Essays on Milton’s developing ideas on liberty, and his republicanism, as expressed in his writings over his lifetime.
In his
Second Defence of the English People (1654), reflecting on his career as a prose writer, prior to embarking on the composition of
Paradise Lost, John Milton identified ‘three varieties of liberty without which civilized life is scarcely possible, namely ecclesiastical liberty, domestic or personal liberty, and civil liberty’. In retrospect he was able to find in his earlier writings a systematic exposition of the grounds of freedom, and a commitment to expanding its domain through publication and polemic. Taking initiative from both the history of political thought and historicist aesthetics, the essays in this collection (which derive from the International Milton symposium at York) consider the conditions of liberty in Milton’s writings, and the contested development of his republicanism, through his career as a civil servant and prose writer, through his great poems, to his posthumous reputation and the appropriation of his works; and they extend laterally to typologies of liberty, the realm of law, prosody, and religious faith and persecution.Winner of the 2002 Irene Samuel Prize for best composite work on Milton.
Table of Content
John Milton and the Politics of Slavery – Quentin Skinner
Milton before ‘Lycidas’ – Thomas Corns
Prosody and Liberty in Milton and Marvell – John Creaser
‘In These Western Parts of the Empire’: Milton and Roman Law – Martin Dzelzainis
The King is a Thing – Joad Raymond
‘in time of warre … our
Language is all corrupt with military
Tearms’: The Politics of Martial Metaphors in Post-Regicide England Post-Regicide England – Christopher Orchard
Alexander More Reads Milton: Self-Representation and Anxiety in Milton’s Defences – Stephen Fallon
Stylometry and the Provenance of
De doctrina christiana – John Rumrich
The Figure and the Ground: Samson as a Hero of London Nonconformity, 1662-1667 – Janel Mueller
The Publication of the King’s Privacy:
Paradise Regained and
Of True Religion in Restoration England – Katsuhiro Engetsu
‘To try, and teach the erring Soul’: Milton’s Last Seven Years – Barbara Lewalski
Pandemonic Panoramas: Surveying Milton’s ‘vain empires’ in the Long Eighteenth Century – Anne-Julia Zwierlein
About the author
GRAHAM PARRY is Professor of English and Related Literature at University of York, York, UK.
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