Immortality and the Body in the Age of Milton
Immortality and the Body in the Age of Milton

Author: John Rumrich

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-03-01

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1108397166

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Seventeenth-century England teemed with speculation on body and its relation to soul. Descartes' dualist certainty was countered by materialisms, whether mechanist or vitalist. The most important and distinctive literary reflection of this ferment is John Milton's vitalist or animist materialism, which underwrites the cosmic worlds of Paradise Lost. In a time of philosophical upheaval and innovation, Milton and an unusual collection of fascinating and diverse contemporary writers, including John Donne, Margaret Cavendish, John Bunyan, and Hester Pulter, addressed the potency of the body, now viewed not as a drag on the immaterial soul or a site of embarrassment but as an occasion for heroic striving and a vehicle of transcendence. This collection addresses embodiment in relation to the immortal longings of early modern writers, variously abetted by the new science, print culture, and the Copernican upheaval of the heavens.

Milton’s Moving Bodies
Milton’s Moving Bodies

Author: Marissa Greenberg

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2024-09-15

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0810147416

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A collection of innovative examinations of embodiment in Milton’s oeuvre that challenge assumptions about disciplinary boundaries This volume brings unprecedented focus to the forms, spaces, and implications of embodied motion in Milton’s writing and its afterlives to explore how and why he privileges the body—human and textual—as a site of dynamic movement. The contributors bring a variety of lenses to Milton’s moving bodies: political history, kinematics, mathematics, cosmology, translation, illustration, anatomies of racialized and disabled bodies, and twenty-first-century pedagogies. From these wide-ranging vantage points, they consider anew Milton’s contributions to the histories of scientific development, global exploration and imperial expansion, migration and diaspora, and translation and adaptation in England, Europe, and the Americas, from the early modern period to today. Milton’s Moving Bodies draws together established and emerging scholars, offering fresh analyses of the poet’s legacy for multiple traditions within and beyond Milton studies.

Milton's Theological Process
Milton's Theological Process

Author: Jason A. Kerr

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-01-12

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0198875088

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This volume proposes a method for reading Milton's De Doctrina Christiana as an artifact of his process of theological thinking rather than as a repository of his doctrinal views. Jason A. Kerr argues that reading in this way involves attention to the complex material state of the manuscript along with Milton's varying modes of engagement with scripture and various theological interlocutors, and reveals that Milton's approach to theology underwent significant change in the course of his work on the treatise. Initially, Milton set out to use Ramist logic to organize scripture in a way that drew out its intrinsic doctrinal structure. This method had two unintended consequences: it drove Milton to an antitrinitarian understanding of the Son of God, and it obliged him to reflect on his own authority as an interpreter and to develop an ecclesiology capable of sifting divine truth from human error. Consequently, Milton's Theological Process explores the complex interplay between Milton's preconceived theological ideas and his willingness to change his mind as it develops through the layers of revision in the manuscript. Kerr concludes by considering Paradise Lost as a vehicle for Milton's further reflection on the foundations of theology--and by showing how even the epic presents challenges to the fruits of these reflections. Reading Milton theologically means more than working to ascertain his doctrinal views; it means attending critically to his messy process of evaluating and rethinking the doctrinal views to which his prior study had led him.

Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell
Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell

Author: Diane Kelsey McColley

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780754660484

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The focus of this study is the perception of nature in the language of poetry and the languages of natural philosophy, technology, theology, and global exploration, primarily in seventeenth century England. Its premise is that language and the perception of nature vitally affect each other and that seventeenth-century poets, primarily John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and Henry Vaughan, but also Margaret Cavendish, Thomas Traherne, Anne Finch, and others, responded to experimental proto-science and new technology in ways that we now call 'ecological' - concerned with watersheds and habitats and the lives of all creatures. It provides close readings of works by these poets in the contexts of natural history, philosophy, and theology as well as technology and land use, showing how they responded to what are currently considered ecological issues: deforestation, mining, air pollutionion, drainage of wetlands, destruction of habitats, the sentience and intelligence of animals, overbuilding, global commerce, the politics of land use, and relations between social justice and justice towards the other-than-human world. In this important book, Diane McColley demonstrates the language of poetry, the language of responsible science, and the language of moral and political philosophy all to be necessary parts of public discourse.

The Cambridge Companion to Milton
The Cambridge Companion to Milton

Author: Dennis Danielson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1999-07-22

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1107494184

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An accessible, helpful guide for any student of Milton, whether undergraduate or graduate, introducing readers to the scope of Milton's work, the richness of its historical relations, and the range of current approaches to it. This second edition contains several new and revised essays, reflecting increasing emphasis on Milton's politics, the social conditions of his authorship and the climate in which his works were published and received, a fresh sense of the importance of his early poems and Samson Agonistes, and the changes wrought by gender studies on the criticism of the previous decade. By contrast with other introductions to Milton, this Companion gathers an international team of scholars, whose informative, stimulating and often argumentative essays will provoke thought and discussion in and out of the classroom. The Companion's reading lists and extended bibliography offer readers the necessary tools for further informed exploration of Milton studies.

Locating Milton
Locating Milton

Author: Thomas Festa

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2021-11-16

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1949979733

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Locating Milton: Places and Perspectives collects nine previously unpublished essays that examine Milton’s works as the product of his unique intellectual experiences at home and abroad, while also tracing the ways in which those works themselves express the influence of his travel, his reading, and his political engagement. Following an interpretive introduction that seeks to locate Milton through his last surviving letter, the first group of essays examine how young Milton locates himself through his travels in Italy, how Milton’s early reading leads him to situate himself intellectually, and how the intellectual framework Milton generated remains pertinent to students and communities today. The second group calculates the impact of early modern mathematical and scientific models on Milton’s cosmology, demonstrating how Milton’s complex negotiations of such models give form and perspective to his greatest poetic works. The final group of essays locates Milton distinctly through his works’ global reception, ranging from the anonymous English poem Praeexistence, to Milton’s place in the “new world” and science fiction, to his presence as a figure inspiring political resistance in communist Hungary.