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...