All too often, childbirth in early modern England was associated with fear, suffering and death, and this melancholy preoccupation weighed heavily on the seventeenth-century mind. This landmark study examines John Milton's life and work, uncovering evidence of the poet's engagement with maternal mortality and the dilemmas it presented. Drawing on both literary scholarship and historical research, Louis Schwartz provides important readings of Milton's poetry, including Paradise Lost, as well as a wide-ranging survey of the medical practices and religious beliefs that surrounded the perils of childbirth. The reader is granted a richer understanding of how seventeenth-century society struggled to come to terms with its fears, and how one of its most important poets gave voice to that struggle.
This edited volume explores the combination of cultural phenomena that have established and canonized the work of John Milton in a global context, from interlingual translations to representations of Milton's work in verbal media, painting, stained glass, dance, opera, and symphony.
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.
This book joins a growing trend toward transnational literary studies and revives a venerable tradition of Anglo-Italian scholarship centering on John Milton. Correcting misperceptions that have diminished the international dimensions of his life and work, it broadly surveys Milton’s Italianate studies, travels, poetics, politics, and religious convictions. While his debts to Machiavelli and other classical republicans are often noted, few contemporary critics have explored the Italian sources of his anti-papal, anti-episcopal, and anti-formalist religious outlook. Relying on Milton’s own testimony, this book explores its roots in Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and that great "Venetian enemy of the pope," Paolo Sarpi, thereby correcting a recent tendency to make native English contexts dominate his development. This tendency is partly due to a mistaken belief that Italy was in steep decline during and after Milton’s travels of 1638-1639, the period immediately before he produced his prose critiques of the English Church, its canon law, and its censorship. Yet these were also fundamentally "Italian" issues that he skillfully adapted to meet contemporary English needs, a practice enabled by his extraordinarily positive experience of the Italian language, cities, academies, and music, the latter of which ultimately influenced Milton’s "operatic" drama, Samson Agonistes. Besides republicanism and theology (radical doctrines of free grace and free will), equally strong influences treated here include Italian Neoplatonism, cosmology, and romance epic. By making these traditions his own, Milton became what John Steadman once described as an "Italianate Englishman" whose classical "literary tastes and critical orientation...were...to a considerable extent" molded by Italian critics (1976), a view that is fully credited and updated here.
Recent critical conversation has described John Milton’s major works as sites of uncertainty, irreconcilability, or even confusion—as texts that actually reflect radical incoherence and openness. These newer critical voices posit, moreover, that traditional critics must strain to find coherence and authorial control in Milton’s poetry. Richard DuRocher and Margaret Thickstun, together with an esteemed group of Milton scholars from a wide range of critical and theoretical backgrounds, respond to this challenge. While accepting the presence of uncertainty and welcoming the multiple perspectives that Milton builds into his works, this volume offers a variety of nuanced approaches to Milton’s texts. As these eleven essays demonstrate, Milton’s own acts of interpretation compel readers to reflect not only on the rival hermeneutics they find within his works but also on their own hermeneutic principles and choices—an interpretive complexity that is integral to his poetry’s enduring appeal. Thus, each of the contributors takes up the problem of this interpretive dilemma in some way: several explore Milton’s own engagement with the texts of Scripture and the classics; some examine the ways in which Milton represents the process of interpretation in his narrative poems; and still others are intrigued by the challenges that Milton’s works present for the reader’s own interpretive skills. Milton’s Rival Hermeneutics, in responding directly to the “incertitude critics” of Milton, will be of interest to those on all sides of this debate and will certainly redirect the ongoing conversation.
The National Children's Study (NCS) is planned to be the largest long-term study of environmental and genetic effects on children's health ever conducted in the United States. It proposes to examine the effects of environmental influences on the health and development of approximately 100,000 children across the United States, following them from before birth until age 21. By archiving all of the data collected, the NCS is intended to provide a valuable resource for analyses conducted many years into the future. This book evaluates the research plan for the NCS, by assessing the scientific rigor of the study and the extent to which it is being carried out with methods, measures, and collection of data and specimens to maximize the scientific yield of the study. The book concludes that if the NCS is conducted as proposed, the database derived from the study should be valuable for investigating hypotheses described in the research plan as well as additional hypotheses that will evolve. Nevertheless, there are important weaknesses and shortcomings in the research plan that diminish the study's expected value below what it might be.
Readers will no doubt discern points of contiguity among the essays in this volume. For example, several essays investigate sources - literary, pictorial, architectural - and Milton's use of those sources in his poetry. Others view Milton from the perspective of his age and seventeenth-century contemporaries such as Michael Drayton and Aemelia Lanyer.
In Milton and Ecology, Ken Hiltner engages with literary, theoretical, and historic approaches to explore the ideological underpinnings of our current environmental crisis. Focusing on Milton's rejection of dualistic theology, metaphysical philosophy, and early-modern subjectivism, Hiltner argues that Milton anticipates certain essential modern ecological arguments. Even more remarkable is that Milton was able to integrate these arguments with biblical sources so seamlessly that his interpretative 'Green' reading of scripture has for over three centuries been entirely plausible. This study considers how Milton, from the earliest edition of the Poems, not only sought to tell the story of how through humanity's folly Paradise on earth was lost, but also sought to tell how it might be regained. This intriguing study will be of interest to eco-critics and Milton specialists alike.
