“To due conversation accessible”: or, The Problem of Courtship in Milton's Divorce Tracts and Paradise Lost

2014 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lara Dodds
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Divorce Tracts

Milton and Transcendent Authorship

Making Milton ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 17-30
Author(s):  
Stephen B. Dobranski
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Spiritual Life ◽  
Divorce Tracts ◽  
Young Writer ◽  
Material Form

This chapter examines Milton’s notion and practice of authorship over the first half of his career. Beginning with Sonnet 8 and some of Milton’s other early poems—‘On Shakespeare’, Mansus, ‘The Passion’, and Lycidas—the chapter shows how as a young writer he embraced an idealistic notion of poetry’s preservative power but always in terms of his texts’ material transmission. Two crucial experiences helped to develop Milton’s thinking about his authorship: the outrage prompted by his divorce tracts underscored his works’ vulnerability, while the printing of his Poems in 1645 drove home the need for collaboration if his writing were to survive. All of Milton’s early works illustrate how his concept of authorship anticipates the monist philosophy that will animate Paradise Lost. He understood early on that his writing was both letter and spirit: his words needed an appropriate material form if they were to have a lasting spiritual life.

Milton's Attitude Towards Women in the History of Britain

PMLA ◽  
1947 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 977-983
Author(s):  
Edward S. Le Comte
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Source Book ◽  
Samson Agonistes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Divorce Tracts ◽  
The Voice

When all the evidence has been marshalled, Milton's views on the position of women are both consistent and plain, whatever the astonishing obfuscations of many of his critics, assailants and apologists alike. Each side in the old controversy might at least have known better what they were attacking or defending if they had not ignored a major source-book for Milton's attitude, the History of Britain. There is reason to believe that Milton was here giving vent to a passing mood, but it was sharp and arrogant while it lasted. Herein we have a contrast with the evidence usually cited. Just preceding the composition of the early books of the History had come the divorce tracts, where the author made an heroic effort at impersonality, and perhaps only his images betray him; it would take a very sensitive critic to analyze them. Years later came Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, where, as Professor Allan H. Gilbert has warned,1 the interpreter must tread lightly, for the poet in the angry outbursts of Adam and of Samson was not ostensibly speaking in his own person but rather writing as a dramatist. But in the History of Britain the voice that speaks out on the inferiority and proper subjection of women is at times unmistakably Milton's own. To heap up discredit upon what John Knox called “the monstrous regiment of women” he will go out of his way, whether by parenthetical remark, or by free alteration of his sources, or, in one case, by sheer misinterpretation of the original Latin.

Leaving Eden

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Quint
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Church

This concluding chapter examines the structure of the composite books 11 and 12, in which the prophesied destruction of Eden corresponds, antithetically, to the building of Pandaemonium at the beginning of Paradise Lost in book 1. After the Fall, Eden might become a temple, oracle site, a grove of pagan rites, goal of pilgrimage—it has already, at the moment that Satan invades it in book 4, been compared to the sheepfold of the Church, prey to thieves, a Church too rich to escape corruption. In books that predict the rise of empires, God dissociates his cult from power and wealth, closing down and eventually washing away Eden, lest it become another Pandaemonium—a haunt of foul spirits.

Ulysses and the Devils: The Unity of Book 2

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Quint
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Trojan War

This chapter focuses on book 2 of Paradise Lost. In book 2, Milton continues the story of the demilitarization of the fallen angels and of his epic more generally when he bases all of its action around the figure of Ulysses, the hero of eloquence and fraud, whose own epic comes in the aftermath of the Trojan War. The chapter demonstrates that the Odyssey, imitated and parodied in Satan's voyage through Chaos to God's newly created universe in the book's last section, is just one of the classical stories about the career of Ulysses that Milton evokes as models for its different episodes. The various parts of book 2 are held together by this pattern of allusion, as well as by the Odyssean figures of Scylla and Charybdis, the emblem of bad choices, or of loss of choice itself.

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