peers

With the old institutions of knowledge collapsing all around us — something I write about occasionally, e.g. here — I want to pay brief tribute to one: peer review of academic writing.

When I was working on my biography of Paradise Lost — pub date: tomorrow! — I came to believe that Milton’s view of Eve was more ambivalent than I had previously thought. (You’ll need to read my book for the details.) But, I reasoned, it is a truth universally acknowledged that Milton was an absolutely unreconstructed misogynist who couldn’t possibly have portrayed Eve, at any stage of the story, in a positive light. So I suppressed my own inclinations and went on with the book.

Then, when PUP sent the finished text out for peer review, I received from one reviewer a pretty scathing report. He or she liked much of the book, but thought that my neglect of a more positive interpretation of Eve was a damning oversight: even if I did not share that view myself I should certainly have acknowledged it as a possibility, since it is well-represented in the critical literature on the poem. This criticism, by the way, while quite severe, was expressed without rancor or insult or snark, and was accompanied by equally thoughtful praise for other elements of my book.

Had I never entertained the idea that Milton commends Eve, this criticism would still have been very useful to me, because I do not know the critical literature on Paradise Lost as well as a Miltonist does. (Remember, my book is not about Paradise Lost itself so much as about its reception history, how people have read it and responded to it — an assignment much better suited to a generalist like me.) But the response was especially welcome to me because it gave me permission to write something I wanted to write but had believed I shouldn’t.

The moral of this story: Honest peer review, even or especially when it’s highly critical, is a real gift to the scholar being reviewed.