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This book demonstrates that if we treat sixteenth- and seventeenth-century erotic literature as part of English political history, both fields of study will look rather different. This important new book traces some surprising implications of two early modern commonplaces: first, that love is the basis of political consent and obedience, and second, that suffering is an intrinsic part of love. Rather than dismiss such commonplaces as mere convention, the book uncovers the political import of early modern literature’s fascination with erotic violence. Focusing on representations of masochism, sexual assault, and cross-gendered identification, the book re-examines the work of politically active writers from Philip Sidney to John Milton. It argues that political allegiance and consent appear far less conscious and deliberate than traditional historical narratives allow when Sidney depicts abjection as a source of both moral authority and sexual arousal; when Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare make it hard to distinguish between rape and seduction; when Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish depict women who adore treacherous or abusive lovers; when court masques stress the pleasures of enslavement; or when Milton insists that even Edenic marriage is hopelessly pervaded by aggression and self-loathing. The book shows that this literature constitutes an alternate tradition of political theory that acknowledges the irrational and perverse components of power and thereby disrupts more conventional accounts of politics as driven by self-interest, false consciousness, or brute force.

Cedric C. Brown combines the study of literature and social history in order to recognize the immense importance of friendship bonds to early modern society. Drawing on new archival research, he acknowledges a wide range of types of friendship, from the intimate to the obviously instrumental, and sees these practices as often co-terminous with gift exchange. Failure to recognize the interconnected range of a friendship spectrum has hitherto limited the adequacy of some modern studies of friendship, often weighted towards the intimate or gender-related issues. This book focuses both on friendships represented in imaginative works and on lived friendships in many textual and material forms, in an attempt to recognize cultural environments and functions. In order to provide depth and coherence, case histories have been selected from the middle and later parts of the seventeenth century. Nevertheless many kinds of bond are recognized, as between patron and client, mentor and pupil, within the family, within marriage, in courtship, or according to fashionable refined friendship theory. Both humanist and religious value systems are registered, and friendships are configured in cross-gendered and same-sex relationships. Theories of friendship are also included. Apart from written documents, the range of ‘texts’ extends to keepsakes, pictures, memorials, and monuments. Figures discussed at length include Henry More and the Finch/Conway family, John Evelyn, Jeremy Taylor, Elizabeth Carey/Mordaunt, John Milton, Charles Diodati, Cyriac Skinner, Dorothy Osborne/Temple, William Temple, Lord Arlington, Sir Orlando Bridgeman, and Katherine Philips and her circle, especially Anne Owen/Trevor and Sir Charles Cotterell.

This book takes a fresh approach to the literary biography of the two great poets of the Puritan Revolution, John Milton and Andrew Marvell. The book reconstructs the political contexts within which Milton and Marvell wrote, and reassesses their writings against the background of volatile and dramatic changes of public mood and circumstance. Two figures are shown to have been prominent in their minds. First there is Oliver Cromwell, on whose character and decisions the future of the Puritan Revolution and of the nation rested, and whose ascent the two writers traced and assessed, in both cases with an acute ambivalence. The second is Marchamont Nedham, the pioneering journalist of the civil wars, a close friend of Milton and a man whose writings prove to be intimately linked to Marvell's. The high achievements of Milton and Marvell are shown to belong to a world of pressing political debate, which Nedham's ephemeral publications helped to shape. The book follows Marvell's transition from royalism to Cromwellianism. In Milton's case the profound effect on his outlook brought by the execution of King Charles I in 1649; his difficult and disillusioning relationship with the successive regimes of the Interregnum; and his attempt to come to terms, in his immortal poetry of the Restoration, with the failure of Puritan rule.

This book offers a comprehensive reassessment of Milton's poetic oeuvre in light of the literary and conceptual problem posed by Milton's sustained attempt to put into words that which is unsayable and beyond representation. The struggle with the ineffability of sacred or transcendental subject matter in many ways defines Milton's triumphs as a poet, especially in Paradise Lost, and goes to the heart of the central critical debates to engage his readers over the centuries and decades. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this study sheds fresh light on many of these debates by situating Milton's poetics of ineffability in the context of the intellectual cross-currents of Renaissance humanism and Protestant theology. The book plots an ongoing narrative in Milton's poetry about silence and ineffable mystery, which forms the intellectual framework within which Milton continually shapes and reshapes his poetic vision of the created universe and the elect man's singular place within it. From the free paraphrase of Psalm 114 to Paradise Regained, the presence of the ineffable insinuates itself into Milton's poetry as both the catalyst and check for his poetic creativity, where the fear of silence and ineffable mystery on the one hand, and the yearning to lose himself and his readers in unspeakable rapture on the other, becomes a struggle for poetic self-determination and, finally, redemption.

This book presents an account of the provenance of De Doctrina Christiana, with a history of the manuscript, a reconstruction of the way it was assembled and revised, and an assessment of its place in the interpretation of other works by John Milton. It resolves issues relating to its place in Milton's canon, thus concluding a controversy that has recently been central to Milton studies.

Who are ‘the people’ in Milton’s writing? They figure prominently in his texts from early youth to late maturity, in his poetry and in his prose works; they are invoked as the sovereign power in the state and have the right to overthrow tyrants; they are also, as God’s chosen people, the guardians of the true Protestant path against those who would corrupt or destroy the Reformation. They are entrusted with the preservation of liberty in both the secular and the spiritual spheres. And yet Milton is uncomfortably aware that the people are rarely sufficiently moral, pure, intelligent, or energetic to discharge those responsibilities which his political theory and his theology would place upon them. When given the freedom to choose, they too often prefer servitude to freedom. This book traces the twists and turns of Milton’s terminology and rhetoric across the whole range of his writings, in verse and prose, as he grapples with the problem that the people have a calling to which they seem not to be adequate. Indeed, they are often referred to not as ‘the people’ but as ‘the vulgar’, as well as ‘the rude multitude’, ‘the rabble’, and even as ‘scum’. Increasingly his rhetoric imagines that liberty or salvation may lie not with the people but in the hands of a small group or even an individual. An additional thread which runs through this discussion is Milton’s own self-image: as he takes responsibility for defining the vocation of the people, and for analysing the causes of their defection from that high calling, his own role comes under scrutiny both from himself and from his enemies.

Literary criticism often treats Milton as if he were the last of the Renaissance poets or a visionary prophet who remained misunderstood until he was read by the Romantics. This collection sets Milton in the context of his contemporaries and immediate heirs. Its chapters demonstrate that some early eighteenth-century critics were finer readers of Milton than even his most perceptive Romantic and twentieth-century readers. The translations, editions, and commentaries produced by early eighteenth century men of letters emerge as the seedbed of modern criticism. And the term ‘neoclassical’ is itself unmasked as an inadequate characterization of discursive practices that could define a Miltonic sublime distinct from that of Edmund Burke’s, even as they supported and described all the varieties of parody and domestication found in the mock epic and the novel. These chapters cover a range of topics—from Milton’s early editors to his first theatrical producers; from Miltonic similes in Pope’s Iliad to Miltonic echoes in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; from marriage, to slavery, to republicanism, to the heresy of Arianism. What they share in common is a conviction that the early eighteenth century understood Milton and that the Long Restoration cannot be understood without him.

Milton in Translation is an unprecedented collaboration that demonstrates the breadth of John Milton’s international reception from the seventeenth century through today. The volume presents new essays on the translation of Milton’s works written by an international roster of experts. Chapters are grouped geographically but also, by and large, chronologically. The chapters on the twenty-three individual languages are framed by an introduction and two major chapters on the global reach and the aural nature of Milton’s poetry at the beginning, and an epilogue at the end: ‘Part II: Influential Translations’ (English, Latin, German, French); ‘Part III: Western European and Latin American Translations’ (Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, Icelandic, Italian, Portuguese, European Spanish, Latin American Spanish), ‘Part IV: Central and Eastern European Translations’ (Bulgarian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Serbian/Montenegrin, Serbo-Croatian languages), ‘Part V: Middle Eastern Translations’ (Arabic, Hebrew, Persian), and ‘Part VI: East Asian Translations’ (Chinese, Japanese, Korean).

Milton's Paradise Lost is a poem about angels. It is told by and of angels; it relies upon their conflicts, communications, and miscommunications. They are the creatures of Milton's narrative, through which he sets the Fall of humankind against a cosmic background. Milton's angels are real beings, and the stories he tells about them rely on his understanding of what they were and how they acted. While he was unique in his imaginative rendering of angels, he was not alone in writing about them. Several early modern English poets wrote epics that explore the actions of and grounds of knowledge about angels. Angels were intimately linked to theories of representation, and theology could be a creative force. Natural philosophers and theologians too found it interesting or necessary to explore angel doctrine. Angels did not disappear in Reformation theology: though centuries of Catholic traditions were stripped away, Protestants used them in inventive ways, adapting tradition to new doctrines and to shifting perceptions of the world. Angels continued to inhabit all kinds of writing, and shape the experience and understanding of the world. This book explores the fate of angels in Reformation Britain, and shows how and why Paradise Lost is a poem about angels that is both shockingly literal and sublimely imaginative.

In the realm of Milton scholarship there have been extensive studies of Milton's representations of God, Satan, the angels, Adam and Eve, and Chaos, among others. This book provides the first comprehensive book-length analysis of the nature and significance of the Son of God in Milton's poetry and theology. The book engages with biblical and Patristic theology, Reformation and post-Reformation thought, and the original Latin of the treatise De Doctrina Christiana, to argue for a radical reassessment of Milton's doctrine of the atonement and its importance for understanding Milton's poetics. In the footsteps of Dennis Danielson's Milton's Good God, this study responds to William Empson's celebrated portrayal of Milton's God as a deity invoking dread and awe, and instead locates the ultimately affirming presence of mercy, grace, and charity in Milton's epic vision. Challenging the attribution of an Arian or Socinian model to Milton's conception of the Son, this interdisciplinary interpretation marshals theological, philological, philosophical, and literary-critical methods to establish, for the first time, not only the centrality of the Son and his salvific office for Milton's oeuvre, but also the variety of ways in which the Son's restorative influence is mediated through the scenes, characters, actions, and utterances of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain'd. From the allegorical sites Satan encounters as he voyages through the cosmos, to Eve's first taste of the Forbidden Fruit, to the incarnate Son's perilous situation poised atop the Temple pinnacle, this book illustrates how a redemptive poetics upholds Milton's proclaimed purpose to assert eternal providence and justify God's ways.

After a short account of Milton's life as a writer, this book guides us through Milton's poetry and polemical prose. What do Milton's words look like when we acknowledge their personal and political history; when we track them from text to text; when we consider both the big learned words and the very small ones; when we consider the frequency and uniqueness of words; when we tackle these issues in the Latin texts; when we consider the possibility that certain words gain or lose value for Milton through his life, or become keywords to a particular text; when we reconsider the question of Milton's coinages? This book explains the shape of Milton's writing career and the life-long tension between his literary ambitions and the pressures of political circumstances. The effect on his vocabulary of his campaign to reform his country's church government and its divorce laws was galvanic. He discovered that he enjoyed verbal conflict and he developed a new set of verbal resources. He never got over the experience of writing the divorce tracts. It was still on his mind when he revised his Latin treatise on theology, De Doctrina Christiana. When he was called upon to justify the Long Parliament's execution of Charles I, it forced him to come to terms with the political keywords of his generation. Milton's poetry and prose have been segregated for so long that we have not tended to track his favourite political words into the great poems, where they change their valence.

The experimental and diverse writings of John Milton's early career offer tantalizing evidence of a precocious and steadily ripening author, but critical approaches that contend his juvenilia is self‐consciously designed to chronicle his artistic progression impose an order on work that results more often than not from immediate occasions. In filling a scholarly void regarding Milton's early Latin and English writing (there has been no volume exclusively focused on his writing of the 1620s, 1630s, and the first years of the 1640s), the contributors to this book largely reject the idea of a linear development in favour of achievement of various kinds, unequal in merit, and not predicated upon maturation over time. The literary output for this period has diverse sources—religious holidays; family celebrations; grammar school exercises and university requirements; the deaths of family members, ministers, university officials, and personal friends; aristocratic celebrations and commissions. Such occasionality challenges the argument for the young Milton's uniform progress insofar as this writing includes both Lycidas, one of the most celebrated elegies ever written in English, and The Passion, an unfinished poem declared by its author to involve a subject beyond his grasp. Understanding the accomplishments of Milton's early career requires a grasp of and an attention to the historical, religious, linguistic, educational, and political contexts informing and inspiring creation. This volume features a group of established and emerging scholars whose collective efforts aim to uncover not only Milton's diversity but the degrees of his success.