slight icterus
in the conjunctiva and urine, and an increase of the urine secreted
and an excess of the contained urea.
In passive cases however the obstruction to the escape of blood
from the liver prevents the development of icteric symptoms, of
uræmia and of polyuria. In all such cases however there follows a
general congestion of the portal system and if it persists for any
length of time gastro-intestinal congestion and catarrh and even
ascites may develop.
In all cases alike the history of the attack will help towards a
satisfactory diagnosis.
Prevention. A rational hygiene embracing daily work or exercise,
moderate laxative diet, green food in its season, pure cool air are
important precautions.
Treatment. A moderate supply of green or laxative food, the
withholding for the time of grain, and especially of maize, wheat or
buckwheat, saline laxatives daily, and a stimulating embrocation or
blister to the tender hypochondrium are the most important
measures. Exercise in a box stall, or still better in a yard or paddock
in the intervals between more systematic work forms an important
adjunct to medicine. As a laxative sulphate of soda is to be preferred
at first in a full cathartic dose and later in a daily amount sufficient to
relax the bowels. Given in a bucket of water every morning before the
first meal a very small dose will be effective.
CONGESTION OF THE LIVER IN THE DOG.
Active congestion is very rare excepting in over-fed and indolent
family pets. Passive congestion induced by diseases of the lungs and
heart is however far from uncommon.
Lesions. True to their origin these usually appear as the spotted
nutmeg liver with the deep congestion in the centre of the acini. For
the same reason the fibroid degenerations shown in chronic cases,
show the firm fibroid neoplasm chiefly around the hepatic veins.
Granular, fatty and pigmentary degeneration of the cells are found as
in the solipeds.
Symptoms. These are as obscure as in the horse. There is always a
history of a sluggish, gourmandizing life, and in the early stages, a
manifestation of embonpoint which suggests a torpid liver. Further
suggestions may also be obtained from coexisting diseases of the
lungs, or heart, from gastro-intestinal catarrh, from piles, or ascites.
Then there is at times a slight icterus of the conjunctiva and urine.
Finally tenderness on percussion on the right hypochondrium,
decubitus on the left side, and an increased area of dullness on
percussion may afford useful hints for diagnosis.
Treatment. In the rare cases due to infection from the intestine, an
active saline purgative followed by antiseptics (salol, naphthalin,
naphthol, etc.,) daily will be of value. It is also desirable to keep up
the action of the bowels by morning doses of salines. In cases
consequent on chest disease attention must be given to such primary
trouble. In all cases a restricted laxative diet, and graduated but
increasing exercise in the open air are demanded.
HEPATIC HÆMORRHAGE OR RUPTURE.
Causes: Mechanical injuries, falls, blows, kicks, degenerations, amyloid, fatty,
granular, congestion, neoplasms, glanders, tuberculous, myomatous, microbian
infection. In the horse, disease of liver, heart, lungs, hepatic artery, portal vein,
degenerations following overfeeding, idleness, foreign bodies, arsenic, phosphorus,
parasites, violent movements in colic, running, draught, leaping. In the dog,
pampering and traumatism. In cattle forced feeding, emaciation, microbian
infection. In birds, tubercle, tæniasis, microbian infection. Lesions: extravasation,
intracapsular, or through capsule into the peritoneal cavity. The extravasation
bulges of a deep black, covering a dark softened, pulpy, hepatic tissue, with light
colored fatty tissue around. Clots may be stratified from successive bleedings. Liver
usually enlarged. Symptoms: onset sudden, or preceded by stiffness, soreness and
other signs of hepatic trouble. Extensive rupture, entails weakness, unsteady gait,
perspiration, pallor of mucosæ, small weak rapid pulse, palpitations, dilated
pupils, rolling eyes, amaurosis, tremors, convulsion in case of survival, coldness,
œdemas. Death in five hours to five days. Risk of relapse in recovering cases.
Treatment: rather hopeless, rest, laxative, ergot, ferric chloride, tannic acid, witch
hazel, cold water, snow or ice to right side. In meat producing animals fatten.
Causes. Hemorrhage and rupture of the liver are closely correlated
to each other, the accumulation of extravasated blood in the
parenchyma in the one case leading to over distension of the capsule,
and the laceration of this capsule and of the adjacent substance of
the liver occurring in the other as a mere extension of the first. They
usually occur as the direct result of mechanical injury (falls, blows,
kicks) acting on a liver already softened and friable through disease.
These predisposing degenerations may be amyloid (Caparini, Johne,
Rabe), fatty (Julien, Gowing, Adam, Siedamgrotzky), granular
softening, hepatitis or congestion (Zundel), glander neoplasms
(Mathis), tubercles, angiomata (Trasbot), microbian infection
(Stubbe), tumors (Brückmüller).
In the horse predisposing conditions may be found in diseases of
the liver, heart or lungs, in embolism of the hepatic artery (Wright),
in obstruction of the portal vein (Pierre), in infarction of the liver, in
degeneration with softening, in sarcomatous, melanotic, glanderous
or cancerous deposits in its substance, in degenerations consequent
on over feeding, idleness, congestions, on the penetration of husks of
grains into the liver substance, on arsenical or phosphorus
poisoning. The presence of flukes, echinococci and other parasites
may also cause congestion and softening. To the immediate or
traumatic causes above named may be added the violent movements
attendant on a severe attack of colic, and violent exertions in
running, draught, leaping, etc. (Friend).
In the dog we must recognize all the pampering conditions which
predispose to congestion and degeneration, together with more
direct operation of kicks, blows, falls, fights, over exertion, etc.
In cattle a forcing regimen is especially predisposing, and yet the
loss of vigor resulting from a diametrically opposite treatment, must
be accepted as an occasional cause. Stubbe found in emaciated cows
miliary hemorrhagic infarcts of a dark red color which gradually
extended to an inch or more in diameter. These he traced to
microbian infection coming by way of the chronic intestinal lesions
which are common in old cows. The final result of such infarctions
was loss of hepatic substance and the formation of cicatricial tissue
with a marked depression on the surface of the organ.
In birds fatal hepatic hemorrhages occur in connection with local
tubercle (Cadiot), tæniasis of the liver, or microbian infection.
Lesions. The hemorrhage may take place into the substance of the
liver only, or the capsule may be lacerated so that the blood escapes
into the peritoneal cavity in considerable quantity.
In the horse it usually occurs in the right or middle lobe, rarely in
the left. There may be one or more hemorrhagic effusions varying in
size from a cherry to a duck’s egg, or even an infants’ head (Lorge).
This projects from the surface of the organ and its deep black
contrasts strongly with the white of the adjacent capsule. When laid
open the hepatic tissue is seen to be softened and pulpy, and its dark
color forms a striking contrast with any surrounding fatty liver. Any
form of degeneration may be revealed on microscopic or chemical
examination. Not unfrequently small clots of blood form under the
capsule raising it in the form of little sacs. Such clots are usually
stratified indicating a succession of small hemorrhages.
When the capsule is torn, the lesion may extend from one surface
of the organ to the other, and the edges, smooth, uneven or fringed,
are united together by a blood clot.
In case of hemorrhagic infarcts the lesion usually has a distinctly
conical outline corresponding to the vascular distribution. These are
especially characteristic of cases supervening on heart disease.
The volume of the liver is usually increased and the weight may
reach 30 lbs. (Schmeltz), 34 lbs. (Lorge), or even 66 lbs. (Trasbot).
In other domestic animals analogous lesions are found modified
largely according to the size of the subject.
Symptoms. These may develop instantaneously without any
marked premonitory indication. In other cases tenderness on
percussion over the liver, stiffness or groaning under sudden
movements or turning, arching of the back, hanging of the head,
slowness in rising, costiveness, slight transient colics, and even
icterus may have been detected on close observation. The symptoms
of actual rupture are essentially those of internal hemorrhage. The
animal becomes weak, or unsteady upon its limbs, perspires, arches
the back, and shows a marked pallor of the visible mucosæ. The
pulse is small, thready, weak and accelerated, and the heart beats
violent or palpitating. The percussion dullness over the liver is
extended (Weber), the loins become insensible to pinching, and
there may be some distension of the abdomen. Dilatation of the
pupils, retraction or rolling of the eyes, amaurosis, tremors of the
muscles of the neck, lying down, or falling, and general convulsions
may precede death. This may occur in a few hours or it may be
delayed if the lesions are restricted. In case of survival, coldness and
œdema of the extremities and sheath have been observed. The lesser
hemorrhages may terminate in recovery if there is no attendant
incurable disease. In anthrax, glanders, cancer, tuberculosis,
septicæmia, etc., a favorable issue is not to be looked for.
Duration. Termination. In severe cases a fatal issue may be
expected in from five hours to five days. In the milder cases which
make a temporary recovery there is great danger of a second
hemorrhage from the new vessels in the tissue undergoing
organization or from the adjacent degenerate liver tissue. The course
of the affection may be altered by such complications as arthritis
(Dieckerhoff), pneumonia, pulmonary thrombosis (Leblanc),
enteritis or peritonitis (Cadeac).
Treatment is usually of no avail. Rest, and the administration of
laxatives and hæmostatics, have been especially recommended. Of
the latter, ergot by the mouth or ergotin subcutem, tends to
contraction of the blood-vessels and to check the flow. Ferric
chloride is also used, though apt to interfere with hepatic function.
Tannic acid, hamamelis, and other astringents may be used instead.
Cold water, snow or ice applied to the right hypochondrium may act
as a check to the hemorrhage. Unless in purely traumatic cases in an
otherwise healthy liver, a recovery is at best temporary, and the
already degenerate liver is liable to relapse at any moment. In horses
and dogs, therefore, recovery is by no means an unmixed good. Meat
producing animals that recover should be prepared for the butcher.
HEPATITIS.
Forms of hepatitis: Parenchymatous hepatitis. Definition: Degeneration of
hepatic cells. Relation to enteritis and nephritis. In horse—causes:—as in
congestion, pampering, spoiled fodder, malt, inundated meadows, chill,
overfeeding, hot moist climate, hæmoglobinæmia, infection. In cattle—causes:—
forcing ration, hot weather, overwork, infection. In dog—causes:—infection from
alimentary canal. Lesions: Enlarged, softened liver, round edges, a week later
yellow atrophy, granular on section, bloodless. Acini with indefinite margins, cells
granular, nuclei lost. In dog centres of softening. Symptoms:—in horse: Attack
sudden, rigor, fever, dullness, prostration, yellowish red mucosæ, unsteady gait,
slight colic, anorexia, urine decreased, glairy, brownish red, groaning in defecation,
excited circulation and breathing, increased icterus by third day, fœtid, colorless
diarrhœa. Diagnosis: Coincidence of fever, prostration, icterus, painful defecation,
fœtid diarrhœa, light color of stools, tenderness and flatness on percussing hepatic
area. From influenza by absence of watering eyes and contagion. Prognosis in
horse: Very grave unless urine is free. Treatment in horse: Portal depletion,
calomel, ipecacuan, salines, diuretics, fomentation of loins, antiseptics, derivatives,
mineral acids, bitters. Careful laxative diet in convalescence. Symptoms in cattle:
Slower onset, anorexia, dullness, depression, drivelling saliva, grinding teeth,
icterus, constipation, later fœtid diarrhœa, pale colored stools, recumbency, groans
on rising, arching back, tender right hypochondrium, fever. Prognosis grave. Death
in five to six days. Treatment as in horse: Only saline laxatives. Symptoms in dog:
Muscular tremors, staring coat, hyperthermia, icterus, fœtid breath, ventral
decubitus, extreme prostration, anorexia, tender right hypochondrium, diminished
urine, death in two or three days. Treatment in dog: Calomel and jalap, diuretics,
laxatives, derivatives, germicides, in convalescence, mineral acids, bitters, careful
diet.
The different forms of inflammation of the liver are distinguished
according as they affect, especially the hepatic cells and tissue of the
acini (parenchymatous), as they result in suppuration (suppurative,
catarrhal, abscess), as they cause necrobiosis in nodular masses
(infectious or necrotic), as they lead to fibroid thickening under the
peritoneum and proper capsule (perihepatitis); or as they cause
general fibroid induration of the organ by increase of its connective
tissue (cirrhosis).
PARENCHYMATOUS HEPATITIS, ACUTE
YELLOW ATROPHY OE THE LIVER.
The characteristic morbid lesion in this disease is the degeneration
of the liver cells, loss of their protoplasm and nuclei and of their
normal functions. It may be circumscribed to limited areas, or may
affect the liver, generally. As the hepatic functions, are so intimately
related to those of the bowels and kidney, the affection is usually
accompanied by inflammations of these organs as well.
Causes in horses. The same general causes which produce
congestion, may also determine the further morbid stage of
inflammation. Cadeac mentions a case which developed in a horse
kept alone and idle in the stable. He makes no mention of condition,
food, cleanliness nor ventilation. Haubner and Franzen have traced it
to a diet of malt or of hay harvested from inundated meadows.
Zundel records a case following exposure to extreme cold. More
commonly the disease is secondary to the overtaxing of the liver, by
heavy feeding in warm moist climates, or in hæmoglobinæmia, or to
the arrest of the micro-organisms of the food, or of infectious
diseases.
Causes in Cattle. These suffer rarely, but from essentially the same
conditions. It has followed aphthous fever (Eletti), and arisen under
a forcing ration, in hot weather (Callot, Cruzel), or under overwork
(Cruzel).
Causes in Dogs. Most cases result from infection by way of the
stomach and intestines, or by the transfer to the liver of the
ptomaines and toxins of such infections. It is thus related in its origin
to catarrhal jaundice and hyperæmia.
Lesions. In the earliest stage with albuminoid exudation into its
substance the liver may be greatly enlarged, its sharp edges rounded,
and its consistency softened. After a week’s illness atrophy may have
set in and the organ appears shrunken and of ocherous yellow. In the
early stages there may be sanguineous engorgement, the cut surface
may bleed freely, and small extravasations may show throughout the
liver substance, later the clay yellow hue, the granular aspect and the
absence of blood on the cut surface are characteristic. The margins of
the adjacent acini are indefinite or lost, and under the microscope
the hepatic cells are charged with granules (albuminoid, fatty and
pigmentary), while the nuclei are no longer demonstrable.
In cattle the liver may be double the normal size and at first of a
deep purple red, which may change later to the earthy yellow.
In dogs the liver is tumid and yellow, and marked by small pea-
like centres of softening. There is marked softening and the
microscope reveals the characteristic degeneration of the hepatic
cells.
Symptoms in the Horse. These resemble those of congestion
rendered more intense and therefore somewhat less obscure. The
attack is usually sudden, there may be rigor followed by
hyperthermia, dullness, pendent head, drooping eyelids, injected
conjunctiva with a yellowish tinge, unsteady gait and slight
indications of colic. There is anorexia, partial suppression of urine,
and what is passed is thick, glairy and brownish red, fæces are passed
with pain, and groaning, probably from compression of the liver, the
heart beats violently, while the pulse is small, breathing accelerated
and perspiration abundant. The temperature rises (101° to 106°) and
remains high throughout unless lowered through biliary intoxication.
Percussion over the liver and especially on the right side shows
increased area of dullness and marked tenderness. On the second or
third day the icterus usually increases, and a slight fœtid diarrhœa
may set in with marked fœtor of the pale or colorless discharges. The
jaundice is not, however, a criterion of the danger, as it may become
less marked or entirely disappear because of the extensive
degeneration of the hepatic cells and the arrest of the formation of
bile.
Diagnosis in the horse. The disease is recognized by the
coincidence of fever, with great depression, icterus, painful
defecation, constipation followed by a fœtid diarrhœa with lack of
color in the stools and by increased area of dullness and tenderness
in the region of the liver and especially on the right side. From
influenza which it resembles in many respects, it is distinguished by
the absence of watery discharge from the eyes, and by the entire
absence of all indication of contagion. The cases occur one at a time.
Prognosis in the horse. The disease is exceedingly fatal. When the
kidneys remain active, the poisons are eliminated and there may be
hope of recovery, but when urine is suppressed an early death by
poisoning is to be expected.
Treatment in the horse. A most important indication is to secure
depletion from the portal system. Calomel 1 dr., aloes 4 drs.,
ipecacuan 1 dr. may be given in bolus, and followed by small daily
doses of sulphate and nitrate of soda with bitters, with or without the
ipecacuan. Action on the kidneys is essential to secure elimination of
the poisons which threaten a fatal poisoning if retained. To favor the
same action fomentations may be applied to the loins. The frequent
presence of pathogenic microörganisms either in the bowels or liver
suggests the use of germicides (salol, salicylic acid, salicylate of soda,
naphthalin, naphthol, beta-naphthol, etc.) as in catarrhal jaundice.
Sinapisms or blisters applied to the right side of the chest and over
the short ribs may be useful, and after the subsidence of the more
violent symptoms, dilute mineral acids and especially nitro-muriatic
acid may be resorted to in combination with diuretics and bitters.
When appetite returns succulent, laxative, non-stimulating food in
small quantity should be given. Wheat bran mashes, carrots, turnips,
potatoes, apples, fresh grass, ensilage may be adduced as examples.
Throughout the disease the ingestion of an abundance of pure water
should be encouraged.
Symptoms in the ox. These may appear more tardily than in the
horse, loss of appetite, staring coat, dullness, pendent head and ears,
unsteady movements, rigors, drivelling of saliva from the mouth and
grinding the teeth are usually noted. To these are added the more
diagnostic symptoms of slight (or severe) jaundice, constipation
followed by a fœtid light colored diarrhœa, a strong disposition to
remain recumbent, marked suffering attendant on rising, arching of
the back when up, and tenderness on percussion over the right
hypochondrium. The temperature gradually rises, though more
slowly than in the horse, and may again descend under a profound
poisoning.
Course. The disease reaches its acme in four to six days, and
generally has a fatal issue.
Treatment, is on the same lines as for the horse only as a
purgative, sulphate of soda may advantageously replace the aloes.
Symptoms in the dog. The symptoms are those of congestion in an
exaggerated form. There are muscular tremors, erection of the hair,
followed by rising temperature up to 105° or 106°, an icteric hue of
the mucosæ, the pulse is accelerated, strong, irregular, respiration
rapid, panting, fœtid breath, ventral decubitus, and prostration
extreme. Appetite is completely lost, the bowels become relaxed, the
stools fœtid, the right hypochondrium painful on pressure or
percussion, and the urine greatly reduced and icteric or suppressed.
This feature of urinary suppression, determines a rapid poisoning
and death in two or three days.
Treatment must follow the same lines as in other animals, a
purgative of calomel and jalap, followed by diuretics, laxatives,
derivatives, and above all germicides. In case of survival mineral
acids, aqua regia, bitters, and a carefully regulated diet will be in
order.
SUPPURATIVE HEPATITIS. HEPATIC
ABSCESS.
Causes in horse: pyæmia, omphalitis, thrombosis, infection, biliary calculi,
concretions or parasites, foreign bodies, hot, damp climates, strangles,
brustseuche, glanders, endocarditis. Lesions in horse: from parasites and
mechanical irritants, pea-like or hazelnut; embolic abscess, pin head to hen’s egg;
infection from strangles, foreign bodies, etc., may be of large size, and burst into
adjacent organs, the peritoneum or externally. Symptoms in horse: of pre-existent
malady, remitting fever, successive chills, intermittent icterus, hypochondriac
tenderness. Spontaneous recovery, aspiration, opening, antiseptics locally and
generally. Lesions in ruminants; secondary multiple abscesses, bean-like or (with
foreign body) very large, may extend into adjacent parts. Symptoms in cattle: fever,
chills, jaundice, tympany, diarrhœa, dysentery, wasting, tender right
hypochondrium. Treatment: as in horse. Causes in dog: foreign bodies, tumors,
infections, blows, traumas. Lesions: traumatic abscesses, single, large, infectious
abscesses multiple, small. Former fœtid. Symptoms in dog: hepatic congestion or
colic, then chills, prostration, irritability, tenderness of right hypochondrium,
nausea, vomiting. Treatment in dog: antiseptic aspiration, laparotomy.
Causes in the Horse. Hepatic abscess arises from a great many
primary morbid conditions. As a secondary abscess it is seen in the
different forms of pyæmia and especially in suppurative omphalitis
in young animals. It may start in thrombosis determined by clots or
septic matters carried from a distance through the portal vein or
hepatic artery, in biliary calculi or concretions, in parasites
introduced from the duodenum, in barbs or husks of the cereals that
have penetrated through the biliary ducts, or in bacteria or their
toxins which have been carried from the bowels, spleen or pancreas.
The government veterinarians have found it a comparatively
common lesion in the hot damp climate of Hindoostan, and a similar
frequency has been noticed in west Africa. Among general affections
it is liable to occur in strangles, contagious pneumonia, glanders,
endocarditis of the left heart and phlebitis with the formation of
thrombi in the lungs. In the two last named disorders, the affection
takes place by the simple transference of detached clots to the liver to
block its arteries or capillaries. Or it may be that micro-organisms
are transferred in the same way. With modern views of suppuration
the presence of the pyogenic organisms must be conceded.
Lesions in the horse. Cadeac distinguishes the different types of
hepatic abscess as: 1st biliary abscess in which suppuration
commences in the interior of the biliary ducts and usually from
parasites or mechanical irritants introduced or from calculi or
concretions formed within them: these rare abscesses contain biliary
salts, pigments, and epithelium and acquire the size of a pea or
hazelnut: 2d Metastatic abscesses which start in the arterial, portal,
or capillary vessels, by the arrest of infecting clots, which determine
a further clotting, the obstruction of the vessel, the accumulation of
leucocytes and the formation of abscess of the size of a pin head or
larger up to a hen’s egg, surrounded by a hæmorrhagic infarct
softening in the centre: these are numerously disseminated through
the liver: 3d Mechanical Abscess due to the penetration of foreign
bodies or parasites: 4th Infection as in strangles. These may attain a
large size, cause adhesion to adjacent organs, and rupture into the
chest, the colon, stomach or peritoneum. The pus may even escape
externally through the right hypochondrium.
Symptoms in the horse. These are always obscure and vary much
with the source of the malady. If there has been a pre-existing
hepatic malady the symptoms of that will be in evidence; if an
omphalitis its existence may still be recognizable; if pulmonary or
cardiac disease, that may be detected; if parasites, evidence of their
existence may perchance be found; if gall stone, a previous violent
hepatic colic with icterus may have occurred; and if intestinal septic
disorder, there may be the testimony of intestinal troubles. The more
diagnostic symptoms are a fever of a remittent type, one or several
violent shivering fits, a marked jaundice which like the fever shows
exacerbations, and a similar irregularity of the condition of the urine
which may be successively of a dark brown, a deep yellow, and a
transparent amber color. Tenderness and grunting on percussion of
the right hypochondrium would be an additional aid in diagnosis.
Treatment. Death has been hitherto considered as the inevitable
result, yet recoveries may ensue after rupture into the colon or
through the abdominal walls. If the seat of the abscess can be
ascertained its evacuation through an aspirator and the subsequent
injection of an antiseptic would be appropriate. The concurrent use
of antisuppurants like hyposulphite of soda, or sulphide of calcium
would also be in order.
Causes in Cattle. Hepatic abscess is much more frequent in cattle,
and is commonly a result of perforation by sharp pointed bodies
(needles, pins, nails, wires, etc.) from the reticulum and rumen, or of
parasites, or biliary calculi. Other cases are occasioned by the
presence of tubercles, actinomycosis, or omphalitis.
Lesions in Cattle and Sheep. Secondary abscesses are usually
multiple and disseminated through the organ, though Cadeac says
they are more common in the left half. They vary in size from a bean
to a pigeon’s egg, project often from the surface, and contain a viscid,
creamy, yellowish or greenish pus. Abscesses dependent on foreign
bodies often attain a great size, so as to contain a pint or quart of pus
(Landel). They may make their way through the diaphragm, rumen,
or abdominal wall leaving a thick cicatrix in the liver, or they may
become slowly absorbed and dry up into a putty-like or cretaceous
mass. Brusaferro found hepatic abscesses in lambs twenty to thirty
days old—probably of omphalic origin.
Symptoms in Cattle are usually very obscure. Fever, shivering fits,
jaundice, indigestion, diarrhœa or dysentery, emaciation, colics,
tender right hypochondrium, and peritonitis may all be in evidence
but the diagnosis is little better than a guess.
Treatment when possible at all would be on the same lines as for
the horse.
Causes in the dog. According to Cadeac these are mostly foreign
bodies (needles, pins, etc.) which have been swallowed, tumors of the
liver or adjacent organs, phlebitis and thrombosis of the portal vein,
pyæmia, septicæmia, and external injuries (kicks, blows, contusions,
falls, etc.)
Lesions in the dog. As in the other animals traumatic abscess is
usually solitary and large, secondary abscess multiple and small. The
pus developed around a foreign body is reddish, greenish and fœtid,
that of the metastatic abscess is usually whitish or yellowish and with
a sweet odor.
Symptoms in the dog are those of hepatic congestion, or violent
gall stone colic, followed by severe rigor, great depression, or
irritability, and tenderness over the right hypochondrium. Nausea
and vomiting is a marked symptom though not a diagnostic one.
Treatment. If the flaccid abdominal walls will allow of the locating
of the abscess it should be treated by aspiration and antiseptic
injections. It would even be admissible to perform laparotomy, stitch
the wall of the abscess to the external wound, and empty it under due
antiseptic precautions.
INFECTED HEPATITIS. NODULAR
NECROBIOSIS OF THE LIVER.
In ox, sheep, pig, dog, horse. Necrotic areas projecting on surface of liver.
Causes: bacteria, toxins, from bowels, womb, navel. Lesions: In cattle dirty gray
nodules in brownish red liver, nodules firm, granular, necrotic, elements do not
stain, later leucocytes and fibro-plastic growth in periphery. In lambs the nodules
are white, common to the lungs and pleura, pathogenic to rabbit. In pigs nutmeg
liver, cells without nuclei, fatty, granular, pathogenic to rabbits, guinea pigs, rats
and young pigs. In dog, nutmeg liver, with violet areas, and white spots, 1–2 lines,
having granular, fatty cells without nuclei. Symptoms: fever, constant lying, tarry
fæces, icterus, tender right hypochondrium, and those of the primary disease.
Treatment: antisepsis of primary seat, and bowels, elimination by kidneys, general
antisepsis, stimulants, etc. Case usually hopeless. Prevention.
This has been observed particularly in cattle, but also in sheep, pig,
dog and horse. It is characterized by the formation of circumscribed
areas of gangrene, becoming hard, dry, yellowish and usually slightly
projecting beyond the adjacent surface. Its infected character is
shown by the presence in the lesion and adjacent parts of the hepatic
tissue of an abundance of bacteria, which, from the varied
description, appear to differ in different cases. The cause may
however be safely stated as one of the bacteria of gangrene. It is
alleged with some show of reason, that the lesion may be determined
by the action of toxins and ptomaines produced by bacteria in the
alimentary canal and carried to the liver with the portal blood
(Cadeac). The bacteria themselves commonly come from the same
source, (Stubbe), but also from the uterus (Berndt), the mammæ
(LeBlanc), and above all from the suppurating or septic umbilicus.
McFadyean in five cases found a long slender bacillus, Hamilton in a
single case in the horse found cocci, Rivolta in an infectious hepatitis
in sheep found bacterium subtilis agnorum, and Semmer found the
same condition in young pigs from micrococci introduced through
the diseased umbilicus.
Lesions. In cattle the liver has a general brownish red, or greenish
white color, and shows projecting, hard nodules of a dirty gray color
more or less tinged with yellowish brown. The margins of these hard
nodules are very sharply defined, and on section show a
homogeneous granular surface, devoid of areas of softening or of
connective tissue, and formed of the hepatic parenchyma in a state of
necrobiosis. The granules and nuclear elements do not stain like
those of healthy liver. As the disease advances the periphery of the
nodule may be invaded by leucocytes and become the seat of a fibro-
plastic hypertrophy (McFadyean) with the ultimate formation of
cicatricial tissue (Stubbe).
In lambs Rivolta found the necrosed nodules standing out as white
patches under the capsule of the liver, but similar lesions were met
with in the lungs and pleuræ, an observation which has been
confirmed by Hanbold. The affection was conveyed by inoculation to
the rabbit.
In pigs Semmer found nutmeg liver, deep red or grayish yellow,
hypertrophied, the hepatic cells swollen and divested of nuclei but
containing fatty and pigmentary granules. It was inoculable on
rabbits, guinea pigs, white rats and on young pigs.
In the dog, Courmont and Doyon found congested liver (portal
congestion) with projecting patches of a deep violet color and sharply
defined borders, and one to two lines in diameter, also salient white
spots with distinct outlines. In the white spots the hepatic cells had
lost their nuclei and were charged with fatty granules.
Symptoms. These are indications of hepatic disease. In parturient
cows, Berndt noted fever (102° to 104°), anorexia, stiffness, cough,
labored breathing, intense thirst, constant decubitus, and
constipation followed by lowering temperature, tarry fæces and
icterus. The region of the liver was very sensitive to pressure or
percussion. In the other animals the symptoms appear to be largely
over-shadowed by those of the primary disease, but the same general
indications of jaundice, hepatic tenderness and digestive disorder are
superadded.
Treatment when it can be intelligently adopted, consists largely in
evacuation and antisepsis of the seat of primary infection, and of the
prima viœ, and in maintaining elimination by the kidneys. In this
way, as in congestion and hepatitis, the concentration of the poison
is as far as possible counteracted, and an opportunity may
sometimes be furnished for the recuperation of the liver cells. As a
rule, however, the case is hopeless, and thus preventive measures, by
cleanliness, disinfection and antisepsis of the ascertained sources of
the infection are indicated.
PERIHEPATITIS.
Inflammation of capsule of liver (external and Glisson’s). Causes: Traumas,
infective diseases, phlebitis of the portal vein, chill, distomatosis. Lesions:
Peritonitis and inflammation of the capsule in patches, yellowish gray exudate,
fibroid thickening or pus. Adhesions to adjacent objects. Thickening of trabeculæ.
Symptoms, tardy respiration and circulation, tender hypochondrium, colics,
diarrhœa, painful defecation, moan with expiration. Slight cases recover. Sequelæ:
compression of portal vein or bile duct, gastric catarrh, piles, etc. Treatment:
Salines, alkaline diuretics, mineral tonics, bitters.
This is inflammation of the external capsule of the liver and
Glisson’s capsule. It may arise from direct mechanical injury, or by
extension of inflammation from adjacent structures, such as the
peritoneum. It may also complicate contagious pneumonia in the
horse, tuberculosis in the ox, pneumoenteritis in pigs, and also
phlebitis of the vena portæ (Cadeac, Morot). It may follow a chill, or
distomatosis.
Lesions. These are essentially peritonitis circumscribed by the
liver, and extending to the proper capsule, and its vaginal
investments of the hepatic vessels. It is usually limited to certain
spots which become the seats of a yellowish gray exudation, with a
tendency to fibroid development and thickening, but sometimes
degenerating into pus. The deposits on the outer side of the hepatic
peritoneum may develop false membranes and fibrous adhesions to
surrounding objects, the diaphragm, omentum, stomach or intestine.
The deposits under the peritoneum lead to similar fibrous
development with hypertrophy or thickening of the capsule, the
trabeculæ extending thence into the liver and the vaginal sheaths of
the vessels. Such areas of thickening are revealed as depressed spots
or patches of a white color, and showing a firm fibrous, pearly
appearance when incised. Such lesions are not uncommon in the
livers of horses, cattle and swine. In the pig they may have a violet, or
brownish red color, but with spots of other colors—grayish or
brownish (Kitt).
Symptoms. Dopheïde, who has studied the disease in cows and to
a less extent in horses, found a reduction in pulsations (26 per

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Digital Milton 1st ed.

ISBN 978-3-319-90477-1 ISBN 978-3-319-90478-8 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018952371

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover illustration: “Pandemonium” by Andrew Kulman, reproduced with kind permission.

and David Wrisley. Iman Al Kaisy provided valuable editorial assistance.

1 Milton! Thou Shouldst Be Living in These Media 1

Part I Textual Remediations 25

3 “Is There a Class in This Audiotext?” Paradise Lost

4 “Apt numbers”: On Line Citations of Paradise Lost 77

Part II Scale, Space, and Sociality 109

5 Form and Computation: A Case Study 111

6 Mapping the Moralized Geography of Paradise Lost 129

7 “Still Paying, Still to Owe”: Credit, Community,

Part III New Audiences, Novel Engagements 179

8 The Online Revolution: Milton and the Internet

9 Digital Milton and Student Research 207

10 Milton for Millennials: Sponsoring Digital Creativity

11 Epilogue: Milton in the Digital Waves 245

David Ainsworth is Associate Professor of English at the University of

c­ ollaborator on digital editions of Paradise Lost and Leaves of Grass. He

Islam Issa is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Birmingham City

Fig. 3.1 Paradise Lost Audiotexts interface displaying modernized

Fig. 6.4 “A Map of the Moralized Geography of Paradise Lost”:

Milton! Thou Shouldst Be Living

David Currell and Islam Issa

© The Author(s) 2018 1

Digital literary study is a rapidly changing field whose theories,

“Books Are Not Absolutely Dead Things”3

decisive influence in the former domain has been “Greenblattian New

By living streams among the trees of life,

What follows in Paradise Lost, of course, is a war in Heaven. It is as well to

ties scholarship.”20 Framed as a battle line, the situation may appear—to

“Distant reading”: with Basu we reject “an artificial opposition between

Distant reading is the computational processing of textual information in

As Zukerman’s chapter relates, the desire to help human readers fully

“POD people” threatening to repopulate the local library. Whether or not

Histories of Digital Milton

which validated Milton’s role as statesman. Corns also makes pragmatic

Google Books, would trouble Psyche.39 In this context, independent,

Digital Milton: Scope and Structure

Cordelia Zukerman opens the volume with a critically and personally

commonplacing and consultation reading, two textual practices thor-

spatial “moralization”: by examining each geographical reference in its

David Ainsworth offers an engaging narrative of the pedagogical prin-

founding inclusive networks, bringing us together, encouraging us to col-

be as unsullied as we have been accustomed to believe. This is not a negli-

31. Trettien, “Deep History,” ¶26, 28.

Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures: And A Second Look. Cambridge: Cambridge

The John Milton Reading Room

© The Author(s) 2018 27

texts “position[]…readers as users who are organizing their paths in the

Others, however, see early modern orthographical forms as an intrinsic

calling on their critical judgment. Introducing the volume Digital Critical

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1 Milton! Thou Shouldst Be Living in These Media 1

Part I Textual Remediations 25

3 “Is There a Class in This Audiotext?” Paradise Lost

4 “Apt numbers”: On Line Citations of Paradise Lost 77

Part II Scale, Space, and Sociality 109

5 Form and Computation: A Case Study 111

6 Mapping the Moralized Geography of Paradise Lost 129

7 “Still Paying, Still to Owe”: Credit, Community,

Part III New Audiences, Novel Engagements 179

8 The Online Revolution: Milton and the Internet

9 Digital Milton and Student Research 207

10 Milton for Millennials: Sponsoring Digital Creativity

11 Epilogue: Milton in the Digital Waves 245

c ollaborator on digital editions of Paradise Lost and Leaves of Grass. He