Milton expert recognized with book award

The president of the Milton Society of America named Associate English Professor Louis Schwartz the 2009 James Holly Hanford Book Award winner on Jan. 8, continuing a legacy of Milton scholars at the University of Richmond.

The Milton Society of America awards this prize annually at the Modern Language Association conference for the best book about John Milton published that year. This year, the conference was held in Los Angeles and the committee chose Schwartz's book, "Milton and Maternal Mortality."

Paul Stevens, a member of the society's awards committee, said that out of the 11 books competing in 2009, Schwartz's had been the best, considering its originality. It was a landmark study that uncovered evidence of Milton's internal struggle from watching his first two wives die during childbirth.

Stevens is an English professor at the University of Toronto, but in 1984 when he won the James Holly Hanford Article Award for "Milton and the Icastic Imagination," he held Schwartz's position as the Miltonist of the English department at Richmond. Before Stevens, Georgia Christopher served this role, and in 1983 she too won the book award for "Milton and the Science of Saints."

"There has been an apostolic succession of Milton scholars at the University of Richmond," Stevens said. "Georgia Christopher was incredibly distinguished. I published a number of articles during my time there, and Louis Schwartz has now received this prestigious award."

Mary Fenton, the current president of the Milton Society of America and an English professor at Western Carolina University said that the James Holly Hanford Award was the most prestigious and highly coveted award that the society offered.

"It is a rigorous competition, and to be awarded this prize alludes to the quality of [Schwartz's] scholarship," she said. "This recognition puts him in a league of great Milton scholars. He is in extraordinarily good company, and his book will remain important because of this honor."

The Milton Society of America, founded in 1948, is an allied organization of the Modern Language Association of America. According to the society's website, its mission is to further scholarship on John Milton, to cite outstanding scholars in the field, to publish an annual booklet summarizing the work of the society and to promote the exchange of ideas about Milton. The society currently comprises about 575 members mostly from the United States and Canada, but also from 10 other nations.

Schwartz said he had come across the idea for his award-winning book by accident during a conversation with a former girlfriend.

"I was preparing for my first interview for the teaching position at the University of Richmond I hold now," he said. "She asked me one of those questions that spins the world around for you. People have been wondering for hundreds of years whether Milton is referring to his first or second wife in the sonnet I read to her, but she asked what the cause of death was."

After this conversation, Schwartz said he had researched to find that both of Milton's wives had died eerily similar deaths during childbirth. This realization served as the catalyst to 18 years of research that culminated in a book, Schwartz said.

"It is simply fascinating to study the way people in the past dealt with and explained women dying during childbirth," Schwartz said.

In the early 17th century, he said, it was a fairly common occurrence, and people had very little knowledge of why this happened.

"Today, it is very different," Schwartz said. "It is interesting to think what life would feel like if dying in childbirth were an ever-present danger."

Milton struggled with how to capture that kind of loss in art, Schwartz said.

"I found ways of talking about, interpreting and understanding part of Milton's work that other people hadn't," he said.

The history of childbirth is a relatively new field in the last three to four decades, Schwartz said.

"Thanks to the brilliant people that spend years combing through archives, death bills and records, and the computer programs used to do statistical analyses," he said, "I was able to conduct my research."

Schwartz said he also attributed part of his own success to Richmond's incredible generosity of time and resources. Schwartz accredited the inter-library loan service, as well as the travel funds and grants he received, to his ability to conduct such extensive research. He said he had spent most of the '90s taking the train to and from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.

"Because the university was so patient with me," Schwartz said, "I never felt pressured to publish before I was ready, and ultimately was able to publish with a very prestigious company, the Cambridge University Press."

Richmond has also evolved since Schwartz began teaching, he said.

"It was a different institution when I started -- much more dedicated to teaching than research," he said. "As my own career as a researcher grew, the university's response to research did too."

Suzanne Jones, Richmond's English department chairwoman, said that she was proud of his accomplishment.

"We are doing a fine job here in the English department," she said. "Each year, the teaching evaluations go up in quality and the publications go up in quantity. We are wonderful teachers and wonderful scholars, and Louis is a wonderful example of this."

Schwartz said being a professor has helped him tremendously as a scholar.

"In the classroom, students share new perspectives with me on literature I have read hundreds of times before," Schwartz said. "It is enormously exciting and a little unnerving."

Kevin Creamer, Richmond's director at the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology, is a living example of this. Creamer graduated from Richmond in 1985 and was a student of Stevens during his undergraduate studies. When he returned to the university in 1988 as a graduate student, Creamer took Milton courses with Schwartz.

"The Milton stuff grabbed me," Creamer said of his first undergraduate experiences. "When I took a Milton course with Schwartz in graduate school, I first heard Schwartz's ideas about illuminating the emotion Milton felt after his first two wives died in childbirth. It was interesting at the time to hear him working through those preliminary ideas."

Since then, Creamer has worked with Schwartz to start Milton-L, an online discussion list created at Richmond in September 1991. The list is now linked to the Milton Society of America's website and currently hosts 550 subscribers around the globe, though most reside in the United States and Canada.

"The list serves as an ongoing fascinating discussion between the best Milton scholars of the day," Creamer said. "These are people who really put their passion into something that they love."

Schwartz was enthusiastic about the list from the start, he said, and had been fantastic in guiding the list conversations during the past 20 years.

In turn, Schwartz said he owed much of his success to Creamer for allowing him to network through Milton-L and to meet Milton scholars from all over the world.

On Schwartz's recent accomplishments, Creamer said he wished he could have been in Los Angeles to see him accept the award.

"It's an award of a lifetime," Creamer said. "I hope people are eligible to receive it more than once. Louis is a fascinating professor as well as a scholar, and the award serves as a confirmation of Louis's ongoing commitment and scholarship to the Milton community."

Since the book's publication and recognition, Schwartz said he had already begun four other Milton projects. Among them, Schwartz said he would be working with Fenton to edit their second collection of essays on Milton. Schwartz said he would also be creating the line-by-line commentary on Book III of "Paradise Lost," which would be part of the ongoing Milton Variorum Project. Most recently, Schwartz said his editor at Cambridge University Press had asked him during the award ceremony in Los Angeles to help edit a Cambridge Companion to "Paradise Lost" for students in the coming year.

"If I thought there was nothing left to say about Milton, I'd do something else for a living," Schwartz said. "The thing about the past is that even though so much of it is lost, you never know what you will be able to uncover."

Contact reporter Kaylin Politzer at kaylin.politzer@richmond.edu