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Both in his life and in his writings, Milton became the very embodiment of contention. He was an embattled figure whose ideas provoked endless controversy from his own time to the present. The ten new essays in this volume examine major issues that have become the grounds of contention in the study and interpretation of Milton and his works. These issues include the significance of women writers and readers, the nature of Milton's influence and the reception of his works, the gendered bias that informs the portrayal of Eve, the vexed subject of choice and election that underlies the character of Samson, and the taint of heresy that Milton's theological beliefs are said to betray. In their engagement with these issues, the scholars represented here concern themselves with such figures as Edmund Burke, Lucy Huitchinson and Elizabeth Singer Rowe. Their essays explre the concept of 'femme covert', the authorship of 'De Doctrina Christiana', the significance of Milton's failure to pursue the Passion and Crucifiction of Jesus, and the place of the Socinian controversy in Milton and his heirs.
Debate about the authorship of the manuscript known to us as De Doctrina Christiana has bedevilled Milton studies over recent years. In this book four leading scholars give an account of the research project that demonstrated its Miltonic provenance beyond reasonable doubt. But the authors do much more besides, locating Milton's systematic theology in its broader European context, picking open the stages and processes of its composition, and analysing its Latinity.
Milton and the Spiritual Reader considers how John Milton’s later works demonstrate the intensive struggle of spiritual reading. Milton presents his own rigorous process of reading in order to instruct his readers how to advance their spiritual knowledge. Recent studies of Milton’s readers neglect this spiritual dimension and focus on politics. Since Milton considers the individual soul at least as important as the body politic, Ainsworth focuses on uncovering the spiritual characteristics of the reader Milton tries to shape through his texts. He also examines Milton’s reading practices without postulating the existence of some ideal or universal reader, and without assuming a gullible or easily manipulated reader. Milton does not simply hope for a fit audience, but writes to nurture fit readers. His works offer models of strenuous and suspicious close reading, subjecting all authors except God to the utmost of scrutiny. Milton presents Biblical interpretation as an interior struggle, a contention not between reader and text, but within that reader’s individual understanding of scripture. Ainsworth’s study rethinks the basic relationship between reading and religion in seventeenth-century England, and concludes that for Milton and his contemporaries, distinguishing divine truths in worldly texts required a spiritually guided form of close reading.
This book studies the interplay of theology and poetics in the three great epics of early modern England, the Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained. Bond examines how Spenser and Milton adapted the pattern of dual heroism developed in classical and Medieval works. Challenging the opposition between 'Calvinist,' 'allegorical' Spenser and 'Arminian,' 'dramatic' Milton, this book offers a new understanding of their doctrinal and literary affinities within the European epic tradition.
Locating John Milton's works in national and international contexts, and applying a variety of approaches from literary to historical, philosophical, and postcolonial, Milton and Toleration offers a wide-ranging exploration of how Milton's visions of tolerance reveal deeper movements in the history of the imagination. Milton is often enlisted in stories about the rise of toleration: his advocacy of open debate in defending press freedoms, his condemnation of persecution, and his criticism of ecclesiastical and political hierarchies have long been read as milestones on the road to toleration. However, there is also an intolerant Milton, whose defence of religious liberty reached only as far as Protestants. This book of sixteen essays by leading scholars analyses tolerance in Milton's poetry and prose, examining the literary means by which tolerance was questioned, observed, and became an object of meditation. Organized in three parts, 'Revising Whig Accounts,' 'Philosophical Engagements,' 'Poetry and Rhetoric,' the contributors, including leading Milton scholars from the USA, Canada, and the UK, address central toleration issues including heresy, violence, imperialism, republicanism, Catholicism, Islam, church community, liberalism, libertinism, natural law, legal theory, and equity. A pan-European perspective is presented through analysis of Milton's engagement with key figures and radical groups. All of Milton's major works are given an airing, including prose and poetry, and the book suggests that Milton's writings are a significant medium through which to explore the making of modern ideas of tolerance.
John Milton’s poetry and prose are central to our understanding of the aesthetic, political and religious upheavals of early modern England. Innovative recent scholarship, however, continues to expand the range of contexts through which we read Milton beyond Christian Europe, unearthing the vitality and resonance of the Miltonic text within religious and political debates across borders, through time and in multiple languages. The Islamic world has begun to receive deserved recognition as one such global site of this cultural energy. The publication of complete translations of Paradise Lost into Arabic has stimulated fresh critical explorations from a multiplicity of perspectives: historicist, comparative and theological. Attention to spatially and religiously diverse influences and reception contexts offers new avenues of approach into masterpieces including Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Areopagitica, as well as into the cultural forces these texts represent, reimagine and contest. By exploring how Milton, Islam and the Middle East address and implicate one another, this collection asks how, why and where Milton matters. This book was originally published as a special issue of English Studies.
John Milton (1608-1674) was arguably one of the best-read persons of his epoch. Miltonâ¿¿s commonplace book reveals that in addition to the thoroughly humanistic education that he received at Trinity College Cambridge (1625-1632), he also conducted an extensively broad reading program of his own immediately after concluding his university studies which included forays into nearly every branch of learning in a period that he affectionately referred to as his â¿¿studious retirementâ¿¿ (1632-38). For over 400 years, many literary critics have declared this monumental work, Paradise Lost, to be the greatest poem in the English language. Dr. Stallard contends that a full understanding of the Bible as the poemâ¿¿s primary inter-text is essential to appreciating the poem in its Puritan context. John Miltonâ¿¿s Bible is lavishly annotated with Biblical references that demonstrates that Milton was mining a wide variety of translations including the 1540 Great Bible, the 1560 Geneva Bible, the Bishops Bible of 1568, the Douay-Rheims of 1582, and the revised Authorized Version of 1612. This Biblically annotated edition of Paradise Lost will be useful to all scholars and students of Milton alike. That a lack of familiarity with the Bible should discourage students of English literature from reading the pinnacle achievement of one of the finest poets and minds in the English language is both sad and avoidable. This edition makes Milton more accessible, comprehensible, and enjoyable for everyone.
This volume of essays reconfigures the reception history of Milton and his works by bringing to the fore women reading, writing, and rewriting Milton, bringing together in conversation a range of voices from diverse historical, cultural, religious, and social contexts across the globe and through the centuries. The book encompasses a rich range of different literary genres, artistic media, and academic disciplines and draws on the research of established Milton scholars and new Miltonists. Like the female authors and artists whom they explore, the contributors take up a variety of standpoints. As well as revisiting the work of established figures, the volume brings new female creative artists, new subjects, and new approaches to the study of Milton.
At the centre of John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) is a radical commitment to divine and human freedom. This study situates Paradise Lost within the context of post-Reformation theological controversy, and pursues the theological portrayal of freedom as it unfolds throughout the poem. The study identifies and explores the ways in which Milton is both continuous and discontinuous with the major post-Reformation traditions in his depiction of predestination, creation, free will, sin, and conversion. Milton's deep commitment to freedom is shown to underlie his appropriation and creative transformation of a wide range of existing theological concepts.
The New Milton Criticism seeks to emphasize ambivalence and discontinuity in Milton's work and interrogate the assumptions and certainties in previous Milton scholarship. Contributors to the volume move Milton's open-ended poetics to the centre of Milton studies by showing how analysing irresolvable questions – religious, philosophical and literary critical – transforms interpretation and enriches appreciation of his work. The New Milton Criticism encourages scholars to embrace uncertainties in his writings rather than attempt to explain them away. Twelve critics from a range of countries, approaches and methodologies explore these questions in these new readings of Paradise Lost and other works. Sure to become a focus of debate and controversy in the field, this volume is a truly original contribution to early modern studies.