The seventeenth century saw some of the most important jurisprudential changes in England's history, yet the period has been largely overlooked in the rich field of literature and law. Helping to fill this gap, The Legal Epic is the first book to situate the great poet and polemicist John Milton at the center of late seventeenth-century legal history.

Alison A. Chapman argues that Milton's Paradise Lost sits at the apex of the early modern period's long fascination with law and judicial processes. Milton's world saw law and religion as linked disciplines and thought...