This book takes a fresh look at John Milton's major poems⎯Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, and Paradise Regained⎯and a few of the minor ones in light of a new analysis of Milton's famous tracts on divorce. Luxon contends that Milton's work is best understood as part of a major cultural project in which Milton assumed a leading role⎯the redefinition of Protestant marriage as a heteroerotic version of classical friendship, originally a homoerotic cultural practice. Schooled in the humanist notion that man was created as a godlike being, Milton also believed that what marked...

"Neuer came Reformation in a Flood, / With such a heady currance," exclaims the Archbishop of Canterbury in Shakespeare's Henry V, describing the king's seemingly miraculous conversion from the reprobate prince he had been. This description must have seemed quite apt to Shakespeare's post-Reformation audience. Religious reform in early modern England, whether driven by individual experience or by institutional theology or politics, occurred as more of a deluge than as a clearly defined or steady voyage. And the English stage -- where drama revised, resisted, and reacted against Reformation...

How does soil, as an ecological element, shape culture? With the sixteenth-century shift in England from an agrarian economy to a trade economy, what changes do we see in representations of soil as reflected in the language and stories during that time? This collection brings focused scholarly attention to conceptions of soil in the early modern period, both as a symbol and as a feature of the physical world, aiming to correct faulty assumptions that cloud our understanding of early modern ecological thought: that natural resources were then poorly understood and recklessly managed, and that...

Though renowned in her own time, noted Interregnum and Restoration poet Katherine Philips fell into relative obscurity within a few decades of her sudden death at age 32 and was soon relegated to the margins of the English canon. In recent decades, however, critics have begun to rediscover and recognize the importance of Philips's poems and translations. This first scholarly collection devoted solely to the poetry of Katherine Philips is an important milestone, not only in the continuing recovery of Philips's reputation, but in our understanding of her influence in the literary circles of the...

Winner of the John Donne Society Award for Distinguished Publication in Donne Studies (2016)

hough law and satire share essential elements -- both aim to correct individual vice, to promote justice, and to claim authority amid competing perspectives -- their commonality has gone largely unexplored by both legal theorists and literary critics. Gregory Kneidel, in this thoroughly original work, finds that just such an exploration leads to fascinating new insights for both fields of study. Reversing the more common association of satire with illegality, especially with libel, Kneidel...

Following the trial and execution of Charles I in 1649, the later seventeenth century witnessed an explosion of print culture in England, including an unprecedented boom in biographical writing. Andrea Walkden offers a case study examination of this fascinating trend, bringing together texts that generations of scholars have considered piecemeal and primarily as sources for their own research.

Private Lives Made Public: The Invention of Biography in Early Modern England contributes an incisive, fresh take on "life-writing"--a catch-all label that, in contemporary discourse, encompasses...

Throughout his poetry, as he explored how human beings could and should align their wills with God's, John Milton grappled with this reality: as we travel through this life, our paths fork and choices are made, and thus the eventual integration into the divine "all in all" described in Paradise Lost is always delayed or projected forward. In this relationship, Milton sees a generative tension between certainties--such as the premise that God exists and is good--and contingencies, those acts and experiences that are generated by the created world. As the essays in this volume argue, it is this...

In a major contribution to the burgeoning area of study that crosses between early modern texts and premodern cultures, Danila Sokolov argues for the necessity of reading the work of English Petrarchan writers in light of earlier medieval forms of poetic subjectivity. By doing just that, this book directly challenges one of the most enduring myths of contemporary criticism and shows that the many innovations associated with the poetry of Petarchism derive from medieval subjectivities that continue to inform modern ideas of selfhood and modernity more generally.

While the lines of division...

Bringing together eight original essays from leading and emerging Miltonists, this volume explores a second wave of critical thought about Milton's monist materialism, the view that all existence arises from a single substance or reality. Contributors examine sensory matters of fragrance and sound, the literary politics of walking and of sexual reproduction, the ontology of embodiment as human beings and angels, and the appropriation of Milton's materialism by both early Mormons in the nineteenth century and fringe figures such as gun enthusiasts in the twentieth. In so doing, they...

Examines Milton's identification with characters in Jesus's parables. Connects Milton's engagement with the parables to his self-representation throughout his poetry and prose.