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"As the author of Milton and the Masque Tradition (1968), and Milton's Theatrical Epic (1980), it is not surprising that John G. Demaray continues his thoughtful explorations into masques, Milton, and seventeenth-century literature. . . . Demaray's readings of this material [related to Milton] are sophisticated and informed by extensive research, including firsthand investigations of pilgrimage sites. . . . Miltonists will find much of interest here as will those in early modern historiography."
—M. G. Aune, Renaissance Quarterly (Summer 2007)
John G. Demaray's groundbreaking new study From Pilgrimage to History argues that modern global cultural historicism arose, not in the eighteenth century as is commonly held, but in the Renaissance. For a thousand years before Renaissance voyages of discovery revealed a vast, seemingly ever-expanding globe, medieval pilgrims traveled East beyond the realm of Latin culture to Jerusalem, the supposed geographic "middle" of the medieval earth. They carried back from the Holy Land accounts of the world as an ordered, iconographic-historical Book of God's Works, a volume that left its mark upon the form and content of world cultural historicism in the West. When, in a jolting geographic, ideological revolution in the Renaissance, Jerusalem was displaced from its central position in a disintegrating medieval World Book, a new global historicism arose under the influence of a new philosophy of empiricism and a flood of Early Modern literature on global discovery.
Demaray examines how pivotal Renaissance revisionist authors, rebelling against the old iconographic conceptions, altered the remnants of medieval pilgrimage iconography and produced transforming historicist methods and structures, focusing increasingly on an irregular, free-form globe teeming with strange peoples, societies, and civilizations. Among the Renaissance figures examined are Peter Heylyn, Richard Hakluyt, Francis Bacon, Abraham Ortelius, Samuel Purchas, and John Milton. Placed in the context of clashing iconographic and naturalist historicist traditions, their achievements and failings are also seen in the light of the very different secular, scientific, philosophic, and even religious world histories of later centuries. Ranging back to fourth-century pilgrimage accounts in the time of Constantine and forward to "end-of-history" announcements, Demaray's perspectives are wide, and include the examination of the conflicting world views of Hegel, Marx, Engels, Roger Owen, Arnold Toynbee, and Francis Fukuyama, among others.
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