It has been the fate of Milton, the most Hebraic of the great English poets, to have been interpreted in this century largely by those inhospitable to his Hebraism. To remedy this lack of balance, Jason Rosenblatt reveals Milton's epic representations of paradise and the fallen world to be the supreme coordinates of an interpretive struggle, in which Jewish beliefs that the Hebrew Bible was eternally authoritative Torah were set against the Christian view that it was a temporary law superseded by the New Testament. Arguing that the Milton of the 1643-1645 prose tracts saw the Hebrew Bible from the Jewish perspective, Rosenblatt shows that these tracts are the principal doctrinal matrix of the middle books of Paradise Lost, which present the Hebrew Bible and Adam and Eve as self-sufficient entities. Rosenblatt acknowledges that later in Paradise Lost, after the fall, a Pauline hermeneutic reduces the Hebrew Bible to a captive text and Adam and Eve to shadowy types. But Milton's shift to a radically Pauline ethos at that point does not annul the Hebraism of the earlier part of the work. If Milton resembles Paul, it is not least because his thought could attain harmonies only through dialectic. Milton's poetry derives much of its power from deep internal struggles over the value and meaning of law, grace, charity, Christian liberty, and the relationships among natural law, the Mosaic law, and the gospel.
It has been the fate of Milton, the most Hebraic of the great English poets, to have been interpreted in this century largely by those inhospitable to his Hebraism. To remedy this lack of balance, Jason Rosenblatt reveals Milton's epic representations of paradise and the fallen world to be the supreme coordinates of an interpretive struggle, in which Jewish beliefs that the Hebrew Bible was eternally authoritative Torah were set against the Christian view that it was a temporary law superseded by the New Testament. Arguing that the Milton of the 1643-1645 prose tracts saw the Hebrew Bible from the Jewish perspective, Rosenblatt shows that these tracts are the principal doctrinal matrix of the middle books of "Paradise Lost," which present the Hebrew Bible and Adam and Eve as self-sufficient entities. Rosenblatt acknowledges that later in "Paradise Lost," after the fall, a Pauline hermeneutic reduces the Hebrew Bible to a captive text and Adam and Eve to shadowy types. But Milton's shift to a radically Pauline ethos at that point does not annul the Hebraism of the earlier part of the work. If Milton resembles Paul, it is not least because his thought could attain harmonies only through dialectic. Milton's poetry derives much of its power from deep internal struggles over the value and meaning of law, grace, charity, Christian liberty, and the relationships among natural law, the Mosaic law, and the gospel.
In Illuminating Moses: A History of Reception, readers discover the roles of Moses from the Exodus to the Renaissance--law-giver, prophet, writer--and their impact on Jewish and Christian cultures as seen in the Hebrew Bible, Patristic writings, Catholic liturgy, Jewish philosophy and midrashim, Anglo-Saxon literature, Scholastics and Thomas Aquinas, Middle English literature, and the Renaissance. Contributors are Jane Beal, Robert D. Miller II, Tawny Holm, Christopher A. Hall, Luciana Cuppo-Csaki, Haim Kreisel, Rachel S. Mikva, Devorah Schoenfeld, Gernot Wieland, Deborah Goodwin, Franklin T. Harkins, Gail Ivy Berlin, and Brett Foster.
That the writings of John Milton continue to provoke study and analysis centuries after his lifetime speaks no doubt to his literary greatness but also to the many ways in which his art both engaged and transcended the political and theological tensions of his age. In Dominion Undeserved, Eric B. Song offers a brilliant reading of Milton’s major writings, finding in them a fundamental impasse that explains their creative power. According to Song, a divided view of creation governs Milton’s related systems of cosmology, theology, art, and history. For Milton, any coherent entity—a nation, a poem, or even the new world—must be carved out of and guarded against an original unruliness. Despite being sanctioned by God, however, this agonistic mode of creation proves ineffective because it continues to manifest internal rifts that it can never fully overcome. This dilemma is especially pronounced in Milton’s later writings, including Paradise Lost, where all forms of creativity must strive against the fact that chaos precedes order and that disruptive forces will continue to reemerge, seemingly without end. Song explores the many ways in which Milton transforms an intractable problem into the grounds for incisive commentary and politically charged artistry. This argument brings into focus topics ranging from Milton’s recurring allusions to the Eastern Tartars, the way Milton engages with country house poetry and colonialist discourses in Paradise Lost, and the lasting relevance of Anglo-Irish affairs for his late writings. Song concludes with a new reading of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in which he shows how Milton’s integration of conflicting elements forms the heart of his literary archive and confers urgency upon his message even as it reaches its future readers.
In England, the late seventeenth century was a period of major crises in science, politics, and economics. Confronted by a public that seemed to be sunk in barbarism and violence, English writers including John Milton, John Dryden, and Aphra Behn imagined serious literature as an instrument for change. In Lines of Equity, Elliott Visconsi reveals how these writers fictionalized the original utterance of laws, the foundation of states, and the many vivid contemporary transitions from archaic savagery to civil modernity. In doing so, they considered the nature of government, the extent of the rule of law, and the duties of sovereign and subject. They asked their audience to think like kings and judges: through the literary education of the individual conscience, the barbarous tendencies of the English people might be effectively banished. Visconsi calls this fictionalizing program "imaginative originalism," and demonstrates the often unintended consequences of this literary enterprise. By inviting the English people to practice equity as a habit of thought, a work such as Milton's Paradise Lost helped bring into being a mode of individual conduct—the rights-bearing deliberative subject—at the heart of political liberalism. Visconsi offers an original view of this transitional moment that will appeal to anyone interested in the cultural history of law and citizenship, the idea of legal origins in the early modern period, and the literary history of later Stuart England.
""This is a book not only for Milton scholars but for academics writing in the recently active field of literature and Midrash (and literature and the Bible). There are deep reserves of learning behind it; unlike Saurat, Fletcher, and Baldwin, Dr. Werman reads the Hebrew and Aramaic sources expertly. She provides a wealth of new information which less scholarly academics will probably exploit.""--Jason P. Rosenblatt, Professor of English, Georgetown University ""Werman's study corrects much that has been written about Milton's Hebraism and adds significant new information. The appendix is enormously valuable and will assist future scholars in pursuing more specifically detailed study of Milton's use of midrash.""--James H. Sims, Distinguished Professor of English, The University of Southern Mississippi The use of Jewish nonbiblical sources (Midrash) in Paradise Lost has never been so thoroughly examined as in this volume, in which Golda S. Werman combines esoteric scholarship with interesting facts and insightful commentary to answer questions that have perplexed literary scholars for decades. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when literary scholars first discovered the midrashic elements in Paradise Lost, one school of critics responded with skepticism and disbelief--why, they asked, would a Puritan poet dig through ancient Hebrew and Aramaic texts for material to be used in a Christian epic on the fall of man? They insisted that Milton could not read difficult midrashic texts and that everything not taken from Christian or classical sources is a product of the poet's own rich imagination. Another school regarded Milton's use of Midrash as proof of his profound knowledge of Talmud, Midrash, the Zohar, and other Hebrew/Aramaic texts. In Milton and Midrash, Werman effectively demonstrates that both camps err: Milton did indeed use midrashic sources, but he did not read the difficult midrashic texts in the original languages. She shows, in a detailed analysis of the nonbiblical Judaic materials included in the prose works, that Milton's limited understanding of Midrash rules out any possibility of his having read the sources in the original. Yet her investigation revealed that Milton uses midrashim on almost every page of the epic, and that many of these midrashim come from the eighth-century Midrash Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer. Further research showed that this Midrash had been translated into Latin in 1644, just before Milton began Paradise Lost. At last the puzzle was solved--Milton's midrashic materials were taken from translations made by Christian Hebraists. Indeed, Milton had many Latin translations by Christian Hebraists of midrashic works available to him, and here Werman surveys the contemporary intellectual climate in which these translations flourished. These findings have revolutionized Milton scholarship, correcting much that has been written about the poet's Hebraism. All future source studies of the poem will make use of the book's appendix, which provides an invaluable line-by-line gloss of Paradise Lost that matches passages from the epic with their analogues in the midrashic literature. Golda S. Werman was educated in the United States and now lives in Jerusalem, Israel. Her other field of interest is Yiddish, and she has published several important English translations of Yiddish literature, including most recently S. Ansky's The Dybbuk and Other Writings.
Providing a close examination of Milton's wide-ranging prose and poetry at each stage of his life, Barbara Lewalski reveals a rather different Milton from that in earlier accounts. Provides a close analysis of each of Milton's prose and poetry works. Reveals how Milton was the first writer to self consciously construct himself as an 'author'. Focuses on the development of Milton's ideas and his art.
John Milton is widely known as the poet of liberty and freedom. But his commitment to justice has been often overlooked. As Alison A. Chapman shows, Milton’s many prose works are saturated in legal ways of thinking, and he also actively shifts between citing Roman, common, and ecclesiastical law to best suit his purpose in any given text. This book provides literary scholars with a working knowledge of the multiple, jostling, real-world legal systems in conflict in seventeenth-century England and brings to light Milton’s use of the various legal systems and vocabularies of the time—natural versus positive law, for example—and the differences between them. Surveying Milton’s early pamphlets, divorce tracts, late political tracts, and major prose works in comparison with the writings and cases of some of Milton’s contemporaries—including George Herbert, John Donne, Ben Jonson, and John Bunyan—Chapman reveals the variety and nuance in Milton’s juridical toolkit and his subtle use of competing legal traditions in pursuit of justice.
