The Milton Encyclopedia 9780300183627

Table of contents :
Contents
List Of Illustrations
Preface
List Of Abbreviations
The Milton Encyclopedia
Bibliography
List Of Contributors

Citation preview

THE MILTON ENCYCLOPEDIA

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the Milton Encyclopedia EDITED BY

T H O M A S N. CORN S

New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the Louis Stern

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Memorial Fund. The Milton encyclopedia / edited by Thomas N. Corns. p. cm. Copyright © 2012 by Yale University. Summary: “A resource for the general reader, the student, All rights reserved. and the scholar alike that provides easy access to a wealth of This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, information to enhance the experience of reading the works including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying of John Milton”—Provided by publisher. permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Includes bibliographical references and index. Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

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ED I TOR - I N - C HI E F Thomas N. Corns Bangor University

ED I TOR I A L B OARD Sharon Achinstein St. Edmund Hall, Oxford

Gordon Campbell University of Leicester

Dennis Danielson University of British Columbia

Stephen M. Fallon University of Notre Dame

Roy Flannagan University of South Carolina, Beaufort

Marshall Grossman (deceased) University of Maryland

John K. Hale University of Otago

N. H. Keeble University of Stirling

Laura L. Knoppers Pennsylvania State University

Barbara K. Lewalski Harvard University

David Loewenstein University of Wisconsin, Madison

Diane Kelsey McColley Rutgers University

Annabel Patterson Yale University

John P. Rumrich University of Texas, Austin

Nigel Smith Princeton University

Nicholas von Maltzahn University of Ottawa

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Contents

List of Illustrations ix Preface xi List of Abbreviations xiii The Milton Encyclopedia 1 Bibliography 395 List of Contributors 405

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Illustrations

Article: William Blake 1. William Blake, Milton (1804), title page 2. Blake, Milton, plate 29 3. Blake, Milton, plate 15 4. Blake, Comus (1801), plate 7 5. Blake, Paradise Lost (1807), plate 11 6. Blake, Paradise Regained (1816), plate 4 7. Blake, Milton, plate 13

Article: Illustrations of Milton’s works 1. Bernard Lens, Paradise Lost (1688), book 4 2. John Baptist Medina, Paradise Lost (1688), book 9 3. Francis Hayman, Paradise Lost (1749), book 4 4. Jean-Frédéric Schall, Paradise Lost (1792), book 4 5. Schall, Paradise Lost, book 2 6. Louis Chéron, Samson Agonistes (1720) 7. Francis Hayman, Samson Agonistes (1752) 8. John Graham, Samson Agonistes (1796) 9. Richard Westall, Samson Agonistes (1794 – 1797) 10. William Blake, Paradise Lost (1808), book 5 11. Henry Fuseli, Paradise Lost (1794 –1796), book 2 12. Fuseli, Paradise Lost (1779), book 4 13. Fuseli, Paradise Lost (1802), book 12 14. John Martin, Paradise Lost (1824 –1827), book 4 15. Martin, Paradise Lost, book 5 16. Martin, Paradise Lost, book 10

17. Jane Giraud, Paradise Lost (1846), title page 18. Harrison Weir, Comus (1858) 19. Birket Foster, Comus (1858) 20. Frederick Richard Pickersgill, Comus (1858) 21. E. H. Corbould, Comus (1858) 22. Jessie King, Comus (1906) 23. King, Comus 24. A. Garth Jones, Comus (1898) 25. Jones, Comus 26. Jones, Comus 27. William Blake, Comus (1801) 28. A. Garth Jones, Samson Agonistes (1898) 29. Arthur Rackham, Comus (1921) 30. Rackham, Comus 31. Rackham, Comus 32. Rackham, Comus 33. Mildred R. H. Farrar, Comus (1937) 34. Edmund Dulac, Comus (1954) 35. Trina Schart Hyman, Comus (1996) 36. William Hyde, Samson Agonistes (1904) 37. Robert Ashwin Maynard, Samson Agonistes (1931) 38. Robert Medley, Samson Agonistes (1979) 39. Medley, Samson Agonistes 40. Carlotta Petrina, Paradise Lost (1936), book 9 41. Petrina, Paradise Lost, book 6 42. Petrina, Paradise Lost, book 12 43. Mary Elizabeth Groom, Paradise Lost (1937), book 5 44. Alexis Smith, Snake Path (1992) 45. Smith, Snake Path ix

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Preface

T

he Milton Encyclopedia is the most ambitious reference work in this field in a generation, designed to act as a resource for the general reader, the student, and the scholar alike. It provides easy and immediate access to a wealth of information to enhance the experience of reading the works of John Milton. Milton has been well served in recent decades. W. R. Parker’s meticulously documented biography, first published in 1968, was reissued by the Clarendon Press in 1996, substantially revised by Gordon Campbell to incorporate more recent scholarship. Campbell also produced a detailed and eminently useful chronology (1997). More recently, there are considerable critical biographies, each with its own interpretative emphasis, by Barbara Lewalski (2001) and Gordon Campbell and Thomas Corns (2008). Other important resources are available in most research collections, most significantly the fine-grained two-volume index to the Columbia edition of Milton’s complete works (1938) and J. Milton French’s edition of the life records (1949 –1958). The earlier Milton encyclopedia, prepared under the general editorship of William B. Hunter (1978 –1980), brought together a wealth of scholarship and information. But the general reader, the student, and the scholar need a different kind of resource that gives easy and immediate access to what they need to know to enjoy the experience of reading Milton. This encyclopedia is not a biography of Milton, though it contains and presents much biographical information. It is not a “companion” to Milton—there are already three such

collections: the widely used Cambridge companion, edited by Dennis Danielson and now in its second edition (1999); one by Thomas N. Corns (2001); and one by Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (2009). In our entries, critical and interpretative elements are discouraged, though bibliographical information sometimes points the reader to appropriate discussions elsewhere. It is not a chronology; however, this encyclopedia refers to all significant life events and all significant contemporaries who relate to Milton, and it carefully relates Milton’s life and work to major contemporary events and cultural developments. Articles cover: Each poem and prose work by Milton Milton’s family members All contemporaries and historical figures mentioned significantly in his writing Events mentioned in his works Every book of the Bible, with an account of Milton’s use and interpretation of it Other texts mentioned in his works, and their authors Pertinent contemporary movements, groups, and related ideologies and religious beliefs Major “characters” in his creative writing Early printers and booksellers of Milton Early editors and critics of Milton Early biographers Significant eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Milton scholars Significant illustrators of Milton Significant imitators of Milton Major writers influenced by Milton A select list of early-twentieth-century Milton scholars xi

xii

Preface

Milton’s editors Pertinent organizations in the world of Milton studies

A Note on the Bibliography and Editions Used Many articles are followed by references that guide readers to the bibliography at the end of the book, which can then help them on to the next stage of their personal research. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations of Milton’s English prose are from The Complete Prose Works of John Milton (CPW), edited by Don M. Wolfe et al.; for his Latin prose, from The Works of John Milton (WJM), edited by Frank Allen Patterson et al.; for Paradise Lost (PL), from the Longman annotated edition edited by Alastair Fowler (referring to book and line number); for Samson Agonistes, Paradise Regained (PR), and the shorter poems, from the Longman annotated edition Milton: The Complete Shorter Poems (CSP), edited by John Carey (referring to book [PR] and line number); and for the Bible, from the Authorized Version (1611, referring to chapter and verse).

A Note on Dates During Milton’s time in Scotland and continental Europe, the new year was usually reckoned to start on 1 January. In England the conventions were more complex. English printed title pages usually mark the year as beginning on 1 January; but in wider usage and generally on manuscript documents, the year is deemed to start on 25 March, the Feast of the Annunciation. This encyclopedia follows

the modern convention. In the case of documents relating to some continental European countries, it is sometimes necessary to record two dates, divided with a solidus. The Julian calendar (sometimes termed Old Style, or OS) in use in England and some other Protestant countries was ten days behind the Gregorian calendar (New Style, or NS) in use in Catholic countries. Thus, a date such as 6/16 March 1652 means that it was 6 March in England and 16 March in, for example, Italy. Some thanks, and some apologies, are in order. I am, of course, immensely grateful to the legions of Miltonists of several academic generations who have given their labors to this endeavor, and sorry, too, that a project, entered into with such élan, has taken so long to bring to completion. I am grateful, too, to members of the editorial board, whose wise advice shaped this volume profoundly, and many of whom were among the first and most arduous toilers in the vineyard. Special thanks goes to Linda Jones, research administrator of the Department of English at Bangor, who contributed so much to the organization and execution of the early stages, and to Pat Corns, who set aside things she would rather have done to help with the late revisions. I am grateful to staff at Yale University Press: my commissioning editor, Vadim Staklo, for patiently guiding a sometimes rather leaky vessel into port; Susan Laity, senior manuscript editor and coordinating editor for reference; and my copy editor, Jessie Dolch, who has deftly edited out inelegancies, challenged irrelevances, and eliminated many errors. Thanks to them all.

Abbreviations

Abbreviations are used for in-text references and references to the bibliography, where full publication information for other than reference works is given.

Editions AV CP CPW CSP LR PL Poems PR TMS WJM

The Bible, Authorized Version, 1611 (King James) The Complete Poems, ed. John Leonard Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey The Life Records of John Milton, ed. J. Milton French Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler Paradise Regained, in CSP The Trinity Manuscript, most readily available in John Milton, Poems, Reproduced in Facsimile . . . The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson et al.

Abbreviations: Standard Reference Works BDBR DBI DNB ER GMO New Grove OCCL OCD

Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Richard L. Greaves and Robert Zaller. 1982 –1984. Brighton: Harvester Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, ed. Aldo Ferrabino et al. 1960 –. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee. 1885 –1901. London: Smith and Elder The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade et al. 1987. New York: Macmillan Grove Music Online, at Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline .com/public/book/omo_gmo New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 2001. 2nd ed. New York: Grove’s Dictionaries The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, ed. M. C. Howatson. 1989. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawforth. 2nd ed. 1996. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press xiii

xiv

OCEL ODCC ODNB ODR OED

Abbreviations

Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble. 2000. 6th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone. 2005. 3rd rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. 1994. Oxford: Oxford University Press The Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance, ed. Gordon Campbell. 2003. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press The Oxford English Dictionary, ed. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner. 1989. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press; and OED Online, http://www.oed.com

A Aaron. Old Testament figure who with Moses leads the Exodus from Egypt and becomes with his descendants the beginning of the Jewish priesthood (Exod. 28, 29; Lev. 8 –10). Milton repeatedly rejects Aaron’s priesthood as precedent for the episcopal organization of the Caroline church, charging in The Reason of Church-Government that the prelates disturbed “the bones of old Aaron and his sonnes” solely for their own ambition. Todd Butler

Abbot, George (1562 –1633). Archbishop of Canterbury (1611–1633). Born at Guildford and educated at Balliol College, Oxford University, he was ordained in 1585. Abbot was successively master of University College (1597), bishop of Coventry and Lichfield (1609), bishop of London (1610), and archbishop of Canterbury (1611). His opposition to the issuing of the Book of Sports in 1618 was of a piece with the markedly Puritan temper of his churchmanship and opinions. With the appointment of William Laud as his successor, toleration—still less patronage— of Puritans within the established church ceased. See ODCC, ODNB.

N. H. Keeble

Abbot, Robert (1560 –1618). Bishop of Salisbury (1615 –1618). Elder brother of George Abbot, he was born in Guildford and became a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford University, in 1581. He enjoyed a considerable reputation as a preacher and as a controversialist against Rome. His three-part Defence of the Reformed Catholicke (1606 –1609) traced the tradition of the early church through such medieval heretics as the Lollards to the Calvinist Reformation, against both Tridentine Catholicism and the developing Arminianism of the English church.

Milton would take a similar line in his antiprelatical tracts. See ODNB.

N. H. Keeble

Abdiel. In Paradise Lost the sole angel among Satan’s host who remains “unseduced” (5.899). He is noted as the angel “than whom none with more zeal adored / The Deity, and divine commands obeyed” (5.805 – 6), virtues deriving from traditional depictions of the fiery devotion of the Seraphim, whose name means “fiery serpents,” and from the translation of Abdiel’s name from Hebrew, “servant of God.” The only biblical instance of the name Abdiel is in 1 Chronicles 5:15, where it is applied to a human ancestor of a family of Gadites. Though an angel Abdiel appears in the medieval Jewish kabbalistic Sepher Raziel, there is little evidence that Milton is borrowing more than a name from this work. Feisal G. Mohamed

Abraham [Abram] (?early in the second millennium B.C.). Biblical patriarch. A cluster of narratives relating to him are found in Genesis chapters 11–25, which establish his status as the ancestor of the Hebrews through the line of Isaac and Jacob. Milton selects some of these narratives for inclusion in the visions of futurity presented to Adam in book 12 of Paradise Lost. In Genesis 14:18 –20, after a military victory by Abraham, “Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine: and he was the priest of the most high God,” and Abraham responded and “gave him tithes of all,” that is, onetenth of the booty he had won. Milton discusses the passage at some length in The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings. He argues that Melchizedek does not receive the reward because he is a priest

1

2

Abraham [Abram]

but because he brought succor to Abraham and his army. See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

absolutism. The political theory holding that sovereigns’ power over their subjects is limited only by the rules of God and nature. Classic statements of absolutist theory include works by Jacques-Benigne Bossuet and Jean Bodin, as well as The Trew Lawe of Free Monarchies by James I. While these thinkers held that a good sovereign should rule in accordance with established laws and customs, absolutist theory rejected the right of subjects to resist the sovereign. The actions of the king were thus only bound by his accountability to God, his own will, and his desire to provide an example for his subjects. Although the source of kingly power varied among theories, most common were an original grant from God (often married with patriarchal comparisons to familial structure) and an original, irrevocable transfer of power from a community to the sovereign. In The Reason of Church-Government Milton briefly acknowledges that the civil magistrate’s power comes from God and patriarchal precedent, but this work is generally marked by a profound hostility toward absolutism. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates compactly states Milton’s case against absolutism, arguing that the genesis of kingly power lay in the covenantal transfer of power from the people to their chosen magistrates. These arguments are thoroughly elaborated in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, where Milton supports his claims against Claudius Salmasius with extensive historical, classical, and biblical evidence. On the eve of the Restoration Milton returned to these arguments, praising Parliament’s abolition of kingship and a restructuring of the governmental covenant in The Readie and Easie Way. Milton’s opinion regarding absolutism also appears in Paradise Lost, both in Satan and in the depiction of Nimrod as a man who, rejecting the fraternal equality of early humanity, “Will arrogate dominion undeserved / Over his brethren” (12.27–28). Todd Butler

Accademia degli Svogliati. See Svogliati. Accedence Commenc’t Grammar. Milton, work of prose; full title, Accedence Commenc’t Grammar,

Supply’d with Sufficient Rules for the Use of Such as, Younger or Elder, Are Desirous Without More Trouble Then Needs, to Attain the Latin Tongue; the Elder Sort Especially, with Little Teaching, and Their Own Industry. Published by Samuel Simmons, probably on 28 June 1669, it was the first of the early works that Milton had printed in his closing years. The term accidence denotes the variable forms of words (especially inflections), and Milton’s full title indicates that the teaching of accidence should precede grammar. It is not clear when Milton wrote this primer. It may be a product of his years as a teacher in the 1640s, but may reflect his experience of teaching older pupils in later years. What is striking about the pedagogy of the volume is Milton’s insistence that fluency is more important than competence: the deep understanding that comes with a knowledge of Latin grammar takes second place to a command of the language sufficient to access its literature and write coherent Latin. See John Amos Comenius and Samuel Hartlib. Thomas N. Corns

Achilles. Son of Peleus and Thetis and central character of Homer’s Iliad. Milton refers to him once, in the prologue to book 9 of Paradise Lost, where Milton distinguishes his own poem from classical epic. Shifting to the tragic mode, Milton announces the wrath of God upon humankind and deliberately contrasts this with the wrath celebrated in the epics of Homer and Virgil, notably the rage of Achilles in his pursuit of Hector (Iliad 22.136 –253). Milton claims that, as a subject for epic or “heroic song” (PL 9.25), the Fall of man and consequent anger and judgment of God is an “argument / Not less but more heroic than the wrath / Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued / Thrice fugitive about Troy wall” (9.13 –16). Beverley Sherry

Act of Oblivion (1660). Full title, Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity, and Oblivion. The Declaration of Breda promised a “free and general pardon” in the event of Charles II’s return, and through this act, Charles was committed to the fulfillment of that pledge. However, the bill that was first introduced into the Convention Parliament the day after Charles was proclaimed king did not receive the royal assent until 29 August, and then only after direct intervention by Charles himself. What delayed its passage was debate within and between the two houses about the act’s precise scope.

Act of Uniformity (1662)

To “bury all seeds of future discord,” it provided that all treasonable or criminal acts performed “by virtue or colour” of the authority of king or Parliament since 1 January 1638 and before 24 June 1660 should be “pardoned . . . and put in utter oblivion”; in the very words of Breda, “no crime whatsoever committed against his Majesty or his royal father shall hereafter rise in judgement or be brought in question” against any save those persons excepted by name from the act. It was the difficulty in reaching agreement on these exceptions that delayed the passage of the bill. Charles was very clear that the number should be as small as possible, confined simply to the regicides. In the course of parliamentary debates, four categories of exception were eventually agreed on. Thirtythree people (out of more than sixty whose names were considered) involved in the trial of Charles I were wholly excepted and could expect execution. A further nineteen regicides who had surrendered to the authorities were imprisoned under threat of execution (but the necessary bill, though introduced, was never passed into law). Seven men, excepted in respect of penalties less than execution, were imprisoned, with loss of their estates (chiefly those who, though nominated to the court that tried Charles I, had played little or no part in its proceedings). Finally, twenty people were disqualified from holding public office. During the period of uncertainty while these names were being agreed, Milton lived in hiding. As one who had very publicly defended the regicide, and who had many friends and acquaintances among those excepted, he could expect to be excepted from the act. On 18 June he was named in the House of Commons as one who should suffer punishment short of execution, but the motion was not seconded. Early biographers put down this escape to the behind-the-scenes lobbying of Andrew Marvell, seconded by others, including William Davenant. Certainly, it is remarkable that in 1660 a man so closely associated with Oliver Cromwell, regicide, and the republic should have retained both his life and his freedom. N. H. Keeble

Act of Toleration (1689). Full title, the Act for Exempting Their Majesties’ Protestant Subjects Dissenting from the Church of England from the Penalties of Certain Laws. The legislation of the Clarendon Code had sought to extirpate religious dissent from the life of the nation, but the resilience of nonconformists under persecution, the alliance

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forged between the established church and nonconformity to oppose the Romanizing policies of James II, and the succession of the Dutch Protestant William III combined to secure the legal right for Protestants to worship according to their consciences. The Act of Toleration did not repeal the Act of Uniformity or the other acts of the Clarendon Code, but it suspended them in the case of those who took the oaths of allegiance and supremacy (to the monarch as supreme head of the Church of England), who subscribed the declaration against transubstantiation provided in the Test Act, and who accepted the doctrine of the Trinity, provided that their worship was conducted only in registered premises with unlocked doors by ministers who subscribed to the doctrinal articles of the Church of England (Baptists were excused from the article on infant baptism, and Quakers were permitted to affirm rather than to swear to oaths). It was toleration at last, but far more grudgingly conceded, and hedged around with far more conditions, than Milton would have wished. N. H. Keeble

Act of Uniformity (1559). Full title, the Act for the Uniformity of Common Prayer and Divine Service in the Church; it was the chief legislative means by which the national Protestant church of Edward VI was restored after the period of Roman Catholicism under Mary I. By reinstating the Second Act of Uniformity of Edward’s reign (1552) and reimposing the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, slightly revised, the act sought to ensure that there should be no variation of, or dissent from, the prescribed form of Protestant worship. Any minister of religion refusing to use the Prayer Book was to be imprisoned for six months for a first offense, for a year for a second offense, and for life for a third offense. N. H. Keeble

Act of Uniformity (1662). Full title, the Act for the Uniformity of Public Prayers; it was the fundamental statute of the Clarendon Code. No one doubted that the restoration of monarchy in 1660 would entail the restoration also of episcopacy, abolished by the Long Parliament in 1643. Prolonged negotiations ensued concerning the extent to which Puritan opinion would be accommodated within this reestablished national episcopal church, but the act finally passed by the Cavalier Parliament made no concessions. Despite its title, it went far beyond its 1559 predecessor (see Act of

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Act of Uniformity (1662)

Uniformity [1559]) in seeking to define the religious and devotional character of the Church of England. It imposed the revised 1662 Prayer Book and required every beneficed minister publicly to declare his “unfeigned assent and consent” to “all and everything contained and prescribed” in it (the 1559 act had required only a general undertaking to use the Prayer Book). Incumbents were further required to subscribe to a declaration of nonresistance to the restored regime and to repudiate the Solemn League and Covenant. Finally, unlike the 1559 act, which had not mentioned clerical orders, the act deprived of his benefice any incumbent not episcopally ordained by 24 August, Black Bartholomew Day. Milton in The Readie and Easie Way had warned Presbyterian royalists of the dangers they ran by promoting the Restoration. N. H. Keeble

Acts of the Apostles. Book of the New Testament that narrates the history of the apostolic church. There is general agreement that it was written by Luke, the author of the third gospel. The identification was made during the early patristic tradition. Its principal focus is on the missions of Paul, although other apostles, among them Peter, figure significantly. The information available to Milton and his contemporaries from Acts, particularly about the organization and institutions of the apostolic church, has a central role in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century discussions about Protestant church government. See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

could also mean “red,” the colour of the clay from which he was formed. Adam in Christian, particularly Pauline, thought acquired crucial typological importance as the type of the Second Adam, Christ, and many of the First Adam’s attributes came to be necessitated by the requirements imposed by the attributes of the Second Adam. Thus, in Paul’s rigorous opposition, “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22). Such oppositions put severe pressure on the spare narrative of Genesis chapters 1–3, however: all are “made alive” in Christ; “all die” in Adam; thus was created the doctrine of original sin. Later in the patristic period, even more of Adam’s attributes—largely unspecified in Genesis—were inferred from certain judgments on Adam’s Fall or on the corollaries of God’s axiomatic benevolence. Thus, Irenaeus argued that the fact of the Fall in Genesis chapter 3 suggested that Adam was created as a fallible child who needed to make mistakes and thereby grow up. Conversely, the more philosophically rigorous Augustine insisted that a perfectly benevolent God could in justice create only perfectly and benevolently, and so it was that Adam in the Augustinian tradition came to resemble the mature, intellectually advanced philosopher familiar from early modern accounts. Thus, the Adam of Genesis was partly defined by pressures exerted from without the Genesis narrative itself—pressures of theological, narrative, or philosophical coherence. The major problem for the Augustinian model of Adam was that although Adam’s creation now looked unproblematic, his Fall was rendered rather more mysterious. The orthodox response to such cavils was that given by Raphael to Adam in Paradise Lost: “God made thee perfect, not immutable” (5.524). See Evans (1968), Leonard (1990), Turner (1987).

Adam. According to Genesis the first human to be created by God “in his own image” from dust and divine breath. Genesis, however, states in chapter 1 that “male and female he created them,” which led some (particularly Jewish) commentators to posit an initial androgynous creation, only later split into man and woman when Eve is taken from Adam’s side in the following chapter (Gen. 1:26 –27; 2:7– 8, 21–24). Most early modern exegetes, however, preferred the orthodox solution that Genesis chapter 2 explained in detail what Genesis chapter 1 had only summarized. Adam, like Eve, has two names in Genesis, but unlike his wife he possesses both before the transgression of Genesis chapter 3. His generic name is Ish, “man,” and his proper name is Adam, which was often traced from a Hebrew word that

William Poole

Adamitism. A probably fictitious religious sect that practiced nudity, “discovered” from 1641 on. “I am the son of Adam,” one Adamite is made to declare, “who begot me in his innocency. I follow his steps before he fell” (Obadiah Couchman, The Adamites Sermon, 1641). Some early Quakers went naked “as a sign” for prophetic force, and one couple toured under the names of Adam and Eve (Anon., Brief Relation, 1653). In Paradise Lost, as Adam and Eve retire to their bower, Milton’s tactfully indirect “nor turned I ween / Adam from his fair spouse” (4.741– 42) is utterly opposed to the pornographic representations of the Adamite

adiaphora

pamphlets, later recycled for Ranter heresiography. Adamites are not to be confused with Preadamites, who thought there were men before Adam. William Poole

Adams, John (1735 –1826). Second president of the United States. He was a key figure in the American revolution and in the early national period was a Milton admirer. Miltonic rhetoric and references, especially to that “heroick poem” Paradise Lost, are sprinkled throughout Adams’s writings. As a youth, Adams wrote that Milton’s “Power over the human mind was absolute and unlimited. His Genius was great beyond Conception, and his learning without Bounds,” whereas his own mind resembled “Milton’s chaos” (Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 1961). In 1775 Adams imaginatively described British foes as “infernal Spirits” who “have recovered from their first astonishment arising from their fall . . . —not subdued tho confounded—plotting a fresh assault upon the Skies” (Papers of John Adams, 1977). It was in part from Milton and other English republicans that Adams drew confirmation for his belief that republican government was the best form of government, though he was highly skeptical of Milton’s notion that the supreme legislative body should sit in perpetuity. David L. Weeks

Addison, Joseph (1672 –1719). English poet, essayist, literary critic, dramatist, poet, and statesman. Born in Milston, Wiltshire, and educated at Charterhouse and Oxford University, he was allied with the Whigs from the 1690s onward and, besides being a member of Parliament for Malmesbury from 1709 until his death, held various offices during those periods when the Whigs were in power. He was and continues to be recognized for The Campaign (1704), a poem celebrating the English victory at the Battle of Blenheim; Cato: A Tragedy (1713); and the essays he wrote for and published in various periodicals, including The Spectator (1711– 1712; 1714), an immensely popular London daily produced almost entirely by himself and his friend Richard Steele. Addison’s critical engagement with Paradise Lost in that periodical confirmed Milton’s preeminence among narrative poets in English. See critical tradition in Milton studies.

William W. Walker

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“Ad Eandem” [To the Same] (“Altera Torquatum cepit Leonora poetam”). Poem by Milton; see the introductory note to “Ad Leonoram Romae Canentem” [To Leonora Singing at Rome]. This epigram takes as its subject the soothing power of Leonora’s song, a theme likewise prominent in the Applausi poems of Fabio Leonida and Gasparo de Simeonibus. The reference to Torquato Tasso’s madness as a consequence of his love for another Leonora may favor the argument that it was during his second visit (and hence after his meeting at Naples with Giovanni Battista Manso, patron and biographer of Tasso) that Milton composed the Leonora epigrams. Manso’s Vita di Torquato Tasso (1621) had linked Tasso with no fewer than three Leonoras, with one of whom (Leonora d’Este) he was obsessively infatuated. See Haan (1998).

Estelle Haan

“Ad Eandem” [To the Same] (“Credula quid liquidam sirena Neapoli iactas”). Poem by Milton; see the introductory note to “Ad Leonoram Romae Canentem” [To Leonora Singing at Rome]. Milton’s epigram depicts Leonora as a Siren and, more specifically, as Parthenope, who, having exchanged the noisy Posillipo for the lovely Tiber, now captivates men and gods with her song. Leonora as a living Siren is a recurring theme in the Applausi, while Milton’s allusion to the favorable enthusiasm of Roman audiences (“Illic Romulidum studiis ornata secundis” [line 7]) may allude not only to concert audiences at Rome, but also perhaps to the literary encomiastic vogue ultimately exemplified by the Applausi collection itself. See Haan (1998).

Estelle Haan

adiaphora. A theological term (from the Greek, “things indifferent”) that designates choice of those things (ceremonies, vestments, objects, liturgies, institutions, actions) neither specifically prescribed nor specifically proscribed in scripture and thus left to discretion. By the 1640s in England, adiaphora had become a watchword for liberty of conscience. Strident debate arose over who should determine adiaphora: the state, the state church, the magistrate, the local congregation, or the individual householder. Milton employs the term to argue for institutional neutrality on adiaphora and individual discretion in its use. However, his radical assertion

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adiaphora

that both marriage and divorce are adiaphora alienated him from many of his antiprelatical allies. See Lake (1988).

Margaret J. Dean

“Ad Joannem Rousium.” Poem by Milton; full title, “Ad Joannem Rousium Oxoniensis Academiae Bibliothecarium” [To John Rouse, Librarian of Oxford University]. This Latin ode to John Rouse is a delicately urbane occasional poem written to accompany a replacement copy of the Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645) dispatched at the librarian’s request. The poem is in manuscript at the Bodleian Library, pasted into the book it accompanied; it was published in 1673 in Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions. Thomas N. Corns

“Ad Leonoram Romae Canentem” [To Leonora Singing at Rome]. Poem by Milton. This Latin epigram and two others (see “Ad Eandem” [To the Same]) in praise of the Neapolitan soprano and theorbo-player Leonora Baroni were composed during either or both of his visits to Rome in 1638 and 1639. A volume of Italian, Latin, Greek, Spanish, and French poetry titled Applausi Poetici Alle Glorie Della Signora Leonora Baroni was published at Rome in 1639. Although Milton’s epigrams were not included, and were presumably not intended for such, they bear some resemblance to these pieces, some of which may have been circulating in Rome before publication.

who can be equated with the soul of the godly redeemed by Christ’s atonement (lines 998 –1005). In the myth, Venus restored the slaughtered Adonis and concealed his body in a secret garden. Milton alludes to the story in Paradise Lost, distinguishing the real beauties of the paradisal garden from the mere legendary “feigned” garden of Adonis (9.438 – 40). The River Adonis, as a major river in modern-day Lebanon was known in antiquity, was the site of an annual ritual in which the pagan god Thammuz, to be equated with Adonis, was worshipped as seasonally the waters ran red (which was interpreted as the bleeding of the wound inflicted by the boar). Thammuz appears in the lists of pagan deities, false gods on occasion worshipped by errant Hebrews, whose form fallen angels sometimes take (PL 1.450). Thomas N. Corns

“Ad Patrem” [To My Father]. Latin poem by Milton. Dating remains conjectural; some commentators place it as early as 1631 or as late as 1645, though there are good arguments, too, for a 1638 date, shortly before Milton left on his travels in continental Europe. It is a poem of filial thanks for the gifts of languages, which Milton learned through tuition that John Milton, Sr., had paid for (see languages of Milton). Milton celebrates their complementary skills, his father those of a composer and his own those of the poet. He published the poem while his father was still alive, so on one level it is a public document, but it has some of the qualities of a more private communication between son and father.

See Haan (1998).

Thomas N. Corns Estelle Haan

Adonis. In Greek mythology, a youth of astonishing beauty. He was born of the incestuous union of Cinyras, king of Cyprus, and his daughter, Zmyrna or Myrrha. He was courted by Aphrodite but preferred instead to continue hunting wild boar, with fatal consequences (the subject of William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis). The myth was reworked by early modern mythographers, among them Natali Conti and George Sandys, and the figures of Venus and Adonis were moralized to represent types of natural love. In this capacity, they appear in Milton’s Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle as representatives of a lower kind of love than that manifest by “Celestial Cupid,” who is to be equated in some sense with Christ, and by “his dear Psyche,”

“Ad Salsillum” Poem by Milton; full title, “Ad Salsillum Poetam Romanum Aegrotantem. Scazontes” [To Salzilli, a Roman Poet, When He Was Ill]. It was probably composed during Milton’s first visit to Rome in 1638 because it precedes “Mansus” (associated with his Neapolitan period) in Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645). Milton prefixed to that volume a four-line Latin “written Encomium” by Giovanni Salzilli, in which he prefers Milton to Homer, Virgil, and Torquato Tasso. “Ad Salsillum” alludes to this preference (“praetulit” [line 8]) and develops Salzilli’s use of the river motif and its equation with a local poet. Salzilli was a member of the Accademici dei Fantastici at Rome and a contributor of fifteen Italian poems (eleven sonnets, three canzoni, one ottava) to the Poesie de’ Signori

Alcinous

Accademici Fantastici (Rome, 1637). “Ad Salsillum” may draw upon these poems. See Haan (1998).

Estelle Haan

Aeschylus (525 – 456 B.C.). Greek dramatist, author of eighty to ninety plays, only seven of which survive. His work is generally regarded as the foundation of Greek tragedy. Milton explicitly cites him as an influence on Samson Agonistes: “they only will judge [its style, ‘uniformity,’ and plot] who are not unacquainted with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the three tragic poets unequalled yet by any, and the best rule to all who endeavour to write tragedy.” See OCCL.

Thomas N. Corns

“Agreement of the People.” Political, liberationist manifesto produced by leaders of the Levellers. It was read and discussed in a meeting of officers and agitators on 29 October 1647 during the Putney debates. By promoting populism, toleration, and legal and economic rights, the manifesto served as the basis for a written republican constitution. Subsequent versions appeared in December 1648 and May 1649. The subject of much controversy, these documents were often cited, both favorably and “as strik[ing] . . . at the very root of all Government” (Anon., The Triall of Lieut. Collonell John Lilburne, 1649). The Levellers’ use of the unlicensed press and their efforts at generating an informed readership through their printed polemic connect their concerns with Milton’s. The republican poet and polemicist likewise employed civil, political, and tolerationist discourses in his appeals for liberty and justice, particularly in his pamphlets of the 1640s. See Gentles (2001), Loewenstein (2001).

Elizabeth Sauer

Agricola, Gnaeus Julius (A.D. 40 –93). Roman general and governor of Britain from about 77 to 85. He pushed Roman occupation of Britain into southern Scotland. Tacitus, his son-in-law, praised his career in Agricola, on which Milton drew extensively in his account of the early phases of the Roman occupation in The History of Britain.

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Ahab (c. 874 – 852 B.C.). King of Samaria and seventh ruler of Israel. His story is told in 1 Kings chapters 16 –22. Milton cites biblical examples of Elijah’s curse on Ahab’s posterity in An Apology Against a Pamphlet and makes reference to Ahab both in “Elegia Quarta” (99 –100) and in Paradise Regained (1.372 –77). Ahab is alluded to in Areopagitica, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, and Eikonoklastes. In the Trinity Manuscript, Milton gives “Ahab. 1 Reg. [Kings] 22” as one of the potential subjects for a tragedy. Carol Barton

Aitzema, Lieuwe van [Leo ab] (1600 –1669). Dutch historian and statesman. He came to England in 1652 as an agent of some Hanse towns. He became acquainted with Milton during the visit and was responsible for a Dutch translation of the first of Milton’s divorce tracts, about which he corresponded with Milton. Copies of this apparently lost edition have now been identified. Thomas N. Corns

Alberti, Leon Battista (1404 –1472). Italian architect, painter, theorist, cartographer, cryptographer, philosopher, organist, and prose stylist. The illegitimate scion of a prosperous Florentine merchant, he was born in Genoa, studied classics at Padua from 1416 to 1418, and then studied law at the University of Bologna. In the mid-1430s he moved to Florence, then under the Medici family; for much of his life Alberti would be associated with this city and neighboring courts, such as that of Federigo da Montefeltro at Urbino. He died in Rome. The archetypal Renaissance humanist, Alberti used his knowledge of mathematics to write his pioneering account of perspective, Della pittura, dedicated to Filippo Brunelleschi in 1435. In 1452, after careful study of the ancient architect Vetruvius, Alberti completed his influential treatise De Re Aedificatoria. As an architect, Alberti is best known today for his work on the Palazzo Rucellai (Florence), the Malatesta Temple (Rimini), and the church of Sant’Andrea (Mantua), establishing some of the built environment through which Milton traveled during his visit to Italy in 1638 –1639. See Grafton (2000).

Wayne Gochenour, Jonathan F. S. Post

See OCCL.

Thomas N. Corns

Alcinous. Legendary king of the Phaeacians. He and his queen, Arete, welcome the wandering hero

8

Alcinous

of the Odyssey. During festivities, the blind bard Demodocus recounts the story of the Trojan horse, which deeply moves Odysseus (8.72 –92). In “At a Vacation Exercise in the College,” Milton wishes to compose verse describing “kings and queens and heroes old, / Such as the wise Demodocus once told / In solemn songs at king Alcinous’ feast” (47– 49). In Paradise Lost, he refers twice to Alcinous’s magnificent gardens (5.341, 9.439 – 41). Stephen M. Buhler

Alcuin [Albinus, Flaccus] (c. 740 – 804). Theologian, liturgist, poet, churchman, and royal advisor. He was born in the kingdom of Northumbria, and his education and early career were in York at a time of considerable civil strife. Perhaps as an emissary from the bishop of York, he attended the court of the Frankish king, Charlemagne. In his final years, he was abbot of St. Martin’s, Tours, from which period most of his major writings date. In The History of Britain, Milton refers to him as “a learned and prudent man, though a Monk.” He cites Alcuin sparingly in his narrative, probably not drawing on him directly but through the work of William of Malmesbury. In material added to the second edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Milton pays Alcuin the compliment of linking him with the early church reformer John Wycliffe. See ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

Aldersgate Street. A north-south thoroughfare in London extending from St. Martin’s Le Grand near St. Paul’s Cathedral to beyond Bridgewater Square. It links several of Milton’s residencies: on the street itself (1640/41–1645), in the Barbican (1645 – 1647), on Jewin Street (1661–1669), and on Bunhill Row (1669 –1674). In its proximity to St. Paul’s Cathedral, Aldersgate was a short distance from the White Bear, the Milton family home on Bread Street. Evidence for Milton’s Aldersgate Street residency dates from 29 April 1641 and survives for 1642 (in parish records of St. Botolph’s) and 1643 (in Ephemerides, Samuel Hartlib speaks of “Mr Milton in Aldersgate Street” as the author of “many good books”). A recently discovered tax document extends Milton’s Aldersgate residency to July 1645. Edward Jones

Alfred the Great (849 – 899). King of the West Saxons. In Milton’s estimation, he was “the most

worthy King, and by som accounted first absolute Monarch of the Saxons heer, so ordain’d,” a ruler whose “noble minde . . . renderd him the miror of Princes” (The History of Britain). In May 878, via the decisive Battle of Edington on the Salisbury Plain, Alfred drove the Danes back into what was later to be known as the Danelaw and restricted their further incursions into Anglo-Saxon territories. In the Trinity Manuscript, the only candidate Milton specifically targets for a “Heroicall Poem” is Alfred. There are some forty-five mentions of Alfred in Eikonoklastes and The History of Britain alone. Carol Barton

All Hallows. The church where Milton was baptized on Tuesday, 20 December 1608. It was located on the east side of Bread Street toward its southern end (north of the intersection with Cannon Street). The original All Hallows was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. The church was rebuilt in 1680 –1684 under the direction of Sir Christopher Wren but was demolished in 1876 –1877 by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners of the City of London. Carol Barton

allusions. Milton’s poems abound with biblical and classical allusions, but critics differ as to how they work. Early commentators, including Richard Bentley and Samuel Johnson, faulted Milton for what they saw as his indiscriminate mixing of classical myth with biblical truth. Most modern critics see the classical allusions as providing implicit commentary on the narrative. Alastair Fowler in his edition of Paradise Lost avers that “Milton’s allusions to ancient epics” are “so consistently organized as to amount to a distinct strand of meaning—a kind of metapoetic accompaniment.” Davis P. Harding anticipates Fowler in his groundbreaking book The Club of Hercules (1962), which argues that allusions to Homer, Virgil, and Ovid guide the reader’s moral responses. In a chapter on Satan, Harding detects numerous “covert allusions” in the first two books of Paradise Lost that discredit Satan’s heroic posturing by likening him to serpents and dragons in earlier epics. To cite but one example, Harding claims that Milton’s phrase “incumbent on the dusky air” (PL 1.226) alludes to incumbunt pelago in Virgil’s Aeneid. Virgil applies the phrase to two serpents that come sliding over the sea to devour Laocoon and his sons (2.205). For Harding, the allusion characterizes Satan as a serpent and suggests his “menacing movement towards the shore.”

Ambrosius Aurelianus [Ambrose]

Harding and Fowler also note the way that Milton’s allusions often hit around a target text, inviting the reader to remember details that Milton refrains from stating explicitly. Fowler points out that the last two lines of Paradise Lost (“They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way”) allude to Psalm 107:4: “They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way; they found no city to dwell in.” The allusion might seem despairing, but Fowler does not draw that inference. “Those who heard this echo,” he writes, “would remember the continuation: ‘They cried unto the Lord . . . And he led them forth by the right way.’” Milton has only “solitary way” (not “right way”), but Fowler thinks the fit reader would supply the missing words and so infer the hope that Milton omits. Some critics think that editors have exaggerated the number of Milton’s allusions. Charles Martindale and William Porter warn critics not to confuse allusion with topos. Many supposed allusions in Paradise Lost may be traditional formulae common to several epics. When Satan wakens Beelzebub with the whispered words “Sleepst thou” (PL 5.673), Fowler detects an allusion to Iliad 2.23, “the opening of the baneful dream inciting Agamemnon to an attack.” But many epic poets (including Virgil, Torquato Tasso, and Edmund Spenser) have used this formula. It would be perilous to assume that Milton is alluding to any one poet when he uses a topos that numerous poets had used. In recent years some critics have evoked the notion of “unconscious allusion” to account for those allusions that appear to work against Milton’s didactic intentions. The term “unconscious allusion” seems absurdly contradictory to some (for example, Martindale), but it does at least acknowledge that not all Miltonic allusions conform to the pattern discerned by Fowler. Some allusions (such as the notorious recollection of Ovid’s Amores 1:5 in the last line of “Elegia III”) admit embarrassing complications that Milton is unlikely to have wanted. See Fowler (PL), Harding (1962), Leonard (2000), Martindale (1986), Porter (1993).

John Leonard

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that has been identified as that of his nephew John Phillips, who was currently living with Milton and was under his tuition. Phillips’s hand has been seen, too, in the manuscript of “Ad Joannem Rousium.” Presumably, in these cases he was copying from earlier drafts. By 1650 Milton was experiencing difficulties with his sight, and by 1652 blindness was complete, leaving him dependent on others not only to take dictation, but to read to him (see Thomas Ellwood.) All early biographies of Milton describe his coping strategies, and evidently a reliable group of relatives, friends, and employees made possible the great projects he accomplished after he became blind. In the case of Paradise Lost Milton dictated several lines at a time to whoever was available, which his nephew Edward Phillips then consolidated, correcting punctuation and orthography into the style he knew his uncle to favor. The manuscript of the opening book is extant (and held in the Morgan Museum and Library, New York). A single amanuensis produced a fair copy, which Edward Phillips corrected. In the case of De Doctrina Christiana Milton used Jeremie Picard to draft and redraft the main part of the manuscript, though additions and alterations are in numerous hands that have not been identified. Again, several people added notes to the Commonplace Book, and Cyriack Skinner among others added further poems to the Trinity Manuscript. See Campbell et al. (2007).

Thomas N. Corns

Ambrose (c. 339 –397). Church father. He was a zealous upholder of orthodox Christology against Arianism and, as bishop of Milan, was an influential figure on emperors of the western empire. His most remarkable political intervention was his excommunication of the emperor Theodosius, which Milton alluded to with approval in Eikonoklastes. Milton drew only sparingly on Ambrose’s theological writings, citing him in The Judgement of Martin Bucer and in Tetrachordon, though generally with approval for what he terms the “grave saying of St. Ambrose” (Tetrachordon). See ODCC.

amanuenses. Scribes who wrote from dictation. In the seventeenth century, the rich and powerful often dictated letters and other documents, a practice that retains some currency into our own age. Milton, however, rarely used amanuenses while his sight lasted. In the Trinity Manuscript some of the sonnets and minor poems of the 1640s are in a hand

Thomas N. Corns

Ambrosius Aurelianus [Ambrose] (fl. fifth century). Military leader. Under his leadership the Britons, after the departure of the Romans, achieved something of a recovery against the

10

Ambrosius Aurelianus [Ambrose]

incursions of Germanic tribes. Gildas is the source of Milton’s account of this rather shadowy figure in The History of Britain. Thomas N. Corns

Ames, William (1576 –1633). Calvinist divine, casuist, controversialist, and systematic theologian. He was educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge (afterwards Milton’s college), where “the English Calvin,” William Perkins, was his tutor. As an undergraduate in the later 1590s and a fellow of the college (1601–1610), his behavior and opinions were forcefully Puritan, and he left the university after he conflicted with university authorities. He was refused a license to preach at Colchester and removed to Leiden in Holland. In 1618 –1619 he was among the Calvinist delegates to the Synod of Dort, and in 1622 he became professor of theology at the University of Franeker. He died at Rotterdam. Ames enjoyed a European reputation for De Conscientia, Eius Jure et Casibus (1632, translated into English in 1639), the first Protestant treatise on casuistry, which Milton owned; for his work of systematic theology, Medulla Sacrae Theologiae (1627, translated to English in 1642 as The Marrow of Sacred Divinity), which was among the works Milton studied for his own system of divinity and from which, in the heterodox De Doctrina Christiana, he came to dissent; and for his controversial works against the Roman Church and against Arminianism. In 1610 Ames issued a Latin version of William Bradshaw’s English Puritanism, with a preface of his own; as his regard for Bradshaw implies, his writings foreshadow a congregational church polity. N. H. Keeble

Amos. Book of the Old Testament. Amos, a “minor prophet,” has been identified as historically the earliest of the prophetic books of the Old Testament. It shares common concerns with the others, although it perhaps seems bleaker in its assessment of the future. Nonetheless, it ends with an eloquent vision of the resettlement of the people of Israel. Milton cites it thirty-two times in De Doctrina Christiana, typically in association with other prophetic writing.

Born in Bourgueil, he studied theology at the Protestant academy of Saumur, where he was afterwards lecturer and, from 1641 until his death, principal. There he developed a “middle way” between Arminianism and Calvinism that maintained election to salvation, but not to damnation. This “hypothetical universalism” rejected the limited atonement of Calvinism, but, though holding that Christ died for all humanity, it also held that those for whom God would efficaciously work salvation are predetermined. By attributing salvation to the beneficence of the divine will and damnation to the culpability of the reprobate, this view avoided both the Arminian pitfall of overreliance on human will and the Calvinist pitfall of implicating God in the moral turpitude of the wicked. This middle way commended itself to many moderate Puritans, notably Richard Baxter. Amyraldianism has sometimes been thought closer than Arminianism to Milton’s position in Paradise Lost (3.183 –202) (see the argument in De Doctrina Christiana that predestination refers only to election). See ODCC.

N. H. Keeble

Anabaptism. Initially a derisive term used to denote a wide number of continental sects that rejected the Roman Catholic Church and believed that the Protestant churches of the Reformation did not go far enough toward seeking a true Christian church based on the New Testament. Although the term Anabaptist, or “rebaptizer,” refers to the belief that baptism is valid only when it is the voluntary act of a conscious adult and performed by a true church, Anabaptist sects placed comparatively little emphasis on such theological and ceremonial issues. The term Anabaptist was often used as a default term for any radical, separatist theology or sect. In The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Milton includes Anabaptism in a list of traditionally heretical “fanatick dreams” but is more tolerant in Of True Religion and, indeed, seems to defend its position on infant baptism. On the issue of baptism itself, Milton in De Doctrina Christiana opposes infant baptism and favors the immersion of adults. Linda B. Tredennick

See Bauman (1989), ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

Amyraut, Moïse (or Moyse) [Amyraldus, Moses] (1596 –1664). French Protestant theologian.

Ancient Constitution. A term that achieved currency during the 1640s referring to four overlapping principles enshrined in English common law and political practice: monarchy’s human, rather than divine, origin; the necessity of the monarch ruling

Angles

in concert with Parliament (also known as “mixed monarchy”); the monarch’s inability to alter the nation’s laws without Parliament’s explicit consent; and the monarch being subject to the law. Furthermore, a monarch who defies these principles can be deposed. As John Selden puts it, “Though there bee no written law for it [deposition], yet there is Custome which is the best Law of the Kingdome; for in England they have allwayes done it.” Milton’s Commonplace Book and his writings on divorce and on church government demonstrate his awareness of the Ancient Constitution. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates constitutes his most important use of this tradition. Milton explicitly turns to the common law for evidence of monarchic accountability: “It is also affirm’d from diligent search made in our ancient books of Law, that the Peers and Barons of England had a legal right to judge the King.” The Ancient Constitution shapes the politics of Paradise Lost. When Satan speaks in terms of freedom constituting the native right of all angels, who are, if not equal, “yet free, / Equally free” (5.791–92), his words echo the emphasis on freedom repeated in virtually all the constitutionalist arguments of this period. See Burgess (1992), Fortescue (1997), Greenberg (2001), Pocock (1957), Selden (1927), Sommerville (1986).

Peter C. Herman

Andrewes, Lancelot (1555 –1626). English prelate. Admired court preacher and prominent translator of the King James Bible, he was one of the most eminent episcopal divines of the early seventeenth century. Andrewes was equally renowned as a skilled orator and a “metaphysical” preacher, whose sermons were marked by wit, paradox, intricate paragraph structures, and a Senecan curt or “pointed” style. Contemporary scholarship has identified the painstaking revision that characterized his prose. Milton’s “Elegia Tertia” (1626) offers a public declaration of grief at Andrewes’s death. In book 1, chapter 5, of The Reason of Church-Government (1642), Milton engaged Andrewes polemically, respectfully addressing Andrewes’s A Summary View of the Government . . . , which had been included in Certain Briefe Treatises (1641). James Egan

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the early poetry, A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus) evokes the traditions of angels as Platonic ideals (213 –15) and as guardian spirits (455, 658), it is rather more so in his later work. Thus in Paradise Regained mention of angels typically refers to, and elaborates little upon, specific passages of the Bible, with the notable exception of the choric celebration of Christ’s victory at the epic’s close (4.596 – 635). The “Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues” of Paradise Lost (5.601, 5.772, 5.840, 10.460) refer to Colossians 1:16 and Ephesians 1:21 rather than the celestial hierarchy of [Pseudo-]Dionysius the Areopagite—which describes divine illumination proceeding outward from God to, in descending order, the seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominations, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels, and angels. Though Milton refers indifferently to this “ninefold harmony” of angels in “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (131), the close association of the Areopagite’s celestial hierarchy with episcopal church government would, as one might expect, prompt a resistance to this tradition. The minor status of the seraphim and cherubim in the heaven of Paradise Lost, and their prominence in hell, registers such a reaction: just as Milton dismisses ecclesiastical hierarchy in the antiprelatical tracts, so he undercuts its foundation on celestial order. His emphasis on the angels’ role as “ministring Spirits” (Of Reformation, cf. Heb. 1:14) derives from the Latin angelus, “messenger,” and is shared with Jean Calvin (Institutes I.xiv.9) and most other Reformation theologians. The priority of scripture over tradition also informs Milton’s insistence on angelic ethereality rather than incorporeality (PL 3.100, PR 1.163) and on imperfect angelic knowledge of creation, both of which depart from the seminal angelology of Thomas Aquinas, where angels are pure form and intellect. This priority also accounts for the departure in Paradise Lost from Augustine’s influential De Genesi ad Litteram, which argues that the “Let there be light” of Genesis 1:3 signifies the creation of the angels. That Milton’s angels exist well before terrestrial creation agrees with De Doctrina Christiana as well as the view evident in such seventeenth-century commentaries on Genesis as those of Alexander Ross, John White, Henry More, and Abraham Wright. See Fallon (1991).

Feisal G. Mohamed

angels. As a general rule, Milton follows scripture rather than tradition in his depictions of angels. Though this principle is not rigidly adhered to in

Angles. A Germanic tribe. They settled in large numbers during the fifth and sixth centuries in what

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Angles

became Mercia, Northumbria, and East and Middle Anglia. Milton gives an account of their incursion in The History of Britain. Thomas N. Corns

Anglesey. An island, about twenty miles long by twenty miles wide, situated off northwest Wales. Its Latin name is Mona. Edward King, the subject of Milton’s poem “Lycidas,” may well have been shipwrecked off its coast, perhaps on the treacherous Mole Rock. Anglesey was associated with Druidic worship. Milton probably alludes to the island in his reference to “the shaggy top of Mona high” (“Lycidas,” line 54), though it should be noted that the name Mona applied, too, to the Isle of Man, which also lies on sea routes between England and Ireland. Thomas N. Corns

Anglo-Dutch Wars. One-time allies England and the United Provinces fought three primarily naval wars in the 1650s, 1660s, and 1670s. The First Anglo-Dutch War (1652 –1654) erupted when the Dutch admiral Martin van Tromp refused to lower his flag, a sign of respect, to the English admiral Robert Blake. In his capacity as Secretary for Foreign Tongues, Milton handled diplomatic correspondence between the two nations during the war, though in Pro Se Defensio he would later say that he regretted that the two great nations had gone to war. The Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665 –1667) ignited over commercial conflicts. Following some initial successes, a humiliated England sued for peace. In the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672 –1674), Charles II secretly allied with France against the Dutch, but lack of support for this unpopular war forced him to sue for humiliating, separate peace. See Fallon (1993), Miller (1992).

Andrew Fleck

Animadversions. Milton, work of prose; full title, Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence Against Smectymnuus. Published anonymously, most probably in late July 1641, it was aimed primarily at Bishop Joseph Hall’s Defence of the Humble Remonstrance (April 1641) and secondarily at several of Hall’s other controversial tracts, including Episcopacie by Divine Right (1640) and An Humble Remonstrance (1641). As the third of Milton’s five antiprelatical pamphlets (see also Of Reformation, Of

Prelatical Episcopacy, The Reason of ChurchGovernment, and Apology Against a Pamphlet), Animadversions is ideologically consistent with the positions he had taken in Of Reformation and Of Prelatical Episcopacy (both 1641). Alert to the probability of objection to his treatment of Hall, Milton includes in his preface a lengthy discussion of what he calls “grim laughter,” his mixture of jest, wit, earnest admonition, and harsh censure, meant to be a “strong and sinewy force in teaching and confuting.” The preface remains the most extensive theoretical defense in Milton’s prose of satire, polemic pamphleteering, and the moral authority of the zealous Christian controversialist. Having prepared his audience for the chastisement of Hall that follows, Milton itemizes grievances against episcopacy that were the common property of ecclesiastical reformers in the early 1640s. He censures the Church of England’s clergy, liturgy, courts, and ceremonies by comparing them to their notorious Roman Catholic equivalents, all the while disputing the use of set forms of prayer and the holiness of the episcopal liturgy. Milton denounces as well the related problems of scandalous clerical misconduct and the corrosive effects of a learned yet mercenary or “hireling” clergy. As he does elsewhere in the prose, Milton likens the veneration of the church fathers to superstitious idolatry and questions the scriptural justification for episcopal ceremonialism. The values he endorses in Animadversions can be summarized in the long, patriotic prayer near the end of the tract that celebrates the divine inspiration of reformation in England and urges the immediate perfection of that reformation. Recently, the structure and techniques of Animadversions have been contextualized more sympathetically in several ways: as an adaptation of the quote-andreply fictive tactic of the tradition of Martin Marprelate of native English polemic, complete with mock logic and intricate word play; as a diatribe, with a primary speaker controlling what is, in fact, a monologue; and as an attempt to levy against Joseph Hall the very techniques Hall himself had used in early-seventeenth-century debates. James Egan

Annesley, Arthur, First Earl of Anglesey (1614 – 1686). Politician. Born in Dublin, Ireland, he was the son of Sir Francis Annesley, Lord Mountnorris and First Viscount Valentia. Upon attaining his B.A. from Magdalen College, Oxford University, in 1634, the younger Annesley was admitted to

Antichrist

Lincoln’s Inn. Elected member of Parliament for Carmarthen in 1660, he was appointed president of the Council of State and held the office of vice treasurer of Ireland between 1660 and 1667. He was created First Earl of Anglesey and Lord Annesley of Newport-Pagnell in 1661. But this new prominence evidently did not inhibit his friendship with Milton, and Annesley almost certainly came to Milton’s aid when he was arrested and imprisoned in the summer of 1660. Three years after Annesley’s death in London, his executors discovered what came to be called the “Anglesey Memorandum,” an annotation in his copy of Eikon Basilike to the effect that, in 1675, the author (presumably Annesley himself ) had been told by both Charles II and the Duke of York (later James II) that the king’s book “was none of the said King’s compiling, but made by Dr. [ John] Gauden, Bishop of Exeter”— ostensibly from papers written by Charles himself. See ODNB.

Carol Barton

“Another on the Same.” Poem by Milton. The second poem on the death of Thomas Hobson the University Carrier (the first is “On the University Carrier”) is a sustained exercise in wit and paradox that enjoyed more circulation in print than any other of Milton’s early poems. In style it seems indebted to John Donne’s more flippant elegies where one witty observation relentlessly follows another. The use of scholastic material—the “sphere-metal” that Aristotle believed was the substance of the celestial spheres, and the “time numbers motion” concept that also derives from Aristotle—also reminds the reader of Donne. This poem was first published in Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645) and appeared also in A Banquet of Jests (1640, 1657, 1658) and in Wit Restor’d (1658). Graham Parry

Answer to a Book, Intituled, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, An. Anonymous forty-fourpage tract published in 1644, the only full-length reply to Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643). The Answerer quotes, paraphrases, and rebuts Milton’s argument in the conventional polemic manner of disputation, accusing Milton of wrenching scripture to suit his own ends, an offense tantamount to blasphemy; calling Milton’s position

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an excuse for licentiousness; and regularly challenging his “loose Divinitie.” James Egan

anti-Calvinism. Calvinism held sway in the universities throughout the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, amply buttressed by the university presses, as witnessed by the vernacular reprintings of the Calvinist commentaries of Jeremias Bastingius and Zacharias Ursinus at Oxford University and Cambridge University, respectively. Nevertheless, doubts about Calvinist doctrine grew during the Elizabethan period in some quarters, particularly involving the doctrines of total depravity, double predestination, and the irresistibility of grace, as the scandals involving Antonio del Corro at Oxford and Peter Baro at Cambridge demonstrate. On a more populist level, Erasmus’s influential Paraphrases were non-Calvinist in orientation. Anti-Calvinism as a movement gained coherence only with the rise of Arminianism in the first two decades of the seventeenth century. Arminianism, however, suffered a severe setback after the Synod of Dort (1618 –1619), and James I remained hostile to it. The end of Calvinist supremacy in the English church and universities was heralded by the accession of Charles I; what had hitherto been orthodox teaching was increasingly stigmatized as “Puritan” by its opponents, an association that would have perplexed the Elizabethans. See Tyacke (1987).

William Poole

Antichrist. In Christian thought a composite figure embodying all that is evil in opposition to Christ. Constructed from the word’s use in the New Testament of those who deny that Jesus is the Messiah (1 John 2:18, 22, 4:3; 2 John v. 7), from the “man of sin” and “mystery of iniquity” of 2 Thessalonians 2:3 – 12, and from the beasts of Revelation chapter 13, the identification was assimilated to millenarianism in the belief that a climactic battle with the Antichrist would herald the Second Coming. By the time of the early church the Antichrist was identified with Roman emperors such as Caligula and Nero. Medieval heretics, notably John Wycliffe and the Lollards, equated the Pope, or the Church of Rome, with Antichrist. This identification was strongly promoted by early Protestantism (for example in the annotations of the Geneva Bible of 1560) and

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Antichrist

by seventeenth-century Puritans. It is a recurrent assumption in Milton’s prose. See Hill (1990), ODCC.

N. H. Keeble

anticlericalism. Milton’s anticlericalism first surfaces in an early letter (1628) to Alexander Gil the younger, bitterly complaining about the ignorance and sloth of his fellow ministerial students, charges intensified during his pamphlet wars against the prelates. Denying the scriptural grounds of their separation of the upper from the lower clergy, he also claims their case is invalidated by their failure to produce a more learned laity. He prefers a continental system of elders or presbyters, but only five years later accuses presbyters of being worse than “old Priest[s]” (“On the New Forcers of Conscience”). After the Puritan victory over the Laudian prelates, Milton regularly vituperates Puritan ministers for betraying the revolution and perpetrating artificial lay/clergy distinctions. Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana encourages mutual teaching among all congregation members. Similar views were held by some members of the circle surrounding Samuel Hartlib, and most classical republicans resented the “superstitious” clergy for enslaving the people to their fears. Catherine Gimelli Martin

antiepiscopalianism. The retention of episcopal church government was seen by many sixteenthand seventeenth-century English divines as a sign of imperfect reformation. The national church’s refusal to follow the Presbyterian model of Jean Calvin’s Geneva gave rise to such Elizabethan separatist movements as the Barrowists, led by Henry Barrow, and Brownists, led by Robert Browne, as well as to the acidic antiepiscopal pamphlets of Martin Marprelate. Elizabeth I, as Milton observes in Of Reformation, saw resistance to episcopacy as a challenge to royal authority over the church and consequently treated it as a brand of treason: she imprisoned Browne’s followers and executed Barrow. This view was continued by James I, as summarized in his axiom “no bishop, no king.” Charles I brought opposition to episcopacy to a head in his support of Archbishop William Laud, whose inflexible institution of high-church reform stoked fears that the English church was rather too close to the Roman one, an anxiety that prompted the Long Parliament of 1641 to initiate action against episcopacy: in March of that year, Laud

was sent to the Tower of London, where he would wait almost four years for execution, and bills were drafted preventing the bishops from sitting in the House of Lords and revoking the judicial authority of the Court of Star Chamber. Acting on a petition of fifteen thousand signatures presented to the House of Commons in December 1640, Oliver Cromwell, Sir Henry Vane the younger, and Sir Arthur Hesilrige began to agitate, in the following May, for the legislation proposed in the Root and Branch Petition that would eradicate episcopal church government. The abolition of episcopacy initiated by the Commons was, predictably, blocked by the bishops and their allies in the House of Lords and was not brought into effect until January 1643, when, as Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, describes it, the First Civil War united the two Houses in their desire to cement an alliance with the Scots. When Milton first intervened in this debate with Of Reformation (May 1641), the tide was already turning against the bishops. In this tract and in his other antiprelatical tracts, Of Prelatical Episcopacy ( June/July 1641), Animadversions ( July 1641), The Reason of Church-Government ( January/February 1642), and An Apology Against a Pamphlet (April 1642), Milton rehearses many of the arguments against episcopacy that had been common since the reign of Elizabeth. His arguments resemble those of a Root and Branch advocate like Vane in their toleration of Independency. Feisal G. Mohamed

antinomianism. The heretical belief that the Law of the Old Testament, as inscribed in the Ten Commandments, is not binding on Christians who are under the law of grace. Antinomianism was a component in the beliefs of some of the most radical religious groups in England during the 1640s and 1650s. It was perhaps the defining conception of Ranters and an important element among early Quakers. The term was often used as an insult by Presbyterians and their associates, leveled against more radical or more heterodox thinkers. In Colasterion Milton identifies it as “a jolly slander” to be used against him for his innovative views on divorce. However, Christopher Hill has influentially argued that Milton’s mature perspective on antinomianism was more complex. See Hill (1977).

Thomas N. Corns

Apocrypha

antiprelatical tracts. Five works of prose Milton wrote during 1641–1642 advocating the further reformation of the Church of England. See Of Reformation, Of Prelatical Episcopacy, Animadversions, The Reason of Church-Government, and Apology Against a Pamphlet. antitrinitarianism. Broadly, any denial of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity as affirmed by the Athanasian Creed, the Council of Nicea, and the Council of Constantinople. This doctrine asserts the distinctness of the three persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—within the unified Christian Godhead. Further, each of the three persons is co-equal and co-eternal. Such triune orthodoxy responded to two heresies. On one side is Saballianism, which holds that instead of distinct persons, there are merely three aspects of one God. On the other side is Arianism, which holds that there are three distinct persons but that only one, God, is without origin, while the Son was created and in turn created all things. The Reformation, which rejected the consensus of the church and tradition as theological authorities, reopened the debate surrounding the Trinity because many Protestants felt that the doctrine had no scriptural authority and was irrational. Although mainstream Protestantism ultimately remained Trinitarian, some important currents of antitrinitarianism remained. Perhaps foremost of these were the Socinians, who believed in the mortality and humanity of Christ. Socinian beliefs are spelled out in the Racovian Catechism, translated into English by John Biddle (or Bidle) and licensed for publication in England by Milton in 1650. It appeared in 1652. Both “Socinian” and “Arian” are also used pejoratively to mean any antitrinitarian belief. It is clear from the evidence of De Doctrina Christiana that Milton holds some beliefs that can only be called antitrinitarian; he affirms the unity of the Godhead but believes that that unity is logically incompatible with the trinity of persons. See Hunter, Patrides, and Adamson (1971), Kelley (1962).

Linda B. Tredennick

Apatisti. Florentine academy founded by Agostino Coltellini. The name is now usually translated as “the Dispassionates,” reflecting a Stoic ideal. Milton mentions six of its members as friends. Records of his own attendance at their meetings have recently been rediscovered. See Haan (1998).

Thomas N. Corns

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Apocalypse. Both St. John’s revelation in the final book of the New Testament, and that book itself (see Revelation). Anticipation that the Apocalypse was imminent was rife in the seventeenth century, particularly in the 1640s and 1650s. Radical political and religious groups looked forward to the millennium, which they conceived as the thousand-year rule of Christ and his saints on earth that would precede the earth’s conflagration. In Milton’s Of Reformation (1641) the “Eternall and shortly-expected King” will “put an end to all Earthly Tyrannies,” and in his Eikonoklastes (1649) Christ’s “saints” appear in apocalyptic triumph over “those European Kings, which receive thir power, not from God, but from the beast.” Similarly, in Paradise Lost (1667), Milton depicts the faithful suffering “heavy persecution” but anticipates a day “of respiration to the just, / And vengeance to the wicked, at return / Of him so lately promised” (12.531, 540 – 42). See Cummins (2003).

Juliet L. Cummins

Apocrypha. From the Greek apokrupha— “hidden”—these fifteen books were written between 200 b.c. and a.d. 120 and were excluded or “hidden” from the Hebrew Old Testament but included in the Greek translation (the Septuagint) and reproduced in the Latin Bible (the Vulgate). Although Protestants regarded these books as noncanonical, they were bound with the Old Testament in all English Bibles until 1628, including the King James Version, which Milton used. He regarded the canonical scriptures as the word of God and all other writings as the works of men, but he granted considerable authority to the Apocrypha. When developing his argument in De Doctrina Christiana for creation out of matter, he draws evidence from “the apocryphal writers, as closest to the scriptures in authority,” and quotes Wisdom 11:17 and 2 Maccabees 7:28. Similarly, he cites Ecclesiasticus (or Sirach) 13:16, 25:26, and 37:27 to support his argument for divorce on the grounds of incompatibility. Although it is sometimes claimed that the books of the Apocrypha might particularly have influenced Milton in their union of Greek and Hebrew thought, his most significant debt is clearly to the Book of Tobit, from which he drew the character of Raphael in Paradise Lost. Raphael does not appear in the canonical scriptures but has a central role in Tobit, which recounts the adventures of Tobit’s son Tobias in traveling with the archangel Raphael. As a guardian angel, Raphael secures Tobias’s marriage to Sarah, previously possessed by a demon

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Apocrypha

lover, Asmodeus; Raphael binds Asmodeus and, on returning from the journey, cures old Tobit’s blindness, a detail of certain interest to Milton. Despite Puritan objections to the Apocrypha, the Book of Tobit was well known in seventeenth-century England through written and visual materials, and Tobias was a popular name; European paintings of Tobias and the angel were also numerous from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. In Paradise Lost, Milton cast Raphael as the friend to man, although Gabriel was the usual choice in Christian epic. He alludes explicitly to Tobit (4.166 –71, 5.219 –23), and the story becomes a primary association around the figure of Raphael, coexisting easily with his Hermes-like role. When read as a subtext to the episode of Raphael’s visit to paradise, the Book of Tobit underscores the friendship of Raphael and Adam, the opposition of Raphael and Satan, the love of Adam and Eve, and Satan’s designs upon Eve. Milton further uses the Apocrypha by drawing on 2 Esdras to portray the instructing archangel Uriel in Paradise Lost (3.621–739); and the Wisdom of Solomon influenced the depiction of his muse in Paradise Lost (especially 7.9 –12). A story from 1 and 2 Maccabees is twisted by Satan to his own ends in Paradise Regained (3.163 –70). In arguing for the accountability of kings in Eikonoklastes, Milton refers in detail to the story of the three bodyguards from 1 Esdras 3:1– 4:63. Beverley Sherry

“Apologus de Rustico et Hero” [The Fable of Peasant and Landlord]. Poem by Milton, in all probability a school exercise dating to his final years at St. Paul’s School (c. 1624). Published only in 1673, this Latin poem is a close imitation of a short fable of Mantuan (1448 –1516), whose religious, moral, and pastoral poems probably formed part of the curriculum of St. Paul’s. Mantuan’s poem, occurring in Sylvae 4, has an accompanying prose paraphrase (Opera B. Mantuani [Paris, 1513]). Milton seems to draw upon both versions and also upon parallel English phonetic versions (again in both verse and prose) by William Bullokar in Aesop’s Fables in True Orthography (London, 1585). Estelle Haan

Apology Against a Pamphlet. Milton, work of prose; full title, An Apology Against a Pamphlet Call’d A Modest Confutation of the Animadversions upon the Remonstrant Against Smectymnuus. The fifth and

last of his antiprelatical tracts (see also Of Reformation, Of Prelatical Episcopacy, Animadversions, and The Reason of Church-Government), it appeared anonymously, printed by Edward Griffin for John Rothwell (as was The Reason of ChurchGovernment), probably in April 1642. It was a reply to A Modest Confutation, a direct attack on Milton’s third antiprelatical work, which had itself attacked Defence of the Humble Remonstrance, by Joseph Hall. The Modest Confutation was published anonymously, perhaps as early as January or as late as March 1642. Many scholars have thought that Hall (perhaps with his son Robert) wrote some or all of this work, but there is no certainty of this. Milton claims in this tract that the author may be a chaplain or assistant to the bishop, and he believes that Hall was at least “not unconsulted with.” Henry S. Limouze

Aquinas, Thomas (c. 1225 –1274). Dominican theologian and philosopher who taught theology in France and Italy. His major works, Summa Contra Gentiles and Summa Theologiae, are vast systematic presentations of Christian doctrine, and the latter is perhaps the greatest intellectual achievement of the medieval church. Basic to his thought, which involves a constructive synthesis of traditional Augustinian theology with the newly rediscovered philosophy of Aristotle, are the distinctions between necessary and contingent being, faith and reason, potency and act, and essence and existence. His work deeply influenced Counter-Reformation Catholic theology and post-Reformation Protestant scholasticism. In Areopagitica, Milton indicates his preference for poetry as a didactic medium when he describes Edmund Spenser as “a better teacher” than Aquinas. Benjamin Myers

Aramaic. A language known to Milton as Chaldee, it belongs to the northwest branch of the Semitic language family. While it can be found in five passages of the Hebrew Bible, Aramaic would have been more consequential to Milton as the language of the Targumim, the Aramaic biblical translations/ paraphrases. Although Milton’s knowledge of Aramaic allowed him to teach his nephews to read from the Targum Onkelos, it is probable that his linguistic proficiency would not have permitted him to access the vast corpus of rabbinical writings in Aramaic. Jeffrey Einboden

Areopagus

Arcades. A pastoral entertainment by Milton performed at Harefield in honor of Alice Spencer, Countess of Derby. The first jottings in the earliest part of the Trinity Manuscript are drafts of Arcades. The date of the performance at Harefield is unknown, but it seems likely to have been after Milton came down from Cambridge in July 1632 and before the Bridgewater family embarked on their progress through Wales in July 1634. A good case has been made for the late summer of 1632; the countess’s seventy-fifth birthday on 4 May 1634 is another possibility. It was written for a private performance before an aristocratic audience and published in 1645 as one of three occasional pieces (together with “Lycidas” and A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle) at the end of the volume. The reason for the choice of Milton for the commission of Arcades (and subsequently of A Masque for the same extended family) remains conjectural. See Brown (1985).

Thomas N. Corns

Areopagitica. Milton, work of prose; full title, Areopagitica; a Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parliament of England. It was written in November 1644 in response to the June 1643 ordinance that sought to control printing (see Licensing Order [1643]). Before 1641 all printing in England and Wales had been governed by prepublication licensing—a form of censorship—that ensured a degree of order in the book trade and provided mechanisms for punishing transgressors. In 1641 control broke down and an expansion of printing occurred. More books were published, many of them topical, satirical, and political in ways that had not been hitherto possible. Parliament was occasionally alarmed by this freedom and introduced measures to restrict it. The 1643 ordinance was one of these. This was the most immediate occasion for Milton’s Areopagitica, but there were other factors. A 1642 parliamentary act to control printing nominated authors as responsible for their books. Authors had long been punished for their writings, but this was the first time legislation (as opposed to proclamations and practice) had identified authors alongside booksellers, vendors, and printers as responsible for maintaining the orderliness of the book trade. Moreover, a number of religious Independents had written attacks on parliamentary licensing procedures, attacks that situated them in the context of opposition to monopolies, and, most

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importantly, within debates about religious toleration. Milton was writing in the wake of Henry Robinson’s Liberty of Conscience: Or the Sole Means to Peace (March 1644) and William Walwyn’s The Compassionate Samaritan ( June or July 1644), both eloquent, inspired, and imaginative works demanding religious toleration and liberty of the presses. Areopagitica offers a history of censorship from Athens, through ancient and modern Rome, through the Henrician Reformation, to the present day. It is well informed in these matters, though its historical narrative aims to taint censorship with popery. Milton argues that censorship is never effective, is practically inoperable, and only promotes private or monopoly interests. Milton accepted that books might deserve punishment by due legal process if they were scandalous or dangerous, but only after publication. It has been suggested that Milton was motivated by self-interest; the outcry against his divorce tracts had included suggestions that they be censored, and in August 1644 Parliament had ordered a search for the authors, printers, and publishers of tracts on divorce. Yet Milton had criticized censorship earlier, and his arguments in favor of liberty of the press were part of a broader account of freedom. Areopagitica is not an attack on censorship so much as a defense of the liberty of reading, and it defends this liberty on the grounds that it is the basis of true religion. Areopagitica engages with the reality of the marketplace of books. It is rich with references to the physical properties of books and pamphlets and to the contexts in which they appear. Milton refers to the prominent royalist newsbook Mercurius Aulicus as evidence of the inefficacy of censorship. Areopagitica is written in the form of, and printed to resemble, a speech to Parliament, a common pamphlet genre in the 1640s. See Dobranski (1999), Norbrook (1999a), Raymond (2003).

Joad Raymond

Areopagus. “The Hill of Ares” and the Athenian court of law that convened there. Isocrates composed his Areopagiticos, a defense of its powers, as a literary oration to the Ecclesia, or general assembly. Saint Paul later preached on “The Unknown God” (Acts 17:16 –34) at the Hill of Ares. In Areopagitica, Milton refers to Isocrates’s “discourse to the Parlament of Athens” and notes the harsh judgment of the Areopagus against the skeptical writings of Protagoras. In Eikonoklastes, he cites its authority over royalty. The Areopagus serves in The Readie

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Areopagus

and Easie Way as a historical model for the perpetual senate Milton proposes. Stephen M. Buhler

Arianism. A Christological heresy that argues against the full divinity of the Son of God. The position originated with Arius, a fourth-century churchman of Alexandria, and was for a while profoundly influential, especially in the eastern parts of the Roman empire. It regards the Son as the earliest and most important creation ex nihilo (that is, out of nothing) of the Father. In this it differs from orthodox Christology, which asserts that the Son is eternal and consubstantial with the Father. Arianism has sometimes been identified as an influence on Milton’s own heterodox view of the Trinity. See also antitrinitarianism. Thomas N. Corns

Ariosto, Ludovico (1474 –1533). Italian poet. Under the patronage of Cardinal Ippolito d’Este of Ferrara, he was author of Orlando Furioso (1516; revised and expanded, 1532), a continuation of Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Inamorata. Like The Aeneid, Orlando Furioso grounds a patron’s dynasty in the story of destined marriage, and its dynastic couple, Bradamante and Ruggiero, is a model for Britomart and Arthegal in The Faerie Queene. In Of Reformation, Milton praises Ariosto and translates some lines from Orlando Furioso, canto 34, to support a negative view of Constantine. Samuel Johnson thought frivolous the imitation of the same canto in the Paradise of Fools section of Paradise Lost (book 3). Other references are scattered throughout Milton’s poems. Marshall Grossman

Aristophanes (c. 445 – c. 385 B.C.). Athenian dramatist and leading exponent of Old Attic Comedy. Eleven of his plays are extant, together with many fragments. Conscious of Plato’s apparent support for censorship, Milton in Areopagitica notes that he commended the reading of Aristophanes, “the loosest” of classical writers of comedy. See OCCL.

Thomas N. Corns

Aristotle (384 –322 B.C.). Greek philosopher, scientist, and physician. Milton expressed negative views of the scholastic curriculum at Cambridge

University; nevertheless, references to and inferences from Aristotle occur throughout his writing. He playfully presents a literal-minded Aristotle as the speaker of an early, probably academic, poem, “De Idea Platonica” (1628), but the more serious presence of Aristotle in Milton can be seen within three broad categories: Milton’s understanding of literary mimesis in general and tragedy in particular engages the Poetics; his analysis of ethical agency in a fallen world is continually informed by the Nicomachean Ethics; and his rejection of Platonic and Augustinian dualism draws significantly on the Physics and Metaphysics. Thus in his cosmological imagination, his pursuit of Christian ethics, and the practice of his art, Milton remains an Aristotelian. For example, the definition of tragedy from the Poetics (V. 1449b) appears as an epigraph for Samson Agonistes. Iterated twice on the title page (in Greek and Latin) and discussed in the opening paragraph of the preface, “Of That Sort of Dramatic Poem Which Is Called Tragedy,” the citation indicates that Milton’s “dramatic poem” includes a self-conscious reflection on Aristotelian catharsis and poses the question of whether the poem’s peculiar failure to establish “tragic inevitability” through its central agons, of which Samuel Johnson famously complains, reflects an implicit com’′τη mentary on the dissonance between classical α and the proto-Christian spiritual liberty afforded by the play’s Hebraic decorum. A reading along these lines follows from Milton’s reference in the preface to “passions well imitated” where Aristotle refers to the “imitation of actions.” If Samson’s actions in the catastrophe are subordinate to what transpires in the inward arena of his passions, the absence of the visible passion from Paradise Regained, which precedes Samson Agonistes in the 1671 volume, affirms the final elevation of internal over external action hinted at in its Hebraic antecedent. In the epic, too, Milton pushes against the limits of Aristotelian mimetic theory and its attendant criterion of verisimilitude; for example, in the opening of book 1, where Satan’s “passion” is represented through a series of actions and descriptions that cannot be visualized—as in the picture of Satan “Hurled headlong . . . down / To bottomless perdition, there to dwell” (PL 1.45 – 47), falling in perpetuity yet somehow landing, where “darkness visible” discovers “sights of woe” (1.63 – 64). Impossible as external actions, these characteristic expressions render a “landscape” of passions “Mixed with obdurate pride and steadfast hate” (1.58). The ethical relation of passion and action is an overarching theme of Paradise Lost as well, from

Arminius, Jacobus [Harmensen, Jacob; Hermansz, James]

its stated intention to “justify the ways of God to men” and to Michael’s explanation to Adam that “by faith imputed, [men] may find / Justification towards God . . . / . . . [and] the moral part / Perform” (12.295 –99). For Milton, as for his contemporaries, ethical questions are addressed against the background of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which enjoins men to identify the good and bring it about through voluntary actions. In physics, Milton famously adheres to Aristotle’s assertion that “nothing comes out of nothing,” positing instead a “preexisting matter,” which he curiously depicts as matter devoid of form that ultimately derives from God pro se as God the Father and explains in Paradise Lost book 7 (168 –71). Marshall Grossman

Armada. In the summer of 1588, a Spanish fleet confronted a smaller English force and was defeated. The Armada, under the command of Medina Sidonia, would have supported an invasion intended to replace England’s Protestant regime and Queen Elizabeth I. The year 1588 would be recalled for generations as a turning point in English history—when a smaller, weaker English nation, perhaps with divine assistance, weathered the invasion of Catholic forces bent on the eradication of Protestantism. Milton recalls the event in this way at the end of Of Reformation. Andrew Fleck

Arminianism. A school of thought that takes its name from Jacobus Arminius, a Dutch Calvinist theologian who came to oppose orthodox Calvinist teachings on predestination. The Arminian understanding of election closely parallels the position Milton argued in De Doctrina Christiana and dramatized in Paradise Lost. As Nicholas Tyacke notes, in Milton’s time the term “Arminian” carried two different but equally pejorative meanings. Puritans, because they saw a link between Romanizing sacramentalism and antagonism to a strict Calvinist understanding of predestination and election, applied the term to William Laud’s high-church party. The term was also used to condemn arguments that explicitly attacked absolute predestination. While Milton can be termed an Arminian in the latter sense, he shared Puritan antipathy to the high-church “Arminian” party. Jean Calvin and his followers taught that God predestines from eternity individuals to salvation or damnation, irrespective of foreseen merit. Christ

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died for the elect only, and thus the atonement is not universal. Individuals chosen to receive irresistible grace believe, become regenerate, persevere, and are saved. Those not chosen for grace cannot believe and are inevitably damned. Arminius came to believe that this teaching left no room for human freedom and made God the author of sin. While vigorously opposing the Pelagian belief that human beings can either believe or act virtuously without grace, Arminius argued that sufficient and enabling grace is given to all and that each individual, thus endowed, is free to choose or reject God. He argued further that one can fall away from belief. In sum, against Calvin’s insistence on the particularity and irresistibility of grace, Arminius argued for its universality and resistibility; against Calvin’s teaching on the necessary perseverance of the saints, Arminius taught that perseverance is a matter of continual choice. Whereas Calvin’s God unconditionally predestines individuals regardless of foreseen merit, Arminius’s God conditionally predestines to salvation those who will, aided by grace, freely choose to believe. Arminius’s God foreknows but does not cause that belief. Milton employed the term “Arminian” in a pejorative sense in Areopagitica (1645), but over time he was won over to Arminius. When he mentions Arminius again, in Of True Religion (1673), his tone is at least neutral, if not positive—a noteworthy fact given Arminius’s status as whipping boy in the seventeenth century. The change in Milton’s tone is not surprising given that his understanding of predestination had come to echo that of Arminius point for point, as we see for example in the Father’s speeches in Paradise Lost (3.176 –202) (to say nothing of the arguments of De Doctrina Christiana, which closely and extensively echo Arminius). While there are, inevitably, minor points of difference between the systems of the two men, and while some Milton scholars bridle at labeling Milton an Arminian, Milton precisely echoes the teaching on predestination for which Arminius is remembered. See Bangs (1985), Tyacke (1987).

Stephen M. Fallon

Arminius, Jacobus [Harmensen, Jacob; Hermansz, James] (1560 –1609). Dutch minister and theologian. His name became synonymous with opposition to the orthodox Calvinist position on predestination (see Arminianism). In Amsterdam he was involved in a bitter controversy with the strict Calvinist Franciscus Gomarus. Arminius argued

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Arminius, Jacobus [Harmensen, Jacob; Hermansz, James]

against Calvinist predestination on the grounds that it made God the author of sin and that it left no place for significant human freedom. His views were condemned posthumously by the Synod of Dort in 1619. Milton’s position on predestination is very close to Arminius’s. See Bangs (1985).

Stephen M. Fallon

The Artis Logicae is in one sense a reworking of the 1572 edition of Petrus Ramus’s Dialectica, but its debt to the Latin commentary on Petrus Ramus by George Downame is so substantial that Milton’s work is in another sense an edition of Downame; similarly, the biography with which it concludes is a condensed version of the life of Ramus by Johann Freige. Thomas N. Corns

Army Plot. See Goring, George, Baron Goring. Arnold, Christoph. A German traveler (from Nürnberg) who met Milton in London in 1651 and described the encounter in a letter. Milton signed his autograph album, now in the British Library. Thomas N. Corns

Arthur. See King Arthur. Articles of Peace. Peace treaty negotiated between Charles I’s Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, James Butler, Twelfth Earl and First Duke of Ormonde, and the Catholic Confederacy in the latter months of 1648. The treaty proclaimed by Ormonde on 17 January 1649 contains thirty-five items that rescind much anti-Catholic legislation, clearing the way for the free exercise of religion, the restoration of church governance, and political rights that would culminate in a free Irish Parliament. In desperate straits, the treaty was negotiated in bad faith by Charles I and Ormonde in return for Irish military support for the royalist cause. Milton was ordered by the Council of State to respond to the treaty, and other relevant documents, on 28 March 1649. His Observations upon the Articles of Peace was published in the first half of May. Jim Daems

Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio. Milton, work of prose; full title, Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio ad Petri Rami Methodum Concinnata, Adjucta Est Praxis Analytica & Petri Rami Vita [A Fuller Course in the Art of Logic, Arranged According to the Method of Pierre de la Ramée; an Analytical Exercise and a Life of La Ramée Are Appended]. Published in May 1672, it had probably been written much earlier. If so, like Accedence Commenc’t Grammar, it was part of an attempt to bring early work into print in the closing years of Milton’s life.

Art of Logic. See Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio.

Ascham, Roger (1515 –1568). Author and royal tutor. Educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge University, he was a student of fellow and Greek reader Sir John Cheke, and for a time from 1548 he was tutor to Princess Elizabeth, later Elizabeth I. He is most famous for The Schoolmaster, a treatise on Latin instruction posthumously published by his widow, which, he claims, sets down the methods of Cheke and the German scholar John Sturm, with whom Ascham had a long and amicable correspondence. Though Milton shows similar humanist concern with reform of scholastic pedagogy in Of Education, he does not borrow from The Schoolmaster. Ascham, like Milton, asserts the importance of leading students to knowledge through pleasure rather than force; values physical exercise, particularly that with martial application, as evinced in his treatise on archery, Toxophilus (1545); and eschews “barbarous and rude rhyming” in English verse. Feisal G. Mohamed

Ashtaroth [Astarte]. Milton uses Ashtaroth first to signify a plurality of feminine idols, whose counterparts are the masculine Baalim in the epic catalogue of false idols in Paradise Lost (1.421–23). A few lines later (1.438), a variation on this name (“Astoreth”) indicates the Phoenician fertility goddess Astarte, a lunar goddess with “crescent horns” (1.439). Similarly, in “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” it is “mooned Ashtaroth” who is “Heaven’s queen and mother both” (200 –201). In 1 Kings chapter 11 Solomon is persuaded by his wives to worship Astarte, an event alluded to in Milton’s “uxorious king . . . / Beguiled by fair idolatresses” (PL 1.444 – 45). Astarte is identified with the chief Babylonian goddess Ishtar and the

“At a Vacation Exercise in the College”

Sumerian Inanna. In these manifestations her consort is Thammuz, who follows directly behind her in Paradise Lost. Eric C. Brown

Asmodeus [Asmadai]. A demon. In the Book of Tobit of the Apocrypha, Asmodeus (literally “destroyer”) prevents seven successive bridegrooms from consummating their marriage to Sarah, his beloved, by slaying them on their wedding nights. With instruction from the angel Raphael, her kinsman Tobias succeeds in driving Asmodeus off by burning the innards of a fish. The latter flees into Egypt, pursued by Raphael, where he is “fast bound” (PL 4.171). In Paradise Lost Milton recalls the being’s defeat by “the fishy fume” (4.168) and later describes Raphael as “the sociable spirit, that deigned / To travel with Tobias, and secured / His marriage with the seven-times-wedded maid” (5.221–23). It is also Raphael who sends the “potent throne” Asmadai into flight “Mangled with ghastly wounds” (see 6.365 – 69). In Paradise Regained, Asmodai is “the fleshliest incubus” (2.152), more lecherous than even Belial, and so particularly inimical to the sanctity of wedded union. John Dryden uses the name Asmoday in State of Innocence in lieu of Beelzebub. Eric C. Brown

astrology. The application of astronomical observation to the prediction of events in the lives of individuals or more widely, regarded as having some validity among most people in early modern England. Milton mentions it with vague approval in Of Reformation and neutrally in An Apology Against a Pamphlet. Sometime around 1650 Milton had his own horoscope cast by the astrologer John Gadbury. It is extant, though its interpretation (we have only the chart) poses difficulties. It could be argued that the incident which ends the confrontation in Paradise Lost between Satan and Gabriel is essentially astrological in character (PL 4.995 –1015). Thomas N. Corns

“At a Solemn Music.” Poem by Milton. Its dating remains uncertain, though some time around 1633 –1634 has attracted support among commentators. A strong Italian influence is apparent. The stanza form is modeled on Petrarch’s “Vergine

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Bella,” a canzone to the Virgin. The title alludes to attendance at a religious service and to the spiritual value of music as a component of worship. Its emphasis on anticipation of a time when, at the Second Coming, the music of the spheres will again be heard resembles a similar theme in “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” Thomas N. Corns

“At a Vacation Exercise in the College.” Poem by Milton. Its much-quoted opening lines, “Hail native language, . . .” were composed about 1628 but did not appear in Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645); they reached print only in Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions (1673). To do so, they had to be separated from the rest of the student exercise—a bilingual salting, in prose and verse—for which they were first written. The verses read differently according to context. The 1673 title told readers that “the Latin speeches [having] ended, the English thus began,” conveying that this too was a speech, one of several. The first ninety lines are a speech by Milton as presenter, on his own behalf, the last ten as he presents a character from the pageant, Rivers, as the Aristotelian category of “Relation.” Before and after Rivers came other English prose speeches, no longer extant. So the magniloquent opening couplets look in print like the realization of a destiny as poet in the mother tongue and are often quoted to that effect. Yet it took Milton another ten years to declare the intention to write his big epic in that mother tongue, not in Latin. Most of the original context has been restored by Phyllis and E. M. W. Tillyard, whose translation of Milton’s Latin exercises from his years at Cambridge University reunited the English verses to the two larger preceding Latin prose speeches. That was in 1932, but we still await a reintegrated bilingual text. It makes a big difference, to reach the English verses by way of the two Latin prose sections. The first is an ironic praise of foolery, in an Erasmian spirit. It parodies the student exercises by upholding folly in a register of high eloquence. The second section lampoons those present, in groups and then individually, in a riot of unsavory comparisons and gross puns. It is high spirits in a low register. So when Milton advances into his English verses, he does it in his role as master of ceremonies, keeping up the variety show — the higher the new register, the better. He changes from Latin to English at exactly the point where other presenters’ salting scripts do so. Thus

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“At a Vacation Exercise in the College”

in their original context they function as virtuoso teasing of a crowded house. See Milton (1998b).

John K. Hale

Athanasius (c. 296 –373). Bishop of Alexandria. A major figure in the controversies about the nature of the Godhead that deeply divided the early Christian church, he defended the concept of the Trinity, as it was to become established in the western church, against Arianism. As such, his status among western theologians of Milton’s own age was high. In Of Reformation, Milton cites Athanasius’s argument about the sufficiency of scripture to resolve points of controversy to support his view that the only divine guidance on church government is that actually found in the canonical scriptures. See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

atheism. Professed atheism in the early modern period was almost entirely unknown, and the word itself had broader application than now, covering meanings from perceived heterodoxy or religious scoffing to something closer to genuine unbelief. Thus, there is no questioning that early modern “atheism” covers a different though not necessarily incompatible set of ideas from those catered for by the modern term. This has encouraged modern commentators to be wary of the term in the earlier period, preferring to interpret it as tending toward impiety, and not atheism as it is now understood. Two caveats, however, should be borne in mind. First, even if there were no obvious atheists, there was plenty of worry about atheism. Second, for reasons of personal safety, genuine unbelievers were surely very discreet, and we should infer from such discretion only that they covered their tracks well, or were silent, not that they did not exist; enough lapses have been detected across Europe by modern commentators to confirm early modern suspicions. As the Chorus in Samson Agonistes remarks, “Unless there be who think not God at all, / If any be, they walk obscure” (295 –96). See Hunter and Wootton (1992).

William Poole

Athens. Ancient Greek city-state that provided Western civilization with foundations for its arts, philosophy, and political thought. After periods of kingship and oligarchy, Athens established a limited democracy and eventually extended the franchise

to all the city’s freemen. During the governance of Pericles (443 – 429 b.c.), Athens achieved cultural, economic, and political preeminence. The visual arts flourished, and such playwrights as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides invented tragic drama. Even in decline, the city produced seminal figures in philosophy: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and many others. In Paradise Regained, Satan offers Athens to Christ as a temptation emblematic of earthly knowledge (4.240 – 41). In reply, the Son of God asserts that the best of all knowledge can be found in the Hebrew tradition: “Greece from us these arts derived; Ill imitated” (4.338 –39). In Areopagitica, however, Milton associates Athens with the healthy toleration even of scandalous authors. He identifies England’s Parliament with the city-state’s Areopagus, a legal body elected by popular vote. Stephen M. Buhler

atonement. The Christian doctrine that Christ’s death settled the debt owed by the human race because of its inherited sinfulness and thus reconciled the human race to the Godhead. The term applies also to the act of Christ’s sacrifice. Milton’s perspective on the issues are orthodox. In Paradise Lost the Father asserts, “Die he [man] or justice must; unless for him / Some other able, and as willing, pay / The rigid satisfaction, death for death” (3.210 –12). Alastair Fowler (PL) notes that Milton here is “taking for granted the Anselmic satisfaction theory of the Atonement,” but he adds that he “occasionally incorporat[es] the earlier ‘ransom’ theory of Irenaeus, Augustine, etc.” Thomas N. Corns

Attaway, Mistris. Preaching lacewoman who, if she existed, was one of the earliest commentators on The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. Even if she did not exist, the interpretation of Milton’s tract attributed to her is an early response to the piece in terms of women’s relationship to divorce. She is discussed by the heresiographer Thomas Edwards in Gangraena. Edwards comments, “She hath practised it in running away with another womans husband.” He makes a point of the veracity of this particular report, embarrassing as it was to the ministers of the gathered churches, and prints letters from Attaway (saying she has gone to repair Jerusalem) and from her husband. Susan Wiseman

Augustus Caesar (Gaius Octavius)

Aubrey, John (1626 –1697). Antiquary, natural philosopher, and biographer, to whom we owe a crucial early life of Milton. He was close friends with Robert Hooke, with whom he sometimes lodged at Gresham. In his lifetime, Aubrey published only his Miscellanies; his most important work, including his Brief Lives, The Naturall Historie of Wiltshire, Monumenta Britannica, and An Idea of Education of Young Gentlemen, remained in manuscript form in the Bodleian Library at his death, where they still are; many have since been edited. Aubrey gained information on Milton from Milton’s brother Christopher that was precise enough to be able to describe Milton’s eye color and height. He was also one of Milton’s keener early readers.

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Aristotle’s. Again, Augustinian citations dominated Jean Calvin’s Institutes. Augustinianism emphasized the initial grandeur of man in Adam, his fall and consequent depravity, the utter helplessness of man fallen, and the free grace of God through Christ to restore to salvation some, but only some, of those fallen. Augustine’s theological influence was unparalleled. But the seventeenth century also saw significant attacks on Augustinianism: antiCalvinism is of necessity anti-Augustinian, and the rise not only of Arminianism but interest in the alternative patristic systems of, notably, Irenaeus and Origen took their toll on the theology represented by the Thirty-Nine Articles. See McGrath (1987), Tyacke (1987).

See Darbishire (1932), ODNB.

William Poole William Poole

Augustine [Aurelius Augustinus] (354 – 430). Bishop of Hippo and influential church father. Born of a Christian mother, he early had an illegitimate son, and his first religious calling was to Manichaeism. Eventually leaving his native Africa for Italy, he encountered the preaching of Ambrose and the Neoplatonic writings of Plotinus and Porphyry. Later, after a conversion experience, he became a Christian. Ordained in 391, back in Africa, he became full bishop of Hippo in 396. Augustine wrote his famous Confessions over the turn of the century, and from the second decade of the new century he fell into dispute with Pelagius, a British monk who had suggested the perfectibility of humankind, thus effectively denying original sin and minimizing the role of grace. To this period belong Augustine’s great works On the City of God and On the Trinity. His youthful Neoplatonism now gave way to a darker approach, the older theologian emphasizing, as a consequence of the Fall, the depravity of humankind, helpless without grace. William Poole

Augustinianism. The teachings mainly of the later Augustine, particularly as derived from his anti-Pelagian writings. Augustine, already reasserting his dominance over western theology in the late scholastic period through such reactionary movements as the schola Augustiniana moderna, was easily the major theological influence on the Reformation, his works newly available in corrected texts. Martin Luther remarked as early as May 1517 on the rise of Augustine’s influence and the decline of

Augustus Caesar (Gaius Octavius) (63 B.C.– A.D. 14). Roman emperor. He was the great-nephew and adopted son of Julius Caesar. On his adoption he took that name Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus; from 27 b.c. he was known by his title, Augustus. After the establishment of the Roman empire, following a series of civil wars that ended with the death of Mark Antony, he became its first emperor, although the transition from a republican constitution was a complex and lengthy one. His period of political domination was an especially rich one for Roman literary culture, in which flourished Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Livy, among others. In his preface to Samson Agonistes, Milton remarks on Augustus’s own attempts to write a play about Ajax in confirmation of his argument that “men in highest dignity have laboured not a little to be thought able to compose a tragedy” (“Of That Sort of Dramatic Poem Which Is Called Tragedy”). The period of Augustus’s rule was characterized by a widespread cessation of hostilities, the so-called pax Romana, which coincided with the birth of Christ. Milton alludes to this “universal peace through sea and land” in the ode “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (lines 52 – 60). In The History of Britain, Milton debates at length the probable reasons for Augustus’s failure to revive Julius Caesar’s project for the invasion and colonization of Britain. Augustus retained a status as an exemplar of austere and upright government, though in Areopagitica Milton concedes that he was active in the suppression and punishment of libels. See OCCL.

Thomas N. Corns

B Babel. A city and tower from Genesis 11:1–9 at which the language of humanity was “confounded” and the people scattered. Babel corresponds to the Akkadian Babili/u, “gate of the gods”; but Genesis 11:9 identifies “Babel” with the verbally related Aramaic balal, “to confound or confuse,” a significance popularized by Flavius Josephus (Antiquities), Augustine (City of God), and others. Milton’s reference in Paradise Lost to the cementing of the Tower of Babel’s bricks with bitumen (12.41) is indebted to Josephus. Following Genesis 10:8 –10 and Dante’s Purgatorio, Milton identifies Nimrod as the builder of the tower (PL 12.24, 33, 36) on the plain of Shinar (3.466 – 67, 12.41). The monument to fame is raised at the mouth of hell (12.42) and reduced to an object of divine ridicule, named “Confusion” (12.62). Accounts of Babel in popular travel writings that influenced Milton include those of Samuel Purchas and Peter Heylin. Contemporary images of Babel appear throughout Milton’s ecclesiastical and political treatises in reference to prelates and monarchs (for example, in Of Reformation, Eikonoklastes, and The Readie and Easie Way, in an attack on the factions of the Commonwealth government). Elizabeth Sauer

Babylon. Ancient city in the empire of Mesopotamia. From the Hebrew babel, it was the capital of Babylonia located on the Euphrates eighty-nine kilometers south of Baghdad in the land of Chaldea (Shinar). Destroyed by the Assyrians in 689 b.c., it was magnificently restored under Nebuchadnezzar. Its capture by the Persians in 538 b.c. resulted in its decline. Genesis 10:8 –10 identifies Babylon as a city within Nimrod’s kingdom. Hebrew prophets ( Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel) denounce the city while predicting Jerusalem’s deliverance. Citing the New Testament reference to the “new Babylon” (Rev. 14:8, 17–18), Milton figures “Babylon” as the 24

seat of the Pope. His most famous account of “that proud city . . . Babylon” (PL 12.343) is in the story of the Tower of Babel in Paradise Lost 12.38 – 62 (cf. Gen. 11). Other references appear in “Sonnet XV,” line 14, recalling the image of papal Rome as Babylon from Petrarch’s Sonnet 108, partly translated in Of Reformation. For contemporary applications of the term, see Of Reformation, The Reason of Church-Government (cf. Rev. 18:10 –13), and Eikonoklastes. The word also occurs multiple times in the major poems Paradise Lost (1.717; 12.343, 348) and Paradise Regained (3.280, 4.336; cf. Ps. 137:1–3). Elizabeth Sauer

Bacchus. Roman god of wine and fertility, called Dionysus by the Greeks. The son of Jupiter and Semele; in most mythic accounts, his mother asked to see Jupiter in his full divinity and perished as a result. The frenzy that Bacchus could inspire in his devotees, known as Maenads or Bacchantes, is reflected in stories of the death of Orpheus. In “Elegia Sexta,” Milton mingles the muses with the Maenads, playfully asserting wine’s importance to poets (14 –32). In “Ad Patrem,” Bacchus is called Lyaeus (“liberator”), releasing the bard’s eloquence (41– 43). In “L’Allegro,” Bacchus is father of the Graces (14 –17); in A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, he is the father of Comus (46 –57, also 522). Orpheus’s destruction at the hands of the Maenads appears in “Lycidas” (61– 63) and in Paradise Lost: “that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard” (7.34). Milton alludes to alternative myths concerning Bacchus’s birth in Paradise Lost (4.276 –79) and in Animadversions. In The Readie and Easie Way, the impending royalist regime consists of “tigers of Bacchus,” embodiments of excess and violence. Stephen M. Buhler

Baillie, Robert

Bachiler, John (d. 1674). Clergyman. He was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge (B.A. 1636, M.A. 1639). Under the Ordinance for the Regulation of Printing of 1643 he was appointed a licenser of new books. Thomas Edwards perceived him to be too permissive toward heterodox opinions and advocates of toleration. Indeed, Edwards called Bachiler “Licenser-Generall of the Sectaries Books . . . who hath been a Man-midwife to bring forth more monsters begotten by the Divell” (Gangraena, 1646). Yet he linked Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce with Roger Williams’s Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, calling them both reprehensible books in a gratuitous observation made while licensing John Goodwin’s Twelve Considerable Serious Cautions (1646). See ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

Bacon, Francis (1561–1626). English statesman and natural philosopher. He began his studies at Cambridge University in 1573 and was elected to Parliament in 1581, rising to attorney general (1613), then Lord Keeper (1617), Lord Chancellor and Lord Verulam (1618), and finally Viscount St. Alban (1621). Removed from his position in 1622 after a politically motivated conviction for corruption, Bacon continued until his death the philosophical writings that had begun with Novum Organon, Essays, and The Advancement of Learning. Milton’s most explicit acknowledgment of Bacon comes in his prose works. While Bacon generally favored a reform of episcopacy and Milton its abolition, the two thinkers also shared points of common agreement. Bacon’s anonymous Certaine Considerations Touching the Better Pacification and Edification of the Church of England (1604) was reprinted in 1640, and the privately circulated An Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the Church of England (1585) was printed in 1641 as A Wise and Moderate Discourse, Concerning Church-Affaires. References to both texts appear in Milton’s prose, with Certaine Considerations possibly providing Milton with the “learned English writer” who demonstrates that even early bishops were dependent on counsel. Milton also clearly approved of An Advertisement’s arguments that the worldliness of bishops was the cause of schism and that persecuting sectarians and their writings would fail to enhance popular faith, citing the text first in his Commonplace Book and again in Animadversions and twice in Areopagitica. There are traces of Bacon in Milton’s poetry as well. Catherine Gimelli Martin has contended (Milton Quarterly, 2001) that Bacon’s De Sapientia Veterum

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helps shape the mythology of Milton’s A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle and that Milton’s depiction of Sin draws heavily upon Bacon’s depiction of Scylla in both The Advancement of Learning and Novum Organon. Karen Edwards has placed the poem within a broader scientific framework that includes Bacon. See Edwards (1999).

Todd Butler

Bacon, Nathaniel (1593 –1660). Historian, politician, and judge. Member of Parliament during the rule of both Oliver Cromwell and Richard Cromwell as well as the Convention Parliament, he was author of An Historical Discourse of the Uniformity of the Government of England (1647) and The Continuation of an Historical Discourse, of the Government of England (1651), tracts surveying English constitutional history and defending the authority of Parliament and common law primarily on the basis of a contractual kingship first established during the Saxon period. Similarities to Bacon’s arguments can be found in Milton’s The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), Eikonoklastes (1649), and Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (1651). Todd Butler

Baillie, Robert (1599 –1662). Scottish divine and scholar. Born in Glasgow and educated at the University of Glasgow, he accepted episcopalian ordination in 1622, though his antipathy to the initiative to impose a new service book on Scotland drew him to Presbyterianism. In the general assembly of the Church of Scotland he spoke against Arminianism. In 1640, he went to London to assist in preparing a case against William Laud. He served as a member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, and though he was appointed professor of divinity at the University of Glasgow in 1642, he was frequently in London. An active polemicist against episcopalianism, from the mid-1640s he turned to attack Independency and assailed Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce in Dissuasive from the Errours of the Time Wherein the Tenets of the Principall Sects, Especially of the Independents, Are Drawn Together in One Map (London, 1645). He quotes extensively from the second edition. He later attacked the execution of Charles I. The editorial tradition usually identifies him as the “Scotch What-d’ye-call” attacked in “On the New Forcers of Conscience.” See ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

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Bainbridge, Thomas

Bainbridge, Thomas (c. 1574 –1646). Master of Christ’s College, Cambridge, from 1622 to 1646, and thus throughout Milton’s time at the college. He assumed a posture of neutrality in the political crises of the 1640s and managed to retain his position as head of college despite the purge of the universities. See ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

Bale, John (1495 –1563). English scholar, playwright, and reformer. Born at Cove, Suffolk, he entered a Carmelite monastery at age twelve. Educated at Cambridge, he became a vehement Protestant. His vernacular reformist plays included The Temptation of Our Lord (1538), treating the same matter as Paradise Regained, and a play of King John (1548), the first known English history play. He was a scholar of English literary antiquities and a mentor of John Foxe. See ODNB.

Tom Bishop

Baptists. Any of three distinct denominations linked by their rejection of infant baptism in favor of adult baptism, most frequently by immersion. The first denomination to form was the General Baptists, initially dissenters from the separatist church in Amsterdam and settling in London in 1611 under the leadership of John Smith. General Baptists believe in universal salvation by good works and have accordingly been associated with Arminianism and Pelagianism. Particular Baptists seceded from the Independent Church in Southwark in 1633 under the leadership of John Spilbury and were strict Calvinists. Both General and Particular Baptist churches were separatist, anti-tithe, and democratic, and held that no special preparation was needed for preaching. The third and most radical Baptist denomination was the Seventh-Day Baptists, also known as Traskites or Seventh-Day Men. Associated with Fifth Monarchists (see millenarianism), SeventhDay Baptists were Sabbatarians and adhered to many Old Testament practices, earning them the epithet “Judaizers.” On the issue of baptism, Milton opposes infant baptism in De Doctrina Christiana and favors the immersion of adults. Linda B. Tredennick

Barberini, Antonio (1607–1671). Cardinal. Scion of the most powerful family in Rome in the 1620s

and 1630s, he was the younger brother of Francesco Barberini and nephew of Pope Urban VIII. He was made a cardinal in 1627. He remained in Rome, engaging in the cultural life of the city (he wrote neo-Latin poetry) and assisting Francesco in the development of the Palazzo Barberini. Milton certainly met his brother, and he may well have known Antonio, too, at least slightly. When Milton attended the comic opera Chi soffre, speri, mounted on 17/27 February 1639 to inaugurate the new theater of the palazzo, another audience member recalled that Antonio had greeted them at the door. See DBI.

Thomas N. Corns

Barberini, Francesco (1597–1679). Cardinal and nephew of Pope Urban VIII. Parker (1996) terms him his “Prime Minister of Rome and chief counselor.” Through the Vatican librarian, Lucas Holstenius, Milton, while he was in Rome, attended a musical entertainment given by Cardinal Barberini. The cardinal’s courtesy quite awed Milton, to judge by the phrasing of his thank-you letter to Holstenius the next day. The letter exists in a manuscript of 1639 as well as being letter 9 in the Epistolarum Familiarum Liber Unus [Book I of the Familiar Letters]. John K. Hale

Barbon, Praise-God. A pious leather merchant who was a member of what came to be known, after Barbon, as the Barebone’s Parliament. Barclay, John (1582 –1621). Roman Catholic author. Born in Lorraine, the son of William Barclay, a Scot, and his wife, Anne de Malleviller, he was educated at the Jesuit school in Pont-à-Mousson until about 1602 but rebelled against the Jesuits and attacked them in Euphormionis Lusinini Satyricon (1605). To Milton he was an example of a rootless Roman Catholic writer, without nation or proper religion. The Reason of Church-Government contains an attack in kind on Barclay for his assertion in Icon Animorum (1614) that the English lack manners. See Ijsewijn (1990), ODNB.

Nigel Smith

Barebone’s Parliament. On 20 April 1653 Oliver Cromwell dismissed the Purged Parliament. Ten

baroque

days later, he and his senior officers appointed a new Council of State, much smaller than its predecessor. Milton’s employment as a public servant continued without interruption. Then, in a constitutional experiment, a nominated assembly was contrived. The new body, with 120 members, grew to 144 with co-options of men close to Cromwell, who predominated in the new Council of State it proceeded to establish. It decided to call itself a parliament, to which contemporaries mockingly added the epithet “Barebone’s,” after Praise-God Barbon, a pious leather merchant, who was a member. It busied itself with a cluster of issues relating to a new church settlement. Milton’s views are fairly clear from his sonnet “To the Lord General Cromwell”; he broadly favored a separation of church and state, an untithed ministry, and a wide toleration of heterodoxy. However, presumably because of his status as a public servant, he did not involve himself at this stage in the associated controversies. Within the Barebone’s Parliament the more radical faction favored a settlement along the lines proposed by Sir Henry Vane and apparently supported, at least in private, by Milton. Such a settlement would have proved financially ruinous in many congregations. On 12 December, the moderate faction withdrew from Parliament to tender their resignation to Cromwell, while those remaining were cleared from the house by troopers of the New Model Army. In a further constitutional innovation Cromwell was installed as Lord Protector, and the first Protectorate was established. See Woolrych (2000).

Thomas N. Corns

Baroni, Leonora (1611–1670). Singer and musician. Daughter of Adriana Baroni, herself a leading singer, she probably trained initially with her mother. Admired for her elegance and beauty as well as her extraordinary singing voice, she moved to Rome in 1633 and achieved immediate success, singing frequently in the salons of the Palazzo Barberini, where Milton probably heard her sometime in 1638 or 1639. He wrote three Latin epigrams to her: “Ad Leonoram Romae Canentem” and two titled “Ad Eandem.” She attracted verses from numerous other poets, some of which were collected as Applausi Poetici alle Glorie della Signora Leonora Baroni (Rome, 1639). Milton’s poems appeared first in Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645).

baroque. The complex of styles evolved by artists in the service of the Catholic Church as part of the enterprise to revitalize the Catholic faith after the setbacks of the Reformation. The emergence of the baroque is associated with the deliberations of the Council of Trent, which met at Trento in northern Italy from 1545 to 1563 to consider how the appeal of the reformed doctrines of the Protestant churches could be combated. Among many other results was a determination to encourage a more intensive manner of devotion among the followers of Rome. The characteristic features of the new baroque style began to appear in the later years of the sixteenth century, reaching their height in the middle of the seventeenth century. In architecture, the firm lines of the classical style began to develop a novel exuberance, and decorative motifs became more animated and surprising as men such as Pietro da Cortona, Carlo Maderno, Francesco Borromini, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini experimented with new forms. The dynamics of this architecture directed attention upward toward the illusionistic spaces of the painted ceilings, which became celestial fields crowded with spiritual figures. Painting responded to the need for an intensely energized devotional art, with grand, gesticulating characters and a fondness for scenes of martyrdom and extreme suffering, or for moments of vision or miracle. In the dramatic interplay of shadow and light in the canvases of Caravaggio, in the eventful works of Guido Reni or the strenuous productions of the Carracci, the vitalism of the baroque is at its height. Sculpture also attained a new animation and expressiveness in the hands of Bernini and Allesandro Algardi (1598 –1654). As an example of baroque at its fullest expansion, the church of the Gesu, the mother church of the Jesuits, might be instanced. At the time of Milton’s visit to Rome in 1638 –1639, he would have found the city alive with new building and decoration. St. Peter’s was nearing completion; the Barberini Palace where he attended a reception and a concert had recently acquired its spectacular frescoes: Andrea Sacchi’s “Divine Wisdom” and Pietro da Cortona’s “Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Power.” In northern Europe the baroque style made its first appearance in painting, through the practice particularly of Peter Paul Rubens and Jacob Jordaens. Architectural developments followed, especially in the Spanish Netherlands, which were responsive to modern fashions in Catholic art. In England, wary as ever of continental influences, the baroque made slow progress.

See GMO.

Thomas N. Corns

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Graham Parry

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Barrow [Barrowe], Henry

Barrow [Barrowe], Henry (c. 1550 –1593). Puritan Separatist. He was educated at Clare Hall, Cambridge. He was converted to the Puritan cause around 1580 and, like Robert Browne, became an advocate of a radical Separatist ecclesiology which held that, by the New Testament model of the early church, authority was vested in individual congregations and not in any national ecclesiastical organization (see Separatists). Imprisoned in 1586, he was charged with disseminating seditious books in 1590 and executed in 1593. Those who adopted his ideas were briefly known as Barrowists (see Brownists), but his legacy was not a distinct sect. It was, rather, a significant contribution to the development of congregationalist thought. As such he figures in the early history of radical Puritanism that arguably culminates in the inclusive and tolerationalist model of church government represented by John Goodwin, to which important aspects of Milton’s own ecclesiology approximate. See ODCC.

N. H. Keeble

Barrow, Samuel (c. 1625 –1682). Physician. Helen Darbishire notes that in 1698 John Toland identified Barrow as the “S.B., M.D.” who signed the first of the two commendatory poems prefaced to the second (1674) edition of Paradise Lost (the second poem was by Andrew Marvell). There is no independent corroboration of this identification nor documented evidence of contact between Barrow and Milton. Barrow was chief physician to the Scottish army of George Monck and at the Restoration became physician-in-ordinary to Charles II. William Riley Parker suggests that he may have begun visiting Milton within a year or two of the Restoration, but this is mere conjecture. The poem “In Paradisum Amissam Summi Poetae Johannis Miltoni” [On the Paradise Lost of the Supreme of Poets, John Milton] applauds the scope, ambition, and sublimity of Paradise Lost.

by Christians (cf. Milton, Commonplace Book). His uncompleted series of sermons on the six days of creation, Homilies on the Hexameron (cf. Milton, Commonplace Book), influenced both the patristic and the Renaissance conception of Eden and earthly paradise. Gregory Kneidel

Bastwick, John (1593 –1654). Physician and Puritan controversialist. Born at Writtle, Essex, he was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and at Padua, where he took an M.D. He returned to England in 1623 and practiced as a physician at Colchester. For his identification of English episcopacy with Roman prelacy in Elenchus Religionis Papisticae (1624, 3rd ed. 1634) and his advocacy of Presbyterianism in Flagellum Pontificis (1634) he was interrogated by William Laud and imprisoned in the Gatehouse. There he wrote The Letany of John Bastwick against the bishops, which, through the agency of John Lilburne, was published in four parts at Leiden in 1637. For this, Lilburne was whipped, pilloried, and imprisoned in 1638. Bastwick was arraigned, along with William Prynne and Henry Burton, by the Court of Star Chamber for publishing seditious libels. All three were condemned to be fined, pilloried, mutilated by the severing of their ears, and imprisoned (separately) for life. At the scaffold in Westminster Palace Yard, however, their heroic composure turned their mutilation into a spectacle of triumph. The fame of the incident ensured that in 1640 Bastwick was released by order of the Long Parliament (as were Burton and Prynne). He served as a captain in the parliamentarian army and continued to publish against both Independency and episcopacy. His satirical and vituperative antiprelatical tracts anticipate the belligerence of Milton’s own early prose. See BDBR, ODNB.

N. H. Keeble

See Darbishire (1932), Parker (1996).

N. H. Keeble

Basil (the Great) (c. 330 –379). Greek church father. He turned from his secular ambitions to promote monastic asceticism, then to defend publicly the Nicene faith, and finally, in 370, to succeed Eusebius as bishop of Caesarea. Milton quotes from his Opera (2 vols.; Paris, 1618). Basil’s essay “On the Right Use of Greek Literature” is an important early defense of the study of pagan literature

Battle of Dunbar (3 September 1650). A turning point in the war between Scotland and England, which followed the execution of Charles I (see Third Civil War). Oliver Cromwell, whose army was outnumbered two to one, achieved an overwhelming victory. Milton alludes to the event in his sonnet “To the Lord General Cromwell”: “Dunbar field resounds thy praises loud” (line 8). Thomas N. Corns

Bede [Beda]

Battle of Edgehill (23 October 1642). The first major battle of the First Civil War, a stalemate although both sides claimed victory. It left the road to London open to the royalist forces, which probably provided the immediate occasion for Milton’s “Sonnet VIII” (“When the Assault Was Intended to the City”). It also allowed the royalist capture of Oxford, which probably retarded the return of Milton’s first wife, Mary Powell, to John, and of Reading, where Milton’s brother Christopher Milton was living with John Milton, Sr. See Turnham Green. Thomas N. Corns

Battle of Marston Moor (2 July 1644). Decisive battle of the First Civil War in which the royalist army of the north, commanded by the Marquis of Newcastle, together with Prince Rupert, was routed by parliamentary forces and their Scottish allies. Marston Moor lies outside the city of York. The battle in effect ended royalist control of northern England. It was a personal triumph for Oliver Cromwell, who commanded the cavalry on the left of the parliamentary line. He was, however, subordinate to Thomas Fairfax, the Earl of Manchester, and Alexander Leslie, First Earl of Leven, who led the Scottish forces. Milton does not list it among Cromwell’s signal accomplishments in his sonnet “To the Lord General Cromwell.” Thomas N. Corns

Battle of Naseby (14 June 1645). The decisive battle of the First Civil War. After sacking Leicester, the principal royalist field army, commanded by Charles I and Prince Rupert, marched south to relieve Oxford. It was intercepted by a major parliamentary force commanded by Thomas Fairfax, seconded by Oliver Cromwell. In the ensuing battle, the royalists were routed. Charles never again could assemble an army on the same scale. Oxford fell, thus displacing Richard Powell, Sr., and his dependents, who looked to Milton for shelter. The private papers of the king were captured and published, with interpretative observations, by order of the Long Parliament as The Kings Cabinet Opened (London, 1645). In terms of its polemical strategy, the book anticipates Milton’s Observations upon the Articles of Peace, which it probably influenced. Thomas N. Corns

Baxter, Richard (1615 –1691). Puritan divine and author. Born in Rowton, Shropshire, he became one

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of the most widely read of seventeenth-century divines even though his schooling was poor and he did not proceed to university. Ordained in 1638 he ministered at Dudley and Bridgnorth before moving to Kidderminster in 1641. After serving as chaplain in the New Model Army, he returned to Kidderminster where his renowned pastorate was remarkable for its commitment to catechizing and personal instruction. His churchmanship was Puritan in character, but he refused allegiance to any one ecclesiastical tradition. He was similarly moderate in doctrine, promoting the “middle way” of Moïse Amyraut between Calvinism and Arminianism. Above all, he advocated toleration of diversity in belief and practice. Though those of Baxter’s own mind were popularly known as Presbyterians, he preferred to style them as “Reconcilers.” Since he could not support a church founded on exclusive principles, in 1662 he refused to subscribe as required by the Act of Uniformity (1662) to become the preeminent nonconformist minister of the Restoration period. The only reference to Milton that has been noticed in Baxter’s works is mention of his “oratorical” antiprelatical tracts. See ODCC, ODNB.

N. H. Keeble

Beale, John (1608 –1683). Ecclesiastic, fellow of the Royal Society, and correspondent of Samuel Hartlib and John Evelyn, to whom we owe some very early references to Paradise Lost, among other Miltonic works. He attended Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, and despite Calvinist beginnings became sympathetic to Socinianism. He corresponded with Hartlib on educational and agricultural matters and also on the project for a universal language. Despite some Republican dalliance during the Interregnum, Beale conformed and became a corresponding member of the Royal Society and their first honorary fellow. See ODNB.

William Poole

Bede [Beda] (673/74 –735). Monk, theologian, and historian, known as the Venerable Bede. He was born in northern Northumbria and entered the monastery of Wearmouth at age seven, transferring later to the sister house of Jarrow. His extensive writings include works of theology and hagiography though he is best known, and was best known to Milton, as a historian of the Christian church in England from the age of Augustine to his own

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Bede [Beda]

time. His major work is Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum. Milton drew on it in his Commonplace Book, using the version found in Jerome Commelin’s Rerum Britannicarum (Heidelberg, 1587). Bede’s history was a major source for Milton’s History of Britain, though evidently by the time he was writing that, he had available to him the text of Bede’s history that had been edited by Abraham Wheloc, published in Cambridge in 1643. Thomas N. Corns

Beelzebub. Satan’s second in Paradise Lost, a “bold compeer” who is “next himself in power, and next in crime” (1.127, 79). The name appears in 2 Kings 1:3, where it is usually translated “Lord (Baal) of Flies” and where Beelzebub is the oracle of the Ekronites from whom the ill King Ahaziah hopes to learn his fate; the same idol is later called “Beelzebul” or “Lord the Prince” (Matt. 10:25). Elsewhere in the New Testament he is figured as the chief of all devils (Matt. 12:24, Mark 3:22, Luke 11:15), but in these parables he is sometimes used as another epithet for Satan. Robert Burton also situates Beelzebub as the prince of the first order of devils, those “false gods of the Gentiles, which were adored heretofore in several Idols, and gave Oracles at Delphi” (Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621). Many of Milton’s prose references to Beelzebub (for instance, in Animadversions, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, and Pro Se Defensio) similarly recall his ironic role as exorcist. Eric C. Brown

Behn [née Johnson], Aphra (1640 –1689). Dramatist and author. Born of uncertain parentage, she was the first Englishwoman to make her living as an author. She lived for a time in Surinam as an adolescent and then returned to England, marrying a Dutch merchant named Behn. Spying for Charles II in Holland from 1665 to 1667, she endured poverty after her return home but then embarked on a playwriting career with The Forced Marriage (1670). This tragicomedy was of the popular genre to which Milton responded with Samson Agonistes, whose preface condemned such plays for “intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity; or introducing trivial and vulgar persons, which by all judicious hath been counted absurd; and brought in without discretion, corruptly to gratify the people.” The bawdy adventures of a rake comprise her best-known play, The Rover (Part I:

1677; Part II: 1681). Her Oroonoko (1688) has gained current praise for its critique of colonialism. See ODNB.

Christopher Baker

Belfast. Town in Ulster, Ireland. In 1603 there were only two towns of note in Ulster, Carrickfergus and Newry. The scheme for the “plantation” of Ireland through the introduction of many Protestant settlers, including large numbers of Scots of Presbyterian inclination, made provision for the establishment of new urban settlements, which resulted in the development of three towns, Londonderry, Enniskillen, and Belfast, as centers of the planter region. By the 1640s Belfast, though still in the metropolitan Milton’s dismissive phrase “a small Town in Ulster” (Observations upon the Articles of Peace), was the location for the leading Presbyterian organization in Ireland, its Scots Presbytery. Thomas N. Corns

Belial. One of the preeminent fallen angels who offers counsel to Satan in the infernal synods (PL 2.119 –225 and PR 2.154 –71). His name derives from the Hebrew compound noun meaning “worthlessness” or “lawlessness,” usually found as part of the formulation “sons of ” or “children of ” Belial in the Old Testament, but the word also occurs in numerous apocryphal and pseudepigraphal texts as a proper name. In each case, this particular devil stands in opposition to or violation of the Law. The only New Testament mention of the name is found in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians (2 Cor. 6:15; commented upon by Milton in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce). This devil is characterized consistently by a wanton and violent sexuality, a talent for prevarication, and sloth (except in pursuit of vice). T. Ross Leasure

Bellarmine, Robert (1542 –1621). Jesuit theologian and cardinal. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1560, studied at Padua and Louvain, and was ordained a priest in 1570. In Louvain he established a reputation as both a preacher and a theologian, and in 1576 he became the first professor of controversial theology at the Collegium Romanum. The resulting lectures were published as the Disputationes (3 vols., 1586 –1593), a systematic defense of Roman Catholic theology that remained immensely influential

Bernini, Gian Lorenzo

among Catholics and Protestants alike throughout the seventeenth century. Bellarmine was appointed papal theologian in 1597 and cardinal in 1599. He opposed the Dominicans in the free will controversy, participated in the Galileo case, and engaged in written controversy with James I. He also attracted academic confutations from English Protestant theologians ridiculed in Milton’s Animadversions. Benjamin Myers

Bellerophon. Greek hero. He appears in the sixth of Milton’s Prolusions and in the invocation to Paradise Lost book 7, where Milton’s worries that he will fall from his epic flight “as once / Bellerophon, though from a lower clime” (17–18), fell from Pegasus. In the Iliad Bellerophon rejects the amorous advances of Anteia, who accuses him to her husband, the king of Argos. King Proetus sends Bellerophon to Iobates, king of Lycia, with orders that he be killed. Iobates fails in several attempts, recognizes Bellerophon’s virtue, and marries him to his daughter. After losing two children, a griefstricken Bellerophon wanders the Aleian Plain. Hesiod, Pindar, Horace, Plutarch, and Pausanias write that Bellerophon tamed Pegasus and that he was ultimately thrown to his death by the gods for his presumption in attempting to fly up to heaven. The Mythologiae of Natalis Comes (1567) conflates the two stories, having Bellerophon survive his fall from Pegasus to wander forlorn. Stephen M. Fallon

Benson, William (1682 –1754). Politician, architect, and literary critic. Charles Symmons commends “Mr. Benson . . . who in 1737 introduced a . . . memorial of Milton into Westminster Abbey, to the walls of which venerable building his very name had been considered, only a few years before, a species of pollution” (Life of John Milton, 1822). This statement and others like it are based on Samuel Johnson’s report that when “the monument of [ John] Philips [the poet, not Milton’s nephew], in which he was said to be soli Miltono secundus, was exhibited to Dr. [Thomas] Sprat then Dean of Westminster, he refused to admit it; the name of Milton [being] in his opinion too detestable to be read on the wall of a building dedicated to devotion” (Lives of the Poets, 1779 –1781). Carol Barton

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Bentley, Richard (1662 –1742). English classical scholar. He deployed his emendatorial powers on Paradise Lost in an edition of 1732, for, he said, “There was no manuscript” of the poem, and the illogic of the 1667 text must be due to the intrusions of some meddlesome “Editor” who exploited Milton’s blindness. There was a manuscript, of book 1, and Bentley had read it; but he thirsted to display his Augustanizing improvements to the court and intelligentsia. Yet within the reception of Paradise Lost Bentley’s work is not a farcical scandal but a felix culpa, for the poem’s reputation rose as Bentley’s wavered. Nor were all his proposals ridiculous. His acute mind drew attention to genuine idiosyncrasies of Milton’s style. See critical tradition in Milton studies. John K. Hale

Berni, Francesco (c. 1498 –1536). Italian poet. Born near Florence, he served in several administrative capacities for the Catholic Church. In his lifetime he was best known for comedic works, such as parodies of the Petrarchan sonnet. His major achievement was a rifacimento, or refashioning, of Orlando Innamorato, the romance epic by Matteo Maria Boiardo. While retaining the outlines of the incomplete original, Berni “corrected” the style and diction; he also added verses that commented wittily on the poem’s events and themes. The revision, first published in 1541, became the poem’s standard version. Berni died in Florence. In his Commonplace Book, Milton quotes from Berni in Orlando Innamorato on the topics of lying, kings, and courtiers. Stephen M. Buhler

Bernini, Gian Lorenzo (1598 –1680). Prolific sculptor and architect of the Italian baroque. His work transformed the face of Rome, and his influence was felt throughout Europe. Bernini was born in Naples but spent his entire career in Rome, finding continuous patronage among the powerful. Probably through his father, Pietro, a gifted but facile sculptor, Bernini came to the attention of the Borghese Pope Paul V and his nephew Cardinal Scipione Borgese, for whom Bernini produced the first dazzling series of sculptures on Roman, biblical, and mythological subjects, including “Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius” (1618 –1619), “Pluto and Persephone” (1621), “Apollo and Daphne” (1622 –1624), and “David” (1623). With the ascension of Maffeo Barberini to the papal throne as Urban VIII in 1623, Bernini be-

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Bernini, Gian Lorenzo

gan his lifelong involvement with St. Peter’s Cathedral in the gilded triumphant canopy, known as the Baldacchino, that he constructed above the tomb of St. Peter (1624 –1633). Further work at St. Peter’s included the Decoration Pillars (1647–1648), the Cathedra Petri (1657–1665), and the Great Square, with its colonnades and Scala Regia (1656 –1666). Throughout his career, Bernini produced portrait busts of the ruling elite in Italy and abroad: Charles I (1636), Richelieu (1641–1642), and Louis XIV (1665). His much celebrated “Ecstasy of St. Theresa” was done for the Cornaro chapel in the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria (1644 –1652). He left his mark as well in the many public fountains in Rome, the most famous being the “Fountain of the Four Rivers” in the Piazza Novona (1648 –1651). Bernini’s most visible work postdates Milton’s visit to Rome in 1638 –1639; critics of the Miltonic baroque, along with noting similarities in subject matter, point to the epic scale and stylistic exuberance that characterize the work of both men. Loren Blinde, Jonathan F. S. Post

Beza, Theodore [de Bèze, Théodore] (1519 – 1605). French theologian and man of letters. Born at Vézelay, he was educated at Orléans and Bourges under Melchior Volmar. In 1548, because of a serious illness, he gave up his benefices and embraced the Protestant religion. The following year he obtained the chair of Greek at Lausanne. In 1559 he received the chair of theology in Geneva and succeeded to Jean Calvin in 1564. In 1570 he presided over the Assembly of French Protestants at La Rochelle. Milton borrows extensively from his Tractatio de Polygamia et Divortiis (Geneva, 1568; republished on several occasions until 1610) and Annotationes Majores in Novum Testamentum (Geneva, 1594) and refers to his Icones (Geneva, 1580). The Response of John Phillips wrongly makes him the author of Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (1579). Beza enjoyed a high reputation among Milton and his Protestant contemporaries. Christophe J.-B. Tournu

Bible, books of. See individual books of the Old Testament and New Testament by name and Apocrypha.

Bible, Milton’s use of. The frequency with which Milton uses the Bible is neither surprising nor unique. His was a biblically suffused age, where the Bible, for example, exemplified literary genres.

Often, however, Milton’s use of the Bible is surprising and unique, resulting from his balance of “the external scripture of the written word” with “the internal scripture of the Holy Spirit” (De Doctrina Christiana). While poetic paraphrases of the Bible were common, Milton did not merely mine the Bible for plot; he refashioned “external scripture” to espouse better his beliefs. For instance, though Dalila’s extrabiblical scenes in Samson Agonistes derive from Milton’s “internal scripture,” they simultaneously match Milton’s reading of “external scripture” and foreground distinctly Miltonic issues, such as divorce. Thus, when Milton augments the Bible, he does so as both poet and proselytizer. This approach continues in his prose. Royalists could agree with Milton’s Jesus—who finds in the Bible “What makes a Nation happy, and keeps it so” (PR 4.362)—while condemning Milton’s exegesis. With the Bible as urtext for both sides, Milton walks a hermeneutical tightrope each time he uses the Bible to decry tyranny or to defend divorce. But he also castigates the “ridiculous wresting of Scripture” (Commonplace Book) by others; to rebut the comparison of Charles I and Job in Eikon Basilike, Milton returns to “external scripture” and pairs Charles with Job’s unctuous friends (De Doctrina Christiana). Whether discussing doctrine in De Doctrina Christiana, politics in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, or poetics in Paradise Lost, Milton ultimately begins and ends with his own interpretation of the Bible—his “internal scripture.” See Gay (2002), Hill (1993).

Craig T. Fehrman

Bible, translations of. In Tetrachordon, Milton condemns the Authorized Version’s (AV) rendering of Malachi 2:16: “The Lord God saith, that hee hateth putting away.” Suggesting this passage “hath bin tamper’d with,” Milton remarks that its only authority comes from the Latin Junius-Tremellius Bible ( JT), compiled by Franciscus Junius and (Joannes) Immanuel Tremellius. Next, Milton analyzes Malachi’s tone in the context of similar Hebrew passages and cites Jean Calvin and French Hebraist François Vatable, among others, to support his translation: “Let him who hateth put away saith the Lord God of Israel.” The significance of this passage lies not in Milton’s conclusion, but in his method. Though here Milton explicitly creates a new translation, the same erudition that enables him to contest the AV underlies each of his biblical citations—whether they follow or alter existing editions, whether they

Birkenhead [Berkenhead], Sir John

appear in De Doctrina Christiana or his Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle. Often, this erudition obscures the particular edition that Milton employs. Thus, surveying the translations of the Bible available to Milton does not help identify what Milton uses so much as it illuminates how Milton works. Milton considered the Bible textually corrupt, and this corruption motivated his method; when he labels Malachi 2:16 “tamper’d,” he refers to exactly this problem. To compensate, he recommends balancing “the external scripture of the written word” and “the internal scripture of the Holy Spirit” (De Doctrina Christiana). Milton’s “external scripture” is an amalgam of all available translations and apparatuses. Yet, “external scripture” defers to “internal scripture”: the “pre-eminent authority” rests in “the Spirit . . . the individual possession of each man.” Milton’s brand of individualism presupposes careful, scholarly study, and, in crafting a dissenting translation of Malachi 2:16, Milton follows his “internal scripture” only after sifting through layers of “external scripture.” Milton, of course, had many layers to sift. The important English translations are the Geneva Bible and the AV. Milton also uses Latin translations, namely the Vulgate of Jerome and the Protestant-minded JT. Latin and English, however, did not suffice. Conversant with Hebrew, Greek, and much more, Milton emphasizes the Bible’s original languages; in Of Reformation, for example, he chides scholars who, out of their ignorance of Hebrew and Greek, produce “dangerous and suspectfull translations.” As an inveterate humanist, then, Milton often turns to Greek New Testaments—by scholars such as Desiderius Erasmus and Theodore Beza—and, buoyed by England’s reviving interest in Israel, Hebrew Old Testaments. Though earlier critics debated Milton’s Hebrew, most now think he read the Bible in Hebrew, Syriac, and Aramaic but read rabbinic literature in Latin translations. Multilingual work became more feasible in 1657, when Brian Walton issued the monolithic Biblia Sacra Polyglotta. Considered the finest polyglot, Walton’s edition is a pastiche of nine different languages— including Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, Aramaic, and Chaldee—and matching Latin translations. Despite this surfeit of editions and translations and commentaries, several patterns appear in Milton. Normally, Milton favors the AV and the JT as base texts for English and Latin quotations. See Gay (2002), Hill (1993).

Craig T. Fehrman

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Biddle, John (1615 –1662). Unitarian writer. Educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, he was repeatedly imprisoned for preaching and publishing antitrinitarian views in such works as XII Arguments . . . Wherein the Deity of the Holy Ghost Is Clearly and Fully Refuted (1647) and Twofold Catechism (1654), refuted at length by John Owen. Biddle was probably responsible for the 1652 English version of the Racovian Catechism. He was exiled to the Scilly Isles in 1655 and died from disease contracted in prison. Biddle’s Socinianism (as it was then styled) has affinities with Milton’s antitrinitarianism. Though Milton never mentions Biddle, as the man who licensed the Latin Racovian Catechism for publication he could hardly have been unaware of Biddle’s writings. See Hill (1977), ODCC, ODNB.

N. H. Keeble

biographies of Milton. For early biographies of Milton, see John Aubrey, Edward Phillips, Cyriack Skinner, John Toland, and Anthony Wood. Bion (fl. late second century B.C.). Greek poet. A shadowy figure, to whom little extant may with certainty be attributed, he probably lived in Sicily. He is the subject of the anonymous Lament for Bion, which in Milton’s age was usually attributed to Moschus and which has often been identified as a source for or influence on Milton’s “Lycidas.” See OCCL.

Thomas N. Corns

Birkenhead [Berkenhead], Sir John (1617– 1679). Poet and journalist. Born in Northwich, Cheshire, he attended Oriel College, Oxford, and with the patronage of William Laud became a fellow of All Souls College. With the outbreak of war he became a royalist propagandist, and in January 1643 he assisted Peter Heylin with the editing of the newsbook Mercurius Aulicus. Soon Birkenhead became the main editor, perhaps because of his vicious satirical skills. Aulicus was prominent in the propaganda war, was mentioned in Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), and was opposed by Marchamont Nedham’s Mercurius Britanicus. It ceased production in September 1645, shortly after the loss of the First Civil War. Birkenhead also wrote a number of political pamphlets and poems. After the Restoration he was licenser to the press

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Birkenhead [Berkenhead], Sir John

from 1660 to 1663 and editor of the government newsbook Mercurius Publicus. See ODNB.

Joad Raymond

Bishops’ Wars. Two successive campaigns in Scotland spawned by Charles I’s insistence upon imposing a uniform Prayer Book on the Scottish church. Open dissent over the book’s imposition in July 1637 rapidly escalated into war between the king and a Scots opposition committed to Presbyterianism and the supremacy of parliamentary statute. Charles’s initial incursion into Scotland (May 1639) resulted in June in a bloodless settlement committing him to refer the controversy to the first Parliament in more than a decade. With the collapse of this Short Parliament in May 1640, a financially hamstrung Charles began another campaign without the necessary subsidies, and the resulting disarray helped prompt Scots forces to invade in August and occupy portions of Northumberland. Though open hostilities were concluded with the Treaty of Ripon, Scottish demands for tribute and the need for military financing drove Charles I to call Parliament into back session in November 1640 (see Long Parliament). In Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda Milton explains that news of the first war drove him to abandon his studies on the Continent and return to England, as he felt it dishonorable to continue his studies while his “fellow-citizens at home were fighting for liberty.”

Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654 –1729). English physician and prolific writer. Educated at Oxford and Padua (M.D.), he was physician to King William III and to Queen Anne. His voluminous literary output, notably his epics Prince Arthur (1695), Eliza (1705), Redemption (1722), and Alfred (1723), elicited mainly ridicule or indifference. The one exception is his philosophical epic Creation (1712), which was praised highly by Joseph Addison and Samuel Johnson. Creation joins Paradise Lost in the English Lucretian tradition. See ODNB.

Stephen M. Fallon

Blake, William (1757–1827). Poet and artist and illustrator of Milton’s works. Daughters of Beulah! Muses who inspire the Poets Song Record the journey of immortal Milton through your Realms Of terror & mild moony lustre . . . (Milton I, lines 1–3; fig. 1)

In the vast intertext of European art and letters, the primal, ever-evolving bond joining the art

Todd Butler

Black Bartholomew Day. St. Bartholomew’s Day (24 August) 1662, when the Act of Uniformity (1662) came into force. It was anticipated with considerable apprehension by the newly restored regime, which feared that Presbyterians might join with radical groups in a general uprising. In the event, the day passed off peaceably, but about one thousand ministers, schoolmasters, and university fellows left their positions rather than subscribe. With those variously ejected since 1660, the total number was in the region of eighteen hundred. Several collections of farewell sermons by ejected ministers were published in 1662 and 1663. N. H. Keeble

Fig. 1. William Blake, title page to Milton (1804). Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Photo courtesy of the Huntington Library photographic archives.

Blake, William

of William Blake to that of John Milton is surely among the most complex. Sometimes a visionary father (“Now my lot in the Heavens is this; Milton loved me in childhood & shewd me his face” [letter to John Flaxman, 12 September 1800]), sometimes the source of errors in need of correction, Milton figures massively in Blake’s oeuvre of “composite art”—beginning with his first designs for Paradise Lost in 1788 and ending only with his death at seventy years of age. This inspiration reveals itself both in Blake’s illuminated prophetic poems and in his illustrations for virtually all of Milton’s works (a number in multiple sets), which serve as both celebration and commentary and reveal the evolution of Blake’s assessment of “immortal Milton.” Blake’s most important verbal statements about Milton appear in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790 –1793) and in his long poem Milton (1804 – 1816). He also reveals his relation to Milton somewhat less directly in the preface to Jerusalem (1804), where he writes of freeing his poem from the “bondage” of blank verse—in so doing, both echoing and going beyond Milton’s dismissal of rhyme in the prefatory note to Paradise Lost. Elsewhere Blake rejects Homer and Virgil, the classical models Milton cites, identifying them entirely—as does Milton more equivocally (for example, in PL 9.25 –33)— with epics of “war and dominion.” This ambivalent combination of identification and criticism typifies Blake’s treatment of his great predecessor in both The Marriage and Milton. In The Marriage, Blake—albeit through “The voice of the Devil”— describes Paradise Lost as containing the “history” of reason’s restraint of desire, with Satan representing desire and God the Father and Son representing reason. In Milton’s epic, says Blake’s devil, “the Father is Destiny, the Son, a Ratio of the five senses. & the Holy-ghost, Vacuum!” Milton, he goes on, “wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God and at liberty when of Devils & Hell,” for “he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it.” The comment, given its dramatic source, must be taken, at least to some extent, as ironic and double-edged. And Blake, unlike Percy Bysshe Shelley later, does not seem to have considered Satan the hero of Milton’s poem. But, like his friend Henry Fuseli, Blake seems to have agreed with his “Devil” here that Milton’s representation of Satan possessed more energy than his representation of God the Father and Son—thus leaving the poem without an effective hero. Perhaps partly for this reason, in the later Milton Blake describes the poet of Paradise Lost as “unhappy in Eternity” and willing to descend back into

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Fig. 2. William Blake, Immortal Milton entering Blake through his left foot (Milton, 1804, plate 29). Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Photo courtesy of the Huntington Library photographic archives.

the fallen world and enter into Blake through his foot (fig. 2)— empowering the younger poet, in Milton and Jerusalem, to complete the true poetic part of Milton’s imperfectly realized vision. The poem’s explicit reason for Milton’s descent is to redeem and put things right with his sixfold emanation— identified with his three wives and three daughters, divided from him and scattered through the fallen world. The descent is impelled by his hearing a bard’s song, uttered in Eternity. The song recounts Blake’s myth of fallen human history, seen in synecdoche as a dispute between Satan and the figure Palamabron, an avatar for Blake himself. In this allegory, Satan mirrors Blake’s patron William Hayley, author of a life of Milton and “corporeal friend” but “spiritual enemy” (Milton I, line 26). Both are sons of Los, Blake’s cosmic artist-blacksmith hero. Los has assigned to Satan work in the mills and to Palamabron work with a harrow—a seeming inequality that arouses Satan’s envy. He appeals to his brother Palamabron with “soft dissimulation of friendship” to reverse their roles, actually exerting his manipulative power to get what he wants. At first, Palamabron is taken in by Satan’s dissimulation but, seeing

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the disastrous consequences of their role reversal, becomes angry. This anger, in fact, saves him; for through it he is cleansed of dissimulation and false pity, while Satan, who lacks the “science of wrath,” has only the “science of pity”—a form of hypocrisy that destroys community by masking and suppressing anger. Blake’s Milton is moved to descend in order to confront and imaginatively shape the true Satan—who never can be redeemed, but who must be endlessly reshaped in order to be rightly recognized (fig. 3); to complete his unfinished identification with his own misunderstood ideals (emanations); and, through William Blake, to reenvision the themes of his epic, cleansing it of its false and mistaken theology. The remaining two-thirds of the poem narrate Milton’s descent—ultimately to Blake’s cottage in Felpham and to its garden path, which is also Blake’s poetic path. Here, Blake witnesses Milton’s reunion with his emanations, collectively named Ololon, and hears the great speech in which Milton casts off his errors, “the rotten rags of

Fig. 3. William Blake, Milton imaginatively reshaping Satan (Milton, 1804, plate 15). Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Photo courtesy of the Huntington Library photographic archives.

Memory.” In addition to his failed familial relationships, these errors include theological views that, in Blake’s view, partially negated Milton’s poetic energy. Thus Blake’s poem, like most of his work, is both a criticism of Milton’s partial capture by the forces of reason and an embrace of what Blake regarded as the true part of the Miltonic vision (which included the radically inward Jesus of Paradise Regained). This vision Blake’s poem now perfects and extends, for Milton has come into him to “cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration.” Yet however ambivalent, Blake’s admiration for Milton was profound, as is obvious in the beautiful designs he produced in response to virtually all of Milton’s major works—more than one hundred in all, far more than any other of Milton’s nearly two hundred illustrators. “Without Contraries,” Blake wrote in Marriage, “is no progression.” And in his struggle with Milton’s works Blake seems to have found an ever more complete marriage of “Attraction and Repulsion,” “Reason and Energy,” divinity and human existence. Because for Blake these are eternal forces, he did not, like most other illustrators, seek to represent either Milton’s narrative or its natural setting. Rather, he sought to embody in visible form the invisible struggle between the apparent dualities underlying human existence. Indeed, the study of his readings of Milton is the study of his ever-developing appreciation for the way Milton had dramatized those struggles. Anticipating modern critics who have emphasized, for instance, the “inwardness” of Milton’s Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, Blake (in two sets of eight plates from 1801 and 1805) subverts and clarifies both Milton’s narrative and his Neoplatonic emphasis on virginity, to foreground the Lady’s own struggle—not only through the blandishment of Comus’s predatory sexuality, but also through the repressiveness of her parents and narcissism of her brothers—to arrive at the possibility of sexual maturity and fulfillment. Blake achieves his reinscription of Milton’s allegory through a variety of subtle moves, such as moving the Sabrina scene out of Comus’s palace and back into the woods where the Masque begins (fig. 4). In so doing he suggests that the palace has been a projection of the Lady’s virgin fears—fears that, for Blake, must be overcome not by abstinence, but by “an improvement of sensual enjoyment” available not through the “pale religious letchery call[ed] . . . virginity, that wishes but acts not” (Marriage), but through the recognition implicit in the Attendant Spirit’s evocation of the Garden of Hesperus: “every thing that lives is Holy.”

Blake, William

Fig. 4. William Blake, Sabrina disenchanting the Lady (Comus, 1801, plate 7). Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Reproduced by permission of the Bridgeman Art Library, London and New York.

In addition to a number of independent designs inspired by Miltonic episodes, Blake went on to illustrate all of Milton’s major poetic works except for Samson Agonistes—making two sets for Paradise Lost (1807 and 1808), two for “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (1808 and 1809), and one each for “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” (1816) and Paradise Regained (1816). All show his extraordinary and ever-growing attentiveness to Milton’s text. Traditionally, for instance, illustrators of Paradise Lost have represented books 11 and 12 with the arrival of Michael, with several scenes from his prophecy, or with Adam witnessing Abel’s murder by Cain. Only Blake chooses to represent Michael’s foretelling of the Crucifixion—a scene he represented three times (1807 [fig. 5], 1808, and c. 1822) and one that underscores his remarkably Christocentric reading of the poem as a whole. If in Marriage Blake saw the poem as lacking a true hero, in virtually every design he recompenses that perceived failure— either literally, as in his design for book 3, or symbolically, as in his remarkable rendering of the dinner party with Raphael in book 5. (See illustrations of Milton’s works.) Likewise, in his representation of Christ on the pinnacle in Paradise Regained book 4 (fig. 6), Blake manages to convey in visible form both poets’ utter refusal to separate body from spirit. “Man has

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Fig. 5. William Blake, Michael foretelling the Crucifixion (Paradise Lost, 1807, plate 11). Courtesy of the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California.

Fig. 6. William Blake, Christ standing on the pinnacle of the temple (Paradise Regained, 1816, plate 4). Courtsey of the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botarical Gardens, San Marino, California.

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aloft in a pose denoting both serene triumph and calm sacrifice. The contraries are perfectly married in the focused energy of the divine human form—a form that Milton, in divesting himself of “the robe of promise” and “ungird[ing] himself from the oath of God” (Milton, fig. 7), has come to resemble for Blake “more distinctly than . . . any priest or hero.” See Behrendt (1983), Curran and Wittreich (1973), Dunbar (1980), Werner (1986), Wittreich (1975).

Hazard Adams, Wendy Furman-Adams

Fig. 7. William Blake, Milton divesting himself of “the robe of promise” and the “oath of God” (Milton, 1804, plate 13). Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Photo courtesy of the Huntington Library photographic archives.

no Body distinct from his Soul,” he had written around 1790; “for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses” (Marriage). The Jesus of Paradise Regained embodies this assertion through each of Satan’s four temptations to negate it. But its most perfect embodiment (at least for Blake) comes at the moment when, upon the temple’s “highest Pinnacle,” the Christ simply stands, as perfect man, while his satanic negation, “smitten with amazement,” falls zigzagging through nineteen vertiginous lines (PR 4.549 – 81; fig. 6). Revealed now in all his arrogant hypocrisy—as Blake’s Milton has returned to reshape him (see fig. 3), thus “annihilat[ing] the Selfhood of Deceit & False Forgiveness”—the devil (who also resembles Blake’s Urizen) pulls his long, divided beard in “dread and anguish,” feet splayed in agony, knee raised toward his massive chest, as he begins his infinite tumble into “Ruin, desperation, and dismay.” To his right, in a breathtaking image—yet one entirely faithful to Milton’s vision—Blake displays a Jesus so inwardly undivided that he balances easily on the highest “golden spire,” using only the second toe of his blessed right foot, while holding his arms

blasphemy. The expression of contempt for God through thought, word, or action. It was punishable by stoning to death under the Mosaic Law of the Old Testament (Lev. 24:16, 1 Kings 21:10), and by severe punishments, including death, under early and medieval Christian canon law. Burnings for blasphemy, as for heresy (the two often became confused or identified), were a feature of European Reformation history, though there were no more than six executions for this offense in England, where religious dissent was more often punished as a form of treason. In May 1648, on the precedent of the Mosaic Law and in partial fulfillment of the religious policy of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, the Long Parliament passed an Ordinance for the Suppression of Blasphemies and Heresies that prescribed death for atheism, mortalism, and denial of the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, not as heresies but as forms of blasphemy. In August 1650, largely in reaction to the perceived threat from the Ranters and other radicals, the Purged Parliament passed a Blasphemy Act. This was a more restrained enactment than the 1648 ordinance: it did not concern itself with the many doctrinal opinions (such as Arminianism and antipaedobaptism) proscribed as heresies in 1648; it limited its sense of blasphemy to denial of the reality of God, impersonation of God, and the claim that gross immorality is compatible with religious faith; and it imposed not death but six months’ imprisonment for a first offense and banishment for a second. It was under this act that John Biddle was imprisoned in 1655, and it led to many prosecutions of Quakers. With his heterodox views (and especially his antitrinitarianism), Milton, had he declared himself openly, would clearly have been vulnerable under such legislation, and in any case we might expect his tolerationist bias to find it uncongenial. It is true that, in his prose, he nowhere advocates severe punishments for blasphemy, but Milton was no friend to immorality or irreligion, and although he

Bodleian Library

rejected the received understanding of heresy and would not proscribe any religious opinion sincerely derived from a biblical source, he did, in common with many contemporaries, argue that the magistrate had power to punish blasphemy since this was not a matter of private religious conviction but of civil and moral concern, a form of “slander [or] malitious or evil speaking,” and so an offense against the law of nature detectable by mere reason. Hence, approving its definition of blasphemy as “a crime belonging to civil judicature,” Milton could commend the 1650 legislation as “that prudent and well deliberated act” (Treatise of Civil Power). See Coffey (2000), Dobranski and Rumrich (1998).

N. H. Keeble

blindness. Milton was totally blind by February 1652, at the age of forty-three, although the condition had been developing for ten years. In 1654 he described his symptoms in detail to Leonard Philaras, but the diagnosis remains uncertain: modern ophthalmologists have suggested secondary glaucoma or bilateral retinal detachments. Externally his eyes appeared normal, as in William Faithorne’s portrait (see portraits of Milton), for which Milton probably sat in 1670. Milton refers to his blindness in “Sonnet XVI” (“When I consider how my light is spent”), the sonnet “To Mr. Cyriack Skinner upon His Blindness,” and “Sonnet XIX” (“Methought I saw my late espoused saint”). His most personal lament for the loss of sight is in Paradise Lost (3.1–55), where he mentions the medical term for nondisfiguring blindness, “drop serene” (gutta serena); the invocation to book 7 refers to his vulnerability in blindness (7.23 –28). As a blind author he worked within a distinctly oral and aural culture, relying on people to speak to him, read to him, and take his dictation, so that blindness affected both his method of composition and certain formal elements of his writing. Beverley Sherry

Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313 –1375). Italian poet of the Decameron. Milton surely studied Boccaccio, at Cambridge University or alone. In his Commonplace Book, Milton includes notes from Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante; the entry focuses on the censorship of Dante’s De Monarchia. Although this is Milton’s only explicit reference to Boccaccio, Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum is a potential source for Milton’s “Manlike” Eve of Paradise Lost (8.471) and Demogorgon allusions (PL 2.964 – 65), among

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others (cf. Samson Agonistes 971–74; “De Idea Platonica,” 4; and “Elegia Sexta,” 71). Craig T. Fehrman

Boccalini, Traiano (1556 –1613). Political satirist. He was born in Loreto and educated at the University of Padua; he died in Venice. His best-known work, and the only one cited by Milton, is Ragguagli di Parnasso [Reports from Parnassus], 201 ironic newsletters in which wise men are represented as discussing art, literature, and politics. It was published in Venice in 1612 –1613. Milton cited it twice in his Commonplace Book; both notes are critical of the legal professions. See DBI.

Thomas N. Corns

Bodin, Jean (c. 1530 –1596). French lawyer and political theorist. Born in Angers of a bourgeois family, he was reportedly a Carmelite monk before being educated in law in Toulouse and called to the bar in Paris (1561). The Duc d’Alençon, leader of the party of the Politiques, made him his master of requests and councillor (1571). In 1576, as a deputy of the Third Estate for Vermandois, he sat in the Parliament at Blois. The same year, he published Les six livres de la République (Paris, 1576), which was translated into English by Richard Knolles in 1606. As he was favoring a fully sovereign monarch, Milton could use Bodin only incidentally, in 1659 –1660, to uphold the superiority of permanent assemblies. Bodin died of cholera. Christophe J.-B. Tournu

Bodleian Library. The library of Oxford University, restored by the early seventeenth century through the major benefaction of Sir Thomas Bodley (1545 –1613). It was, as it remains, a reference library, not a lending library. At some time after the royalist occupation of Oxford ended ( June 1646), Milton presented Bodley’s librarian, John Rouse, with the eleven prose pamphlets he had published by that date (bound together and housed at the library). He followed these in January 1647 with a copy of Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645), sent to replace a copy that he had presented earlier and that had gone astray. This volume contained, pasted to the verso of its Latin title page, the poem “Ad Joannem Rousium.” In February 1651, Milton presented a copy of the first edition of his Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio. In June 1656 Milton pre-

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Bodleian Library

sented two further publications, Eikonoklastes and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (bound together).

namorato in its descriptions of conflict (2.714 –15; 6.354 –72). Stephen M. Buhler

Thomas N. Corns

Boehme [Böhme or Behmen], Jakob (1575 – 1624). German mystic. He was born in Görlitz, Silesia, worked as a cobbler, and was married in 1599. The following year, upon seeing a ray of light reflected from a dish, he experienced a mystical event in which God appeared to him to be infused throughout all of creation as the foundation of the cosmos, synthesizing all of its contrarieties into a single absolute. His most noted work, Morgenröte im Aufgang oder Aurora [The Beginning of Dawn or Aurora], was published in 1612. A larger collection of writings, Der Weg zu Christo [The Way to Christ], appeared in 1623. He left for Dresden in 1624, having been criticized by the Lutheran pastor in Görlitz, but he returned later, dying there. Significant among his voluminous writings are Die Drei Prinzipien Göttlichen Wesens [The Three Principles of Divine Being] (1619), on the nature of the Godhead; a treatise on cosmology, Signatura Rerum (1621/22); and a commentary on Genesis, Mysterium Magnum (1622/23). Boehme’s syncretistic theology combines elements from Christianity, alchemy, Paracelsian thought, the Kabbalah, and hermeticism. Milton’s writings contain no direct references to Boehme; however, he may have felt the effect of Boehme’s ideas through his friendship with Peter Sterry, a perceptive reader of Boehme and one of Oliver Cromwell’s chaplains. See Fallon (1991).

Christopher Baker

Boiardo, Matteo Maria (c. 1434 –1494). Italian poet. He was count of Scandiano and governor of Reggio and Modena. He wrote translations of classical texts along with original works, notably the epic Orlando Innamorato [Orlando in Love], which focuses on the passion that Angelica, a pagan princess, inspires in one of Charlemagne’s knights. Boiardo died at Reggio. His unfinished masterwork, first published in 1495, prompted an irreverent sequel by Ludovico Ariosto and a revision by Francesco Berni. Its earnest treatment of chivalric love influenced Torquato Tasso and Edmund Spenser. In his Commonplace Book, Milton quotes Boiardo on slander and courtiers. Paradise Lost at least twice echoes Orlando In-

book burning. There was biblical precedent for both oppressive and praiseworthy book burning ( Jer. 36:23; Acts 19:19), and in England, books had been burned for political or theological reasons long before the advent of printing. The seventeenth century saw a continuation of book burning for reasons of sedition, scandal, and heresy. After the Restoration, following a request of the House of Commons on 16 June 1660, Milton’s Eikonoklastes and Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio were burned by the common hangman, and at Oxford in 1683 his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates joined in the flames many books by both erstwhile enemies and friends, including Samuel Rutherford, John Goodwin, George Buchanan, Richard Baxter, and John Owen. William Poole

Book of Common Prayer. The service book of the established Church of England. Written in large part by Thomas Cranmer, it substituted for the various Latin breviaries of the medieval Roman Catholic Church a single national standard for reformed worship in English. The first Edwardian Prayer Book, imposed on all clergy by the Act of Uniformity of 1549, brought worship into line with Protestant doctrine, eradicated practices with no biblical warrant, and made the proceedings intelligible to the laity. It substituted for the Mass a service of the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion with receipt of the sacrament in both kinds, but it retained clerical vestments and a number of other features of Roman Catholic practice. Such conservative elements attracted criticism from, among others, Martin Bucer. The second Edwardian Prayer Book of 1552 was markedly more Protestant. Where 1549 referred to the “altar,” it spoke of the “Lord’s table” and it ordered the wearing of a surplice (a simple white linen tunic) rather than clerical vestments. Although kneeling was required at the reception of the sacrament, the “Black Rubric” explained that this was a posture of humility, not of adoration. At the accession of Mary I (1553) the old services were restored, but when her sister Elizabeth I succeeded (1558), the 1552 Prayer Book was republished with some slight alterations and

Bradshaw, John

once more was imposed by the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity (1559). For the developing Puritan movement, the 1559 Prayer Book continued to embody an ideal of worship that was ritualistic, sacerdotal, and eucharistic, rather than plain, congregational, and homiletic. In 1645 the Prayer Book was superseded by the Presbyterian Directory of Public Worship. After the Restoration, Puritan disquiet with the Prayer Book was debated at the Savoy Conference of 1661. This led to some revisions in the 1662 Prayer Book reimposed by the Restoration Act of Uniformity (1662). For Milton the Prayer Book was simply “an Englisht Mass-Book” (Eikonoklastes). See ODCC.

N. H. Keeble

Book of Sports [King’s Declaration of Sports]. A declaration by James I that attempted to clarify laws governing Sunday recreation. In August 1617 James I learned that Lancashire magistrates had ordered “That theare bee no pipinge, Dancinge, bowlinge . . . or any other profanacion upon any Saboth Day in any parte of the Day.” The order was innovative in two ways: whereas previous legislation of Sunday recreations restricted “wanton” activities, the new order banned several traditionally permissible recreations. Also, whereas previous legislation prohibited recreations during divine services, the order banned recreations during any part of the Sabbath (see Sabbatarianism). The Book of Sports, drafted by Thomas Morton and revised by James, reaffirms the legality of “honest” sports after divine services. Charles I’s reissuance of the declaration in 1633 exacerbated tensions between secular and ecclesiastical officials and between religious radicals and conservatives, and it remained the subject of controversy in the years leading to the First Civil War. In Of Reformation, Milton curses a “publique Edict” advocating the “horror” of “gaming, jigging, wassailing, and mixt dancing” on Sundays. Gregory M. Colón Semenza

book trade. For a discussion of the book trade in Milton’s time and Milton’s relationship with the book trade, see stationers. Borromini, Francesco (1599 –1667). Italian architect of the Roman high baroque. Born into a family of building workers, he trained as a stone mason un-

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der his uncle Carlo Maderno in Milan. He moved to Rome in 1619 to become an architect at St. Peter’s Cathedral with rival Gian Lorenzo Bernini but struck out on his own in 1631. Borromini’s first major project, the small monastic church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (begun in 1638), established his reputation as a genius with concave and convex surfaces that create the illusion of elasticity and instability appropriate to the baroque goal of spiritual ecstasy. Later, larger works such as Sant’Ivo della Sapienza (1642 –1660) and the Church of Sant’Agnese (1652 –1666) in Piazza Navona (across from Bernini’s “Fountain of the Four Rivers”) continue this fascination with modeling complex curving structures on intricate mathematical designs. Emulated but also criticized in his own time, Borromini died by his own hand. He belonged to the generation of architects and designers who were transforming the built environment of Rome during the time of Milton’s visit to Italy in 1638 –1639. Carrie L. Meathrell, Jonathan F. S. Post

Bradshaw, John (1602 –1659). Lawyer and politician. He was born in Cheshire and educated at Gray’s Inn (called to the bar in 1627). He may have been remotely related to Milton on Milton’s mother’s side. He practiced at the bar during the 1630s and 1640s and acted for Milton in a Chancery case in which he was embroiled. He was active in London politics during the Long Parliament, and by 1647 he was functioning as a sort of attorney general for Parliament. On 10 January 1649 Bradshaw was appointed Lord President of the high court of justice appointed by the Purged Parliament to try Charles I, and he played a crucial role in the conduct of the trial. He was thereafter appointed Lord President of the Council of State established by the Purged Parliament. He retained the post until 1651, at which time it became rotational, apparently to Bradshaw’s personal disappointment. Milton had frequent dealings with Bradshaw from 1649 in his capacity as Latin secretary to the Council of State, and he presented him with copies of his republican writing. In February 1653 Milton wrote to Bradshaw to recommend the employment of Andrew Marvell, though without success. Under the Protectorate, which Bradshaw opposed, his political fortunes declined steeply. In Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda Milton introduced a long digression on Bradshaw’s merits and achievements, perhaps as much to coax him back into working with the government as to soften the attitude of

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Oliver Cromwell to a former, though now alienated, comrade. In 1656 Bradshaw added a codicil to his will, leaving £10 to Milton. See ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

Bradshaw, William (1571–1618). Puritan divine. Educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, he became, through the influence of Thomas Cartwright, a convinced Puritan; but unlike Cartwright, he was an advocate of an Independent or congregational church polity. Bradshaw argued for the autonomy of particular churches within a national church in his anonymous English Puritanisme (1605, translated into Latin [1610] by William Ames). This was one of the earliest formulations of Independency or congregationalism in English, and one of the first signs that Presbyterianism was no longer in the vanguard of the Puritan movement. Bradshaw was elected a fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in 1599. In terms of discipline and church government, he could be perceived as a significant precursor of Milton’s mature views, but his political quietism ran counter to Milton’s own militancy. N. H. Keeble

Bramhall, John (1594 –1663). Archbishop of Armagh. He was educated at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and consecrated bishop of Derry in 1634 and archbishop of Armagh in 1661. Living mostly on the Continent during the English civil wars and Interregnum, he published works in defense of episcopacy and against Thomas Hobbes. In The Serpents Salve (1643) he objected to the dismissive attitude to Thomas Cranmer and the English reformers in Milton’s Of Reformation, but more significant are three details in his letter of 9 May 1654 written from Antwerp to his son. First, the letter states that on his return to Cambridge after his rustication in 1626, Milton was “turned away” by his Cambridge tutor William Chappell, “as he well deserved to have been both out of the University and out of the society of men” (LR), indicating a complete breakdown in relations between Milton and his tutor. Second, it shows that Bramhall believed that Milton himself was the author of John Phillips’s Responsio (1652) to John Rowland’s anonymous Apologia (1651) against Milton’s Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, and hence that Milton was responsible for the Responsio’s erroneous attribution of the Apologia to Bramhall and for its

disparaging characterization of him as a dissolute sycophant. This ascription was popularly reported, as was the attribution to Bramhall of Joseph Jane’s Eikon Aklastos (1651), an anonymous reply to Milton’s Eikonoklastes. And third, the letter implies that Bramhall possessed secret and damaging information about Milton, presumably acquired from Chappell. Bramhall had written “roundly” to Milton about this but had received no reply. See LR, ODCC, ODNB.

N. H. Keeble

Bread Street. London street running from Cheapside toward the Thames. Milton was born at the home and place of business of his father, John Milton, Sr., which was at the Cheapside end. It remained Milton’s home until he left for his university education. Thomas N. Corns

Brief History of Moscovia, A. Milton, work of prose. A short historical account of the empire of Moscovia, it was written probably in 1648, “at a vacant time . . . before other occasions diverted me,” as Milton discreetly puts it when preparing to publish the work after the Restoration. The bookseller Brabazon Aylmer later confirms that “This book was writ by the Authour’s own hand, before he lost his sight.” Compiled from two previous collections of travel materials, those of Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, A Brief History of Moscovia is the only example of that “Epitome of all Purchas’ Volumes” that Milton is reported as undertaking ( July 1648, Hartlib Papers). It looks like a first and last attempt at achieving the right “proportions” in such synthesis before he turned to The History of Britain. The choice of Moscovia followed first from its status as an English trading colony, whatever Milton’s own disavowal of “the excessive love of Gain and Traffick.” These trading privileges had resulted from the English discovery in the midsixteenth century of the northern shipping route through the White Sea. Milton appropriately begins with Archangel, where the English maintained a trading station, and the river route up the Dvina to Vologda and overland to Moscow. His interest in climate theory seems also to have informed his choosing thus to assess Moscovia, for which he offers the sardonic reason, otherwise inscrutable, that it is “the most northern Region of Europe reputed civil.” Milton’s Baconian objective in conveying

Britons

“that which is usefull, and onely worth observation” informs his selection of what “hath been discover’d by English Voyages.” He works through Hakluyt’s and Purchas’s compilations to assemble a concise narrative. No evidence has been found of its use by English diplomats, though Milton’s prefatory comment that it “was thought by some, who knew of it, not amiss to be published ” invites speculation about his friend Andrew Marvell’s interest, since Marvell was secretary in the Earl of Carlisle’s embassy to Muscovy (1663 –1664). Published belatedly in 1682, A Brief History of Moscovia had been held in reserve by Aylmer, who “hop’d to have procured some other suitable Piece of the same Authour’s to have joyn’d with it.” Aylmer’s clientele in the Royal Exchange met with a well-printed small octavo in seven and one-half sheets (120 pages), this as fresh commercial opportunities in the East beckoned. The Brief History of Moscovia was republished thereafter in compilations of Milton’s prose or complete works, from the Complete Collection (1698) to the usefully annotated modern edition by George B. Parks, with a Russian translation published in 1874. Nicholas von Maltzahn

Brief Notes upon a Late Sermon. Milton, work of prose; full title, Brief Notes upon a Late Sermon Titl’d The Fear of God and the King. It appeared in early April 1660 without printer or publisher’s name, as a response to the vindictively royalist sermon “The Fear of God and the King” preached on 25 March by Matthew Griffith, former chaplain to Charles I. Griffith went too far in not only delivering the sermon, but publishing it with a dedication to George Monck, and he was imprisoned by order of the Council of State. Milton adduces Griffith as an example of the deceivers about whom he had warned in The Readie and Easie Way. Although Griffith preached on Proverbs 24:21, “My son, fear God and the King, and meddle not with them that be seditious [Griffith’s interpolation], or desirous of change,” Milton charges that he himself is seditious—parallel to Korah, Absalom, Zimri, and Sheba. Brief Notes contains a point-by-point refutation of Griffith’s scriptural exegesis, belaboring, for instance, his error in using Gideon—who in fact refused kingship—to defend kings or in applying the injunction “touch not mine anointed” to kings when it was spoken (or so Milton argues) to reprove kings who threatened God’s saints and servants. Milton was answered by Roger L’Estrange in No Blinde Guides (20 April 1660), whose title

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page bore the motto, “If the Blinde lead the Blinde, both shall fall into the Ditch.” Laura L. Knoppers

Britain. Around 330 b.c. Pytheas, the Greek navigator, discovering new trade routes around northern Europe, came upon some islands that he recorded as Pretanike (Latin Britannia). The small western island he called Ierne (Latin Hibernia), and the larger island he called Nesos Albionon (Latin Albionum). In 54 b.c. Julius Caesar invaded, and in a.d. 43 the emperor Claudius incorporated Britain into the Roman empire. Many nativity narratives of Britain were advanced during the sixteenth century: creations from the material of legend, in which King Arthur figured prominently; historical records, which were fragmentary; and scripture, in which God’s plan for the nation was revealed. Although these historical endeavors were part of a larger enterprise to endorse Tudor power (Henry VII through Elizabeth I), it was under Stuart rule ( James I) that Britain ceased to be a mere reference to the Roman occupation. James’s vision was for the kingdoms to be unified by faith, law, language, and the name of Great Britain. Drawing on a common heritage for a common national identity, James pressed forward with his plans for unification in the face of resistance from Scottish and English parliaments, until in 1607 the English Parliament blocked unification. When Charles succeeded in 1625 he attempted to realize his father’s hopes for unification, though with less vision, less vehemence, and less tact. Although the nominal subject of Milton’s History of Britain extends more widely, his principal concern is focused firmly on England. It was to be another century before the Act of Union made Great Britain a political reality. See Britons and Brutus. Vivienne Westbrook

British Milton Seminar. A research seminar, founded in 1988 by H. Neville Davies of the University of Birmingham and Thomas N. Corns of the University of Wales, Bangor. It meets twice a year (spring and autumn) and is open to academics and postgraduate students interested in the study of Milton. Thomas N. Corns

Britons. The principal inhabitants of Britain before incursions by Germanic tribes. Milton prefers

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Britons

the term “Britans” and uses it frequently in The History of Britain to refer to the dominant people of Britain before and immediately after Roman conquest and occupation. His early history depicts them as little better than savages, domesticated and civilized by their Roman masters with difficulty. Thomas N. Corns

Brownists. Followers of Robert Browne, who criticized the Church of England as morally corrupt and advocated an early form of congregationalism, believing that churches should be a self-governing, local body of believers. Browne and his partner Robert Harrison established a separatist congregation in Norwich in 1581, and then in 1582 moved that congregation to Holland, where it exerted considerable influence on the Puritans emigrating to America. Browne was voted out of this congregation in 1583, was excommunicated in 1586, and was reconciled to the Church of England shortly thereafter. Although Browne was an active Separatist only from 1579 to 1586, the term “Brownist” came to refer to Protestant Separatists. Milton both recognized the opprobrium afforded to the word and perceived some continuity between his own mature position and theirs (see The Reason of Church-Government). Linda B. Tredennick

Brutus. Legendary founder of Britain. From the works attributed to Nennius, Geoffrey of Monmouth took a founding myth for Britain that attributed to Brutus, a descendant of the Trojan Aeneas, the founding of Britain (which derived its name from him). The legend had a wide currency and by Milton’s time had been incorporated into both popular and high-culture accounts of ancient history. In The History of Britain Milton plainly recognized the absurdity of the legend. Thomas N. Corns

The marriage produced six children. After his death, she married Mervin Touchet, Second Earl of Castlehaven, whose scandalous behavior resulted in his trial for sodomy and rape and his eventual execution in perhaps the most sensational law case of the early 1630s. His offenses included sexual outrages perpetrated against Anne and her daughter Elizabeth, who had married Touchet’s son, James. Alice, the Countess of Derby, was slow to be reconciled to her daughter and violated granddaughter but seems to have taken at least some of the other Brydges children into her household at Harefield; in 1632 some of them probably performed in the aristocratic entertainment Arcades, for which Milton provided the script. See Brown (1985), ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

Bucer [Butzer], Martin (1491–1551). Reformer and polemicist. He was born in Alsace and entered the Dominican order, then went on to study at Heidelberg and Mainz. During his time at the former he attended Martin Luther’s disputation on 18 April 1518, which proved to be formative of his own intellectual and religious development; in 1521 he was released from his monastic vows. After his excommunication, he fled to Strasbourg and played a leading part in the Protestant reformation of that city. His work as reformer took a much wider dimension in the years that followed. His contemporary status roughly equaled that of Philipp Melanchthon or Ulrich Zwingli. Eventually forced to leave Strasbourg, he settled in England in 1549 at the invitation of Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury. He was appointed regius professor of divinity at Cambridge University, a post he held until his death. Milton translated sections of his treatise De Regno Christi as The Judgement of Martin Bucer (1644), in which he prints the testimonials of other leading Protestant reformers. Thomas N. Corns

Brydges [née Stanley], Anne, Lady Chandos [Anne Touchet, Countess of Castlehaven] (1580 –1647). Noblewoman. She was the first of three daughters of Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, later Fifth Earl of Derby, and his wife, Alice Spencer, Countess of Derby. After her father’s death, her mother married Thomas Egerton. Her sister Frances married John Egerton, First Earl of Bridgewater. Anne herself married Grey Brydges, Fifth Baron Chandos, probably in 1608.

Buchanan, George (1506 –1582). Latin poet, teacher, historian, and political propagandist. Born in Stirlingshire and educated at St. Andrews and Paris, he died in Edinburgh. His career first touched Milton in the person of his tutor, Thomas Young. Milton’s earliest English poems, “A Paraphrase on Psalm cxiv” and “Psalm cxxxvi,” owe specific expressions to Buchanan’s frequently reprinted Latin psalm paraphrases, many of which the Scotsman

Bunhill Row

composed in 1551–1552 while interned for his Lutheran leanings by the Lisbon Inquisition. Editors of Milton’s seven Latin elegies have discerned numerous debts to Buchanan, citing common phrases and observing in “Elegia Quinta” and “Elegia Septima” general resemblances to Maiae Calendae (Elegy 2), Calendae Maiae (Miscellany 11), and De Neaera (Elegy 9) (poems first printed abroad [1560s–1580s] and collected in Poemata Omnia [Edinburgh, 1615]). Parallels have also been drawn between Calendae Maiae and Milton’s “Song. On May Morning” and “L’Allegro.” In “Ad Patrem,” “Mansus,” “Epitaphium Damonis,” and lesser Latin poems, Milton freely used diction found in Buchanan’s shorter poetry, psalms, plays, and the unfinished cosmological epic Sphaera (Herborn, 1586). Milton’s “In Quintum Novembris” (80 – 85) shows particular acquaintance with Buchanan’s verse satires Franciscanus and Somnium. Similar anti-Franciscan sentiments have been noted in Paradise Lost (3.474 – 80) and Paradise Regained (1.314, 497–98). “Amaryllis” and “the tangles of Neaera’s hair” in “Lycidas” (lines 68 – 69) may trace back to Buchanan’s Desiderium Lutetiae (Sylvae 3), Elegy 9, and Epigrams I, 44. Thomas Warton observed that in these lines Milton “obliquely censured” Buchanan—a judgment that David Masson termed “absurd.” But Milton’s respect for Buchanan was that of a rival. In turning from the amatory to the prophetic strain, in turning from Latin to English, Milton turned his back on the European fame that Buchanan enjoyed. Although Milton probably read Buchanan’s Jephthes (Paris, 1554) and Baptistes (London, 1577)— tragedies which, Sir Philip Sidney declared, “bring forth a divine admiration”—scholars have, for the most part, found in Samson Agonistes no direct borrowings but only shared neo-Stoical commonplaces. One can nevertheless hear an echo of “Ecce Baptistes Novus” (Baptistes 79) in Satan’s scornful “our new baptizing Prophet” (PR 1.328). Milton’s Commonplace Book yields scant evidence of his undoubted study of Buchanan’s Rerum Scoticarum Historia (Edinburgh, 1582). When he came to write The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes, however, Milton chided Presbyterian backsliders by citing precedent for resistance to unlawful rule from Buchanan and John Knox—“Scotchmen of best repute”— even for those exempla that in the Commonplace Book are taken from non-Scottish authors. Also in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, especially in the argument that the people, not just the magistrates,

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have the right to depose tyrants, some have spied the influence of Buchanan’s polemical dialogue De Iure Regni Apud Scotos (Edinburgh, 1579), whose lessons were aimed, prophetically, at the author’s pupil, King James VI. In The History of Britain, Milton depended on Buchanan but also reproved the reliance of “our Neighbor Historian” on “Fables” and censured his Scottish bias against the English. In Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, Milton summoned Buchanan’s prestige to refute the French scholar Claudius Salmasius; in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda, he made this high regard his own: “Now poets who are truly so called, I love and reverence; and it is one of the most frequent and delightful of my pleasures to listen to their song. Besides, I know that most of them, if I pass them in review from the very first to our own Buchanan, are the sworn foes of tyrants.” In 1683 Oxford University condemned and burned copies of the regicidal works of (among others) Buchanan and Milton. See Berkowitz (1992).

Steven Berkowitz

Bunhill Fields. Burial ground and public open space. Bounded by Bunhill Row, where Milton lived at the time of his death, and City Road in London, Bunhill Fields Burial Ground is the resting place of such famous dissenters as William Blake, John Bunyan, and Daniel Defoe, as well as members of the Cromwell and Wesley families and other prominent clergymen and scholars. Though her gravesite has been lost, the body of the poet’s last direct descendant, Elizabeth Foster, child of his youngest daughter, Deborah Milton, also lies there. In recent times scholars have sometimes seen Milton’s burial at St. Giles Without Cripplegate rather than in Bunhill Fields as problematic. However, Milton actively chose to bury his father at Cripplegate in 1647 and had interred his royalist and presumably orthodox Church of England father-in-law, Richard Powell, Sr., there too in 1646. Carol Barton

Bunhill Row. Street north of the walls of London where John Milton was living at the time of his death on or about 10 November 1674. Also known as Artillery Row, Bunhill Fields. Carol Barton

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Bunyan, John

Bunyan, John (1628 –1688). Baptist minister and author. Born in the village of Elstow, Bedfordshire, he received slight schooling. In 1644 he was mustered in the parliamentarian army and stationed at Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire. When he left the army in 1647, he took up his father’s trade as a tinker. In the early 1650s he underwent a prolonged period of spiritual and psychological crisis, perhaps in part induced by his civil war experiences and his encounters with radical army preachers. This led to his conversion and his admission in 1655 to John Gifford’s Open Communion Particular Baptist Church in Bedford (an Independent church Calvinist in theology that practiced adult baptism but did not insist on it as a condition of membership). Bunyan soon began both a preaching ministry and a career as a writer, publishing Some Gospel Truths Opened (1656) and its Vindication (1657) against the Quakers. At the Restoration he refused to stop preaching, and in November 1660 he was arrested. He was tried in 1661 and imprisoned in Bedford Gaol until such time as he agreed to give over his ministry. This he refused to do, remaining a prisoner (though with occasional periods of liberty) until released under Charles II’s 1672 Declaration of Indulgence. While in prison he continued to write, composing among other works his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), and The Pilgrim’s Progress. Anxious about the propriety and reception of this allegorical and fictional treatment of the Christian life, Bunyan did not release it for publication until 1678. It was an immediate, continuing, and extraordinary success, proving to be by far the most popular English prose work of the early modern period. On his release from prison Bunyan was chosen to be pastor of the Bedford congregation and, though he was again briefly confined (1676 –1677), his subsequent preaching ministry in East Anglia and London was largely undisturbed, earning him a considerable reputation. He continued to publish in the allegorical vein, following The Pilgrim’s Progress with The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), The Holy War (1682), and the second part of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1684). The fictional but realistic representation of contemporary experience in these works has earned Bunyan a place in the literary prehistory of the novel. In addition, Bunyan wrote more than fifty homiletic, controversial, expository, and poetic works. Bunyan makes no mention of Milton (nor Milton of him), but it has been suggested that Bunyan’s Holy War was influenced by Paradise Lost (for example, by Roger Sharrock), and the two writers

have been associated and paralleled in several critical accounts. See OCEL, ODCC, ODNB.

N. H. Keeble

Buonmattei, Benedetto (1581–1647). Scholar and philologist. He was a member of the Svogliati and Apatisti academies. Milton met him in Florence in 1638, when Buonmattei was completing a grammar of Tuscan that he was shortly to publish as Della Lingua Toscana, Libri Due. With some temerity, Milton suggested that Buonmattei might usefully add a chapter on pronunciation and furnish the reader with a list of Tuscan authors (perhaps including comedy, tragedy, dialogues, and letters) whose language might be exemplary. Buonmattei seems to have expressed polite interest, and so Milton decided to press the suggestions by writing to him not in Tuscan but in Latin. The letter is an encomium to Tuscan, to Buonmattei, and to the calling of the grammarian. See DBI.

Thomas N. Corns

Burnet, Gilbert (1643 –1715). Bishop of Salisbury and historian. Born in Edinburgh, he was educated at Marischal College, Aberdeen, and was appointed professor of divinity at the University of Glasgow in 1669. In 1674 he moved to England to become an influential and politically active figure at the English court. His churchmanship was moderate and latitudinarian, and his politics Whig. He attended John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, on his deathbed and published an account of his repentance, Some Passages in the Life and Death of . . . Rochester (1680). He was an active supporter of the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 –1689, accompanying William and Mary when they sailed from Holland. In 1689 he was made bishop of Salisbury. He published the three-volume History of the Reformation in England (1679, 1681, 1715) and History of His Own Time (1723 –1734), which is one of the key sources for late-seventeenth-century religious and political history. Reflecting on the Restoration settlement, he remarked that Milton’s escape from capital punishment seemed an “odd strain of Clemency.” See OCEL, ODCC, ODNB.

N. H. Keeble

Bushell, Thomas (1594 –1674). Mining engineer, disciple of Francis Bacon. He proposed to rehabil-

Byrd, William

itate drowned mines in England and Wales in order to reduce importation of minerals from the Americas that were mined by slaves and profited Spain; give petty felons suitable work; save the expense of transporting unrefined ores; and replenish the king’s coffers with silver coin without oppressive taxation. A socially conscious proto-conservationist, but no respecter of habitats, Bushell wished to rifle the bowels of Mother Earth (PL 1.687) more efficiently. Though a royalist, he adjusted to Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate and went further than Milton in toleration.

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State “to make some observations vpon the Complicacion of interest wch is now amongst the severall designers against the peace of the Comonwealth.” Published on or before 16 May 1649, Milton’s account portrays Ormonde as the “Ringleader” of the rebels. Cromwell’s Irish campaign and Charles II’s acceptance of the Solemn League and Covenant rendered Ormonde’s position in Ireland hopeless, and he left in December 1650. See DNB.

Jim Daems

Diane Kelsey McColley

Butler, James, Twelfth Earl and First Duke of Ormonde (1610 –1688). Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Born into a predominantly Catholic family that had for centuries been staunch supporters of English interests in Ireland, upon his father’s death in 1619, he was briefly educated by his mother’s appointed Catholic tutors. He was, however, soon made a royal ward and brought up at court under the tutelage of Archbishop George Abbott, as a Protestant. In 1632 Butler succeeded to the earldom of Ormonde upon the death of his grandfather. Ormonde supported the policies of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, as Lord Deputy through the 1630s and was made commander in chief during Wentworth’s absence from Ireland later that decade. Upon the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion in October 1641, Charles I appointed Ormonde lieutenant general of his forces in Ireland. After the establishment of the Catholic Confederacy of Kilkenny in 1642, which effectively shrank English control to the Pale, he was put in the difficult position by Charles I of negotiating a peace. Appointed Lord Lieutenant, Ormonde negotiated a cessation of arms late in 1643 and a much more comprehensive treaty in 1646, only to be undercut by the hard line of the papal nuncio Giovanni Battista Rinuccini. After the surrender of Dublin, Ormonde left Ireland but returned in September 1648 to try to construct a new royalist alliance with the Confederate Catholics. The Articles of Peace were proclaimed thirteen days before the king’s execution. On 28 March 1649 Milton was ordered by the Council of

Byrd, William (c. 1540/43 –1623). Composer. His works are still frequently performed. A pupil of Thomas Tallis and probably a boy chorister in the Chapel Royal, he was organist and choirmaster of Lincoln Cathedral (1563 –1590) and from 1572 a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal of Queen Elizabeth I, who continued as his patron despite his known Catholicism (he was cited for recusancy in 1584). His Great Service for Morning and Evening Prayer in ten voice parts was probably begun at Lincoln Cathedral but was completed later and may have been performed in cathedrals and university chapels during the Laudian revival. Milton’s early poems and angelic choirs show affinity with such “Solemn Music” despite his aversion to other Laudian elaborations. Milton’s father also wrote sacred anthems in both Latin and English, and, since Byrd managed to publish his Latin Cantiones (with Thomas Tallis, 1575), Cantiones Sacrae (1589, 1591), and Gradualia (1605 and 1607), the poet may have heard and performed some of Byrd’s sacred works at his father’s music gatherings, as well as songs to texts by poets such as Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Edward Dyer, madrigals, settings of metrical psalms for voice and strings, and keyboard and consort music. Both Byrd and John Milton, Sr., contributed madrigals to Thomas Morley’s Triumphes of Oriana (1601) and sacred songs to William Leighton’s The Teares, or Lamentations of a Sorrowfull Soule (1614). See Brennecke (1973), GMO.

Diane Kelsey McColley

C Cædmon (fl. 658 – 680). Illiterate Anglo-Saxon shepherd, poet, and monk. He was credited by Bede with singing the first English poem, “The Hymn of Creation” or “Cædmon’s Hymn.” Initially employed as a herder at Whitby Abbey, a double monastery founded in 657 by the Abbess Hilda, Cædmon later became a singer of verse to the laity, after God divinely bestowed on him the gift of song. In the Trinity Manuscript, Milton writes that the story of Cædmon is a “perplacide historiola.” In addition, Milton’s close friendship with the Dutch scholar Franciscus Junius allowed Milton access to four religious poems that Junius had ascribed to Cædmon. One of these four poems, Genesis B, focuses on the creation, the fall of Lucifer, and the Fall of humanity and parallels Paradise Lost. Coleman C. Myron

Calamy was appointed a licenser of books of divinity and, argues William Poole (in Notes and Queries, 2003), he is ironically invoked in the course of Milton’s attack in Areopagitica on prepublication censorship. See ODNB.

N. H. Keeble

Callimachus (c. 310 to 305 – c. 240 B.C.). Poet and scholar. A Greek writer of the Hellenistic period, he was the principal cataloguer of the great library at Alexandria. His poetic output was enormous, though only six hymns and a collection of short epigrams have survived intact, together with fragments of other writing. Milton alludes to him alongside Pindar as an author of “magnifick Odes and Hymns” in the autobiographical digression in The Reason of Church-Government. See OCCL.

Calamy, Edmund [the elder] (1600 –1666). Presbyterian divine, one of the five acronymic authors who constituted Smectymnuus. He was briefly Milton’s contemporary at Cambridge University, entering Pembroke Hall in 1616 and taking his B.A. in 1620, his M.A. in 1623, and his B.D. in 1632. There he developed pronounced Calvinist and Puritan views. Episcopal pressure to conform led him in 1636 to resign from the lectureship at Bury St. Edmunds that he had held since 1627. As a member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines he worked for a national Presbyterian church settlement. His “Englands Looking-Glasse” (1642), a fast sermon before Parliament, called vehemently for reform of church and state very much in the way of Milton’s antiprelatical tracts, but like other Presbyterians, Calamy opposed the trial and execution of Charles I and so was among those whom Milton castigated in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates for what he took to be their inconsistency and lack of revolutionary heart. In 1643 48

Thomas N. Corns

Calvin, Jean [ John] (1509 –1564). French theologian. In 1521 he received his first benefice (chaplaincy to the altar of La Gésine in the cathedral of Noyon, France). After studying rudiments of Latin in Noyon, he went to Paris to pursue his studies (1523 –1527). The year 1528 marked a turning point in his life: although destined to study theology and become a priest, Calvin enrolled as a student of law at Orléans with Pierre de L’Estoile and proceeded to Bourges in 1529. After his father’s death he returned to Paris in 1531 to study Greek at the Collège Royal. In 1532 he emerged as a humanist by writing a brilliant commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia. In 1532 –1533 he embraced Protestantism. After the Day of the Placards incident (1534) and the persecution of heretics, he fled France. In 1535 –1536 he was in Basel, where he composed and published the first edition of Institutes of the Chris-

Cambridge Platonists

tian Religion in Latin (1536, six chapters). During 1536 –1538 he was in Geneva working with Guillaume Farel to reform the church there. He wrote his “Instruction and Confession of the Faith for Use in the Church” (1537) but was soon expelled by civil authorities. From 1538 to 1541, under the patronage of Martin Bucer, he stayed in Strasbourg as pastor of a French refugee congregation and married. In 1539 he published his second, much enlarged edition of the Latin Institutes. In 1540 –1541 he attended conferences at Haguenau, Worms, and Regensburg. In 1541, when the Libertines were defeated, he returned to Geneva, where he spent the rest of his life. Calvin immediately drew up Ecclesiastical Ordinances (1541), which provided for church government by pastors, doctors, elders, and deacons and set up a consistory that had the power of excommunication. Church authorities were distinct from the state. Contrary to what is usually assumed, Geneva was no theocracy. Calvin’s resolve to moralize the life of civilians and defend Christianity led him to ask for the death of Unitarian Michel Servet, burned at the stake in 1553. In 1559 Calvin published the final Latin edition of the Institutes, divided into four parts, chapters, and paragraphs. Milton rarely mentions Calvin by name in his works, and his attitude toward one of the major founders of Protestantism ranges from deep respect to irreverence. In Of Prelatical Episcopacy, Milton refers to him with Theodore Beza as “the dissolvers of Episcopacie,” and in his pamphlets on divorce, he quotes from Calvin’s Praelectiones in Duodecim Prophetas Minores (Geneva, 1559), his translation of Malachi 2:16 (“Si odio habeas, quisquis odio habet, dimittat, uxorem, dicit Iehovah Deus Israel”) as God’s command to divorce where love cannot be. If Milton finds the purpose of marriage in “a meet and happy conversation,” and not in procreation, he buttresses his view by alluding to Calvin’s A Commentarie of Iohn Caluine, vpon the First Booke of Moses Called Genesis (1578). Milton cautiously quotes from Calvin’s Praelectiones in Librum Prophetiarum Danielis (Geneva, 1561) to make Calvin speak for the deposition of wicked kings, which Milton did not. Milton rejects Calvin when used as an authority by others: “as if we could be put off with Calvins name, unlesse we be convinc’t with Calvins reason” (Animadversions). Calvin is often regarded as a grim character because of his doctrine of double predestination (from eternity God has elected a few people to salvation and doomed the majority to reprobation). This, however, does not seem to be the original

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view of Calvin in Of Christian Religion (1536), and its future developments were intended only as a rebuke to his detractors. Christophe J.-B. Tournu

Calvinism. A general term, already current in Milton’s age, for the theology derived from Jean Calvin. It was typically used with respect to Calvinist soteriology, and particularly the doctrine of predestination, often in distinction from the doctrine of Arminianism. See OED.

Thomas N. Corns

Cam, River. See River Cam.

Cambridge Platonists. Seventeenth-century moralists, clergymen, and philosophers, who shared a confidence in reason, engagement with Plato and Neoplatonism, and hostility to enthusiasm and fanaticism. Several, including John Smith (1618 – 1652) and Ralph Cudworth, studied with Benjamin Whichcote of Emmanuel, a Puritan college at Cambridge University that became the center of the movement. Other notable Cambridge Platonists include Henry More, whose first year at Christ’s College, Cambridge, was Milton’s last, and the Oxford-educated Joseph Glanvill (1636 –1680). Milton shared the Cambridge Platonists’ confidence in “right reason,” the faculty by which human beings are able to discern and participate in the divine plan, and opposition to voluntarism, whether of the Calvinist theological variety or the Hobbesian ethicopolitical variety. Things do not become good because God chooses them; God chooses logically according to prior and rational standards of the good. The good perceived and chosen by God is available to the regenerate individual, a principle epitomized in Whichcote’s favorite biblical text: “The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord” (Prov. 20:27). Confidence in reason fostered in the Cambridge Platonists, though not in Milton, an irenic temper and latitudinarian approach to doctrinal divisions. The two leading members of the school, More and Cudworth, tirelessly opposed Thomas Hobbes’s mechanist materialism, argued that incorporeal substance is responsible for all motion, and defended the freedom of the will. While their insistent dualism separates them from Milton, Whichcote expressed in aphoristic form a Neoplatonizing element of the movement that recalls Milton: “Good men study to

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Cambridge Platonists

spiritualize their bodies; bad men to incarnate their souls” (Moral and Religious Aphorisms No. 367). See Fallon (1991).

Stephen M. Fallon

Cambridge University. With Oxford University, the only university of early modern England. Milton entered in 1625 and left in 1632. During that period, Cambridge had sixteen constituent colleges (Milton’s was Christ’s College) and consisted of more than three thousand students and teachers, all of them male. Notionally, a strict, almost monastic discipline governed the lives of students and fellows. None could marry. Students were supposed to speak Latin at all times, except in their own rooms at times of relaxation. Rules forbade students from freely circulating outside their own colleges, except for academic reasons, though ample evidence suggests these were often flouted. Within each college, the status of students was sharply differentiated, in reflection of the differential fees that were required. The most affluent entered as fellow-commoners or greater-pensioners, who enjoyed certain privileges, particularly in terms of accommodation, dining rights, and the service they received. Below them came lesser-pensioners; this was Milton’s status. Below them, the sizars paid least, received inferior accommodation, and were required at times to act as college servants. They sometimes received an allowance from their colleges. The university, not the colleges, was the degreeawarding body, although college exercises constituted part of the assessment process, together with public examinations under the immediate control of the university. The principal degrees were the bachelor of arts, usually achieved after about four years of study, and the master of arts, which required a further period of study, typically about three years. The curriculum was traditional and wholly pursued through the medium of Latin. Most teaching was done within each student’s college, although there were university lectures, for the most part delivered by university professors, that members of all colleges could attend. See Morgan and Brooke (2004).

Thomas N. Corns

Camden, William (1551–1623). Antiquary, teacher, and educational theorist. He was educated at Oxford University, though left it, disappointed by his lack of preferment, to become a schoolteacher

(and eventually headmaster) at Westminster School, where he counted, among his illustrious pupils, the appreciative Ben Jonson. His eminence, however, arose from his work as an antiquary, in which he labored to capture much information about England and its early history and to publish editions of early chroniclers, though he later devoted his energies to chronicling more recent history. He was a leading figure in the Society of Antiquaries, which reflected and stimulated the development of English historiography during the late Tudor and early Stuart periods. His achievements were recognized by his appointment as Clarenceux king of arms, one of the three kings of arms, the senior heralds in the College of Arms. Milton drew substantially on three of his publications: Britannia, a survey of the antiquities of Britain, first published in Latin in 1586, reissued in enlarged editions in 1587, 1590, 1594, 1600, and 1607, and published in Philemon Holland’s translation in 1610; Anglica, Normannica, Hibernica, Cambrica, a Veteribus Scripta, first published in Frankfurt in 1603, which made available much of the material on which Camden’s chorographical writing had depended; and Annales Rerum Anglicarum, et Hibernicarum, Regnante Elizabetha, first published in 1617. Milton took notes from Camden’s writings in the compilation of his Commonplace Book and cited him variously in his antiprelatical tracts. His History of Britain displays a major indebtedness, and Camden figures frequently in his marginal annotation. See ODNB, Parry (1995).

Thomas N. Corns

Camões [Camoëns], Luís Vaz de (1524/25 – 1580). Portugal’s national poet. He is most famous for Os Lusíadas (1572), a Virgilian epic in ten cantos of ottava rima celebrating Vasco da Gama’s heroic voyage of 1497–1499 from Lisbon around Africa’s Cape of Storms (later renamed Good Hope) to India and back. These two years are greatly expanded by Vasco and Paulo da Gama’s narrations of Portuguese history (Cantos III, IV, V, and VIII); Jupiter’s prophecies of Portuguese glory to assembled gods (Canto II); Adamastor’s predictions of vengeance on the explorers (Canto V); and Vasco’s reception of a siren’s prophetic narrative of the future exploits of Portugal in the East and of Tethys’s visions of the future significance, geographic and cosmic, of his voyage (Canto X; these foreshadow Michael’s visions and narrative of the future for Adam in Paradise

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Lost, books 11–12, originally book 10). The poem so mingles history with fable, Christianity with mythology, and actual places with fanciful settings as to invite comparison with Milton’s epic; whether or not Milton knew Camões’s epic in Portuguese, in Spanish, or in Richard Fanshawe’s English translation (1655), similarities provoke commentary. James H. Sims

Campion, Edmund (1540 –1581). Jesuit priest and martyr. Initially conforming to the Elizabethan Settlement, he experienced a crisis of conscience and abandoned his advanced theological studies at Oxford University. He fled briefly to Ireland, then to Douai, and eventually to Rome. Campion returned to England in 1580 as part of the Jesuit mission to reconvert Catholic sympathizers. After a year of covert ministry, he was arrested, tortured, tried, and executed. Officially, his crime was treason, but Campion claimed that he was a loyal Englishman being executed for his religion. Fifty years after the controversy surrounding his execution, Campion’s influential history of Ireland, which had been incorporated into Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, was republished in two editions in Dublin. In his Commonplace Book, Milton refers to the edition of Campion’s History that had been published with Edmund Spenser’s View. See ODNB.

Andrew Fleck

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London cultural milieu in which Milton the poet spent his childhood. Tom Bishop

Canne, John (d. ?1667). Minister, polemicist, and printer. Perhaps educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, his early career was as a separatist minister, first in London and thereafter in Amsterdam, where, in the 1630s, he operated a printing press producing antiprelatical material. He returned to London in the mid-1640s and was drawn to the regicide cause, to which he brought a strong element of millenarianism. His career in 1649 and the early 1650s brought him close to Milton. His apology for the trial and execution of Charles I, The Golden Rule, appeared three days after Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Apparent echoes have long been seen to indicate that Canne had read Milton’s tract in manuscript form or had, at least, discussed it with him. Once he became a public servant, the Council of State instructed Milton to respond to two pamphlets by John Lilburne. Though Milton did not carry out that commission, Canne responded in his place, publishing two responses, the first of which, The Discoverer: Wherein Is Set Forth (to Undeceive the Nation) the Reall Plots and Stratagems, and Its Companion Piece, The Discoverer. . . . The Second Part, carried on its title page the endorsement “Published by Authoritie.” See ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

Campion, Thomas (1567–1620). English poet, composer, and physician. Born in London, at age fourteen he entered Cambridge University and at nineteen Gray’s Inn, without apparently finishing at either. In 1602 he enrolled at the University of Caen to study medicine, practicing in London until his death. His first songs appeared in 1591 and a volume of Latin poems in 1595. Four books of lute songs were published between 1601 and 1617, and a treatise on counterpoint in 1613. He was interested in quantitative meters. His Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602), describing rhyme as “vulgar and unartificial,” elicited Samuel Daniel’s A Defence of Rhyme (1603). Campion was also a masque writer, composing Lord Hayes’ Masque (1607), The Lords’ Masque (1613), and The Squires’ Masque (1614). Campion figured prominently in the musical milieu in which Milton’s father John Milton, Sr., was also active and was part of the

canon law. A canon is a rule of conduct, specifically one laid down by a Christian church to govern the conduct of its members. The Christian church in England had assembled a considerable body of such rules by the time of the Protestant Reformation, much of which it shared with other Roman Catholic countries and some of which can be traced to the general councils and papal legislation of late antiquity. In 1532 under pressure from Henry VIII, the Convocation, the governing body of the church in England, undertook to enact no further canons without royal assent. A major revision was projected but not effected. Significant additions occurred throughout the reign of Elizabeth I, which reflected the Elizabethan Church Settlement, but canon law, at her death, remained in a state of confusion. However, early in the reign of James I, Richard Bancroft, archbishop of Canterbury, initiated and

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carried through a new set of canon laws, which were augmented in 1640. Their enforcement fell within the remit of bishops’ consistory courts. Canon law was a significant target for Puritan reformers, and Milton in his antiprelatical tracts was alert to opportunities for criticizing both the law and its defenders, the “only-Canon-wise” bishops. His divorce tracts explicitly engaged with reforming those aspects of canon law that governed marriage and divorce, and allusions to the canons occur frequently in those writings. Thomas N. Corns

Cantacuzene, John VI (c. 1292 –1383). Historian and statesman. A leading political figure in the Byzantine empire, he was crowned emperor (1347– 1355) after a six-year civil war. His history of his own times was known to Milton, probably in a Latin translation published in 1603. In his Commonplace Book Milton took from it a single anecdote, about the introduction of tournaments and jousts into the eastern empire by the entourage of Anne of Savoy, who accompanied her to Constantinople when she came to marry an earlier emperor. Thomas N. Corns

Canute [Cnut] (c. 995 –1035). King of England, Denmark, and Norway. Milton describes his life and reign in more detail than he usually employs in The History of Britain. One anecdote, that Canute demonstrated the limitations of earthly kingship by trying unsuccessfully to turn back the tide, had interested him for some time. In his Commonplace Book he noted, under the heading “OF FLATTERY,” “Read k. Kanuts act by the sea side and answer to flatterers in his life.” In his history, the anecdote, derived from Henry of Huntingdon, is reworked into a tableau expressing obliquely a republican value system. Thomas N. Corns

and intensify the sonnets of Petrarch or Sir Philip Sidney. John K. Hale

Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da (c. 1571– 1610). Italian painter. His highly dramatic, naturalistic rendering of religious and mythological subjects is often regarded as initiating the pictorial baroque and, subsequently, a school of “Caravaggisti” descending to Rembrandt. Born in the small Lombard town bearing his name, he rose to prominence in the 1590s in Rome under the patronage especially of Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte. Caravaggio’s early paintings are mostly of youthful, erotic subjects, appropriate to the cultivated tastes of private households, for example, “Boy with a Basket of Fruit” (1593 –1594), “The Musicians” (1595 –1596), “Bacchus” (1596 –1597), and the “Lute Player” (1596 –1597); but with the Papal Jubilee of 1600, he embarked on the broader subject of religious paintings for which he would become best known. Capturing the spiritual turmoil of the Counter-Reformation, two separately commissioned pairs of compositions, in particular, “The Calling” and “The Martyrdom of St. Matthew,” and “The Crucifixion of St. Peter” and “The Conversion of St. Paul” (1600 –1602), fully display the artist’s innovations with chiaroscuro to illuminate the human subject at the moment of greatest emotional stress. Notorious for using street companions for models, including a prostitute in “The Death of the Virgin” (1602), Caravaggio frequently conflicted with authorities. He was exiled from Rome in 1606 and sought refuge farther south, in Naples, where he stayed with Giovanni Battista Manso (the friend and patron of Torquato Tasso and Giovan Battista Marino, whom Milton was later to visit), and then in Malta and Sicily, painting important works until his death. Although the biographical connection through Manso is intriguing, Milton’s familiarity with Caravaggio’s paintings remains a matter of scholarly speculation. See Frye (1978).

“Canzone.” Poem by Milton. The canzone (“big song”) is a major independent form in Italian and was declared the noblest form by Dante (Variorum, 371). Milton’s “Canzone,” however, follows a later and smaller development, the single-stanza canzone. Being placed between “Sonnet III” and “Sonnet IV,” it is not independent but indeed is barely longer than the enclosing sonnets. Its function resembles that of the songs that punctuate

Jonathan F. S. Post

Carew, Thomas (c. 1595 –1640). English poet and courtier. His father was a master in Chancery and his mother descended from Lord Mayors of London. He was educated at Oxford, graduating in 1611. He entered the Middle Temple but studied “very little.” When his father was ruined in 1612,

Caryl, Joseph

Thomas became secretary to Dudley Carleton in Venice, in whose service he continued in Holland until dismissed for insulting him in 1616. He became a regular, but unsponsored, courtier before resuming diplomacy in France under Edward Herbert in 1619. In 1630 he was appointed to the Privy Chamber and made the king’s carver. He attended the king on the frigid campaign of the first of the Bishops’ Wars. From the early 1620s Carew’s poems circulated in manuscript and were avidly read, though they were largely unpublished until after his death. Witty, lithe, and erotic, they were influenced by John Donne and Ben Jonson and by Italian models, especially Giovan Battista Marino. He was friends with Sir William Davenant, Aurelian Townshend, and especially Sir John Suckling, who twitted him with contracting the pox. His most famous poem, “A Rapture,” branded him a libertine, but the speeches in his unique court masque, Coelum Britannicum (1634), reveal a philosophic bent, derived from Giordano Bruno, and are not unlike parts of Milton’s A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus) of later that year. See ODNB.

Tom Bishop

“Carmina Elegiaca.” Title often applied to two schoolboy verses by Milton discovered in manuscript form with Milton’s Commonplace Book in 1874, but strictly the title (“Elegiac Verses,” that is, Ovidian elegiac couplets) refers only to the first. The second, in a more unusual meter, the lesser Asclepiad, is untitled. The theme of both is the desirability of rising early. The common factor is abundance of exemplum and repetition. They hold interest for Milton scholarship for several reasons: they are in his juvenile hand; they contain self-corrections (of scansion); their survival shows that he kept his papers with some care throughout his life; and their separation from other holographs demonstrates the dispersal that his papers underwent toward and after his death. His not printing them in 1645 or 1673 may attest to his good editorial judgment. The manuscript is now in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, with autotype at the British Library. See Hale (1997).

John K. Hale

Carracci. Family of Italian painters. The brothers Agostino (1557–1602) and Annibale (1560 –1609),

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along with their cousin Lodovico (1555 –1619), were the chief exponents of the grand style in painting at the end of the sixteenth century. Working originally in Bologna, where they were born, they turned away from fashionable mannerism and developed an academically labored style, eclectic in its borrowings from Raphael, Correggio, and the great Venetians Titian and Veronese. Notable for large idealized figures, heavily rhetorical gestures, and deep glowing colors, their paintings formed an influential strand in the development of the baroque style. Annibale was the most innovative, and his finest works were the frescoes in the Farnese Palace in Rome (1597–1604): heroic histories of Hercules and Ulysses and mythological love scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. As such, he was a contributor to the visual arts of the Italy that Milton visited in 1638 –1639. Graham Parry

Cartwright, Thomas (c. 1535 –1603). Minister, theologian, and polemicist. Following a complex and sometimes interrupted career at Cambridge, he was elected to its Lady Margaret’s Chair of Divinity in 1569. By then he had acquired a reputation as a formidable advocate of a more thorough reformation of the Church of England, which has led his modern biographer to call him a Presbyterian avant la lettre. His reputation among English Presbyterians in the 1640s was very high. Milton guilefully cited him in the material added as a coda to the second edition of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, noting Cartwright’s approval of the view that parliaments may depose tyrants. See ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

Caryl, Joseph (1602 –1673). Prominent preacher during the English civil wars. He was a frequent participant (1643 –1649) in the parliamentary program of fasts, humiliations, and thanksgivings. As a mark of his favor with Parliament, roughly half of Caryl’s sermons to the House of Lords and House of Commons were published. Doctrinally, he was considered an Independent and, though essentially conservative, was one of the first members of the Westminster Assembly of Divines to advocate publicly a moderate toleration of dissent in matters of faith and practice. Caryl was also a parliamentary licenser of theological treatises, and it was

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in this capacity that he incurred Milton’s most overt displeasure. James Egan

Castiglione, Baldassare (1478 –1529). Diplomat and writer. He is best known as the author of the vernacular Il Libro del Cortegiano [The Book of the Courtier] (1528; translated by Sir Thomas Hoby, 1561), an international best seller that in four books of dialogue, presented as a graceful game extending over four evenings in 1507 at the idealized court of Urbino, considers the accomplishments needed by a courtier, and his possibly useful influence. Milton, who seldom refers to courtiers except with disapproval, never mentions Castiglione, despite the Platonic seriousness of speakers such as Bembo in the fourth book or Castiglione’s explicitly raising questions about flatterers and the prince. Greater sympathy between the two writers can be seen in Castiglione’s Latin elegy Alcon and Milton’s “Epitaphium Damonis,” where parallels may sharpen a reader’s awareness of how pastoral conventions are deployed. Kay Gilliland Stevenson

son Agonistes: the relevant passage of Poetics VI appears in both Greek and Latin as epigraph on the title page of the 1671 edition, and his brief essay on the nature of dramatic poetry opens with a paraphrase of Aristotle’s definition of catharsis. Feisal G. Mohamed

Catherine [Catherine of Braganza, Catarina Henriqueta de Bragança] (1638 –1705). Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland and consort of Charles II. The kingdom of Portugal, at the time still struggling to defend recently won independence from Spain, proposed a marriage alliance with the French king, Louis XIV, which the French, though supportive of Portugal against Spain, declined. An English alliance had previously been considered and rejected by Charles II, but in 1660 negotiations were revived, and in 1662 Catherine traveled to England and married the king. In the second edition of The Readie and Easie Way, with a remarkable prescience, Milton warned that the king, if restored, would bring not only his Catholic mother, Henrietta Maria, but also quite probably a Catholic consort. See ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

Castlehaven scandal. Scandal involving Mervin Touchet, Second Earl of Castlehaven, who was executed on Tower Hill on 14 May 1631. His crimes involved sexual relations with his male servants (punishable under Henry VIII’s buggery statute) and accessory to the rape of his wife and stepdaughter. His behavior was brought to the attention of Charles I by Touchet’s son, James. Some critics have claimed a link between the scandal and Milton’s A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus) for John Egerton, First Earl of Bridgewater, marking his appointment as Lord Lieutenant of Wales and president of the Council of Wales and the Marches. Bridgewater was Castlehaven’s brother-in-law. See Breasted (1971), Creaser (1984).

Jim Daems

catharsis. In its Aristotelian definition, catharsis refers to the capacity of tragedy to arouse pity and fear so that it might effect a cleansing of these and similar emotions, a response, in part, to Plato’s misgivings on the dangers of the genre’s stimulation of emotion (Poetics VI.2 –3). Milton draws heavily on this category in the prefatory material to Sam-

Catholicism. The tenets of the Roman Catholic Church, the Christian church headed by the Pope, the bishop of Rome, whose primacy is based on Petrine supremacy. Milton’s grandfather, Richard Milton (d. 1601), was a recusant Catholic, who disinherited his son, John Milton, Sr., for embracing Protestantism. Christopher Milton, son of John Milton, Sr., and the poet’s brother, was a Catholic. From the start of his literary career, Milton betrays his aversion to Catholicism, which he viewed as a “twofold Power, Ecclesiastical, and Political” (Of True Religion). The Latin epyllion “In Quintum Novembris” (1626), on the failure of the Gunpowder Plot and Catholic treachery, celebrates England as the paradisal chosen nation that spurns Satan. Milton’s Puritan repulsion against ritual, idolatry, and sacrament ignited his revulsion against Holy Communion, a “cannibal feast” (De Doctrina Christiana); his condemnation of the prelacy in The Reason of Church-Government, Animadversions, and Of Reformation; his attacks on marriage as “the Papist’s Sacrament” (Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce) and on the papist’s rejection of divorce; his condemnation of literal appre-

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hension; his rejection of the doctrine of purgatory; his identification of popery with tyranny; his criticism of the prohibiting of scripture; and his outrage about “easy Confession, easy Absolution, Pardons, Indulgences, Masses . . . , Agnus Dei’s, Reliques” and the like (Of True Religion). As some of these references also demonstrate, Milton denounces as papist the closely related religion of Anglicanism, manifested particularly in Laudianism. In A Treatise of Civil Power, in which he maintains that “no man or body of men in these times can be the infallible judges or determiners in matters of religion to any other mens consciences but thir own,” Milton still refuses to defend liberty of conscience for Catholics “for just reason of state more then of religion,” thus reinforcing the political associations of Catholicism. Paradise Lost includes attacks on Catholicism in the Paradise of Fools (3.496), which features “friars / White, black and gray, with all their trumpery” (Carmelites, Dominicans, Franciscans; 3.474 –75). As the “sport of winds” in this limbo of vanity, the friars are represented by the trappings of Catholicism, including “relics, beads, / Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls” (3.491–93). The treatment of English Catholics deteriorated sharply in the 1640s, after a more indulgent acceptance, especially of gentry and courtier-class Catholics, during the Personal Rule of Charles I. See Coffey (2000), Tumbleson (1998).

Elizabeth Sauer

Cato, Marcus Porcius [Cato the Elder, Cato the Censor] (234 –149 B.C.). Roman statesman. He rose from humble origins to military and civic prominence under the Roman republic. He was a leading figure in Roman political life and a fierce opponent of the Carthaginian state and advocate of its destruction. In 184 b.c. he was elected to the office of censor, a magistrate charged with the responsibility of general supervision over the conduct of Roman citizens. He advocated a stern moral code based on a notion of ancient Roman values. Descended from farmers, Cato retained his attachment to agriculture throughout his life. His surviving writings include a prose treatise on agriculture, De Agri Cultura (sometimes known as De Re Rustica), and a collection of maxims, Dicta Catonis, that Milton may have known since his school days. In Areopagitica, Milton recalls that Cato, skeptical of the corrupting influence of some Greek philosophers, had demanded their banishment but was over-

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ruled and had subsequently taken up the study of the philosophy he had prejudicially rejected, making the Censor an example of the dangers of prejudging ideas or books. In Of Education Milton recommends the reading of De Agri Cultura. Cato the Elder must be distinguished from his greatgrandson Cato the Younger (95 – 46 b.c.). A Stoic and staunch republican, he opposed the first triumvirate and died by his own hand after the defeat of the republican cause. Milton alludes briefly to Cato the Younger in Tetrachordon. See OCCL.

Andrew Fleck

Catullus, Gaius Valerius (c. 84 –54 B.C.). Roman poet. During the Renaissance he was known for the Hellenistic grace, satiric scurrility, and emotional volatility of his carmina. This collection contains epigrams, elegies, and other nugae in an assortment of meters, most notably hendecasyllabics, as well as several longer poems, including two epithalamia and a miniature epic. Milton notes in Areopagitica that the carmina were not prohibited, and in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio and Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda he quotes Catullus to mock his royalist adversaries, but critics have found only verbal echoes in Milton’s English poetry. Gregory Kneidel

Cavalier Parliament. Parliament that met on 8 May 1661 and continued through eighteen sessions until its dissolution on 24 January 1679 (making it far longer than the Long Parliament). After the Convention Parliament, it was the first parliament summoned and elected under the restored monarchy. It takes its name from the pronounced royalist fervor of its earlier sessions: where the Convention Parliament had been moderate and pragmatic, the Cavalier Parliament was openly partisan. Presbyterian membership was reduced to fewer than fifty members, and on 13 May the House of Commons resolved that, as a test of loyalty to the new regime, before taking their seats all its members should receive the sacrament according to the rite of the Book of Common Prayer. Its commitment to ensuring that monarchy and episcopacy were safeguarded from republican and Puritan opposition was demonstrated by a legislative program designed to stifle both religious and political dissent (see Clarendon Code, Licensing

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Act, and Test Act). It set the political climate that Milton endured from the Restoration to the end of his life Although the overwhelming majority of members of both Houses were uncritically loyal to monarchy in principle, by no means were all unfailingly sympathetic either to Charles or to his policies. For all their fervid royalism, members were jealously committed to the rights of Parliament. Hence, the Cavalier Parliament presented no less of a challenge to the king than had early-seventeenth-century parliaments over the exercise of the royal prerogative and the relative constitutional positions of monarch and Parliament. It refused, for example, to ratify Charles’s Declaration of Indulgence, and many members saw in Charles’s inclination toward religious toleration and admiration for the despotism of Louis XIV the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England, in the words of the title of a 1677 tract by member Andrew Marvell. The contrasting positions adopted by members on these issues led to the emergence in the later 1660s of “Court” (or monarchist) and “Country” (parliamentarian or oppositional) groupings in Parliament, and in the 1670s of the proto-political parties of Tories and Whigs. It was Parliament’s rabid hostility to popery, which it identified with tyranny, that led Charles finally to dissolve it, precipitating the Exclusion Crisis, during which, in a succession of parliaments, the Whigs sought (unsuccessfully) to exclude from the succession the Roman Catholic James II. See Hutton (1985).

N. H. Keeble

Cavaliers. In the 1640s an initially hostile name for those who supported Charles I in arms. Propaganda for the parliamentary side rapidly constructed a negative stereotype of Cavaliers as roisterers, inclined to alcohol abuse, whoring, and the perpetration of sexual outrages on the populations of areas under their control. They were frequently depicted as gamesters who had wasted their patrimonies and suffered from venereal diseases. They were often called by the alternative name of “dammees” or “damme” because of their alleged enthusiasm for swearing. Anti-Cavalier tracts, often of a sensational and populist character, abounded in the early 1640s. Milton’s prose of that period carries no allusion to Cavaliers; however, the popular stereotype is recognizable in his depiction in Eikonoklastes of the

men-at-arms who accompanied Charles I in his ingression into Parliament in pursuit of the five members. The stereotype recurs in The Readie and Easie Way. See Corns (1992).

Thomas N. Corns

Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle (?1623 –1673). Writer and philosopher. George Colman the elder and Bonnell Thornton, under the pseudonym of Mr. Town, suggested in The Connoisseur (22 May 1755) that Milton borrowed from Margaret Cavendish: “Milton seemed very much chagrined; and it was whispered by some, that he was obliged for many of the thoughts in his L’Allegro and Il Penseroso to this Lady’s Dialogue between Mirth and Melancholy. N.B. this Lady wrote before Milton.” Colman and Thornton rewrote the passage for later editions so as to cast doubt on the suggestion of borrowing: “N.B. This Lady, it is supposed, wrote before Milton.” Since Cavendish was a royalist and was thought to be somewhat eccentric, Colman and Thornton may have found it comic that the parliamentarian Milton, author of a deeply serious epic poem, might have owed her a literary debt. James Fitzmaurice

Cedren, Georges [Cedrenus] (eleventh century A.D.). Byzantine monk and historian. He wrote a history of the world from the earliest times to his own age, known to Milton in the edition, with parallel Greek and Latin versions, published in Basel in 1566 under the title Compendium Historiarum a Mundo Condito Usque ad Isaacium Comnenum Imperatorem. Milton cites it once in his Commonplace Book. In Of Reformation, he picks out the detail that the emperor Nicephoras Phocas “is said by Cedrenus to have done nothing more grievous and displeasing to the people, then to have inacted that no bishop should be chosen without his will.” In Of Prelatical Episcopacy Milton draws on Cedren twice to provide evidence for the church practices of the early eastern empire. Thomas N. Corns

Celtic peoples. A term now applied to early Indo-European people who lived throughout the British Isles and Spain and into Asia Minor. The

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British context of the term “Celtic” has changed substantially since Milton’s lifetime. According to T. G. E. Powell, ancient writers did not apply the name “Celt” to the natives of Britain and Ireland, and no evidence has yet been produced that these peoples referred to themselves as Celts. George Buchanan changed this perception with his pioneering philology of Celtic languages and his historical scholarship. Buchanan, in Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582), was the first author to propose that the Scots and Irish were Celtic peoples, while the Welsh were Gallic or Belgic and the Picts were Germanic. Milton agrees with ancient historians that Celtic peoples are continental, rather than British or Irish. He uses “Celtica” for “Gaule” in The History of Britain (1670). See Powell (1980).

Mel Kersey

censorship. Term describing a set of practices that constrained the free exercise of speech in print and manuscript in the early modern period. At the center of these was prepublication licensing, and it is this that Milton famously attacked in Areopagitica (1644). However, several postpublication practices, including prosecutions for seditious libel, scandalum magnatum, and slander, focused on offenses committed in the act of publication, and book burning by royal proclamation can also be understood as a restriction on speech. Printing in England began in 1477; half a century later Henry VIII was concerned about its effect, and he issued several proclamations listing prohibited books, forbidding imports, and requiring that all books be officially licensed. These restrictions were facilitated with Philip and Mary’s granting a charter to workers in the book trade, or stationers, incorporating them into the Stationers’ Company. Perhaps the most significant fact about the early modern book trade is that it was a monopoly, with printing restricted to members of this trade guild. In return for exercising various kinds of controls over printing and bookselling, Stationers (capitalization indicating company members) were granted exclusive rights. Thus the government and the company, by an unspoken understanding, traded supervision for profit. The Stationers’ royal charter of 1557 was approved by Queen Elizabeth I in 1559. During her reign a series of expectations, practices, and rules that provided the basis of censorship were put in

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place, especially the 1559 injunctions, 1562 company ordinances, 1566 decrees issued by the Court of High Commission, and 1586 decrees of the Court of Star Chamber, which established, together with more severe Star Chamber decrees in 1637, the pattern of press control until 1695. Under this diverse legislation all books required ecclesiastical approval before publication and were to be entered in the Stationers’ Register. After 1586 it was illegal to sell, “utter,” bind, stitch, or sew unlicensed books, and the number of printing presses was restricted. After 1637 printer, publisher, and authorial anonymity were forbidden (the last was reinforced in 1643). An ecclesiastical license was intended as a mark of ideological approval. Licenses often appeared facing the title pages of books, and Milton mocked the subservient appearance and Roman Catholic origins of these imprimaturs (“let it be printed”). However, a license was not a guarantee against prosecution if a book subsequently caused an offense according to the Roman law notion of injuria. Company rules required that any book before printing be “allowed” by one of the wardens. This was independent of ecclesiastical licensing (though the warden might first insist on seeing an ecclesiastical license) and of entry in the Register (many manuscripts were entered before they were written). This procedure also suggests a form of ideological or moral approval. Prepublication licensing should be distinguished from entering in the Stationers’ Register, a practice that established ownership of copy. This was not a straightforwardly ideological procedure. Nevertheless, as nonentry was technically an offense, it provided an easy means for printers and publishers who caused offense to be harassed. None of these procedures guaranteed, or was intended to guarantee, ideological unity, nor were the requirements of licensing and registration by any means universally observed. Noncompliance went unnoticed except when offense was taken. Nevertheless, offense was thereby discouraged and offenders were occasionally punished. Several prominent cases have persuaded some historians that England and Wales possessed a draconian censorship mechanism that was used for ideological policing. (Matters were different in Scotland, where the Stationers’ Company had no authority, where the printing trade was much smaller, and where the monarch was accustomed to controlling printing by direct order.) Controversial publications, such as John Stubbs’s Discovery of a Gaping Gulf (1579) and the tracts of Martin

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censorship

Marprelate (1588 –1589), along with the severe or violent responses from the government and its various arms that they evoked—including the Bishops’ Ban in 1599; the controversy around Richard Montague in 1624 –1625; the clipping of William Prynne’s ears for his Histriomastix in 1634; and the punishment of Prynne, with Henry Burton and John Bastwick, for subversive publications in 1637 (one of the contexts for the anticlericalism of “Lycidas”)—have perhaps wrongly been viewed as typical or symptomatic of a book trade in which “normal” conditions involved very little control. These events represent what happened when the “normal” conditions of trade broke down. On the other hand, such notorious cases may equally have overshadowed other normal patterns—such as the imprisonment of printers and booksellers by order of Parliament, fines, surety bonds, investigation by the sergeant at arms or company officers, the breaking of presses and burning of books—that did not result in manhunts, public trials, and scaffold punishments. The fact that these measures did not silence opposition does not mean that they had no effect. Moreover, the restrictions on importing books and the monopoly the Stationers’ Company exerted over the importation of printing paper (which was not manufactured in Britain) also played a part in constraining speech. In 1641 a series of events commonly described as the “collapse of censorship” occurred. Parliament abolished the courts of High Commission and Star Chamber and imprisoned Archbishop William Laud, thereby undermining ecclesiastical licensing procedures. The Stationers’ Company no longer had effective support for maintaining its authority, and this helped prompt a struggle within it. The Scots had been surreptitiously exporting covenanting propaganda to England since the outbreak of the Bishops’ Wars in 1637, breaking the Stationers’ monopoly (the printing transformations of 1641 look different in an archipelagic or pan-European perspective). Ideological division between king and Parliament, and within Parliament, weakened the authority of those who wished to harness the press for any one point of view. These factors resulted in a significant increase of the number of books printed in London, many of them short, politically engaged, topical, satirical, and polemical. At the end of 1641 the first newsbooks appeared, introducing a cheap and weekly supply of British news to the reading public for the first time. These paper bullets contributed to the political and religious conflicts that led to the

outbreak of civil war in 1642 and were exploited by both sides as a means of courting public opinion and recruiting an army. Parliament’s subsequent attempts in 1642 –1643 to restrain this newfound liberty of printing by reintroducing prepublication licensing was the occasion for Milton’s Areopagitica. Over the middle two decades of the century, various acts and ordinances sought to curb the press, with limited or only temporary success. A licensing act introduced by the Commonwealth in September 1649 suppressed the publication of opposition newsbooks but never entirely silenced critics (nor was it intended to). In 1655 another licensing act stopped the publication of newsbooks opposed to the Protectorate and quelled opposition polemic, though imperfectly and temporarily. Visitors to England during the Commonwealth and Protectorate commented on the freedom of expression in print. When Oliver Cromwell died in 1658 the press became again as vociferous as it had been in 1641–1642. The output of the presses was generally higher (in numbers of titles, not necessarily in volume) when ideological or legal division undermined press control mechanisms. With the assistance of his licensers Sir John Birkenhead, Sir Roger L’Estrange, and Sir Joseph Williamson, Charles II adopted a dual-faceted approach to controlling the press. He established a severe licensing and punishment system that clamped down on opposition sentiment more than Cromwellian mechanisms had. The 1662 Licensing Act reestablished prepublication licensing, with increased powers of search and fines for offenders. Apart from its lapse between 1679 and 1685 (years that saw a noisier political and news press), it provided a major means of censorship until 1695 when it lapsed without renewal. Thereafter, the government relied on existing legal means of prosecution for specific offenses, and introduced a stamp tax, in order to control the press. Charles II also granted monopolies for supplying news that made it more difficult for competition to survive economically. Marchamont Nedham’s Mercurius Politicus was replaced with Mercurius Publicus, then the Publick Intelligencer, and then the London Gazette. Thus the supply of news was carefully controlled by the state, and its provision was assigned to those who had both an interest in and a means of controlling unsympathetic publications. Traditional press controls were enhanced and supplemented by the use of semiorganized street violence, particularly against nonconformists, by the Hilton Gang, for

Chancery

example. The Restoration regime’s success in preventing Daniel Skinner from publishing Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana is evidence of its ingenious powers of censorship. See Blagden (1960), Clegg (1997, 2001), Patterson (1994), Shuger (2006).

Joad Raymond

Censure of the Rota, The. Anonymous work of prose published in late March 1660. Recently attributed to Samuel Butler, it takes issue with Milton’s political philosophy as a whole and particularly with his plea for an oligarchic Commonwealth government. By establishing the pretense that the Censure was written by James Harrington as a transcript of a discussion by members of Harrington’s Rota Club, its author allows himself to undercut both Harrington and Milton. In the brief space of sixteen pages, the Censure provides one of the most telling pamphlet critiques of Milton’s revolutionary republican ideology, a critique that suggests a close familiarity with Milton’s writing and his political career. Milton’s rhetoric in both editions of The Readie and Easie Way may be read as an elaborate dialogue of rebuttal with the Censure and other antiRump tracts of 1659 –1660. James Egan

Ceres. Roman corn goddess, identical with the Greek Demeter. Milton alludes to her in Paradise Lost, once in her traditional role (4.980) and twice in association with her daughter Proserpina (4.271–72, 9.395 –96). The story is told explicitly by Ovid in Metamorphoses and Fasti. Beverley Sherry

Certain Briefe Treatises. Collection of nine works by eight authors that reiterated the episcopal position in the antiprelatical controversy; full title, Certain Briefe Treatises, Written by Diverse Learned Men, Concerning the Ancient and Moderne Government of the Church. Published in 1641, its unidentified compiler included the work of Richard Hooker (“The Causes of the Continuance of These Contentions . . .”), Lancelot Andrewes (“A Summarie View of the Government Both of the Old and New Testament”), Martin Bucer (“The Judgement . . .”), John Rainolds (“The Judgement . . .”), James Ussher (“The Originall of Bishops and Metropolitans” and “A Geographicall and Historicall

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Disquisition”), Edward Brerewood (“The Patriarchall Government of the Ancient Church”), Francis Mason (“The Validity of the Ordination of the Ministers of Reformed Churches”), John Duree (“The Severall Forms of Government . . . in the Reformed Churches”), and Francis Mason (“The Addition”). Measured against the abrasive tone of several contemporary episcopal defenses, notably those by Joseph Hall, the rhetorical demeanor of Certain Briefe Treatises proves moderate and rational, relying on several routine polemical strategies, all meant to validate the authority and lineage of episcopal government through logical inference as well as citation of scripture, patristic authority, and the precedent of recent European Protestantism. Milton’s response to Certain Briefe Treatises in The Reason of Church-Government (1642) offers a greater measure of aesthetic self-definition than it does of polemical rebuttal, for Milton treats most of the arguments in Certain Briefe Treatises cursorily, if at all. James Egan

Chaldee. Seventeenth-century term used for both the inhabitants of Chaldea and their language; also the biblical Aramaic or Syriac. Thomas N. Corns

Chalfont St. Giles. Village in Buckinghamshire approximately twenty-five miles northwest of London. Milton moved there in 1665 from the city because of an outbreak of plague. Speculation as to the date of the move ( June), the length of the residency (eight months), and the house rented (from Anne Fleetwood, daughter of regicide George Fleetwood) derives from a single source, The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood. Thomas Ellwood, a Quaker, introduced by Nathan Paget to Milton in 1662, reports that he leased “a pretty box for him in Giles Chalfont” before being imprisoned in Aylesbury on 1 July 1665. See Milton Cottage. Edward Jones

Chancery. In Milton’s time, the Court of Chancery ruled on such issues as contracts, fraud, and corruption. It had the power to rule on cases in which common law could not function effectively and to grant injunctions against proceedings brought under common law. Milton was very familiar with its

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operation, firsthand and through the experiences of his father, John Milton, Sr., and through his extended family. Both husbands of his sister Anne Milton held the post of deputy clerk of the crown in the Crown Office of Chancery. The profession of his father, scrivener, occasionally involved him in litigation with clients. From 1647 Milton himself fought a long-running Chancery case against Sir Robert Pye as he tried to tidy up the affairs of his late father-in-law, Richard Powell, Sr.. In this he was represented by John Bradshaw. Thomas N. Corns

Chaos. In Paradise Lost, a place or rather state of matter and at the same time the allegorical character who presides, ineffectually, over that matter. Milton, who does not share the common view that God creates out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) (PL 7.165 –73, 210 – 42; De Doctrina Christiana book 1, chapter 7), portrays God in his epic creating the world out of the matter of Chaos. The anarch Chaos is surrounded by a Hesiodic mythic-allegoric court of Night, Orcus, Ades, Demogorgon, Rumor, Chance, Tumult, Confusion, and Discord (PL 2.959 – 67). In his nonworld, form and matter are not combined. Without stabilizing form, qualities are fluid and “things” cannot sustain themselves (PL 2.898 –900). In creation, Milton writes, God adds to prime matter forms, “which, incidentally, are themselves material.” Chaos then is the state of matter before substance as we experience it comes into being. Stephen M. Fallon

Chapman, Livewell (fl. 1643 –after 1665). Bookseller. He completed his apprenticeship in 1650, and from the following year his name appeared on imprints. Milton had no dealing with him until 1659. Indeed, while Milton remained a loyal public servant of successive regimes, Chapman, as a committed Fifth Monarchist, conflicted frequently with the authorities through the 1650s and was arrested at least twice, although by 1657 his reservations about Thomas Venner’s brand of direct action had estranged him from the movement. Milton turned to him in 1659 to publish The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings, printed by “T.N.,” and in the following year he published the first edition of The Readie and Easie Way. However, by the time Milton went to press with the second edition, Chapman was already on the run from warrants for his arrest. At the Restoration he was a marked man, and

though he attempted to continue in the book trade, he was frequently arrested. See also stationers. See ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

Chappell, William (1582 –1624). College tutor of Milton and bishop of Cork (Ireland). A distinguished student and later tutor at Christ’s College, Cambridge, he became bishop under Archbishop William Laud but fell into disfavor along with the Laudian party. He was ironically regarded as a Puritan at Cambridge, yet because of his love of ceremony, he was considered a papist in Ireland. Milton unrepentantly celebrates his famous quarrel with his tutor in “Elegia Prima,” which exults at being temporarily expelled from the stultifying halls of Cambridge. Milton was assigned another tutor. Catherine Gimelli Martin

Character of the Long Parliament. Milton, work of prose; full title, Mr. John Miltons Character of the Long Parliament and Assembly of Divines. In MDCXLI . . . and Very Seasonable for These Times. The Digression omitted from Milton’s History of Britain (1670) first found publication as this piece in 1681. The printed Character follows the Digression closely, except that it drops the prefatory 450 words that set the Digression in its context in the History. Instead, the Character features an editorial introduction that comments scathingly on Milton, his “Party,” and the corruption endemic to parliamentary rule in the 1640s, and by implication also in 1681. The pamphlet was printed in two sheets quarto for Henry Brome, a bookseller with the closest ties to Roger L’Estrange, earlier Surveyor of the Press and a major Tory controversialist at this date. L’Estrange seems to have been Brome’s source for the publication: the pamphlet exactly serves his purposes as a polemicist, and he had likely been involved in licensing Milton’s History in 1670. In the context of the Exclusion Crisis (the parliamentary attempt to forestall the succession to the throne of the Catholic James, Duke of York, later James II), the Character aims to discomfit Whigs by using Milton himself as a witness to the failures in state and church during parliamentary rule in the 1640s. The Character takes Milton’s classical republican fulminations against a trading interest that had chosen to “Huckster the Common-wealth” and directs them against the Whig embrace of commercial society. That its title misrepresents the date of Milton’s subject as 1641 associates the Charac-

Charles II

ter with the many contemporary tracts accusing Whigs of now beginning another rebellion like that of “forty-one.” That it found a sympathetic Tory readership appears from the first notice of it in Heraclitus Ridens (4 April 1681) and later from John Moore. The Jacobite Charles Leslie, valuing it as what Milton “wrote Unbrib’d,” sneered at its omission from the great 1698 Whig edition of Milton’s complete prose. The Character was republished within Milton’s History only in 1738, when it might serve as a tirade against the corruption of Robert Walpole’s regime. Its editor, Thomas Birch, lacking the transitional passage in the Digression that links the History to the Character, intruded the text near the very beginning of book 3 of that work; only with the modern discovery of the manuscript Digression and its specification of its later location in book 3 could Birch’s decision be corrected. The only modern edition is French Fogle’s parallel publication of the Character and Digression in The Complete Prose Works. See CPW 5, von Maltzahn (1991, 1993).

Nicholas von Maltzahn

Charles I (1600 –1649). King of England, Scotland, and Ireland. He was the third child born to James VI of Scotland (the future James I of England and Ireland) and his queen, Anne of Denmark. His infancy was spent in Scotland, though he followed his father south after his accession to the English throne in 1603. In 1605 he was created Duke of York. The death of Prince Henry in 1612 left him the heir to his father’s throne in advance of his older sister, Princess Elizabeth, relegated by her sex. In 1613, she married Frederick, the Elector Palatine, whose adventurous ambitions would shortly be a significant element in the development of the Thirty Years War. In 1616 he was created Prince of Wales. He formed a friendship with George Villiers, who would be advanced to the title of Duke of Buckingham, the king’s favorite. Through the early 1620s England was effectively ruled by a troika of James, Charles, and Villiers. In 1620, as Frederick lost control of the Palatinate and the English crown came under pressure from more zealous Protestants to intervene on his behalf, a vague plan, the so-called Spanish Match by which Charles would marry the Spanish infanta, was taken up with a new urgency. By it, Spain would put pressure on the Holy Roman Empire to allow the elector to regain his ancestral lands. In a bold move, in 1623, as negotiations stalled, Charles and Villiers traveled incognito to Spain to advance the

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project. They returned, having failed, to a rapturous popular welcome. James died in 1625. Charles succeeded him and shortly afterwards married a French princess, Henrietta Maria, risking by this Catholic match the loss of some popular support as the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years War remained hard pressed. War broke out with Spain and then, somewhat disappointingly, with France. Both were conducted by inept naval campaigns under the leadership of Villiers, who was roundly censured in the succession of short-lived parliaments called to raise usually inadequate “supply,” that is, funding through taxation, to support the war effort. In 1629 he dismissed his last Parliament, concluded the wars, and began the period of Personal Rule, which extended to the calling of the Short Parliament in 1640. Charles’s enthusiasm for hierarchy, ritual, and ceremonialism extended from the secular to the religious realm, where he actively promoted those elements through the agency of his favorite churchman, William Laud, to the irritation of more zealous and puritanical English people, who perceived the tendencies to approximate Catholicism. However, while he avoided wars, such opposition, though it generated sympathy and increasing support, was ineffectual because he did not need to call parliaments. Once his attempts to extend his ceremonial and hierarchical model for church government and discipline to his Scottish kingdom produced armed resistance (see the Bishops’ Wars), the Personal Rule rapidly unraveled. Parliaments were called in 1640, and the second, the Long Parliament, initiated the series of measures and criticisms that led in 1642 to the First Civil War. By 1645 and the Battle of Naseby, his military campaign had collapsed. He surrendered to his Scottish subjects, who returned him to the English Parliament, and he was taken into the custody of the New Model Army. After Pride’s Purge, instigated by senior army officers around Oliver Cromwell in association with radical elements among the civilian politicians, he was brought to trial and, on 30 January 1649, beheaded, on a scaffold outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall. He was buried in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. See Corns (1999), Cust (2005), ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

Charles II (1630 –1685). King of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The eldest surviving son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, he spent most of the First Civil War with his father, though he

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Charles II

was appointed nominal commander of the army in the southwest of England during the final phase. By 1646 he had withdrawn into exile to France and shortly afterwards moved his court to The Hague. On his father’s execution, he was proclaimed king by his supporters. His Scottish subjects, even those who had supported Scottish military support for the English Parliament, had disapproved of the execution of Charles I and were conditionally prepared to accept him as king of Scotland. Scotland and republican England were at war by 1650, the first phase of which ended with Oliver Cromwell’s victory at the Battle of Dunbar. On 1 January 1651 Charles was crowned king of Scotland. In August he and an overwhelmingly Scottish army marched south. Very few English royalists joined them. Cromwell’s army tracked them, shepherding them away from London, and on 3 September they were routed at the Battle of Worcester, thus ending the Third Civil War. Traveling incognito and hunted by the forces of the republic, he made his way to the coast and thence to Normandy. He joined his mother in the Louvre Palace, Paris, moving on from there to Cologne and then to Bruges and Brussels. As the English Commonwealth collapsed over the winter of 1659 –1660, Charles entered into negotiation with key figures, making conciliatory statements to woo over former enemies. In the spring of 1660 he was recalled and the Restoration of monarchy effected. To an extent, the undertakings he had given were honored, and, with the exception of Sir Henry Vane the younger, capital justice was limited only to those closely involved in the trial and execution of his father. The Cavalier Parliament, which was called in 1662, carried rather more repressive measures of a general kind, affecting Presbyterians who had supported the Restoration as well as more radical Puritans who had opposed it (see the Clarendon Code). His popularity eroded over the decades of his rule, accelerated by the sexual scandals of his court and his own numerous and highly visible mistresses and illegitimate children, by the failures of the English navy in two Anglo-Dutch Wars, and by the conversion to Catholicism of his heir, the future James II, and the king’s associated attempts to decrease the civil and religious impediments endured by Catholics. See Hutton (1985).

Thomas N. Corns

Charles X [Karl X Gustav] (1622 –1660). King of Sweden. His cousin Christina nominated him as her heir in 1649, and he succeeded to the throne

on her abdication in 1654. Milton drafted diplomatic correspondence to him on behalf of the Protectorate. Charles’s bellicosity toward other Baltic states, which resulted in war with Poland and Denmark, alarmed the governments of both England and the United Provinces, for whom regional stability was important for trade. Hostilities were curtailed by his death in 1660, and northern Europe enjoyed a period of relative peace for the rest of the century. See Fallon (1993).

Thomas N. Corns

Chateaubriand, François Auguste René, Vicomte de (1768 –1848). French writer and politician. Born in Saint-Malo of noble birth, he grew up in his family’s castle of Combourg. In 1791 he visited the United States and, returning, became an émigré and lived in England from 1792 to 1800. Le Génie du christianisme (1802) made him the most important author of his time in France. After holding different official posts he retired into literature in 1830. Miltonists will remember him for his literal translation of Paradise Lost (1836) (see translations of Milton), which he describes, in Essai sur la littérature Anglaise (1836), as “the work of my whole life, because I have been reading and reading over again and translating Milton for 30 years.” Christophe J.-B. Tournu

Chaucer, Geoffrey (c. 1340 –1400). Medieval poet. Son of a London vintner, at about age fifteen he was taken prisoner during Edward III’s invasion of France but was later ransomed. Through his wife, Philippa, he became close to John of Gaunt, a contact that led to several posts at court. Chaucer journeyed to France several times on diplomatic duties and spent several months in Italy during 1372 –1373. In 1374 he was appointed comptroller of customs, a position he held for twelve years, though in later life his career fluctuated with that of Richard II. His long state service in various capacities was rewarded by an annuity from Henry IV. His writings begin under a clear French influence, seen in The Book of the Duchess (1369) and his portion of a translation of the Romaunt of the Rose. His “Italian period” (1372 –1386) includes works influenced by Dante and Giovanni Boccaccio: The House of Fame, The Parlement of Foules, Troylus and Cryseyde, and The Legend of Good Women. The Canterbury Tales belongs to his final phase (1386 –1400).

Christmas

He also completed a prose translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and “A Treatise on the Astrolabe.” Milton’s annotations in his Commonplace Book show that he had read The Canterbury Tales and Romaunt of the Rose in Thomas Speght’s 1602 edition. He alludes to the Squire’s Tale in “Il Penseroso” (see “L’Allegro”) (109 –15). Three of the Latin university poems and “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” appear to refer to Chaucer, though other sources may be at work as well. “On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough” blends “Chaucerian rime royal with the Spenserian stanza” (Lewalski [2000]), and Of Reformation and Animadversions also reveal Chaucerian borrowings. Christopher Baker

Cheke, Sir John (1514 –1557). Scholar and prominent figure in the humanist transformation of English higher education. From 1529 he was a fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, and was, from 1540, the first to hold the regius chair of Greek at Cambridge. In 1554 he was appointed tutor to Edward, Prince of Wales, the future Edward VI. Milton alludes to him in the concluding lines of “Sonnet XI” (“A book was late called Tetrachordon”). Thomas N. Corns

Chimentelli, Valerio (1620 –1668). Scholar and priest. During Milton’s two visits to Florence in 1638 –1639, he joined the academy of the Apatisti, where he encountered Chimentelli. He was a young priest with a reputation in humanist circles for formidable learning; he subsequently became professor of Greek (and later of eloquence and of politics) at Pisa. See DBI.

Thomas N. Corns

Christina [Kristina] (1626 –1689). Queen regnant of Sweden. She was the daughter and heir of Gustavus Adolphus and acceded to the throne at the age of six. During her minority, Sweden was effectively governed by Axel Oxenstierna as regent. In 1644, Christina ruled in her own person. Not wishing to marry, she sought to stabilize the issue of succession by nominating a cousin, the future Charles X, as her heir. Sweden assumed considerable importance in Oliver Cromwell’s northern foreign policy as he attempted to achieve a balance of power between

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the Swedes and Danes, thus retaining Protestant unity and guaranteeing vital trade links, especially important for supplying the English navy. Christina was a patron of literature and philosophy and a bibliophile, and she played a minor part in the clash between Milton and Claudius Salmasius over Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, Milton’s response to his attack on the English republic and the trial and execution of Charles I. Nicolaas Heinsius, an old adversary of Salmasius, drew Milton’s tract to the attention of Isaac Vossius, at that time librarian to Christina. Vossius later wrote back to say that a copy had reached Stockholm, that Christina had immediately read it, and that she had praised Milton’s genius and style. Milton’s own apparent high regard for Christina, or at least for her taste in neo-Latin prose style, soon intersected with his duties as a public servant. In September 1653 Bulstrode Whitelocke, perhaps a former patron of Milton’s, was appointed ambassador to the Swedish court. Milton, who may have been encouraged by reports of Christina’s admiration for him, incorporated in his work in progress, Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda, a protracted panegyric to the queen, in which her character and achievements are fulsomely acclaimed. Milton’s diplomatic initiative came to nothing. Writing the tract evidently took longer than anticipated, and by the time it was available to send to Sweden, Whitelocke had secured the outcome he had hoped for, the Treaty of Uppsala. Indeed, unbeknownst to Milton, Christina had secretly converted to Catholicism. A week after his tract appeared, she abdicated in favor of Charles X and left for Rome, where she died in 1689. Thomas N. Corns

Christmas. In early Stuart England, a festival marked by an extended period of celebration, which concluded on Twelfth Night (6 January, in royal circles a frequent date for the performance of a court masque). In the liturgical year, Christmas Day, commemorated by Milton in “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” was duly observed, and the festive period was temporarily interrupted by the Feast of the Circumcision (see circumcision), on 1 January, marked by Milton in his poem “Upon the Circumcision.” However, Puritan objections to Christmas had a long history, founded on a general antipathy to the license for revelry it apparently occasioned, on its apparently pagan origins, and on an aversion to observation of a feast for which there was no biblical authority. The very name, with its

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Christmas

etymological connection with the Catholic Mass, was deprecated. In the 1640s such long-held distaste was translated into political action as the traditional celebration of Christmas was first discouraged and eventually outlawed. Thomas N. Corns

Christology. The part of theology that relates to Christ. Milton’s views are revealed most notably in Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and his theological treatise De Doctrina Christiana. See God. Allene Phy-Olsen

Christ’s College, Cambridge. One of sixteen colleges at Cambridge University in the early seventeenth century and the one Milton attended from 1625 to 1632. When Milton arrived, the academic staff of Christ’s College, which was the third largest after the two huge colleges of Trinity and St. John’s, consisted of a master and thirteen fellows. The most illustrious, the polymath Joseph Mede, was a friend of Milton’s tutor, William Chappell. Mede was at the height of his powers, working to complete his magnum opus, the Clavis Apocalyptica, which first appeared in 1627.

in the vision of futurity vouchsafed by Michael to Adam (see esp. PL 12.333 – 44). See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

Chrysostom, John (c. 347– 407). Greek church father. Trained in sophistic rhetoric and then drawn to the church by Basil (the Great), Chrysostom (“Golden-mouthed”) earned his title primarily for his eloquent preaching on church reform. He also wrote on Christian education and produced volumes of rhetorically sensitive homilies, especially on Genesis, the Psalms, and the Pauline epistles. Milton’s copy of Chrysostom’s Orationes LXXX (Paris, 1604) survives in Ely Cathedral. Although seventeenth-century royalists frequently cited his conservative interpretation of Romans 13:1 (“Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers”; cf. Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio), Chrysostom actually died, as Milton notes in Eikonoklastes, while in exile for inveighing against royal corruption. In Areopagitica Milton holds Chrysostom up as an example of pious intellectual liberty for having cleansed Aristophanes’s “scurrilous vehemence into the stile of a rousing Sermon.” Gregory Kneidel

Thomas N. Corns

1 Chronicles. Book of the Old Testament. The two books of Chronicles were not divided before the compilation of the Septuagint. This first one substantially rehearses events described in the earlier books of the Bible, carrying the narration from the time of Adam to the accession of Solomon, thus presenting many of the events Milton describes in Paradise Lost books 11 and 12, though Milton, of course, would also have encountered them in the biblical books summarized in Chronicles. See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

2 Chronicles. Book of the Old Testament. Like 1 Chronicles, it rehearses the historical narrative of earlier books of the Bible. It carries the account forward from the accession of Solomon, through the building of the temple (see 2 Kings), to the mostly depraved reigns of his successors, to the throne of Judah and the eventual Babylonian captivity of the Israelites, drawing occasionally on new material. It supplements the narratives that Milton adapted

Church of England. National Protestant episcopal church established in the 1530s by Henry VIII. The immediate occasion of its creation, and of the beginnings of the Tudor Reformation in England, was the refusal of the Church of Rome to grant Henry a divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. To overcome this obstacle and so make possible a marriage to Anne Boleyn, Henry determined to create a national church subject not to the jurisdiction of the Pope in Rome but to the English monarch as its supreme head. This was effected through the legislation of the “Reformation Parliament” in the 1530s. Under the leadership of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and Henry’s vicar general Thomas Cromwell, this church adopted a number of Protestant practices; but Henry’s own religious disposition was conservative, and although by breaking with Rome he had created an ecclesiastical structure susceptible to the influence of the ideas of Martin Luther, during his lifetime there was little change in the official doctrinal emphasis of the national church. During the reign of his son and successor, Edward VI, however, a set of markedly Protestant documents was adopted: the doctrine of justifica-

Ciceronianism

tion by faith is pronounced in the Book of Common Prayer, in the Forty-Two Articles of 1553 that formed the basis of the later Thirty-Nine Articles, and in the 1547 book of homilies prescribed to be delivered in parish churches (a second book appeared in 1571). Under Edward’s Roman Catholic successor, his sister Mary I, the English church was returned to Roman jurisdiction. English clerics who went into exile during this period of persecution of Protestants returned on the accession of her Protestant sister Elizabeth I with minds fueled by their experience of reformed Protestantism in the Geneva of Jean Calvin and the Zurich of Ulrich Zwingli. They formed the core of a developing Puritan movement in the 1560s and 1570s for which the steps so far taken were only stages on the way to a more thoroughgoing reformation. The campaign, led by Thomas Cartwright, came to focus on episcopacy as the great obstacle. Arguing that this form of church government was a corrupt and corrupting nonscriptural relic of Rome, they advocated its replacement by Presbyterianism. In response to this challenge, the Church of England developed a distinctive theological and devotional character as a church reformed yet traditional, a via media, or middle way, between Rome and Geneva. John Jewel’s Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1562) and, most influentially, the volumes of Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity published from 1593 formulated and defended this ecclesiastical identity by appealing to the Bible, the early church, tradition, and reason within a selfdetermining national context. In the early seventeenth century the Church of England began to turn away from the Calvinism both it and its Puritan critics had professed toward a theology that increasingly stressed cooperation with grace—Arminianism to its opponents. Increasingly, too, it stressed the desirability of orderliness and uniformity in worship. This program was identified especially strongly with the archiepiscopate of William Laud. In the early 1640s the established church became a target of the resurgent Puritanism of the Long Parliament. In 1643 episcopacy was abolished, the use of the Prayer Book was proscribed, and through the work of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, a Presbyterian church settlement was attempted. Presbyterianism, however, never took nationally in England. The Cromwellian church of the Interregnum was rather a loose federation of essentially Independent churches whose ministers might be Presbyterian, Independent, or sectarian— or, indeed, episcopalian as long as

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they did not reintroduce the old liturgy and church order. In 1660 episcopacy was, with monarchy, restored, and a period of sustained persecution of Puritanism was instituted by the Clarendon Code. See Fincham (1993), Spurr (1991), Tyacke (1987).

N. H. Keeble

Cicero, Marcus Tullius (106 – 43 B.C.). Roman orator, rhetorician, and statesman. Sometimes called Tullius, he led a tumultuous political career marked by dutiful service to the Roman republic and principled opposition to Caesar, as well as occasional self-aggrandizing and time-serving. His substantial writings include orations, several treatises on rhetoric and logic, treatises and dialogues on politics and philosophy (inclining to stoicism and skepticism), and personal letters. Popular school texts, they became for Milton the locus classicus of republican ideals and arguments. Milton and his poetic protagonists frequently fashion themselves as orator-statesmen like the one idealized in Cicero’s dialogues On Oratory and On the Republic. Cicero’s literary influence manifested itself in genres other than oratory, especially the familiar letter collection (see Milton’s own late Epistolarum Familiarum Liber Unus, 1674]) and the humanist dialogue, which seeks to reconcile competing arguments through leisurely conversation rather than, like the Platonic dialogue, expose faulty logic through rigorous cross-examination (cf. Adam and Raphael’s convivial dialogue in Paradise Lost 5 – 8). Gregory Kneidel

Ciceronianism. In modern criticism, the term “Ciceronian” refers to a prose style, purportedly modeled on Cicero’s, featuring amplified periods; antithetical, climactic, or symmetrical clauses; ornamental figures of speech; and, in its broadest sense, a privileging of expression (verba) over matter (res). It flourished in English prose in the late sixteenth century but lost ground during the seventeenth century to the so-called plain style. Milton’s English prose is usually regarded as non-Ciceronian, relying on an unbalanced, loosely additive sentence structure, inventive word choice, and (especially in his earlier prose) vivid poetic imagery to gain its force. Milton’s Latin prose more naturally resembles the periodic style of Cicero’s speeches (which itself differs from the style of his letters and dialogues). But even here Milton’s ad hominem attacks and punning invective more closely resemble Cicero’s own practice

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than the artificial style codified as Ciceronian by his most apish Renaissance imitators. See Hale (1997).

Gregory Kneidel

Cifra, Antonio (1584 –1629). Prolific composer of the Roman school, though his later polychoral music was published in Venice. He was among the composers whose work, according to Edward Phillips, Milton sent home from Venice in 1639. He produced masses, concertato motets, polychoral psalms and litanies, madrigals, scherzi, and monodies. Henry Lawes set the table of contents of Cifra’s Scherzi et Arie, which his countrymen thought “a rare Italian song.” His Sacrae Cantiones sets church music with varied voicing for the liturgical year. His Madrigali a Cinque Voci contains a dedicatory letter on the music of the spheres according to “Pitagora inuentor della Musica” (cf. the second of Milton’s Prolusions). See New Grove.

Diane Kelsey McColley

circumcision. An operation infrequently practiced in early modern England, and only as a medical procedure, rather than a religious rite. However, the Feast of the Circumcision, which on 1 January commemorated the circumcision of Jesus Christ, was observed in the liturgical year of the Church of England as a day of reflection and purification. Milton’s poem “Upon the Circumcision” reflects that spiritual emphasis. See also Christmas. Thomas N. Corns

civil wars. Between 1642 and 1651 there were three periods of intense military activity involving armies raised in England, Ireland, and Scotland as supporters and enemies of Charles I and Charles II resorted to open warfare to pursue their rival objectives. The conflicts are often termed “the English Civil War(s).” See First Civil War, Second Civil War, and Third Civil War. Thomas N. Corns

Clarendon Code. Informal summary title for the series of parliamentary acts of penal religious legislation passed in the 1660s while Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, was Lord Chancellor, though the legislative incentive was rather the reactionary temper of the Cavalier Parliament than the

chancellor’s own inclination. The Corporation Act (1661) sought to ensure the loyalty of the restored regime’s local agents by requiring all civic officers and magistrates to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, to disclaim the lawfulness of taking up arms against the king, to repudiate the Solemn League and Covenant, and to receive the sacrament according to the Prayer Book rite within the year preceding office (even though the Book of Common Prayer had not yet been reimposed). By the Act of Uniformity (1662) only those episcopally ordained who subscribed to the Prayer Book could hold benefices in the established church after 24 August, Black Bartholomew Day. By the first Conventicle Act (1664) all religious gatherings of five or more people conducted without the Prayer Book were prohibited. Offenses incurred fines, imprisonment, and, ultimately, transportation. The 1665 Five Mile Act prohibited ministers of religion who had not subscribed as required by the Act of Uniformity from coming within five miles of any city, corporation, or parliamentary borough, or any place where they had previously ministered (“unless only in passing upon the road”) without having first taken the Oxford Oath (so called since the act was passed at Oxford during the plague in London). This oath repudiated taking up arms against the king and undertook “not at any time [to] endeavour any alteration of government either in Church or State.” Of the £40 fine incurred, a third went to “such person or persons as shall sue for the same,” that is, to informers whose evidence had led to conviction. This unsavory trade was a feature also of the second Conventicle Act (1670). Making no distinction between Puritan religious opinion and political sedition, this body of legislation assumed that the security of the restored regime could brook no dissent from the reestablished episcopal Church of England. See Hutton (1985), Keeble (2002).

N. H. Keeble

closet drama. Printed plays designed to be read rather than (or as well as) staged. Playwrights of the circle of Philip Sidney (Fulke Greville, Samuel Daniel, William Alexander, Samuel Brandon, and Elizabeth Cary) refined the conventions of the Senecan models in producing closet dramas. The classicizing, anticourt dramas examined the nature and duties of kingship, the corruption of royal favorites, and conflicts of social rebels. Generic features include Italianate Senecanisms, the primacy of speech over action, philosophical and moral discourses,

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and the inclusion of a nuntius, all of which encourage active readerly engagement. During the Restoration the royalist-sponsored theater reemerged as the primary venue for drama. Political dialogues and Latin plays were among the few closet dramas written at this time, though Milton’s own closet drama, Samson Agonistes, does not belong in either category. In the tradition of the closet drama, the antiestablishment vernacular adaptation of Greek tragedy problematizes the antihero’s motives and offstage performance, thus encouraging critical play-reading. Elizabeth Sauer

Coke, Sir Edward (1552 –1634). Lawyer. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, which he left without a degree to train as a lawyer, finally in the Inner Temple. He was called to the bar in 1578 and soon proved an active and successful advocate, beginning the acquisition of considerable personal wealth, which he pursued through his career. He sought and achieved senior law offices of the state. His Institutes of the Laws for England achieved an abiding status as the classic statement of the principles of English common law. Milton’s perspective on him is curious. “Sonnet XVIII” (“Cyriack, whose grandsire on the royal bench”) opens with the formal praise of Coke, who was Cyriack Skinner’s grandfather. Yet Milton draws only rarely on Coke’s writings in his own prose polemic—in contrast with some other radicals, in particular John Lilburne, who cite Coke frequently. See ODNB.

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little beyond what he had already provided in the 1643 and 1644 editions of Doctrine and Discipline. Rather than revising these positions in Colasterion, Milton contents himself with clarifying his earlier theses in Doctrine and Discipline (repeatedly citing and cross-referencing the 1643 edition), contesting misinterpretations of his claims by the Answerer and correcting the Answerer’s misreadings of scripture. Milton’s elaborate characterization of his opponent, as well as his strategies of attack, are at the center of critical contextualization of the pamphlet. Identifying his anonymous antagonist in An Answer as a servingman turned solicitor, Milton treats the Answerer stereotypically, as a presumptuous, overreaching member of the lower classes who has meddled in spiritual matters well beyond his ken and proved only his own inadequacy. See Corns (1998).

James Egan

Colet, John (1467–1519). Ecclesiastic, reformer, and educator. Born in London, he studied at Cambridge and then embarked on a continental tour during which he was influenced by humanism. Having studied divinity at Oxford, he eventually became dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. He met Desiderius Erasmus in 1499, the beginning of a lifelong relationship. Colet used his inheritance to endow St. Paul’s School, which provided free education for boys. A century later Milton benefited from Colet’s philanthropic project. The moral instruction and classical studies he encountered as a young student at St. Paul’s undoubtedly shaped the mature Milton. Frances M. Malpezzi

Colasterion. Milton, work of prose; full title, Colasterion: A Reply to a Nameless Answer Against the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. The last and shortest of Milton’s divorce tracts, it was published along with Tetrachordon on 4 March 1645. Though Milton’s initials are on the title page, the pamphlet was unlicensed and unregistered, and definite evidence of its printer is absent as well. Clearly, Milton intended to address the anonymous author of An Answer to a Book, Intituled, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (November 1644), but his remarks are also meant to include Joseph Caryl, the parliamentary licenser of An Answer, and perhaps the Smectymnuans, Milton’s allies in the antiprelatical controversy, especially Edmund Calamy, Stephen Marshall, and Matthew Newcomen (see Smectymnuus). Milton’s argument offers

Collier, John (1901–1980). Author, whose last publication was an adaptation of Milton, Milton’s Paradise Lost: Screenplay for Cinema of the Mind (1973). He began writing as a poet, receiving England’s This Quarter prize in 1922. He later published three novels, His Monkey Wife (1930), Tom’s A-Cold (1933), and Defy the Foul Fiend (1934). The Devil and All (1934) launched his career as a fantasist author of short stories, collected in several volumes and finally in The John Collier Reader (1972). His many film scripts include The Elephant Boy (1937) and The War Lord (1965). In a review of Collier’s Milton’s Paradise Lost, John Updike called it un-Miltonic and rife with “humanist pieties and left-wing wrath.” Others, however, praised it as, for example, “a symbiotic work of literary art, . . . full

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of knowledge and delight” (Timothy Foote, Time, 1973). Most students of Milton’s epic will find Collier’s treatment at once irritating and fascinatingly relevant. James H. Sims

colonialism. With the emergence of postcolonial literary studies in the 1970s, the innumerable references to colonialism in Milton’s works took on a startling new resonance. For instance, in his 1642 antiprelatical tract The Reason of ChurchGovernment, just before he announces his vocation to become a national poet, Milton likens the task of speaking out on public matters to that of a colonial trader. When it comes to bearing God’s truth, he argues, the difference between the bishops and himself is the difference between two kinds of colonial entrepreneur: on the one hand there are those false merchants who “abuse the people, like poor Indians with beads and glasses,” while on the other there are those resolute adventurers who bear themselves honestly at the trading post, “uprightly in this their spiritual factory,” offering stones of “orient lustre” at bargain prices, “at any cheap rate, yea for nothing to them that will.” Thus, in 1642 at least, at the same time that he explicitly justifies himself for speaking out against the bishops, Milton also implicitly justifies colonial trade by distinguishing the true from the false. He is in effect offering the mercantile members of his audience an idealized view of their own colonial trade, tacitly accepting the legitimacy of establishing factories or trading colonies like those set up by the Virginia Company at Jamestown in 1607 or by the East India Company at Surat in 1612. In Paradise Lost especially, allusions to contemporary colonial trade (for example, the East Indies spice trade [2.636 – 43]) and overseas imperial expansion (for example, Spain in the New World [11.406 –11] or Adam and Eve as South Asian and American Indians [9.1099 –1133]), together with the poem’s intense engagement with the territorial imperatives embedded in scripture and classical texts such as the Aeneid, have attracted the attention of various scholars.

tive doctrinal statements (discussed in De Doctrina Christiana; see also PL 5.831– 45) and warnings against false teachings. Milton echoes it in both The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and Areopagitica. The dominant concept in the doctrinal statements, which figured centrally in controversies regarding antitrinitarianism, is of fullness or completion. For Protestant exegetes this section affirms the perfection of Christ’s redemptive suffering (cf. PL 12.415 –17). See Dobranski and Rumrich (1998).

Gregory Kneidel

Coltellini, Agostino (1613 –1693). Founder of the academy of the Apatisti (“Dispassionates”) in Florence, of which Milton was a member during his Italian sojourn of 1638 –1639. Four years Milton’s junior, he was by profession a lawyer, though he invested much of his energy in the academy, which met in his house on Via dell’Oriolo, Florence. See DBI.

Thomas N. Corns

Comenius, John Amos [Komenský, Jan Amos] (1592 –1670). Theologian and educator. Born in Moravia, he achieved international eminence as an advocate of educational reform, writing on the merits of universal education and on the development of a more efficient pedagogy to meet that end. In England, his ideas were disseminated by the German émigré Samuel Hartlib. Hartlib persuaded Comenius to visit London in 1641, and around Hartlib there developed a circle of like-minded reformers who promoted a wide-ranging debate. Milton was on the periphery of the group, and his little treatise Of Education should be contextualized against the immediately contemporary interest in educational reform. His tract endorses Comenius’s view that learning, especially of Latin, could be much accelerated. However, where Comenius’s interests are in universal education, Milton’s program is tailored to provide a new Puritan elite. Thomas N. Corns

See Armitage (1995), Quint (1993), Stevens (1996).

Paul Stevens

Colossians. Book of the New Testament. It divides roughly into two principal sections. The first is concerned with Christology and contains both affirma-

Commines [Commynes], Philippe de (?1447– ?1511). French historian and soldier-diplomat. Born near Hazebrouck, from a noble Flemish family, he was advisor to Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, leader of the League for Public Good against the French crown; he changed sides in

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1472. After Louis XI’s death (in 1483), as he plotted against the regent Anne Beaujeu, Commines fell into disgrace and was imprisoned (1488). Later, back in favor, he accompanied Charles VIII during his invasion of Italy in 1495. In 1510 he retired to his estate at Argenton, where he died miserably. In his Memoirs (1524) from 1464 to 1498, written in a vivid and elegant style, he endeavors to shed light on the course of events, supplying a subtle analysis of political motives, which includes some criticism aimed at his masters. Milton cites him several times in his Commonplace Book and again in Eikonoklastes. In Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio he calls him as he cites him, “the reliable Philippe de Commines.”

Most of the entries are in Milton’s own hand until 1650, when, with his eyesight failing, he resorted to the help of amanuenses; after 1652, when his blindness became total, he relied wholly on others. The notes are in English, Latin, Greek, Italian, and French (see languages of Milton). He rarely copies extensively from the texts on which he draws; indeed, the format rather suggests that the manuscript was used primarily as a finding guide, to take him back to the right places in the primary sources when he needed them. It was acquired by the British Museum in 1900 and is now held in the manuscript collection of the British Library in London. See Mohl (1969).

Christophe J.-B. Tournu

Committee of Safety. The first Committee of Safety was a high-level committee of the Long Parliament established to oversee much of the running of the country and fighting of the civil wars. It was replaced in 1644 by the Committee of Both Kingdoms (which also coordinated the combined endeavors of England and Scotland). A second Committee of Safety was established by senior army officers in October 1659. It consisted of ten senior officers and thirteen civilian politicians deemed to be sympathetic to the interests of the New Model Army and its commanders. Once the restored Purged Parliament was dismissed, it took over the role of its Council of State, though it never achieved control of the machinery of government. Amid riots and incipient anarchy, it allowed the Purged Parliament to convene again on 26 December, thus becoming in effect defunct. Thomas N. Corns

Commonplace Book. Manuscript notebook of Milton, begun in the late 1630s and continued into the mid- or late 1660s. It was rediscovered in 1874 among the manuscript collection at a Cumberland country house owned by the descendant of Sir Richard Graham, Viscount Preston (1648 –1695), whose patronage had been sought by Daniel Skinner, who acquired important Milton manuscripts after Milton’s death, most significantly the Letters of State and the systematic theology now known as De Doctrina Christiana. Presumably, he presented the Commonplace Book to Viscount Preston as a gift to seek his favor; Preston not only retained it but also added a few notes of his own.

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Thomas N. Corns

Commonwealth. Term (also Commonweal) used for the whole body of people constituting the state of England, widely current in the mid-seventeenth century. After the execution of Charles I in January 1649, it was the commonest term to describe the ensuing government and state of England without a monarch, sometimes in the formula “free commonwealth,” a locution adopted by Milton in the title of his late republican tract The Readie and Easie Way. The term “republic” was used much less frequently. See Corns (1995), OED.

Thomas N. Corns

Commonwealthsman. Generally, a person devoted to the well-being of the commonwealth. It acquired in the 1650s the narrower meaning of a supporter of the free Commonwealth or republic of England and was sometimes used to identify supporters of the Purged Parliament who were opposed to the role of Oliver Cromwell and the institution of the Protectorate. See OED.

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compounding. A form of financial penalty against propertied royalist activists during the English civil wars. By an ordinance of March 1643, the Long Parliament instituted sequestration, a procedure for the seizure of all the personal property and real estate of those who had aided the king, later adjusted to allow wives and children to retain one-fifth of

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the whole. In January 1644 compounding, a more lenient measure, was introduced for activists who were not leading members of the royalist cause. The work of implementation fell to a Committee of Parliamentary Sequestrations, which determined the severity of the punishment to be exacted, ranging from sequestration, which remained an option in the case of leading royalists, to the exaction of one-third of the estate, and, for those whose “malignancy” was deemed less culpable, a fine of one-tenth; the Committee for the Composition of Property owned by Delinquents administered the exactions. Milton was involved in attempting to protect the estates of his brother, Christopher Milton, and his father-in-law, Richard Powell, Sr., both of whom petitioned to compound in August 1646. Thomas N. Corns

Comus. The villain of Milton’s A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (often simply titled Comus after him). The name derives from the Greek komos for revelry or a company of revelers. Komos appeared in late antiquity as the personification or god of festive mirth. One of the Imagines (1.3) of Philostratus the Elder (b. c. 190 B.C.) describes a painting of “the daimon Komos . . . stationed at the door of a chamber” at a nocturnal wedding feast. He is a youth “delicate and not yet full grown, flushed with wine and, though upright, fallen asleep from drinking.” He wears a garland of roses, and a torch is about to fall from his sleepy right hand. Behind him, Philostratus evokes a dim light for the revelers, cross-dressed men and women wildly dancing, beating time and singing—an image that suggests the passage in Milton’s Trinity Manuscript of the masque where Comus’s “rout,” both men and women, “intrant komazontes.” Two contemporary images of Comus were also available to Milton. Of these, the obese and gluttonous belly-god, “first father of sauce and deviser of jelly,” from the first antimasque of Ben Jonson’s Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618), is less like the Comus of his own masque than the central figure in the neo-Latin dream-allegory of sensuality and indulgence Comus, Sive Phagesiposia Cimmeria: Somnium by Hendrik van der Putten (“Erycius Puteanus”), a professor at Louvain. First printed in 1608, this was republished at Oxford in 1634, the same year as Milton’s masque. This Comus, son of Venus and Mercury, appears as the sponsoring god of a forest revel of sexual and gustatory license, later relocated to a sumptuous palace. He carries a torch

and a cup of wine as his emblems, leads a rout of disguised monsters, and, like Milton’s figure, is a seducer as well as a reveler. Milton’s innovations on this figure spring in particular from the novel genealogy he gives him as the son of Bacchus and Circe. Tom Bishop

conscience. Milton, following Martin Luther and Jean Calvin, saw conscience as the inviolable inner faculty by which God communicated to humans over matters of right and wrong. Calling conscience God’s “Secretary” (The Reason of ChurchGovernment), “umpire” (PL 3.195), as “having the image of God” (Tetrachordon), and seeing it as a kind of court of law (Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and Tetrachordon), in his sonnet “To Mr. Cyriack Skinner upon His Blindness,” Milton imagined conscience as an infallible guide (6 –10). He distinguished it from other mental faculties, such as knowledge (Tetrachordon), faith (Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce), will (Areopagitica), and reason (Eikonoklastes). In his theological treatise De Doctrina Christiana, Milton equates conscience with “right reason,” and God is guarantor of that rightness. Milton championed conscience as the Lady’s “strong siding champion” against the magician Comus in A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (211). A component of the experiential approach to religion, conscience in the early modern period had been the basis of a Protestant “case divinity” through which moral principles of actions were considered. While during the Renaissance the language of conscience was adopted by the Jesuits and used by Catholic recusants to elude exposure and persecution by authorities, Protestants attacked the papists’ alleged assurance of faith and claimed that the doctrine of conscience had been abused through popery. William Perkins, in A Discourse of Conscience (1596) and The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (1606), and William Ames, in De Conscientia (1630) and Conscience with the Power and Cases Thereof (1639, 1643), described how Protestants were to consult conscience in ethical and religious matters such as salvation, the sacraments, oaths, and how through conscience they could develop prudence, virtue, and justice. Since conscience was experiential and inward, it could not be forced, and liberty of conscience became a central principle for those opposing the imposition of prescribed forms of worship. Over the period of the civil wars, questions of conscience shaded from

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the religious to the political, as writers addressed the questions of the legitimacy of opposing state religion and even raising an army to fight the king. The royalist propagandist Henry Ferne, for example, titled a work Conscience Satisfied. That There Is No Warrant for the Armes Now Taken Up by Subjects (1643); the Levellers grounded their opposition to Oliver Cromwell upon liberty of conscience as a right. Thomas Hobbes sought to put a brake on the potentially antinomian results of this attachment to liberty of conscience by writing in Leviathan that “the Law is the publique Conscience . . . Otherwise in such diversity, as there is of private Consciences, which are but private opinions, the Commonwealth must needs be distracted.” Milton viewed conscience as central to political freedom; he pleaded “to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties” in Areopagitica. In A Treatise of Civil Power, he equated conscience with “religion, that full perswasion whereby we are assur’d that our beleef and practise, as far as we are able to apprehend and probably make appeer, is according to the will of God & his Holy Spirit within us, which we ought to follow much rather then any law of man.” Also in A Treatise of Civil Power he had distinguished the Roman Catholic sense of conscience from that of the Protestants: “of an implicit faith, which they [papists] profess, the conscience also becoms implicit; and so by voluntarie servitude to mans law, forfets her Christian libertie.” Milton’s commitment to liberty of conscience was absolute throughout his writing life even as political meanings of conscience varied during the period from 1640 to 1674. He opposed the formalism of the state church in The Reason of Church-Government, deploring the “wounding of . . . conscience even to death” by prelatical strictures. In the sonnet “On the New Forcers of Conscience,” Milton wrote against Parliament’s imposing a Presbyterian system of church governance, and he pushed for a wider latitude of toleration on the grounds of conscience, an entity “that Christ set free” (6). After the regicide, Milton derided in Eikonoklastes the king’s appeal to conscience, and as Cromwell’s government was considering a narrower orthodoxy against the dangers of Quakers and Socinianism, Milton’s sonnets to Henry Vane and Cromwell pressed for religious freedom in the name of conscience. In “To the Lord General Cromwell” Milton pleaded, “Help us to save free conscience from the paw / Of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw” (13 –14). During the Restoration, liberty of conscience became a principle of radical dis-

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sent in politics. Milton revolted against the state’s encroachments upon conscience, lamenting in Paradise Lost how “Spiritual laws by carnal power shall force / On every conscience” (12.521–22). Sharon Achinstein

Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings . . . . See Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings. Conventicle Act (1664). Full title, the Act to Prevent and Suppress Seditious Conventicles. Passed by the Cavalier Parliament as part of what became known as the Clarendon Code, it sought to disperse congregations loyal to the ministers ejected on Black Bartholomew Day by forbidding all religious meetings (or “conventicles”) of five or more people not conducted according to the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer. A first offense incurred a £5 fine or three months’ imprisonment; a second, a £10 fine or six months in prison; a third, a £100 fine or transportation, whence it was commonly known as the “Act of Banishment.” Despite being renewed (and strengthened) in 1670, this act failed to prevent the development of a Restoration tradition of religious nonconformity. N. H. Keeble

Conventicle Act (1670). After the Conventicle Act of 1664 lapsed on 1 March 1669, the Cavalier Parliament in 1670 passed a more stringent successor. This second Conventicle Act empowered any one justice of the peace (the agreement of two justices was required to convict by the 1664 act) on the evidence of confession, two witnesses, or merely “by notorious evidence and circumstance of fact,” notes Andrew Browning, to convict an accused of attending an illegal conventicle. Justices were authorized to use the militia to break open and enter houses where a conventicle was suspected. Fines for attendees were less than in the 1664 act, but the 1670 act imposed fines of £20 on the owner of a property used for a conventicle; of £20 for a first, and £40 for any subsequent offense, on ministers; of £5 on anyone who failed to inform; and of £100 on any justice of the peace who failed to implement the act. The fines were split with any informers who had made conviction possible. In cases of inability to pay, goods to the sum of the fine were distrained (Browning). The compulsion to inform and authorization of forced entry to private property appeared

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to many an erosion of fundamental liberties, and the act generated a succession of oppositional tracts. It was famously described by Andrew Marvell as “the Quintessence of arbitrary Malice.” See Browning (1966).

N. H. Keeble

Convention Parliament. “Convention” is the term used of a parliament not summoned by royal authority. After George Monck had secured the return of the secluded members to the restored Purged Parliament in February 1660, the full Long Parliament, now with a Presbyterian majority, prepared the way for the Restoration by voting its own dissolution on 15 March and resolving that a new Parliament should meet on 25 April. Writs were moved for the new Parliament in the name of the Keepers of the Liberties of England, an old republican formula, but the oath of allegiance to the Commonwealth (see Engagement Controversy), hitherto required of new members, was abolished on 13 March; a proposal to deprive all royalists of the franchise was defeated; and the prohibition on royalists and Roman Catholics standing as candidates proved a dead letter. The Convention that met on 25 April was hence overwhelmingly sympathetic to the restoration of monarchy, and on 1 May, following a reading of the Declaration of Breda, it unanimously approved the motion that the ancient constitution of the country comprised king, lords, and commons and that ways should be found to bring about the unconditional return of Charles II. The Convention showed itself exceptionally adroit at negotiating the uncertainties and rivalries of the early months following the Restoration. The Act of Oblivion safeguarded the restored regime from a republican or radical backlash, while the payment of arrears to the soldiers of the New Model Army and the disbanding of their regiments dispelled the potential threat of military action. Confirmation of the authority of legal and civic institutions and of local officers of the state ensured stability and good order. And finally, those who had been instrumental in securing the Restoration and who had suffered in the royalist cause were rewarded, though not always to everyone’s satisfaction, especially when it came to dealing with the perplexing question of title to land that had changed hands many times during the years of war and revolution. In all, the Convention achieved a far more moderate and balanced address to the political uncertainty than its successor, the

Cavalier Parliament, would enact. The Convention was dissolved on 29 December 1660. Before then, Milton had been subject to some of its attention. In June 1660 Parliament resolved to petition the king to issue a proclamation calling in Eikonoklastes and Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio. It also instructed that Milton be brought before the House of Commons, a resolution that probably occasioned Milton’s temporary incarceration later in the year. See Campbell and Corns (2008), Hutton (1985), Keeble (2002).

N. H. Keeble

Conway [née Finch], Ann[e], (1631–1679). Philosopher. In 1651 she married Edward, Third Viscount Conway. Throughout her life she suffered from severe and debilitating headaches, which kept her largely confined to her room in Ragley Hall, Warwickshire. She demonstrated exceptional intellectual ability from an early age and became extremely learned, gaining the admiration of her lifelong correspondent Henry More and of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz. Her posthumous Opuscula Philosophica (1690), translated and published in English as The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (1692), rejected atomism and Cartesian dualism for a vitalistic and perfectible universe in which spirit and matter are indistinguishable. This animism has been thought close to Milton’s position. She was, like Milton, sympathetic to Quakers, finding that Quaker beliefs paralleled her mystical sense of an interpenetrating spiritual power. She became a convert in 1677, two years before her death. See Fallon (1991), ODNB.

N. H. Keeble

Cook, John (1608 –1660). Judge and regicide. Educated at Oxford and Gray’s Inn, he was a “man of rabid and sometimes eccentric opinions . . . [who] combined fervent religious faith with convinced republicanism” (C. V. Wedgwood, A Coffin for King Charles, 1997). He had spoken out against attainder of his old employer, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, in 1642, and defended Leveller leader John Lilburne before the House of Lords in 1646. He was appointed solicitor for the Commonwealth after Attorney General Anthony Steele declined to serve as the chief prosecutor of the High Court of Justice during the trial of Charles I. Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates provided ret-

1 Corinthians

rospective justification for the legal process against the king. Carol Barton

Copernicus, Nicolaus (1473 –1543). Astronomer. Born in Torun, Poland, he studied astronomy, medicine, and canon law in Cracow, Bologna, Padua, and Ferrara. In 1503 he settled permanently in Varmia, where he was one of sixteen canons who administered this northern ecclesiastical province, serving also as a doctor, though not as a priest. In his spare time he developed a cosmology contrary to the long-prevalent geocentric and geostatic model of Ptolemy, asserting that the earth is a “planet” (a “wandering star”) tracing both a diurnal rotation upon its axis and an annual circuit about the sun, now reimagined as central and stationary (heliocentrism). Although Milton is often superficially styled Ptolemaic, numerous features of Paradise Lost— the absence of crystalline spheres, earth’s status as a star, hints about possible extraterrestrial inhabitants, the extension of space beyond the starry sphere, references to Galileo’s telescopics, and aspects of Satan’s journey through space—are evidence of his rich participation in the legacy of Copernicus. Dennis Danielson

Coppe, Abiezer (1619 –1672). Religious radical. Born in Warwick he entered All Souls, Oxford, in 1636, transferring to Merton but leaving without a degree. A Presbyterian and then a Baptist preacher in Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, and Worcestershire in the early 1640s, he became chaplain to the parliamentary garrison at Compton in 1646. Coppe was soon espousing radical “Ranter” doctrines, publishing prefaces to Richard Coppin’s Divine Teachings (1649) and John the Divines Divinity (1649), by one “I.F.,” as well as his own works, Some Sweet Sips of Some Spiritual Wine (1649) and, most famously, A Fiery Flying Roll and A Second Fiery Flying Roule (both 1649). Printed together in January 1650, the latter caused an immediate furor owing to Coppe’s stunning appropriation of God’s voice in prophesying the imminent “levelling” of all “great ones” and the instauration of universal love and liberty. He was subsequently imprisoned, and his Roll, condemned by Parliament (1 February 1650), may even have motivated the Blasphemy Act passed later that year. In January 1651 Coppe issued A Remonstrance against blasphemous opinions attributed to

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him and was released by September, having published a full recantation, Copps Return to the Ways of Truth (1651). However, he was soon active again, identified as a Ranter when visiting George Fox in 1655 and associating with John Pordage. After the Restoration, Coppe practiced medicine under the name of Higham, preaching occasionally, at Barnes, Surrey, where he died. His poem “A Character of a True Christian” appeared posthumously (1680). Milton’s physician, Nathan Paget, owned a copy of Some Sweet Sips, but, despite Christopher Hill’s convictions about Milton’s affinity to Ranters, there is no evidence that Milton knew Coppe’s works. See BDBR, DNB, Hill (1977).

Michael Davies

1 Corinthians. Book of the New Testament. Corinth was a cosmopolitan port city, and the apostle Paul had established a diverse church there. In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he tries to quell incipient factionalism and urges the Corinthians to edify or “build up” their church. The letter thus affords an unparalleled glimpse into the social dynamics of the early church and, by analogy, of English Puritanism, which aspired to reproduce the early church’s purity in both doctrine and discipline. The letter can be divided into five sections: (1) Paul’s weakness and the folly of the Cross (chapters 1– 4). Paul contrasts the Corinthians’ fondness for worldly wisdom and “enticing” speech (2:4) with the folly of the Cross and his own weakness in learning, speech, and appearance. This section inspired scriptural attacks on humanist learning. Milton, identifying himself with Paul, uses it in The Reason of Church-Government, for example, to claim the authority traditionally granted his prelatical opponents. (2) Marriage and sexual behavior (chapters 5 –7). Paul discusses a specific case of incest, the problem of marriage to a nonbeliever, and the relative virtues of marriage and virginity. Milton cites these chapters frequently in his divorce tracts, and 7:10 –16 is one of his so-called “tetrachordon.” (3) Eating meat sacrificed to idols (chapters 8 –10). Apparently some “strong” believers in Corinth, “knowing” that all idols were empty, felt free to eat meat sacrificed to them. This discussion became paradigmatic for Reformation controversies about “things indifferent” (see adiaphora). Milton counters it in Animadversions and Apology Against a Pamphlet with the stricter prohibitions against sacrificial meats from the Acts of the Apostles and Revelation. (4) Communal worship

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(chapters 11–14). Paul lauds the Corinthians’ “variety of gifts,” especially charismatic prophecy and speaking in “strange tongues,” within his prescriptions for an orderly worship service. Gender subordination is a specific concern, as in Milton’s divorce tracts and Paradise Lost (4.440 – 43). Here again, the church is described as Christ’s body (12:12 –27) governed by love (cf. Paul’s famous hymn to love [13:4 –13]). (5) The Resurrection of Christ and of the body (chapter 15). This complex discussion of the resurrected body in relation to other kinds of bodies (for example, “natural” and “spiritual”; cf. De Doctrina Christiana book 7, chapter 13) figured centrally in Milton’s mortalism and ends with a cosmic vision of Christ’s final victory over death (“O death, where is thy sting?” [15:55]; cf. PL 3.250 –59 and PR 1.157– 62). Gregory Kneidel

2 Corinthians. Book of the New Testament. It consists almost wholly of Paul’s defense of his apostolic authority against adversaries in Corinth whom he labels hyper- or pseudo-apostles (11:5, 13) and who characterized him as weak, crude, and vain. Its tone varies widely: modern scholars suspect that it consists of at least two letter fragments (esp. the conciliatory chapters 1–9 and the accusatory, even sarcastic chapters 10 –13); Reformation commentators found in this variety evidence of Paul’s rhetorical sophistication. Because its argument centers on Paul’s character and the style of his ministry, 2 Corinthians includes several, sometimes conflicting, statements about godly rhetoric that Reformation polemicists and Miltonic orators frequently adopt. See O’Keeffe (1982).

Gregory Kneidel

Coronation Oath. The oath taken by English monarchs at their coronation, from a piece of paper subsequently laid upon the altar. Its written form dates from c. 732 –736 (the Echberht Pontifical) to the present. Together with the Recognition by the people and the anointing, it is fundamental to the institution of kingship. From earliest times, it was sworn on the gospels, spoken in the vernacular before the people, requiring the monarch to maintain peace and to show equity and mercy in his judgments. Between Henry III and Edward I, new words were included that specifically preserved the monarch’s prerogatives, together with a require-

ment to maintain the “laws of Edward the Confessor,” and that added a fourth clause to uphold laws and customs “which the commonalty of [the] kingdom have.” A Latinized version was preserved in the clerical ordo, the Liber Regalis (c. 1351–1377), with the oaths of James I, Charles I, Charles II, and James II adapting this form to English. (Scotland required a different Coronation Oath of all its monarchs by the 1567 Scots Coronation Oath Act, Anne being the last monarch to take this oath in 1702.) In the Remonstrance of 26 May 1642, the House of Commons translated the fourth clause from a Latin/French text as compelling the king to assent to any law which the “community of the realm” (interpreted to mean the Commons and perhaps the House of Lords) shall choose, leaving the king, in William Prynne’s words, “no negative voice.” However, James I’s and Charles I’s oaths, sworn in English, stated that the king shall “hold and keep the laws and rightful customs which the commonalty of your kingdom have.” Accordingly, Charles I had refused assent to the Militia Ordinance, which he saw as a fundamental breach of the crown’s prerogative, and rejected the Remonstrance, referring to the oath in English that he had actually taken. The trial of Charles I defended by Milton in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates was in part based upon false allegations that the king had deliberately taken an oath different from that of his predecessor, and simultaneously upon the king’s alleged breach of the oath. In Eikonoklastes, Milton contends at length that the Coronation Oath restricted the role of the monarchy, guaranteed the right enjoyed by citizens at the time of the king’s accession, and in effect, underwrote the Ancient Constitution. Charles II and James II took largely the same oath as Charles I. The revolutionaries of 1688 –1689 reframed the Coronation Oath in the Coronation Oath Act of 1689, assented to by William III and Mary II, removing the references to the prerogative and Edward the Confessor and requiring the monarch or monarchs to govern according to English laws and customs, and statutes agreed upon by the English Parliament (the monarch and the two Houses); to make judgments with law, justice, and mercy; and to maintain the laws of God. The 1701 Act of Settlement requires all English monarchs to take this Coronation Oath. Margaret Kelly

Cortona, Pietro da (1596 –1669). Baroque architect and painter. Most of his best work was done

Council of State

in Rome, where his patron was Cardinal Francesco Barberini. He designed several churches in Rome notable for their domes and idiosyncratic façades (including Santi Luca e Martina, San Carlo al Corso, and Santa Maria della Pace). In painting, his finest achievement was the decoration of the Grand Salon of the Barberini Palace (1633 –1639). These tumultuous frescoes depict the Glorification of the Reign of Urban VIII, showing myriads of allegorical figures swarming upward into the luminous vault, drawn by the supreme figure of Divine Providence. Milton must have seen these frescoes when he visited the Barberini Palace in February 1639, and they may have shaped his conception of how divine history might be presented.

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Milton’s outstanding grasp of contemporary astronomy and of Galileo’s Dialogue on the Chief World Systems is now generally acknowledged, and Galileo himself appears five times in Paradise Lost. Other influences on Milton’s “world picture” are Francis Bacon’s Descriptio Globi Intellectualis, John Wilkins’s works proving earth a planet and the moon a “new world,” William Gilbert’s theory of magnetism as the source of solar energy, and the Oxford scientist Seth Ward, who at mid-century rightly insisted that both heliocentrism and geocentrism were still viable alternatives. See Fallon (1991), Rogers (1996).

Catherine Gimelli Martin

Graham Parry

cosmos. Milton’s epic cosmos contains all three traditional regions of heaven, earth, and hell, with the unconventional addition of an ongoing and apparently neutral Chaos whose unformed atoms are capable of both good and evil. This addition may be traced to two sources: the contemporary resurrection of Lucretian atomism, and the usefulness of an indeterminate realm of prematter for sustaining Milton’s “free will” defense of God. This cosmos also responds to the new science of the day by showing that a monistic physical continuum connects heaven, earth, and Chaos, whose contrasts are matters of degree, not dualistic difference (PL 5.404 – 43, 469 –505). By describing a greatly expanded, potentially infinite universe and the possibility of plural worlds (PL 5. 261– 68, 7.166 –71), Milton’s Paradise Lost definitively breaks with the “closed world” of literary tradition. Although his created cosmos is still linked by a golden chain to heaven, its shape is indefinitely globular or “starlike,” not circular (2.1004 –5, 1051–53), and the traditional Aristotelian boundary between the “lower” sublunar realms and the “perfect” circles above has disappeared. Neither Raphael nor Satan encounters these circles in their voyages to earth, itself merely a “cloudy spot” (5.266). While Raphael does not definitively say whether the earth is the center of the solar system or instead revolves around the sun, his enthusiastic description of the heliocentric alternative, combined with Milton’s obliteration of Ptolemy’s crystalline spheres, strongly suggests his Copernicanism (see Nicolaus Copernicus). Other confirmations include the fact that Satan needs to land on the sun (traditionally, only the fourth circle of Ptolemy’s cosmos) before discovering earth and Milton’s Paradise of Fools.

Cotton, John (1584 –1652). Congregational divine. He was educated at Trinity and Emmanuel Colleges, Cambridge. In 1612 he became vicar of Boston, Lincolnshire, and gained considerable reputation as a preacher and theologian, but for refusing to comply with the ceremonial practices prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer, he was cited before the Court of High Commission in 1633. He resigned and was among the earliest Puritan immigrants to New England, where he became a minister in Boston, Massachusetts. His publications were crucial to the development of the church polity known in New England as congregationalism (the term that subsequently superseded Independency in England), in particular the works that profoundly influenced John Owen, The Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven (1644) and The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared (1648). New England congregationalism thus provided the model for the kind of church government that Milton probably endorsed by the mid-1640s. See ODNB.

N. H. Keeble

Council of State. In place of the Privy Council, the Long Parliament sought to establish a government executive through a series of committees, culminating in 1648 in the Derby House Committee, also known as the Committee of Both Houses. The Purged Parliament in February 1649 remodeled its executive function through the establishment of a forty-one-member Council of State, initially under the chairmanship of John Bradshaw. From its inception, the council was accountable to the full Purged Parliament. While most of its members were also members of Parliament, the relationship nevertheless produced some vacillation in

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policy, as recommendations from the former could be revised or referred back by the latter. At some points, there was uncertainty about where the right or power to make decisions precisely rested. The council changed on the basis of annual elections by the Purged Parliament, and halfway through its life a system of compulsory rotation was introduced, in which the twenty members with the fewest number of votes were replaced. Although Oliver Cromwell always topped the poll and there were considerable continuities, the composition of the council did change from year to year in ways that reflected the changing complexion of Parliament, which became less militantly republican as members who had not supported the regicide drifted back, though the House of Commons could seem more radical as issues arose, as the external threats to the state grew or faded, and as its agenda changed. On 15 March 1649, the Council of State appointed Milton Secretary for Foreign Tongues, initially for one year. His appointment was renewed over the four and a half years of the council’s life. After Cromwell dismissed the Purged Parliament and the Protectorate was established, successive Councils of State were constituted by successive regimes, though under Richard Cromwell the term Privy Council was revived. Milton continued in employment as a public servant until 1659. What was probably his last salary payment was approved by the final Council of State of the reconvened Purged Parliament on 25 December 1659. Thomas N. Corns

Counter-Reformation. The phase of religious history when the Catholic Church undertook to renew itself, structurally, doctrinally, and spiritually, in response to the breakaway of the Protestant churches and in order to reform its own perceived corruptions. It effectively extended from the third decade of the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth. The process began with the foundation of new orders such as the Capuchins and the Theatines in the 1520s and strengthened with the foundation of the Jesuit order by Ignatius Loyola in 1540. The Jesuits took the lead in attempting to reconvert Protestants in northern Europe and in propagating the faith in the Americas and in India, China, and Japan. The main engine of the Counter-Reformation was the Council of Trent, which, meeting intermittently from 1545 to 1563, redefined many of the doctrines of the Catholic Church and fostered a greatly intensified devotional life throughout the Catholic world.

In England the Counter-Reformation was experienced in various ways. From the 1570s there was a pervasive presence of seminary priests and Jesuits who attempted to reinforce the faith of native Catholics, to make conversions among Protestants, and occasionally to subvert the government. By the 1620s and 1630s this proselytizing activity was proving quite successful at court and in aristocratic circles. In the scholarly world there was much publishing of learned defenses of Protestant doctrines and refutation of Catholic claims. Continental devotional works in translation and emblem books that aided piety circulated freely among a Protestant readership. During the reign of Charles I, Catholic painters such as Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Peter Paul Rubens, and Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi were welcome at court, and collectors were keen to acquire devotional paintings in the baroque idiom. Milton’s visit to Italy in 1638 –1639 took him to the heart of the Counter-Reformation, and his courteous reception there demonstrated that by the 1630s the confident new culture of the Catholic world had developed a broad tolerance for followers of the reformed religion. Europe was opening up after a century of acrimonious divisions. Graham Parry

Court of Star Chamber. Prerogative court whose body was selected by the monarch from the Privy Council and the bishops. Originally begun in the medieval period as an appeals court serving as an extension of the monarch’s interest in redressing grievances, by Milton’s time the body’s mandate had expanded considerably to serve as a primary court trying a range of matters including sedition, printing and licensing, and public disorder. Though private individuals continued to bring the majority of cases, increasingly the court became viewed as an instrument of the state and episcopacy, particularly with Charles I’s reliance on the body during the so-called Personal Rule. The court was finally abolished in 1641 by the Long Parliament. With the dissolution of the Star Chamber also came the collapse of the legal framework for licensing books. In Areopagitica Milton makes particular reference to the 1637 Star Chamber decree regulating printing. Todd Butler

Covenanters. Scottish Presbyterians who bound themselves together by subscribing a solemn un-

Cowper, William

dertaking (or covenant) to preserve and promote, by military combat if necessary, the reformed religion as practiced in Scotland. The “First Protestant Engagement” (“First Band” or “First Bond”) of 1557, an undertaking signed by Scottish nobility to resist the work of the Antichrist, which at the time was perceived in the planned marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to the French Dauphin, later Francis II, set a precedent for the much more significant National Covenant of 1638. Provoked by the attempt of Charles I in 1637 to impose in Scotland a version of the Book of Common Prayer, this undertaking to defend the religion and liberties of the Scots was signed by nobility, gentry, and ministers throughout Scotland and led to the king’s humiliation in the Bishops’ Wars. The Solemn League and Covenant, an alliance of mutual defense between the English and Scottish parliaments ratified in 1643 during the First Civil War, was primarily of military and political, rather than religious, significance in England (though not in Scotland), where, with the rise of Oliver Cromwell, Presbyterianism was superseded by Independency. Milton slighted its undertaking to defend the person and authority of the king as “the unnecessariest clause,” arguing that this gave “no unlimitable exemption” to Charles I and so could not be used by Presbyterians to justify their refusal to support the Independents in prosecuting him to the death (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes). After the Restoration, Covenanters came to form a much more distinctively extreme religious grouping in Scotland consisting of those who, continuing to regard both the covenants as enduringly binding religious and confessional documents, resisted the Stuart regime and its attempts to reimpose episcopacy. Subjected to fierce persecution, they resorted to military rebellion in the Pentland Rising of 1666 and the rebellion of Bothwell Brig in 1679. Following their defeat, they were ruthlessly pursued during the “killing times” of the 1680s. Daniel Defoe celebrated the heroism of the Covenanters and what he presented as their Whig resistance to Stuart tyranny in Memoirs of the Church of Scotland (1715). N. H. Keeble

Cowley, Abraham (1618 –1667). Poet and essayist. Milton’s widow named him among the three English poets he “approved most.” In his own century Cowley’s reputation was extraordinarily high. Born in London and educated at Westminster

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School, Cowley won early fame with Poeticall Blossoms (1633), in its third edition by 1637. If, in the usual way, the collection became known through manuscript circulation before appearing in print, Milton may allude in “Sonnet VII” to the poet ten years his younger as he laments that his own “late spring no bud or blossom sheweth.” Royalist in sympathies, Cowley left Cambridge for Oxford in 1642; wrote a satire, The Puritan and the Papist (1643); and began an epic poem, The Civil War, for which, like Lucan, he took recent political conflict as his subject. He followed the queen to France, served in her court for some ten years, and was briefly imprisoned by the Commonwealth government after his return to England. The Poems of 1656 consists of four parts: “Miscellanies,” “The Mistress, or Love-Verses,” “Pindarique Odes,” and “Davideis.” Although the odes had the greatest influence on subsequent poets, “Davideis,” with Cowley’s notes on this “Heroical Poem of the Troubles of David,” is of particular interest in relation to Milton, both for the two poets’ general conception of David and kingship and for their handling of epic conventions. Cowley completed only four books but announced a plan to follow Virgil in writing twelve. At the Restoration, despite an extravagant ode comparing Charles II to Christ, Cowley was disappointed in hopes of royal favor. In retirement he wrote six books of Latin poems on plants. Ideas he developed in A Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy (1661) sometimes chime with those in Milton’s Of Education, and the “Hymn to the Light” (1663) parallels “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” Kay Gilliland Stevenson

Cowper, William (1731–1800). Poet. Born at Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, and educated at Westminster, he qualified as a barrister from Middle Temple in 1754 but never practiced. At age thirtytwo he suffered a severe mental illness, subsequently enduring bouts of depression and convictions of damnation throughout his life. Becoming friends with the Rev. John Newton, he settled in Olney, Buckinghamshire, in 1768, where together they composed Olney Hymns (1779). His Poems appeared in 1782, followed by The Task in 1785. He read Paradise Lost at age fourteen (The Task 4.709-17), and Milton’s influence was profound: Cowper considered him unsurpassed in English poetry, and his blank verse translation of Homer (first published in 1791) consciously followed “the divine harmony” of

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Milton’s “numbers.” Milton even appeared to him once in a dream. In preparing an ill-fated edition of Milton’s poetry (c. 1791–1793), Cowper translated the Latin and Italian poems, but he eventually abandoned the project. Michael Davies

Cranmer, Thomas (1489 –1556). First Protestant archbishop of Canterbury. Educated at Jesus College, Cambridge, on his appointment as archbishop of Canterbury in 1533 he served “the King’s business” by annulling Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon and maintaining the king’s right to be designated supreme head of the Church of England, independent of the jurisdiction of the Church of Rome. He subsequently oversaw the steady development of Protestant doctrines, practices, and worship in the national English church (the Book of Common Prayer was largely of his composing). Under the Roman Catholic Mary I, he was martyred by burning in 1556. Like other Reformation bishops, he attracted Milton’s scorn in Of Reformation. See ODCC, ODNB.

N. H. Keeble

Crashaw, Richard (c. 1612 –1649). Poet. He attended Charterhouse, close to St. Paul’s School, which Milton attended, though there is no evidence that he and Milton met as students. He received a B.A. from Cambridge University in 1634, having already contributed poems to the second edition of Lancelot Andrewes’s XCVI Sermons (1631), and worshipped at Nicholas Ferrar’s religious retreat at Little Gidding. He became a fellow of Peterhouse in 1635, was ordained and given a cure, but left for the Netherlands as civil war approached. By 1646 he had converted to Roman Catholicism and moved to Paris, where he was favored by Queen Henrietta Maria. That year saw publication of Steps to the Temple, a collection that secured his place among the English devotional poets and whose title records his debt to George Herbert. Crashaw’s style, an often intensely visceral blend of Catholic mysticism and baroque conceit, distinguishes him from other metaphysical poets. In 1646 he entered the service of Cardinal Giovanni Batista Maria Pallotta in Rome and moved in 1649 to the shrine at Loreto, but he died of a fever on 21 August, just a few weeks after arriving. Despite their shared Cambridge educations, influential visits to Italy, and

broadly baroque poetic traits, direct links between Crashaw and Milton are few. See ODNB.

Christopher Baker

creation. As regards God’s creation, Milton follows Genesis chapters 1–3 in Paradise Lost. However, he amplifies the account from his vast learning, including natural history and philosophy, both old and new. His principal narrators of the six days of creation are the archangel Raphael as eyewitness and Adam and Eve themselves. The agent of creation is the Son. Milton’s account is monistic and vitalistic (see monism). He denies the orthodox creation ex nihilo (out of nothing; compare De Doctrina Christiana book 1, chapter 7); the “first matter” of which all things are made can only have originated in God himself (see Raphael’s explanation to Adam, PL 5.469 –74). Each created life has freedom to evolve in some measure, human and angelic ones most fully, and each is intrinsically good but can be perverted or misused. Milton’s views of the nature of matter and the resurrection of creatures oppose the dualism of Jean Calvin, Francis Bacon, and René Descartes and participate in debates over natural philosophy and theology. Although Raphael cannot serve as eyewitness to the creation of the angels, a lesser angel named Abdiel, trying to dissuade Satan from warring against God, argues for their creation by God (PL 5.835 – 43). Satan denies that the angels were created at all and claims to be “self-begot” (5.860), alienating himself from creaturehood. Scholars debate whether Milton makes the Son himself a creature. If all beings are made of the substance of God, the line between begetting and creating is hard to discern, and the Incarnation becomes a natural development. The “wild abyss” of Chaos is substance without order from which the divine will has been withdrawn (PL 2.910 –16). Hell is a lifeless site that the fallen angels attempt to make livable by technology; earth is wholly alive. The first characters to mention God’s plan to make a new world are the defeated Satan and Beelzebub. The six-day creation is a process of separating and ordering the elements and calling forth the creatures from their habitats. All parts of the creation actively respond. Raphael teaches Adam and Eve that God chooses the moment after the defeat of Satan “lest his heart exalt him . . . to have dispeopled heaven” (7.150 –51) and

critical tradition in Milton studies

that the new creation is to be a place of human responsibility. The Son goes forth with golden compasses “Far into chaos, and the world unborn” and circumscribes the dark, unformed “universe, and all created things” (7.220, 227). In addition to his monistic sense of the kinship of creatures, Raphael expresses an empathetic respect for each kind of being. Earthly creatures arise vigorously from habitats fully involved in their making. Earth is an active mother to her plant and animal conceptions, and they in turn are sentient and responsive in their degrees. The creation of the celestial bodies, as in Genesis, comes after the creation of vegetation. It is narrated twice, by Raphael (PL 7.339 – 86) and by Uriel (3.717–18). They are also the topic of a long conversation between Adam and Raphael (8.90 –91, 151). Animals are generated by their habitats with their own cooperation (7.391– 466). Adam recounts to Raphael (PL 8.250 –559) his first moments of consciousness, and Eve recalls hers to Adam (4.440 –91). Perhaps Milton’s most remarkable innovation in interpreting Genesis chapter 2 is that he—and his Adam and Eve, Eve especially—takes literally and seriously God’s charge to “dress and keep” the Garden, which is the epitome of earth. The work of Adam and Eve guides and supports but does not commandeer the plants and animals. Their “dressing” or cultivation is minimal but attentive, assisting nature’s own processes in ways both informative and creative and making for themselves a natural habitat through which they can move with ease. Their “keeping,” oddly thought by many commentators to mean protecting themselves from wild animals, is the preservation of the habitat they share with peaceable ones. Had there been no Fall, this vocation of earth-keeping would have extended to the rest of the planet. See Edwards (1999), Fallon (1991), McColley (1993), Rogers (1996).

Diane Kelsey McColley

critical tradition in Milton studies FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO JOHNSON

Most of the written and spoken public commentary on Milton and his writing during his lifetime supported or refuted his tracts on prelacy and divorce, and his defense of the regicide in Eikonoklastes and Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio. The early response, which often included personal attack, thus established Milton’s reputation as an antiprelate, a divorcer, a regicide, and a republican. This

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reputation significantly affected uses and more strictly critical discussions of Milton up to and beyond Samuel Johnson’s treatment of the “acrimonious and surly republican” in Lives of the English Poets (1779 –1781). Shortly after his death, Milton became the subject of several brief biographies, including that of John Toland which prefaced the 1698 edition of the prose works and which included positive critical assessments of both their argument and their style. By this time, however, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, and John Dennis had all briefly but publicly praised Paradise Lost, which had appeared in several editions, including Jacob Tonson’s lavish 1688 fourth-edition folio published on subscription from both Whigs and Tories. In addition, this poem was the object of the first full-scale scholarly annotation to a work of literature in English, P[atrick] H[ume]’s Annotations on Milton’s Paradise Lost (1695). By the end of the seventeenth century the regicide apologist was thus also known and celebrated in England as the author of the national Protestant epic. One of the premises of Hume’s commentary is that Paradise Lost is “obscure” because of the poet’s allusions to the Bible and the pagan epics, his unusual syntax and compressed expression, his tropological usage, his usage of obsolete and coined words, and his Latin and Greek idioms. This observation of the obscurity of the poem and its causes is restated in several later commentaries on the poem, the most important of which are the Richardsons’ Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton’s Paradise Lost (1734), Francis Peck’s New Memoirs of the Life and Poetical Works of Mr. John Milton (1740), James Paterson’s A Complete Commentary (1744), the notes and commentary included in Thomas Newton’s variorum edition of the poem (1749), and William Massey’s Remarks upon Milton’s Paradise Lost (1761). Hume and many eighteenth-century commentators and editors felt that Paradise Lost was obscure and that the common reader, in order to understand it fully, needed an explanation of it. Criticism of the poem throughout the century is thus to explain its meaning—to make clear what the author himself meant—by methods derived from classical philology and English Protestant biblical commentary. Though there was a strong consensus among early commentators and editors of Paradise Lost that the text of the poem was sound, the great classical scholar Richard Bentley disagreed. He asserted that the text had been corrupted by incompetent amanuenses, a meddling editor, and an incompetent printer. In 1732 he therefore published a new

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edition of the poem in which he proposed extensive emendations and expurgations with the aim of restoring “the poet’s own words.” The most important expression of the protest that ensued was A Review of the Text of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1732 –1733) in which Zachary Pearce extends the methods of Hume to refute Bentley. In 1747 the integrity of the text of the poem was again questioned, but this time by William Lauder who, in Gentleman’s Magazine, accused Milton of plagiarism. The charge incited further investigation into Milton’s sources, which grounded several public refutations of Lauder and the exoneration of the poet. Projects explaining the meaning of Paradise Lost and establishing the integrity of the text were regarded as doubly important: the poem was considered to be of the highest quality and a sacred work that was an honor to the nation. Throughout the entire period, the high quality of the poem is commonly asserted on grounds that its thought, expression, and author are “sublime.” Sublimity had been equated with literary merit since Longinus’s treatise On the Sublime had been translated into English and French during the Restoration. However, critics such as John Dennis, in The Grounds of Criticism (1704), and Edmund Burke, in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), also considerably revised the Longinian account in their praise of the Miltonic sublime. In his very popular and influential discussion of the poem in the periodical The Spectator (1712), Joseph Addison, too, praises the sublimity of the poem. But he also establishes the view that the poem was as good as if not better than the works of Virgil and Homer by Aristotelian and Horatian criteria as well. These criteria were taken to stipulate that one of the principal functions of literature is to provide moral instruction. Since Addison and all major eighteenth-century commentators on the poem saw the Christian moral instruction that Milton offered to be superior to the instruction that the pagan epics offered, they all felt that the poem had a strong claim to aesthetic supremacy. Many aspects of the poem were, however, troubling to its admirers. From Dryden to Johnson, critics discussed, often adversely, Milton’s versification, Sin and Death, the Limbo of Vanity, Milton’s apparent materialism and antitrinitarianism, the final books, puns, allusions to romance and pagan mythologies, and the success and vivacity of Satan. Paradise Lost dominated eighteenth-century discussion of Milton, but the prose and other poems received considerable attention as well. Of Education was frequently reprinted and cited,

and The History of Britain was regarded as an authority on the subject. The minor poems were sometimes treated in the course of commentaries on Paradise Lost and were the objects of major commentary and praise in Peck’s New Memoirs and in editions of them published by Newton in 1752 and Thomas Warton in 1785. A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle received considerable critical attention throughout the period and was produced on the stage in 1738 and 1772, with the result that the republican epic poet also came to be widely known as a playwright. See Shawcross (1970, 1972), Walsh (1997).

William W. Walker

FROM JOHNSON TO BRIDGES

The attack by Samuel Johnson in Lives of the English Poets on both Milton the man and his works stimulated a vigorous response along familiar lines, which both praised the lofty “sublimity” of Paradise Lost and defended it, in the neoclassical manner, in terms of its comparability with the achievements of Homer and Virgil. Milton’s reputation fared well in the great expansion of Scottish cultural life, the “Scottish enlightenment,” of the mid- and late eighteenth century. James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714 –1799), a leading jurist and a prominent figure among Edinburgh intellectuals, included a patient neoclassical defense of Milton in Of the Origin and Progress of Language (1773 –1792), which praises Milton’s learning while disparaging Johnson’s. Some writers of the 1790s and early nineteenth century found Milton’s poetry to exhibit a rather different kind of sublimity, close to the aesthetic and cultural preferences of the Romantic movement. His radicalism, which was an element to be excused and explained away by earlier admirers, was reassessed as a potent embodiment of the antiestablishment zeal of his new supporters, as the word “rebel” became a term of praise, not opprobrium. Much of the response centered on Milton’s depiction of Satan. Thus, in his widely read treatise An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), William Godwin explores the question of why Satan rebelled against God, concluding, “It was . . . because he saw no sufficient reason for that extreme inequality of rank and power which the creator assumed.” The intense, though diverse, visionary spirituality that characterized the leading Romantic poets also drew them to redefine Milton’s own sublimity, and at the same time accommodated them to accepting him as a model and influence on

critical tradition in Milton studies

their writing. William Blake’s appropriation was particularly complex, though he only manifested in extreme form an admiration for Miltonic energy, embodied especially in the representation of Satan, to be found again in the response of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Sensibilities as diverse as William Wordsworth’s and John Keats’s found in the Miltonic sublime a vision they could associate with their own aspirations. Milton’s standing in English literary culture emerged enhanced from the early nineteenth century. As movements toward widened participation both in the education of children and in higher education established the discipline of “English literature” in the high Victorian era, Milton’s status as the leading nondramatic poet in English was firmly established, confirmed by a flurry of editorial activity designed to make his work more accessible to a redefined and much broader readership. His work was the subject of two ambitious critical projects that are milestones in the development of the academic discipline. In 1852 David Masson (1822 –1907) was appointed professor of English language and literature at University College, London; in 1865 he moved to the chair of rhetoric and English literature at the University of Edinburgh, which he held for the next thirty-five years. The crowning achievement of his career was the massive seven-volume study The Life of John Milton: Narrated in Connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of His Time (1859 –1894). Masson wrote at a time when English historiography was in rapid transition, thanks in considerable measure to his great contemporary, the historian Samuel Rawson Gardiner, whose own work on early- and mid-seventeenth-century English history kept pace with Masson’s. Though much has been discovered since Masson wrote, the debt to him remains profound, and his writings still contain much useful and illuminating information. The second great Victorian study was by a poet, rather than a professional academic, Robert Bridges (1844 –1930). Bridges was an immensely popular writer in his day— one collection of his poetry sold twenty-seven thousand copies—and in 1912 he became poet laureate. A friend and admirer of Gerard Manley Hopkins, he too was an innovative prosodist, favoring the “sprung rhythm” Hopkins developed that aimed at a poetic meter that approximated the rhythm of speech. From the 1880s he was drawn to a close and systematic study of Milton’s prosody, and his monograph Milton’s Prosody, first published in 1893 (final revised edition, 1921), not only set a standard for the analysis of English metrics but still

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remains useful, though it is somewhat superseded by S. E. Sprott’s Milton’s Art of Prosody (1953). See Newlyn (1993), Shawcross (1972).

Thomas N. Corns

FROM ELIOT TO EMPSON

Milton’s reputation was so high by the start of the twentieth century that some devaluative reaction was almost inevitable. From 1920 to 1963 debates over the value of his verse roiled literary studies as the new criticism defined itself through a reappraisal of canonical poets. Detractors—among them Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Middleton Murry, Herbert Read, and F. R. Leavis—were not Milton scholars per se but were well-known men of letters whose complaints carried uncommon weight. The essence of their case against Milton was that despite its grand sound, “his poetry doesn’t mean very much” (Christopher Ricks). The initial reaction of Milton scholars to the “dislodgment” of their poet by these high-profile interlopers (“effected with remarkably little fuss,” said the smug Leavis) tended to inarticulate indignation. Eventually, however, the sharp and detailed attacks of modern critics stimulated fresh attention to Milton’s verse and gradually were incorporated into thematic interpretations of Milton’s work that set the stage for a new era in Milton scholarship. The grand contention began in 1921 with these evocative remarks from T. S. Eliot: “In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden.” Evidently encouraged and influenced by Murry (1930) and Leavis (in Scrutiny in 1933; reprinted in Revaluation in 1936), Eliot was by 1936 more forthcoming about Milton’s verse, claiming, as Leavis had previously, that Milton “writes English like a dead language,” the syntax actively and gratuitously complicated “for the sake of musical value, not for significance.” Lamenting the pernicious effect of Milton on subsequent poets, Eliot recommends that poets avoid him: “He may still be considered as having done damage to the English language from which it has not wholly recovered.” This claim repeats Murry’s assertion (in a study of Keats) that Milton’s poetic precedent “led nowhere.” These strictures, despite their gravity, were brief and unsubstantiated. In Murry’s case they were explicitly accompanied by what Eliot, likening himself to Samuel Johnson, would only in retraction

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acknowledge his own: “an antipathy towards Milton the man.” The critical ramifications of such antipathy should not be underestimated. Certainly in the mid-twentieth century, in Cleanth Brooks’s view, “many and perhaps most of those who have helped make the modern critical revolution have been hostile to Milton and the fact simply has to be admitted.” With regard to Eliot’s wonderfully phrased poet’s conceit, “dissociation of sensibility,” the complaint was not only brief and unsupported, but to the shame of a generation of literary scholars who blindly embraced it, half-baked. As Douglas Bush observed a quarter century after the lucky words were written, Eliot tosses off in a few paragraphs a doctrine that would “require a considerable analysis of a vast and various body of writing before it could be launched even as a hypothesis.” Eliot himself later admitted that “if such a dissociation did take place . . . the causes are too complex and too profound to justify our accounting for the change in terms of literary criticism.” The modern anti-Milton position owes its substance and staying power to F. R. Leavis. He elaborated the fitful attacks of Eliot and Murry into a coherent critique, which he repeatedly insisted had not been pertinently answered. Closely analyzing passages from Paradise Lost, Leavis argues that Milton’s prosody often “has no particular expressive work to do, but functions by rote . . . in the manner of a ritual.” The verse is magniloquent, which is to say, “it is not doing as much as its impressive pomp and volume seem to be asserting.” Leavis renewed the centuries old complaint that Milton, as Johnson put it, “wrote no language, but has formed what [Samuel] Butler calls a Babylonish Dialect.” For the next thirty years Leavis’s objections to Milton’s verse went largely unanswered. E. M. W. Tillyard repudiated the modern devaluation of Milton’s poetry as being parochial and inconsistent with expert scholarly opinion. Leavis disdained Tillyard’s argument as impertinent. Tillyard also asserted that Milton’s style was not so Babylonish as all that, but again offered little by way of compelling evidence drawn from Milton’s poetry. C. S. Lewis, by contrast, conceded that Leavis’s analysis was accurate: “It is not that [Leavis] and I see different things when we look at Paradise Lost . . . the disagreement between us tends to escape from the realm of literary criticism.” What Leavis had deemed empty pomp Lewis defended as circumstantially compensatory. Decisive, direct rebuttal of Leavis’s specific and often repeated complaints would not occur until Christopher Ricks produced Milton’s Grand Style, more than twenty years later.

This is not to say that Leavis had not been effectively answered before 1963. Where Lewis conceded the accuracy of Leavis’s main complaint, William Empson challenged the notion that Milton, in effect, “wrote in a muddle,” elevating sound over sense. Empson contrived to do so without ever mentioning Leavis or the modern reaction against Milton but instead through painstaking analysis of Richard Bentley’s edition of Paradise Lost (1732). Although Bentley had historically been dismissed as an editorial megalomaniac, Empson discerns genuine value in his work. By admitting the value of Bentley’s objections and articulating fresh interpretive insights in reaction to them, Empson demonstrated how the conflict in modern evaluations of Milton could improve appreciation of his poetry. Empson put the matter plainly: “Milton is wholly entitled to muddles when serious forces are at work in them.” He would not address these “serious forces” to his own satisfaction until in 1961 he published Milton’s God, arguably the greatest twentieth-century contribution to interpretation of Paradise Lost. When Milton’s ideas did come under scrutiny, per Empson’s precedent, controversy over the verse of Paradise Lost became a platform for fresh interpretation of the epic’s structure, action, and characters. Instrumental to this development was Maurice Kelley’s This Great Argument: A Study of Milton’s “De Doctrina Christiana” as a Gloss upon “Paradise Lost” (1941). Unlike Denis Saurat’s stimulating but uneven Milton: Man and Thinker (1925), which studied Milton through the lens of a broadly based intellectual history, Kelley restricted his focus to elucidation of Paradise Lost via painstaking attention to its correspondence with arguments in Milton’s own theological treatise. Some dismissed the “amusingly simple” assumption that the discursive basis of Milton’s epic could be rendered so prosaically (Brooks). But even condescending rebuttal of Kelley’s immensely valuable efforts required careful attention to the precise meaning of Milton’s lines and detailed acquaintance with his theological positions. In what proved to be the pivotal argument in the modern Milton controversy, A. J. A. Waldock effectively organized the alleged intellectual incoherence of Milton’s verse by arguing that his intent was more reliably indicated by the poem’s action and characters’ speeches than by the narrator’s interjections. This reductive division was the springboard for Stanley Fish’s influential interpretation of Milton’s didactic strategy. See Brooks (1951), Bush (1945), Eliot (1936, 1947, 1950), Empson (1935), Fish (1967), Johnson (1950), Kelley (1962),

Cromwell, Oliver

Lau (1998), Leavis (1936, 1952a, 1952b), Lewis (1942), Milton (1732), Murry (1930), Ricks (1963), Saurat (1944),Tillyard (1938), Waldock (1947).

John P. Rumrich

Cromwell, Bridget (1624 –1662). Eldest daughter of Oliver Cromwell. She was married to two of her father’s close military associates: in 1646 to Henry Ireton, Lord Deputy of Ireland, and in 1652 (after Ireton’s death) to Charles Fleetwood, lieutenant general and later Lord Deputy of Ireland. The latter, highly susceptible to pious rhetoric and overestimating his own influence over junior officers, played an equivocal role in the downfall of the Protectorate. Bridget herself had a reputation for piety, so that Lucy Hutchinson, though criticizing Oliver’s wife and children as “setting up for principality, which suited no better with any of them than scarlet on the ape,” exempted Bridget: “His daughter Fleetwood was humbled, and not exalted with these things, but the rest were insolent fools.” Laura L. Knoppers

Cromwell, Henry (1628 –1674). Fourth (and second eldest surviving) son of Oliver Cromwell. He was more gifted politically and had considerably more military acumen and experience than his elder brother Richard Cromwell. Henry fought under his father in Ireland and remained there as commander in chief (appointed 1654). He was de facto ruler of Ireland after Charles Fleetwood, Lord Deputy and Henry’s brother-in-law, left for England in 1655, although not formally named Lord Deputy until 1657. Henry continued the policies of transplantation and oppression of native Irish and Catholics. Having resigned with the fall of Richard’s Protectorate, Henry was allowed to retire peaceably to his lands in Cambridgeshire and faded into obscurity. See ODNB.

Laura L. Knoppers

Cromwell, Oliver (1599 –1658). Military general, regicide, and nonmonarchical head of state. He was highly controversial in his own time and beyond; Milton’s attitude toward Cromwell, in whose government he served as Secretary for Foreign Tongues, has also been the subject of debate. Cromwell was born in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, and was educated at Huntingdon Grammar School and (briefly) at Sidney Sussex Col-

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lege, Cambridge. He married Elizabeth Bourchier, daughter of a wealthy London merchant, in 1620, and the couple had nine children. A country squire of relatively humble circumstances, Cromwell for a time slipped below the gentry into the status of yeoman farmer before inheriting a maternal uncle’s land in Ely. A religious conversion experience in his thirties gave Cromwell an intense piety that marked his private relations and future public role. He was a member of the 1629 Parliament that produced the Petition of Right. Elected to represent Cambridge in the Short Parliament and the Long Parliament, he was an early and outspoken opponent of King Charles I. In August 1642 Cromwell raised a cavalry troop in his native Huntingdon. Despite his lack of training or experience, he was an effective leader of highly disciplined troops and he rose quickly to become lieutenant general of the Eastern Association under the Earl of Manchester. After the important parliamentary victory at the Battle of Marston Moor, Cromwell conflicted with his superiors in advocating a more aggressive prosecution of the war against the king. The quarrel was taken to Parliament, which eventually passed a Self-Denying Ordinance that removed Manchester, and all members of Parliament, from their military posts. After Sir Thomas Fairfax had been appointed general of the New Model Army, Cromwell was given an exemption and took the position of lieutenant general. He played a major role in the victory of the Battle of Naseby and, with Fairfax, oversaw the surrender of Oxford in June 1646. In the aftermath of the First Civil War, Cromwell strove to unify the army and Parliament and to bring both into a settlement with the king. When eventually forced to choose, however, Cromwell sided with the army, backing Cornet Joyce’s seizure of the king from Parliament in June 1647 and supporting the army’s “Heads of the Proposals,” the terms offered to the king in August 1647. Cromwell played a major role in the Putney Debates during October–November 1647. But the king’s fleeing to the Scots and signing an engagement with them led to the Second Civil War and brought the army to believe that the king was a man of blood responsible for the renewed bloodshed in the nation. Cromwell supported Pride’s Purge and helped to push through the execution of Charles I in January 1649. By now a central political and military figure, Cromwell in early spring 1649 strove to broaden the base of government, and he acted decisively against radical Leveller elements in the army (see Levellers). He brutally suppressed the Irish Rebellion and then invaded Scotland, which had recognized

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Cromwell, Oliver

Charles II as king. Cromwell’s victory over royalist and Scottish forces under Charles II at Worcester brought an end to the civil wars and stability to the new English republic. Cromwell then worked with Parliament to bring about reform, but in April 1653, denouncing their self-seeking, he dissolved Parliament by force and joined in the millenarian hopes that greeted the nominated Barebone’s Parliament of July 1653. Nonetheless, Cromwell differed with this new Parliament over the handling of the Anglo-Dutch Wars and over the most radical changes to law, tithes, and property, and he colluded in its resignation fewer than six months later. On 16 December 1653 Cromwell took on power as Lord Protector under the Instrument of Government, a constitution written by a military junta but nonetheless with checks and balances in legislative and judicial power. With a powerful army and navy at his disposal, Cromwell made England an international power, ending the war with the Protestant Dutch; allying with Jules Mazarin’s France and intervening diplomatically on behalf of the persecuted Vaudois Protestants; capturing Jamaica and destroying two Spanish treasure fleets; and increasing both diplomacy and activity in the Mediterranean and the Baltic. Nonetheless, Cromwell struggled domestically in his quest for both settlement and reform. Having conflicted with and abruptly dissolved the first Protectoral Parliament (1654 –1655), he met royalist threats in 1655 by a brief period of more direct military rule under the major generals. The second Protectoral Parliament (1656 –1658) put forward a new constitution, the Humble Petition and Advice, which Cromwell eventually accepted, although he rejected the offer of the crown, avowing, “I would not seek to set up that that providence hath destroyed and laid in the dust, and I would not build Jerusalem again.” Cromwell died in September 1658, and his son Richard Cromwell peacefully succeeded. But army discontents brought about the fall of the Protectorate in less than a year, and the inability of the army and the restored Purged Parliament to work together led to the fall of the republic and the return of the king in May 1660. While reiterating a view of himself as an instrument dependent on divine providence, Cromwell in his lifetime was the subject of praise, advice, criticism, and ridicule and was represented in portrait, engraving, ceremony, Latin verse, newsbook, pamphlet, sermon, prose, and poetry. From the mid-1640s Cromwell was praised in parliamentary newsbooks and attacked in popular print as a Machiavel, iconoclast, devil, and big-nosed brewer.

Such attacks grew even more vociferous at the time of the regicide, but the new republic incorporated Cromwell as a heroic figure. The first and especially second Protectorates reintroduced some elements of regality and formal ceremony, but Cromwell himself remained self-effacing, paradoxically giving more control to both satirists and king-makers to shape his public image. Milton mentions Cromwell positively in Observations upon the Articles of Peace, and there is little evidence that Milton— or many of his contemporaries— disapproved of the now-infamous massacres of civilians at Drogheda and Wexford. Indeed, all evidence indicates that Milton sympathized with Cromwell’s broadly Protestant foreign policy for which, as Latin secretary, he wrote or translated diplomatic correspondence. Milton also specifically praised, and gave direct advice to, Cromwell at two crucial points. In May 1652 Milton wrote a sonnet, “To the Lord General Cromwell,” that lauds Cromwell’s military victories over the Scots at Preston, Dunbar, and Worcester and urges him to fight on in the even more difficult wars of peace, preserving free conscience “from the paw / Of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw” (13 –14). Milton’s panegyric on Cromwell in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda, written six months after the inception of the Protectorate, sounds similar praise— on similar conditions. Milton stresses Cromwell’s piety as a military commander and a civil leader, but he also cautions that this piety will be tested in peace even more than in war. After Defensio Secunda, however, Milton did not mention Cromwell again by name in his own prose writings. Given the differences between the two men, the disillusionment of prominent republicans and sectarians with the later Protectorate, and the failure of Cromwell to fulfill the conditions underlying Milton’s earlier praise (for example, the separation of church and state), scholars have debated whether Milton, too, was disappointed in or even harshly repudiated the Lord Protector. See Knoppers (2000), ODNB.

Laura L. Knoppers

“Cromwell, our chief of men.” See “To the Lord General Cromwell.”

Cromwell, Richard (1626 –1712). Third and eldest surviving son of Oliver Cromwell. He was an amiable country squire but assumed the office of

Cyprian [Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus]

Lord Protector upon Oliver’s death in September 1658, thus establishing what is sometimes termed “the second Protectorate.” Milton continued to serve in its administration. The shift toward more conservative civilian rule and away from sectarianism and the sword was welcomed by the country as a whole but displeased the Army Grandees, who thereby lost influence in the Privy Council. Propelled by a barrage of propaganda for the Good Old Cause, soldiers, sectarians, and Commonwealthsmen stirred up trouble inside and outside the Parliament called by Richard for January 1659, not ceasing until Richard was forced by the Army Grandees to dissolve Parliament, and they in turn were pushed by their junior officers into recalling the Purged Parliament, bringing the Protectorate to an end. Richard fled to France, where he lived peaceably for twenty years under the name of John Clarke before returning to England in 1680. See ODNB.

Laura L. Knoppers

Cudworth, Ralph (1617–1688). English philosopher, one of the leading Cambridge Platonists. He was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, where he became a fellow in 1639. In 1645 he became master of Clare Hall, after the expulsion of his predecessor by parliamentary visitors. The same year he was elected regius professor of Hebrew, a position he held until his death. Cudworth’s major works were the ambitiously titled The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) and the

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posthumous A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (1731). Like Milton, he defended free will and opposed the materialist determinism of Thomas Hobbes, who is the unnamed but unmistakable target of The True Intellectual System, a historical survey and refutation of atheism and an argument for the monotheistic underpinnings of ancient paganism. Although his spirit-body dualism clashes with Milton’s materialist monism, he agrees with Milton that even apparently inanimate entities are infused with spirit. See ODNB.

Stephen M. Fallon

Cyprian [Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus] (d. 258). Bishop of Carthage (in modern-day Tunisia). He was a church leader in a time of considerable persecution and died a martyr’s death. His writings consist mainly of short treatises and epistles and were edited and available in the early modern period. Milton drew frequently on him in his Commonplace Book. Cyprian’s writings throw some light on the early church in the postapostolic period, but they proved contentious within the debate about church government in the early 1640s. Milton cites him in his antiprelatical tracts as providing evidence that the early episcopacy was elective and that primitive bishops recognized the need for the consent of their fellow church members. See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

D Dagon. A sea deity of the Philistines. Half-man, half-fish, his monstrous hybrid form is made further grotesque in 1 Samuel 5:5, which describes the destruction of Dagon’s image. Having placed the captured ark of the covenant within Dagon’s temple, the Philistines twice find their idol fallen, the second time with his head and hands severed from his body. Milton thus depicts him in “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” as “twice battered god of Palestine” (199) and in Paradise Lost as “Maimed . . . head and hands lopped off ” (1.459). He is the “sea-idol” (Samson Agonistes 13) to whom Samson is to be sacrificed and might rightly be termed “thrice-battered” since Samson, too, pulls down a building housing the deity. Though Milton pictures Dagon as “upward man / And downward fish” (PL 1.462 – 63), others have seen in Dagon a connection to a Phoenician word for grain, dagan, and thus connected him with various fertility idols. Eric C. Brown

Dalila. Character in Milton’s Samson Agonistes based on the biblical character Delilah who betrays the Israelite judge Samson. In the biblical account Delilah is identified as a “woman of the valley of Sorek” ( Judg. 16:4) and is not necessarily a Philistine or a prostitute. Unlike the biblical character, Milton’s Dalila is given the opportunity to defend her actions that lead to the blinding and enslavement of her lover. Samson Agonistes presumes that readers know details of the biblical account (for example, Samson’s Nazirite status, his miraculous strength, the hair cut, the gouged-out eyes). Interpretations of Dalila must presume the extent to which Samson Agonistes either distinguishes her character from the biblical Delilah or requires that readers supply their knowledge of the biblical character in order to complete the dramatic characterization. 86

The exchange between Samson and Dalila is the central and longest episode of the five that make up the drama. The most important detail that Milton adds to the biblical account is to make Dalila Samson’s estranged wife, a point on which the biblical account is silent but for which there is Talmudic precedent ( Joseph Wittreich, 2002). In adding this element Milton intensifies the subjective and objective nature of Dalila’s betrayal, affording treatment of the relationship among matrimony, civil authority, and religious authority (lines 844 –902, 971–96). Dalila’s explicit aim in Samson Agonistes is to persuade Samson to live with her. During the exchange, their rhetorical modes shift from deliberative to forensic epideictic discourse. Ultimately, Dalila describes her actions toward Samson in the same terms of civic and religious duty that could be used to defend the justice of Samson’s violent actions toward the Philistines. She thus aims to relativize their respective political and religious claims. Whether Samson Agonistes implies such a relativization is a different question, the answer to which depends on whether one finds Dalila’s claims intrinsically persuasive—thus placing the reader in a situation analogous to Samson’s. Phillip J. Donnelly

dance. One of the principal means of self-display at court during the Renaissance and a route of promotion to royal favorite status under both Elizabeth I (for example, Christopher Hatton) and James I (for example, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham). Courtly dance in Milton’s time was undergoing a transition from Renaissance to baroque styles, and popular or “country” dances were beginning to be codified and taken up by the elite. By the end of the seventeenth century, “contradances,” performed by columns of couples facing each other, would be a regular part of the gentry dancer’s repertoire, as the galliard and branle had been in 1600.

Dati, Carlo Roberto

Dance was controversial in Milton’s time. Critics of court licentiousness under James I and Charles I associated it with moral laxity, and reformist preachers inveighed against traditional dancing in popular culture as the work of the devil. William Prynne, not surprisingly, was particularly strenuous, calling dance “the Devil’s Mass.” Milton’s attitude seems inclined to be severe. Celestial bodies are allowed to dance innocently, in mathematical and mystical praise of God, as are the angels around God’s throne in Paradise Lost book 5. The trees also rise from the ground in Eden (PL 7) “as in a Dance.” But dancing humans or humanoids — like the fairies that end Paradise Lost book 1—Milton finds in general suspect. In particular, dance is regularly associated with idolatrous worship and sexual license, from the ode “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” through Samson Agonistes. See New Grove.

Tom Bishop

Daniel. Book of the Old Testament. It tells the story and prophecies of Daniel, a young Jew removed to King Nebuchadnezzar’s court after the fall of Jerusalem. References to Daniel (both the book and the prophet) occur throughout Milton’s work, including the major poetry and prose. Of particular interest to Milton was the story of Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams and Daniel’s subsequently vatic interpretations. In both Animadversions and Paradise Regained (4.145 –53), for example, Milton relies on Daniel 2:24 – 48. Todd Butler

Daniel, Samuel (1562 –1619). English poet and historian. He was a versatile poet most associated with the late Elizabethan and early Stuart courts. Like Milton, he wrote, among other things, sonnets, closet dramas, and masques and was much absorbed with England’s cultural past and the formation of English nationalism. Daniel published the eloquent Defense of Ryme (1603) and, like Milton, a History of Britain (1612; expanded in 1618). His historical epic The Civil Wars (1595; expanded and revised in 1609) recounts the history of the English Wars of the Roses (where his History of Britain had left off ) in the manner of Lucan’s anti-Virgilian epic De Bello Civili. In it, Daniel presents the War of the Roses as a felix culpa—it produced a “happie gaine [that is, Elizabeth’s reign] / for all our losse”

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(cf. PL 12.469 –78)—and critics have noted several echoes in Paradise Lost. Gregory Kneidel

Dante (Dante Alighieri) (1265 –1321). Poet. Born in Florence, he was politically active in the deeply polarized politics of that city, from which he was finally banished in 1309, and to which he never returned. During his long exile he completed his Divina commedia [The Divine Comedy]. His influence on Milton is subtle and perhaps pervasive, though he is rarely named in Milton’s printed works. The scale, scope, and ambition of the Divina commedia set an awesome precedent for Paradise Lost. His shorter poems, collected as Canzoniere, seem an influence on Milton’s own early Italian poems (see “Sonnet II” through “Sonnet VI” and “Canzone”). The incident of love at first sight rehearsed in “Elegia Sexta” has parallels in Dante’s description of his encounter with Beatrice in Vita nuova [New Life]. Indeed, Milton draws an analogy between Henry Lawes, who had set the songs of A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, and “his Casella,” who meets Dante in the Purgatorio and whom Dante asks to sing one of his settings of his canzoni, which implies that Milton in some sense regarded Dante as a significant model and precursor (see “Sonnet XIII”). Milton was reading Dante with attention in the late 1630s, making several notes in his Commonplace Book, mainly from the Divina commedia. In Of Reformation he quotes from Dante in his own translation a passage deploring the accession of riches into the Christian church on the conversion of the emperor Constantine. During his Italian sojourn in 1638 –1639 Milton interested himself in the continuing controversy over what form of Italian should be adopted as the agreed language of literary discourse, siding with the view that the Tuscan of Dante’s age was the preferred option. Thomas N. Corns

Dati, Carlo Roberto (1619 –1676). Scholar. Milton listed him among his Italian friends in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda. The acquaintance had been formed at the academy of the Apatisti during Milton’s sojourn in Italy in 1638 – 1639. Dati was the literary prodigy of Florence and was only eighteen years old when Milton met him, yet his eloquence and scientific and historical knowledge were already widely acknowledged. He was soon to establish a European reputation

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and is now valued as the first art historian to attempt a documentary history of painting in classical antiquity. Dati’s most enduring book, Vite dei pittori antichi [Lives of the Ancient Painters], was published in 1667. He lavished praise on Milton in a Latin letter he wrote while Milton was still in Florence; Milton saved the letter and printed it in the testimonia that preface the Latin section of the Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645). He was the only member of the Apatisti with whom Milton is known to have remained in contact. A letter he wrote to Dati dated 20 April 1647 is held by the New York Public Library, though it is too frail for inspection. Two letters from Dati to Milton are also extant. Dati is mentioned (along with Antonio Francini) in Milton’s “Epitaphium Damonis” (line 137). Thomas N. Corns

Davenant [D’Avenant], Sir William (1606 – 1668). English poet and dramatist. Born in Oxford, he was later rumored to have been William Shakespeare’s illegitimate child, a rumor he may have encouraged. He entered Lincoln College, Oxford University, in 1621 but left before taking a degree and entered court service as a page, first to the Duchess of Richmond and later to Fulke Greville, until the latter’s murder in 1628. He then became a dramatist, his first play, Albovine, appearing in 1629. Further successful plays in the principal contemporary genres followed, and in 1635, with the queen’s masque The Temple of Love, Davenant, now “her Majesty’s servant,” became the regular furnisher of verses for Inigo Jones’s court masques, a role he sustained until the final masque, Salmacida Spolia, in 1640. On the death of Ben Jonson in 1637, Davenant was appointed poet laureate, ahead of Thomas May. During the English civil wars Davenant escaped to France, became a Catholic, and undertook several liaison missions between the queen in France and Charles I, attempting on one of them to persuade Charles to convert to Catholicism, only to receive a severe rebuke. In 1650 he was captured in the English Channel leading a colonizing party from France to Maryland as lieutenant governor. He was imprisoned, awaiting trial for high treason, but then released, possibly on the intervention of Milton. During this period, he wrote and published his unfinished epic poem Gondibert, a long stanzaic work on a chivalric subject. According to various early accounts, Milton’s life may have been spared at the Restoration through the influence

of Davenant in reciprocation of Milton’s earlier intervention. See ODNB.

Tom Bishop

David (fl. tenth century B.C.). Second king of Israel. Milton’s allusions to him fall into two principal groups. First, in the early modern period, it was widely held that David was the principal or sole author of the book of Psalms, several of which Milton translated into English verse (and one into Greek). Charles I, or whoever wrote Eikon Basilike, included in each chapter a prayer that drew heavily on the imagery of the Psalms, as part of a careful intertwining of the royal history of David and Charles’s own. Thus, with considerable polemical ingenuity, parallels are suggested to the reader. Milton in Eikonoklastes recognizes and challenges the maneuver, denouncing the late king as “transported with the vain ostentation of imitating Davids language, not his life.” The second cluster of allusions appears almost entirely in Paradise Regained. The prophetic books of the Old Testament promise a messiah who will take up the role of David in liberating Israel. In the brief epic, both the Son and Satan show some uncertainty about how such prophecies relate to the former’s humble origins and pacific worldview. Thomas N. Corns

Davis, Dr. and Miss. London acquaintances of Milton during the early 1640s. In his early biography of his uncle, Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips recorded that, during the extended absence of Milton’s first wife, Mary Powell, Milton had considered an alternative partnership, “a design of Marrying one of Dr. Davis’s Daughters.” Phillips attributes Mary’s decision to return to John to news of this development. See Darbishire (1932).

Thomas N. Corns

death. Death haunted Milton’s life even as it blessed his literary production; the deaths of acquaintances, friends, and family members provide a perpetual if painful spur to his muse. This output includes not only various elegies and occasional poems, but also two of the most accomplished poems of mourning in the English language, the pastoral elegy “Lycidas” and “Sonnet XIX” (“Methought I saw my late espoused saint”).

Declaration of Breda

Paradise Lost famously proclaims in its opening lines the entry of death into the world at “man’s first disobedience.” In the epic, Milton allows death to assume three distinct but overlapping forms: an allegorical character, a physiological phenomenon of corrupt flesh, and a threshold to heaven. The love child of Satan and Sin, the allegorical figure of Death shows Milton at his most Spenserian, depicting an omnivorous creature distinguished by its complete lack of physical distinction: “If shape it might be called that shape had none” (PL 2.667). In the vision of the future that Michael grants the fallen Adam, though, death assumes a gruesome array of physiological manifestations. Adam is forced to watch Cain kill Abel and asks, “But have I now seen death?” Michael responds by telling Adam that there are “many shapes / Of death” and then produces the nightmarish vision of death in all its horrible incarnations (11.462, 467– 68). But because of the Son’s willingness to endure a “cursèd death,” “temporal death” will be for the blessed “like sleep, / A gentle wafting to immortal life” (12.406, 433 –35). In Paradise Lost, then, and throughout his oeuvre, Milton endeavors to transform death from a ferocious predator to a gracious portal to eternity. Michael Schoenfeldt

Deborah. The biblical Rebecca’s nurse (Gen. 24 and 35), who is buried under an oak when Jacob builds an altar at Bethel. She is listed as a character under the heading “Dinah” in Milton’s manuscript outlines for biblical tragedies. A judge of Israel ( Judg. 4 –5), Deborah is also a prophet and a wife. She tells Barak to lead an army against the Canaanite general Sisera, promising victory and Sisera’s death at the hand of a woman. Barak stipulates Deborah’s presence. Barak triumphs; Jael subsequently kills Sisera; Deborah and Barak sing their victory in Judges chapter 5. In Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Milton compares those who curse a king to Deborah cursing Meroz. In De Doctrina Christiana Milton declares a prophet to be a teacher “endowed with extraordinary piety and wisdom,” listing Abraham, Miriam, and Deborah. Julia M. Walker

de Bry, Theodor (1528 –1598). Flemish publisher and engraver. He worked mainly in Frankfurt-amMain, but while in London (1586 –1589) he met Thomas Harriot (the scientific reporter) and John White (the artist), who had accompanied Walter Ralegh’s Roanoke expedition. On White’s water-

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color drawings de Bry based his engravings for Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, the first of the four volumes of de Bry’s Americae, which are often sympathetic to the native inhabitants. On “Their sitting at meate” (illus. XVI) Harriot remarks “they are verye sober in their eatinge, and trinkinge, and consequentlye verye verye longe liued because they doe not oppress nature”— compare from Paradise Lost “when with meats and drinks they had sufficed, / Not burdened nature” (5.451–52). The “feathered cincture” in which “Columbus found the American . . . girt” (PL 9.1116) could have been suggested by the title page of de Bry’s Americae or plate XXIIII of volume 4, but the feathers are ceremonial and too short to cover those “middle parts” (PL 9.1097) of which fallen Adam and Eve (who use leaves, not feathers) feel ashamed. Diane Kelsey McColley

Declaration, or Letters Patents. Milton, work of prose; full title, A Declaration, or Letters Patents of the Elections of This Present King of Poland John the Third, Elected on the 22d of May Last Past, Anno Dom. 1674. Probably published in July 1674, it was his final prose work. It was published by Brabazon Aylmer, who also published Milton’s Epistolarum Familiarum Liber Unus and Brief History of Moscovia. A Declaration, a translation from the Latin Diploma Electionis S. R. M. Poloniae promulgated in Poland in the same year, concerns the election of King John [ Jan] III Sobieski. Like Of True Religion, it marks a return to purposeful political activity on Milton’s part as he engages tactically with the developing crisis of the regime of Charles II. The document presents an account of a monarchical constitution in operation, showing that kingship can be organized on more than one model and that there are other options besides the principle of heredity, the basis on which the Catholic James, Duke of York (later James II), the target of oppositional agitation, was heir apparent (the Polish king was elected from among a ruling caste). Thomas N. Corns

Declaration of Breda. A statement of royal intent composed by Edward Hyde and signed by Charles II on 4 April 1660 (old style) at Breda in Holland. During the crucial period between the dissolution of the Long Parliament on 16 March and the meeting of the Convention Parliament on 25 April, the declaration, with accompanying letters, was sent to George Monck, then the dominant

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political and military figure in England. It was read in the Convention Parliament on 1 May, and, amid general acclamation, the vote to restore monarchy was unanimously carried. See Keeble (2002).

N. H. Keeble

Declaration of Indulgence. Proclamation issued on 15 May 1672 by Charles II, exercising what he took to be his “supreme power” in ecclesiastical affairs, that suspended the penal legislation of the Clarendon Code and granted to Protestant dissenters from the established episcopal Church of England liberty to worship publicly in “allowed” places under “approved” ministers, and to Roman Catholic recusants liberty to worship privately. The Cavalier Parliament, opposed both to the toleration of Roman Catholics and to the exercise of the royal prerogative to override statute law, compelled Charles to withdraw the declaration in March 1673. By then passing the Test Act, it left no doubt that it found popery intolerable; so, too, did Milton, prompted by this episode to discuss toleration and its limits in Of True Religion. N. H. Keeble

decorum. The doctrine of literary propriety (Latin, “that which is fitting”). It derives chiefly from Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric and Horace’s Ars Poetica and entered the early modern period through such works as Antonio Minturno’s L’Arte Poetica (1563) and George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589). By Milton’s time it held a central place in literary theory, applied to genre, speaker, audience, and subject matter. Milton expressed views on decorum in his prose writings. In particular, Of Education (1644) urges understanding “the fitted stile of lofty, mean, or lowly” and “what the laws are of a true Epic poem, what of a Dramatic, what of a Lyric, what decorum is, which is the grand master peece to observe.” Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (1651) includes the more precise observation that “we should consider not so much what the poet says, as who in the poem says it. Various figures appear, some good, some bad, some wise, some foolish, each speaking not the poet’s opinions but what is appropriate for each person.” Beverley Sherry

De Doctrina Christiana. Milton’s Latin treatise containing his systematic theology. The canonic-

ity of this work has sometimes been questioned and occasioned a spirited controversy in the recent past. However, an interdisciplinary study, drawing on stylometrics, codicology, and a careful study of its Latinity, has demonstrated that it belongs in the Milton oeuvre, although, as was customary in this genre, he has borrowed substantially from other Protestant theological writers, in particular Johan Wolleb and William Ames. Although Milton shares much common ground with other Protestant thinkers, he develops heterodoxy views on divorce (see divorce tracts), polygamy, the fate of the soul at death (see mortalism), and the three persons of the Trinity and their relationship (see God). He worked on the manuscript using the services of Jeremie Picard as his principal amanuensis, and he probably at least suspended its composition at the time of the Restoration. The text was still a working manuscript unfit for the press at the time of his death. Daniel Skinner tidied it up and attempted to have it printed in the United Provinces along with Milton’s Letters of State, but Sir Joseph Williamson, a senior civil servant, tracked it down and required that Skinner surrender it to him. Both manuscripts were confiscated and only rediscovered in 1823 (see Robert Lemon), and what we know now as De Doctrina Christiana was prepared for the press by Charles Sumner. Its appearance in 1825 stimulated critical debate because the treatise explicitly establishes powerfully heterodox positions on major issues of doctrine whereas Paradise Lost had seemed to early-nineteenth-century readers to be a classic expression of orthodox English Protestantism. See Campbell et al. (2007).

Thomas N. Corns

Dee. See River Dee. Defoe, Daniel (?1660 –1731). Pamphleteer and novelist. Born into a dissenting family in London, he was greatly influenced by Samuel Annesley, the ejected vicar of St. Giles Without Cripplegate, and by Charles Morton, master of the dissenting academy at Newington Green, where Defoe was educated. By the 1690s he was becoming known as a pamphleteer, poet, journalist, satirist, and controversialist of Whig and nonconformist sympathies, evident in his opposition to compromise with the Church of England in An Enquiry into the Occasional Conformity of Dissenters (1698), in his support for the government of William and Mary in

Denham, Sir John

The True-Born Englishman (1701), in his defense of nonconformists in The Shortest Way with Dissenters (1702), and in his high regard for Scottish Covenanters and Presbyterianism in Memoirs of the Church of Scotland (1715). These emphases are still evident in the fictions that at the end of his career developed out of Defoe’s journalism. Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722), and Roxana (1724) present themselves as morally edifying autobiographies in the Puritan tradition. Milton is a recurring presence in Defoe’s writings. Defoe frequently quotes, and refers admiringly to, Paradise Lost in his periodical The Review (1704 –1713). In his verse The Reformation of Manners (1702) he prefers Milton’s sublimity to John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester’s lewdness (lines 1060 – 63). In Conjugal Lewdness; or Matrimonial Whoredom (1727) he takes issue with Milton’s liberal view of divorce. He draws upon Paradise Lost to structure his ironic depiction of England as a Satanic realm in The True-Born Englishman, and in The Political History of the Devil (1726) he engages in a sustained discussion of Paradise Lost, of which he was a sufficiently acute reader to discern its Arianism. See OCEL, ODNB.

N. H. Keeble

“De Idea Platonica.” Poem by Milton; full title, “De Idea Platonica Quemadmodum Aristoteles Intellexit” [On Plato’s Archetype, as Aristotle Understood It]. It has some relation to the “act verses” that constituted part of the examination process in the Examination Schools of Cambridge University and that summarized the argument expounded by candidates. It is sometimes described as a college examination exercise, though much about its status and original purpose remains elusive. See Hale (2005), Milton (1998b).

John K. Hale

Dell, William (c. 1607–1669). Independent divine and prolific controversialist. He took his M.A. at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, in 1631. From his days as a chaplain in the New Model Army Dell sought the storm of dispute, advocating congregational church polity beyond civil authority with few or no forms, sustained by the Spirit’s life in the members, with no place for tithes or a paid clergy. He argued for baptism by the Spirit rather than by water, and from his posi-

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tion as intruded master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, he preached against university learning for ministers. His ideas, often similar to Milton’s, were profoundly disturbing to the Presbyterians and bishops. In 1662 he was ejected from his living at Yelden, Bedfordshire. See BDBR, ODNB.

Norman T. Burns

Demosthenes (384 –322 B.C.). Athenian orator. He was most famous for his four Philippics and his masterpiece On the Crown. In the former he agitated unsuccessfully for pan-Hellenic opposition to the encroaching Philip II of Macedon, and in the latter he successfully defended the integrity of his constant political scheming. Paralleled with Cicero in Plutarch’s Lives, he was regarded by Milton as a champion of political liberty. His style was praised in both antiquity and the Renaissance for its simplicity and power, often in contrast with the polish and frivolity of Cicero’s. Hermogenes’ On Ideas (recommended by Milton in Apology Against a Pamphlet and Of Education) is essentially a sensitive analysis of Demosthenes’s style. Gregory Kneidel

Denham, Sir John (1615 –1669). Royalist poet. As a young man he squandered his wealth gambling. He gained fame with his topographical poem Cooper’s Hill and his play The Sophy, both published in 1642. He collaborated with Abraham Cowley as a royalist cryptographer but nonetheless made friends with Hugh Peters and was known to Samuel Hartlib, who in 1653 described him as “A mighty Ingenious man for all manner of Water Works and other Ingenuities. Hee is also about a common or double writing.” He helped the future James II escape to Holland and collected money for Charles I in Poland. At the Restoration he was rewarded with the position of surveyor general of the King’s Works; Christopher Wren was his deputy. Jonathan Richardson the elder first recorded the anecdote of Denham walking into Parliament in 1667 “with a sheet, wet from the press” of Paradise Lost. Denham provides a rare glimpse of Milton’s appropriations of contemporary poetry in Paradise Lost. Cooper’s Hill had described the luxurious countryside of Windsor, “Where no stupendious Cliffe, no threatening heights / Accesse deny”; in contrast, Milton’s paradise, lost and unavailable, “With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild, / Access

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denied” (PL 4.136 –37, italics added). Milton shears Denham’s phrase “Accesse deny” of its negative. In Denham’s nature there are no steeps and no threats; in Milton’s the steepness is the point: unlike Windsor, it is hard to get into Eden. See ODNB.

William Poole

Dennis, John (1657–1734). Poet, playwright, and critic. In the preface to his ode on the death of Queen Mary, “The Court of Death” (1695), he acknowledged that he admired Milton and “resolv’d to imitate him as far as it could be done without receeding from Pindar’s manner,” but it is in a series of major critical treatises that Dennis’s real importance in relation to Milton lies. Along with Joseph Addison and, as he declares in his letters, even before Addison, Dennis provided rational grounds for admiration, measuring Milton against classical writers, judiciously balancing faults and beauties. His earliest piece of criticism, the preface to a translation from Ovid, sets the tone of much of his later commentary in praise of Milton, “Who without the assistance of Rhime, is one of the most sublime of our English Poets.” Sublimity is at the center of his literary values. In extensive Remarks on . . . Prince Arthur (1696), the initially popular epic by Sir Richard Blackmore, he can acknowledge that Blackmore’s claim to follow Virgil is justified but condemns the work as “servile Imitation.” In The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry. A Critical Discourse (1701) and in The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704) he supports the cause of sacred poetry and champions Milton’s energy and originality. Kay Gilliland Stevenson

de Salluste, Guillaume, Seigneur Du Bartas (1544 –1590). Poet, soldier, and diplomat. Born in Gascony, he was praised for the erudition and piety of his verses. His first published volume, La Muse Chrétienne (1574), consists of three poems: an epic about Judith and Holofernes; a dream vision of the triumphal procession of Faith and her handmaidens; and “L’Uranie,” a poem articulating a Christian aesthetic. In the last, the protagonist is educated by Urania, the muse of astronomy turned muse of divine poetry, about the divine origin and end of poetry. This aesthetic governed Du Bartas’s poetry and is one of the compelling reasons for his popularity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Based on the first two books of Genesis and its

patristic commentaries, Du Bartas’s encyclopedic and hexameral La Semaine; ou, création du monde (1578) is epic in its scope, relating in its seven parts or days the creation of the world. Its sequel, La Seconde Semaine, was to cover the time from the Fall to the Last Judgment but remained incomplete at the time of Du Bartas’s death. Numerous editions of La Semaine (often accompanied by the detailed commentary by the Huguenot scholar Simon Goulart) followed the first publication. Critics have deemed his work— either in the original or through English translations, most notably that of Josuah Sylvester—an influence on the style and/or subject matter of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Michael Drayton, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Alexander Pope, Abraham Cowley, and John Dryden. With his muse Urania, his biblically based subject matter, his epic scope, and his hexameral material, Du Bartas is seen as an influence on Milton, especially Paradise Lost. Frances M. Malpezzi

Descartes, René [Cartesius, Renatus] (1595 – 1650). French philosopher and mathematician. One of the leading intellectual figures of Milton’s time, his articulation of mind-body dualism was immensely influential. Descartes also made important discoveries in geometry and optics. He shared the seventeenth-century enthusiasm for method and for mathematics as the foundation of philosophy. Descartes’s Discourse on the Method (1637) and Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), published during his twenty-one years in Holland, achieved immediate and lasting fame. Thomas Hobbes among others composed objections to the Meditations, which were published along with Descartes’s replies. Descartes attempted to reinvent philosophy, building on what can be known clearly and distinctly. The famous cogito (“I think, therefore I am”) provides a fulcrum point; one can doubt the validity of any sense perception or conception, but one cannot doubt the existence of oneself thinking. The extended substance perceived by the thinking subject must exist, Descartes added, because otherwise God would be a deceiver. The Cambridge Platonists used Descartes’s incorporeal substance as a bulwark for theism against the atheistic implications of mechanist materialism, but the mechanism of Descartes’s physical science and, in Passions of the Soul (1649), of much of his psychology led them to consider Descartes a mechanist wolf in sheep’s clothing. There is no evidence that Milton read Descartes’s writings, but he must at least have known of

Digression

them. When Satan, lamenting the deterioration of his body, declares that “The mind is its own place” (PL 1.254), Milton may glance at Descartes’s Discourse IV: “I knew I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is simply to think, and which does not require any place.” If so, Milton, for whom body and soul are inseparable, discredits Cartesian dualism by giving it an infernal provenance. Descartes ended his life at the court of Milton’s admired Queen Christina of Sweden. See Fallon (1991).

Stephen M. Fallon

Deuteronomy. Book of the Old Testament, the “fifth book of Moses.” It provides a retrospective look at the history of the Israelites, with a review and amplification of the laws they should observe to preserve their special relationship with the Lord. Set on the plains of Moab in the fortieth year after the Exodus, it is structured as a series of exhortations by Moses, addressing the children of Israel before their entry into the land promised long before to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Given that Jesus quotes Deuteronomy three times within the brief gospel accounts of the temptation in the wilderness, the book has a significant place in Paradise Regained. Of special importance to Milton’s prose are Deuteronomy 17:14 –20, the only passage on kingship in the Mosaic books, and Deuteronomy 24:1–2, one of the “foure chief places in Scripture, which treat of Mariage, or nullities in Mariage,” discussed in Tetrachordon and other divorce pamphlets. Kay Gilliland Stevenson

devils. Milton’s devils are fallen angels. According to De Doctrina Christiana, “a great many of [the good angels] revolted from God of their own free will before the fall of man.” Fallen angels wander heaven, hell, and earth to “carry out God’s judgments,” but “their proper place is hell.” Satan, “the author of all wickedness,” rules over the devils, who retain their hierarchical, angelic ranks. On these points, the treatise parallels Paradise Lost. The devils carry out Milton’s judgments as well as God’s. By presenting the stories of pagan gods as garbled and belated versions of the careers of fallen angels, Milton establishes the temporal and moral priority of the Judeo-Christian myth. In the tradition dominant since Thomas Aquinas angels and devils are incorporeal, but Milton’s devils, in accordance with his animist materialism

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and like Neoplatonist daemons, are corporeal. They become more so as they descend into evil. One’s position on the unbroken spectrum linking refined spirit and gross corporeality marks one’s moral worth. In the War in Heaven, the devils’ vulnerability to pain and injury measures their moral and ontological decline. Stephen M. Fallon

Digression. Milton, work of prose. In this passage of approximately twenty-five hundred words from The History of Britain, Milton compares the troubles suffered by the fifth-century Britons to the misfortunes of the English in the 1640s. The headnote in the manuscript Digression specifies where the passage fits in the first edition of the History (1670, p. 110, after “from one misery to another”). Here the context is Milton’s bitter account of how the Britons mismanaged the freedom given them by the Romans’ departure, which confusions he compares to England’s “late civil broils.” The History gains urgency on this point because “the gaining or loosing of libertie is the greatest change to better or to worse that may befall a nation under civil goverment.” With the sixth-century Gildas’s jeremiad against the ancient Britons as its text, the Digression insistently compares “that confused Anarchy with this intereign,” “those” ancient Britons with “these” Milton’s contemporaries, in order to draw the “parallel betweene their state and ours in the late commotions.” It first decries the corruption of public institutions by private interest, with special contempt for the self-perpetuating Parliament that refused to allow itself to be brought to account in fresh elections. It then turns to impugning the unreforming reformers of the church, and the Presbyterians of the Westminster Assembly of Divines in particular, who had themselves set up “a Spirtual Tyranny by a Secular power, to the advancing of their own Authority above the Magistrate.” Citing the adverse influence of climate on the national character, Milton concludes that education alone will repair his fellow citizens’ lack of “civil vertues.” The likeliest date for the composition of the passage, and that which Milton himself claims for this part of his History, is February – March 1649, soon after the execution of Charles I (the consensus on this point is not complete, however). Now Milton could look back in anger at the unfulfilled opportunities for settling state and church. He discounts the authority of those who had thus failed their obligations, and he instructs

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Digression

the nation to make the most of the new occasion for political and ecclesiastical reform. The Digression is omitted from all the early editions of the History (1670, 1677, 1695, 1698, 1706, 1719), an omission that seems to have followed from difficulties in getting the History licensed (the episode is reported by Edward Phillips and by John Toland, with the suppressed passages cited as having been in the Earl of Anglesey’s possession). Especially the opening paragraph of the Digression, which speaks of “such a manumission as never subjects had a fairer,” may well with other reflections on the Interregnum have made the whole passage vulnerable to the negotiations with the licenser that Milton’s early biographers describe. Whether Milton himself wished to hazard publishing the passage remains uncertain; the History as published in 1670 contains other harsh reflections on the Presbyterians as well as the established church. The Digression found posthumous publication in shortened form as Milton’s Character of the Long Parliament (1681), which version was restored to the 1738 edition of the History near the beginning of book 3. It has survived in full in a lone manuscript at Harvard University in twelve pages of seventeenth-century hand. Although this manuscript refers in its headnote to the printed History, and so is of the 1670s at the earliest, its sometimes idiosyncratic spellings argue for its derivation from a Miltonic holograph. The full text of this manuscript was first published in WJM 10; then in parallel with the Character of the Long Parliament in CPW 5, part 1; and in Herschel Baker (The Later Renaissance in England, 1975). The first page of the manuscript is reproduced in Nicholas von Maltzahn’s Milton’s History of Britain: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution, where the Digression and its historical context find fuller discussion. See von Maltzahn (1991, 1993).

Nicholas von Maltzahn

Diodati, Charles (c. 1609 –1638). Friend of Milton. The son of a physician of Tuscan descent, he grew up in the community of émigré Italian Protestants then centered close to Milton’s childhood home. He was Milton’s contemporary at St. Paul’s School. He studied at Trinity College, Oxford (B.A. in 1625, M.A. in 1628), and briefly entered the Academy of Geneva as a theology student. However, he left to follow a medical career. Diodati died while Milton was in Italy. He and Milton corresponded during their student days. Milton addressed to him his “Elegia Prima” and “Elegia

Quinta,” and he commemorated his death in “Epitaphium Damonis.” Thomas N. Corns

Diogenes Laertius (fl. third century). Biographer. His Lives of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 –250) provides valuable information on the development of Greek philosophy. His treatment of Epicurus is sympathetic and thorough, preserving otherwise lost Epicurean texts. The book divides Greek philosophy into two “successions,” the Ionic and the Italic. Diogenes derives the Ionic tradition from Anaximander, whose successors include Socrates, Plato, the Cynics, and Aristotle. The Italic philosophers follow Pythagoras, including Parmenides, Zeno of Elea, Democritus, and Epicurus. Milton includes the Lives as part of his curriculum in Of Education. Edward Phillips, in his Life of Milton, considers Diogenes to be the equal of Plutarch in the art of biography, perhaps reflecting his uncle’s opinion. Stephen M. Buhler

Dionysius the Areopagite. See [Pseudo-]Dionysius the Areopagite. Disbrowe [Desborough], John (bap. 1608, d. 1680). Parliamentarian cavalry officer and politician. He fought with distinction at the Battle of Naseby and Battle of Longport and rose to senior rank in the late 1640s and the 1650s. A close associate of Oliver Cromwell, to whom he was related by marriage, he played a central role in government during the Protectorate. He was a member of the Council of State formed after the dismissal of the Purged Parliament in 1653. Milton included him among the military heroes praised in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda. Disbrowe played a significant, though ineffectual, role in the final year before the Restoration, after which he fled into exile, returning in 1665, whereupon he was incarcerated until 1667. Thomas N. Corns

disputation. The practice of abstracting, analyzing, and replying to arguments, using the devices of medieval scholasticism. Disputation incorporated formulaic procedures familiar to participants, procedures widespread in late Renaissance literature, law, and divinity. Much prose controversy during

Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce

the seventeenth century follows the stratagem of disputation. In a typical disputation, an opponent’s arguments would be cited, one by one, and then subjected to a vigorous cross-examination in which they were abstracted and their terms distinguished, the integrity of their assumptions and conclusions critiqued, the accuracy of their individual syllogisms measured, and the credibility of their citations and translations weighed. The practice of disputation is pervasive in the Milton canon, from the Prolusions, through the pamphlets of the 1640s and 1650s, to the speeches of the epics. James Egan

divorce tracts. A series of works by Milton about divorce, written between 1643 and 1645. In the two main tracts, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643; 2nd ed. 1644) and Tetrachordon (1645), he pioneered what has come since to be known as no-fault divorce. At the time, English law allowed divorce only for adultery, nonconsummation, and desertion and remarriage only for the innocent party (and by no means in all cases), so the response to Milton’s arguments was swift and severe. Stung, Milton replied with The Judgement of Martin Bucer (1644), his self-validating translation of the pro-divorce argument of a leading reformer, and Colasterion (1645), a vitriolic attack on an anonymous critic of The Doctrine and Discipline. Milton advocated allowing divorce for mutual incompatibility and remarriage for both partners. The existing law, he argued, absurdly valued physical satisfaction over “conjugall fellowship [with] a fit conversing soul” (Doctrine and Discipline). Milton faced an uphill battle, especially given what appear to be explicit prohibitions of divorce in the New Testament (Matt. 5:31–32 and 19:3 –11; 1 Cor. 7:10 –16). He took on that challenge directly in Tetrachordon, in which he cited from Genesis and Deuteronomy permission of and even exhortation to divorce. He insisted that God would not replace Old Testament mercy with New Testament rigor and argued that Christ’s apparent prohibitions of divorce are addressed only to the Pharisees who were attempting to entrap him. While Milton does make the argument for divorce for blameless mutual incompatibility, the divorce tracts often descend into defense of a hapless man snared by a scheming, recalcitrant, and unfit woman. For his pains, Milton’s contemporaries labeled him a libertine. The suggestion of self-interest in the charge of libertinism was made more plausible by the fact that the first tract appeared the year after

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Milton’s first wife, Mary Powell, deserted him; on the other hand, while Milton admitted the “spurre of self-concernment” in the second edition of Doctrine and Discipline, he does not highlight desertion as grounds for divorce. Stephen M. Fallon

Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. Milton, work of prose; full title, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce; Restored to the Good of Both Sexes, from the Bondage of Canon Law, and Other Mistakes, to the True Meaning of Scripture in the Law and Gospel Compared. The first of Milton’s divorce tracts appeared unsigned in August 1643, addressed to both Parliament and the Westminster Assembly of Divines. It was a proposal for an aspect of ecclesiastical reform, written in the context of discussions in the Assembly of Divines that were aimed at a final reformation of the English church. The second, much-expanded edition appeared not later than 2 February 1644; third and fourth editions with no substantive revisions appeared in 1645. In the imminent new church discipline, Milton wanted marriage declassified as part of canon law since in Protestant teaching it was no longer a church sacrament. Custom, ignorance, and prelacy had alienated people from the truth that marriage was for the purpose of “fit conversation” rather than procreation and in order to enhance the dignity of man. Divorce should be allowed on the grounds of incompatibility; it should be a private matter and not part of public jurisdiction (but restricted to the authority of husbands), with the right of remarriage for both parties. He found in the Bible a case for freedom for men to divorce and remarry. He argued that Jesus’s denial of divorce for any grounds except fornication was very largely compatible with Moses’s permission for divorce. The ancient Hebrew rules for divorce (Deut. 24:1–2) were perfectly consistent with the purposes for which God instituted marriage (Gen. 2:18). Women were first created and marriage was instituted for men to remedy the “evill of solitary life.” If a wife fails to remedy male loneliness, the consequences of which range from frustration to atheism, a man should be free to divorce her and take another with or without her consent. He believes hindering a man’s prerogatives in these matters is irrational, unnatural, and uncharitable. Since Jesus could not have intended to introduce irrational, unnatural, or uncharitable restrictions on manly liberty, Milton argues, his words must not mean what they have usually been taken to mean;

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therefore, Jesus was exaggerating in order to rebuke the Pharisees. Milton’s divorce argument also involved a radical position on hermeneutics. The Bible cannot be interpreted, he implies, to teach anything or require any behavior that does not meet rigid standards for rationality, charity, and naturalness. Milton wants to focus on the mind here, but the force of the Hebrew original compels him to take in the body too. While he pursues the matter of incompatible partners, his descriptions of failed marriages take on very physical dimensions. Incompatibility might drive a man to extremes in a gloomy picture of domestic discontent. The tract provoked much hostile reaction, especially from Presbyterian divines, who feared social anarchy. As he defended his position, Milton was able to develop the divorce argument further in three other divorce tracts, especially Tetrachordon (1645). See Luxon (2005), Patterson (1990), Turner (1987).

Nigel Smith

dominions. One of the nine orders of angels. Milton uses the term interchangeably with “dominations” in Paradise Lost. According to the fourth-century work attributed to [Pseudo-]Dionysius the Areopagite, the heavenly beings are divided into three hierarchies, each containing three orders, or choirs. Thomas N. Corns

Donne, John (1572 –1631). Preacher, prose writer, and poet. He was born to Roman Catholic parents. After studying at Oxford University and Cambridge University, he attended Lincoln’s Inn. In 1596 –1597 he sailed to Cadiz and the Azores with Sir Walter Ralegh. His subsequent post as secretary to Lord Keeper Sir Thomas Egerton was terminated after his elopement (1601) with Anne More. He and his increasingly large family lived thereafter in straitened circumstances until his ordination into the Anglican Church in 1615; just when he chose to leave Catholicism is unclear. He became dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1621, a post he held until his death. Donne’s poetry is the most formative literary influence upon succeeding English metaphysical poets, most immediately George Herbert, whose mother had been a patron of Donne’s. His varied poetic genres rework Ovidian, Petrarchan, and Christian motifs within highly intellectualized erotic and religious contexts, employing intricate conceits that earned him disfavor among neoclassical readers. In addition to his pub-

lished sermons, his religious prose ranged from a satire on the Jesuits (Ignatius His Conclave, 1611), to a defense of suicide (Biathanatos, 1646), to religious meditations during a critical illness in 1623 (Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 1624). As a student, Milton quite probably heard some of Donne’s sermons at St. Paul’s; he seems to have used Donne’s sermon on Psalm 89:48 in crafting Eve’s response to God’s injunction against eating the forbidden fruit, and Donne’s sermon “Jesus Wept” has been seen as providing a useful context for “Lycidas.” It has been suggested that Biathanatos influenced Samson Agonistes and that “On Time” may be an intentional response to Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 10.” See Carey (1981), Guibbory (2001), ODNB.

Christopher Baker

Dorislaus, Isaac (1595 –1649). Scholar and diplomat. Born at Alkmaar, Holland, he moved to England when he was about thirty-two years old. Appointed on the recommendation of Oliver Cromwell to a lectureship in history at Cambridge founded by Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, he was forced to resign after the second of two lectures for making a controversial defense of the Dutch against Spain that also “placed the right of monarchy in the people’s voluntary submission” (Christopher Hill). Milton may have heard either or both of these talks. Dorislaus was nonetheless admitted to the College of Advocates in 1629. Twenty years later he was appointed to assist John Cook in the preparation of an indictment against Charles I for treason. Dorislaus was assassinated by royalist zealots while serving as Cromwell’s envoy to The Hague and was buried at Westminster Abbey. His body was disinterred (along with the other actors of the Interregnum) in 1661 and moved to a mass grave at St. Margaret’s Church. Dorislaus was the author of Prælium Nuportanum [The Battle of Newport] (1640). Milton may have been involved in the preparation of a letter of credence for Dorislaus’s appointment as envoy to the United Provinces (Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1649 –1650), still extant, though no proof of such a connection has been established. Carol Barton

Downame, George (d. 1634). Logician and churchman. He was educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and was elected to a fellowship there from 1587. A noted exponent of Ramism, he was from 1590 to 1616 the university’s professor of

Dryden, John

logic. His major publication in the field was Commentarii in P. Rami Dialectica [Commentaries on the Dialectic of P. Ramus], on which Milton drew heavily in his own Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio. The latter part of Downame’s career saw his advancement in the church, culminating in his appointment as bishop of Derry. His later writings are predominately theological. Thomas N. Corns

Drayton, Michael (1563 –1631). Poet. Born in Warwickshire, a near contemporary of William Shakespeare, he experimented during his long poetic career with a wide range of genres—pastoral, sonnet, ode, minor epic—many of which also attracted Milton. After an early search for patronage, he became alienated from the court. Recurrent attention to British history and landscape makes him a national poet, concerned in more or less explicit ways with political and moral issues. Of his works that have a place at the edge of epic tradition, three elaborate on Old Testament stories (Moses [1604], Noah [1630], and David and Goliath [1630]) in heroic couplets. In the preface to his first collection of poems, The Harmonie of the Church (1591), he claimed to reject Mount Ida for Mount Sion, but his work follows in the footsteps of major classical and Renaissance poets. A long historical poem set in Edward II’s reign, Mortimoriades (1596), invited comparison with Lucan. When Drayton rewrote it as The Barons Warres (1603), he aligned himself with Italian writers of epic by referring to its ottava rima as “Ariosto’s stanza.” Epic in scale though not in character, the topographical Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622), thirty songs in hexameter couplets surveying “this renowned Isle of Greate Britaine,” was annotated by John Selden. Milton calls on the fifth and sixth songs of Poly-Olbion for Sabrina in A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle. Kay Gilliland Stevenson

Dring, Thomas, the younger (fl. 1666; d. 1695). Bookseller. Around November 1673, he published Milton’s Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions. See also stationers. Thomas N. Corns

Drogheda. Town on the eastern coast of Ireland in County Louth, situated on the River Boyne. Soon after landing in Ireland in August 1649, Oliver Cromwell turned his sights on the town, and on

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10 September his siege guns breached the walls and his troops massacred its inhabitants. Many defenders of the town, however, were English Protestants. Contemporary newsbooks justified the slaughter in terms of retribution for supposed Catholic atrocities committed during the Irish Rebellion. Cromwell’s actions were also justified by seventeenth-century rights of war, whereby resistance from an indefensible position forfeited any expectation of mercy. For Cromwell, the capture of Drogheda fulfilled scripture, that the kingdom of the Antichrist “be laid in blood.” Milton’s Observations upon the Articles of Peace has sometimes been criticized as providing a preemptive justification for the severity of Cromwell’s campaign. Jim Daems

Dryden, John (1631–1700). Poet and dramatist. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, he entered the civil service of the Protectorate no later than 1657. With Milton and Andrew Marvell he walked in the funeral procession for Oliver Cromwell. His elegy on Cromwell, Heroique Stanzas (1659), was his first important poem. At the Restoration, Dryden changed allegiances, writing poems of welcome to Charles II. From 1663 he wrote for the stage and was the most accomplished exponent of “heroic” drama, which was written in couplets and depicted grand and exotic events. During the reign of James II, he converted to Catholicism. After the Williamite Revolution, he lost all royal patronage and offices. Despite his political apostasy, Dryden retained some friendly relations with Milton, and probably in 1674 he approached Milton for his permission to produce an “opera” in rhymed couplets based on Paradise Lost. Presumably because of the estimated cost of staging, the work, The State of Innocence, was never performed, though it was published in no less than nine early editions and achieved far greater circulation than the epic poem. No doubt it did much to raise the profile of the original and to ease Milton’s wider acceptance among a readership dubious about his republic notoriety. Andrew Marvell ridiculed the project in his poem prefixed to the 1674 edition of Paradise Lost. Miltonic allusions and echoes abound in Dryden’s later poetry, both in his satirical verse and, very conspicuously, in his translations of Virgil. See ODNB, Winn (1987).

Thomas N. Corns

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dualism

dualism. The belief that either reality as a whole (ontological dualism) or human existence in particular (anthropological dualism) consists of two substances. Milton rejects both views. Ontological dualism identifies “God,” or ultimate reality, as a composite of good and evil. This position was advocated by the ancient Manicheans and more recently by the likes of William Blake and the Star Wars films of George Lucas. Within such a view, the classic Christian “problem of evil,” as addressed in Paradise Lost, simply does not appear. Theodicy poses a genuine question for Milton only because he believes in the complete goodness of God and the original goodness of creation. Milton also argues against anthropological dualism; although he maintains in De Doctrina Christiana that human existence entails both a soul and body, he insists that a soul cannot exist apart from the body. See Fallon (1991).

Phillip J. Donnelly

Du Bartas, Seigneur. See Guillaume de Salluste, Seigneur Du Bartas. Du Chesne, André (1584 –1640). French historian. Born at L’Ile Bouchard in Touraine, he was educated at Loudun and completed his studies in Paris. A friend of Cardinal Armand Richelieu, he was appointed geographer and historiographer to Louis XIII. A brilliant scholar, he published many works and is renowned for his genealogy of the Montmorency family. Milton refers to two of his publications: Histoire générale d’Angleterre, d’Écosse et d’Irlande (Paris, 1614, 1634, 1641) and Historiae Normannorum Scriptores Antiqui (Paris, 1619), which includes “Emma Enconium,” a chapter Milton used as source material in The History of Britain. Du Chesne was styled the father of French history. When he died, he left more than one hundred in-folio manuscripts. Christophe J.-B. Tournu

Dugard, William (1606 –1662). Printer. His edition of Eikon Basilike [The King’s Book] was published in March 1649 and included additional material that had not appeared in Richard Royston’s first edition. One of the prayers in Dugard’s edition is the famous instance of plagiarism noted by Milton in Eikonoklastes: Pamela’s Prayer from Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. Francis Falconer Madan provides evidence dispelling the charge that Milton was re-

sponsible for this prayer appearing in Eikon Basilike. Dugard was arrested, and released, following the appearance of his edition of Eikon Basilike. He was rearrested for his royalist activities in February 1650. However, after recanting his royalism (and possibly with Milton’s assistance), Dugard was appointed printer to the Council of State in April 1650. In this capacity, he printed Milton’s Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio in February 1651. Jim Daems

Du Moulin, Peter [Pierre], the younger (1601– 1684). French Protestant theologian and Church of England clergyman. He graduated (D.D.) from the University of Leiden and moved to England and became an Anglican divine (Adisham, Kent). Called to Oxford as a preacher, he graduated from “our two universities,” became chaplain to Charles II at the Restoration, and received the prebend at Canterbury, where he died. Du Moulin had already completed two works in support of the Stuarts— Ecclesiae Gemitus Sub Anabaptistica Tyrannide (London, 1649) and Defence de la religion réformée, et de la monarchie et Eglise anglicane. Contre l’impieté & tyrannie de la ligue rebelle d’Angleterre (Paris, 1650), with an epistle dedicated to Charles II—before he produced his reply to Milton’s Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (1651). In August 1652 his Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum Adversus Parricidas Anglicanos [The Cry of the Royal Blood to Heaven, Against the English Parricides] was published at The Hague by Adriaan Vlacq. Milton says he was commissioned by the Council of State to reply to the work, which he mistakenly ascribed to the professor of ecclesiastical history at Amsterdam, Alexander More, in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda (30 May 1654). Du Moulin admitted his authorship in two of his works: Poematum Libri Tres (Cambridge, 1670) and A Replie to a Person of Honour (1675). A second edition of Regii Sanguinis Clamor came out in 1661. Christophe J.-B. Tournu

Dury, John (1596 –1680). Protestant divine and ecumenist. Born in Edinburgh, the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, he was educated at Sedan and Leiden, where his father had settled. In 1625 he was appointed minister to the English Company of Merchants at Elbing in Prussia, and it was during his five years in this post that he conceived a scheme for uniting the Protestant churches of Europe. For the next forty years he traveled, negotiated, pub-

Dutch (language)

lished, and corresponded tirelessly in the cause of church unity. He was encouraged by Samuel Hartlib, correspondent of Milton’s. His endeavors won the support of Gustavus Adolphus in the 1630s and of Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s. Indeed, the sort of international Protestant response to the massacre of the Waldensians owed something to Cromwell’s adoption of Dury’s principal ideal. Milton was involved in the administration of that response and wrote his own literary protest, “Sonnet XV” (“On the Late Massacre in Piedmont”). His zeal in this cause earned him the respect and friendship of Richard Baxter. He died at Cassel. N. H. Keeble

Dutch (language). Sometimes called Flemish and sometimes Low Dutch to distinguish it from the High Dutch (Deutsch) of Germany, Dutch was spo-

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ken in the United Provinces and parts of the Spanish Netherlands. Richard Verstegen’s Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1605; reprinted 1653, 1655) popularized Johannes Goropius Becanus’s discredited idea that Dutch was the language Adam spoke in Eden. In Of Reformation, Milton recognized the proximity of the Dutch and the English, positing their “similitude of manners and language,” and of their reformed churches, as a basis for cooperation between England and the United Provinces. Creating a sublime chiaroscuro effect, Milton four times employs a relatively new English word derived from a Dutch term for genre painting, as in the lines “the louring element / Scowls o’er the darkened landscape” of hell (PL 2.491–92). Milton probably learned Dutch no earlier than the 1640s. See also Roger Williams and German. Andrew Fleck

E Ecclesiastes. Book of the Old Testament. The title refers to the “Preacher,” the central figure and voice in the text. “Vanity of vanities” is the Preacher’s appraisal of earthly pursuits. The book offers a critical survey of the fallen world. Ecclesiastes 9:9 illustrates the covenant of marriage in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. Milton interprets Ecclesiastes 8:1, 8:4, and 9:17 to oppose royalist views in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio. In Paradise Lost Michael’s vision of repetition in fallen history incorporates the Preacher’s sense of recurrent patterns: “so shall the world go on, / To good malignant, to bad men benign” (12.537–38). The temptations in Paradise Regained allow Jesus to survey the fallen world critically and to judge its vanities in resolute obedience to God. Jesus compares classical wisdom to “An empty cloud” (PR 4.321), suggesting the Hebrew hebel, or vapor, translated as “vanity” in the AV. Jesus alludes to Ecclesiastes 12:12 in the making of “many books” (4.321–22) and also affirms the providential purpose of time (3.182 – 83), evoking Ecclesiastes 3:1– 8. See Gay (2002).

David Gay

Eden. Mesopotamian region named in the Old Testament in the east of which lay paradise, the home of Adam and Eve before the Fall (Gen. 2:8). “Eden” derives from the Hebrew word for “pleasure” or “delight”; “paradise,” a Greek word used in the Septuagint to describe a garden to the east of Eden, ultimately derives from the Old Persian pairidaza, “enclosure” or “park.” Milton uses both English words, one connected with emotive, the other with spatial aspects of the region. Eden, despite Michael’s closing promise to Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost of “A paradise within thee, happier far” (12.587), must be understood as a literal place for the average person dur100

ing the early modern period, despite the allegorical claims of some groups, notably the Diggers. To encourage this sense of literalism, many Bibles included maps of Eden, and indeed the various types of Eden map used in sixteenth-century Bibles comprised a quarter of all biblical maps. The most prominent example is the map of Mesopotamia deriving from the French text of Jean Calvin’s Commentary of Genesis (1553), reprinted in the vastly popular Geneva Bible of 1560. Paradise itself was understood as a garden, with some medieval illuminators, influenced by Song of Solomon 4:12 (“A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse”), surrounding it with walls, recalled in the “verdurous wall” bounding Milton’s paradise, also described by God as a “mansion.” Likewise, Milton’s Eden is “a woody theatre” (PL 4.141, 143; 8.296; cf. Edmund Spenser’s “stately Theatre” in the Faerie Queene [3.5.39]), although Milton’s wall appears to be made of close-planted trees (PL 8.303 –5). In Genesis, as in Paradise Lost, Adam is created outside paradise and placed in it by God, who commands him to “dress” and “keep” the Garden and to eat of any tree other than the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:15 –17). The injunction to regulate the Garden is preceded in the Bible by God’s gift to humanity of dominion over the natural world (Gen. 1:28). Milton’s paradise is frequently described in such a fashion as to complicate positive descriptive statements about it. Sizeable portions of Edenic description employ negative comparison: Eden is “Not that fair field / Of Enna,” “nor that sweet grove / Of Daphne by Orontes,” “nor that Nyseian isle,” “Nor where Abassin kings their issue guard, / / . . . wide remote / From this Assyrian garden” (PL 4.268 – 85). This is the rhetorical device of occupatio/praeteritio, the listing of things only apparently rejected. William Poole

editors of Milton

editors of Milton. The great biographer of Milton David Masson edited the complete poetry of Milton in three volumes in 1883, including headnotes for all the poems, the notes understandably focused on biographical information that Masson had mastered. His notes were his own and not arranged as in a variorum edition (not crediting each previous editor). A. W. Verity followed Masson with a student’s edition first issued in one volume in 1910 and subsequently issued in two volumes. His edition became the standard in the United Kingdom for generations of schoolchildren: its annotations are kept discrete in a second volume, and they are remarkably thorough, with acknowledgments to Thomas Newton and Henry John Todd and allusions to contemporary poets such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose debt to Milton Verity recognized. Verity’s annotations are remarkable also for their unobsolete or undatable objectivity. In the 1970s Cambridge University Press made a heroic attempt to create a new student’s edition of Milton, edited by John Broadbent, to replace Verity, with a series of volumes devoted to parts of the poetry, but the edition seems to have enjoyed limited success despite distinguished contributions from scholars such as Mary Ann Radzinowicz and B. A. Rajan. With The Poetical Works of John Milton, published by Oxford’s Clarendon Press in two volumes in 1952, Helen Darbishire attempted to produce “a reformed text, a text not modernized but, on the contrary, brought as near as possible to that which Milton himself intended.” Darbishire developed a system of spelling based on the manuscript of the first book of Paradise Lost, which, though dictated to an amanuensis, may give signs of Milton’s preferences in the spelling of some words. Darbishire’s edition, though it never became the standard from which to quote, nevertheless influenced subsequent modernized or “old-spelling” editions of Milton such as those of John T. Shawcross, John Carey and Alastair Fowler, and Roy Flannagan. In the United States, Frank Allen Patterson’s The Students’ Milton (rev. ed. 1933), an enormous one-volume edition of the complete poetry and a generous selection of lightly annotated prose, became the teaching edition of choice for several generations of students in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s; editions by the author of A Milton Handbook, James Holly Hanford, never caught on, nor did the New Critical school edition of the 1645 Poems by Cleanth Brooks and John Edward Hardy published in 1950. In the late 1950s Merritt Y. Hughes collected various one-volume editions of the poetry and prose

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into one volume, not quite so large or forbidding as The Student’s Milton, under the title John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957). Hughes’s edition quickly became the standard in the United States. Hughes’s unpretentious, fair, and unbiased notes helped sell the edition to college teachers and students, as did the format that allowed for student notes in the wide margins. Editions of the poetry by Edward LeComte and Marjorie Nicolson were notable inexpensive best sellers, and the carefully prepared text with the spare but authoritative notes of John Shawcross, first for New York University Press (with a jointly published volume of prose edited by J. Max Patrick) and then for Doubleday Anchor, has remained in print, along with the edition of the poetry by Edward LeComte. Shawcross’s text is still often quoted. Notable also are Arthur E. Barker’s edition of Samson Agonistes and the shorter poetry for Croft’s Classics and C. A. Patrides’s collection of prose, last published in a revised edition by the University of Missouri Press in 1986 but now out of print. Douglas Bush’s The Portable Milton, despite having been last revised in 1986, remains in print, with complete poetry and a selection of prose. In British upper college levels, the heavily annotated Longman’s edition of the complete poetry edited by John Carey and Alastair Fowler, first published in 1968 and updated in 1990, became the standard from which to quote. This distinguished and thorough edition is available in two paperbacks in a second edition, with considerable revision to engage with more recent criticism. Roy Flannagan’s Riverside Milton, first published in 1998 by Houghton Mifflin and revised with the same pagination in 2001, attempted to replace Hughes as the one-volume, large-scale text of complete poetry and selected prose for use in college and graduate school courses. Like the companion volumes devoted to William Shakespeare and Geoffrey Chaucer, this edition attempts to use authoritative texts and extensive and in this case variorum notes together with individual bibliographies for each poem or prose work. There is a revision of Hughes by David Scott Kastan, and another largescale edition of the poetry and prose to be edited by John P. Rumrich and William Kerrigan is in progress. The standard commentary to the poetry is A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, published originally by Columbia University Press starting in 1970, with the aim “to furnish a body

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of variorum notes and discussions uniting all available scholarly illuminations of the texts on all levels from the semantic and syntactical to those of deliberate or unconscious echoes of other works in all the languages known to Milton.” Since the Columbia Variorum went out of print before it was completed, it has been taken over by a staff of scholars headed by Albert Labriola at Duquesne University, with new or completed volumes planned to be issued by Duquesne University Press. Notable popular editions in England and North America included the B. A. Wright edition of the poems of 1976, superseded by Gordon Campbell’s Everyman Complete English Poems of John Milton, which included Areopagitica and Of Education, now no longer in print, and John Leonard’s Penguin edition of the poetry, which has become a popular choice as a classroom text in the United States and the United Kingdom. The Oxford World Classics paperbound edition edited by Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (latest edition 2003) includes the English and Italian poetry plus a generous selection of the prose. Christopher Ricks’s edition of the poetry has been reissued by Signet (2001) with a preface by Susanne Woods. Scott Elledge’s Norton Critical Edition of Paradise Lost (1992, 2nd ed.) is also a popular classroom text when just Paradise Lost is featured in a course. Elledge’s edition is the only one of the epic that includes critical essays as well as an annotated text. North American scholars were responsible, first, for the standard large edition of Milton’s poetry and prose, the eighteen-volume Columbia University Press Works of John Milton, edited by F. A. Patterson et al., now usually referred to as the Columbia Milton; and the collection of prose carefully edited in old-spelling editions by a team of scholars headed by Don M. Wolfe, including Merritt Hughes, John S. Diekhoff, J. Milton French, Maurice Kelley, Alexander M. Witherspoon, Herbert Grierson, Douglas Bush, Earnest Sirluck, A. S. P. Woodhouse, and Walter Ong. Now usually referred to as the Yale Prose Works or the Yale Edition, The Complete Prose Works of John Milton was published in eight volumes, some of them divided between two books, starting in 1953 and ending in 1982, with William Alfred, Robert W. Ayers, Christopher Hill, Louis L. Martz, Harry Starr, and John M. Steadman having been added to the editorial board by 1982. A new comprehensive edition is currently under way, under the general editorship of Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns. The first volume to be published, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, edited by Laura Knoppers, appeared in 2008.

Facsimiles of early editions of Paradise Lost and of the Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645), plus individual prose works, were issued by Scolar Press. These facsimiles—plus earlier facsimiles of Milton artifacts such as the 1899 facsimile of manuscripts of Milton’s poetry under the care of William Aldis Wright at Cambridge University Press, and the authoritative facsimiles and transcriptions of the poetry assembled by Harris Fletcher—provide visual evidence of what the early texts looked like whenever those early texts are not readily available for scrutiny. S. E. Sprott, in 1973, put together transcriptions of the various manuscript and printed versions of Milton’s Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle in a large-format parallel-text edition that shows the many versions of the text side-by-side. See Milton (various) in the bibliography.

Roy Flannagan

education. Formal education in Milton’s day was open to fewer students than now: women, for instance, were not admitted to grammar school or university, and Catholics could not take a degree. Those attending grammar school would typically begin study at the age of seven or eight, and a few might go on to university some time in their early to mid-teens. Like the grammar schools, the universities— only two in England, Oxford University and Cambridge University—were under ecclesiastical control, or at least strongly associated with ecclesiastical interests: the universities turned out trained members of the clergy, and the grammar schoolmaster was licensed by his local bishop. Grammar school education was arduous, with a great deal of emphasis placed on the learning of Latin grammar, later accompanied by Greek and even Hebrew in the better schools. Oxford and Cambridge were by no means aristocratic institutions, and richer and poorer scholars were educated together, the latter earning their fees by acting as servants to the former. Indeed, the number of students attending Oxford and Cambridge was growing rapidly during Milton’s youth, and the 1620s and 1630s saw a greater number of students enrolled than during any other comparable span in the early modern period, as well as a good deal of intellectual and curricular change. The organization of education rested, as it still does in both institutions, on a mixture of tutors and lectures. Each student was assigned to a tutor in his college, who would instruct him individually and supervise his religious well-being. Students attended public

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lectures together. The core curriculum rested on the medieval and Elizabethan tradition of the liberal arts: the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic, also termed dialectic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music). The bachelor of arts degree occupied four years, and the master of arts the next three, making the standard length of university education seven years. Students, of course, also received theological training and might proceed to the higher degree doctor of divinity. The personal interests of the tutors were crucial to the education that individual students received. Despite the changes that came over both universities during the period, the backbone of such an education was still Aristotelian, and no one should think that the growing chorus of antiAristotelianism signaled freedom from it. Particularly in areas such as logic, Aristotelianism remained dominant, and the basic if increasingly reassessed assumptions of the period about matter, motion, causation, taxonomy, and so forth cannot be understood without some knowledge of their Aristotelian foundation. Both universities, finally, maintained their own presses. Nevertheless, the universities were not the only higher educational institutions in operation, and London’s Inns of Court provided an attractive third option to the legally inclined, and to the fop. Far more radically, the entirety of traditional education came under increasing attack in the seventeenth century, particularly during the revolutionary decades. The grammar schools were criticized for being too cerebral, more interested in words than things, limited in curriculum, and neglectful of spiritual and physical welfare. Particularly due to the influence of the Moravian educational reformer John Amos Comenius ( Jan Amos Komenský), who visited England in 1641–1642, many pamphlets advocating total restructuring of both grammar school and university education appeared in England. William Poole

Edward VI (1537–1553). King of England and Ireland. The only surviving legitimate son of Henry VIII, he acceded to the throne on his father’s death in January 1547. Edward’s reign was represented in the tradition of Protestant hagiographers and most influentially in the work of John Foxe as a golden age of godly reformation before the atrocities of the reign of Mary I. Edward was educated by leading Protestant humanists, of whom the most eminent was Sir John Cheke. In “Sonnet XI,”

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Milton recalled that Cheke “taught’st Cambridge, and King Edward Greek.” Thomas N. Corns

Edwards, Thomas (c. 1599 –1648). Church of England clergyman and religious controversialist. He was an active Puritan during the 1620s and 1630s, whose outspoken sermons probably cost him his post as university preacher to Cambridge University. Thereafter, he moved to a lectureship at St. Botolph, Aldgate, where he occasionally fell foul of William Laud, then bishop of London. In 1636 he moved to a living in Hertford, though by the end of the decade he had returned to London. As the fragile alliance of a broad spectrum of Puritan believers started to fragment in 1642, he was among the most prominent of the Presbyterian controversialists to attack Independency and the sects. His most influential publication was Gangraena, more than eight hundred pages long, which appeared in three parts in 1646. This was a vast catalogue of heresies allegedly perpetrated by Independents and sectaries. Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce attracted Edwards’s attention. As the New Model Army, whose religious practices he had also excoriated, threatened to occupy London, he fled into exile, dying in Amsterdam in February 1648. In “On the New Forcers of Conscience,” Milton dismissed him as “shallow Edwards” (line 12). See Hughes (2004), ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

Egerton, Alice (1619 –1689). English gentlewoman. Her father was John Egerton, First Earl of Bridgewater, her mother a co-heir of the Earl of Derby. She was the youngest of eleven daughters among fifteen children. She appeared at court in the queen’s masque Tempe Restored (1632), by Inigo Jones and Aurelian Townshend, and, with her younger brothers John and Thomas, acted and sang (as “the Lady”) in Milton’s Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus) in September 1634. Little is known of her later life. In 1650, aged thirty-one, she married Richard, Lord Vaughan, the Earl of Carbery, who was twenty-one years her senior. Carbery was a royalist peer and military commander who had been accused of cowardice following his retreat from Pembroke in 1644. At the Restoration, Carbery was appointed, as Alice’s father had been, Lord President of the Council of Wales and the Marches and Lord Lieutenant of Wales, but he was removed in 1672 for malfeasance and cruelty.

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Egerton, Alice

Katherine Phillips wrote a poem in praise of Alice. She bore no children. Tom Bishop

Egerton, John, First Earl of Bridgewater (1579 – 1649). English peer and royal minister. He was the second son of Thomas Egerton, Lord Ellesmere, Elizabeth I’s Lord Keeper and James I’s first Lord Chancellor. He accompanied Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, to Ireland in 1599, where he was knighted and his older brother was killed. He was a member of Parliament in 1597 and again in 1601, around which time he married Frances Stanley, the daughter of his stepmother, the Dowager Countess of Derby, for whose household Milton later wrote the pastoral entertainment Arcades (1634). At James I’s accession he was made a knight of the Bath. On his father’s death in March 1617 he became Viscount Brackley and, two months later, was made Earl of Bridgewater. His opinions in religion were with the reformers, and he was a patron of the godly. He was also a loyal and energetic servant of the crown. He became a privy councilor in 1626 and was appointed Lord President of the Council of Wales and the Marches and Lord Lieutenant of Wales and the Welsh border counties in 1631, eventually taking up residency at Ludlow Castle in 1634. This occasion was celebrated by Milton’s Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus), in which three of Egerton’s children—Alice, John, and Thomas—had speaking roles. He joined Charles I at Newcastle in 1639 for the first of the Bishops’ Wars and in 1643 was joint commissioner of array for Flintshire, Denbighshire, and Merionethshire in north Wales; he later withdrew to his house in Ashridge, Hertfordshire, where he died. See ODNB.

Tom Bishop

Egerton, John, Viscount Brackley, Second Earl of Bridgewater (1622 –1686). English peer. He was the third but oldest surviving son of John Egerton, First Earl of Bridgewater. In 1634, at age twelve, he and his younger brother, Thomas, danced as torchbearers in the king’s Shrovetide masque, Coelum Britannicum, by Inigo Jones and Thomas Carew. Later that same year, at their father’s settlement at Ludlow Castle as Lord President of the Council of Wales and the Marches and Lord Lieutenant of Wales, the two boys and their sister, Alice Egerton, acted in Milton’s Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus), John taking the part of

the Elder Brother. Henry Lawes’s dedication of the 1637 edition of Comus was to Egerton, and Milton retained it in Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645) but removed it for the 1673 edition. In 1649 Egerton succeeded his father as Earl of Bridgewater. He was arrested and imprisoned on suspicion of conspiracy against the government in 1651 but released on sureties of £20,000 to be of good behavior. His views on the Commonwealth may be represented in a title-page inscription in his copy of Milton’s Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio: “Liber igne, author furca dignissimi” [A book fittest for the fire, its author for the gallows]. Tom Bishop

Eikon Alethine. Anonymous work of prose and among the earliest responses to Eikon Basilike [The Kings’ Book]; full title, Eikon Alethine, The Pourtraiture of Truths Most Sacred Majesty Truly Suffering, Though Not Solely. Wherein the False Colours Are Washed Off, Where-with the Paintersteiner Had Dedawbed Truth, the Late King and Parliament in His Counterfeit Piece Entituled Eikon Basilike, Published to Undeceive the World (London 1649). George Thomason’s copy is dated August 13. It refutes the claims of Eikon Basilike and challenges Charles I’s authorship, detecting instead the writing of “Some Prelaticall Levite gaping after a Bishopricke, Deanery or the like.” Marshall Grossman

Eikon Basilike [The King’s Book]. Anonymous work of prose; full title, Eikon Basilike: The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings. On the day that Charles I was executed, 30 January 1649, Eikon Basilike began to circulate. Copies were being sold in the street by 4 February. Purporting to be the king’s own exposition of his cause, which he had refused to argue at his trial, the book was a tremendous success in terms of both the number of copies sold and the sympathy aroused for the “royal martyr.” Having gone rapidly through many editions, it exists in a variety of forms. The earliest issue, published by Richard Royston, bears the date 1648 (old style) and lacks two powerful elements, which were added in the third issue of the first edition (printed by William Duggard in March 1649): William Marshall’s elaborate frontispiece and the “Expostulations and Prayers of the King.” These addenda were important to the continued success of the book and figure prominently in the succession of responses to it. Clerical authorship

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was immediately suspected (see Eikon Alethine), but it was only after the Restoration that the king’s chaplain, John Gauden, came forward to claim it. The fact that Gauden was rewarded with a bishopric suggests that his claim was persuasive, but controversy about the book’s exact origins persists. The current scholarly consensus is that the book was produced by Gauden, based on material composed by the king and supplied to Gauden in November or December 1647. In his authorized response, Eikonoklastes, Milton casts doubt on the king’s authorship. Despite acknowledging the presence of a second writer, Milton chooses to hold the king responsible for it. Comprising a series of more or less chronological episodes, Eikon Basilike begins with the calling of the Long Parliament and gives an account of the controversies between king and Parliament, culminating in the king’s letter to Prince Charles and his meditations at Carisbrooke Castle while awaiting execution. In it Charles is portrayed as a royal martyr. See Knachel (1966), Madan (1950).

Marshall Grossman

Eikon e Piste. Anonymous work of prose replying to Eikon Alethine; full title, Eikon e Piste. Or, the Faithfull Pourtraicture of a Loyall Subject, in Vindication of Eikon Basilike. Otherwise Intituled, The Pourtraicture of His Sacred Majestie . . . In Answer to an Insolent Book, Intituled Eikon Alethine . . . (London, 1649). The author claims personal witness to Charles I’s authorship of Eikon Basilike and challenges his opponent to reveal the name of the putative ghostwriter. The frontispiece depicts a hand drawing a curtain to reveal the king’s accuser receiving a cap and bells from one King Charles while trying to remove the crown on another. George Thomason’s copy is dated September 11. Marshall Grossman

Eikonoklastes. Milton, work of prose; full title, Eikonoklastes, in Answer to a Book Intitl’d Eikon Basilike, The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings. Most likely written at the request of the Council of State, it is Milton’s “authorized” answer to Eikon Basilike, appearing in October 1649 and printed by Matthew Simmons. George Thomason’s copy is dated October 6. A slightly expanded and corrected edition, printed by Thomas Newcomb, followed in June 1650. In both

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editions the author is identified only by the initials J.M. The first edition bears on the title page the legend “Printed by Authority” above the printer’s name. As the title suggests, Milton treats the version of Charles I portrayed in the book as a graven image that lacks corresponding substance. To show that the idol is hollow, he proceeds through it chapter by chapter, breaking each into fragments with his interpolated commentary. Milton’s point-by-point refutation of the king’s presentation of events also gives an ironic analysis of the royal image as manufactured commodity: “He who writes himself Martyr by his own inscription, is like an ill Painter who, by writing on the shapeless Picture which he hath drawn, is fain to tell passengers what shape it is; which els no man could imagin.” The effect of this critique is to parallel a substantive argument that magistracy precedes monarchy with a demonstration that the king is the product of his image rather than its reflected object, a goal Milton accomplishes by rewriting the Eikon Basilike’s portrait of Charles I as royal martyr with a portrait of the tyrant. The anonymous Eikon Alethine, which preceded Milton’s authorized response, had already challenged the king’s authorship of Eikon Basilike. Milton acknowledges the presence of a second writer but seizes the right to treat the book as the king’s work. His strategy is to give priority neither to the book nor to its putative author, but rather to treat both king and book as pastiche. Thus Charles is charged with plagiarism for appropriating as his own Pamela’s Prayer from Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and held responsible for its pagan context. Marshall Grossman

Elder Brother. See A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle.

election. Originally a designation for Israel as a chosen nation separated for God (Ps. 33:12), “a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation” (Exod. 19:6), a status that also involves religious obligations (Ps. 147:19 –20). God’s establishment of a covenant with Abraham and his seed—a blessing to the whole earth (Gen. 11:31–12:7 ff.)— confirmed the election of Israel. The Hebrews’ liberation from Egyptian slavery, leading to the renewal of the covenant at Sinai and the promise of land and a national home (Exod. 3:6 –10 ff.), further demonstrated their peculiar status. While Old Testament election was primarily national, select patriarchs, monarchs,

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election

and prophets of ancient Israel were called to minister to the covenanted people and thus advance the nation’s mission. New Testament writers appropriated the designation of election for the primitive Christians. 1 Peter 2:9 states: “ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people.” “A chosen generation” is derived from “a chosen race” (Isa. 44:1 ff.), “a royal priesthood” from “a kingdom of priests” (Exod. 19:6), “an holy nation” from Exodus 19:6 and “an holy people” (Deut. 14:2), and “a peculiar people” from “a peculiar people unto himself ” (Deut. 14:2) and “his peculiar people” (Deut. 26:18). New Testament election is national, but personal election to eternal salvation is emphasized on the basis that God determined by eternal decree to predestinate certain individual sinners to restoration and election. The identification of election with piety and holiness is first attributable to Augustine. During the Reformation era, the Augustinian view, modified by Thomas Aquinas, was adopted by reformers, notably Jean Calvin, who maintained that the saving benefits of Christ’s redemptive act apply only to the gratuitously chosen. Calvin deviated from Augustine in dismissing the concept of merit and in developing the doctrine of “double predestination”—predestination to reprobation as well as to election. Differentiating themselves from the rigidity of Calvinism, Anglican and Catholic theologians accommodated the notion of human will in their doctrine on election. Milton does likewise in maintaining that “God did not predestine reprobation at all, or make it his aim” (De Doctrina Christiana). Election acquired a national dimension in Reformation countries, particularly England, where God’s restoration of order confirmed the nation’s chosen status. Thus, Milton envisioned England’s chosenness in the fiery apocalyptic Of Reformation, in The Reason of Church-Government, and in Areopagitica. Eikonoklastes marks a turn in England’s chosen status as Milton’s faith in the nation becomes shaken by the English who deny their election by reverting to their former slavery, an accusation he repeats in The Readie and Easie Way. In De Doctrina Christiana, Milton surveys various concepts of election. His understanding of the term is distinct from that of predestinarian theologians such as Hieronymus Zanchius, William Bucanus, Johan Wolleb, William Perkins, and Calvin who advanced such notions as the predestined fall of Adam and predamnation (the ordaining to deserved punishment), while rejecting free-will

theology, the significance of Christ’s mediating role, good works, and the universal availability of election. The elect will be saved through God’s will, but God also offers conditional salvation to all. Different concepts of election are illustrated in Milton’s major poems, though he generally ties election and damnation to the exercise of reason and free will. The cooperation of God’s “sufficient grace” and humanity’s will represented by the acceptance of grace is outlined in book 3 of Paradise Lost (3.173 –75). Milton’s God predestines to salvation those who repent and seek mercy (3.183 –90). Paradise Lost also describes Israel’s national election (12.111–12, 214 –15). In Samson Agonistes, what Milton refers to in De Doctrina Christiana as “special vocation” is applied to Samson (678 – 80), a status and calling that also test Samson’s worthiness. Elizabeth Sauer

“Elegia Prima.” Poem by Milton; full title, “Elegia Prima ad Carolum Diodatum” [First Elegy, to Charles Diodati]. Dating perhaps to April 1626, this verse epistle was written from London to Milton’s close friend Charles Diodati in Cheshire. Diodati was also the intended recipient of “Elegia Sexta.” It is possible that the poem was composed in response to one of two of Diodati’s surviving Greek letters. In the piece Milton expresses his delight in his “exile” from Cambridge University, a likely reference not to the “university vacation” ( John Carey) but to his probable rustication from the university. This may have resulted from a quarrel with his tutor William Chappell. Characterized by its rich mythology and especially by its exuberant Ovidianism, “Elegia Prima” depicts Cambridge, the place from which Milton has been exiled, in terms reminiscent of Ovid’s account of Tomis, the place to which he was banished. Estelle Haan

“Elegia Quarta” [Fourth Elegy]. Poem by Milton. Composed in March 1627 (“Anno Aetatis 18” [at age eighteen]), this Latin verse epistle outlines Milton’s gratitude toward Thomas Young, his former tutor, now pastor at Hamburg. As Milton’s tutor between approximately the ages of nine and twelve, Young played an important role in introducing the young poet to the classics (see lines 29 –32). An accompanying Latin prose letter dated 26 March thanks Young for the gift of a Hebrew Bible. The poem articulates a genuine affection between Milton and Young, who in lines 19 –20 is depicted in

“Elegia Sexta”

terms reminiscent of Horace’s description of Virgil animae dimidium meae (Odes 1.3.8). Estelle Haan

“Elegia Quinta.” Poem by Milton; full title, “Elegia Quinta. In Adventum Veris” [Fifth Elegy. On the Coming of Spring]. Composed “Anno Aetatis 20” (at age twenty), it may be dated to spring 1629. Taking as its subject the arrival of spring in the natural world, the poem also celebrates the associated onset of inspiration within the poet, and in so doing achieves a fusion between earthy sexual, and indeed secular, realism (in nature and among pagan deities) and a more elevated vatic and quasireligious stance. One of the key features of the elegy is the parallel established between nature and the speaker, between virescit (line 4) of the earth as it receives new life and vigescit (line 7) of the poet’s ingenium. Moreover, inspiration is presented as a poetic frenzy that is spiritual (spiritus [line 21]) in essence: a sacred fury (sacer . . . furor [line 22]). Set against this is Phoebus’s wooing of Aurora and the teasingly daring striptease performed by Earth as she casts off her old age and longs to be held in Phoebus’s embrace. As a spring poem, “Elegia Quinta” takes its place alongside classical and neo-Latin treatments of the theme by, for example, Horace, Girlolamo Fracastoro, Andrea Navagero, and Jacopo Sannazaro, and may interact in particular with George Buchanan’s Maiae Calendae (Elegy 2). But it seems to transcend the genre in its depiction of the close affinity between nature and the poetic art. Estelle Haan

“Elegia Secunda.” Poem by Milton; full title, “Elegia Secunda. In Obitum Praeconis” [Second Elegy. On the Death of the Beadle]. The Cambridge University beadle, Richard Ridding, died on 26 September 1626, so Milton would have composed this short elegy sometime during the following month, possibly as a contribution to a projected memorial volume. In keeping with the custom of the time, a copy of these verses would have been pinned to the black cloth covering the coffin, for mourners to read; such verses were often thrown into the grave at interment. Ridding was an alumnus of St. John’s; he matriculated in 1587, with a B.A. in 1591 and an M.A. in 1594. His function as beadle was to act as the official messenger of the vice chancellor and to marshal academic processions. The conceit on which the poem hinges is that Death, the ultimate beadle, has summoned his Cambridge equivalent to

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everlasting rest. The application of a series of Greek mythological figures to the deceased is entirely conventional in academic exercises at this time. The sources of Milton’s allusions are Ovidian. They were published in the 1645 volume of Milton’s poems (see Poems of Mr. John Milton [1645]) and again in 1673. Graham Parry

“Elegia Septima” [Seventh Elegy]. Poem by Milton. Composed “anno aetatis undevigesimo” (in the nineteenth year of age), it may be dated to the spring of 1628. A more precise date based on the reference to the first of May in the poem is possible, but the reference may indicate no more than the poem’s dating of the time of Cupid’s visit to the speaker. Likewise, it is unwise to read any autobiographical significance into the piece. “Elegia Septima” describes an experience of first love instigated by Cupid’s revenge upon the speaker for a slight to his godhead. Marked by its youthful and romantic conception, and its wryly detached and ironic tone, the poem draws upon the playfulness of such classical elegists as Ovid and Propertius. It also finds less refined parallels in the neo-Latin poetry of Joannes Secundus and George Buchanan, whose ninth Latin elegy (De Neaera) likewise conveys the speaker’s attempt to escape the snares of Cupid. Estelle Haan

“Elegia Sexta.” Poem by Milton; full title, “Elegia Sexta. Ad Carolum Diodatum, Ruri Commorantem [Sixth Elegy. To Charles Diodati Staying in the Country]. It may be dated to c. December 1629 since its closing lines (79 – 88) summarize “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” and suggest that its composition is a recent event. Like “Elegia Prima” the poem is addressed to Milton’s friend Charles Diodati. As indicated by the headnote, the Latin verses reply to a letter of Diodati dated 13 December (qui cum idibus Decemb scripsisset) requesting that his poems be pardoned if they are less good than usual and offering as an excuse the favorable reception he has gained from his friends and the fact that he has had inadequate time to pay to the muses. “Elegia Sexta” seems to pick up and rework Diodati’s references to festivity and lack of inspiration (summarized in Milton’s headnote). In outlining the contrast between wine and the divine as inspirational forces, Milton gives expression to a debate voiced in the writings of such Renaissance theorists as Antonio Minturno (De Poeta) and

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“Elegia Sexta”

Julius Caesar Scaliger (Poetices Libri Septem) and also sheds some light on his early conception of the epic poet. Estelle Haan

“Elegia Tertia.” Poem by Milton; full title, “Elegia Tertia. In Obitum Praesulis Wintoniensis” [Third Elegy. On the Death of the Bishop of Winchester]. Lancelot Andrewes, bishop of Winchester, was one of the leading churchmen of Jacobean England, in whom profound piety and eminent learning were combined. He had been one of the translators of the King James Bible. Strongly interested in the history and liturgy of the church, he encouraged the practice of a formal and ceremonious mode of worship that looked forward to William Laud. Andrewes had close connections with Cambridge University, having been a fellow and then master of Pembroke Hall from 1575 to 1605. He died on 25 September 1626, and Milton’s poem must have been written shortly thereafter. Milton links the bishop’s death with the devastations of the plague in England the previous year and with recent losses to the Protestant cause incurred during the Thirty Years War. The elegy was first printed in the 1645 volume of Milton’s poems (see Poems of Mr. John Milton [1645]) and again in 1673. See Parry (2001).

Graham Parry

elegy. A mournful lyric poem expressing the poet’s contemplations upon the death or loss of a particular person, or upon death in general, expressed in the form of a lament and often ending in some form of consolation. In classical Greek and Roman literature, the term elegeia was used to describe a song of mourning written in alternating hexameters and pentameters, although it could also describe any kind of meditative poem dealing with a variety of subjects, whether serious or merely reflective, including but not limited to death. In classical literature, an elegy was more distinguished by its use of elegiac meter than by its subject matter. In the English tradition, courtly poets of the sixteenth century used the term to describe love poems, mostly complaints (as in the case of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey; Philip Sidney; and Edmund Spenser), but by the seventeenth century the elegy came to signify amatory as well as mournful poetry. Thereafter, elegies were regarded almost solely as poems of mourning that usually contained elements of both lament and

consolation, each of which genre included a number of identifiable topics or conventions that are largely commensurate with those of funerals or funeral rites. Examples from Milton’s early lyric poetry include such works as his Latin elegiac verses “On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough,” “Lycidas,” and “Epitaphium Damonis.” See OCCL.

Philip E. Phillips

Elizabeth I (1533 –1603). Queen of England, Wales, and Ireland. Elizabeth Tudor ruled England from 1558 to 1603, the third and last child of Henry VIII to come to the throne. After the extremes of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism that marked the reigns of her younger brother, Edward VI, and older sister, Mary I, Elizabeth strove to avoid further religious strife for reasons more political than theological. The Act of Uniformity (1559) erased the work of the reign of Mary I. After Mary’s devotion to Rome and public burnings of Protestant “heretics,” the Elizabethan Settlement, or Compromise, as it came to be called, was seen as moderate. Although it was hardly a compromise—the Book of Common Prayer was once more compulsory, priests could marry, Elizabeth was declared supreme governor of the Church of England, and church attendance was made mandatory (with a punitive fine of one shilling per week)—no one was threatened with death merely for individual beliefs. In The Readie and Easie Way, Milton calls Elizabeth “so good a Protestant”—not an especially accurate statement, especially after her refusal to let the House of Commons institute more Protestant reforms in 1572. Milton’s remarks on Elizabeth are scattered through his Commonplace Book and A Brief History of Moscovia and are generally positive, if largely limited to the factual. As for Milton’s general stance on female rulers, he challenges the story of Boadicea [Boudicca] and diminishes the importance of Martia in The History of Britain, but he praises Queen Christina of Sweden quite lavishly in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda. See Walker (2004).

Julia M. Walker

Ellwood, Thomas (1639 –1713). Quaker leader and friend of Milton. Born into a gentry-class family in Oxfordshire, he did not attend university, a deficiency that he came to feel keenly. In 1659 –1660

England

he was converted to Quakerism, and he was imprisoned several times in the 1660s. Through his association with Isaac Penington the younger, he came to know Nathan Paget, a friend of Milton’s. In return for lessons to remedy his deficiency in the ancient tongues, Ellwood read to the blind Milton regularly. The account in his History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood (London, 1714) usefully describes the support network and coping strategies developed to allow Milton’s research and writing to continue despite his disability. In 1665 Ellwood arranged for Milton and his family to retreat from the plague to a cottage in Chalfont St. Giles. There, Ellwood read Paradise Lost in manuscript and, on his own account, suggested it needed a companion piece, thus inspiring Paradise Regained. This claim, however, is usually treated with skepticism by the critical tradition. Yet Ellwood was a man of courage and intelligence whom Milton plainly respected. Later, the Quaker movement would entrust to him the task of transcribing and publishing the Journal of George Fox. Thomas N. Corns

Engagement Controversy. A debate in England about loyalty to the new government— or Engagement—after the execution of Charles I. Following similar oaths taken by members of the Council of State and the Purged Parliament, a bill passed in October 1649 required the entire literate population to endorse the authority of Parliament without a king or House of Lords. On 2 January 1650 it was extended even further, so that each male citizen of the Commonwealth older than eighteen was required to “declare and promise” loyalty to the new government. Milton’s sixth state letter, addressed to the senate of Hamburg, urges that English merchants abroad be allowed to subscribe to the Engagement without interference. In a manuscript note to his Fasti Oxonienses, Anthony Wood erroneously attributed to Milton The Grand Case of Conscience Concerning the Engagement (1650), a tract arguing for the consistency of the Engagement with the spirit of the Solemn League and Covenant; this attribution was dismissed by Thomas Birch in his 1738 edition of the Works of John Milton. See Worden (1974).

Feisal G. Mohamed

England. A country to be distinguished from Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, which, together

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with it, constitute the British Isles. Multiple factors contributed to the formation of English history and nationhood, including the accession of the Tudors to power, the end of the Hundred Years War, and continental humanism. Henry VIII renounced the foreign jurisdiction of the See of Rome and was confirmed as supreme head of the Church of England by the first Act of Supremacy in 1536. The most decisive factor in England’s development, the Protestant Reformation, whose intellectual origins lay in Europe, mediated the transformation into the modern nation and defined England’s distinctive identity. In conjunction with the revival of Old Testament nationalism, the Reformation gave rise to the concept of a providential and manifest destiny and to myths of ethnic election. The effect of print culture was crucial to the emergence of the English identity. The Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation were among the landmarks in the history of English Christian nationalism. The nation was also conceptualized in chorography—which gives a narrative to topographical survey and represents history through geographical mapping (Richard Helgerson). George Sandys, Samuel Purchas, Thomas Fuller, and Peter Heylin produced the influential chorographical works including maps and travel literature that located England’s central place on the globe. Encompassing the whole world textually as well as chorographically, Heylin’s 1652 Cosmographie describes England’s geographical location and outlines the nation’s history from the time that the first Saxon monarch named the southern parts of Albion (or later Britain) “England,” a name derived “from the Angles, who with the Jutes and Saxons conquered it.” In terms of its geography, history, and culture, England is hailed by the early English historians as the superior nation. England achieved its literary embodiment in the imaginatively constructed nations of Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare. The nation’s self-designated prophet, however, was Milton. His meditations on England as a community of the elect serve as an impetus for an emerging Protestant nation. The identification of English nationalism with Protestantism fueled Milton’s opposition to popish tyranny, which in the early tracts became bound up with monarchy and prelacy. True Englishness for Milton was defined by civil liberties and religious toleration, which Parliament was responsible for promoting.

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The English revert to their former slavery under kingship, Milton laments in The Readie and Easie Way, and he proceeds to justify rule by a minority. The Restoration was for Milton a time of disillusion with the English. In private correspondence, Milton alluded to his redefined relationship with England: “One’s Patria is wherever it is well with him.” The great works he produced during this period are correspondingly less national and more universal than the epics of his classical and Renaissance predecessors, Virgil and Edmund Spenser, and yet they possess contemporary preoccupations specific to England. See Hadfield (2001).

Elizabeth Sauer

English Revolution. Term used to describe various tumultuous events in English history in the 1640s and 1650s, including the civil wars, the execution of Charles I, and the establishment of an English republic. The word “revolution” certainly had some currency in the mid-seventeenth century in roughly its modern political signification. However, a review of book titles suggests strongly that the Williamite Revolution of 1688 –1690 was contemporaneously much more likely to be termed a “revolution” than were the events of the mid-century. Indeed, after the Restoration, the favored word for the latter was “rebellion,” which is a judgmental term carrying a clear implication of treasonous illegality. In later historiography, the use of the term “English Revolution” was perhaps accelerated by the Whig tradition, which saw the history of the 1640s as anticipating the Glorious Revolution of William III and Mary II. Among later scholars, the term is more current among those writing in the tradition of Christopher Hill and is less frequently employed by revisionist historians and critics who follow them. See OED.

Thomas N. Corns

Ephesians. Book of the New Testament. Modern scholars have questioned Paul’s authorship of the letter to the Ephesians, partly because of its pleonastic style and, ironically, partly because of its comprehensive articulation of Pauline theology. Perhaps a summary of Paul’s teachings drawn up by a second-generation disciple, it is distinctively lucid and coherent. Paul’s poetic description of the spiritual armor of God inspired a warfaring, instead of just wayfaring, conception of Christian activ-

ism (cf. the textual crux in Areopagitica; also PL 12.491–92). Gregory Kneidel

epic. A long narrative poem distinguished by a particular kind of magnitude and grandeur. It exhibits encyclopedic knowledge; expansive temporal and cosmic perspectives; an august, ceremonial style; a unifying principal action; and a focus upon heroes. In the early modern period, “heroic poem” was synonymous with “epic.” Renaissance humanism resulted in a proliferation of attempts by Christian writers to emulate the epics of Homer and Virgil. Notable successes were Lui´s Vaz de Camões’s epic of Portugal, Os Lusíadas (1572), and Torquato Tasso’s epic of the First Crusade, Gerusalemme Liberata (1575). Milton’s early aspirations as expressed in The Reason of Church-Government were similar. Paradise Lost follows the theory of Aristotle and Horace. Its various components, not least the title, serve the principal action, which Aristotle considered the lifeblood of epic; as Horace advised, the poem begins in medias res, and decorum is minutely observed, so that, within a general epic majesty, the style varies according to situation, subject, and character. At the same time, Milton the inspired iconoclast breaks and recasts epic. His subject is not national, but universal. Above all, Milton in Paradise Lost turns epic heroism on its head. He invests Satan and the fallen angels with the prowess of epic heroes— Satan is like Achilles, Odysseus, Turnus, and even Aeneas—but the spiritual valor of Abdiel emerges as a higher heroism; and in the War in Heaven, the Son subsumes and transcends both the Homeric ethos and the Renaissance ideal of magnanimity. By book 9 Milton claims that the subject of his “Heroic Song” is “more Heroic” than that of classical epic, and that, within a tradition encompassing epic and romance, may be singled out as justly “Heroic” (PL 9.13 – 44). Paradise Regained is a realization of Milton’s early consideration of “that Epick form” of which “the book of Job [is] a brief model.” While it barely relates to classical epic, it has thematic and structural affinities with the Book of Job and belongs to a European tradition of brief biblical epics that began in the fourth century. See Martindale (1986), OCCL, Porter (1993), Quint (1993).

Beverley Sherry

Epistolarum Familiarum Liber Unus

epic simile. An ornate comparison differing from simple simile in its greater length and detail. It originated with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and appeared before Milton notably in Virgil and Dante. The complex simile allows Milton to expound upon an image, an abstract idea, a character, or a geographical place. For example, in Paradise Lost (1.284 –91), the basic comparison of Satan’s “large and round” shield hanging upon “his shoulders like the Moon” acquires epic shape and luminous density when he ornaments the moon in this way: . . . whose orb Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views At evening from the top of Fesole, Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands, Rivers or mountains in her spotty globe. Of the 237 similes in Paradise Lost, 99 are epic and 138 are simple (if we allow as few as three to four lines in the form; otherwise, there are 92 epic similes of at least five lines). Larry R. Isitt

Epicurus (c. 341–270 B.C.). Greek philosopher. He established an important school, the Garden, in Athens. His materialist views supported an ethics based on tranquility as life’s highest pleasure and goal. After Epicurus’s death his philosophy flourished, rivaling Stoicism. Its hedonism and belief in divine indifference were denounced, but teachings against superstition and about higher pleasures gained occasional acceptance. During the Renaissance, recoveries of Diogenes Laertius and Lucretius led to a revival of interest; later, Pierre Gassendi would rehabilitate Epicurean atomism. Milton associates Epicurus with luxurious pleasure in the antiprelacy tracts and with “careless ease” in Paradise Regained (4.299). He refers to Epicurus’s mortalism in the seventh of his Prolusions and his skepticism toward divine solicitude in Areopagitica. See Fallon (1991).

Stephen M. Buhler

epigram. Originally, an inscription, then a poetic one, then any brief poem upon an occasion, and overwhelmingly one in elegiac couplets. Praise or commemoration or love was its Greek locus. The Romans, especially Martial, moved the form toward its modern meaning of a short witty poem with a

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surprise ending. For Milton, the term refers to the shorter occasional Latin elegiacs among the Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645)—it is their shortness that distinguishes them from the numbered “Elegiae” in the same meter. They comprise the poems on the Gunpowder Plot (“In Proditionem Bombardicam” and “In Eandem”) and on the inventor of gunpowder (“In Inventorem Bombardae”), and those on the singer Leonora Baroni (“Ad Leonoram Romae Canentem” and “Ad Eandem”). See OCCL.

John K. Hale

episcopacy. A system of church government by bishops. Controversies about church government in Milton’s age often focused on the role and status of bishops in the early Christian church and the extent to which apostolic church government had instituted a hierarchical order that invested considerable authority in bishops over other clergy. Until their authority was openly and successfully challenged in the 1640s, the archbishops and bishops of the Church of England in effect managed ecclesiastical affairs through a hierarchical system that subordinated more junior clergy and the laity to their control. Such structures were largely missing from the reformed churches that radical reformers regarded as appropriate models. Milton argued against the episcopal government of the Church of England, drawing on scriptural evidence, the history of the early church, and more recent ecclesiastical history. See, especially, Of Reformation, Of Prelatical Episcopacy, and Reason of ChurchGovernment. Thomas N. Corns

Epistolae Familiares. A collection of private letters of Milton published as a book in 1674; see Epistolarum Familiarum Liber Unus. Epistolarum Familiarum Liber Unus [Book I of the Familiar Letters]. Collection of private letters and Prolusions put out by Milton in 1674; full title, Joannis Miltonii Angli, Epistolarum Familiarum Liber Unus: Quibus Accesserunt, Ejusdem, jam olim in Collegio Adolescentis, Prolusiones Quaedam Oratoriae [Book I of the Familiar Letters; to Which Are Added Certain Prolusions of the Oratorical Art by the Same Person, When He Was a Young Man in College]. Shortly before his death, Milton gathered and prepared for press a collection of his private

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Latin correspondence extending back to the 1620s and exchanged with friends, pupils, and acquaintances, both in England and in the community of continental European humanists. The letters demonstrate the eloquence of his less public neo-Latin. The collection was published by Brabazon Aylmer (see stationers). It has been speculated that Aylmer had hoped to make a double volume with Milton’s Letters of State, and that, when that proved impossible or impolitic, he supplemented the letters with Milton’s university Prolusions to produce a book-length publication. Thomas N. Corns

“Epitaphium Damonis” [Damon’s Epitaph]. Poem by Milton. Composed shortly after Milton’s return to England after his travels of 1638 –1639 (c. autumn 1639), it is a pastoral elegy on his close friend Charles Diodati, who had died in London (buried 27 August 1638) while Milton was in Florence. That Milton arranged to have the poem privately published is indicated by Leicester Bradner’s discovery in the British Library of an anonymous copy titled “Damon.” That he sent a copy of the poem to Italian academicians in Florence is attested by Carlo Dati’s acknowledgement of his receipt of such in a letter to Milton. The poem as a whole establishes a series of parallels and contrasts between England and Italy with Diodati’s Italian extraction (“et Thuscus tu quoque Damon” [line 127]) facilitating as a natural bridge between these two worlds. The choice of the pastoral mode is particularly pertinent when viewed alongside the exuberant pastoralism of Diodati’s extant Greek letters to Milton.

Erasmus, Desiderius (c. 1467–1536). Humanist scholar, educator, and theologian. He was born in Rotterdam. He became an Augustinian canon and was ordained a priest. A scholar of international renown, he studied and taught in Paris, Louvain, England, Italy, Basel, and Freiburg im Breisgau, moving freely among major seats of learning. In theological terms, his greatest achievement was probably his edition and Latin translation of the Greek New Testament. During the years he spent in England, he proved a leading figure among humanist educational reformers and influenced John Colet, who refashioned St. Paul’s School into an institution not radically different from that of Milton’s own school days. He was a powerful advocate for founding education on a mastery of classical languages and biblical Hebrew. A generation older than Martin Luther, Erasmus shared with him many assumptions about the importance of the fresh interrogation of biblical evidence, as opposed to received tradition. He did not, however, break with the Roman Catholic Church and engaged Luther in important controversial exchanges. Nevertheless, in the English Protestant tradition he was held in high regard into Milton’s own age and beyond as, in some respects, a precursor of the Reformation. Milton found in him some welcome confirmation of his own views on the reform of divorce laws. In the Judgement of Martin Bucer Milton invokes Erasmus’s “eloquent and right Christian discours” on the topic. He cites him several times in Tetrachordon, noting the parallels between his interpretation of key biblical passages and Milton’s own. See ODNB, ODR.

Thomas N. Corns Estelle Haan

“Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester, An.” Poem by Milton commemorating the death of Jane Paulet, Marchioness of Winchester. It can confidently be assigned to 1631, although it did not appear in print until 1645. Numerous poems on her death survive, and it has been conjectured that a volume by Cambridge poets had been projected, though never completed. Ben Jonson also wrote an elegy on the marchioness, and the octosyllabic verse form, sometimes favored by Jonson, may reflect a Miltonic gesture toward the older poet. The poem had some limited manuscript circulation before its appearance in print. Thomas N. Corns

Erastianism. The set of beliefs supposedly derived from Thomas Erastus (1524 –1583) that asserts the ascendancy of the state over the church even in ecclesiastical matters. Erastus was a SwissGerman physician and theologian who disputed the practice of the Calvinist churches of continental Europe of using widely the power of excommunication. His works were not widely read in England in the early seventeenth century, and his principal publication, the Explicatio, was not published in an English translation until 1659. However, a more general influence is discernible among some influential figures of the mid-century, and some of those who in the Long Parliament and the Westminster Assembly of Divines opposed the reformation of the church along Scot-

Euripides

tish Presbyterian lines have been termed Erastians. Erastianism was probably an influence in shaping Milton’s own views on the separation of church and state. Thomas N. Corns

Esther. Book of the Old Testament. It relates episodes from the Babylonian exile of the Jews. Mordecai, a leading figure among the Jews, saves Ahasuerus (that is, Xerxes I) from an assassination plot. Haman, the new grand vizier, initiates the prosecution of Mordecai as a stage in concerted action against the Jewish migrants and intends his execution. However, Mordecai’s niece, Esther, has gained favor with Ahasuerus and become his queen. The king, reviewing recent events, realizes that Mordecai was unrewarded for his former loyalty and is advised of Haman’s intentions. Haman is hanged, largely at the prompting of Esther, and his family also executed. The events are celebrated with a new festival, Purim, which survives among the festive days observed in modern Judaism. Milton dips occasionally into the story in the course of De Doctrina Christiana. Esther’s vindictiveness is alluded to in his consideration of the status of vengeance. Purim provides an example for Milton of how public feasts may be initiated. Esther’s rise from the harem of virgins sampled in turn by the king to the status of queen offers him some insight into how polygamy could have been organized in the ancient world. Her history also affords an example, discussed by Martin Luther, of legitimate remarriage after divorce; Milton alludes to the event and the discussion in Tetrachordon. See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

eternity. In Christian tradition eternity is ascribed to God as a timeless condition of stasis. It is distinct from endless time, a distinction emphasized by Augustine (City of God xi.6, xii.10, 12; Confessions xi.11) and Boethius (De Trinitate iv; Consolatio Philosophiae v.6). Milton departs from this tradition: his Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio states that “to God is usually attributed ævum or eternity, and not time. But what properly is ævum if not perpetual duration?” Eternity as stasis is suggested in Paradise Lost (7.91–92, 12.314), but Milton more typically represents eternal rest paradoxically as movement and eternity as duration (“On the Morning of

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Christ’s Nativity” 13, “On Time” 11, “At a Solemn Music” 28, PL 3.337, 12.549). In Paradise Lost there is change and movement in both heaven and hell: “Grateful vicissitude” (6.8) and harmonious movement in heaven, and turbulence in hell, the condition described in A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle as “eternal restless change” (595). Heaven and hell are created states, eternal in the sense of being everlasting. In Of Reformation and De Doctrina Christiana, the blessed progress to eternity in heaven while the damned are “thrown downe eternally” into hell. See Cummins (2003).

Beverley Sherry

Eton. A village and school in England. Associations with Milton’s life span four decades. Eton College owned the home on Bread Street that Milton’s father leased from Sir Baptist Hicks. In late March or early April 1638 Milton visited Eton College and met its provost, Sir Henry Wotton, most likely making the short journey of five miles from the family residence in Horton. The two men exchanged letters, Milton writing first on 6 April 1638 and including a copy of a poem, and Wotton responding on 13 April with comments revealing that poem to be A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle. A letter that Andrew Marvell wrote to Milton on 2 June 1654 establishes additional contact with the village and college. On 30 May 1654 Milton sent a letter and three copies of Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda to Marvell at Eton: one for Marvell; one for John Oxenbridge, a recently elected fellow; and one for John Bradshaw, to whom Milton also enclosed a letter. Edward Jones

Euripides (480 – c. 406 B.C.). Greek dramatist. Of the three main Greek tragedians, it is Euripides (rather than Sophocles or Aeschylus) whose influence on Milton is fundamental. The evidence ranges from anecdotes about his favorite reading to his very extensive Euripidean marginalia, and from choices of epigraph and allusion to the imitations embedded in Samson Agonistes. Certainly Milton knew all three poets, together with Aristotle’s discussion of tragedy in the Poetics, not to mention the comedies of Aristophanes. But it remains misleading to think of the others as having influence commensurate with Milton’s absorption of, and in, Euripides. Milton is a fellow-rationalist

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with Euripides, argumentative and advocatorial from whatever side he is taking. John K. Hale

Eusebius (c. 260 – c. 340). Bishop of Caesarea (in modern-day Israel) and church historian. In Of Prelatical Episcopacy Milton calls him “the ancientest writer extant of Church-history.” His “Ecclesiastical History,” which deals with the early church from the apostolic age to his own day, provided much information about primitive episcopacy, and Milton both takes notes from it in his Commonplace Book and cites it frequently in his antiprelatical tracts of 1641–1642. See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

Eve. In the Bible, the first woman and wife of Adam. In Paradise Lost she is one of the most complexly presented figures in literature, not least because there is so little about her in Genesis chapters 2 and 3, yet so much about her in the Christian canon. In Genesis, the woman created out of Adam’s rib, the woman who takes and eats the forbidden fruit and gives it to Adam who also eats, has no name. Not until Adam is told he is to be expelled from Eden (Gen. 3:20) does he name Eve. Milton first presents Adam and Eve to the reader as a couple in Paradise Lost 4.287, albeit a couple with a strong resemblance to the first sighting of Sin and Death in book 2. They are described as having “the image of their glorious maker” (4.292) in their looks, “though both / Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed” (4.295 –96), but neither of their names is given until lines 323 –24. Unlike Eve of the scriptures, however, Milton’s Eve has a great deal to say for herself. Of Milton’s couple, she speaks both first and last in the poem. Eve’s first speech (after an introduction in which she regrets that Adam has no audience his equal, while she has him) is her own creation narrative, from the moment she awoke in the shade, to her visit to a reflecting lake, to the intervention of God’s voice, to her first sight of Adam, to her submission to her husband. Adam is her audience, but Satan also hears her speech. The key allusion in Eve’s creation narrative is to Ovid’s story of Narcissus, for she unknowingly finds her own reflection in a lake and is drawn away from it by a voice warning that she must turn aside or stay there pining with “vain desire” (4.466), a telling pun. Although she wishes to return and gaze at what she now knows to be her-

self, the voice leads her “invisibly” to what she is told will be “he / Whose image thou art, him thou shall enjoy / Inseparably thine” (4.471–73). Seeing Adam, however, she finds him “fair indeed and tall,” but “less fair” (4.477–78) than the image in the lake, to which she tries to return. She tells Adam of hearing his cry “Return fair Eve” (4.481) as she seeks again the “smooth watery image” (4.480), and tells him that she eventually yields after he seizes her hand. By giving both Adam and the reader (and Satan) this detailed narrative, Milton makes clear the extent to which Eve lacks a sense of self apart from Adam: she is told that she is made in Adam’s image but knows that Adam differs from the image she saw, unidentified, in the lake. This narrative also renders willfully revisionist Adam’s account in book 8 of the reason why Eve turns away. In addition to giving the version from Genesis chapter 2 of Eve’s creation from his rib, Adam there tells Raphael that Eve turned away because she wanted to be pursued and wooed. Satan marks out Eve as the weaker of the pair, and it is Eve’s head into which he puts a dream of the Fall; she wakes weeping and Adam comforts her. While he is being educated by Raphael, Eve most often retires, preferring, as the narrator says in book 8, to learn of the angel’s teachings from Adam, amid embraces and between kisses. Although this turning away from education is presented as an essential part of Eve, she does sometimes overhear the dialogue, thus learning that there is a threat in the Garden. In book 9 she proposes to work in the Garden independently of Adam, challenging him to trust her. Some critics see their argument over this separation as a preface to the Fall, since Adam does not force Eve to obey. Other critics see it as an exercise in free will. As she works alone in the Garden, Satan sees her and by her beauty is struck, temporarily, “Stupidly good” (9.465). Recovering, Satan, in the body of the serpent, tempts Eve with knowledge, which in this poem is something given to Adam, not only before her creation, but while she has been otherwise occupied and retiring. She eats, then expresses satisfaction that she can now be “more equal, and perhaps, / A thing not undesirable, sometime / Superior: for inferior who is free?” (9.823 –25), those last words echoing Satan’s speeches in book 1. After the Fall, it is Eve who proposes, while Adam is giving in to despair, that they avoid the burden of their punishment on their descendants by ending their lives. Here, Eve seems in many ways stronger than Adam, insofar as she is able to think somewhat altruistically of future generations, even

Exodus

before Michael’s visions of the future are granted, while Adam thinks only of his own plight, wishing that God had filled the world with “Men as angels without feminine” (10.893). Eve suggests that they remain childless and choose death themselves so as “to prevent / The Race unblest” (10.987– 88). Adam’s indignant rejection of this proposal ignores his own recent consideration of suicide. It is Eve’s abject apology, which Adam accepts, that allows the pair to face their future. The most radical departure Milton makes from canonical representations of Eve is to make Adam, not her, clearly responsible for the Fall. He falls “not deceived, / But fondly overcome with female charm” (9.998 –99). While Adam holds Eve’s beauty too dear, as Raphael has told him, the fault for that does not lie with her. Her beauty, when linked to nature, is positive; but the attraction that that beauty holds for Adam is negative, even unnatural. When Eve claims blame for “all this woe” (10.935), she asks that God’s sentence be pronounced on “Me me only just object of his ire” (10.936). The subliminally heard “just object of desire” underlines Adam’s problem with Eve’s beauty. Readers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have found Eve’s lack of intellect—a key element in making Adam the more responsible—to be a great stumbling block to a benign interpretation of Milton’s first woman, but readers (especially women) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries found Milton’s Eve to be a positively enlightened representation of woman, relative to the centuries of writings following the pronouncements of Paul (see women, Milton’s representation of). Feminist critics have given a number of insightful readings of Eve, among which Patricia Parker’s stands out: Eve is the only key figure in Genesis who, having come into existence second or later in a story, does not triumph over the eldest member of her generation. From Cain and Abel to Joseph and his brothers, the first-born always loses out. Milton’s Eve, by speaking first and presenting her creation narrative before Adam’s, can be read as participating in that pattern. Milton has managed to make Eve both secondary and supplanted. In Paradise Regained, Eve is called Adam’s “facile consort” (1.51), a designation more in keeping with Pauline tradition. While some critics argue that Milton constructs Eve as the perfect wife, his continual stressing of her singularity refutes this reading. Milton presents Eve not as a woman, but as the first woman. She is at once the singular figure and a type, as Milton suggests in this complex set of appositives: “Adam the goodliest man of men since

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born / His sons, the fairest of her daughters Eve” (PL 4.323 –24). See McColley (1983), Walker (1998).

Julia M. Walker

Evelyn, John (1620 –1706). Diarist. He was educated at Oxford University. His Diary (1641– 1705) comprises an invaluable account of later Stuart England; though lacking Pepys’s inimitable style, it is six times as long. On 24 October 1663 he noted: “Mr. Edw: Philips, came to be my sonns praecepetor: This Gent: was Nephew to Milton who writ against Salmasius’s Defensio [Regia Pro Carolo I (1649)] but not at all infected with his principles, & though brought up by him, yet no way taint[e]d.” He later (9 June 1686) termed the poet’s brother Christopher Milton a “papist” for becoming baron of the exchequer without agreeing to the Test Act, referring to him as “bro: to the Milton who wrot for the Regicides,” having earlier cited Milton’s advocacy of regicide in the preface to The Pernicious Consequences of the New Heresie of the Jesuites (1666). Though a royalist, Evelyn took no active part in the civil wars, touring the Continent instead. In 1652 he retired to Sayes Court, Essex, publishing on various topics. Acetaria. A Discourse of Sallets (1699) alludes to Paradise Lost, stating that “our Paradisian Bard introduces Eve, dressing of a Sallet for her Angelical Guest” and cites the epic: 5.333 –36 and 5.304 –5, 338, 341– 47, 391–94, 445 – 46. His Fumifugium: or The Inconveniencie of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated (1661) expresses a concern for ecology displayed in Adam and Eve’s stewardship of Eden (cf. PL 4.340 – 46, 5.321– 49, 8.96). Evelyn’s Numismata. A Discourse of Medals, Antient and Modern (1697) names Milton among the English poets. Evelyn became James II’s commissioner for the privy seal and was an early member of the Royal Society. Christopher Baker

exercises at Cambridge University. See Prolusions. Exodus. Book of the Old Testament, the second “book of Moses.” It takes its name from the departure of the children of Israel from Egypt, after a period of servitude when the Pharaohs no longer remembered Joseph. The book has three major, interwoven themes: (1) A history of the Israelite liberation: oppression in Egypt, departure after ten

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plagues culminating in the death of the firstborn of every household (from which the Israelites were spared, the source of Passover commemorations), crossing of the Red Sea, and crises in the wilderness. Murmurings caused by hunger are resolved through miraculous aid, manna from heaven, and water from a rock, and a desire to be like other nations is met with Moses’s violent anger and the destruction of the golden calf forged by Aaron while Moses was absent from the camp. (2) The biography of Moses: from being a babe in the bulrushes, to fleeing to Midian after killing an Egyptian official, serving as his father-in-law’s shepherd until God speaks to him from a burning bush, confronting Pharaoh, leading a restless people in the wilderness, and receiving the Law from God on Mount Sinai. (3) The law code transmitted by God through Moses, including the Ten Commandments. Milton’s prose and poetry are full of references to all three of these strands. See Lieb (1981).

Kay Gilliland Stevenson

Ezekiel. Book of the Old Testament. Like the other two major prophetic books, Isaiah and Jeremiah, it rehearses the themes of the collapse of the kingdom of Judah under its own corruption, the imminent fall of Jerusalem, and the Babylonian exile of the Jews. In De Doctrina Christiana Milton draws on it less frequently than on the other two but nevertheless cites it 128 times. Its most distinc-

tive incident, however, has a profound effect on his poetry, assuming a literally central importance in Paradise Lost. In Ezekiel chapters 1 and 10, as the prophet receives a divine visitation, God arrives in an elaborately described chariot. At the very center of Milton’s epic the Son enters the “chariot of paternal deity” in order to sally out and overthrow the rebel angels. It, too, is described in considerable detail, which rests closely on the description in Ezekiel (6.750, 751–53). As in Ezekiel, what is depicted is both a chariot and a throne. See Bauman (1989), ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

Ezra. Book of the Old Testament. It narrates the return of the Israelites from captivity in Babylon and the rebuilding of the temple under the protection of successive Persian kings and the leadership of Ezra the priest. One component of the return particularly interested Milton. Ezra encouraged the Israelites to “put away” the “strange wives” they had married while in exile, along with their children, in order to ensure the religious purity of the reestablished state (chapter 10). Milton interpreted the incident as an example in which divorce (with the option of remarriage) was “very firmly insisted upon.” The second building of the temple is briefly described in Paradise Lost (12.344 –51). See Bauman (1989), ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

F Fagius, Paul (1504 –1549). Hebraist. After serving as professor of Hebrew at the universities of Strasbourg and then Heidelberg, he was appointed reader in Hebrew at Cambridge University, although he died before he gave any lectures. His arrival in England could be perceived as part of the glorious and godly age of the humanist reformation under Edward VI. Like Martin Bucer, he came at the explicit invitation of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. During the reign of Mary I his remains, like those of Bucer, were exhumed and publicly burned. In the second edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce Milton added an appendix drawn from venerable Protestant divines respected across a broad spectrum of Protestant believers, among whom he places Fagius, thus meeting the charges of heresy leveled against the first edition of the tract. Thomas N. Corns

Fairfax, Thomas, Third Baron Fairfax of Cameron (1612 –1671). Parliamentarian general, statesman, patron, and poet. Born of an ancient Yorkshire military family, he entered St. John’s College, Cambridge University, in 1626. Three years later he left for the Low Countries to fight for the Protestant cause under English general Sir Horace Vere. In 1632 Fairfax returned to England, apparently in hopes of gaining permission to join the Swedish army under Gustavus Adolphus, but he remained in England, marrying his former commander’s daughter, Anne Vere, in 1637. They had one child, Maria, born in 1638. At home, Fairfax was knighted by the king in 1641 for service in the first of the Bishops’ Wars; he was to side with Parliament during the civil wars, however. He was instrumental in securing the parliamentarian victory over the royalists at the Battle of Marston Moor (2 July 1644). Widely regarded for his daring military tactics, Fairfax was appointed Lord General Commander of the New

Model Army on 21 January 1645, and, in one of the decisive battles of the First Civil War, he routed the king’s army at the Battle of Naseby on 14 June 1645. Fairfax’s involvement in England’s political fortunes over the next four years are complicated and often bound up with disputes between the army and Parliament. These involved both matters of army pay, which Fairfax supported, and the fate of the king, whose trial Fairfax apparently condoned but whose execution he opposed and later openly regretted. On 14 May 1649 Fairfax was also called on to suppress the Levellers in the army. Fairfax’s greatest military exploit in the Second Civil War was also one of the most bitterly disputed. On 27 August 1648 the siege at Colchester concluded with the execution of the royalist officers Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle. Royalist poets such as Henry King used the execution to vilify Fairfax, while Milton, in the first of his heroic sonnets (“On the Lord General Fairfax at the Siege of Colchester”), used the occasion of the siege to address Fairfax to be vigilant in pursuing both war and peace. By early 1650, however, Fairfax had retired to Appleton House in Yorkshire, having resigned his military command over objections to Parliament’s proposed invasion of Scotland. Fairfax is one of the Republican heroes Milton celebrates in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda (1654). Sean R. Silver, Jonathan F. S. Post

Faithorne, William (c. 1620 –1691). English engraver, the first to achieve international recognition. He was born in London, but little is known of his early life. According to Griffiths (1998), Faithorne was apprenticed to the printseller William Peake in 1635, then to Peake’s son, Robert. He served in the royalist army as Robert Peake’s ensign until the surrender of Basing House, Hampshire, in 1645. During his imprisonment at Aldersgate, Faithorne 117

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engraved portraits of both royalist and parliamentarian leaders. Exiled to Paris in the late 1640s, he encountered a higher quality of engraving, especially in the work of Robert Nanteuil, portrait engraver to Louis XIV. Back in London by 1652, Faithorne opened a shop near Temple Bar where he sold his own work and that of European engravers. His portrait style became more complex and detailed, as is evident in his 1658 engraving of William Sanderson. In 1662 The Art of Graveing and Etching appeared, which Faithorne had adapted and translated from the French work of 1645 by Abraham Bosse. Faithorne’s engraving from his pastel drawing of John Milton at age sixty-two was executed for the frontispiece of Milton’s The History of Britain (1670). Robert White used this same pastel drawing to engrave the frontispiece for the 1688 folio edition of Paradise Lost. The quality of Faithorne’s work declined during the 1680s. He died in London. See Frye (1978), Griffiths (1998), ODNB.

Patricia G. Waldron, Jonathan F. S. Post

Fall. Christian doctrine of humanity’s movement from a state of innocence and obedience to God to one of sin, disobedience, and suffering. On the basis of the biblical account of the first human transgression, the doctrine seeks to explain the entry of evil, suffering, and death into an originally perfect creation. The biblical account of the Fall follows the creation narratives of Genesis chapters 1 and 2. The Lord God places Adam in the Garden of Eden and commands him: “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Gen. 2:17). After God has created Eve to be with Adam, the serpent, which is “more subtil” than any of the other animals, speaks to Eve (Gen. 3:1). It assures her that eating the fruit will not result in death, but rather: “God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods” (Gen. 3:5). Deceived by the serpent, Eve eats the fruit and gives some to Adam, who also eats. Immediately, Adam and Eve are aware of their nakedness, and they try to hide from God. God judges them for their disobedience, pronouncing curses on the serpent, the woman, and the man. The serpent is to crawl on its belly and to be an enemy of humankind; the woman is to bring forth children in pain and to be ruled by her husband; and the man’s work is to be painful toil, followed eventually by death. The Christian doctrine of the Fall began to develop in response to the Gnostic teaching that mat-

ter is inherently corrupt and that the human soul becomes contaminated through contact with matter. In the eastern church, Irenaeus argued that the world was created by God from nothing and was thus originally good, and in the western church Tertullian claimed that the whole human race was physically present in Adam and was corrupted by Adam’s transgression. The idea of the Fall was elaborated by Augustine during his controversy with Pelagius in the early fifth century. While Pelagius denied any essential connection between the transgression of Adam and the corruption of human nature, Augustine argued that the Fall resulted in both the guilt and the corruption of the whole human race. Building on a literal reading of the biblical narrative, Augustine claimed that Adam and Eve were created with the natural endowments of reason and free will. In addition, God gave them the supernatural gifts of immortality, which preserved them from a natural tendency toward death, and integrity, which preserved them from a tendency toward concupiscence. In this state, the first human beings thus enjoyed holiness, immunity from moral and physical evil, and the freedom to choose between good and evil. By obeying God and by eating of the Tree of Life, they could progressively attain a state of incorporeal, heavenly perfection. The corollary of Augustine’s emphasis on the happiness of humanity’s original condition was an emphasis on the calamity of the Fall and the misery of its consequences. When Adam and Eve freely ate the forbidden fruit, their supernatural gifts were lost and their natural capacity to make free choices was radically perverted. By the misuse of freedom, the human will became inclined to concupiscence and was thus enslaved to evil. Further, because they were physically present in the seed of Adam, all human beings inherit original sin, which includes both the guilt and the corruption of Adam. Augustine affirmed nevertheless that human nature remains inherently good by virtue of its creation. Its corruption is a privation of good, but not a positive substance or quality. Augustine’s doctrine of the Fall remained dominant throughout most of the Middle Ages. In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas viewed original righteousness as a supernatural endowment that consisted in a holy inclination of the will, so that its loss entailed an aversion of the will from God. Thus for Aquinas, humanity has fallen from a supernatural to a natural state, and the will has come under the power of concupiscence, but human nature as such is not corrupted by the Fall. While Aquinas’s

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doctrine of the Fall was a modified Augustinianism, John Duns Scotus (c. 1264 –1308) broke decisively with the Augustinian doctrine, arguing that despite the Fall all human beings retain the same uncorrupted nature and freedom in which Adam was created. The opposing Thomist and Scotist views dominated reflection on the Fall in late medieval theology. The Council of Trent favored the Scotist doctrine but sought to compromise with the Augustinianism of the Thomists. Although Augustine’s doctrine of the Fall had declined considerably by the sixteenth century, the Reformation involved the revival of a significantly modified Augustinianism. Like Augustine, the reformers stressed the perfection of the prelapsarian state and the enormity of the Fall; but unlike Augustine they regarded Adam’s original righteousness as an intrinsic aspect of his created nature. The reformers therefore denied both that the human race fell from a supernatural to a natural state, and that the Fall entailed merely a privation of good. Instead, they claimed that through the Fall human nature was wholly subjected to a state of depravity. This view of human corruption took the form of a denial of free will, most emphatically by Martin Luther, but also by Jean Calvin and the other reformers, who argued that the mind has been darkened and the will inclined toward evil, such that human nature is enslaved to sin. Although the reformers affirmed both the guilt and the corruption of the human race through the Fall, they did not attempt to explain precisely how Adam’s guilt and corruption passed to his descendants. This problem received extensive consideration in seventeenth-century covenant theology, which was developed by Johannes Cocceius (1603 –1669) and achieved credal status in the Westminster Confession of Faith. According to covenant theology, God established a covenant of works with Adam, making Adam the federal representative of humanity and giving him the opportunity to attain eternal life for the entire human race by obeying the divine command. When Adam freely violated the covenant, the guilt of sin was legally imputed to his descendants, and the punishment of this guilt was the depravity of every part of human nature. Milton’s long-term engagement with the story and theology of the Fall is notable even by seventeenth-century standards. Major works such as A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus) and Paradise Regained explore the complex psychological process of temptation and decisionmaking, while Areopagitica affirms the value of

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temptation in a fallen world. De Doctrina Christiana discusses the doctrine of the Fall in detail. It denies that the command to abstain from the Tree of Knowledge was part of a covenant of works; rather, the prohibition was given to Adam and Eve only as a test of obedience. Adam was the federal representative of the human race, and the guilt of his transgression was imputed to his descendants. The judicial consequence of the Fall was death, which includes guilt, terrors of conscience, defilement and shame, the darkening of reason, and the enslavement of the will to sin and Satan.The biblical story of the Fall also provided Milton with the basic narrative of Paradise Lost. See Burden (1967), Danielson (1982).

Benjamin Myers

Familists. Members of the Family of Love and followers of the messianic and mystic Hendrik Niclaes. The group privileged personal experience of the Spirit over the reading of scripture; believed in perfectionism, or the ability of an individual believer to achieve perfection after a moment of mental congruence with God; and were organized in hierarchical and sometimes secretive communities of believers. The group was founded in the 1540s; spread throughout Germany, the Low Countries, France, and England; and seems to have declined by the first half of the seventeenth century. In The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce Milton includes Familists in a list of traditionally heretical “fanatick dreams.” However, in The Reason of Church-Government he writes more sympathetically of them. Linda B. Tredennick

Fawkes, Guy (1570 –1606). Conspirator. He is popularly credited in most people’s minds with masterminding the Gunpowder Plot, an abortive conspiracy to detonate thirty-six barrels of explosives at the opening of the parliamentary session on 5 November 1605, with an intention of killing James I along with family members and members of Parliament. Fawkes confessed the entire plot under torture, and with his associates was tried and executed in January 1606. Milton wrote in Latin four short occasional poems on the Gunpowder Plot (“In Proditionem Bombardicam” [On the Gunpowder Plot] and a further three titled “In Eandem” [On the Same]) and the longer poem “In Quintum Novembris” [On the Fifth of November]. The Latin epigram “In Inventorum Bombardae” [On the

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Inventor of Gunpowder] may also relate to the plot. John Carey dates them to c. November 1626. See ODNB.

Carol Barton

Feast of St. Michael and All Angels (Michaelmas). Widely celebrated across the western Christian tradition, it falls on 29 September. There is a service for the feast in the Book of Common Prayer. Michael was associated with the conduct of souls to God at the point of death and with the open combat against the legions of Satan. Milton’s Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle was first performed on the evening of 29 September, which has stimulated within the critical tradition some consideration of links between the feast and its associated celebration and the text or themes of the masque. Thomas N. Corns

Feast of the Circumcision. See circumcision. Featley, Daniel (1582 –1645). Protestant controversialist. Although he was an active pamphleteer and an eminent preacher during the civil wars, the conservative Featley achieved historical recognition primarily for his attack on Milton in the last major tract of his life, The Dippers Dipt (1645). Featley’s dedicatory epistle makes clear his position on Milton’s writings about divorce: “Witnesse a Tractate of Divorce, in which the bonds of marriage are let loose to inordinate lust, and putting away wives for many other causes besides that which our Saviour only approveth, namely in case of adultery.” This description links Milton with Featley’s subsequent target, the Baptists, whose eccentric habits and lowly intellectual status rendered them suspect to conservative politicians and theologians alike. In the preface to Tetrachordon (1645), Milton repudiates Featley as a blasphemer and slanderer of ecclesiastical and civil authority. James Egan

Fell, Margaret (1614 –1702). Quaker and writer. She was the daughter of John Aksey of Marsh Grange, Lancashire, and wife of Judge Thomas Fell of Swarthmore Hall (d. 1658), by whom she had nine children. In 1669 she married the founder of the Society of Friends, George Fox (d. 1691), at Bristol. She was imprisoned on various occasions in

the 1660s, 1670s, and 1680s, primarily for holding illegal Quaker meetings at her house. As the most prolific female dissenter of her day, she contributed significantly to the Quaker literature of suffering. Her first published work, False Prophets, Anticrists, Deceivers (1655), which exposes the hypocrisy of English Protestants who allegedly aided their fellows on the Continent while persecuting Quakers at home, establishes an important context for examining English responses, including Milton’s (“Sonnet XV” [“On the Late Massacre in Piedmont”]), to the 1655 “Piedmontese massacre.” Elizabeth Sauer

Felton, Nicholas (1556 –1626). Bishop of Ely. He was a friend and protégé of Lancelot Andrewes and perhaps of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham. Like Andrewes, he was for a time the master of Pembroke College, Cambridge. In 1617 he was appointed bishop of Bristol, migrating in 1619 to the richer see of Ely in succession to Andrewes. Milton’s commemorative poem “In Obitum Praesulis Eliensis” [On the Death of the Bishop of Ely] is markedly similar to the poem for Andrewes, “Elegia Tertia, In Obitum Praesulis Wintoniensis” [Third Elegy. On the Death of the Bishop of Winchester]. See ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

Ferdinando II (1610 –1670). Grand Duke of Tuscany. Of the Medici family, he acceded to the title in 1621 and was the ruler during Milton’s residence in Italy during 1638 –1639. His own foreign policy was generally irenic. The English state courted his support in the 1650s because it wanted access to Livorno for its Mediterranean fleet. Milton prepared some of the diplomatic correspondence. See Fallon (1993).

Thomas N. Corns

Ficino, Marsilio (1433 –1499). Italian humanist, philosopher, physician, and priest. Born in Figline, near Florence, he helped establish the Florentine Academy at Careggi, disseminating Neoplatonism through translations of such authors as Plotinus, Iamblichus, and [Pseudo-]Dionysius the Areopagite. His translation into Latin of works by Plato became the standard edition until the eighteenth century. Work on Plato was interrupted by

film adaptation of Milton

the arrival of the Greek Hermetica from Constantinople; his translation of these materials contributed to renewed interest in Hermes Trismegistus and hermeticism generally. Later in life, he published the medico-astrological work De triplici vita [The Three Books on Life]. His influential commentary on Plato’s Symposium (In Convivium Platonis sive de amore) helped to define the early modern idea of “Platonic love” for Pietro Bembo, Baldassare Castiglione (who made Bembo one of the chief interlocutors of The Courtier), and countless others. In his Platonic Theology and other works, Ficino attempts to synthesize the Platonic, Aristotelian, and hermetic traditions within an overarching Christian framework. Milton is perhaps most indebted to Ficino as translator of the Hermetica and of Iamblichus; there may also be reflections of the Ficinian scala amoris (ladder of love) at work in the cosmology and psychology of Paradise Lost. The figure of the Christian adept in natural and occult magic—as seen in the longings of “Il Penseroso” (see “L’Allegro”)— clearly had personal appeal as well: in his Cambridge exercise “De Idea Platonica” Milton has his speaker ironically praise the pedestrian Aristotelianism of his university as offering insights far superior to those of Platonism or of “magnus Hermes (ut sit arcani sciens)” (line 33). Ficino’s conflation of hermeticism and Platonism is an obvious source and inspiration here. Stephen M. Buhler

Fiesole. Former city, later hilltop village and retreat, nine kilometers north of Florence. The Etruscan then Roman city Faesulae, it was occupied by the Ostrogoths and the Byzantines and destroyed by Florence in 1125. The ruined Roman theater still seats three thousand. In a Latin letter to Benedetto Buonmattei, Milton writes that neither the “pelucid” Ilissus of Athens nor “old Rome with her bank of the Tiber” have been “so able to hold me” as have the Arno River and “these hills of Fæsule.” Galileo lived for a time in a villa in Fiesole, as well as at Arcetri on the other side of the Arno, and there conducted experiments with the telescope to supplement the heliocentric theories (see heliocentrism) of Nicolaus Copernicus. The bishop of Fiesole was joined by the archbishops of Pisa and Florence in condemning Galileo’s work and insisting that he appear before the Inquisition and recant. Popularly, Milton’s 1638 –1639 visit to Galileo, described in Areopagitica, is located in Fiesole rather than the more likely Arcetri because

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of the poet’s reference to the astronomer viewing the moon “from the top of Fesole” in Paradise Lost (1.289). Julia M. Walker

“Fifth Ode of Horace, Lib. I, The.” Poem by Milton. Because the version was left undated when added to Poems by Mr. John Milton (1673), earlier discussion centered on its dating. Horace is being “rendered almost word for word without rhyme according to the Latin measure, as near as the language will permit,” as Milton remarked in his headnote to the poem. Milton seeks to know what the language does permit. He decides that Horace’s meter (the complex lesser Asclepiad) will not work in English, substituting paired unrhymed iambics, a10 a10, b6 b6. But he does hold his syntax and word order close to those of the Latin. The strenuous experiment has earned a place in the history and theory of translating. John K. Hale

film adaptation of Milton. John Collier’s Milton’s Paradise Lost: Screenplay for Cinema of the Mind (1973), a kind of modern closet drama, may be the closest Milton’s epic has come to direct film adaptation. Collier offers “a parade of scenes based on Milton’s glorious and appalling images,” with the pretext that “speech is such a different thing in the dramatic form that almost none of Milton’s verse dialogue can be adjusted to it” (Collier). What Collier avoids, however, others have appropriated; thus Milton’s cinematic presence moves between direct citation and more indirect homage. A number of films borrow passages from Milton. My Fair Lady (1964), for instance, quotes from “L’Allegro”: “Warble his native wood-notes wild” (134); more recently, the film version of A. S. Byatt’s Angels and Insects (1995) includes a reading of Paradise Lost 11.829 –35, as well as various discussions of “the first parents in Paradise” and “Satan hidden in the serpent,” all gathered from the novella. Other cinematic appropriations take their cue from William Blake, assuming Milton as being, in Blake’s familiar phrase, “of the Devil’s party without knowing it” and using him as a kind of Virgilian guide to all things infernal. Thus from the silent era and such films as Luigi Maggi’s Satan, or, The Drama of Humanity (Italy, 1911) to such later works as The Sentinel (1977) and Seven (1995), the horror genre has represented Milton as a signifier for the diabolical. Al Pacino plays the devil disguised as

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John Milton himself in The Devil’s Advocate (1997), in which the dangers of bureaucracy, industry, and homogeneity become menacingly personified. Such similar characters as Mr. Dark in Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) combine the Miltonic with the Faustian: here, a villain offering to make the old young again also runs the “Pandemonium Shadow Show.” Milton’s idea of PandAemonium, in fact, seems to have attracted nearly as much attention as the figure of Satan, though often for comic purposes. John Landis’s Animal House (1978) may draw its title from Satan’s palace, with demonic fallen angels transferred to a fraternity house, even as it offers a scene of Paradise Lost being taught in the classroom and later evokes the temptation of Eve. Similar architectural playfulness appears earlier in a television sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus titled “M1 Interchange Built by Characters from ‘Paradise Lost’” (1972), featuring angels, devils, and Adam and Eve laboring with shovels but failing to work well enough together to finish their highway construction. Eric C. Brown

First Civil War (1642 –1646). The first of three armed clashes between English royalists and opponents of the monarchy. Charles I’s attempts to bring the Scottish church into conformity with Anglicanism ignited the unsuccessful and costly Bishops’ Wars of 1639 and 1640 and necessitated the recall of Parliament after an eleven-year hiatus. Following an unsuccessful attempt to arrest five leading members of Parliament in 1642, Charles withdrew from Westminster. Between January and August 1642 both Parliament and the king maneuvered for control of the militia and military aid, widening the division between Parliamentarians and royalists. Bolstered by an increase in support, Charles raised his standard at Nottingham on 22 August 1642 and officially declared war against Parliament. The outbreak of civil war precipitated a breakdown in state censorship, providing the opportunity for the unfettered use of print. Not until 23 October did the king’s forces confront the parliamentary militia, led by Robert Devereux, Third Earl of Essex, in the indecisive Battle of Edgehill. After this battle, Essex moved toward Warwick, leaving the road to London unobstructed. Charles, after refusing two parliamentary requests for negotiation, prepared to storm the city. The king’s advance on London caused considerable concern and provided

the immediate context for Milton’s “Sonnet VIII” (“When the Assault Was Intended to the City”). With the aid of London’s trained bands, the Parliamentarians repelled the king’s forces at Turnham Green, while Charles withdrew toward Oxford. By December 1644, after a crushing defeat at Lostwithiel, Parliament amalgamated three of its remaining armies into one: the New Model Army. The Battle of Naseby broke remaining royalist resistance. Charles escaped the army by turning himself over to the Scots at Newark. By 1646, the First Civil War was virtually over. Sandy Bugeja

“Fix here ye overdated spheres.” Two poetic lines attributed to Milton that appear on the reverse of a brief letter to Milton by Henry Lawes. The contents of the letter, which was found tucked into Milton’s Commonplace Book by Alfred J. Horwood in 1874, are unrelated to the subject of the verses as they concern Lawes’s efforts to obtain Milton’s passport for his continental journey. The letter dates to some time around April 1638, but the verses themselves are undated and their context is unclear. They have frequently been excluded from collections of Milton’s works, but modern editions have included them (WJM, CSP, CP). Marlin E. Blaine

Fleetwood, Charles (c. 1618 –1692). Parliamentarian commander. He served with distinction in the civil wars, achieving the rank of lieutenant general. He was a member of the Long Parliament from 1646 and of the Purged Parliament. In 1651 he was elected to the Commonwealth’s Council of State, and his position as a member of the ruling military elite was secured in 1652 when he married as his second wife Bridget Cromwell, eldest daughter of Oliver Cromwell. He served as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1654 to 1657, as major general of the Eastern District in 1655, and as a member of Cromwell’s House of Lords in 1656. After Cromwell’s death, Fleetwood was appointed commander-in-chief under Richard Cromwell’s Protectorate, but during the early months of 1659 army officers, exasperated by what they took to be Richard Cromwell’s religious and political conservatism, plotted the downfall of the Protectorate at Wallingford House, Fleetwood’s London residence. After the collapse of the Protectorate, the army’s Council of Officers, under

Fletcher, Phineas and Giles

Fleetwood, assumed the authority to govern and in May invited surviving members of the Purged Parliament to return to continue the work of the Good Old Cause. The army quickly came to find the Purged Parliament no more to its liking than Richard’s Protectorate, but Fleetwood was unable either to reconcile Parliament and the army or to identify a viable constitutional alternative to the growing anarchy. In December he surrendered the keys of Parliament to the speaker. For his “civility, gentleness, and courtesy,” and for his bravery and fearlessness, Fleetwood was among the Cromwellian grandees praised in Milton’s Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda in a passage that may suggest Milton had known him since boyhood. The Anne Fleetwood from whom Milton rented his cottage at Chalfont St. Giles was Fleetwood’s niece, as was the Martha Fleetwood whom Milton’s nephew Thomas married in 1672. N. H. Keeble

Fleetwood, George (bap. 1623, d. c. 1664). Army officer and regicide. He rose to the rank of colonel and entered the Long Parliament in a recruiter election in 1648. Oliver Cromwell regarded him as a reliable supporter, and he held several offices under the Protectorate. By Cromwell he was first knighted, and then, on the creation of a second chamber of government, was appointed George, Lord Fleetwood. At the Restoration, he was incarcerated and sentenced to transportation to Tangiers, though he probably died before that could be effected. His principal estate was The Vache, Chalfont St. Giles, Buckinghamshire. Though this was confiscated and bestowed on James, Duke of York (the future James II), his wife was allowed to retain it during her lifetime. It was on this estate that Milton found accommodation, in what is now known as Milton Cottage, during the plague year of 1665. Thomas N. Corns

Fletcher, John (1579 –1625). English playwright. Born in Rye, Sussex, his father was a distinguished churchman, sometime chaplain to Elizabeth I, and later bishop of Bristol, of Worcester, and of London. He entered Cambridge in 1591, but otherwise his early life is obscure. In the early Jacobean years he emerged as a playwright, especially in collaboration with Francis Beaumont, with whom, before

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Beaumont’s marriage and retirement in 1611, he wrote some eight or nine highly popular plays and established a lasting fashion for tragicomic courtly romance. Fletcher continued to write for the stage, succeeding William Shakespeare (with whom he co-wrote The Two Noble Kinsmen and possibly Henry VIII) as “resident” dramatist for the acting company the King’s Men and collaborating also with Ben Jonson, Philip Massinger, and others. In all he had a hand in some fifty plays, many of which continued in the repertory long after his death of the plague in 1625. His Faithful Shepherdess, a pastoral tragicomedy that failed when first performed on the public stage in 1608 –1609, was revived for Twelfth Night, 1634, in the Presence Chamber at Somerset House under Queen Henrietta Maria’s patronage. Several elements in it are similar to Milton’s Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus) of later the same year. See ODNB.

Tom Bishop

Fletcher, Phineas (1582 –1650) and Giles (1585 – 1623). Poets. They belonged to a prominent literary family, sons to Giles Fletcher, Sr., an Elizabethan courtier and diplomat whose Of the Russe Common Wealth (1591) was influential on Milton’s A Brief History of Moscovia. Phineas attended Cambridge from 1600 and established himself as a prolific and highly regarded poet. His Locustæ, vel Pietas Jesuitica and its expanded English version The Locusts or Apollyonists (1627) formed part of the burgeoning corpus of mythology around the Gunpowder Plot of Guy Fawkes as synecdoche for a wider millennial struggle, to which Milton contributed several poems, notably “In Quintum Novembris” (1626). The council of hell in the Apollyonists is among various analogues for Milton’s hell. Phineas’s major work was his remarkable epic The Purple Island (1633). Numerous links with Paradise Lost have been proposed: Milton’s allegorical Sin and Death, for example, are reminiscent of Harmatia in The Purple Island (12.27–32). Giles is best remembered for his four-book epyllion Christs Victorie, and Triumph in Heaven and Earth (1610). The second book of his heroic account of Christ may be regarded as an important precursor to Paradise Regained. Both he and Milton present Christ’s resisting Satan as the definitive fulfillment of the Old Testament covenant, typologically overcoming Adam’s failure to resist the Satanic lure. Milton makes no mention of

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Giles and Phineas, but they have been widely cited as precursors to and sources for him. Kevin Killeen

Florence. From the thirteenth century, the principal city in Tuscany. It began as a first-century Roman colony on the Arno River below the Etruscan town of Fiesole. Under the control of the Franks and later the papacy, Florence battled with the neighboring towns of Pistoia, Siena, and Pisa for supremacy. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the leaders of the city split into Guelfs (who wished to see the city allied with the papacy) and Ghibellines (who wished the city to come under the protection of the Holy Roman Empire). The home of Giovanni Boccaccio and Petrarch and the birthplace of Niccolò Machiavelli; of the artists Filippo Brunelleschi, Donatello, Masaccio, and Michelangelo; and of Renaissance humanism, Florence was controlled from the fifteenth century by the Medici family and became a great banking, trade, and cultural center. In 1638 –1639, Milton traveled to Florence in search of “the Italian of Dante and Petrarch,” as a plaque on a city street proclaims today. Milton writes of the trip in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda. In the summer of 1638 he recited his early Latin poems at the Svogliati Academy, was befriended by Carlo Dati and others, and may have been elected to the academy in July. In Areopagitica Milton writes that he visited Galileo, who was living outside the city under house arrest. Julia M. Walker

Fludd [Flud], Robert (1574 –1637). English philosopher and physician. Born in the parish of Bearsted, Kent, he studied at St. John’s College, Oxford, and on the Continent, where he became familiar with the teachings of Paracelsus. He settled in London and established a medical practice, which supported his experiments in chemistry and alchemy. His philosophical works include Tractatus Theologo-Philosophicus (1617) and Utriusque Cosmi Historia (1617–1624). Influenced by Rosicrucianism and hermeticism, Fludd proposes Divine Light as the creative principle at work in the universe, seen in varying degrees in all beings. He also published works on medicine, memory, and alchemy. His importance for Milton has been most strongly argued by Denis Saurat, who sees traces of Fludd’s cosmology throughout Paradise Lost. The invocation of Divine Light at the beginning of book 3 suggests

some affinities with Fludd; Milton may have consulted Fludd’s works for the names and orders of angels, both fallen and unfallen. See Saurat (1944).

Stephen M. Buhler

Forest Hill. A small village just outside the city of Oxford. It was the birthplace of Milton’s first wife, Mary Powell, who was baptized in the parish church of St. Nicholas. On 11 June 1627 John Milton, Sr., lent £300 to her father, Richard Powell, Sr., a future royalist, justice of the peace, and lord of the manor, who was to make interest payments of £12 every six months to John Sr.’s elder son. Powell dutifully made biannual payments in June and December through 1643; presumably to collect one of them, Milton traveled to Forest Hill in June 1642 and a month later, according to his nephew Edward Phillips (twelve years old at the time), returned to London a married man. In August 1642 Mary Powell Milton returned to her family at Forest Hill and remained there until 1645. Edward Jones

Fortescue, Sir John (c. 1395 – c. 1477). Political theorist. He was chief justice of the King’s Bench from 1442 and author of De Laudibus Legum Angliae [In Praise of the Laws of England], a dialogue between the Lord Chancellor and Prince Edward, son of Henry VI. A separate manuscript of Fortescue’s translation into English of the key chapters of De Laudibus circulated under the title “Of the Difference Between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy.” Both texts achieved wide currency during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as they crystallized the political theory that would come to be known in the seventeenth century as the Ancient Constitution. Fortescue’s works were in the air as tensions over the crown’s taxation policies mounted through the 1630s. While Milton does not cite Fortescue, he cites others who do. Sir Edward Coke, for example, calls Fortescue “that most Reverend and Honourable Judge,” and in Brief Notes upon a Late Sermon (1660), Milton praises Coke as a “great Lawyer.” Most importantly, because Fortescue’s arguments are foundational to the legal arguments against Stuart absolutism, they constitute an implicit presence shaping Milton’s conception of English government. Peter C. Herman

France

Fox, George (1624 –1691). Religious mystic and radical, founder of the Society of Friends. Born at Fenny Drayton, Leicestershire, he was the son of a weaver and received very little schooling, working for a grazier and wool dealer. In 1643, deeply disillusioned with what he took to be the vacuous formality and hypocrisy of the religious practices of his time, he left home and, traveling throughout the Midlands, sought advice and counsel from ministers of all sects and denominations. None could ease his spiritual anguish, but in 1647 he underwent a mystical conversion experience and a revelation— or “opening”— of the divine power of Christ. This so transformed his sense of the Christian gospel that he began a peripatetic ministry that took him throughout Britain, to North America, and to continental Europe by the time of his death. In the 1650s the pejorative term Quakers came to be used of his followers, derived from their alleged ecstatic and enthusiastic behavior during worship. The witness of early Friends, including Fox himself, was disruptive and unruly, involving the interruption of religious services, vocal attacks on ministers, and dramatic and demonstrative enactments, in the way of the Old Testament prophets. After the Restoration, however, Fox established an orderly national organization for the Society of Friends, ensuring that of the Interregnum radicals, the Friends alone survived as an enduring religious group. Fox wrote a great many pamphlets, tracts, and letters but no sustained exposition of his ideas. Accounts of his life that he had dictated were completed and published as Fox’s Journal (1694) by Thomas Ellwood, the friend who may have prompted Milton to write Paradise Regained. Milton never mentions Fox or the Friends, but in its interiority and unworldliness, and especially in its apparent pacifism, Paradise Regained has been thought to show affinities with the emphases of Quakerism. See Marx (1992), ODCC, ODNB.

N. H. Keeble

Foxe, John (c. 1516 –1587). English church historian and controversialist. He was made famous as “the martyrologist” with publication of the Actes and Monuments (“Foxe’s Book of Martyrs”) in English (London, 1563, 1570, 1576, 1583). Other of his works include theological controversy, Latin plays, and martyrologies. Foxe was born in Boston, Lincolnshire, and educated at Brasenose and Magdalen Colleges, Oxford. After advancing to fellow at Magdalen, he received an M.A. in 1543 but resigned, probably because of his Protestant views. In

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1547, while serving as a tutor in London, Foxe met John Bale, who shared his interest in hagiography. Foxe had nearly finished his first Latin martyrology when Mary I’s accession cost him his employment. In 1554 he fled to the Continent. From Edmund Grindal and others he gathered material on the early Marian martyrs and included them in his expanding Latin work, Rerum In Ecclesia Gestarum . . . Commentarii (Basel, 1559). Returning to London early in the reign of Elizabeth I, Foxe accepted Anglican ordination. After publication of his English martyrology, he was preferred prebend of Salisbury (1563) and of Durham (1572), but his opposition to vestments may have cost him further preferment and financial means. At Grindal’s urging or that of printer John Day, Foxe compiled his first English martyrology, the Actes and Monuments, which grew from one to two volumes folio and became the focus of his remaining years. In 1587, eighty-seven years before Milton, Foxe was interred in the chancel of St. Giles Without Cripplegate. Issued in four complete editions from 1596 through 1641, Foxe’s martyrology was admired by English writers throughout the period. Milton respects Foxe as “the Author of our Church History” but resists his proestablishment perspective on prelates and monarchs. Insisting on the primacy of scripture, Milton declares in An Apology Against a Pamphlet, “We also reverence the Martyrs but relye only upon the Scriptures.” Milton’s specific citations of Foxe’s martyrology demonstrate that he used the edition of either 1631/32 or 1641. Margaret J. Dean

France. Milton went through France in 1638 on his way to Italy, and in 1640 as he returned to England. The country, which counted some eighteen million inhabitants at the time, was governed by Louis XIII and Cardinal Armand Richelieu, his minister. It had been torn apart by civil wars from 1614 to 1624 as Marie de’ Medici led a Catholic and pro-Spanish policy and could not satisfy the growing appetites of the grandees. When Louis XIII was free from his domineering mother and her favorite, Concino Concini, Richelieu became minister in 1624, and in his Testament Politique he promised the king he would endeavor “to ruin the Huguenot party, to abase the pride of the nobles, to bring back all your subjects to their duty, and to elevate your name among foreign nations.” He repressed the revolt of Protestants at La Rochelle (1628), suppressed their political assemblies, and had their fortresses demolished (Edict of Alès, 1629). He

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eliminated his opponents, including the Marquis de Cinq-Mars in 1642, and reduced regional parliaments to obedience; he crushed popular revolts (1636 –1637), and his aggressive international policy made France a daunting power. For France had embarked on a war in 1630 against the House of Austria, ending with the Peace of Westphalia (Münster, 24 October 1648), which strengthened the authority of the princes at the expense of the Roman emperor. Cardinal Jules Mazarin had succeeded Richelieu in 1643 and was soon embroiled in the Fronde (1648 –1653), brought about by the efforts of the Parliament of Paris to limit the growing authority of the crown, by the personal ambitions of discontented nobles, and by the grievances of the people against financial burdens. War against Spain was renewed until the Treaty of the Pyrénées in 1659. In 1661, at Mazarin’s death, Louis XIV assumed full power, which he was to hold until 1715. Under his reign, absolutism or kingship by divine right was to reach its height, and French culture flourished across Europe. France’s boundaries were enlarged as a result of its successful involvement in the Devolution Wars (1667–1668). Milton’s attitude toward France is ambiguous. If his hostility to France has often been underlined, we must say he showed no aversion to France as such, but out of patriotism disliked any acculturating dependence on France: hence, he condemns the use of law French in English courts as reminiscent of the Norman yoke, “this norman gibbrish,” or he disapproves of the English imitating French manners as in the reign of Edward the Confessor (see his Commonplace Book, Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, and History of Britain). In Of Reformation, he remarks “France [was] a more severe Monarchy then ours.” On the other hand, Milton borrowed examples from historical France so that England should precisely draw lessons from them. He exposes papal usurpation in Chilpéric’s deposition by Zacharius in 752 and reinterprets the episode to claim the right of the ancient Franks to elect or depose whom they chose. Milton used French historians as authorities (Philippe de Commines; Bernard de Girard, Sieur du Haillan; Jacobus Augustus Thuanus; and Claudius Sesellius) to limit the king’s prerogatives and the Monarchomachs to advance a people’s right to bear arms against a tyrant. As Latin secretary, Milton corresponded with Louis XIV and Mazarin, especially after the Treaty of Westminster was signed in 1655. On 23 March 1657, France and England formed an alliance against Spain. In 1659 Milton wrote that he was

afraid lest France should ally itself with Spain to invade England and restore Charles II. In fact, after the Restoration, France was to remain England’s ally until 1674. Christophe J.-B. Tournu

Francini, Antonio (fl. 1610 –1640). Poet. Milton encountered him during his sojourn in Italy (1638 – 1639) at the academy of the Apatisti. He lists Francini among his Italian acquaintances in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda and mentions him, with Carlo Dati, in “Epitaphium Damonis” (line 137). Francini’s verse, written mostly in Italian, circulated in manuscript, and only a few pieces have survived in print. For students of Milton, his most important composition was an eighty-four-line ode, “Al Signor Gio[vanni] Miltoni Nobile Inglese,” which he presented to Milton in Florence; as with Dati’s letter, Milton printed it in the testimonia at the beginning of the Latin section of Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645). Thomas N. Corns

Frederick III (1609 –1670). King of Denmark and Norway. He acceded to the Danish and Norwegian thrones in 1648. In 1658 –1660 he fought a largely unsuccessful war with the Sweden of Charles X, which destabilized the Baltic region. Milton was responsible for drafting some correspondence to him on behalf of the English state through the 1650s. As grandson of Frederick II and nephew of Anne of Denmark, he was a full cousin of Charles I and was perceived, with reason, as inimical to the republican regime responsible for his kinsman’s execution. See Fallon (1993).

Thomas N. Corns

free will. At the heart of many of Milton’s works lies a defense of free will. In Paradise Lost he “justif[ies] the ways of God to men” (1.26) by demonstrating significant human freedom both before and after the Fall. He also builds many of his poems around choice. The companion poems “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” weigh two ways of life—that of the cheerful man and that of the thoughtful man. In “Lycidas” the speaker chooses to “strictly meditate the thankless muse” rather than to “sport with Amaryllis in the shade” (68, 66). A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus) is the first of Milton’s great dramas of choice, as the Lady—prefiguring Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost,

Frost, Gualter [Walter]

the Son in Paradise Regained, and Samson in Samson Agonistes—is tempted by an adversary who makes of evil a “fair appearing good” (PL 9.354). His characters express their heroism by withstanding temptation and choosing the good. What is true of his characters is true of Milton, at least in his selfrepresentations. In autobiographical digressions in The Reason of Church-Government, An Apology Against a Pamphlet, and Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda, Milton is the lone heroic figure who chooses good while others succumb to temptation. All agreed in the seventeenth century that humans perceive themselves subjectively to be free. The real question is whether they are significantly free, whether when they perceive themselves as freely choosing one alternative, they could in fact have chosen another. Milton clearly means to defend significant freedom. He writes in Areopagitica, “many there be that complain of divin Providence for suffering Adam to transgresse; foolish tongues! when God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing.” In Paradise Lost Milton’s God echoes Milton, saying that “reason also is choice” and arguing that without free will and the possibility of falling, the angels “had served necessity, / Not me” (3.107–11). What is true of angels and Adam and Eve is also true, both Areopagitica and Paradise Lost argue, for fallen human beings. Milton rejected the idea that significant freedom would affect divine foreknowledge and thus render God mutable. He replies that God did not decree anything that he left to human freedom and that he would be mutable if he granted humans freedom and then made its exercise impossible. See Danielson (1982), Myers (1987).

Stephen M. Fallon

French (language). Milton was versed in both ancient and modern languages—Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and also French and Italian (see languages of Milton). In “Ad Patrem” the poet praises his father for persuading him to study French (line 82: “quos iactat Gallia flores”), and yet Milton’s academy in Of Education (1644) does not provide for the study of French. When Milton does use books in French, he quotes from English secondary sources. Christophe J.-B. Tournu

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the social, political, judicial, and religious structures of France, putting an end to l’ancien régime. As a republican, Milton’s ideas found their way into the French Revolution: Mirabeau adapted his Areopagitica as Sur la défense de la presse (1788) and he translated John Toland’s 1695 English edition of Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio as Théorie de la royauté, d’après la doctrine de Milton (1789), which was reissued after his death as Défense du peuple anglais sur le jugement et la condamnation de Charles Ier, roi d’Angleterre, par Milton. Ouvrage propre à éclairer sur la circonstance actuelle où se trouve la France (1792). The same year, a bilingual edition of Paradise Lost was published. Christophe J.-B. Tournu

Frescobaldi, Pietro (d. 1654). Roman Catholic priest. Milton encountered him during his sojourn in Italy (1638 –1639) at the academy of the Apatisti and lists him among his Italian acquaintances in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda. At the time of Milton’s visit Frescobaldi held the benefice of the church of Santi Maria e Leonardo in Artimino (Carmignano), near the Medici villa of La Ferdinanda; his duties were probably discharged by a curate. He progressed in the church, and in the year of his death he was consecrated bishop of San Miniato. Thomas N. Corns

Frost, Gualter [Walter] (bap. 1598, d. 1652). English political agent and government official. He worked as a senior civil servant in successive governments from the early 1640s. In 1644 he was appointed cosecretary to the Committee of Both Kingdoms, a major executive instrument of the Long Parliament, and retained that role in its successor, the Derby House Committee (see Council of State). On the formation of the first Council of State of the English republic, he again secured the post of secretary, which he retained until his death. As such, he was from 1649 to 1652 Milton’s senior colleague. John Thurloe was his successor. His son, Gualter Frost the younger, held more junior posts in successive administrations through the 1650s. See Aylmer (1973), ODNB.

French Revolution. Sum of events that, from 1788/89 to the coup of 18 Brumaire 1799 upset

Thomas N. Corns

G Gabriel. One of the archangels mentioned in the Bible. He occupies a unique place in scripture in that his mediating role serves as a unifying link between the Old and New Testaments, as does his intercessory presence in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Traditionally, he is known as the “angel of annunciation, resurrection, mercy, vengeance, death, [and] revelation” (Gustav Davidson, A Dictionary of Angels, 1967), but it is his last title as Revealing Angel that sustains and informs Milton’s poetic imagination. Gabriel means “man of God,” but a closer rendition is “God is my strength” (Davidson) or “God is my hero/warrior” ( J. J. Collins, in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, 1999), the last two forcefully defining the biblical and the Miltonic conception of his character. Gabriel’s readiness to abjure power and to reveal and interpret “mysterious visions and prophecies” (Collins) makes him a custodian and emissary of God’s word. In the Book of Daniel he forecasts both the end time and the coming of the Messiah, and in the gospel of Luke, he announces to both Zacharias and Mary the birth of John the Baptist and the Son of God. Gabriel’s relationship to the past and to the future, his ability to look backward and forward, grants him a peculiar perspective on the significance of salvation history. In Paradise Lost God speaks of the archangel as being second in “military prowess” (6.45) only to Michael, and during the War in Heaven, the “might of Gabriel” (6.355) subdues the rage of Moloch. Although Gabriel is primarily considered the angel of the annunciation, depicted in art as kneeling before Mary with a lily in his hand, Milton emphasizes his militaristic role as seen in the Book of Daniel when the archangel reveals to the prophet how Michael assisted him in his struggle against the prince of the kingdom of Persia (10:13). Traditionally, Gabriel presides over paradise (as in PL 4.561– 63).

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In Paradise Regained Gabriel, as herald, is instructed by God that this “perfect man” shall “o’ercome Satanic strength” only by “humiliation,” “strong sufferance,” and “weakness” (1.160 – 66). As Christ reminds his disciples that the servant cannot be above his lord (Matt. 10:24), so too is the faithful Gabriel reminded that the Son’s “great duel” against “hellish wiles” will also be won not by arms but “by wisdom” (PR 1.174 –75). Marc Ricciardi

Gaddi, Jacobo (d. 1668). Poet and academician. He was the founder of the Accademia degli Svogliati, which Milton attended during his visits to Florence in 1638 –1639. A few years older than Milton, Gaddi had established his reputation as a poet in both Latin and Italian. The Svogliati met in his family’s new palazzo on Via del Giglio, in a building that is now the Hotel Astoria. Milton was to recall him in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda. Thomas N. Corns

Galatians. Book of the New Testament. It is a short, polemical assertion of the same theology of grace and concept of Christian liberty (cf. Treatise of Civil Power and esp. Paradise Lost chapter 12) that Paul more patiently articulates in his letter to the Romans. A favorite among reformers (Martin Luther’s commentaries have been said to reenact as much as explain it), Galatians argues passionately against the works- or law-righteousness (especially the necessity of circumcision for Gentiles) that was apparently being preached by Galatian “Judaizers” in Paul’s absence. It contains an important allegorical interpretation of Hagar, Abraham’s servant, as the covenant of bondage and Sarah, his wife, as the covenant of promise (4:22 –

Gauden, John

31; cf. Gen. 16 –21 and The Reason of ChurchGovernment). Gregory Kneidel

Galileo [Galileo Galilei] (1564 –1642). Florentine astronomer and mathematician. With his telescope, he substantiated the heliocentric theories of Nicolaus Copernicus. He is the only contemporary figure that Milton mentions directly in Paradise Lost. A professor of mathematics at Pisa and then at Padua, Galileo also studied theories of motion and worked out a law of falling bodies. His work with telescopes, for which he ground his own lenses, led to his sightings of the mountains of the moon, the individual stars of the Milky Way, and small bodies in orbit around Jupiter —findings he published in 1610. Drawn into the debate over the differences between the theories of Copernicus and the biblical version of creation, between 1613 and 1616 Galileo wrote a series of letters that attempted to diminish the direct conflict. But with the publication in 1630 of Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World —Ptolemaic and Copernican, which was banned by the Inquisition, Galileo was eventually brought to trial and condemned for heresy in 1633. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest, first in Siena and later in Arcetri, outside Florence. Galileo died in 1642, although his body was not buried in Florence’s Santa Croce until 1737. In 1992 Pope John Paul II stated that the church had made errors in Galileo’s case but did not make specific reference to Copernican theory. Milton writes in Areopagitica that he visited Galileo during his 1638 –1639 sojourn in Italy, presenting Galileo as a martyr to intellectual freedom. In addition to the allusions to Galileo himself in Paradise Lost (1.286 –91, 5.261– 63), book 8 contains Adam’s question to Raphael about celestial motion. Adam describes what seems to him a Ptolemaic universe. Raphael tells him, in a lengthy and convoluted passage, that he is wrong; however, he says that Adam should not concern himself with the cosmos but should instead attend to that which God has given him (8.171–73, 175). Julia M. Walker

Gataker, Thomas (1574 –1654). Puritan divine and member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. He was known for his erudition, his correspondence with James Ussher and Claudius Sal-

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masius, and his friendship with Richard Stock, the rector at All Hallows on Bread Street, the Milton family parish for two decades. After declining a Cambridge fellowship, Gataker, at Stock’s insistence, accepted the living of St. Mary’s, Rotherhithe, in 1611 and served that parish for the next four decades. In addition to his parish duties, he conducted a private seminary for the training of “godly preachers.” Among those who served as his assistants early in their clerical careers were Thomas Young (whom Gataker most likely recommended to Stock as an able tutor for the young Milton) and Edward Goodall, the Miltons’ rector in the 1630s during their years in the village of Horton. Definitive proof that Milton and Gataker met remains to be found. Edward Jones

Gauden, John (1605 –1662). Author of religious tracts. He was educated at both Oxford and Cambridge universities. Early in the First Civil War, he showed some parliamentary sympathies and claimed to have been chosen for the Westminster Assembly of Divines in 1643 (from which, according to himself, he was secretly removed because of his view that episcopacy could be reformed). He held a number of preferments and maintained these through the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, apparently conforming to the ecclesiastical innovations of the period. Upon the restoration of Charles II, Gauden became the king’s chaplain and bishop of Exeter before rising to the bishopric of Worcester in 1662. He died three months later. Gauden was a prolific author of religious tracts but today is known as the probable author (in whole or part) of Eikon Basilike. After he died, his widow claimed that he was its author. The claim was known late in Gauden’s life and seems to be related to his high church office upon the Restoration. There is evidence that Charles II; James, Duke of York; and the Earl of Clarendon accepted his claim, which was made stronger by the discovery of the Anglesey Memorandum by the London auctioneer Edward Millington in 1686 affirming that both Charles II and the Duke of York accepted Gauden’s claim. Milton’s suspicions, in Eikonoklastes, regarding the authorship of Eikon Basilike are, at times, suggestive of a clergyman as author or compiler of the book. Indeed, in a letter of 13 March 1661 that seems to accept Gauden’s claim of authorship,

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Gauden, John

Clarendon writes, “truly, when it ceases to be secrett, I know nobody will be glad of it but Mr Milton.”

which is also the earliest: “He for God only, she for God in him” (4.299). Julia M. Walker

Jim Daems

Gell, Robert (1595 –1665). Church of England clergyman. He matriculated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1615, graduated with a B.A. in 1618, and received an M.A. in 1621. He was elected to a fellowship in 1623 and was in post throughout Milton’s time at the college. In July 1628 Milton wrote to Alexander Gil the younger from Cambridge and described his furtive contribution to the recently held commencement. One of the fellows of Christ’s College had had to act as respondent in a disputation, and in keeping with the custom of the occasion had arranged for printed “act verses” on the theme of the disputation to be distributed during his opening speech. The fellow had deputed the task of composing the verses to Milton, who enclosed a copy to Gil. Neither the fellow nor the theme of the verses is disclosed in the letter, but the fellow was probably Gell, who received a B.D. at the ceremony and was the only fellow of the college to be graduating that summer. The paths of Milton and Gell did cross in 1663 when he officiated at Milton’s third marriage. Thomas N. Corns

gender, Milton’s representation of. Milton would not have made the distinction between sex (sexual identity) and gender (sexually linked behavior) that is acknowledged by late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century scholars. This is not to say that he does not enact that distinction, making Eve’s gathering of fruit for the visiting Raphael’s pleasure in Paradise Lost (5.331– 49) a clearly feminine activity, although one not associated with sexuality. Indeed, when Adam and Eve are introduced, it is with the phrase “Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed” (4.296), a description that moves close to a basic definition of gender as opposed to sex. The most careful discussion of sex and gender comes in Milton’s representation of the private lives of angels (PL 8.595, 615 –17), which presents the possibility of an angelic act through interpenetration. Elsewhere in Paradise Lost, his descriptions of Adam and Eve as the first man and woman are famously quoted representations of the gender roles of men and women (see women, Milton’s representation of), the most frequently referenced of

Genesis. First book of the Torah, the five books of Moses, and the first book of the Christian Bible. The Hebrew title, Bereshith, means “in the beginning”; the English title derives from the Greek for “origins.” It was written and revised by multiple authors from the tenth to the fifth centuries b.c.; the number of authors and redactors is disputed. Genesis is a poetic narrative (though not written in any known Hebrew verse form) synthesizing myth, legend, and history. It concerns the covenant between God and humankind, beginning with creation and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, Cain’s murder of Abel, and the lineage of the patriarchs from Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob through Joseph. It concludes with the death of Joseph. It describes God’s troubled relationship with the chosen people of Israel, their backsliding, moral decisions, and struggles with authority. Their sufferings are underwritten by a series of promises God makes in return for their continuing loyalty. In Christian interpretations it tells the story of sin and thus anticipates atonement. The promise that the seed of Eve will with their heels bruise the heads of the serpent’s seed (Gen. 3:15) is by Christians understood to be the protevangelium, the first gospel, promising the coming of a messiah. The interpretation of Genesis was from patristic times influenced by other texts from the early Christian era, notably the Apocalypsis Mosis and Vita Adae et Evae. Scholastic discussions added further exegetical patinas, so that by the sixteenth century it was hardly doubted that the subtle serpent of Genesis 3 was Satan, the metaphysical embodiment of evil nowhere mentioned in canonical scripture. Genesis came with a great deal of commentary and interpretation; it was, with Revelation, the most discussed and contested book among early modern Protestants. Extensive commentaries were published on it throughout Europe. Scriptural annotations on Genesis tended to be more generous, and not only because of its location within the Bible. The nature of sin and thus of the Fall (and thus of redemption and hence of agency and free will) was fundamental to the difference between reformed and Roman Catholic Christian theology. During the English civil wars the stories of the Fall, of the relationship between Jacob and Esau, and of the providential struggles of a chosen people became powerful imaginative resources and

Genoa

analogues for contemporary politics. Antiformalist Protestants pursued the idea of human spiritual perfection, a model of which appeared in the first three chapters of Genesis. The Protestant emphasis on sola scriptura thereby opened the Bible to intense and imaginative scrutiny, making even these wellworn chapters seem disturbingly new. The Annotations produced by the Westminster Assembly of Divines, published in two editions in 1645 and 1651, anatomizes Genesis in particular detail. It resists radical interpretations and distills a great deal of scholastic commentary, but it nonetheless bears witness to the imaginative scope already inhabiting Genesis. A Commentary upon the Three First Chapters of the First Book of Moses Called Genesis by the Puritan divine John White, published posthumously in 1656, explored the first three chapters at even greater length than Paradise Lost, presenting some ingenious elaborations on the text, including a detailed account of Satan’s deceptive rhetoric. Genesis is Milton’s most cited biblical text, so pervasive of the poetry that allusions are best left as passim than discussed specifically. Milton also layers other scriptural references, to Isaiah, Ezekiel, and the Psalms for example, on top of his Genesis narrative. The relationship of Paradise Lost with Genesis sits between the reformed commentary and the enthusiastic and inspired envisaging of perfection. See Evans (1968), Hill (1993), Turner (1987).

Joad Raymond

Genesis B. Ninth-century Anglo-Saxon translation of an Old Saxon poem focusing on the creation, the fall of Lucifer, and the Fall of humanity. Erroneously attributed to the cowherd poet CÆdmon, this interpolated segment (lines 235 – 851) of a paraphrase of the biblical Genesis, included in the Junius 11 manuscript (see Franciscus Junius), was once considered a potential source primarily for Milton’s characterization of Satan. Other aspects, such as mood and diction, have also fueled speculation by critics who wish to ally Milton with an Old English poetic tradition. However, he could not have read the poem in the original even if his sight had not already failed by the time the manuscript came to light. Later scholars acknowledge the power of the verses attributed to Satan, which express as richly both the elegiac and the vengeful feelings that also distinguish Milton’s representation from those of lesser authors. T. Ross Leasure

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Geneva. Independent city-state that until 1603 had been a constituent part of Savoy. Its conversion to Protestantism was begun by Guillaume Farel, a French reformer, in 1533. By 1535 it formally adopted the faith, and the next year Jean Calvin, recruited by Farel, arrived to assist in its rigorous implementation. He and Farel were expelled in 1538, but Calvin returned in 1541 and rapidly established a near-theocratic rule, not distinguished by toleration. In 1559 Calvin founded the Geneva Academy (the antecedent institution of the University of Geneva), at which Charles Diodati, a friend of Milton, had studied in 1630 and 1631. When Milton visited Geneva in the summer of 1639, en route from Italy to England, it was home to Giovanni Diodati, the resolutely Calvinist uncle of Milton’s late friend Charles. See ODR.

Thomas N. Corns

Geneva Bible. The preeminent English Bible until the mid-seventeenth century, with more than 140 editions appearing between 1560 and 1644. It was first issued as a New Testament (1557), then as a complete translation (1560) with several later revisions. The Geneva was also the Bible of the civil wars. Oliver Cromwell read from it, The Souldiers Pocket Bible contained excerpts from it, and much Puritan polemic relied on its language. But perhaps more important than the Geneva’s translation—a translation that, like most English versions, owes much to William Tyndale—is its innovative packaging. In addition to its explanatory and doctrinal glosses, the Geneva Bible combined verse numeration; cross references between testaments, which fostered typological readings; a portable size; inventive orthographics; and maps and tables. These features appealed to a broad, diverse audience. The Geneva was not the Bible of Milton— or, more accurately, not the primary Bible of Milton. In his use of the Bible, Milton constantly sifts through layers of sources, in part because he finds the Bible’s text corrupt (see Bible, Milton’s use of). Thus, he uses not only English translations such as the Geneva, but also Greek, Hebrew, and Latin translations of the Bible (see Bible, translations of). Milton generally chooses the Authorized Version as his preferred text for biblical quotation. Craig T. Fehrman

Genoa. Independent republic during Milton’s time. Milton sailed there from Nice in 1639 en

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route to Tuscany, thus avoiding a prolonged land journey through the Alps. (He took that route on his return, thus allowing him to visit Geneva.) It was Milton’s first visit to a republic, one whose constitution (modeled on Venice’s) had been modified by Andrea Doria to limit the rule of the doge to two years. Milton seems not to have visited the court but would not have needed to do so in order to glimpse the model of government by a constitutional oligarchy. See ODR.

Thomas N. Corns

geocentrism. The naked-eye, earth-centered view of the universe. It was assumed but not actually “taught” by the Bible, as even the Roman church of Milton’s day granted. Jesuit astronomers opposed Galileo’s heliocentrism because of the ancient authority of the calculations contained in the Greek astronomer Ptolemy’s Almagest. In Paradise Lost Adam and Eve are geocentrists until Adam wonders how vast bodies like the sun and stars could rotate around the earth in a single day (8.15 –38). Admitting the absurd complexities involved in Ptolemy’s system, Raphael explains the heliocentric alternative without conclusively validating it (8.85 –168). Catherine Gimelli Martin

Geoffrey of Monmouth (?1100 –1154/55). Bishop of St. Asaph and historian. Little is known about his life; even the assumption that he was Welsh is speculative and has been challenged. He was the author of one of the most popular and influential historical works of the Middle Ages, Historia Regum Britanniae [The History of the Kings of Britain], a source Milton draws on, somewhat skeptically, in The History of Britain. Milton probably drew on the edition of Geoffrey to be found in Rerum Britannicarum, edited by Jerome Commelin (Heidelberg, 1587). Thomas N. Corns

Geree, John (c. 1601–1649). Puritan divine. He was educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford University, taking his M.A. in 1621. He was then appointed to the living of Tewkesbury, Gloucester, but in 1624 was suspended for nonconformity (that is, refusing to comply with the rites of the Book of Common Prayer). He was restored in 1641 and subsequently served as rector of St. Albans (1646 –1647)

and preacher at St. Faith’s, London, from 1647 to his death. He shared Milton’s hostility to the bishops, and some of his publications carry arguments analogous to those of Milton’s antiprelatical tracts. N. H. Keeble

German (language). In Milton’s day, it was sometimes confusingly called “Dutch,” a word also used for the language of the United Provinces. Roger Williams recorded that he had given Milton lessons in Dutch; he could have meant the language of the states that make up modern-day Germany, though probably the language in question was that of the lands that make up the modern-day Netherlands. See languages of Milton. Thomas N. Corns

Gesualdo, Don Carlo (c. 1560 –1630). Italian composer of noble birth, later prince of Venosa. He was most famed in his own time for provocative chromaticism and for murdering his adulterous wife and her lover in 1590. He was much influenced by the music of the Ferarese court, especially its use of the chromatic arcicembalo or harpsichord. His madrigals, comparable to those of Luca Marenzio, include settings of Giovanni Battista Guarini and Torquato Tasso, with whom he was acquainted, and his sacred music preferred texts concerning the sinner’s contrition. When Milton was on tour in Italy (1638 –1639), he sent home a case of music containing scores of various composers, including Gesualdo and Marenzio. William Poole

Gil [Gill], Alexander, the elder (1565 –1635). Headmaster of St. Paul’s School. He was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (B.A. 1586, M.A. 1589). In 1608 he was appointed high master of St. Paul’s, a position he held until his death (and thus throughout Milton’s time as a pupil there). He was a well-respected educator. See ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

Gil [Gill], Alexander, the younger (1597–1642). Schoolmaster and poet. He was the son of the high master at St. Paul’s School, where he served as an under usher shortly after Milton entered in 1621.

God

Gil had by then earned a B.A. and M.A. from Trinity College, Oxford University, where he also earned his B.D. in 1627, while Milton was still at Cambridge. Gil had been licensed to preach, but his career was cut off when the Court of Star Chamber convicted him of treasonable remarks in 1627. His father managed to have his penalty reduced, but he was still fined and temporarily imprisoned. Highly skilled in Greek and Latin verse, Gil was an able scholar and may have influenced Milton’s politics, but his low opinion of both early Stuart kings and their royal favorite, George Villiers, First Earl and later First Duke of Buckingham, was not then uncommon. By 1630 Gil had received a complete pardon for his Star Chamber offense, but he remained cantankerous all his life. After succeeding his father at St. Paul’s he was dismissed for his bad temper and savage beating of his students. He began teaching privately at his rooms in Aldersgate Street, London, at the same time that Milton did, but soon after he became master of Oakham School in Rutland, where he remained until his death. Three letters from Milton to Gil survive. See ODNB.

Catherine Gimelli Martin

Gildas (fl. fifth to sixth centuries). Historian and controversialist. His principal extant work, De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae [On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain], is a rare source of information on British history in the aftermath of the departure of the Romans. Milton draws on it in The History of Britain and reflects in part something of Gildas’s lamentational idiom. Thomas N. Corns

Girard, Bernard de, Sieur du Haillan (c. 1535 –1610). French historian, born in Bordeaux. Abjuring his Protestant faith, he became secretary to François de Noailles, bishop of Acqs, and wrote De l’Estat et succez des affaires de France . . . (Paris, 1570, 1572, 1584, 1594, 1609), which he dedicated to the Duc d’Anjou. Successively historiographer to Charles IX and Henri III, he wrote Histoire générale des rois de France . . . depuis Pharamond jusqu’à Charles VII inclusivement (Paris, 1576, 1584; Geneva, 1577, 1580). Milton quoted extensively from both of De Girard’s works in his Commonplace Book and retained two basic ideas: that the right of electing and deposing kings lay with the ancient Franks, and that titles were not hereditary. De

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Girard was the first French historian not to relate events in a chronological order. Christophe J.-B. Tournu

Gnosticism. Collective term for a variety of early heresies recorded principally by Irenaeus and Epiphanius, church fathers of the second and third centuries, respectively (the important account of Hippolytus was lost to the early moderns). Gnostics viewed the cosmos as the defective creation of an at best deluded and at worst evil being. This figure Gnostics frequently identified as the God of the Old Testament. For Ophite Gnostics the serpent in Eden, therefore, became a morally positive agent, and the Romantic view of Milton as one of the devil’s party is consequently a late version of this idea. In Milton’s age, Ranters were accused of Gnosticism. The prophet Thomas Tany and the hermit Roger Crab harbored Gnostic compatibilities too, as did most writers influenced by the dualist tendencies of Jakob Boehme. Samuel Pordage’s Behmenist hexameral epic Mundorum Explicatio (1662) well shows the tensions between orthodox and Gnostic/dualist ideas, furnishing an instructive comparison to Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is doubtful there were any self-defined Gnostics in Milton’s age, though; the term can best describe structural tendencies yet was used loosely and as a polemic label. William Poole

God. The Christian deity and creator of the universe. In the seventeenth century (and thereafter) the God of Roman Catholics intervened in nature from time to time to effect miracles, whereas Protestants insisted that the age of visible miracles had ended with the apostolic church. This Reformation variant of the Deus absconditus meant that Milton’s Samson, like John Bunyan’s Christian, undertakes his spiritual journey without any miraculous intervention; they live in a world in which the intervention of a God hidden behind his creation is confined to an occasional inner prompting. God is, however, deemed to be the force behind momentous events. In the case of the Restoration, the divine motive was unclear, but in the case of the Reformation, God’s hand was readily apparent. In De Doctrina Christiana the chapter devoted to God (I.2) is in effect a discussion of God the Father, though he becomes a father only after his son has been generated. The treatment of the Father is conventional. In Paradise Lost, God the Father is

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not a theorized theological entity but a character who can be magisterial, and also curmudgeonly. In his early verse Milton was content to refer to the incarnate Son of God as “Christ,” but that practice ended in 1646 with “On the New Forcers of Conscience” (“to force our consciences that Christ set free”); thereafter in Milton’s poems he refers to the incarnate son as Jesus or “the Son.” The preincarnate son of Paradise Lost is called “the Son,” not Jesus or Christ. This linguistic exactitude is an insistence that God the Son exists only in his subservient relationship to God the Father. This emphasis was unusual in radical circles, where the centrality of soteriology and of the conversion experience made the Son, from a human perspective, the most important member of the Godhead. The Son of God is not a fully developed character in Milton’s early writings, but there is a long chapter on the Son in De Doctrina Christiana, and he appears as a speaking character in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. In De Doctrina Christiana Milton argues that the Son is consubstantial with the Father but not coessential: in other words, he shares the divine substratum of the Father but has a separate mode of existence. Indeed, in Milton’s view the Father was eternal, but the Son was merely perpetual because he was generated in time. Perhaps the most esoteric point of Milton’s Christology was his denial of the ubiquity of the human nature of the exalted Son; he sits, Milton insists, in one definite place. He shares with Arius the view that the Son is perpetual rather than eternal, but disagrees with Arius in his insistence that the Son was generated (Arius thought that he was created ex nihilo). Similarly, Milton opposes the view of Nestorius that the Son consisted of two separate persons, insisting that he had a twofold nature in one person; he also opposes Photinus’s notion that the Son had no preincarnate existence and rejects any form of adoptionist Christology. In recent decades subordinationism has been proposed as a possible category, but this is a mirage: subordinationism is not a doctrine midway between Arianism and orthodoxy, but rather a capacious nineteenth-century term for a tendency within Arianism. In theological terms Milton’s was one of a large number of competing radical Christologies, but it is not aligned with the thinking of any particular group. The theology of the Holy Spirit, which is known to theologians as pneumatology, is one in which Milton is more radical than most of his contemporaries. The Holy Spirit was deemed to have processed from God by spiration rather than generation, but the mode of procession became a matter of dispute

in the ninth century. The eastern church gradually adopted the doctrine of the single procession of the Holy Spirit, according to which the Spirit proceeded from a single font of divinity in the Godhead. The western church, on the other hand, adopted the doctrine of the double procession of the Holy Spirit, according to which spiration took the form of a joint procession from God the Father and the Son. The Latin term filioque (“and the son”) was first added to the creed (in which the Holy Spirit was said to have proceeded from the Father “and the Son”) at the Third Council of Toledo (589), and debate about the issue thereafter centered on this term. In England, the Thirty-Nine Articles incorporate the doctrine of the double procession of the Holy Spirit. De Doctrina Christiana I.6 is Milton’s only systematic exposition of his pneumatology. In his opening paragraph he explicitly denies the notion that the Spirit processed by spiration; he declares that it cannot be said on the basis of scripture whether the Spirit came to exist by generation or creation and also declares that procession and emanation are irrelevant to the issue of the nature of the Holy Spirit. Such views align Milton with the Pneumatomachians of late antiquity, a group of theologians (later known as Macedonians) who denied the full divinity of the Holy Spirit. When in the final book of Paradise Lost the Spirit appears as the Comforter, he is introduced as the Spirit of God the Father (12.486 – 88). The notion that the Spirit proceeds solely from the Father is an echo of the eastern church’s doctrine of the single procession. The youthful Milton was entirely content to proclaim the “trinal unity” of God (see “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” 11), and as late as 1641, in Of Reformation, he was content to invoke the “one tri-personal Godhead,” but his enthusiasm for the doctrine of the Trinity faded as he became more radical. The point at which Milton repudiated Trinitarianism cannot be established with any certainty, especially as his licensing of the Racovian Catechism may reflect toleration rather than endorsement. What is certain is that De Doctrina Christiana is antitrinitarian, and it is arguable that antitrinitarianism is implicit in Paradise Lost. In moving toward an antitrinitarian position, Milton was swimming with the radical European tide as well as his English contemporaries. By the time he came to write De Doctrina Christiana and Paradise Lost, he regarded Trinitarianism as unbiblical. At the end of Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says to his disciples, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations,

Good Old Cause

baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” When Milton adapts these words in Paradise Lost (12.440 – 42) he records the injunction to “teach all nations” but drops the Trinitarian formula of baptism, instead commending believers’ baptism in a “profluent stream,” the radical alternative to infant baptism in a font; Trinitarianism yields to polemical insistence. The other Trinitarian proof text was the Johannine comma (1 John 5:7– 8), which Milton (rightly) dismisses in De Doctrina Christiana as a medieval forgery (see 1 John). See Campbell et al. (2007), Hunter, Patrides, and Adamson (1971), Kelley (1962), Patrides (1966).

Gordon Campbell

Godwin, William (1756 –1836). Polemicist and novelist; husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley. He enjoyed brief, intense fame, highlighted by his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). Godwin admired Milton, often quoting him and lifting the plot for his Imogen from Milton’s Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle. In a letter to Percy Bysshe Shelley, Godwin places “Shakespeare and Milton at the head of our poetry . . . Bacon and Milton at the head of our prose.” Like Milton, Godwin valued education and freedom of expression; like Shelley, he loved Milton’s Satan and loathed Milton’s God. Godwin also wrote a biography of Milton’s nephews (Edward Phillips and John Phillips); Godwin published Lives of Edward and John Philips, Nephews and Pupils of Milton (1815), composed during his slide to ignominy, at his own expense. Craig T. Fehrman

Golding, Arthur (c. 1536 –1606). Translator. Born in Essex, he is best known for his translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which was a source for William Shakespeare and other Elizabethan authors. Yet Golding also translated numerous classical works and religious texts. He completed Sir Philip Sidney’s translation of Philippe de Mornay’s The Trueness of the Christian Religion. As Barbara Lewalski has illustrated, his translations of Jean Calvin’s sermons on the scriptural books of Job and Daniel illuminate Old Testament models for the Son of God in Paradise Regained. See Lewalski (1966).

Frances M. Malpezzi

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Goliath. A giant depicted in the Old Testament. In Milton, he appears only in Samson Agonistes, where he is mentioned as the “chief ” son of Harapha (1249); the episode is Milton’s invention, but it draws heavily from the story of David and Goliath in 1 Samuel chapter 17. Charles A. Keim

Goodall, Edward (1597–1652). Rector. After graduating from Trinity College, Cambridge University (B.A. 1618 –1619, M.A. 1622), he served as an assistant to Thomas Gataker at Rotherhithe and as a lecturer for the parish of St. Pancras, Soper Lane (1624 –1627), before obtaining the living at St. Michael’s, Horton, in October 1631 upon the recommendation of Henry Bulstrode. He prospered from it — a 1639 glebe terrier (a register of landed property) reported the Horton rectory as the largest in all of Buckinghamshire, and Goodall’s will corroborates his ownership of various properties in the Horton/Colnbrook area). He served as the Milton family’s clergyman (1635 –1640) and presided over the burial of Milton’s mother, Sara Jeffrey Milton, and the christenings and burials of several of the sons and daughters of Milton’s brother, Christopher Milton. Goodall married Sarah, daughter of Thomas Valentine, rector of Chalfont St. Giles, in April 1633. Like his father-in-law, who was temporarily suspended from his living by William Laud, Goodall did not abide by all of the archbishop’s policies and was cited for infractions during a 1637 visitation. Goodall was one of the clergymen for whom the Kedermister Library located inside the neighboring parish church of Langley Marish was created, so he could have helped Milton gain access to its collection of theological writings during his years at Horton. Edward Jones

Good Old Cause. Term widely current in the later 1650s and very early 1660s for the political values and ideology associated with English republicanism. Particularly after the death of Oliver Cromwell in September 1658 supporters of the English republic, including those somewhat alienated from the state during the Protectorate, revived the discourse and aspirations associated with the establishment in 1649 of a state without a king. The term was used ironically by their opponents, though Milton in The Readie and Easie

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Way explicitly asserts his solidarity with the Good Old Cause. Thomas N. Corns

and forbidden from holding any place of trust for the rest of his life. See Coffey (2006), ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

Goodwin, John (c. 1594 –1665). Independent minister. Among leading clergymen of the period, he probably most closely resembles Milton in his beliefs on matters of both politics and religion. He was educated at Queens’ College, Cambridge (B.A. 1616, M.A. 1619), where he had a fellowship from 1617 to 1627. He held livings in Norfolk before moving in 1633 to St. Stephen, Coleman Street, London, where he served as vicar and lecturer. His parish was home to several Christian sects, including a leading General Baptist congregation under the leadership of Thomas Lambe. Although Goodwin escaped the attention of William Laud in the 1630s, he emerged in the 1640s as a leading Independent divine (see Independency) and an advocate of toleration, a cause to which Milton was attracted at the same time. There are analogies between Goodwin’s writings on the subject and Areopagitica. Like Milton, he attracted censure from Presbyterian propagandists (see Presbyterianism). In terms of church government, he was drawn to congregational independency and established a separate congregation in St. Stephen while continuing to discharge his parochial duties as a minister of the Church of England. He was deprived of his living, withdrawing with his supporters to form another congregation. He was restored in 1649. Goodwin’s career intersected in several ways with Milton’s, and though there is no evidence of personal acquaintance, it seems likely that they knew each other, given those shared beliefs and the proximity of Milton’s places of residence to Coleman Street through the 1640s. Like Milton, he substantially rejected Calvinist theories of predestination, approximating to the Arminian position in his doctrine of salvation (see Arminianism). Moreover, like Milton, he defended the right of Parliament to take arms against the king. Just as Milton in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates offered the best secular defense of the execution of Charles I, Goodwin defended the trial in print and from his pulpit. At the Restoration, works by both were sentenced to be called in and burnt by the common hangman, and like Milton he found it expedient in 1660 to go into hiding. He escaped capital punishment and incarceration, but he was deprived of his living

Goring, George, Baron Goring (1608 –1657). Royalist army officer. Already an experienced soldier, he commanded a regiment in the first of the Bishops’ Wars and a brigade in the second. In 1641 he was part of a conspiracy by young officers to disrupt by coup the Long Parliament, the so-called Army Plot, although he lost confidence in the plan and partially betrayed it to the parliamentary authorities. He was in arms for the king from the inception of the First Civil War. Goring was a conspicuous figure who attracted the attention of Parliament’s pamphleteers, though he enjoyed mixed success. He spent the last twelve years of his life in exile. In Eikonoklastes, Milton alludes to his role in the Army Plot, suggesting that Goring merely served as an instrument of Charles I and that the plot gave evidence of the king’s bad faith during his early dealings with the Long Parliament. Thomas N. Corns

Gower, John (c. 1330 –1408). Poet, best known for Confessio Amantis. Milton cites the Confessio in An Apology Against a Pamphlet and the Commonplace Book and quotes twenty-two lines from it in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda— each time on the issue of kingship. Craig T. Fehrman

grace. The “free and unmerited favour of God as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowing of blessings” (OED 11a). As the etymology suggests, grace is “gratuitous”; God does not owe grace but dispenses it freely. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve obey God and practice virtue without grace. After the Fall, they and their heirs are dependent on grace to do any good at all. Milton shares the nearly universal Christian belief that without divine grace humanity can only sin. The notable exception to this consensus is the fifth-century heretic Pelagius. Any hint of Pelagianism was anathema in the seventeenth century, as earlier; the debate among Christian thinkers extended only to whether all or only some received grace and whether that grace is resistible or irresistible. On these questions Augustine is ambiguous,

Greek

sometimes suggesting that grace is given only to the elect, who are saved inevitably, and sometimes suggesting that grace is given to all, who are free to accept it or not. The opposition within Augustine is played out in Milton’s time between the strict Calvinist predestinarians (see Calvinism) and the Arminians (see Arminianism), whose thinking on grace and free will is very similar to Milton’s. The understanding of grace in De Doctrina Christiana is thoroughly Arminian. Grace is offered to all, it is sufficient to enable fallen creatures to choose to believe, and it is resistible. The treatise is explicit in arguing that predestination is conditional rather than unconditional. Finally, the treatise is firmly anti-Calvinist in its claim that “no man believes because God had prescience about it, but rather God had prescience about it because the man was going to believe.” Paradise Lost echoes the treatise and Arminius on grace, particularly in the Father’s speeches in book 3. See Danielson (1982).

Stephen M. Fallon

Graham, James, First Marquess of Montrose (1612 –1650). Scottish royalist army officer and minor poet. He was the most active supporter of Charles I in Scotland in the mid-1640s, winning a number of battles against the Covenanters. After the execution of his father in 1649, Charles II was drawn into negotiation with Scottish groups previously opposed to the policies of Charles I, which led eventually to the formation of a principally Scottish incursion into England that was halted and destroyed at the Battle of Worcester (1651). Montrose, however, had been captured by the Scottish government before the alliance with the new king and was executed by hanging. His body, though dismembered, was interred, but his head was posted on a spike on the Tollbooth in Edinburgh. Three years later, a loyal adherent, Andrew Sandelands, who had been a fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, during Milton’s student days there, wrote to Milton, petitioning his help in retrieving the skull so that it could be honorably buried. Sandelands seems to have been unsuccessful. Thomas N. Corns

Grand Remonstrance. A long document (more than two hundred paragraphs) that summarized the complaints laid against both ecclesiastical and civil government over the 1630s and earlier. On 1 De-

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cember 1641, the Long Parliament presented it to Charles I. It had been voted on after a tumultuous and deeply divisive debate in which the House of Commons was polarized between the royalist supporters of the king and his critics and opponents. It marked a significant step along the road to war. Charles’s response was initially temporizing and later emollient, though to no avail. Thomas N. Corns

Greece. By the mid-seventeenth century, much of what is now modern Greece was in Ottoman hands, although the republic of Venice retained some territories, most significantly modern-day Crete. Milton wrote in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda (1654) that he had intended to travel to Sicily and then to Greece, but “the sad tidings of civil war from England summoned me back.” This retrospective account is puzzling for several reasons. First, there was no civil war in England at the time. Second, for a man returning in haste, Milton took an inordinately long time, reaching home six months later. Third, Greece seems an unlikely aspiration, except perhaps in retrospect; it was part of the Ottoman empire and did not become an extension of the Grand Tour until the mid-eighteenth century. Thomas N. Corns

Greek. In Latin Milton stands out as a creative user, but in Greek as a serious scholar; Greek scholarship is discussed among Milton’s marginalia. In both languages he exploits outstanding competence for access to the minds of ancient exemplars and for multilingual allusiveness that infuses his epic style. The poems in Greek are few and early. One impersonates a philosopher, advising a king who is about to execute him not to do so for his own sake—like a cross between Socrates and Diogenes. Our hero speaks in heroic, Homeric hexameters. So does the voice of the psalmist in “A Paraphrase on Psalm cxiv,” arguably the best of Milton’s verse translations. Moving to caustic iambics for the frontispiece of Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645), Milton punishes the engraver of its botched portrait by getting him to engrave an attack on the engraver and his engraving. There is a Greek-like wit in all three poems. Although Graecisms are less frequent than Milton’s Latinisms, they give multilingual energy to his epic style. Thus when Eve in Paradise Lost “knew not eating death” (9.792), we have both a concise locution for “while” eating and a more

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pungent Graecism with verbs of knowing, “that” she was eating death. Greek here helps ambiguity attain precision. Greek authors informed Milton’s independent thought, early and late, across all genres and purposes. For example, a dialogue with Euripides is heard in Areopagitica or Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio; or with Aristotle’s Poetics to launch his Samson Agonistes. No matter whether we turn to Homer or Hesiod; Herodotus, Pindar, or Plato; or the New Testament, Milton knows them in their Greek, which is absorbed and condensed and then forthrightly wielded. See Hale (1997).

John K. Hale

Gregoras, Nicephoras (c. 1295 –1360). Byzantine historian. He was keeper of the archives at Constantinople under the reign of Andronicus II, whose downfall led to the dismissal and retirement of Gregoras. Milton drew on Gregoras’s Byzantinae Historiae Libri XI [Eleven Books of Byzantine History] in his Commonplace Book, taking three notes, on succession in the eastern empire, on control of the sea, and on chivalric games. Thomas N. Corns

Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 330 – c. 390). Greek church father. A contemporary of Basil (the Great), he was an eloquent preacher and learned controversialist whom Milton cites in Eikonoklastes as an opponent of prelacy. He was noted in the Renaissance for having written Christian poetry in classical forms. His shorter poems were translated by Thomas Drant (Epigrams . . . [London, 1568]), and a Euripedian tragedy on Christ’s suffering and crucifixion, titled Christos Paschon, was traditionally attributed to him (as by Milton), though it seems to date from the early twelfth century. It was a model for Hugo Grotius’s important Christus Patiens (Milton contemplated writing a tragedy with the same title) and other biblical tragedies, such as Samson Agonistes. Gregory Kneidel

Gregory of Nyssa (c. 330 – c. 395). Greek church father. The younger brother of Basil (the Great), Gregory wrote orations, letters, lives, and homilies (including a hexameral series). Milton cites from his Opera (Paris, 1638), for example, in his Commonplace Book and An Apology Against a Pamphlet. More than any other Greek father, Gregory

of Nyssa’s writings reveal the Platonizing influence of Origen. Like Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus, he is specifically associated with the defense of the Nicene Creed, especially its doctrine of the Trinity, against the Arians and other sects that would be labeled heretical. Gregory Kneidel

Greville, Robert, Second Baron Brooke (1607– 1643). Parliamentarian and religious writer. He was the adopted son and heir of Fulke Greville, who had been a friend of Philip Sidney and a fellow antiabsolutist in politics, although a more cautious one than Sidney himself. Greville inherited his uncle’s politics with his title and along with his close ally William Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele, became an early and open opponent of Charles I in the clashes that preceded the civil wars. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon later claimed that Greville was the first positive enemy of both church and state in the House of Lords, although by 1640 –1641 he was far from alone in supporting the Root and Branch Petition in the Short and Long Parliaments. He was already politically in deep trouble with Charles for denying his summons in 1639, and religiously he had long held strong Puritan sympathies. Yet while employing a staunch Puritan minister, Peter Sterry, Greville also clashed with Puritan colonists in Rhode Island, who demanded church membership of prospective citizens. As a result, both he and Lord Saye and Sele withdrew from their projected colony and returned to England. Like Sterry a kind of mystical Platonist, Greville nevertheless differed from the Cambridge Platonists in not endorsing free will over predestination. Instead, he tried to reconcile his Calvinism with his rationalism through a diffuse Platonic idealism, which further supported his strong belief in human dignity and religious toleration. He was killed by a sniper’s bullet in the assault on Lichfield (1643). In 1644 Milton’s Areopagitica movingly praised him as a martyr to the cause of toleration. The tolerant views presented in his Discourse Opening the Nature of . . . Episcopie (1641) are his most important contribution to his age. He also influenced Milton’s Of Prelatical Episcopacy (or perhaps vice versa), and Milton was familiar with The Nature of Truth, which like Areopagitica uses the underlying unity of superficially different “truths” to justify the free competition of ideas. Catherine Gimelli Martin

Gunpowder Plot

Griffith, Matthew (?1599 –1669). Royalist divine and occasional chaplain to Charles I. He published his sermon “Fear of God and the King,” together with its lengthy historical postscript “The Samaritan Revived,” in early April 1660. “Fear of God” was preached on 25 March 1660, having as its text Proverbs 24:21, “My son, fear thou the Lord and the king: and meddle not with them that are given to change.” Brief Notes upon a Late Sermon (10 –15 April 1660) was Milton’s hasty reply. For the most part Griffith’s text reflects familiar divine-right political ideology. In Brief Notes, Milton characterizes “Fear of God” as a “pretty fantastic dos of Divinity” and indicts Griffith for abuses of figurative language as well as extravagant readings of scripture that obscure the meaning of the sacred text. James Egan

Grotius, Hugo [de Groot, Huig] (1583 –1645). Dutch jurist, theologian, and poet. He was a prodigy and a polymath, entering Leiden University in 1594, where he was championed by J. J. Scaliger. He attained rapid scholarly and then public prominence and accompanied the Dutch diplomatic mission to France in 1598. Taking the side of the Remonstrants in the Arminian dispute, in 1618 he was imprisoned for life. His political ally the statesman Johan van Oldenbarnevelt was executed. Grotius later escaped in 1621 by hiding in a chest of books. Relocating to Paris, he acted as the ambassador to the French king for Queen Christina of Sweden. In later life he was repeatedly accused of heresy, particularly Socinianism, and corresponded freely across confessional divides. Grotius’s influential De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625), the founding text of international law, resurrected a theory of natural rights. Men, he argued, could be said to possess certain inalienable rights much as they possessed property, a scholastic notion that the humanists had done much to dismantle. Grotius thus laid the foundations for modern natural rights theories and for subsequent discussion of international relations.

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Milton met Grotius in Paris in May 1638, as Milton himself recalls in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda; Thomas Scudamore, Viscount Sligo, had procured him an introduction. Milton later cites Grotius a number of times in his divorce tracts. Apart from the probable theological influence of Grotius’s Arminianism, Milton’s rhetoric of natural rights bears Grotian marks, though Milton maintained a theistic terminology. Grotius’s verse dramas were also popular in England. His Christus Patiens was translated by George Sandys and published in 1640. Francis Goldsmith’s version of Sophompaneas followed twelve years later. In 1601 Grotius published a volume of Neolatin poetry, Sacra, consisting of miscellaneous poems and the verse drama Adamus Exul, on the subject of the Fall. He was not yet eighteen years old when he composed this five-act biblical tragedy, the only one of Grotius’s three biblical plays not to receive early modern translation into English. It is, however, of great interest to Miltonists because of its probable influence on Paradise Lost. See Kirkconnell (1967).

William Poole

Guicciardini, Francesco (1483 –1540). Historian. Educated at the universities of Ferrara and Padua, he entered the diplomatic service of the Florentine republic and remained in public service after the restoration of the Medici family to power. He thereafter held a number of senior appointments in the administration of papal territories, concluding his career with a return to public service in Florence, before his dismissal in 1537. In retirement, he wrote Storia d’Italia, which was frequently reprinted and was also widely translated. Milton twice cites it, in Italian, in his Commonplace Book. Thomas N. Corns

Gunpowder Plot. See Guy Fawkes.

H

William Poole

Habakkuk. Book of the Old Testament. It is one of the twelve “minor prophets” and follows the pattern of the other prophetic books, describing imminent doom (in this case of a somewhat indeterminate kind) and future reconciliation. Milton in De Doctrina Christiana sometimes cites Habakkuk among other prophetic writing. It is, however, distinguished by its observations on saving faith (2:3 – 4), not hitherto a prominent element in Old Testament writing. Cited in Romans (1:17), Galatians (3:11), and Hebrews (10:38), it is a starting point for the Christian concept of faith, which 140

was deeply controversial in Reformation theology and remained so in Milton’s day. Milton includes the text in De Doctrina Christiana. In Of True Religion Milton draws on a rather different aspect of Habakkuk, its denunciation of the worship of graven idols, in his attack on the alleged idolatry of Roman Catholicism. See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

haemony. The herbal root that Thyrsis provides to the brothers in Milton’s Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle to shield them from the enchantments of the demon Comus. The name points both to a Thessalian link (the Latin Haemonia was a reg˘ ular name for Thessaly, a region of Greece associated with magic) and to blood (Gk. αιμα), which has been linked with the blood of Christ. Details of the description that Thyrsis cites from “a certain Shepherd Lad” who gave him the plant—that it has “prickles on it” and is underappreciated “in this soil,” and bears “a bright golden flower” only “in another country”—suggest some such allegorical operation in a work so consistently inclined to Neoplatonism. The plant has been seen as an allusion to a particular medicinal herb, St. John’s wort, that was well known during the period under a variety of names, all of which have resonances for its use in the Masque: Hypericum perforatum, Fuga daemonum, Sol terrestris, and Androsaemum, the latter (Gk. man’s blood) being closest to Milton’s coinage. The virtues of this plant are described in contemporary herbals to include dissolving illusionary spells, resisting miasmas, detecting sorcerers and demons, and driving off evil spirits. Stories were also told of its use to protect maidens from the attentions of demon lovers, who could not stand its presence. John Aubrey records how Henry Lawes, who played Thyrsis in the Masque, witnessed its efficacy in a case of demonic haunting. The simi-

˛

Haak, Theodore (1605 –1690). Translator and natural philosopher. Born in the Palatinate, he visited Oxford University and Cambridge University in 1625 and returned to England in 1628 to carry out relief work for the Palatinate. During his residency, he maintained epistolary connections with many European men of letters, notably John Amos Comenius and Marin Mersenne, and was also close friends with Samuel Hartlib, John Pell, and John Dury. He was approached by the Westminster Assembly of Divines in the 1640s to translate into English the annotated Dutch Bible of 1637, the scholarly outcome of the Synod of Dort (1618 –1619). Haak completed this massive task in 1657 after more than a decade of labor. By this time, he was a colleague of Milton, working as a secretary and translator for the Protectorate. It was apparently Haak who started up in London the meetings in that year of the so-called 1645 gathering of natural philosophers, one of the forerunning groups of the Royal Society, and after the Restoration, Haak was one of the society’s founding fellows. He was also the earliest translator of Paradise Lost, rendering just over three books into German; this translation was rediscovered in 1887 and is reproduced in Barnett (1962).

Hall, Joseph

larity with Milton’s haemony is striking, but the identification by no means excludes allegorical possibilities also. In the Masque the plant is compared with Homer’s “Moly,” which is given by Hermes to Odysseus to protect him from Circe’s spells and which had a lengthy history of allegorical interpretations. Since Milton invented Comus as the son of Circe, it is possible that his use of Hypericum as haemony was similarly free. Tom Bishop

Haggai. Book of the Old Testament. Named for one of the “minor prophets,” it dates from the late sixth century and, using the prophetic paradigm of threats, warnings, and promises, promotes the second building of the temple in Jerusalem. Haggai develops, too, a vision of the Messiah, which allows Milton in De Doctrina Christiana to meet the Jewish argument that the true Messiah is still awaited by reasoning that, since Haggai foretold his coming during the period of the second temple and since the second temple has been destroyed, he must then have come already. See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

Hales, John (1584 –1656). Scholar. Known for his erudition, library, and long association with Eton College (fellow 1613; regius professor of Greek 1615 –1619; chaplain to Archbishop William Laud 1638; and college bursar 1617–1649), he has been linked to Milton through the former’s friendship with Sir Henry Wotton and the possible influence of his Tract Concerning Schism and Schismatics (1636 –1637), a work that explores the notion of religious toleration. In Wotton’s letter of 13 April 1637 to Milton, his reference to “Mr. H” has traditionally been understood to be Hales, who may or may not be the “said learned friend” who introduced the two men to each other in early April 1637. See ODNB.

Edward Jones

Hall, John, of Durham (1627–1656). Poet and writer. A strong polemicist for Parliament and later for Oliver Cromwell, he worked with Milton and Marchamont Nedham on the parliamentary newspaper Mercurius Politicus. One of Hall’s works, A Letter to a Gentleman in the Country (1653), was long attributed to Milton, but no written correspondence

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survives and Milton seems to have denied some request from Hall, perhaps for a meeting. Although already a renowned essayist at St. John’s College, Cambridge, Hall angrily left after three years and entered Gray’s Inn in 1647. In London he became an active member of the circles of both Samuel Hartlib and Thomas Stanley. Despite their conflicting politics, he joined Stanley and friends, such as the royalist poets Richard Lovelace and Robert Herrick, in writing poetry and translations. John Davies prefixed a sympathetic memoir to Hall’s Hierocles, and Thomas Hobbes observed that, if he had lived longer or been less “debauched,” he would have done extraordinary things. Precocious but undisciplined, he continues Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1649) in his best-known work and uncannily proclaims Bacon, Milton, and Hobbes the three greatest men of the age, an uncommon trio at the time. Catherine Gimelli Martin

Hall, Joseph (1574 –1656). Religious writer and satirist. Born in Ashby de la Zouch, Leicestershire, he attended Emmanuel College, Cambridge University (M.A. 1596), and was ordained at Colchester in 1600. Hall became bishop of Exeter (1627) and later of Norwich (1641). He was a literary pioneer, his Virgidemiarum (1597–1598) being the first neoclassical satire in English. In Characters of Vertues and Vices (1608), Hall wrote the earliest Theophrastian characters in English, creating an enormously popular seventeenth-century genre. He contributed introductory verses to his friend John Donne’s Anniversaries and arranged to have the poems printed. Hall’s other achievements in imaginative writing include his utopian satire Mundus Alter Et Idem (1605), his Arte of Divine Meditation (1606), and many later collections of meditations. Hall encountered Milton through his participation in religious controversy; as early as 1610 Hall had criticized Puritan Separatists. During the episcopal controversy in 1640, he wrote the scholarly and voluminous Episcopacie by Divine Right, followed (in January 1641) by the much briefer Humble Remonstrance to the High Court of Parliament. A group of Presbyterian clergymen known as Smectymnuus responded with An Answer to a Booke Entituled, An Humble Remonstrance (March 1641). Milton may have written the “Postscript” to this work, which gave historical support for the antiepiscopal side using language similar to that found in his later works. Hall responded with A Defence of the Humble Remonstrance (April 1641), and the Presbyterian

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clergy replied with a longer tract, A Vindication of the Answer, in June. Hall’s last response is the dismissive Short Answer to the Tedious Vindication (September). Milton entered the controversy in July with Animadversions, a direct attack on Hall. An unknown writer (possibly Hall) replied with A Modest Confutation the following February. Milton responded with his final antiprelatical tract, An Apology Against a Pamphlet. Hall argued that the episcopal hierarchy was decreed by the Holy Spirit and established by the apostles. He is inconsistent on the question of whether its divine status requires episcopacy in every true church: at the very least, however, bishops are divinely warranted. The Smectymnuans and Milton denied both claims. In Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda Milton claimed that his intervention helped the ministers “withstand the eloquence of this bishop.” Hall was known for his eloquence, and his best prose is characterized by his self-consciously “Senecan” style; it is sententious, witty, dense, and sometimes deliberately disjointed. Hall avoids the “Ciceronian” copia of earlier humanists, as well as of Milton, whose prose by contrast often tumbles out in long, far-ranging periods. Thomas Fuller admiringly called Hall “our English Seneca.” Milton on the other hand scornfully branded him a “tormenter of semicolons” in Apology Against a Pamphlet. Hall was imprisoned for a short time in the 1640s. After being evicted from his see (c. 1647), he retired to the village of Heigham in Norwich where he continued to write and preach until his death. Henry S. Limouze

Hall, Robert (?1606 –1667). Eldest son of Joseph Hall. In An Apology Against a Pamphlet, Milton disclosed a suspicion that a son of the bishop had penned the Modest Confutation of his own Animadversions on the prelatical writings of Hall Sr. Robert Hall has sometimes been advanced as the author, although the bishop had six sons, and the author of the Confutation speaks of his own youth, whereas Robert Hall was in his mid-thirties at the time.

tant rate books for the parish of St. Paul’s narrow the date of the family’s relocation from their Bread Street residence to after May 1630 but before 30 April 1631 when Milton’s father (John Milton, Sr.) first appears on the poor relief rolls. By signing his name to the account books for 1633, Milton Sr., a scrivener, served as either a churchwarden or a justice of the peace; additional evidence from Chancery records discovered in 1949 confirms that the Miltons were in Hammersmith through 8 January 1635. Because of the late discovery of this residency, Milton’s Hammersmith period has only slowly come into focus. His reference in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda (“paterno rure”) was to this home rather than to a later residence in Horton; it was also the Hammersmith residence at which Milton likely spent the summers of 1630 and 1631 as well as intervals between university terms during those years before graduating with an M.A. from Cambridge University in July 1632 and taking up fulltime residency. The most plausible explanation for the family’s change of residence was practical. Outbreaks of plague in 1625 and 1630 were especially virulent, and families of means such as the Miltons sought refuge in safer locations outside London. In 1629 the establishment of a chapel of ease in Hammersmith could have been especially appealing to the Miltons because it offset traveling a much greater distance to All Saints, Fulham (the parish church), to attend services. However, that the Miltons decided to join a Laudian-controlled parish challenges traditional assumptions about the family’s Puritanism. During his Hammersmith residency, as opposed to the Horton period that follows it, Milton wrote a considerable amount of poetry, including the commissioned works Arcades and A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, “An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester,” and “Sonnet VII.” He also had his first poem published (“On Shakespeare” in the Second Folio), began purchasing books and attending lectures during periodic trips to London, and maintained correspondence with Alexander Gil the younger and Charles Diodati. Edward Jones

Thomas N. Corns

Hammersmith. A hamlet located approximately eight miles west of London. It was home to the Milton family during the first half of the 1630s. Ex-

Hammond, Henry (1605 –1660). Episcopal divine. He was born at Chertsey, Surrey, and educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford University, where he took his M.A. and became

Harringtonianism

a fellow in 1625. He became rector of Penshurst, Kent, in 1633. Though nominated to the Westminster Assembly of Divines, he never sat, and, in opposition to its Presbyterianism, he subsequently published A View of the New Directory and a Vindication of the Ancient Liturgy of the Church of England (1645). His Practical Catechism (1644) brought him to the attention of Charles I: he was appointed chaplain to the royal commissioners at the treaty conference at Uxbridge in 1645, and in the same year he became a canon of Christ Church, Oxford, and a royal chaplain. The royalism of his pamphlet addressed To the Lord Fairfax (1649) at the time of the king’s trial was mocked by Milton in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. N. H. Keeble

Hampden, John (1595 –1643). Politician. He sat in early Caroline parliaments, though achieved distinction as an opponent of Charles I only in 1634, when he refused to pay ship money, a tax formerly levied only on maritime areas that Charles extended to all of England without the consent of Parliament. A high-profile trial became a test case for the legality of the measure. The case stretched over 1637–1638. Though the verdict went narrowly against Hampden, it enhanced his reputation and ensured that he would have a prominent role in the Short Parliament and Long Parliament. In January 1642, in a reckless act that marked a significant stage in the spiral into civil war, the king attempted unsuccessfully to arrest him, with four colleagues, in the House of Commons. The five members had already fled to the sanctuary of the city. Milton gives an account of the event in Eikonoklastes. During the opening phase of the First Civil War Hampden commanded a regiment of the parliamentary army. He participated in the successful siege of Reading, where Christopher Milton and John Milton, Sr., were beleaguered, before receiving his death wound in a minor skirmish. See ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

Harapha. A Philistine who exchanges boasts and threats with Samson in Samson Agonistes. The character is Milton’s invention and does not appear in the biblical account of Samson; however, the name Harapha appears in 2 Samuel 21:16 in the Geneva Bible, as an attempted transliteration of the Hebrew word for “giant.” In Samson Agonistes

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Samson identifies Harapha as the father of Goliath (1247– 49). See Philistines. Phillip J. Donnelly

Harefield. Country estate of Alice Spencer, Countess of Derby,where Milton’s aristocratic entertainment Arcades was performed. It is located about ten miles northwest of Hammersmith, where Milton was probably living at the time, and is now just inside the M25 orbital motorway. Thomas N. Corns

Harrington, James (1611–1677). English republican political philosopher. He came from an old Rutland family and was educated at Trinity College, Oxford University. He was among the first to conceive of the civil wars as a revolution. His treatises, pamphlets, and aphorisms, nearly all published between 1656 and 1661, proposed an English republic with a bicameral legislature, a third of whose members were to be voted out annually by ballot, and an agrarian law, which would set limits on property ownership by regulating inheritance. Known chiefly for his lightly fictionalized British utopia published in 1656, The Commonwealth of Oceana, Harrington became a spokesman for a classical, humanist republic during the years in which Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate seemed susceptible to pressure from both its own quasi-monarchist inclinations and democratic thought from radical army members and Levellers. Harrington proposed his political system of rotation as a “bank” against oligarchic tyranny. When Milton and others advocated a perpetual senate, Harrington was quick to disapprove; the second edition of Milton’s The Readie and Easie Way makes new allowances for “partial rotation” in response to the censure his first edition received from Harrington and his supporters. Support for a state religion in Harrington’s Aphorisms Political, meanwhile, challenges language borrowed from Milton’s anticlerical tract The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings. See also The Censure of the Rota, a satirical attack on both Harrington and Milton. See Harrington (1977), Sabine and Thorson (1973), Smith (1994).

Christopher N. Warren

Harringtonianism. Legacy of republican political thought and action inspired by James Harrington.

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It is to be identified in republican arguments that proceed from a concern with property ownership, that prescribe regular rotation among representatives elected by ballot, or that advocate a division between the powers of “debate” and “result” in a bicameral legislature. Whether it constitutes the emergence of a Harringtonian “party” is unclear, but certainly elements of Harrington’s rhetoric, historical framework, and models for government emerge in the growing momentum against the Protectorate during its final years, particularly in arguments against the restoration of the House of Lords. Christopher N. Warren

Harsnett, Samuel (1561–1631). High-church divine. Born in Essex and educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge (B.A. 1581, M.A. 1584), he served in a succession of important posts, including the bishoprics of Chichester and Ely (1609) and of Norwich (1619), before becoming archbishop of York in 1628. A year later he was sworn into the Privy Council. Some early critics believed Harsnett’s 1603 work A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures provided Milton with a source for the reference in “L’Allegro” to the “friar’s lantern” (“by the friar’s lantern led” [104]), but G. L. Kittridge conclusively demonstrated that the friar Harsnett referred to was an actual German cleric rather than a traditional will-o’-the-wisp and thus that the reference was inaccurate (PMLA 15, 1900). Todd Butler

Hartlib, Samuel (c. 1600 –1662). Polymath. Born in Elbing in East Prussia, by 1628 he had emigrated to England, and in 1630 he was running a shortlived school in Chichester in association with the mathematician John Pell. He was a tireless publicist for Baconianism and the educational schemes of John Amos Comenius, who visited England at Hartlib’s instigation in the winter of 1641/42. Throughout the middle decades of the century, Hartlib, now based in London, maintained a vast international correspondence with various religious, educational, and scientific reformers. One of Hartlib’s major projects was the establishment of a national “Office of Address” that would act as a kind of record-office-cum-laborexchange. This, like most of his other schemes, came to nothing. After the Restoration he became a somewhat marginalized figure, too associ-

ated with the zeal of the revolutionary decades to be comfortably rehabilitated and lacking the kind of powerful connections that enabled a man such as John Wilkins to weather successfully the transition back to monarchy. Though many of his associates became fellows of the Royal Society, Hartlib did not and died in relative obscurity. Upon his death his extensive archive was purchased by William Brereton and subsequently ordered into bundles in 1667 by Hartlib’s correspondent John Worthington, who also removed certain items. These “Hartlib Papers,” still parceled in Worthington’s bundles, were rediscovered and edited in the midtwentieth century. Milton is mentioned a number of times in Hartlib’s papers. In 1643, perhaps at the start of their acquaintance, Hartlib wrote in his journal (the Ephemerides), “Mr Milton in Aldersgate Street hase written many good books a great traveller and full of projects and inventions.” Later in the same year, Milton donated three shillings to Hartlib’s associate Edmond Felton the engineer toward a military machine. On balance, it seems likely that Hartlib published Milton’s Of Education (1644), which is addressed to Hartlib, whom Milton describes as “sent hither by some good providence from a farre country to be the occasion and the incitement of great good to this Iland.” Hartlib certainly possessed a handwritten facsimile of the title page, and his papers contain numerous but mixed references to Milton’s tract. Milton also gleaned information from Hartlib’s correspondent John Dury on Claudius Salmasius and Alexander More. Dury was quite explicit that More was not the author of the anonymous Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum Adversus Parricidas Anglicanos [The Cry of the Royal Blood to Heaven Against the English Parricides] and that Milton should take heed of this. Milton did not. William Poole

Hayward, Sir John (?1564 –1627). Historian and civil lawyer. A leading exponent of the civil law, he was also among the most distinguished antiquaries of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean period. His major publication, The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII, was published in 1599. Milton drew frequently on his posthumously published Life and Raigne of King Edward the Sixth (London, 1630) in his Commonplace Book. Hayward’s recent biographer has claimed for him the achievement of bringing to English history a Taci-

Hebrew

tean emphasis on understanding the significance of personal character in shaping the affairs of state. Thomas N. Corns

heaven. In Christianity, the spiritual realm and abode of God and the angels (and after the Resurrection, of the saints). Milton refers to it as the “invisible heaven”; the “visible heaven,” or “heavens,” signifies the sky and its astronomical and astrological phenomena. Christianity has no fundamental teaching on the invisible heaven. The theories inherited by Milton and his contemporaries from biblical (and to a lesser extent, classical) antiquity as elaborated by the church fathers and the reformers allow much room for speculation on the nature of heaven. Early Judaism’s rudimentary notion of heaven involves the vindicating or rewarding of just individuals, whose immortal souls (a concept derived from Greek philosophy) ascend to a vaguely imagined pleasant place. In Jesus’s teaching, heaven, which coexists with this world, means the pure experience of God’s presence; at death, souls are judged, and those found worthy immediately join God. Paul teaches the resurrection of the dead in a future reunion with the divine. The writer of Revelation, drawing on the language and imagery of Ezekiel, envisages heaven as a vast temple providing spiritual refreshment. Augustine offers two influential views of heaven: in his ascetic earlier one, purely spiritual saints devote themselves to individual contemplation of God; in his later vision, heaven is a fellowship of saints (with fleshly though perfect bodies), and love of God merges with love of other saints. The scholastics’ heaven is a transcendent, hierarchical, light-filled empyrean. The heaven of the early Renaissance has two parts: the abode of God, where saints and angels worship, and the paradise garden, where the saints dwell. The early Protestant reformers, for whom geocentrism is symbolically useful, introduce the (classical) notion of a heavenly reunion with those loved on earth. Martin Luther imagines the earth’s eventual purification and saints with glorified bodies moving between earth and heaven. The CounterReformationists find heliocentrism to be symbolically useful for their notion of a beatific vision so intense that human personalities are irrelevant. In the beatific vision imagined by seventeenth-century Puritans, joyful worship replaces silent contemplation, and the saints receive perfect knowledge. Milton states in De Doctrina Christiana that the invisible heaven was created before the (vis-

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ible) heaven and earth, and that the paradise of the blessed, where the saints will eventually dwell, is part of it. His fullest treatment of the invisible heaven is in Paradise Lost, though given the epic’s subject and his mortalist views, the heavenly existence of the saints receives little attention. (Glimpses of it may be perceived in “Epitaphium Damonis” 198 – 219, “On Time” 11–22, and “Sonnet XIX.”) The proems to Paradise Lost books 3 and 7 acknowledge the difficulty and (theological) danger of rendering the invisible heaven imaginatively visible, and Raphael not only calls attention to his mode of representation—“By likening spiritual to corporeal forms”—but also hints that likening may be based on likeness (PL 5.573 –76). Drawn primarily from Exodus, Psalms, and Revelation (which itself assimilates imagery from Genesis, Ezekiel, and the gospels), and further elaborated with reference to the Isles of the Blessed and Mount Olympus, the features of Milton’s heaven simultaneously encourage and baffle imaginative apprehension (for example, its shape is “undetermined square or round,” PL 2.1048). The visible heaven, according to the Bible, has both practical and contemplative usefulness. It declares both the “seasons, hours, or days, or months, or years” (PL 8.69; Gen. 1:14) and “The maker’s high magnificence” (PL 8.101; Ps. 19:1). When he and Raphael discuss cosmology (PL 8.15 –178), Adam astutely criticizes geocentrism; Raphael, by refusing to endorse either geocentrism or heliocentrism, implicitly criticizes Adam for computing (PL 8.16) rather than considering (Ps. 8:3) the heavens. Karen L. Edwards

Hebrew. The language of the Old Testament. Milton probably learned its rudiments under the supervision of a private tutor hired by his father before he entered St. Paul’s School, perhaps Thomas Young, who is known to have given him a Hebrew Bible (now lost). At school, Hebrew was studied in the eighth form. Milton on four occasions felt confident and enthusiastic enough to translate selections from the Psalms. In the spirit of Reformation theologians, he recognized the importance of engaging with the scriptures in the original languages and was studiedly contemptuous of theologians of the early church, who were ignorant of Hebrew (Of Reformation). In De Doctrina Christiana he often comments on Hebrew words or phrases, and in his divorce tracts he interrogates the precise

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signification of the Hebrew words “commonly us’d for divorce.” See also languages of Milton. Thomas N. Corns

Hebrews. Book of the New Testament. It was commonly attributed to Paul in Milton’s time, though his authorship had long been questioned and is now generally denied. It is an extended example of and argument for scriptural typology, the method of biblical interpretation that pairs a “type” from the Hebrew scriptures with its “anti-type” in the Christian scriptures and that Milton endorses in De Doctrina Christiana. Critics have noticed the influence of Hebrews, especially the “cloud of witnesses” section, on the structure of Paradise Lost books 11–12, which presents sacred history unfolding “From shadowy types to truth” (12.303; cf. Heb. 10:1). The epistle’s argument also seems to lie behind the typology of Samson Agonistes, which suggests that Samson is a type for Christ (cf. the pairing of Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained in the 1671 edition), though their typological fit is much debated. See Lewalski (1979), Madsen (1968).

Gregory Kneidel

Heinsius, Daniel (1580 –1655). Scholar and poet of the Dutch Golden Age. He was born in Ghent but fled the turmoil of the Dutch Revolt and eventually studied at Leiden. As professor of Greek at Leiden he produced numerous editions and translations of Greek and Latin works, as well as his own Dutch verse. Heinsius was also a masterful literary critic, adapting Aristotle’s Poetics as part of a European program of Neoclassicism. His essay on tragedy, De Tragoediae Constitutione, with its Aristotelian emphasis on pathos and catharsis, influenced early modern drama across Europe, including Milton’s Samson Agonistes. He came into conflict with Claudius Salmasius over his adaptation of classical aesthetics and suffered oblique criticisms in Salmasius’s Defensio Regia, which Milton answered in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio. Andrew Fleck

Heinsius, Nicolaas (1620 –1681). Dutch humanist, poet, and bibliophile. He established a reputation for learning and astute judgment independently of his famous father, Daniel Heinsius. His peregrinations throughout Europe searching for

manuscripts of philological interest resulted in an important edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1646) based on these collations and earned him the patronage of Sweden’s Queen Christina. She simultaneously employed Claudius Salmasius, the bitter adversary of Nicolaas’s father. After Milton castigated Salmasius in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, Salmasius began a response that included further invective against Daniel and Nicolaas, but he died before completing it. Rumors of its abusive content reached Nicolaas, however, and his planned defense of his father and his praise for Milton’s lively Latin are discussed in numerous letters that reveal how Milton’s Latin works were received outside England. Andrew Fleck

heliocentrism. The theory that all planets in our solar system revolve around the sun, a view first taught by Heraclides Ponticus, as Milton knew. Milton’s practice of entertaining both heliocentrism and traditional geocentrism was later adopted by Oxford “new scientists” such as Seth Ward, but many early members of the Royal Society (which Ward helped found in 1660) still followed Francis Bacon in considering Nicolaus Copernicus’s revival of heliocentrism highly dubious or, like the French creation poet Guillaume de Salluste, Seigneur Du Bartas, completely absurd. Milton admired the greatest early Copernican, Galileo, whom he probably met during his visits to Florence in 1638 –1639. Catherine Gimelli Martin

hell. Deviation from God is a punishment in itself, and hell gives a name to this state, extending it beyond subjective experience. Jewish writers sometimes associated this condition with a place, Gehenna or Sheol. Gehenna (“valley of Hinnom’s son”) was a fiery town dump and burial ground outside the walls of Jerusalem, where human sacrifices to Moloch took place and which was sometimes thought to contain a passage to the underworld. In Gehenna, a “waiting room,” one experiences consciousness of one’s shortcomings before moving on to God, or remaining in pain. Sheol, literally “the abyss,” was an Old Testament graveyard or underworld, depending on how you read it, where the souls of the dead congregated. By the second century b.c. Jews had begun to imagine Sheol as a place of temporary suffering for the dead. Sheol was translated as Hades in the Septuagint.

Henri IV

Christians solidified these associations, mixing them with folk traditions and classical imagery, and invented hell, a place of eternal torture for the souls of sinners. Islam followed this path too, its fiery Jahannam deriving from Gehenna. Sheol became hell, the home of Satan, as Satan became the metaphysical embodiment of evil (as if Hades the place were separated from Hades, its nonexistent personification). In hell, Satan, assisted by his fellow fallen angels, punished the damned, humans who had turned from God. Against the Gnostics and Manicheans, Augustine insisted that hell was a real place where the damned eternally suffered for their sins; his view was endorsed by Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, and mainstream Christian theology. Authors of vision literature such as The Vision of Tundal (1149) and poets—such as the anonymous sixth-century writer who added the Descensus ad Infernos to the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, the authors of Genesis B and the Legenda Aurea, and Cynewulf— elaborated on the fires of hell, its chains and fetters, the punishments meted out, and what it felt like to be there. Their writings had as much influence as those of more reserved theologians. Hell was frequently understood to be in the center of the earth, which is where Dante located his Inferno. Such a geography also places hell at the center of the universe and makes it very close to Italy. It also implied that hell was created with earth, suggesting to some orthodox commentators that the fall of the angels—understood to be described in Luke 10:18, where “Satan” falls (is thrown) from heaven—took place within the seven days of creation. Milton rejects this in Paradise Lost, which, as the argument to book 1 states, describes hell “not in the Centre (for Heaven and Earth may be suppos’d as yet not made, certainly not yet accurst) but in a place of utter darkness, fitliest called chaos.” (His hell is at the lower extreme of the universe away from heaven; the created world, within the terrestrial heaven, lies between the two.) Hell is the history of the accumulation of a theological concept, together with a set of imaginative imagery that represents ideal suffering, and it cannot narrowly be defined. Milton’s description of hell for the most part predates the introduction of humans. He explicitly presents it as both a real (not a symbolic) place and a state of mind. Echoing Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus, Milton’s Satan, newly escaped from the gates of hell, says, “Which way I fly is hell, myself am hell” (PL 4.75). Literary descriptions of hell that might have influenced Milton include, in addition to descents into Hades in classical epics,

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Dante’s Inferno, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532), Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1575), John Donne’s Ignatius His Conclave (1611), and Phineas Fletcher’s The Locusts, or Apollyonists (1627). Joad Raymond

Henri IV (1553 –1610). King of France (1589 – 1610) and of Navarre (from 1572). Born in Pau, he joined the Huguenot Army at La Rochelle and was appointed chief of the Protestant party. As a result, he was involved in the French Wars of Religion against the Catholic League. In 1570, as the Huguenots were briefly reconciled to the French crown, Catherine de’ Medici arranged his marriage to his own cousin, Margaret of Valois. Taking advantage of the presence of many Protestants in Paris, the Queen Mother ordered their massacre during the night of St. Bartholomew’s Day (24 August 1572). Henri saved his own life by abjuring Protestantism. For four years he was a virtual prisoner of the court until 1576, when he escaped, joined the Huguenot Army based at Alençon, and returned to the Protestant faith. He became legal heir to the throne in 1584, but he had to battle to claim his right, defeating the Catholic League forces at Arques (1589) and Ivry (1590). He was nonetheless forced to retreat from Paris when his opponents received Spanish aid. In 1593 he again abjured Protestantism and was consequently crowned at Chartres in 1594. Henri IV signed the Edict of Nantes (1598), which granted religious freedom for the Huguenots, and he proved to be one of the most popular kings France ever had. In 1610 he was stabbed to death by a fanatic, François Ravaillac. In his Commonplace Book Milton evokes Henri’s divorce from Margaret of Valois “on account of her conduct, although he did so under pretext of kinship.” Feeling betrayed by Margaret, Henri conspicuously took mistresses, and Margaret also had many lovers and hence a reputedly profligate life. She was also separated from her husband during her exile to the Castle of Ussel in Auvergne (1587–1605) and therefore could not give him a legitimate heir. Henri sought an annulment of the marriage, which he received from Pope Clement VIII in 1599; in 1600 he married Marie de’ Medici, by whom he had a son, the future Louis XIII. According to Milton, Henri IV exemplifies the model of a king because he executed justice and showed mercy. Although he sought assistance from Elizabeth I in 1589 before converting to Catholicism, Milton writes that Henri IV was “most friendly to Protestants,” and Oliver Cromwell requested King

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Louis XIV to observe his grandfather’s lenient policy toward the Piedmontese Protestants. Christophe J.-B. Tournu

Henrietta Maria (1609 –1669). Queen consort of Charles I. Youngest daughter of Marie de’ Medici and Henri IV of France, she was married to Charles I by proxy in Paris in May 1625 and arrived in Dover in June. Their initially stormy relationship became deeply affectionate, after the removal of Henrietta Maria’s French attendants and after the death of Charles’s favorite, George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham. Henrietta Maria bore six children who lived to young adulthood, including two future kings: Charles II and James II. During the Personal Rule of the 1630s the royal couple were celebrated in masque, pastoral, verse, and portraiture. The queen’s love of masque, dancing, and music led to a lavish court culture that had many critics, including William Prynne, who lost his ears for what seemed to be invidious reflections on the queen and other women actresses in Histriomastix (1633). Henrietta Maria’s Catholicism caused even more discontent and anxiety. She was a focus for the anti-Catholic fears and rumors that circulated around the Caroline court, particularly as she was allowed under her marriage contract to keep her own priests and set up chapels in every royal house and to oversee the religion of her children up to age thirteen. Charles had also secretly agreed not to enforce the penal laws against Catholics. In December 1634 a papal envoy arrived in England, and conversions became fashionable at court. In February 1642 Henrietta Maria took the role of helpmeet to unorthodox lengths when she traveled to Holland to pawn the crown jewels to obtain cash, munitions, and troops from the Prince of Orange. The queen returned to England with money and munitions in March 1643, prompting a resolution of impeachment for high treason from the House of Commons. In June she conducted an army to her husband, jokingly referring to herself as “her shee-Majestie Generalissima” (The Kings Cabinet Opened). Reunited with Charles, Henrietta spent July 1643 to April 1644 in relative calm in Oxford. But finding herself again pregnant, she fled to Exeter, where she gave birth to another daughter on 16 June 1644. On 14 July, exhausted and in ill health, Henrietta left Falmouth harbor for France, where she continued to work and scheme tirelessly on behalf of the king. Many of the queen’s schemes and activities were revealed in The Kings Cabinet Opened, the scandal-

ous publication of the royal couple’s correspondence captured after defeat in the Battle of Naseby. The letters showed Henrietta Maria interfering in political affairs, seeking to bring foreign Catholic armies to invade England, urging Charles to promise favors to her fellow Catholics, and chiding him for perceived slights. The accompanying “Annotations” made the most of this seeming incriminating evidence, stressing the king’s duplicity and perfidy but above all that the letters revealed “that the King’s Counsels are wholly managed by the Queen.” Although Henrietta Maria had initially pushed Charles toward intransigence with Parliament, after military defeat she urged him toward accommodation, not much caring about one heresy (Anglicanism) over another (Presbyterianism). She received the news of his death by beheading in February 1649, about a week after the event itself. Henrietta Maria remained in or near Paris throughout the years of the Interregnum. She received a pension from the French queen regent, which, after the troubles of the Fronde, was only irregularly paid. Fiercely devout, often strapped for money, she quarreled bitterly with her sons, particularly on the subject of religion, but was able to raise her youngest child, Henriette Anne, as a Catholic. A convent that she established at Chaillot became a favorite refuge. Printed texts in England kept Henrietta Maria in the public eye, particularly after the Restoration, which renewed the cult of Charles I as the royal martyr. She returned to England briefly in 1660; then in August 1662 she came back from France to settle in Somerset House. She returned to France in 1665. Milton’s most extensive and invariably negative commentary on Henrietta Maria is in Eikonoklastes, where he responds to the king’s defense of his spouse in Eikon Basilike. Milton defends the parliamentary decision to publish the royal couple’s letters captured at Naseby and stresses how incriminating that correspondence was. A decade later, in the second edition of The Readie and Easie Way, Milton remains implacably hostile to the court and queen, warning that with the return of the king “there will be a queen also of no less charge; in most likelihood outlandish and a Papist; besides a queen mother such alreadie.” See ODNB, Veevers (1989).

Laura L. Knoppers

Henry of Huntingdon (c. 1088 – c. 1157). Historian. He succeeded his father as archdeacon of Huntingdon and was active in church affairs. He

hermeticism

was educated at Lincoln. His great project was Historia Anglorum [History of the English], a history of England from the Roman invasion to the coronation of Henry II in 1154. For the early part of the narrative, he drew heavily on the writings of the Venerable Bede and on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. His work was characterized by his representation of successive waves of invaders as plagues visited upon a sinful people and by his identification of the primacy of Wessex among other contemporary kingdoms. Milton used the version of Henry’s narrative published in Frankfurt in 1601, taking some notes in his Commonplace Book and drawing heavily on it in The History of Britain. Thomas N. Corns

Herberstein, Sigismund von (1486 –1566). Historian and diplomat. As a diplomat in the service of the Holy Roman Empire, he went twice as ambassador to Moscovia. He was the author of the first study of the history, geography, and culture of that country, the Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii, first published in Vienna in 1549 and reprinted several times. In his Commonplace Book, Milton notes that Herberstein records that the Moscovites permit divorce, a point he repeats, somewhat strengthened to bring it closer to his own views on the subject, in A Brief History of Moscovia.

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aged the perception that here was an exemplar of Anglican devotion, in salutary contrast to the excesses of Puritanism and enthusiasm. As the only English religious poet of the seventeenth century to approach the critical status of Milton, he offers an important point of comparison and contrast. See OCEL, ODCC, ODNB.

N. H. Keeble

Hermes. Greek god of eloquence and of science, and of all the gods the most companionable to humankind. Son of Zeus and Maia, he is identical with the Roman Mercury, the divine messenger represented with winged hat and sandals. In Milton’s Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, the Attendant Spirit descends from heaven like Hermes and offers the medicinal plant haemony as a protection against Comus, like “that moly / That Hermes once to wise Ulysses gave” (635 –36). In Paradise Lost the archangel Raphael is a majestic Hermes figure: gifted with superhuman vision (5.257– 66), he makes a spectacular flight to earth, then “Like Maia’s son he stood” (5.285). His eloquence could make the sun stand still (7.98 –103), and, like Hermes, he is mediator and guide, the “affable archangel” (7.41) who advises Adam and Eve. Beverley Sherry

Thomas N. Corns

Herbert, George (1593 –1633). Poet. He was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge University, of which he became a fellow in 1614. He was appointed public orator of the university in 1620. Largely through the influence of his friend Nicholas Ferrar, founder of the religious community at Little Gidding, Huntingdonshire, which was admired by William Laud and by Charles I, Herbert committed himself to a religious life. In 1630 he was ordained and became rector of Bemerton in Somerset. In the posthumously published A Priest to the Temple (1652), a prose work of pastoral theology, Herbert describes the life of the parish priest as moderate, orderly, and regular in its devotion to prayer, worship, and the service of parishioners. His own ministry was conspicuous for its piety and commitment. At his death Herbert left to Ferrar a manuscript collection of religious poems, with discretion to publish or destroy it as he saw fit. Ferrar determined on publication and The Temple appeared in 1633. The idealizing life of Herbert published by Izaak Walton in 1670 encour-

Hermes Trismegistus. “Thrice great Hermes,” a legendary figure associated with Thoth, Egyptian god of wisdom. He appears in Milton’s “Il Penseroso” (88) (see “L’Allegro”). The group of writings attributed to him, the Hermetica, was considered a source of gentile lore that paralleled the Old Testament; they circulated widely after being translated into Latin by Marsilio Ficino. Since their author was thought to have lived at the time of Moses and since their mystical teachings seemed to foreshadow Christianity, the Hermetica appeared authoritative. In 1614, however, Isaac Casaubon noted that the Greek texts used terms consistent with being written c. 300, not earlier. Even so, Hermes Trismegistus and hermeticism continued to influence seventeenth-century thought, as in works by Henry Vaughan and the Cambridge Platonists. See Yates (1964).

Stephen M. Buhler

hermeticism. A tradition that derives from texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus that deal with

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mystical theology and practical magic. These writings, known as the Hermetica, are highly syncretic: they conflate ancient Egyptian practices in theurgy, late Hellenistic philosophy, and early Christian teachings. In their syncretism, the hermetic texts suggest a unified path to enlightenment and salvation. Through the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, hermeticism pervaded practices in alchemy, astrology, cryptography (as it relates to the magic of letters), and numerology. Marsilio Ficino, who translated the Greek Hermetica into Latin and ensured their wider currency, personally combined the roles of occultist, philosopher, physician, and priest. In Milton’s “Il Penseroso” (see “L’Allegro”) the speaker aspires to be a hermetic magus (93 –94, 170 –72). See Yates (1964).

Stephen M. Buhler

Herod [Herod Antipas] (c. 20 B.C.– c. A.D. 34). Jewish king who ordered the execution of John the Baptist and returned Jesus to Pilate for execution. Milton makes occasional reference to Herod in several works, but the most extensive occurs in Tetrachordon. Following Tertullian, Milton argues that Christ’s strict line on divorce (Matt. 19:3 – 4) was designed to rebuke not only the Pharisees’ aggressive questioning, but also Herod’s casual abandonment of his first wife for his brother’s, a sin that John the Baptist had also criticized. Todd Butler

Hesilrige [Haselrig], Sir Arthur, Second Baronet (1601–1661). Army officer and politician. He was prominent in the Short Parliament and Long Parliament, promoting legislation to exclude the king from control of the militia. He was one of the five members whom Charles I tried to arrest in January 1642; with his colleagues he had already fled Parliament to the sanctuary of the city. Milton gives an account of the event in Eikonoklastes. Hesilrige saw active service as a cavalry officer in the opening years of the First Civil War. Although he opposed Pride’s Purge and the trial and execution of the king, he was prominently active in the Purged Parliament, serving on the Council of State, to which Milton was Latin secretary. He opposed the formation of the Protectorate and effectively withdrew from politics until the recall of the Purged Parliament in the final months before the Restoration, where his high-profile but poorly

directed activities helped to precipitate the return to kingship. He was excluded from the Act of Oblivion and died in the Tower of London while awaiting trial. Thomas N. Corns

Hesiod (eighth century B.C.). Greek poet. His poems, the Theogony and Works and Days, stand at the head of a long lineage of Western creation poetry. Following a long oral tradition, Hesiod claims to be directly inspired by the muses who dwelt on nearby Mount Olympus, and his accounts of the birth of the gods (as “theogony” means) are later taken up by Homer, rewritten by the pre-Socratic philosophers and poets, and moralized by Plato and his successors. The practice of moralizing these accounts continued well into the seventeenth century when Englishmen such as George Sandys and Francis Bacon helped revitalize the tradition also borrowed by Milton in Paradise Lost. Milton’s retellings of the origins of Chaos and night and the War in Heaven are his most directly Hesiodic episodes. Catherine Gimelli Martin

hexameral poetry. Poems based on the creation myth from Genesis. They constitute a small proportion of the voluminous commentaries on Genesis 1:1–2:4a, the account of the six days of creation that modern biblical scholarship identifies as the Priestly tradition, in contrast to the Yahwist account of Eden and the forbidden tree that follows. With its strong repetitions, notably “And God said” and “And God saw that it was good,” the hexameral account suggests poetic stanzas and refrains; with its cosmic perspective, it contrasts with the much more earth-centered story of Genesis 2. The recurrent emphasis on all that God made as good, and the fact that all his words are creation, blessing, or positive injunctions to increase and multiply, makes the opening chapter of Genesis wholly harmonious. For poets, the choices are the free-standing hymn of celebration, encyclopedic expansion, or accounts imbedded in a more dramatic frame, generally but not necessarily incorporating material from Genesis chapters 2 –3. In what Thibaut de Maisières calls “the celestial cycle,” the creation is placed chronologically as a middle panel in a three-part story, between the fall of the angels and the Fall of man. In medieval English mystery plays and Hugo Grotius’s Latin drama Adamus Exsul (1601), the sequence of creation is narrated either by God himself or by an angel; Raphael’s account in Para-

History of Britain, The

dise Lost book 7 follows this pattern. Of the large free-standing hexameral poems before Milton, the most important and most popular was La Semaine; ou Création du monde (1578) by Guillaume de Salluste, Seigneur Du Bartas, translated by Josuah Sylvester as Divine Weeks and Works (1605). Du Bartas’s work was followed by a spate of hexameral poems on the Continent, including Le Sette Giornate del Mondo Creato (1607) by Torquato Tasso. Abraham Cowley varies the pace of his epic Davideis (1656) when the prophets among whom David takes refuge compose hexameral songs. See Williams (1948).

Kay Gilliland Stevenson

Heylin [Heylyn], Peter (1600 –1662). Episcopalian divine, geographer, and historian. He was educated at Hart Hall and Magdalen College, Oxford University. He received his M.A. in 1620 and became a fellow of Magdalen; his D.D. followed in 1633. Heylin’s episcopalian and sacerdotal churchmanship attracted the patronage of William Laud, and in 1630 he was appointed a royal chaplain. In The History of the Sabbath (1636) and A Coale from the Altar (1636) he defended Laud’s high-church views of the beauty of holiness and the desirability of uniformity in religious observance; in his History of Episcopacie (1642) he was, like Milton, drawn into the controversies over bishops, but on the opposing side. During the Interregnum he lived in retirement, though he joined the campaign of such apologists as Henry Hammond in Ecclesia Vindicata, or the Church of England Justified (1657). At the Restoration he enthusiastically promoted the reestablishment of the Church of England, arguing in Ecclesia Restaurata, or the History of the Reformation (1661) that the episcopal church was in the true tradition of the early Protestants and defending in Cyprianus Anglicanus (1668) the career of Laud against its presentation by William Prynne. Heylin’s was a partisan ecclesiastical career inimical to Milton’s religious bias, but it seems likely that in Paradise Lost (particularly 11.377– 411) and Paradise Regained (particularly 3.267–93) Milton drew on the geographical information gathered in Heylin’s Cosmographie (1652). See ODCC, ODNB.

N. H. Keeble

History of Britain, The. Milton, work of prose, first published in 1670. Its origins are complicated

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and unclear. Milton probably began writing it in 1647, just before the outbreak of the Second Civil War, and broke off in the middle of book 4 early in 1649 when he was offered a government post as Secretary for Foreign Tongues. He may have resumed work on it between 1655 and 1657, taking the story up to the Battle of Hastings, at which point he stopped, although he had intended to carry the work through to his own time. He may have made some adjustments as he prepared the book for publication, but we do not know why he chose to issue it when he did. Nor do we know the reason why Milton chose to begin writing a long national history in the midst of a political crisis when his attention would normally have been directed to contemporary affairs. The motivating principle behind the book may have been to assess the temper of the British people through the ages and to examine how they had responded to the challenges offered by political liberty at critical periods during their history. Unexpectedly, Milton opens the story in mythical times, describing the foundation of Britain by Trojans under Brutus their prince, then narrating the line of British kings down to King Arthur and Cadwallader, derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth. Milton acknowledges that Geoffrey’s history finds no credit with modern scholars; however, he prefers these imaginative fictions, in which traces of truth may be preserved, to the blankness of the historical record before the arrival of the Romans. Book 2 deals with the Roman occupation, about which Milton draws on classical sources for his information. In this section, Milton’s sympathies are divided between the Britons, whom he represents as resisting Roman rule in order to preserve their native liberty, and the Romans, who are the agents of civilizing culture. His support for the British cause is undermined by his scorn for Boadicea, the leader of the major revolt against the Romans. (It is noteworthy that throughout the work he takes a negative view of female leaders.) The critical section of History of Britain is book 3, in which he deals with the fifth century, when the Romans left and the Britons were free to make what they could of their unexpected liberty. Milton is filled with despair at the way the British squandered this opportunity. Lack of leadership, political in-fighting, and fear of independence led to the Saxons being invited to enter the land to defend it against the Picts. Seemingly, the British lacked the will to guard and maintain liberty and were instinctively disposed to servility. The implications for contemporary England were depressing indeed. Milton’s argument is

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complicated here by the problem of the notorious Digression to The History of Britain. In 1681 the Character of the Long Parliament appeared, claiming to be a part of the History omitted at publication in 1670. It is a denunciation of Parliament and the Westminster Assembly of Divines for their failure to secure for the nation the benefits of liberty gained from the conflicts of the civil wars. The Digression is regarded as authentic, although its appropriate place in the text is disputed. But when it is restored to the text, the Digression vitalizes the narrative and gives new interest to dark-age events by enforced comparisons with contemporary England. It strengthens the sense that book 3 is a true jeremiad, a lament for the failures and inadequacies of the nation. The last three books deal with the Saxons, for whom Milton shows little sympathy. He finds their Christianity superficial and believes that their enthusiasm for monastic life weakened the secular government. Their kingdoms were fractious, their kings lacked authority, and their incompetence in the face of Danish invasions was deplorable. Only Alfred the Great gains Milton’s admiration. Frustrated by his poor sources—monkish chroniclers—Milton pushes on to yet another invasion, the Norman Conquest, and stops. The long account of “the misery and thraldom” of his ancestors proved too depressing to continue. The repeated motifs of inadequate kings, a dissolute aristocracy, a clergy grown corrupt, and the common people deprived of leadership and spiritual care make the History Milton’s most despondent work and reflect his own pessimism at the political situation at the end of the civil wars. Published after the Restoration, when the nation had once more submitted to the bondage of monarchy and episcopacy, the gloomy prognostications of The History of Britain seemed to have been fulfilled. A second edition was published in 1677. See von Maltzahn (1991).

Graham Parry

[Concerning Body] (1655) that all things “have all but one universal cause, which is motion.” Mental events were subject to the same universal cause. In De Homine [Concerning Man] (1657), Hobbes wrote that “Conceptions . . . are nothing really, but motion in some internal substance of the head.” Thoughts, like other phenomena subject to physical causation, result from the motion of matter, in this case the motion of particles in the brain. This left no room for free will. In several works, notably his most famous work, Leviathan (1651), and Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance (1656), Hobbes insists that the will, like thinking in general, is determined. He rejects the entire apparatus of Renaissance faculty psychology, with the will as a semiautonomous entity responding to the direction of the reason and the prompting of the passions. He replaces it with a model of sensory input translated mechanically into behavioral output. Humans are inevitably inclined to follow what gives them pleasure and avoid what gives them pain. Hobbes sardonically, and with characteristic literary skill, dispatches freedom of the will: “If a man should talk to me of a round quadrangle; or accidents of bread in cheese; or immaterial substances; or of a free subject; a free-will; or any free, but free from being hindered by opposition, I should not say he were in an errour; but that his words were without meaning; that is to say, absurd” (Leviathan, chapter 5). For Hobbes the only freedom lies in the absence of external impediment in acting on the necessary choices. Hobbes’s arguments against free will dovetail with his authoritarian political views, according to which the subject owes the sovereign power implicit obedience. Hobbes’s arguments on free will and political obedience were anathema to Milton. According to John Aubrey, Milton’s widow reported that “Mr. Hobbes was not one of [Milton’s] acquaintance; yet her husband did not like him at all: but he would grant him to be a man of great parts, a learned man” (in Darbishire [1932]). Stephen M. Fallon

Hobbes, Thomas (1588 –1679). English philosopher. He spent his young adulthood as a tutor in the house of the Earl of Devonshire. A student of the classics, Hobbes published his first significant work, a translation of Thucydides, in 1628, the year he turned forty. The following year he was struck by the power of geometry, which he called “the ways of motion simply,” a passion that shaped his philosophical career. He would write in De Corpore

Hobson, Thomas (c. 1545 –1631). Carrier, businessman, and philanthropist. His wealth was based primarily on his domination of the movement of goods, by horse-drawn carts, between London and Cambridge, and through the hire of horses, though he invested widely and made generous gifts of land to the town and university. His death on New Year’s Day, 1631, was the occasion for two witty elegies by

Honywood, Michael

Milton, “On the University Carrier” and “Another on the Same.” See Campbell and Corns (2008).

Thomas N. Corns

Holinshed [Hollinshead], Raphael (c. 1525 – ?1580). Historian. Perhaps educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, he found employment in a London print shop. The first edition of his Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland appeared in 1577 and offered a Protestant narrative of British history. The second edition, three substantial folio volumes, extended the history to 1587. John Stow may have been responsible for much of the continuation. Milton read the Chronicles with some skepticism, especially in his critique of the more legendary material relating to the early history of Britain. Yet he made extensive notes from Holinshed in his Commonplace Book and drew upon it for his own History of Britain. See ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

Holstenius, Lucas [Holste, Lukas] (1596 – 1661). Geographer, patristic scholar, and librarian. He was born in Hamburg and educated at Rostock and Leiden. He visited England in pursuit of his geographical research and subsequently converted to Catholicism; he was later to become Vatican librarian. Milton met him during his visit to Italy in 1638 –1639. Holstenius invited Milton to meet him at the Vatican, where he showed him the library, including the Greek material on which Milton had been working. Holstenius asked a favor: as Milton was going to be passing through Florence, Holstenius wondered whether he would be willing to copy some passages from a Medicean codex in the Laurentian library. On 19/29 March 1639 Milton wrote a fulsome letter to Holstenius from Florence; the holograph is still in the Vatican library, one of only two letters in Milton’s hand. It is reprinted in Epistolarum Familiarum Liber Unus as number 9. Thomas N. Corns

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ers within the empire were alarmed at Milton’s Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, which was published in sundry unauthorized continental editions in the early 1650s, sometimes together with Claudius Salmasius’s Defensio Regia. Together, they offered humanist educators a perfect example of a disputation, a demonstration by fine neo-Latinists of the controversial arts that the early modern European pedagogic tradition had placed at the heart of its teaching practices. Republican ideology thus found an easy way into the universities of Europe. At a session of the empire’s Reichstag in Regensburg in the summer of 1653, the problem was explicitly addressed by representatives of the German states, and the book was banned. See Miller (1985).

Thomas N. Corns

Holy Spirit. See God. Homer (?eighth century B.C.). Greek epic poet. Although a shadowy figure even in antiquity, he was recognized as the author of the two foundational epic poems of the Western literary tradition, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Later scholarship has questioned the integrity of the canon, postulated separate authors for each poem, or attributed them to successive accumulation and revision through an oral tradition that was preliterate. In the seventeenth century, the issues seemed simpler: Homer was the precursor of Virgil, as epic poet, and aspiring vernacular poets in the same genre owed a debt of influence and an obligation to observe to some degree the Homeric poetic idiom. There are numerous echoes and allusions in Milton, especially in Paradise Lost. Milton recalls that Homer was thought to have been blind, as he himself was as he completed his epic (PL 3.35 and n). The adventures of Odysseus on Circe’s isle underpin the mythography of A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle. Milton’s status alongside Homer and Virgil is claimed in John Dryden’s epigram in the fourth edition of Paradise Lost (1688). See OCCL.

Thomas N. Corns

Holy Roman Empire. A complex super-state. In the seventeenth century, it included much of the modern-day states of Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, northern Italy, some of eastern France, and some of Poland. Rul-

Honywood, Michael (1596 –1681). Academic and clergyman. He was admitted to Christ’s College, Cambridge (B.A. 1615, M.A. 1619), and was a fellow of the college throughout Milton’s student years

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there. He was a moving force behind the project to commemorate Edward King with a volume of poetry, Justa Edovardo King Naufrago, to which he contributed two Latin poems. The volume ended with the first published version of Milton’s “Lycidas.” In 1643 he went into voluntary exile, where he remained until the Restoration. He returned in 1660 to take up the living, at Kegworth, Leicestershire, to which he had been appointed in 1639, and Charles II presented him to the deanery of Lincoln in the same year. In exile Honywood had assembled a considerable collection of books, which forms a major component of Lincoln Cathedral Library. Thomas N. Corns

Hooker, Richard (1554 –1600). Leading divine in arguments in the 1590s for conformism. Born in Exeter, he graduated from Corpus Christi College, Oxford University, in 1573, where he would become an ordained fellow. His eight-book Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie is the most lengthy and detailed argument for uniform worship, episcopal government, and royal supremacy in the tradition of the English church. He saw only the first five books of the Lawes into print before his death, the sixth and eighth books first appearing in a 1648 edition directed by James Ussher, and the seventh book in the 1662 Works of Richard Hooker compiled by John Gauden and dedicated to Charles II. Ussher also prepared for publication Hooker’s The Causes of the Continuance of These Contentions Concerning Church Government for inclusion in his 1641 Certain Briefe Treatises, to which pamphlet Milton responds in The Reason of Church-Government. Milton’s only explicit reference to Hooker is in this tract, where he dismisses the exegesis of 1 Timothy 5:21 favorable to prelacy offered in Lawes 3. Feisal G. Mohamed

Horace [Quintus Horatius Flaccus] (65 – 8 B.C.). Roman poet. Considered with Virgil the preeminent poet of the Augustan era, he was born to a prosperous freedman with enough means to have him educated in Rome and Athens. He fought with Brutus’s losing republican side at Philippi in 42 b.c., for which his family estates were confiscated. But beginning with the publication of his Epodes or iambia c. 30 b.c., his poetry would eventually earn him land, status, and security thanks to powerful patrons such as Maecenas and Augustus himself. His corpus of poetry would grow to include two books of Sermones or satires in dactylic hexameter, four

books of Carmina or odes in a variety of sophisticated Hellenistic meters, two books of Epistles in dactylic hexameter, and his Epistula ad Pisones, the so-called Ars Poetica. This last work was the dominant text in Renaissance poetic theory and, having been integrated with Aristotelian poetics and Ciceronian rhetoric, influenced both Milton’s poetics and his sense of poetic vocation. Its chief principle is decorum, the fitness, for example, of parts to whole, words to things, subject to audience, genre to story. Milton’s keen sense of generic conventions derives in part from Renaissance commentaries on the Ars Poetica. In Apology Against a Pamphlet Milton cites Horace to defend as decorous the religious ridicule in the antiprelatical tracts. Horatian allusions have been found in nearly all of Milton’s major poems, but the sonnets especially adopt Horatian themes and strategies. Like Horace’s political views, Renaissance views of his moral philosophy can perhaps best be described as eclectic: in “Elegia Sexta” lines 27–28, Milton characterizes him as an Epicurean poet of wine and love, but he was equally noted as a Stoic moralist, an urbane wit, a gentlemanly landowner (his Sabine farm became a paradigmatic poet-friendly country estate), a corpulent seducer of Greek flute girls, and an official purveyor of traditional Roman values. Gregory Kneidel

Horton. Village seventeen miles west of London, close to what is now Heathrow Airport. In May 1636, perhaps prompted by the arrival of plague in Hammersmith, John Milton, Sr., moved the family home there. Now in Berkshire, at the time it was in the county of Buckinghamshire. It is not known why he chose this village. Milton evidently spent much of his time in Horton between May 1636 and his departure in 1638 for his continental travels. The Bulstrode family, who occupied the manor house, was locally the most powerful. A daughter of the family was mother of Bulstrode Whitelocke, who was to be a prominent politician in the 1650s and perhaps a patron of Milton’s career as public servant. Their familiarity could well have extended back to this period. There was a decent library to hand, the Kedermister Library in nearby Langley Marish. Milton began his Commonplace Book at this time and evidently drew on the collection. In April 1637, Sara Milton, the poet’s mother, died. She was buried near the chancel in the parish church; the unorthodox orientation of her tombstone attracted censure during the episcopal visitation in August of that year. “Lycidas” was Milton’s

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only significant vernacular poem written at Horton, though the fine neo-Latin “Ad Patrem” probably dates from this period. See Campbell and Corns (2008).

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questioning the argument of the royal apologia that their fate showed a providential punishment for their initial resistance. Thomas N. Corns

Thomas N. Corns

Hosea. Book of the Old Testament. One of the twelve “minor prophets,” it shares in its larger perspective much common ground with Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, attributing imminent national disaster to widespread corruption and depravity while developing a promise of some distant reconciliation. There are, however, significant differences. Hosea writes from the perspective, not of Judah, but of the northern tribes gathered into the kingdom of Israel, and he is much exercised by the corruption of Judaism through exposure to the pagan religion of Samaria. He also takes literally the charge of “whoredom” directed against his society, and the opening chapter recounts his marriage to and procreation with a former prostitute, an intimate detail not found among other Old Testament prophets. Its literalness, however, was challenged in the commentary tradition by those who insisted on reading the incident allegorically, as Milton with some skepticism notes in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. In De Doctrina Christiana Milton cites Hosea thirty-one times, finding some citations that are particularly useful for his discussion of repentance. See Bauman (1989), ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

Hotham, Sir John, First Baronet (1589 –1645). Parliamentarian army officer. In January 1642, Charles I attempted to seize the east coast town of Hull, recognizing its strategic importance and wishing to control its considerable magazine. Thereafter, the Long Parliament appointed Sir John Hotham as governor of the town, instructing him to hold it with his son, Captain John Hotham, against the king, against whom he closed its gates. In secret negotiation with the royalists, Sir John was evidently persuaded to betray his command to the enemy. However, the plan was discovered, and he and his son were subsequently arrested. Documents captured after the Battle of Marston Moor proved sufficiently incriminating for them to be tried for treason, and in 1645 both were executed. The case was discussed in Eikon Basilike, and Milton responds in Eikonoklastes by

Hotman, Francis (1524 –1590). French jurist and publicist. Born in Paris, he graduated from the university of Orléans and occupied lectureships in law at Paris, Strasbourg, Valence, and Bourges. Converted to Protestantism, Hotman made his way to Switzerland, where he was appointed professor of belles lettres and history at Lausanne. He accompanied Jean Calvin to the Diet of Frankfurt (1556). In 1560 he was one of the principal instigators of the conspiracy of Amboise. As agent for the Huguenots, he went on several missions. In 1572 he witnessed the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and consequently published Francogallia (Geneva, 1573; Cologne, 1574, 1576; much augmented, Frankfurt, 1586). Milton uses his account of Chilperic’s deposition as the story puts forward the right of the ancient Franks to elect and remove their kings. Hotman died in Basel. Christophe J.-B. Tournu

Howard, Sir Robert (1626 –1698). Soldier, playwright, and politician. The sixth son of the First Earl of Berkshire, he fought with distinction on the side of Charles I and was knighted for his gallantry at the Battle of Copredy Bridge. At the Restoration, he was awarded numerous lucrative offices. He entered Parliament in 1661 and continued as a member until his death. He was a successful playwright, particularly during the early years of the Restoration. He collaborated with John Dryden and with him developed the genre of heroic drama, of which their play The Indian Queen (1664) was an influential example. He also wrote more explicitly political drama. The Committee rehearses old Cavalier stereotypes in its depiction of Puritans. However, he later became more critical of the court and the politicians it supported and was in later life a Whig and an architect of the Williamite Revolution. The origins of this oppositionalism may be seen in his most complex play, The Great Favourite, or The Duke of Lerma (1668). According to John Toland, he was, perhaps surprisingly, among Milton’s friends and in later life told anecdotes of their acquaintance. Thomas N. Corns

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Huguenots

Huguenots. The word eiguenots appeared in Geneva c. 1520 –1525, probably as a French corruption of the German eidgenossen (confederates), referring to those Genevans allied with people in Berne for the defense of Protestantism. The word (pejorative) was introduced into France by 1530 – 1535. It was further amalgamated with different significations: referring to the supporters of Henri IV, as he descended from Hugues Capet, or to folkloric creatures of King Hugon, a ghost that haunted the streets of Tours and Amboise. First used by Catholics as a nickname for Protestants, huguenot was reappropriated by the Protestants themselves as a name of prestige. It came into disuse after they were defeated in 1629 but resurfaced after 1685 to refer to French Protestant refugees. Exasperated at being persecuted, the Huguenots contrived the conspiracy of Amboise with the Prince of Condé, from the House of Bourbon, to usurp the power of King Francis II (1559 –1560) and get rid of the influential Guise family. The plot was discovered, and twelve hundred people were massacred (1560). The slaughter of seventy-four Protestants at Vassy by the troops of François de Lorraine, Second Duke of Guise, in 1562 brought about the outbreak of the Wars of Religion, which were to last until 1598. Under Charles IX (1560 – 1574), the Holy Catholic League was formed to combat the rise of Protestantism. Thousands of Huguenots were massacred on St. Bartholomew’s Day (24 August 1572) at the instigation of Catherine de’ Medici. Henry of Navarre, head of the Huguenots, became king in 1594, but only after he abjured his faith. The Edict of Nantes in 1598 granted religious freedom to the Huguenots. Local uprisings during the reign of Louis XIII, in Béarn (1621–1622) and at La Rochelle (1625 –1629), ended in the Huguenots being stripped of all political power; they were also deprived of their religious rights in 1685. Milton refers to four main events involving the Huguenots. First, he evokes the treacherous massacre of thirty thousand Protestants across France (24 –26 August 1572) (Commonplace Book and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates). Second, he relates in Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio the siege of La Rochelle (August 1627–October 1629) when Charles I was supposed to come to the rescue of the insurgents led by Benjamin de Soubise but instead surrendered seven warships to Louis XIII, which were used against “our suppliants.” As the English were henceforth distrusted by the Huguenots, their proffered expedition to the Île de Ré ended in disaster. Third, Milton writes about the Huguenots as allies

in his Commonplace Book. In 1589 the Huguenots offered Le Havre to Elizabeth I in exchange for her military help, which she accepted, but as the French Protestants were defeated, she lost much. Though England was exposed to the greatest danger, she also brought assistance, both men and money, to Henry of Navarre in his efforts to secure the French crown after the murder of Henri III in 1589. Last but not least, Milton alludes to the writings of the French Huguenot theorists who opposed monarchy, or the Monarchomachs, to substantiate his own theory of kingship: Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (1579) and Franco-Gallia (1574), both of which justified armed resistance against a “wicked king.” Christophe J.-B. Tournu

Hume, Patrick (fl. 1695). Scholar and poet. Almost nothing is known about the “P. H. Philopoietes” who published Annotations on Milton’s Paradise Lost in 1695, but he is assumed to be Patrick Hume. He may be the same “Mr. Hume” who published A Poem Dedicated to the Immortal Memory of . . . Q. Mary (1695); he may also have been a London schoolmaster. The Annotations occupies an important place in literary history. This work of 321 folio pages, usually bound with Jacob Tonson’s sixth edition of Paradise Lost, is not only the first booklength commentary on Milton’s poem; it also has a claim to be the first book-length commentary on any work of English literature. Hume employed the form and methods of classical and (especially) biblical commentary in analyzing a vernacular poem. He illuminates his sources and analogues in scripture and the classics and glosses difficult passages in an erudite commentary. Jack Lynch

Hunt, ( James Henry) Leigh (1784 –1859). Poet, essayist, and editor. In 1808 he and his brother John founded the Examiner, a radical weekly magazine. He continued to edit it until 1821, when he turned those responsibilities over to his friend John Forster. Hunt dealt extensively with Milton’s Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus) in Some Account of the Origin and Nature of Masks (1815), treating The Latin Poems of Milton (1823) and Paradise Lost in such works as The Originality of Milton’s Harmonious Use of Proper Names (1825), Wordsworth and Milton (1835), An Answer to the Question What Is Poetry? (1844), and Milton (1845). He also addressed Milton’s sonnets in An Essay on the Son-

Hutchinson, Lucy

net (1856 –1859), all of which Joseph Wittreich has anthologized in The Romantics on Milton (1970). Charles C. Clarke, former teacher and later a close friend of John Keats, introduced the young poet to Hunt in the spring of 1816. In 1817 Hunt received a lock of hair passed down to him by Dr. [Robert?] Batty, who had acquired it from John Hoole, “the translator of Tasso,” who received it from Samuel Johnson. It had once belonged to Joseph Addison. Addison was said to have obtained it from the hand of Milton’s youngest daughter, Deborah Milton Clarke, with whom he had spoken shortly before his death in 1719, having been assured by Deborah that the lock had come from the head of her living father—all of which Hunt reported in a postscript to the letter he wrote to Robert Browning in 1857. Hunt showed the lock to Keats, which inspired his ode “On Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair.” The lock is now part of the collection of the Keats-Shelley House in Rome, where it is kept in a reliquary that originally belonged to Pope Pius V. Carol Barton

Huss, John [Hus, Jan] (c. 1372 –1415). Churchman, theologian, and reformer. Born in Bohemia, he was educated at the University of Prague, where he took degrees in theology and arts. He was appointed dean of the faculty of philosophy, and from 1402 to 1403 was the rector of the university. In 1400 he was ordained as a Catholic priest. A marriage alliance between the English and Bohemian thrones had opened Prague to the influence of the early English church reformer John Wycliffe. Huss became convinced about both Wycliffe’s theological methodology (which insisted that doctrine should be founded on the Bible and not on the interpretative tradition) and his views on salvation, which to some extent anticipated those of Jean Calvin. The papal reaction to Wycliffe’s preaching extended to his Bohemian admirers. Huss was excommunicated and, losing royal protection, was expelled from Prague. In 1414 he was granted by Sigismund, the Holy Roman Emperor, safe conduct to appear before the Council of Constance, a papal conference called to address issues of church reform and the threat posed by Wycliffean doctrine. Despite the imperial guarantee of his safety, Huss was arrested, tried, and burned at the stake. Milton alludes to his role in the Protestant Reformation in The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings. His followers, Hussites, after protracted civil wars within Bohemia, secured the independence

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of their church from the papacy, an achievement that lasted until 1620 when Catholicism was imposed after the defeat of the Bohemian Army at the Battle of the White Mountain, an issue of considerable interest in England since the Bohemian ruler was Frederick the Elector Palatine, son-in-law of James I. In The Reason of Church-Government Milton remarks that the practice of prelatical apologists in his own age of calling their critics “Puritans, and Brownists” follows the pattern of earlier bishops of denouncing opponents as “Hussites.” In a postscript to the first pamphlet by Smectymnuus, almost certainly of Miltonic provenance, a note refers to the use of the Hussite schism as an argument against church reform. ODR.

Thomas N. Corns

Hussites. See John Huss. Hutchinson, Lucy (1620 –1681). Republican author and poet. Born in 1620, she was a studious and precocious child, encouraged by her father to attain a level of learning then exceptional for a woman. In 1638 she married John Hutchinson, who took a leading part in promoting the parliamentarian cause from 1643 as governor of Nottingham Castle. In 1646 he was elected to the Long Parliament and in 1649 was a signatory to the death warrant of Charles I. Lucy Hutchinson was as committed an Independent in religion and republican in politics as her husband and found Oliver Cromwell’s one-man rule no more congenial than Charles I’s. During the Interregnum she and her husband lived quietly in retirement. At the Restoration, John Hutchinson escaped execution as a regicide, in part because of Lucy Hutchinson’s intervention on his behalf, but in 1663 he was arrested on suspicion of complicity in a republican plot and died in prison the following year. After his death, Lucy Hutchinson wrote an apologetic life of her husband, first published in 1806 as Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. It defends not only him but the Good Old Cause and the Long Parliament in the face of the propaganda of the royalist reaction against the Puritan revolution at the Restoration. Hutchinson also wrote a fragmentary autobiography, a translation of Lucretius, and, as has recently been established by the scholarly work of David Norbrook, a significant body of topical verse. Norbrook has furthermore identified her as the author

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of the anonymous creation poem Order and Disorder (1679) that resonates with Milton’s Paradise Lost in scope, theme, and ideology. See Norbrook (1999b), ODNB.

N. H. Keeble

Hyde, Edward, First Earl of Clarendon (1609 – 1674). Politician. He was educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford University, where he took his M.A. in 1626, and at the Middle Temple. Elected to the Long Parliament he was initially sympathetic to the cause of reform, helping to prepare the impeachment of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, but his innate respect for order and tradition led him to defend episcopacy and to oppose the Root and Branch Petition and the Grand Remonstrance, the king’s reply to which he helped to compose. In 1642 he joined Charles I at York and for the next three years was the author of all the king’s declarations and public pronouncements. He advised constitutional moderation, but this advice did not prevail over the absolutist inclinations of both Henrietta Maria and the king. In 1645 he joined the council of Prince Charles in the west and in 1646 traveled with him to the Channel Isles and eventually into exile on the Continent. Throughout the Interregnum Hyde was Charles II’s chief advisor, always suggesting caution and patience against those who were for securing foreign alliances, engaging in plots, and promoting invasion plans to recover the throne. In 1651 he was appointed secretary of state and in 1658 Lord Chancellor. At the Restoration Hyde promoted conciliation, notably by supporting the Act of Oblivion. His name became attached to the Clarendon Code, but his temper was not persecutory. In 1661 he was created First Earl of Clarendon. He stood out against the corrupt, the disorderly, and the unconstitutional, but as the administration’s first minister, in the ensuing years he came to be identified with court indulgence, executive mismanagement, and arbitrary government. Hyde’s opposition to the despotic and baroque tendencies of Charles II’s court isolated him as a tedious, pompous, and moralistic figure, pedantic in his appeal to legalities and risible in his regard for tradition. When his name attracted the blame for the ill success of the Second Dutch War (see Anglo-Dutch Wars), he found himself without political allies. He was dismissed by the king in 1667 and, threatened with impeachment, fled to France, where, sentenced to banishment, he remained until his death.

In exile he worked on The History of the Great Rebellion, which he had begun in the late 1640s, and on his autobiography. These were first published in 1702 –1704 and 1759, respectively. The History does not mention Milton, but in a letter of 1661 Hyde refers ironically to the fact that, were the part played by John Gauden in composing Eikon Basilike to become public knowledge, Milton would be delighted. See Hutton (1985), Keeble (2002), OCEL, ODNB.

N. H. Keeble

hymn. Poem of praise that may be distinguished from an encomium by its praise of the gods rather than of great men, as in the Pindaric Odes; in Greek, Roman, and late antique poetry, the hymn is the form by which one may properly offer praise to the gods in verse. Early examples of or references to hymns occur in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Ancient hymns, originally sung or chanted, usually invoke gods through the use of direct address in the form of an apostrophe; contain epithets, or names embodying the particularly desired powers of the deity; mention the sedes, the seat or sacred places associated with the deity’s power or influence; employ hypomnesis, or a reminder of past favorable interaction; and conclude with a request or petition. In the case of Homer, the purpose of the invocation is to dispose the deity favorably toward the hymnist’s petitions on the basis of the latter’s appropriate form of address and pleasing past interactions. In the hymns of Cleanthes, the invocation serves to identify the philosophical significance of the deity so that the worshipper may request illumination from its source. The Lord’s Prayer, in the Christian tradition, employs many of the same formal elements of its classical predecessors in offering praise and making specific petitions. Stylistic elements of hymns or prayers may also include direct address, relative clauses, anaphora, amplification by means of lists, and doublets. The aim, therefore, is to invoke and offer praise to the deity, often by first establishing goodwill, and to make a request that will be fulfilled. Hymns abound in the works of Milton. For example, that he might “see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight,” the poet invokes Holy Light as his muse in Paradise Lost 3.1–55. In the tradition of the ancient hymnists, Milton’s speaker calls upon those qualities of the deity that are commensurate with his own desire for inner illumination in the face of his physical blindness. In the tradition of Christian prayer, the speaker in this section of

hymn

Paradise Lost acknowledges God’s sovereignty and requests spiritual light. Milton effectively employs the hymn in his formal invocations to the muse in Paradise Lost books 1, 3, 7, and 9, and he uses both the positive and the negative forms of praise in many of his major works, including “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” the companion poems “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, “Lycidas,” and

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Paradise Lost. Ultimately, the hymn or prayer is the genre by which one properly praises God and aspires toward that true freedom that is possible only through willful subordination to God (see, for example, Adam and Eve in PL 10.1198 –1104). See OCD.

Philip E. Phillips

I “Ignavus satrapam . . .” [Kings should not oversleep]. An eight-line poem (with no heading) usually attributed to Milton. Like “Carmina Elegiaca,” it occurs in a manuscript sheet that was found about 1874 in the same box as his Commonplace Book. It is a neo-Latin exercise, on the theme of early rising, written in asclepiads, a meter in which each line consists of a spondee, two or three choriambi, and an iambus. Its composition has been speculatively dated to 1624, toward the end of Milton’s school days. Thomas N. Corns

illustrations of Milton’s works. With the Bible and William Shakespeare’s plays, Milton’s poems are among the most frequently illustrated literary works in English. During three and a half centuries, more than 190 artists from at least eight countries have created illustrations for more than twenty of Milton’s works, using a variety of media. J. A. Wittreich’s pioneering essay in A Milton Encyclopedia (1978b) remains indispensable for its chronological list of those artists and its identification of about fourteen hundred illustrations, as well as for his suggestion that the history of Milton illustration is a history not just of decoration, but of interpretation, of “nonverbal criticism.” From the first illustrated edition of 1688 to Alexis Smith’s Snake Path of 1992, artists have illuminated not only Milton’s texts but their own personal, historically grounded readings of those texts. Each has emphasized different aspects of Milton’s vision— different works, different scenes and thematic elements—bringing what a reviewer of Mary Groom’s work called “other eyes.” MILTON’S FIRST ILLUSTRATORS

The earliest illustrated edition of Milton’s poetry was the 1688 edition of Paradise Lost, published for Jacob Tonson with twelve engravings following

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designs by Henry Aldrich, John Baptist Medina, and Bernard Lens. Aldrich’s designs drew heavily on well-known paintings of biblical subjects, sometimes at the expense of Milton’s words. But Medina and Lens revealed a close literal reading of each episode of the poem. Their aim—like that of seventeenth-century biblical illustrators, and in keeping with the “arguments” added to the beginning of each book of Paradise Lost—was to help readers navigate Milton’s complex narrative and to take its moral instruction to heart. To achieve this end, they borrowed the medieval technique of synoptic narration, representing several scenes within one harmonious design. Lens’s representation of book 4 (fig. 1), for instance, begins at the center-right of the picture plane, where a tiny Adam and Eve disport with their animal companions, as Satan sits over their heads “like a cormorant” on the “Tree of Life.” The viewer’s eye follows them, forward and left, to their evening prayer, then to their bower in the right foreground, where Ithuriel and Zephon discover Satan “squat like a Toad, close at the ear of Eve.” Larger figures tell the divine level of the story, as a massive Uriel “glides” on a cloud-banked sunbeam just to the right of mid-center—announcing the fiend’s invasion to Gabriel and his angelic guards, who are seated “betwixt rocky Pillars” with “celestial Armory” hanging at the ready behind them. Lens represents the book’s final episode in a tiny vignette to Uriel’s right: Satan “hemmed round” by angels whose “ported Spears” are indeed “thick as . . . a field of Ceres ripe for harvest” (4.980 – 81), as the Father’s “celestial Sign” hangs overhead. Medina likewise underscores the epic’s literal narrative in his design for book 9 (fig. 2). In the shadowed foreground (literally foreshadowing the background scenes), Satan gesticulates in “bursting passion” as he prepares to enter the snake as the “fittest Imp of fraud” (lines 97, 89). The results

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Fig. 1. Bernard Lens, illustration of Paradise Lost, book 4 (London: Jacob Tonson, 1688). Courtesy of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

Fig. 2. John Baptist Medina, illustration of Paradise Lost, book 9 (London: Jacob Tonson, 1688). Courtesy of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

of this scene move back into the picture plane in a serpentine pattern: (1) Adam and Eve discussing their separate labors and going off in separate directions with their “rude” gardening tools; (2) Eve encountering the serpent “erect / Amidst his circling Spires” (lines 501–2) and holding an apple into which she, “yet sinless,” is about to bite; (3) Eve offering Adam the apple and Adam lifting it to his mouth; and (4) the pair in their “vain Covering,” lamenting as the sky gives “first signs” of disturbance with a sudden storm.

vidual scenes to represent each book and to depict those scenes theatrically—as if on a stage. Their Paradise Lost was not so much a biblical narrative as a play, with characters whose psychological motivation became as interesting as the moral and spiritual outcomes of their decisions. Francis Hayman’s designs (1749) and those of French artist Jean-Frédéric Schall (1792) clearly illustrate this theatrical trend. Rather than represent all the major episodes in book 4, for instance, they depict only the scene in which Satan spies on Adam and Eve and breaks into anguished soliloquy (lines 325 –94). Hayman’s design (fig. 3) emphasizes the couple’s youth and innocence, as well as the malice of the tempter, who grips his spear as he watches them conversing at the base of two intersecting trees. A vine entwines the trees, as the pair entwine their hands. Both their bodies and the trees form an X-shape, suggesting “happy nuptial league”; animals play languidly about them, with the exception of a rearing goat, who registers sexual disturbance in this otherwise innocent scene.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Artists working after 1688 —among them James Thornhill, Louis Chéron, Richard Westall, Thomas Stothard, H. and J. Richter, Richard Corbould, Henry Singleton, and Edward Burney—generally followed Medina, Aldrich, and Lens in focusing on Paradise Lost and in producing one illustration for each of the poem’s twelve books. But in place of synoptic designs that underscored the sequence of events in the narrative, they began to select indi-

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illustrations of Milton’s works

Fig. 3. Francis Hayman, illustration of Paradise Lost, book 4 (London: Jacob Tonson, 1749). Courtesy of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles. Fig. 5. Jean-Frédéric Schall, illustration of Le paradis perdu, book 2 (Paris: Defer de Maisonneuve, 1792). Courtesy of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

Fig. 4. Jean-Frédéric Schall, illustration of Le paradis perdu, book 4 (Paris: Defer de Maisonneuve, 1792). Courtesy of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

Schall’s twelve designs for a sumptuous bilingual edition of Le paradis perdu were the first illustrations of Milton to appear in color. They follow Hayman’s selections episode by episode, while adding details that reflect Schall’s situation as a royalist painter in the midst of the French Revolution. Schall’s lovers (fig. 4), especially with the novel addition of rich pastels, take on the explicit eroticism of a courtly fête galante. In contrast to Hayman’s Eve, who modestly gazes downward at the animals, resting her hand lightly on her husband’s hand, Schall’s far bolder Eve strokes her lover’s chest and firmly clasps his left buttock, while gazing adoringly up into his eyes. Here, even the animals are overtly affectionate; and Satan, peering through a fork in the sheltering tree, appears not so much malicious as anguished—as if, as he says in Milton’s text, he easily “could love” these creatures upon whom he spies (line 363). Thus Schall adds a sentimental rococo aesthetic into his representation of Adam and Eve. In his image of Satan with Sin and Death (fig. 5), he again makes novel use of form and color—in this case to represent both Milton’s poem and the

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politics of his own day. Schall’s Satan, although crowned, carries a sword that resembles the fasces of the new French republic, while Sin—like republican images of Liberty—sports the Parisian red and blue of the tricolor flag. Although Paradise Lost continued to dominate throughout the eighteenth century, a number of artists also began to illustrate Samson Agonistes, among them Chéron, Hayman, and Westall. In 1720, Chéron initiated a pattern that most subsequent artists would follow: focusing, as the poet does, on the protagonist’s inner life—an inner life that is absent in the account of Samson in Judges. One artist after another represented him blinded and in the hands of his enemies, reflecting on his painful plight and shameful past. Most artists make his vulnerability clear, while giving him a dignity born of intelligent interiority. Illustrations of the Miltonic Samson also occasionally represent, although less frequently, the conventional scenes of Samson pulling down the pillars and of Samson with Dalila. But even in representations of these scenes, Samson’s introspection takes center stage. In the earlier eighteenth century, Samson generally appears in a social context. Chéron, for instance, portrays him sitting in chains as Manoah leans toward him in fatherly solicitude (fig. 6). Three other companions gesture as if to say, “See . . . / Or do my eyes misrepresent? Can this be hee, / That Heroic, that Renouwn’d / Irresistible Samson?” (lines 124 –26). But Samson remains isolated in his own thoughts—“As one past hope”—yet not, as the text has it, “by himself given over; / In slavish habit, illfitted weeds / O’erworn and soil’d” (lines 120 –23). A 1752 engraving designed by Hayman (fig. 7) moves forward in the narrative, to a remarkably decorous encounter with Dalila. Here Samson’s female nemesis seems to have come straight from the

Fig. 6. Louis Chéron, Samson Sitting in Prison in Chains, from The Poetical Works of Mr. John Milton (London: Jacob Tonson, 1720). Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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Fig. 7. Francis Hayman, Samson Rejecting Dalila, from Paradise Regain’d. A Poem in Four Books, To Which Is Added Samson Agonistes, and Poems upon Several Occasions (London: J. and R. Tonson and S. Draper, 1752). Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Georgian court, attended by a female servant and a small, elegantly dressed African boy. As she reaches out her hand in “conjugal affection,” Samson refuses her advances, but in a manner far more chivalrous and philosophical than the “Out, out Hyaena” (line 748) of Milton’s play. Later eighteenth-century artists pursued Samson’s Miltonic interiority to the point of abandoning narrative altogether, simply representing the hero in a variety of sorrowing poses. In John Graham’s 1796 illustration to the play in Bell’s British Theatre (fig. 8), for instance, Samson appears in a pastoral setting, “the breath of heaven fresh blowing,” retired upon the craggy side of a wooded hill. His body is large but slack with sorrow, and his face— encircled by soft curls—registers a reflective awareness of the tragic nature of life, as he attempts, without apparent success, to “find some ease” from his relentless thoughts. No one unacquainted with his story would imagine his violent past. Similarly, if more dramatically, in an edition from 1794 –1797, Westall shows a muscular strongman Samson in chains, eyes lifted heavenward in meditative appeal (fig. 9).

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Fig. 8. John Graham, Samson Grieving, from Bell’s British Theatre, Consisting of the Most Esteemed English Plays, Volume XXXIV (London: George Cawthorne, British Library, Strand, 1796). Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

One of the most prolific periods in Miltonic illustration began at the turn of the nineteenth century, just before and after 1800. Sometimes influenced as much by one another as by Milton’s text, William Blake, Henry Fuseli, John Flaxman, Stephen Rigaud, and several contemporaries produced designs much appreciated today. With his profound knowledge of Milton’s texts and his distinctive, hand-tinted pen drawings, Blake illustrated the greatest number of Milton’s poems—including two sets each for Paradise Lost, A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus), and “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (the Nativity Ode); one set each for Paradise Regained, “L’Allegro,” and “Il Penseroso”; and a number of individual works—for a total of more than one hundred designs. These illustrations were created mainly for patrons, however, and were not published with Milton’s texts until the twentieth century. Between 1790 and 1820, Blake’s friend Fuseli also represented Milton’s

Fig. 9. Richard Westall, Samson in Chains, from The Poetical Works of John Milton, with a Life of the Author, by William Hayley and Plates from Designs by Richard Westall (London: W. Bulmer and Co. for John and Josiah Boydell, and George Nicol, 1794–1797). Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

works in various media, some episodes of Paradise Lost as many as seven or eight times. He devoted more than a decade to creating the Milton Gallery, an exhibition of forty-seven oil paintings inspired by both the epics and the shorter poems. Blake and Fuseli signal another shift in the illustration of Paradise Lost: the liberation of Milton’s epic from both literal and theatrical representation. Both artists rejected G. E. Lessing’s subordination of visual expression to the verbal and his claim, in The Laocoön (1766), that the “artist can never seize from ever-changing nature more than a single moment,” whereas the poet can lead the reader “through a whole gallery of pictures.” For Blake, “present, past, & future” were eternally and everywhere present, whether embodied in verbal or visual form, or, ideally, in both. Thus, each of Blake’s designs symbolically alludes to the whole epic, which, for him, is embodied not in its narrative or in its human drama, but in the “divine body of the Saviour, the True Vine of Eternity.” Blake’s Paradise Lost, then, is radically Christocentric. In his 1808 design for book 5 (fig. 10), for example, the angel Raphael discourses on the unity of earth and

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Fig. 10. William Blake, The Archangel Raphael with Adam and Eve (Illustration to Milton’s “Paradise Lost”), 1808, book 5. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photograph © 2012 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

heaven, as Eve “ministers naked,” a bunch of grapes in one hand and a chalicelike gourd in the other. In the background, directly above her head, stands the fatal tree, laden with fruit and enwrapped by the serpent. But the serpent also represents the crucified Savior, as suggested by the Johannine Christ ( John 3:14 –15, referring to Numbers 21:4 –9)—a point Blake underscores by returning to the image in his depiction not just of the Fall, but also of the Crucifixion (book 11), a scene in turn reevoked in his Colloquy in Heaven (book 3). Fuseli agreed with his friend Blake that visual art should not play handmaid to literature—going further in fact, with the Swiss critic Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698 –1783), to argue that the visual imagination was entirely autonomous. Literary works should serve only as inspiration, since painting could achieve its own analogous sublime effects; moreover, those effects were the chief end of both poetry and painting. The task of the artist was neither to instruct nor to narrate, but simply to express the passions. The hero of passion in Fuseli’s Paradise Lost is clearly Satan. Virtually expunging God from his reading of the poem, Fuseli represents this newly heroic Satan again and again— leaping, like the great early ballet dancers of the artist’s experience, up out of Chaos (fig. 11) or up out of his toad disguise at the touch of Ithuriel’s

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Fig. 11. Henry Fuseli, Satan Escaping from Chaos, from Paradise Lost, book 2 (1794–1796). Private collection. Photo: SIK-ISEA, Zurich.

Fig. 12. Henry Fuseli, The Flight of Satan at the Touch of Ithuriel’s Spear, from Paradise Lost, book 4 (1779). Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. © Foto: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

spear (fig. 12). Indeed, this balletic motion—freed from Milton’s narrative as Satan frees himself from Milton’s God—itself becomes the central theme of Fuseli’s Paradise Lost illustrations. Satan’s propulsive, airborne motions find a human counterpoint in the more earthbound but equally stylized dance of the lovers, as exemplified in an 1802 version of their expulsion from Eden (fig. 13). Abandoned by

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Fig. 14. John Martin, Eve and Her Reflection in the Liquid Plain, from Paradise Lost, book 4 (1824–1827). Photograph courtesy of Special Collections, Library of the University of Southern California.

Fig. 13. Henry Fuseli, The Expulsion, from Paradise Lost, book 12 (London: F. J. Roveray, 1802). Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

a deity both dismissive and dismissed, they follow Satan into the tragic ballet of human history, alone onstage. Artists of the mid- and later nineteenth century who illustrated Milton’s works include John Martin, with his two sets of stunning mezzotints for Paradise Lost and a number of Miltonic paintings; J. M. W. Turner, with ten small illustrations for the poetical works; Gustave Doré, with fifty full-page folio plates accompanying the text of Paradise Lost in many widely circulated editions; and Jane Giraud, the first woman known to illustrate Milton’s works. These artists, working during the golden age of English landscape painting, used Paradise Lost to explore a new interest in nature—an interest just beginning to be referred to as “ecological.” Responding to reform movements that followed the vast changes introduced by the Industrial Revolution, these artists emphasized, as Milton’s earlier illustrators had not, the “landskip” of Eden and the earth’s vulnerability to human choices. They did so, however, in gender-specific ways, using sharply contrasting definitions of space to define Paradise and to suggest its fragility. While Martin’s enormous mezzotints and Doré’s dramatic engravings

Fig. 15. John Martin, Raphael Instructing Adam and Eve, from Paradise Lost, book 5 (1824–1827). Photograph courtesy of Special Collections, Library of the University of Southern California.

present a vast and endless prospect— diminishing human beings to proportionate scale within their environment and underscoring their dependence on it— Giraud’s delicate watercolors reduce Milton’s landscape to the eloquent emblem of a flower. In two sets of mezzotints made between 1824 and 1827, Martin represents Adam and Eve as tiny figures in a seemingly infinite expanse of trees and light. His Eve appears humble and curious, in harmony with the landscape, as she discovers herself in the liquid Plain (fig. 14). Raphael’s visit takes up only the lower left corner of an image otherwise devoted to trees and to mountains receding into an invisible horizon (fig. 15)—reminding the viewer how much the angel’s discourse concerns nature and its direct connection to spirit: “Differing but in degree, of kind the same” (PL 5.490). Humankind’s

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Fall gives rise, for Martin, to alienation from nature and thus directly to the ecological disaster besetting a newly industrial England, as Satan builds his Brunelian tunnel-bridge over Chaos (fig. 16), completing “the mortal Sin original” (9.1003 – 4). On the title page to her reading of Paradise Lost in her 1846 Flowers of Milton (fig. 17), Giraud quotes Milton’s description of nature’s reaction to the exact moment Eve plucks and eats the forbidden fruit: “Earth felt the wound” (9.782). She represents this

Fig. 16. John Martin, The Bridge over Chaos, from Paradise Lost, book 10 (1824–1827). Photograph courtesy of Special Collections, Library of the University of Southern California.

Fig. 17. Jane Giraud, title page to Paradise Lost, in The Flowers of Milton (London, 1846). Collection of Virginia James Tufte. Photograph by Dawn Finley.

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decisive moment with a withering, serpent-wrapped tree; with a rosebush rising up into bare thorn; and with a dying bird, bringing “Death into the world” (1.3)—all this brought about by invisible human hands. Giraud goes on to develop this ecological insight by focusing her entire reading of the epic on flowers, whose story becomes the story of an equally fragile earth. Human beings, Giraud suggests, are a part of nature, and their actions affect everything in the universe. In so doing she produces the first ecofeminist reading of Milton. The mid-nineteenth century also witnessed an upsurge in illustrations of A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, including thirty designs by E. H. Corbould, Frederick Richard Pickersgill, Harrison Weir, and Birket Foster, engraved by “the Brothers Dalziel” and published by George Routledge in 1858. Like mid-century illustrators of Paradise Lost, these artists emphasized landscape and the natural world. Their work, however, in a dizzying array of styles, is more traditionally pastoral and “poetic” and less concerned with ecological teaching than that of Martin or Giraud. Each artist, moreover, seems to have been left free to interpret the poem as he would. Weir represents the brother’s loss of the Lady —“[without blame] / Or our neglect, we lost her as we came” (line 510)—with a charmingly naturalistic drawing of “a young kid” that has “lost his dam” (line 498; fig. 18). Foster represents two youthful shepherds resting beside a tranquil stream in a generic pastoral landscape, with sheep grazing placidly in the distance (fig. 19). Pickersgill’s representation of Sabrina and her nymphs (fig. 20) introduces the stylized romanticism of the Pre-Raphaelites. And moving away altogether from the representation of nature, Corbould’s kitschy neoclassical frontispiece (fig. 21) shows the Lady, in a reverse of the Pygmalion myth, literally transformed by a leopard-skin-clad Comus into a statue: “chain’d up in Alabaster” and as “root-bound” as Daphne (lines 659 – 62). At the turn of the twentieth century, two editions of Comus by Jessie King (1906) and A. Garth Jones (1898) rendered more coherent interpretations of A Masque—both in styles that resonate strongly with the Arts and Crafts movement of their time, but with dramatically contrasting effects. King’s wispy art nouveau–inspired designs are almost entirely aestheticized and spiritualized. Her haloed Lady (fig. 22) sits enthroned high above Comus’s cup, which bubbles up before her like a fantastic figment of her imagination— one she gazes at

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Fig. 18. Harrison Weir, illustration from Comus: A Mask (London and New York: George Routledge, 1858). Collection of Virginia James Tufte. Photograph by Dawn Finley.

Fig. 19. Birket Foster, illustration from Comus: A Mask (London and New York: George Routledge, 1858). Collection of Virginia James Tufte. Photograph by Dawn Finley.

Fig. 20. Frederick Richard Pickersgill, illustration from Comus: A Mask (London and New York: George Routledge, 1858). Collection of Virginia James Tufte. Photograph by Dawn Finley.

Fig. 21. E. H. Corbould, illustration from Comus: A Mask (London and New York: George Routledge, 1858). Collection of Virginia James Tufte. Photograph by Dawn Finley.

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Fig. 22. Jessie King, The Lady in Comus’s Chair, from A Masque (London: Routledge/New York: E. P. Dutton, 1906). Collection of Virginia James Tufte. Photograph by Dawn Finley.

Fig. 24. A. Garth Jones, The Attendant Spirit, from The Minor Poems of John Milton (London: George Bell, 1898). Collection of Virginia James Tufte. Photograph by Dawn Finley.

Fig. 23. Jessie King, The Lady Triumphant, from A Masque (London: Routledge/New York: E. P. Dutton, 1906). Collection of Virginia James Tufte. Photograph by Dawn Finley.

sternly, in easy rejection. And King’s last image of Milton’s heroine (fig. 23) renders her as a saint in a stained-glass window—her plain halo replaced by one displaying the top and side arms of the cross, her Gothically graceful, robe-clad body surrounded by four smaller crosses. Like King and other figures in the Arts and Crafts movement, Jones was drawn to A Masque’s evocation of a supra-sensible, immaterial world. The magnificent angelic wings of his Attendant Spirit, for instance (fig. 24), fill the design within which he appears, suppressing the forest into stylized decorative traces behind him. And the series concludes not with the Lady’s reunion with her human family, but with a marital portrait of “Celestial Cupid” and “His dear Psyche sweet entranced” (fig. 25). Yet Jones’s representation of the Lady in Comus’s chair (fig. 26) portrays like no previous artist the often vexed relation between body and mind. Unlike King’s Lady — and even Blake’s (1801; fig. 27), who sits as if in a trance —

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Fig. 25. A. Garth Jones, Cupid and Psyche, from The Minor Poems of John Milton (London: George Bell, 1898). Collection of Virginia James Tufte. Photograph by Dawn Finley.

Jones’s Lady anticipates those of later artists in the intense physicality of her struggle against a force that her mind, registered on her anguished face, rejects. Few artists represented Samson Agonistes during the nineteenth century, William Harvey (1843) being one. But it was Jones who produced the century’s most dramatic Samson (fig. 28), in a woodcut appearing in the same 1898 volume as his Comus designs. Anticipating Christ’s torment at the pillar of flagellation, Jones’s Samson stands at the lowest ebb of his physical and spiritual agon—arms tethered behind him, blinded eyes upcast above his tortured face and bare muscled chest—a man with the intelligence requisite for terrible mental suffering: “Thoughts, my Tormentors, arm’d with deadly stings / Mangle my apprehensive tenderest parts, / Exasperate, exulcerate, and raise / Dire inflammation” (lines 623 –26). Shorn, like many Miltonic Samsons, of narrative context, he stands on the threshold of the twentieth century, a figure of tragic and iconic ambiguity.

Fig. 26. A. Garth Jones, The Lady in Comus’s Chair, from The Minor Poems of John Milton (London: George Bell, 1898). Collection of Virginia James Tufte. Photograph by Dawn Finley.

Fig. 27. William Blake, The Lady in Comus’s Chair, from A Mask (1801). Courtesy of the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California.

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frequently illustrated of Milton’s works. Among these illustrations are three remarkable sets by Arthur Rackham (1921), Mildred R. H. Farrar (1937), and Edmund Dulac (1954). A master of soft color and Botticellian line, Rackham made sixty-one designs—twenty-four of them luminous tipped-in watercolors—for a sumptuous edition of Comus published by Doubleday Page. With psychoanalytically sophisticated images, which range from the playful to the lyrical to the truly frightening, Rackham’s Comus becomes a meditation on the subject of enchantment itself. In his representation of the forest rout of “ill-manag’d merriment” (fig. 29), for instance, it is impossible to distinguish Comus from his fellow revelers. But no one has captured more fully the revelers’ manic exuberance tinged with incipient menace. In contrast, Rackham’s Lady (fig. 30), whose demure verticality and flexible strength are echoed by the forest’s white-barked trees, expresses muted dismay at the “noise” the reader has just seen, and can almost hear, from the right edge of the woods in which she stands. Rackham also underscores the ambivalent, double-edged nature of magic—from his lovely “flow’ry-kirtled Naiades, / Culling their

Fig. 28. A. Garth Jones, Samson Tormented, from The Minor Poems of John Milton (London: George Bell, 1898). Collection of Virginia James Tufte. Photograph by Dawn Finley.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Wittreich’s catalogue lists thirty-two sets of illustrations made between 1901 and 1954, suggesting that for visual artists as for verbal critics Milton continued to speak to the urgent concerns of modern readers. Early in the century, artists began to show renewed interest in a number of Milton’s shorter works, with an edition of “Lycidas” illustrated in 1903 by Gertrude Brodie and another the same year by Robert Anning Bell. The shorter poems also received emphasis in an edition of the poetical works illustrated in 1904 by William Hyde and in several illustrated editions of the Nativity Ode. In 1929 Phillip Evergood made four etchings for an edition of “Lycidas.” Blair Hughes-Stanton made wood engravings for a 1933 edition titled Four Poems by John Milton—including “L’Allegro,” “Il Penseroso,” Arcades, and “Lycidas”—and for a 1931 edition of Comus, both published by Gregynog Press. Indeed, perhaps in keeping with the discoveries of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, A Masque for the first time surpassed Paradise Lost as the most

Fig. 29. Arthur Rackham, “Ill-manag’d merriment,” from Comus (New York: Doubleday Page/London: William Heinemann, 1921). Collection of Virginia James Tufte. Photograph by Dawn Finley.

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Fig. 30. Arthur Rackham, The Lady, from Comus (New York: Doubleday Page/London: William Heinemann, 1921). Collection of Virginia James Tufte. Photograph by Dawn Finley.

Fig. 32. Arthur Rackham, The Brothers, from Comus (New York: Doubleday Page/London: William Heinemann, 1921). Collection of Virginia James Tufte. Photograph by Dawn Finley.

Fig. 31. Arthur Rackham, “Flow’ry-kirtled Naiades,” from Comus (New York: Doubleday Page/London: William Heinemann, 1921). Collection of Virginia James Tufte. Photograph by Dawn Finley.

Potent herbs” (lines 254 –55; fig. 31) to his forests of malevolent writhing trees, which reduce the Lady’s brothers to tiny, vulnerable, undifferentiated shadows (fig. 32). In contrast to Rackham’s mythic approach, Farrar underscores the artificiality and theatricality of A Masque. In five linoleum cuts—rendered in white on strikingly modern shades of ochre, magenta, and gray—she uses abstract patterns and static figures to play with the idea of disguise. Comus, for instance (fig. 33), confronts a Lady in Puritan garb—not in the guise of a literal shepherd, but in that of a Puritan divine. Framed by a proscenium arch of gray maples, before a magenta backdrop etched with a child’s impression of pines, this gray-clad hypocrite removes his John Alden hat in a gesture of solicitude

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Fig. 33. Mildred R. H. Farrar, Comus and the Lady, from The Mask of Comus (Bloomsbury: Nonesuch Press, 1937). Courtesy of Virginia James Tufte. Photograph by Dawn Finley.

Fig. 34. Edmund Dulac, The Lady in Comus’s Chair, from Comus (New York: Limited Editions Club, 1954). Reprinted with permission of MBI, Inc.

that gives away his true nature, by revealing his toocool, satanically spiky hair. Dulac’s six brilliant watercolors share with Farrar’s linoleum prints an interpretation of A Masque as spectacle, while taking on more depth, both figuratively and literally. In his representation of Comus’s attempted seduction of the Lady (fig. 34), for instance, the action takes place in three different registers. In the far background, a purple curtain across an arched window is pulled aside to reveal—to the viewer, not the Lady—a blue sky behind the action onstage. Just behind a proscenium marked by a second purple curtain, lean-bodied, toga-clad, animal-headed revelers of both sexes raise a toast to the scene in the foreground, where a dazzlingly red-haired, apple-green-clad Comus offers an appealing and naturalistically rendered cup to a resisting blue-clad Lady. Like some recent critics, Dulac represents the androgynous Comus as an equal opportunity threat to the Lady and her brothers. The tempter’s beautiful face is clearly made up: eyes and brows lined, lips rouged. His lean, sinuous body— his chest and arms provocatively bared—is as lithe as the Lady’s, lacking only her breasts; his thighs, like hers, are starkly visible under his skimpy dress. For

Dulac the proffered experience is obviously sexual, and of a notably liminal kind. Also in anticipation of Miltonists working a half century later, the artist investigates the exact nature of the Lady’s bondage. No other artist has represented her “corporal rind . . . immanacl’d” in such a chair: claw-footed and lion-faced, it literally hugs her backward, into the glutinous heat of a plush red cushion. In The Uses of Enchantment (1976), Bruno Bettelheim explored the importance of fairy tales in the psychosocial development of children. In 1996 Margaret Hodges and Trina Schart Hyman took up his challenge by writing and illustrating a Comus for young readers. Emphasizing, like no previous artist, the empowerment of the children through their survival of an ordeal in the woods, Hodges and Hyman bring Alice and her brothers through their encounter with the enchanter to a final triumphant bow upon the stage at Ludlow Castle (fig. 35). They join hands on that bare, universal stage with a Comus whose satyr legs and devil horns are now revealed as a part of his costume; with revelers who now carry their animal heads; and with an attendant spirit who is revealed as their music teacher, Henry Lawes. But under his shepherd’s cloak, he continues to wear a

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Fig. 35. Trina Schart Hyman, Bow on the Stage of Ludlow Castle, from Comus (New York: Holiday House, 1996). Illustration copyright © 1996 by Trina Schart Hyman, from Comus, adapted by Margaret Hodges. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Holiday House, Inc.

Fig. 37. Robert Ashwin Maynard, Samson Being Called by an Officer, from Samson Agonistes (Harrow Weald, Middlesex: Raven Press, 1931). Photograph courtesy of Special Collections, Library of the University of California, San Diego.

Fig. 36. William Hyde, Samson Meditating Between the Pillars, from The Poetical Works of John Milton (London: Astolat Press, 1904). Collection of Virginia James Tufte. Photograph by Dawn Finley.

rainbow gown, the bright colors of which continue up behind the stage’s right curtain. Thus, even as terrors reveal themselves to be nightmares that can be overcome, goodness itself remains, onstage and offstage, to give color and hope to the world. Twentieth-century artists illustrating Samson Agonistes continued for the most part to represent the interiority of Milton’s protagonist, yet often with more ambivalence and more dramatic context than appear in earlier artists. In an engraving from 1904, for instance, William Hyde represents the moment of stillness and meditation in the temple of Dagon before Samson pulls down the pillars (fig. 36). Appearing more like an ascetic desert saint or biblical prophet than a strongman bent on avenging his own two eyes, “with head a while inclined / And eyes fast fixed he stood, as one who prayed, / Or some great matter in his mind revolved” (lines 1636 –38). Yet to his right, in a building that looks more like a souk than a temple, stand four veiled figures and an armed guard whose seconds are numbered. Robert

Ashwin Maynard shows a special appreciation for nuances of Milton’s text in a 1931 wood engraving (fig. 37). In this image, one of eleven illustrating the play, a thoughtful Samson, still in prison, resists the request to display his strength at the celebration in the temple of Dagon. A background scene sympathetically represents, in white-on-black line, the people he will soon destroy. But Maynard focuses not on that destruction, but rather on this almost Quakerly moment of internal discernment. Already, for artists of the earlier twentieth century, the complex Samson of later critical debate is beginning to emerge. Finally, in a 1979 edition of Samson Agonistes, Robert Medley eschewed figurative imagery altogether to represent the many ambiguities and difficulties in Milton’s narrative. Instead, he used what he called “organic abstraction”—turning the drama into a kind of Rorschach test for the viewer. Among his most vivid images are one of the cutting of Samson’s hair; one of Dalila (fig. 38) as “a ship in full rig”; and one titled “The Destruction” (fig. 39). An implication that Medley perhaps sees Samson’s death as an attempt to fulfill his appointed role, to “begin to deliver Israel out of the hands of the Philistines,” appears in the final illustration, “Tablet

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Fig. 38. Robert Medley, “‘A ship in full rig’. Delila.” Illus. 12 from Samson Agonistes (Norwich, UK: Mell Clark, 1979). Reproduced by kind permission of the Robert Medley Estate.

Fig. 40. Carlotta Petrina, illustration of Paradise Lost, book 9 (New York: Limited Editions Club, 1936). Reprinted with permission of MBI, Inc.

Fig. 39. Robert Medley, “The Destruction.” Illus. 20 from Samson Agonistes (Norwich, UK: Mell Clark, 1979). Reproduced by kind permission of the Robert Medley Estate.

for the God of Israel.” Yet, conversely, this ink-blot image can just as easily be seen to lay the violence of the poem at Yahweh’s feet—a conclusion that eludes all closure, as have many postmodern critical readings of Milton’s poem. Despite the wealth of illustrations of the shorter poems, it is nonetheless two readers of Paradise

Lost who dominate their era for the complexity and depth of their Miltonic revisions. Carlotta Petrina and Mary Elizabeth Groom brought a new humanist and feminist strain to the visual interpretation of Milton’s epic. For Petrina that feminist strain is grounded in the figure of an abject Eve (fig. 40) who expresses the desolation of history. History indeed appeared desolate to Petrina, who worked in Italy as Hitler and Mussolini moved the world ever closer to apocalypse—an apocalypse that would fall most heavily, Petrina believed, on women, and especially mothers. In place of a tempted couple, Petrina represents a solitary, half-reclining woman—head bent, long hair hanging between anguish-stretched arms, as she weeps a river of tears that spreads toward the viewer and out to the left of the picture plane. Uniquely uninterested in the moment of choice so central to virtually all other illustrators, Petrina

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Fig. 41. Carlotta Petrina, illustration of Paradise Lost, book 6 (New York: Limited Editions Club, 1936). Reprinted with permission of MBI, Inc.

Fig. 42. Carlotta Petrina, illustration of Paradise Lost, book 12 (New York: Limited Editions Club, 1936). Reprinted with permission of MBI, Inc.

focuses instead on the poem’s deep sense of sadness and loss—taking seriously the despair that Adam and Eve feel after their Fall and the bleakness of Michael’s account of the world to come. For Petrina that world had arrived and was about to explode, as can be seen in her Mussolini-like deity (fig. 41) and terrifying expulsion (fig. 42). Made in England at the same time, Groom’s wood engravings offer a more hopeful visual reading of Paradise Lost. Her humanism and feminism contrast strongly with Petrina’s elegiac version— finding expression, rather, in her representation of a strong, mutually supportive couple and an androgynous, infinitely merciful God. Attending to the deep structure of mutuality and even androgyny in Milton’s epic, Groom portrays an Adam and Eve who are ready, even after failure, to walk confidently and together into the future. Groom also made use of

her medium—white-on-black wood engraving—to bring a new globalism to her Christian-humanist project. In her representation of the dinner party in Eden (fig. 43), for instance, she used African and Polynesian masks as models for the characters’ faces—giving her sensuous Eve the face of a Black Madonna, while alluding to the “black but comely” bride of the Song of Songs, as Raphael takes on the look of a gentle Polynesian deity. In so doing she opened Milton’s redemptive myth to a larger, more inclusive audience, while bridging the gap between modern and postmodern readings. Alexis Smith brings Paradise Lost fully into the postmodern age with her 1992 Snake Path—a 560-foot-long footpath in the form of a snake that leads to the library at the University of California, San Diego. The snake circles around a small garden and passes a ten-foot-high granite volume of Paradise

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Fig. 43. Mary Elizabeth Groom, illustration of Paradise Lost, book 5 (London: Golden Cockerel Press, 1937). Reproduced by permission of the Golden Cockerel Press.

Fig. 45. Alexis Smith, Snake Path, 1992. Stuart Collection, University of California, San Diego. Used by permission. Photograph by Philipp Scholz Ritterman.

Fig. 44. Alexis Smith, Snake Path, 1992. Stuart Collection, University of California, San Diego. Used by permission. Photograph by Philipp Scholz Ritterman.

Lost, complete with a call number. In this way, Smith turns the very idea of textual illustration inside out. As Milton incorporated the theme of education into his massive epic, Smith takes that massive epic and plunks it in the midst of a university campus to elicit a walking meditation on the nature of paradise and its relationship to learning (figs. 44 and 45). There is a text in Smith’s class; but that text has leaped out

from the book onto the path, which requires actual walking, and into the Edenic little garden that— on a bench at its center— appropriates a scary image from Doré’s Paradise Lost and a sentimental passage from Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”: “where Ignorance is Bliss, / ’Tis Folly to be wise.” But is ignorance bliss? Is it better to stay in this little garden? Or is it better (as Michael suggests on the front of Smith’s Paradise Lost volume: “then wilt thou not be loath / to leave this Paradise, but shalt possess / A paradise within thee, happier far”) to follow the snake’s inevitably erroneous route to the library door—and to exercise, like Milton’s “true wayfaring Christian,” the choice that makes the difference between faith and heresy? Smith provides no definitive answers. The world lies before the reader, with Providence, one hopes, as guide. See Becker and Hattendorff (1997), Dickson (1990), Furman[-Adams] (1992, 1998), Furman[-Adams] and Tufte (1997, 1998), Furman-Adams and Tufte (1999, 2001, 2003, 2005), Labriola and Sichi (1988), Lawson (1993), Lessing (1895), McColley (1993), Pointon (1970), Ravenhall (1982,

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1984), Shawcross (1975), Tufte (1986, 1987, 1988, 1994), Wittreich (1978a, 1978b).

Wendy Furman-Adams, Virginia James Tufte

“Il Penseroso.” Poem by Milton; companion poem to “L’Allegro.” See that entry for discussion of the two poems. Independency. Essentially and originally an ecclesiastical term denoting a church system granting authority to any particular or local church to elect its own minister, discipline its members, determine its doctrinal bias, and run its own affairs. This polity is founded on the dominical promise of Matthew 18:20 (“where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them”) and enacts the Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers (1 Pet. 2:5, 9) by conferring on the members of any gathering of the faithful the authority to covenant together to form a true church. Since it respects the right of each congregation to determine its own character, Independency is a polity to which the concept of toleration is fundamental. “Liberty of conscience” was its watchword. It traces its rise in England from the turn of the sixteenth century, looking to the early Separatists Robert Browne, Henry Barrow, John Robinson, and John Smith as its originators. Its thinking was developed by William Ames, William Bradshaw, and John Cotton. The term itself (like the analogous “congregational,” which was preferred in New England and by the end of the century had largely superseded “Independent” in England) became current in the 1640s to denote not separatism from an established national church, but a national association of autonomous and independent churches in which, consequently, separatism is impossible. It was this polity that, in An Apologeticall Narration (1644), William Bridge, Jeremiah Burroughes, Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, and Sidrach Simpson, five of the small group of “dissenting brethren” in the Westminster Assembly of Divines, championed over the Presbyterianism favored by the majority of the assembly’s members. By 1648, when the four survivors (Burroughes died in 1646) published The Reasons Presented by the Dissenting Brethren Against . . . Presbyterial Government, Independency had come to rival Presbyterianism as the aspiration of English Puritans. Its opponents regarded it as dangerously democratic and anarchic; its proponents regarded it as the original form of the apostolic church (as indeed it was: “gathering” or “assembly” is the origi-

nal meaning of the Greek ε’κκλησι´α [ekklesia], Latin ecclesia, church). By this time, as well, these two rival ecclesiastical systems had begun to be associated with rival political programs, though in problematic ways: in 1938 J. H. Hexter initiated a prolonged historiographical controversy concerning the applicability and utility of the terms Independent and Presbyterian for an understanding of the political and parliamentary history of the period. The predominantly Presbyterian Long Parliament favored not only uniform adherence to a national church, but a negotiated settlement with the king; the Independents, increasingly influential in the army, grew more radical in their political aims, coming to favor republicanism. It was the Independent party in the army and Long Parliament that was responsible for Pride’s Purge, thereby securing a parliamentary majority for the motion to bring Charles I to trial. Oliver Cromwell, with his marked commitment to toleration, was the great patron of Independency. For this reason, neither the work of the Westminster Assembly nor the commitment in the Solemn League and Covenant to introduce church reform in England on the model of Scotland (that is, Presbyterianism) succeeded in establishing a national Presbyterian Church in England. Though a number of steps were taken at the national level to secure the quality of ordained ministers and the orthodoxy of their preaching, no one national ecclesiastical structure succeeded the episcopal Church of England. In The Savoy Declaration of Faith and Order Owned and Practised by the Congregational Churches in England (1658), drafted in the main by Bridge, Goodwin, Nye, and John Owen, Independency achieved a confession to rival the Presbyterian formularies of the Westminster Assembly. It stated that each gathered church had of Christ “all that Power and Authority” required to fulfill its duties and that “Besides these particular Churches, there is not instituted by Christ any Church more extensive or Catholique.” Though Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana “contains what reads remarkably like a blueprint for Congregational ecclesiology,” according to Geoffrey Nuttall (in Milton Quarterly, 2001), and Milton shows himself warmly responsive to congregational ideals when he writes that Independents take their name “justly from the true freedom of Christian doctrin and church-discipline subject to no superior judge but God only” (Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings), he never describes himself as an Independent; but neither does he lay claim to any other

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ecclesiastical or doctrinal allegiance. His religious and political development began in Puritan opposition to the bishops of the established church and so, presumably, in sympathy for Presbyterianism, but his subsequent disillusion with the centralizing and antitolerationist bias of Presbyterianism led him to an Independent position. He never wavered from his commitment to toleration, but his own intellectual development was to move beyond the doctrinal limits that would have been acceptable to the majority of Independents. N. H. Keeble

“In Eandem” [On the Same] (“Purgatorem animae derisit Iacobus ignem”). Poem by Milton; one of four epigrams on the Gunpowder Plot (see “In Proditionem Bombardicam”). Striking a contrast between the purgatorial fire (Purgatorem . . . ignem [1]) and the envisaged flames (flammas [8]) caused by the explosion of gunpowder as a means of reaching the heavens, this sardonic poem voices contempt for the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, which is hereby undermined and ironically transformed into the conspirators’ wish to elevate James I to heaven in a single blast. The piece may echo such details from A Premonition by James I as his contempt for “Purgatorie and all the trash depending thereupon” (noted by Walter MacKellar, in Modern Language Review 18, 1923) and other more specific structural and thematic features, for example, the progression of the work from a reference to the purgatorial fire cleansing the anima to an allusion to the failed gunpowder conspiracy, the depiction of the Pope as a triple-crowned monster, and of the Roman Church as “the figure of a monstrous Beast, with seven heads and ten hornes.” Estelle Haan

“In Eandem” [On the Same] (“Quem modo Roma suis devoverat impia diris”). Poem by Milton; one of four epigrams on the Gunpowder Plot (see “In Proditionem Bombardicam”). Like the others, it is marked by its sardonic wit and ironic criticism of the Roman Church. The piece ridicules the reckless ambition of the conspirators by depicting “impious Rome,” which had once threatened James I with excommunication, as now wishing to lift him (through the blast of gunpowder) to the gods above. When James came to the throne, he was not excommunicated by Clement VII. In A Premonition James had announced that he had reformed that

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part of the oath of allegiance which had stated “that the Pope had no power to excommunicate me.” Estelle Haan

“In Eandem” [On the Same] (“Siccine tentasti caelo donasse Iacobum”). Poem by Milton; one of four epigrams on the Gunpowder Plot (see “In Proditionem Bombardicam”). It was composed after 27 March 1625, as indicated by the reference (lines 5 – 6) to the death of James I. Echoing Revelation 13:1, Milton addresses the Roman Church as a beast hiding in its seven hills and ridicules its idolatry, describing Rome as “profane” and its statues as “brutish gods,” features likewise criticized by James I in A Premonition. The epigram’s opening sardonic question, introduced by siccine, finds a parallel in a gunpowder epigram of James Johnson, while the exhortation to blow up the foedos . . . cucullos (line 7) anticipates the description of the Paradise of Fools in Paradise Lost 3.489 –97. Estelle Haan

“In Effigiei Eius Sculptorem” [On the Engraver of His Portrait]. Classical Greek epigram by Milton. For the first edition of his collected shorter poems, Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645), an engraved portrait frontispiece was commissioned from William Marshall, the most prolific English engraver of his time. It purports to depict the poet against a background of a pastoral landscape. Marshall was probably known to Milton for his satirical depictions of religious radicals in Presbyterian and allied publications of the 1640s, and so there may already have been an element of animus. In the event, Milton composed a Greek epigram, which claims that the image in no way resembles its subject and urges readers to “laugh at this rotten picture of a rotten artist.” Milton or his publisher, Humphrey Moseley, then had an engraver—perhaps Marshall himself, presuming on his ignorance of Greek— engrave the epigram below the portrait. The second edition of Milton’s shorter poems, published in 1673, had no frontispiece, but Milton included it among other Greek compositions, adding the Latin title by which it has been subsequently known. Thomas N. Corns

influence of Milton. Within fifty years of its publication in 1667, Paradise Lost became a monument of English culture, a vernacular classic to

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which a long succession of major and minor authors have responded with imitation and allusion. In the English tradition Milton’s literary status has been second only to that of William Shakespeare, and many a Miltonist has given him the highest rank. If Shakespeare was the laureate of this world, Milton was the laureate of heaven and hell and paradise. Paradise Lost has widely influenced how Satan and the story of Adam and Eve have been imagined. In politics, Milton’s influence was greatest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though with a legacy also to later liberalisms. In poetry, Milton’s influence was greatest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when he also contributed to the development of the novel. Milton’s poetry, but also his politics, later gave him prestige in the academy. At once a rich store of cultural capital but also a profound criticism of European tradition, Milton’s poetry and prose have now sustained more than three centuries of often deeply engaged response. During his lifetime, Milton was famous for his prose works justifying the execution of Charles I. Eikonoklastes (1649) and Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (1651) became part of the shock of the regicide. The former appeared in several editions and in translations of Milton into Latin and French; the latter appeared in many more editions, English and continental, including some pirated, and in translations into Dutch and English. Both were often referred to, sometimes in hostile reactions, even many years later. Their notoriety led to their impoundment, with book burning on the Continent and also in England after the Restoration, where they were then forbidden by law. Milton’s resistance theory aggressively questioned widespread assumptions about sacerdotal kingship, this at a time when absolute monarchy was finding some elaborate defenses. Moreover, his accomplished Latinity was an attraction in its own right. Years later the young Joseph Addison could cite the merits of Milton’s Latin prose even as he disavowed its subject, admiring “the clean Current [which], tho’ serene and bright, / Betray’s a bottom odious to the sight” (“An Account of the Greatest English Poets,” 1694). Around dissenting academies, more friendly to Milton as both poet and political writer, the Defensio continued to be read with enthusiasm (Samuel Wesley). Eikonoklastes and the Defensio found fresh publication and circulation after the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89. Where Milton combined classical republican discourse with an ultraProtestant argument for civil liberty, his position was in some part secularized during the eighteenth century. Promoted afresh by later republicans—

John Toland at the turn of the century, Thomas Hollis in the mid-1700s, and American and French revolutionaries in the late 1700s—Milton’s lasting status as a proponent of liberty only belatedly drew on his emerging prestige as a national poet. Milton’s contribution to republican discourse was later matched by his success as an avatar of liberalism, most of all in his arguments for press freedom in Areopagitica. Already in the seventeenth century, these found quotation with and without acknowledgment in seasons when the renewal of the Licensing Act was in question. In the eighteenth century, proponents of press freedoms invoked Areopagitica for arguments that went well beyond Milton’s attack on “prior restraint” of the press (prepublication licensing). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Milton’s arguments, understood in the spirit of John Stuart Mill, won a lasting place in the liberal tradition. Seen as a foundational work in the history of “freedom of the press,” Areopagitica has been assured frequent republication and quotation to the present day not only for its argument but for its eloquence. The British Liberal Party, and its successor, the Liberal Democrats, made of the work something like a secular scripture: as late as 2000, it was reported in Britain that “as Liberal tradition demands, the re-elected Party President Michael Meadowcroft is formally presented with a copy of Areopagitica” (Liberal News 82). A great liberal humanist like E. M. Forster could write warmly on “The Tercentenary of the ‘Areopagitica’”: despite some initial misgiving about “the mysteriously uncongenial Milton,” Forster found “the most famous of his prose works” richly rewarding, and that at a difficult hour for press freedom, for there was a war on in 1944, as there had been in 1644 when “this explosive little pamphlet” had first appeared (Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951). In twentieth-century America, Areopagitica remained a standard on lists of Great Books, included in Harvard’s Five-Foot Shelf of classics (chosen by Charles W. Eliot, 1909 – 1910). “A good booke is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life”: thus reads the Miltonic inscription above a door in the main reading room of the New York Public Library. Areopagitica had a place in many a curriculum and was republished in most texts where something Miltonic in addition to his poetry was called for. Especially in the United States, however, the libertarian Milton might come to be at odds with the liberal. Areopagitica looms large, for example, in the defense of freedom in the marketplace of ideas by the influential Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (dissenting

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in Abrams v. United States, 1919)— one of the many American editions of Areopagitica had been edited by Holmes’s father’s friend James Russell Lowell (New York, 1890). Later in the twentieth century, the reconstruction of classical liberalism for neoconservative purposes led to Areopagitica’s success in circles where Forster and Holmes’s values might find less applause. Such is the totemic value of Areopagitica as a liberal text that its influence may yet be felt in some very far-flung references: for example, in the British Columbia legislature in the 1990s, when in a debate on censoring hate literature, a socialist member proclaimed himself “one of those people who cut his teeth . . . on the grand tradition of reading Milton’s Areopagitica when I was about 19 years old and learning it very well,” only to conclude “we cannot treat any liberty within our society as absolute freedom”; or when a liberal member later included in “the Liberal heritage” John Milton, “whose Areopagitica affirmed intellectual freedom, which is something very central to my being” (Hansard, 10 June 1993 and 7 April 1995). The influence of Milton the political writer might be strengthened by that of Milton the poet. In the garden at Stowe House in Buckinghamshire, for example, a bust of Milton joins with others in the Temple of British Worthies, c. 1734 –1735. This Whig Milton was at once the epic seer of Paradise Lost and the controversialist. More prevalent at first, however, was the need to separate Milton the national bard from Milton the regicide. Another bust, erected only in 1737 in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, illustrates the difficulty. In 1710, when a memorial in the abbey was planned for John Philips, that poet’s imitations of Miltonic blank verse had invited his designation as a second Milton, only for the then dean at Westminster to forbid that Milton be thus named in hallowed ground. Even when the ardent Whig William Benson later succeeded in raising the monument for Milton, it celebrated “the Author of Paradise Lost” rather than that author’s “immortal labours in the cause of liberty,” as later republicans might complain (Sylas Neville). After the three early editions (1667, 1674, 1678), the fortunes of Paradise Lost were transformed by the fourth edition (1688). That handsome illustrated folio marked Milton’s emergence as the great English poet on the eve of the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89, as part of the nationalist reaction against the absolutist, Catholic, and pro-French policies of James II. Milton had had some immediate influence on poets he had known, notably Andrew Marvell and John Dryden, but now, and in the decades to

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come, he acquired an ever wider following. A vogue for Milton’s poetry at Oxford University, especially at the Christ Church of Henry Aldrich and the young Francis Atterbury, helped give rise to the illustrated fourth edition. By 1700 Milton was influencing poets in two main ways. The first was in the use of blank verse for Whig panegyrics, which with English successes in the War of the Spanish Succession led to a great outpouring of celebratory poetry. Allied to this was a critical confidence that Milton’s poetry might be harnessed to the promotion of “English liberty.” This was most notably the case in the work as theorist and poet of John Dennis. Second was the parodic imitation of Milton, at first in jest but then in earnest, by the young Christ Church poet John Philips. Encouraged by Atterbury, Philips used an idiom he had first explored in the burlesque The Splendid Shilling (1701) for the panegyric Blenheim (1704) and the georgic Cyder (1708). He brought to Miltonic imitation a more attentive eye and ear than most of the Whig writers. In the space of a decade, Milton’s idiom became a staple of patriotic verse. Such was the phenomenon that contemporaries commented on it, as in Thomas Brown’s “To the Ingenious Mr. John Phillips of Oxon, on the many Scurvy Imitators of Milton.” The rapid increase in Milton’s influence, especially for any poetry of extended description or narration, was then consolidated when Joseph Addison’s major series of essays on Paradise Lost appeared in the Spectator (1712). Addison with great success conveyed Milton out of politics into ideology, in part by translating Milton’s poetics into Augustan aesthetics. He made Milton first and last the poet of Paradise Lost. He praised the classical features of the epic at the expense of its prophetic claims, its “beauties” rather than its “great argument.” In the eighteen Spectator essays, Addison modeled a critical style that had huge influence at home and abroad, both in readings of Paradise Lost and in critical writing more generally. In part through Addison, Paradise Lost contributed to the emergence of aesthetics in the eighteenth century, whether in continental developments— conspicuously in the work of Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger, whose translation and discussions of Paradise Lost reached well beyond Enlightenment Zürich— or in critical discourse as it developed in Britain, especially the transformation of the sublime from a rhetorical term into an ontological category. Milton was elevated from English national poet to British imperial poet within a generation after the Act of Union (1707). Not least the Scots

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learned from Milton a poetic idiom that would become widely influential and that also through their rhetorical instruction (notably Lord Kames, Hugh Blair, and Adam Smith) would find its way into the schools and universities, in Great Britain and across its empire. This cultural resource was especially dear to Country Whigs, whose Miltonic verse found its apotheosis in the work of James Thomson, whether in the lasting triumph of The Seasons or in his ambitious Liberty, with important achievements in comparable “Miltonics” by David Mallet (Malloch) and Mark Akenside. Their legacy shows in later seasons of Liberty, as when, for example, in the aftermath of the Seven Years War the young Anna Aiken (soon to be Barbauld) might sound this Miltonic note in “Corsica,” the first and defining work in her 1773 Poems. Much more inflected allusions to Milton color the work of allied Country Tories, such as William King or even Alexander Pope, who to celebrate ideals of government planned an epic about the foundation of Britain, which was to feature blank-verse narration richly informed by Virgilian and Miltonic example. When Milton stands in for Cicero in Thomas Gray’s quietist “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” he has become the type of the orator and poet, adopted by all parties. This was matched by an ever greater volume of publication, which after the lapse of Jacob Tonson’s copyright in the 1750s led to almost annual editions of Paradise Lost in the second half of the eighteenth century and after, and increasingly also of his other poetry. Thus Paradise Lost became the vernacular classic for a middle-class readership less tutored in the classics of Greece and Rome. Now, too, the epic began to find its way into school curricula, where it presided in the nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth. Milton had defined the high style in English poetry, in a way that even mock-heroic respected. So great was Milton’s influence that it survived, indeed helped animate, the Romantic reaction against prevailing norms of discursive and narrative poetry. Especially as mediated by William Wordsworth, Miltonic blank verse proved capable of many applications, most of all for sustaining longer descriptive poems governed finally by introspection. Moreover, Milton as well as Miltonic techniques had important roles to play. The seventeenth-century revolutionary might now be revived: thus the Milton invoked in Wordsworth’s sonnet “London, 1802”—“thou shouldst be living at this hour”—gains a transcendental import beyond the old Country Whig valuation, reassuring Wordsworth that his nation could participate in

the revolutionary sublime and yet might still “the faith and morals hold / That Milton held” without falling into French extremes. When William Blake complained of Milton, or more especially of “Milton’s shadow,” it was in part the Whig legacy, in which Milton’s epic had so readily been reabsorbed into British militarism, that caused him the most immediate affront. But especially in Milton, Blake also identifies strongly with his compromised protagonist. Elsewhere, in the profound poetic understanding of John Keats’s Milton, or the powerful part Milton’s creations play in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry (coloring the myth-making too of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), Milton’s example lent itself to fresh poetic applications and new ways of idealizing poetic knowledge. For a Christian Platonist like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Milton’s example was inescapable. As Romantic writers reinvented personal autonomy, and celebrated the poet’s elevated sensibility and capacity to write through the contradictions of that autonomy with masculine force, Milton proved a compelling presence, an easy answer to previous anxieties about the status of English literature. In the triumph of imagination that might succeed a crisis of subjectivity, Milton’s Satan became an influential embodiment of these paradoxes. Long before, Dryden had drawn on Tory slurs in regretting that Milton, the arch-rebel, had made Satan his hero rather than Adam, with even the Whig Daniel Defoe sharing the concern (Political History of the Devil, 1726). Now Blake and especially Shelley seized on Milton’s creation, a Promethean figure who might seem heroic in his resistance to the tyranny of heaven, and an expression of all that was vehement, high, and daring. Byron too, and the Byronic hero, owed much to this Miltonic prototype, conspicuously in the Lucifer of the dramatic Cain or, more satirically handled, in The Vision of Judgement. This Romantic legacy has generated much sympathy and some reaction ever since. Even where Milton has fared poorly — with T. S. Eliot, for example, or the critic William Empson, or the novelist Philip Pullman— his influence has remained significant, not least as the foil for deeply felt arguments with and against Christianity. When an older Anna Laetitia Barbauld forecast in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven that the future lay with America, she imagined Milton as the national poet there, whose “tones [would] the raptured ear enthrall, / Mixt with the roar of Niagara’s fall” (95 –96). Many American writers had anticipated the possibility, but it is during the revolutionary

“In Obitum Praesulis Eliensis”

period and especially the early to mid-nineteenth century that Milton helped shape the efforts of successive generations of Americans to forge a national literature. Milton’s poetry led to the imitative productions of earlier poets such as Philip Freneau, Timothy Dwight, and Joel Barlow. But it was in New England that Milton’s deeper influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and most of all Herman Melville contributed centrally to the emergence of American literature. The success of that generation, and the twentieth-century recognition of its achievement, led to Milton’s later having a less central role in American letters, however widely read and taught. From having been a vibrant presence, Milton has for some come instead to seem a monument to dead ideas. In the American literature of the African diaspora, for example, Milton has had a part since the time of Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753 –1784), but he was later featured in denunciations of white power hostile to “African” religion (for example, Ishmael Reed), although also in more complex responses, as when Malcolm X, not averse to preaching that “the white man is the devil,” further recognized in Milton’s Satan a compelling description of oppressive European constructions of heroism (he read Paradise Lost in the Harvard Classics edition while held in the Norfolk Prison Colony). In the Whig legacy to British imperial thinking, Milton retained a significant place. Its apparent universalism and confident Protestantism made Paradise Lost ideal for domestic use as well as for export. When Alfred Lord Tennyson sounds the laureate note—as with “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” (1852)—it is just the most obvious expression of his long familiarity with Milton and English culture’s comfort with that source; Tennyson’s first extant letter (at the age of twelve) comments on Samson Agonistes, and to the end of his days his poetic voice often revealed a Miltonic accent, especially when it celebrated the heroic. With Milton’s help a commercial empire might style its mission in terms more godly and civic, translating imperial power into the languages of transcendence and of virtue. In India that ardent Miltonist Thomas Babington Macaulay insisted that the schools promote English literature—“a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”—with Paradise Lost having the further benefit of circumventing too secular educational policies. Such views might be met with creative generosity: in Meghanadabadha Kabya (The Slaying of Meghanada), Milton’s epic found

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stirring transposition into the world of the Ramayana by a founding father of modern Bengali literature, Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824 –1873), who pioneered the use of Miltonic blank verse in that language. More recently the empire has struck back with brilliant reinventions of Miltonic characters, themes, and versification, notably in Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses (1988) and Derek Walcott’s poetry, especially Omeros (1990). Now, too, however, can be traced the diminishing presence of Milton in the works of such national poets as William Butler Yeats (Ireland), Wallace Stevens (United States), Philip Larkin (England), Seamus Heaney (Ulster), Les Murray (Australia), and Margaret Atwood (Canada). The compensation has been the huge increase in Milton scholarship and in critical responses to his works. See Brown (1707), Datta [Dutt] (2004), Forster (1951), Griffin (1986), Havens (1922), Herron (1987), Nelson (1963), Neville (1950), Newlyn (1993), Nyquist and Ferguson (1987), Sensabaugh (1964), Shawcross (1991), Van Anglen (1993), Wesley (1706), Wittreich (1970), Womersley (1997).

Nicholas von Maltzahn

“In Inventorem Bombardae” [On the Inventor of Gunpowder]. Poem by Milton. Possibly contemporaneous with “In Quintum Novembris” (c. November 1626), it is a witty vignette against the inventor of gunpowder (unnamed in this instance, but traditionally regarded as either the German monk Berthold Schwartz [fourteenth century] or, less commonly, Friar Roger Bacon [thirteenth century]). In Milton’s poem the inventor of gunpowder, in his theft of the weapons and thunderbolt of Jupiter, is ironically presented as surpassing Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods. The theme of gunpowder as usurping the thunderbolt of Jupiter occurs in gunpowder epigrams by Thomas Cooper, John Stradling, and Conrad Celtis. Estelle Haan

“In Obitum Praesulis Eliensis” [On the Death of the Bishop of Ely]. Poem by Milton, written in late 1626 and first published in 1645. Its richly figurative neo-Latin lines, in a meter favored by Horace in Epodes, extravagantly commemorate Nicholas Felton, who died in October 1626. Milton celebrates Felton’s work in his own diocese as a ceremonialist, as he terms him “rex sacrorum” (“king of the sacred rites”). The poet’s avowed grief is resolved in the happy vision of the bishop’s apotheosis. The poem is a useful indicator of the attitude of

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“In Obitum Praesulis Eliensis”

the young Milton to the leadership of the Church of England at that time. Thomas N. Corns

“In Obitum Procancellarii Medici” [On the Death of the Vice Chancellor, a Doctor]. Poem by Milton, written by late 1626, first published in 1645, commemorating the death of John Gostlin in October 1625. Gostlin was a physician and had been appointed regius professor of medicine at Cambridge University in 1623. His academic career had been hampered by suspicions that he was a Roman Catholic. He was appointed master of Gonville and Caius College only after the then bishop of Lincoln investigated those suspicions and confirmed the election. Gostlin was appointed vice chancellor in 1625. Milton’s poem imitates the alcaic meter, in which each stanza has two pentameters and two trimeters, often favored by Horace. Thomas N. Corns

“In Proditionem Bombardicam” [On the Gunpowder Plot]. Poem by Milton. Milton’s four Latin epigrams on the Gunpowder Plot (see also “In Eandem”) and “In Inventorem Bombardae” may be contemporaneous with “In Quintum Novembris” (c. November 1626). Marked by their strongly antipapal content, sardonic tone, and concise expression, they take their place within the neoLatin gunpowder epigrammatic tradition, a tradition prevalent not only because the composition of Latin epigrams on the subject had become a regular exercise in seventeenth-century schools and universities, but also because celebration of the delivery from the Gunpowder Plot was, by government order, an annual event, and hence occasioned such pieces. They also contain several points of contact with King James I’s A Premonition, prefixed to the second edition (1609) of his Apology for the Oath of Allegiance. In this epigram Milton presents the conspirators’ failed attempt from an ironic point of view: they wished that James would be blown up to the heavens just as Elijah was swept up in a whirlwind from the banks of Jordan (cf. 2 Kings 2:11; James I, A Premonition). Estelle Haan

“In Quintum Novembris” [On the Fifth of November]. Poem by Milton on the foiled Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Composed in 1626 and probably for the anniversary of Guy Fawkes Day (cf. lines

225 –26), it pertains to the tradition of the miniature Anglo-Latin gunpowder epic as exemplified by Francis Herring (Pietas Pontificia, 1606), Michael Wallace (In Serenissimi Regis Iacobi . . . Liberationem, 1606), Phineas Fletcher (Locustae, manuscript 1611, published 1627), and Thomas Campion (De Pulverea Coniuratione, c. 1613). Remarkable for its economy of expression (it is less than half the average length of other such epics) and antipapal tone, it shares with its predecessors such devices as Satan as originator of the plot, his journey to Rome, an account of a papal procession, his transformation into a Franciscan friar, God laughing from heaven upon the conspiracy, and the poem’s conclusion in thanksgiving and festive celebration. It may also draw upon contemporary gunpowder sermons and Jacobean masque iconography. Estelle Haan

Instrument of Government. A constitutional document. In December 1653 civilian politicians close to Oliver Cromwell brought about the dismissal of the Barebone’s Parliament. The constitutional void was rapidly filled by the Instrument of Government, which had already been prepared, as contemporaries believed, by John Lambert. It was accepted by the senior committee of the army, the Council of Officers, and Cromwell. It installed Cromwell as Lord Protector, investing him with powers analogous to those of earlier monarchs; it made provision for fresh elections; and it established a new Council of State. Thus the first Protectorate was founded. Henry Lawrence was to chair this council. Its secretariat, headed by John Thurloe, included Milton, again in the capacity of Latin secretary. Thomas N. Corns

Ireland. See Irish Rebellion. Irish Rebellion. Before the outbreak of rebellion in October 1641, Ireland had been relatively peaceful following Lord Mountjoy’s military success at the end of Elizabeth I’s reign. After the flight of the earls in 1607, when Irish leaders and their followers left for continental Europe, James I and his attorney general for Ireland, Sir John Davies, pursued a policy of plantation on confiscated lands. The ban on Scots’ immigration was removed in order to populate, it was hoped, the northern counties with both English and Scots settlers, thereby stabilizing the political situation. This policy, however, granted

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clear land titles to the planters while displacing both the native Irish and, often, the Old English, who were left to depend on the whims of the judiciary to maintain their land titles. Although no armed rebellion occurred for a few decades, land issues would become one of the contributing factors of the 1641 Irish Rebellion. In 1632 Charles I appointed Thomas Wentworth his Lord Deputy in Ireland. Wentworth very quickly came to be disliked by all elements of the population in Ireland. When he arrived to take up his post in 1633, he originally allied himself with the Old English, but continued policies of land confiscation raised anxieties among them. In addition, Wentworth’s enforcement of encroachment laws on crown lands, and his insistence that New English planters fulfill the obligations of their land grants, alienated them. Wentworth’s policy of “Thorough,” in which these measures were robustly implemented, did, however, firmly reinstate the crown’s rights in Ireland— creating a revenue surplus through an effective management of the Irish Parliament, along with the use of the prerogative Court of Castle Chamber, the farming of the customs, and the income from the Court of Wards. Events in Scotland and England in the late 1630s added to the political tensions Wentworth created. The attempts of Charles I and Archbishop William Laud to impose religious uniformity on the king’s Scots Presbyterian subjects led to the two Bishops’ Wars with Scotland. These prompted Wentworth to muster an Irish Catholic army for the king’s use against the Scots. At this time, also, Wentworth’s attempt to curtail any possible assistance that the Ulster Scots might provide their covenanting brethren in their efforts to resist the king’s heavy-handed ecclesiastical policies saw the institution of the hated “Black Oath” of loyalty. This provoked rioting in Ulster, which had already been somewhat economically destabilized by poor harvests and the quartering of the Irish Catholic army raised by the Lord Deputy. Yet, when the rebellion began in October 1641, contemporaries were shocked and surprised. Tales of Irish Catholics massacring Protestants were spread by refugees arriving in Chester, and these fueled calls for bloody vengeance. These stories were collected in official depositions from the Protestant refugees that poured into England and Scotland, and they found a wider public audience through works such as Sir John Temple’s Irish Rebellion. Adventurer schemes, which provided immediate funding from investors in anticipation of considerable future returns, were devised to fund

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a military reconquest of Ireland, and donations for the relief of Protestants were also collected— Milton himself made such a donation in June 1642. The adventurer schemes established the foundation of Oliver Cromwell’s redistribution of land after his successful campaign through 1649 –1650. This resulted in the Act of Settlement of 1652 with the end of armed resistance, which finally allowed the adventurers and Parliament to collect moneys put forward and owed on the security of Irish land. The Act of Settlement was, in large part, upheld upon the Restoration. From its onset, the Irish Rebellion was intimately entwined with the larger political struggle that would engulf Ireland, Scotland, and England in civil war. It foregrounded issues of political authority through parliamentary debates of whether the king or Parliament should be in charge of efforts to quell the uprising. These debates were furthered by rumors that the Irish rebels were acting with the king’s warrant. The suspicions surrounding the king’s response to the rebellion were also heightened with the establishment of the Catholic Confederacy at Kilkenny in 1642, as well as by the attempts of James Butler, Twelfth Earl and First Duke of Ormonde, to construct and maintain a royalist alliance to provide support for the king’s cause in England and Scotland. Ormonde successfully negotiated a cessation of arms in 1643, a second treaty in 1646, and the Articles of Peace in 1649. In addition, a vast number of publications were devoted, either wholly or in part, to covering events in Ireland and relating these events to domestic politics to attack both the “evil counsellors” of the king and the king himself. These publications are significant with regard to Milton. On 28 March 1649 Milton was “appointed to make some observations” on the situation in Ireland, and these were published on or before 16 May as Observations upon the Articles of Peace. Milton had no firsthand knowledge of Ireland and would have relied on popular publications and what he learned in his official role to the Council of State. He also played a part in the publication of Thomas Waring’s A Brief Narration of the Rebellion in Ireland in 1650. On 8 January 1650 Milton was ordered to “conferr with some printers or Stationers, concerning the speedy printing of this Booke, and give an accompt of what hee hath done therein to the Councell.” Jim Daems

Isaiah. Book of the Old Testament. In the view of recent biblical scholarship, this long and challenging

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book owes its complexity in part to composite authorship, the incorporation of other texts, and subsequent revision. However, until modern times it was usually straightforwardly perceived as the work of Isaiah, a major Hebrew prophet of the eighth century b.c. Its central concern is a two-part prophetic thesis: that the depravities of the Jews would cause the collapse of the kingdom of Judah and lead as a consequence to Babylonian exile; and that in the longer term a messianic redeemer would refound Jerusalem, a vision expressed in apocalyptic terms. The latter provided material of immense importance in the development of orthodox Christology, with its unequivocal identification of Jesus with the Messiah. Indeed, the gospel of Matthew echoes closely Isaiah 7:14 in the angel’s declaration to the Virgin Mary (Matt. 1:23). In De Doctrina Christiana Milton cites Isaiah frequently, drawing heavily on the prophetic sections of the text, though ranging widely over the rest. Isaiah’s larger perspective accords in several ways with Milton’s own. Arguably, its projection of current and imminent misery to be followed, at some considerable remove, by a joyous salvation is broadly homologous with the perspective Milton develops over the last two books of Paradise Lost. The notion of a godly remnant, threatened by a depraved and decadent society though itself spiritually untouched, is an element in Isaiah, though developed further in subsequent prophetic books. It informs the historical narrative of books 11 and 12. See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

Islam. Although Arabic was taught in his day at Cambridge University and an English version of the Qur’a¯n appeared in 1649 (the Alcoran), Milton’s writings suggest that he was not greatly interested in Arabic, Islam, or Muslim culture. Nevertheless, when “Turks”—a term most commonly used in seventeenth-century England to refer to Muslims regardless of their national origin—appear in his English prose, Milton shows himself familiarly knowledgeable. Based on the twenty-seven instances of the words “Sultan,” “Mahomet,” and cognates of “Turk” that occur in Milton’s English prose, some inferences can be drawn. The English Alcoran may have influenced his thinking since eleven of these instances appear in works published that year, including two from a total of three mentions of Muhammad—both in Eikonoklastes, which also contains five references to cognates of “Turk.” These, as well as one reference in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates

and three in Observations upon the Articles of Peace, polemically associate King Charles I with despotic tyranny. Milton did not join other anti-Catholic and antiprelatical writers in attacking religious foes with the taint of Islam: except perhaps in the remaining reference to the Prophet, in The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings, which expresses outrage at those guilty of “levelling or rather undervaluing Christ beneath Mahomet.” As for the Qur’a¯n, Milton refers to it only once, in Areopagitica, observing how “the Turk upholds his Alchoran, by the prohibition of printing,” a further indication that he viewed Islam less as a religion than a political strategy for asserting despotic control. Gerald Maclean

Isocrates (436 –338 B.C.). Athenian orator and educator. He championed pan-Hellenic unity in the face of foreign invasion and situated his own humanist educational theories between Plato’s dialectic and the Sophists’ relativism. Milton calls him “that old man eloquent” in “Sonnet X” and modeled (at some level) Areopagitica on Isocrates’s Areopagiticus. His orations To Demonicus, To Nicocles, and Nicocles— exhortations to virtue in the speculum principis tradition—were frequently reprinted during the Renaissance, thus complicating any simple identification of his writings with republican or libertarian causes. Nevertheless, Areopagiticus was linked to republican ideals for preferring the rule of the “best and wisest” over tyrants and has been described as libertarian for extolling the Areopagus court as an educational, rather than legislative or punitive, institution for promoting moral reform. Gregory Kneidel

Israel. Referring primarily to the Israelite peoples rather than a geographical place, Israel was the chosen nation separated for God (Ps. 33:12) and “a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation” (Exod. 19:6). God’s covenant with Abraham and his seed—a blessing to the whole earth (Gen. 11:31–12:7 ff.)— confirmed Israel’s election. The Hebrews’ liberation from Egyptian slavery, leading to the renewal of the covenant at Sinai and the promise of a national home (Exod. 3:6 –10 ff.), further demonstrated their peculiar status. Like other European nations of the early modern era, England translated a belief in election into its own national mythology, designating England as a “new Israel,” home of God’s “chosen and peculier

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people” ( John Lyly, in The Complete Works of John Lyly, 1902). The biblical Israel supplied the Reformation Protestants, who declared their nationhood and election at once, with the forms and foundations for nationhood characterized by the unity of people, language, religion, territory, and government (Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood, 1997). During the tumultuous period of the English civil wars, Hebrew nationalism prevailed in the concepts of the chosen people, the covenant, and messianism. Oliver Cromwell himself maintained that the English were entering an age unparalleled since the days of Israel. Milton’s fascination with the cultural and political history of Israel is apparent throughout his career. He has England in mind in his translations of Psalms 80, 81, and 87, which are accounts of the Hebrew people’s chosen though fraught relationship with their God (see “Psalms lxxx–lxxxviii”). The highest hope for his own nation is evidenced in Milton’s identification of England’s election in Of Reformation, The Reason of ChurchGovernment, and Areopagitica, produced at a time of unprecedented optimism about national potential. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce cites Hebrew laws and customs and particularly the Mosaic concept of divorce (Deut. 24) in its attack on canon law. Eikonoklastes, however, marks a pivotal representation of the England-as-Israel commonplace in the aftermath of the regicide: the elect people revert back to monarchy, rejecting the Bible’s own preference for judges and prophets. Milton hereafter restricts the term “elect” for a fit audience as his faith is shaken by what he later describes as the backsliding of the English like “the Jews . . . to Egypt” (Readie and Easie Way). Elizabeth Sauer

Italian (language). London was home to a small community of expatriate Italian Protestants, whose church, reopened in 1609, was in Cheapside, close to Milton’s childhood home. It is not certain when Milton acquired his evident high competence in the language, but he probably began to learn it under a private tutor before entering St. Paul’s School. The school did not teach modern languages, nor were they a feature of the syllabus of Cambridge University, although learning Italian, like French, had some popularity as an extracurricular activity. Milton wrote five sonnets and a canzone in accomplished Italian before visiting Italy in 1638 –1639. Once there, he moved smoothly through Italian intellectual circles, which suggests that he expe-

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rienced no language problems. See “Sonnet II,” “Sonnet III,” “Sonnet IV,” “Sonnet V,” “Sonnet VI,” and “Canzone.” Thomas N. Corns

Italian academies. Intellectual institutions distinct from universities, museums, and libraries, corresponding roughly to current-day literary societies. They began appearing in the fifteenth century and flourished in the seventeenth; between 1500 and 1729 there were around five hundred. Each met regularly and had its own constitution, officers, impresa, and motto; in addition, every member usually was known by a pseudonym. While in Florence in 1638 Milton met the founder of the Apatisti Academy, Agostino Coltellini, and Jacobo Gaddi, founder of the Svogliati Academy, and befriended Carlo Dati, an influential member of many Florentine academies. Milton corresponded with Dati after returning to England. Milton also met Benedetto Buonmattei, a member of both the Apatisti and the Svogliati, and requested that Buonmattei add a pronunciation guide for foreigners to his grammar of the Tuscan dialect (Della Lingua Toscana). On 6/16 September Milton read a Latin poem at a meeting of the Svogliati. Recently discovered evidence by Estelle Haan points almost certainly to Milton’s participation in the Apatisti in 1638. After traveling to Siena, Rome, and Naples, Milton returned to Florence in 1639, again attending meetings of the Svogliati on 7/17, 14/24, and 21/31 March. There is no direct evidence that Milton visited academies while in Rome and Naples, but Haan suggests that he had connections to the Fantastici Academy in Rome, that he may have heard singer and musician Leonora Baroni perform at the Umoristi Academy, and that he may have attended the Oziosi Academy in Naples through his acquaintance with Giovanni Battista Manso, who founded it. Milton praises the academies in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda but decries a relative lack of “philosophic freedom” in Italy in Areopagitica. Evidence of the effect of the academies on Milton has been found in some of his later works, including Paradise Lost. See Haan (1998).

Valerie A. Cullen, Jonathan F. S. Post

Italy. Milton traveled to the country during 1638 – 1639. He revered it because of its role in reviving humanist learning, its contemporary preeminence

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in art and science, and for providing the home of the classical republicanism revived by Niccolò Machiavelli. He first explains his great love for Italy in a letter to Benedetto Buonmattei, a brilliant Florentine linguist he met at the Svogliati Academy on his continental tour. Remarking that Buonmattei’s cultivation of vigorous and flourishing language is the key to civic virtue, Milton expresses his deep regard for the Italian countryside, the Florentine and Latin tongues, and the “feasts” provided by Dante and Petrarch. These things make him “such a lover of your Nation that no other, I think, is a greater.” The preface to his final poem, Samson Agonistes, again upholds Italian poetry as a model, a significant precedent at a time when English culture was avidly imitating the French drama of Molière, Corneille, and Racine. Never a lover of French culture, both the undergraduate and postgraduate Milton pursued studies in which the Italians remained masters—music, mathematics, and astronomy. As a result, he made a point of visiting Galileo near Florence, and while in Rome he composed poems praising the superior musicianship of Leonora Baroni. Other stops included Genoa, Leghorn (Livorno), Pisa, Siena, Naples, Bologna, Ferrara, and Venice, where he

carried his letters of introduction from the former English ambassador, Sir Henry Wooton, an early admirer of Milton’s Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle. Along with his highly laudatory Latin poem to Torquato Tasso’s patron, Giovanni Battista Manso (“Mansus”), Milton published many commendatory letters to and from other Italians in his first volume of verse. Catherine Gimelli Martin

Ithuriel. A noncanonical angel. He has been traced to sixteenth-century kabbalistic texts and the putatively ancient Key of Solomon. In Paradise Lost Ithuriel (Hebrew for “discovery of God”) is one of the guardians of paradise. With Zephon he is sent by Gabriel to capture Satan (4.800 –20). The scene inspired some of Milton’s best illustrators, notably Henry Fuseli and John Martin; Fuseli illustrated it seven times (see illustrations of Milton’s work). “Ithuriel’s spear” became a metaphor for truth in later poetry and was also appropriated as the name of a wildflower. Beverley Sherry

J Jago, Richard (1715 –1781). Clergyman and author of the topographical poem “Edge Hill.” He attempted to convert Paradise Lost from epic to oratorio simply by selecting, in his own words, those lines “which have the more immediate reference to the principal story, and omitting what was more remote, and digressive.” The result, “Adam, or the Fatal Disobedience. Compiled from the Paradise Lost of Milton and Adapted to Music,” was published in his Poems, Moral and Descriptive (1784). His memo “To the Composer” indicates awareness that a great deal of the material chosen is descriptive, “like still life,” rather than dramatic or “interlocutory.” The focus, as the title suggests, is on the human rather than the cosmic story. Unlike the libretto prepared by Benjamin Stillingfleet, Jago’s attempt at oratorio was never set to music. Kay Gilliland Stevenson

James. Book of the New Testament. It is essentially an exposition of Judeo-Christian morality, directed generally to early Christians (if that is what is intended by “the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad,” 1:2). Its canonicity was accepted in the early patristic tradition, and it was traditionally attributed to James, “the Lord’s brother” (thus designated in Mark 6:3 and elsewhere). It rehearses the themes and values of the Sermon on the Mount. In terms of Milton’s thinking about Christian ethics, the most significant notion in the epistle is its assertion of the value of temptation, in that it presents the true believer with a test of faith from which he or she may emerge with merit. See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

James I (1566 –1625). King of England and Ireland (as James I); king of Scotland (as James VI). He was the only son of Mary, Queen of Scots, and

her second husband, Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley. He acceded to the Scottish throne in 1567 on his mother’s abdication and gradually assumed personal rule through his teenage years. He married Anne of Denmark in 1589. Of their children, Henry died in 1612, Princess Elizabeth married the Elector Palatine, and Charles succeeded to his father’s thrones in 1625 as Charles I. A troubled reign in Scotland left him with profound doubts about the usefulness of parliaments and the value and ambitions of Presbyterianism. In 1603, on the death of Elizabeth I of England, he acceded to the English throne, bringing with him a considerable Scottish retinue. He also brought a greater degree of toleration toward both Puritans and Catholics, who were less rigorously pursued than during Elizabeth’s reign. His response to the Gunpowder Plot was limited to its perpetrators and unleashed no general persecution of their coreligionists. An intelligent and speculative thinker and a competent minor poet and political writer, he extended his patronage particularly to the stage. The principal theatrical company of the day, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, for whom William Shakespeare wrote exclusively, became the King’s Men, and he encouraged other members of the royal family to extend their protection to the other companies of the city. Ben Jonson became his principal masque writer and poet laureate, and he advanced John Donne to the deanship of St. Paul’s Cathedral. His attitude to the Church of England was generally irenic. He certainly discouraged any further reformation of the church along Puritan lines, but he also restrained the spread of Arminianism among leading clergy. He instituted and promoted a new translation of the Bible, which appeared in 1611 as the Authorized Version; its most popular predecessor, the Geneva Bible, seemed to him, with reason, tendentiously oppositional in some of its annotation. Probably his greatest achievement was to keep England out of the Thirty Years War, a decision 189

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that certainly alienated the more zealous of his Protestant subjects. Milton’s poems on the Gunpowder Plot celebrate James as a peace-bringer (see “In Proditionem Bombardicam,” “In Eandem,” and “In Quintum Novembris”). James’s pursuit of the Spanish Match proved damagingly unpopular with English Protestants, who celebrated its failure. See ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

James II (1633 –1701). King of England and Ireland (as James II); king of Scotland (as James VII). Son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria and younger brother of Charles II, he was created Duke of York in 1638. At the fall of Oxford toward the end of the First Civil War, he was in the custody of the Long Parliament but escaped to join the exiled courts of continental Europe. At the Restoration he held the office of Lord High Admiral, which in his case was more than a nominal title, and he was present in some battles of the second and third AngloDutch Wars. His brother’s inability to produce a legitimate heir meant that he was next in line to the throne. However, by the late 1660s (and perhaps earlier) he had converted to Roman Catholicism, and by 1672 he had stopped taking communion in the Church of England. These developments probably stimulated Charles II’s abortive attempts, through his Declaration of Indulgence, to ease the legal constraints on Catholics (and at the same time nonconformist dissenters), which in turn set the context for Milton’s last major prose work, his tolerationist (but anti-Catholic) Of True Religion. Pressure mounted for James’s claims to the throne to be set aside. Milton’s final prose work, A Declaration, or Letters Patents, points to the Polish model of succession, which if adopted would have allowed for such a measure. James succeeded to the throne on his brother’s death in 1685, though he was displaced by William of Orange and Mary II in the Williamite Revolution of 1688. After the failure of his campaign in Ireland to beat the Orangists in the land of his coreligionists, he lived out a pious life in continental exile. See ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

James VI. King of Scotland. See James I. James VII. King of Scotland. See James II.

Jane, Joseph (d. 1658). Politician and pamphleteer. A member of the Cornish gentry, he sat for Liskeard in the Long Parliament. He withdrew to join Charles I’s alternative Parliament in Oxford and was expelled from the Long Parliament as a consequence. Intermittently in arms for the king, he went into continental exile in the late 1640s, where he died in 1658. His solitary publication was Eikon Aklastos [The Image Unbroken], a point-by-point refutation of Milton’s Eikonoklastes published in 1651, which seems to have had little effect, though Charles II in exile admired it. Thomas N. Corns

Jefferson, Thomas (1743 –1826). Third president of the United States (1801–1809). He is perhaps best remembered as the architect of the Declaration of Independence, as the author of the landmark “Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom” (1777), and as the founder of the University of Virginia near the site of his Monticello estate in Charlottesville (1819). Jefferson cited Milton more frequently than any other poet in the Literary Commonplace Book that he composed between the ages of fifteen and thirty. According to George Sensabaugh (1964), some forty-eight excerpts of Milton’s works (primarily from Samson Agonistes and Paradise Lost) appear in Jefferson’s citations, and he drew heavily on Milton’s Of Reformation and The Reason of Church-Government for the “Notes on Episcopacy” that became the basis of his “Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom.” Carol Barton

Jenkins, Sir Leoline (1625 –1685). Lawyer and diplomat. His promising career at Jesus College, Oxford, was interrupted by the First Civil War. He was briefly in arms for the king before retiring to work as a tutor in his native Wales. His career resumed at the Restoration, when he turned to the civil law (Doctor of Civil Law 1661). He was elected to a fellowship at his college and in 1673 became its master. He held senior office as a civil lawyer and became a member of the Privy Council of Charles II, serving in a prominent capacity on diplomatic missions. At least twice he was involved in Milton’s posthumous affairs. In December 1674, as the judge of the Prerogative Court, he ruled on the status of Milton’s nuncupative will, which was being challenged by Milton’s daughters and was defended by Milton’s brother Christopher Milton. The outcome of his

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deliberations is currently undocumented. It is possible that he declared the will invalid, but there is no record of such a decision. In 1676, when Jenkins was serving as Charles II’s plenipotentiary at the peace negotiations at Nijmegen, Samuel Pepys recommended to him that he take as his secretary Daniel Skinner, who at that time was attempting to have the manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana and Milton’s Letters of State published. Sir Joseph Williamson, displeased by what he perceived as Skinner’s uncooperativeness in surrendering manuscripts, brought pressure to bear on him by persuading Jenkins to withdraw any offer of employment. See Campbell et al. (2007), ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

jeremiad. Lament and prophecy—linked with biblical prophets— over the backsliding of a chosen nation, holding up an idealized past and a debased and inglorious present and predicting future curse or blessing based on present action. Most often associated with Puritans in the United States, in England in 1658 –1660 jeremiads over the fall of the nation from the Good Old Cause poured from the presses, evincing a new—and temporary— coalition of sectarians, Commonwealthsmen, and radical elements of the army united in opposition to the Protectorate. Many of these tracts show the formal elements and themes of the jeremiad and may have influenced Milton, at least in a general sense, in the prophetic stance and mode of The Readie and Easie Way. Laura L. Knoppers

Jeremiah. Book of the Old Testament. It was attributed in the Jewish tradition, unchallenged by Milton’s age, to Jeremiah, a prophet and religious leader in Judah in the seventh century b.c. The text rehearses some of the themes found in Isaiah. Jeremiah foretells the Babylonian exile though promises, and at some perhaps remote point in the future, a messianic restoration, represented in this book as a new covenant (chapter 13). In De Doctrina Christiana Milton cites and engages with that chapter twenty-eight times, making it one of the most important Old Testament passages in his systematic theology. In Jeremiah, he found, too, the first rehearsal of an argument to which he would return in Paradise Lost, namely, the recognition that the godly suffer and the wicked often prosper. In the book of Jeremiah there develops a distinctive idiom in which lamentation acquires a mina-

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tory edge as the prophet warns his compatriots of the fate that their conduct would bring. Appropriations of that idiom have been identified in seventeenth-century writing in the Anglophone colonies of North America and in republican writings in England during the period 1658 –1660, when some lament the decline and imminent collapse of a covenant nation. Indeed, the term jeremiad was much later developed to categorize such writing. It has been convincingly argued that Milton’s Readie and Easie Way should be recognized as part of this tradition, an argument substantiated in part by Milton’s own conspicuous borrowing of Jeremiah in its peroration (see Jer. 22:29). Thomas N. Corns

Jeremiah. Old Testament prophet who foretold the capture of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587. He was distinguished by his reluctance to forsake his private concerns to do God’s bidding and by the vehemence of his rhetoric, a rhetoric often associated with estrangement. Milton’s interest in Jeremiah manifests itself in his frequent references to the prophet in De Doctrina Christiana (1658 –1660), in his evocation of Jeremiah’s defense of reluctant but zealous participation in matters of spiritual importance in The Reason of Church-Government (1642), and in his echoing of Jeremiah’s “witnessing” (lamentation) over apostasy and decay in The Readie and Easie Way (1660). See Bercovitch (1978), Holstun (1987), Knoppers (1990).

James Egan

Jerome (c. 347– 420). Church father and translator of the Bible into Latin (the Vulgate). A facility with Hebrew and Greek and a miraculous conversion— briefly alluded to in Areopagitica—prepared him for his lifework of translating the Bible. Milton called Jerome “the learned’st of the Fathers” (The Reason of Church-Government). Although the Vulgate became Jerome’s chief claim to erudition, he also wrote prolific scriptural commentaries. Among the four traditional doctors—Ambrose, Pope Gregory I, Augustine, and Jerome—Milton cites only Augustine more frequently than Jerome. Usually Milton paraphrases Jerome or a secondary source discussing Jerome, but occasionally he quotes Jerome directly (for example, in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce). Craig T. Fehrman

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Jesuits. Members of the Society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius Loyola. The society received papal approval in 1540. An important cadre during the Counter-Reformation, it established a number of “colleges” or seminaries in Rome, among them the English College, which remained under Jesuit supervision at the time of Milton’s visit to Italy in 1638 –1639. Its “Pilgrim Book” records that Milton dined there on 20/30 October 1638. Some mutual antipathy between Milton and the English Jesuits seems to have arisen, either then or shortly afterward. Milton makes numerous references to Jesuits, especially in his antiprelatical tracts, which are, for the most part, hostile, though they often acknowledge the seductive intellectual subtlety of Jesuit writing. See Campbell and Corns (2008).

Thomas N. Corns

Jewin Street. A street in the northwest area of London in Milton’s time, now covered by the Barbican development. Milton lived here for a short while in 1661 before moving to his final address in Bunhill Row. Thomas N. Corns

Jews. The Reformation and Puritanism revived an interest in ancient and contemporary Jewry and in reading contemporary history through the biblical narratives and debates about present-day Jews. The English had banished the Jews from their country on 18 July 1290 by an act of Edward I. Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492, and five years later, the king of Portugal took similar measures. The few Jews with whom the early modern English might have had contact were from the Sephardic background ( Jews of Spain, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East). These Jews located themselves in Amsterdam, where the community absorbed conversos fleeing the ongoing Inquisition. By the mid-1600s Sephardic Jews who made up the Marrano community ( Jews secretly practicing Judaism while pretending to be devout Catholics) also settled in London. Along with Sweden, England became among the most dramatic sites of Protestant interest in Jews and Judaism, though the daily presence of Jews was not as much a reality for the English as it was for people on the Continent. The histories of Jews and Christians intersected in the seventeenth century through the convergence of messianism and millenarianism. In England the

parliamentary pulpit was used during the 1640s to declare a recognizable congregational New Jerusalem, the gathering of the lost tribes of Israel and conversion of the Jews being among the signs of millennial promise. Using the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation to interpret their present in terms of Israel’s future, Puritans and dissenters associated their suffering with that of Jews, while using their writings to replicate the early church in its last days. Following the collapse of Oliver Cromwell’s Western Design against Spanish colonies in the West Indies and his entry into war with Spain, the issue about Jewish toleration became an important part of his national vision, leading to the December 1655 Whitehall Conference on whether to readmit Jews to England. The supporters of readmission sought to establish a historical continuity with the ancient Hebrews but also to convert contemporary Jews. The proposed readmission emerged, according to Don M. Wolfe, as “the most searching tolerationist dilemma” of the time and was connected with the political and economic ambitions inherent in the colonization of North America and trade in the Turkish empire (in Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 1961). Despite the potential economic advantages of readmitting Jews, which were defended even by Menasseh ben Israel—the Amsterdam rabbi and Sephardic Jew whom John Dury introduced to the English—widespread opposition and anti-Semitism eventually led to the rejection of the proposal. Milton equated Jews with infidels, using the name as a term of derision in Tetrachordon and The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings. At best, they served as forerunners of the Christians to whom elect status is transferred. Milton was virtually silent on the subject of readmission, his ambivalence about the Jews captured in his remark “while we detest Judaism, we know our selves commanded by St. Paul, Rom. 11. to respect the Jews, and by all means to endeavor thir conversion” (Observations upon the Articles of Peace). References to Jewish conversion also appear in De Doctrina Christiana and Paradise Regained (3.433 –35). Otherwise, Milton’s fascination with Judaism focuses on ancient Jews, including the prophets Moses and Isaiah, with whose divine calling he associates his own. His knowledge of Hebrew was informed by the writings of Edward Pococke, John Lightfoot, John Selden, and Joseph Mede. Milton’s familiarity with the Hebrew Bible is evidenced throughout his works, from his defense of the Mosaic concept of divorce (Deut. 24) against canon law in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, to his use

Joel

of Genesis and typology in Paradise Lost, to his reworking of Judges in Samson Agonistes. He frequently analogizes England as Israel, the English having become the newly elected. Elect status is transferred from the Hebraic tradition and reserved for the heart-circumscribed Christians (Gal. 5:6 and De Doctrina Christiana). Elizabeth Sauer

Joannis Miltonii Angli, Epistolarum Familiarum Liber Unus. See Epistolarum Familiarum Liber Unus. Joannis Miltonii Angli Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio . . . . See Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio. Joannis Miltonii Angli Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda . . . . See Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda. Joannis Miltonii Pro Se Defensio. See Pro Se Defensio. Job. Book of the Old Testament. It portrays an upright man who suffers a series of calamities that ensue when God permits Satan to test Job’s faith and righteousness. A series of dialogues between Job and the friends who comfort him explores themes of wisdom, justice, creation, and providence in the face of extreme suffering. God speaks to Job from a whirlwind to affirm his purposeful creation and then restores Job to prosperity. Milton’s response to Job can be viewed in two categories: genre and character. In The Reason of Church-Government, Milton surveys the genres: the epics of Homer, Virgil, and Torquato Tasso are long or “diffuse,” while the Book of Job is a “brief model.” As Barbara Lewalski demonstrates, Milton inherits a tradition, extending from patristic to Reformation commentaries, that regards Job as a “brief ” epic. The central conflict between a hero ( Job) and an adversary (Satan) has epic potential. As a character, Job is a combatant in the constant spiritual warfare that comprises earthly life. Job fights alongside Patience in Prudentius’s allegorical Psychomachia or “Spiritual Combat” (fourth century) and illustrates an exemplary soldier in Desiderius Erasmus’s Handbook of the Militant Christian (1503). As Lewalski notes, seventeenthcentury poetic paraphrases, such as Francis Quar-

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les’s Job Militant (1644), depict Job as a spiritual combatant. See Lewalski (1966).

David Gay

Job. Character in the Old Testament Book of Job. In Milton’s words the “patientist of men,” he was also the wealthiest of men, until the Accuser (the literal meaning of the Hebrew ha-satan) barters with Yahweh, causing Job to lose everything. Throughout his misery, Job is oblivious to this supernatural wager. Moreover, three of his unctuous friends criticize him and debate the nature of Yahweh, justice, and sin. When Yahweh finally speaks, it is through caustic rhetorical questions; he accuses Job of speaking “without knowledge” (38:2) but later praises him for speaking “the thing that is right” (42:7). Matching these conflicting perceptions are Job’s conflicting roles. In the prose introduction he is righteous and philanthropic; in the poetical debates, bitter and querulous. That Job is an amorphous character is the only constant, and thus interpretations vary across time: some have seen Job as allegorical, some— drawing from references in Ezekiel 14:14 and James 5:11—as historical. Milton, like most seventeenth-century readers, considered the Book of Job a literal account. His contemporaries considered it one of the earliest literary works and, as always, emphasized its typology, viewing Job as an early type of Christ. Job was considered an almost unequivocally positive character; while the argument to this book in the Geneva Bible admits he “mainteinth a good cause, but handeleth it evil,” the glosses impute Job’s wife and friends. With this virtuous perception, Job was an important allusion in both royalist and parliamentarian polemics and a popular subject for paraphrasing biblical stories into poetic forms. But beyond this cultural significance, Job was surely a personally resonant character for Milton. There are obvious analogues between Job’s friends linking his painful sores to his supposed sin and Restoration sermons linking Milton’s blindness to his supposed sin. See Hill (1993).

Craig T. Fehrman

Joel. Book of the Old Testament. One of the “minor prophets,” it shares much common ground with the other prophetic books of the Old Testament; however, for the Christian tradition it has a special pertinence because the remote reconciliation it

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proposes is to take the form of an outpouring of the Spirit: “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions” (2:28). The passage was widely interpreted as prophetic of the Pentecostal gift of the Holy Spirit. Milton finds the text useful in De Doctrina Christiana for distinguishing the interior and superior nature of the covenant on offer to Christians, above the covenant of Old Testament times. See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

John. Book of the New Testament. Since early patristic days, this fourth gospel was accepted as the work of the apostle John, though later scholarship has regarded direct apostolic authorship as unlikely. It differs from the other gospels in its tendency toward a reflective abstraction and in its omission of sections of the narrative of the life of Jesus. It includes no parables and no exorcisms. But its development of theological propositions required Milton to place it at the heart of his systematic theology. In De Doctrina Christiana he cites it 641 times, slightly more than the gospel of Matthew and much more than those of Mark and Luke. He is especially drawn to the verse so prominently deployed by modern evangelical Christians: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (3:16). Milton cites it twelve times. The opening verse, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (1:1), poses interesting challenges to Milton as he works to define his heterodox Christology (see God). It can be read to mean that the Son, equated with the Word, is perpetual but not eternal, in that he was in the beginning begotten. See Bauman (1989), ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

1 John. Book of the New Testament. This first epistle, attributed by ancient tradition to John, the apostle and author of the fourth gospel, is addressed to no particular church or individual. It rehearses many of the themes of John’s gospel. Though mostly concerned with exhortations to brotherly love of a vague sort, it contains three verses on which rests much of the orthodox view of the Trinity (5:6 – 8). The central section constitutes the so-called Johannine comma, that is, “phrase” or “clause.” It is to

be found in Latin manuscripts from about a.d. 800 and thence found its way into the official Latin text of the Bible. However, it occurs in no Greek manuscript before the twelfth century and has been omitted from scholarly translations of modern times. Presumably, it originated in an attempted clarification of a rather opaque passage. As Milton developed in De Doctrina Christiana his own heterodox views of the Trinity, he carefully explained the noncanonical status of the clause on which so much had been made to depend in the predominant interpretation of the doctrine. He explains that the verse is spurious and that it does not appear in the Syriac, Arabic, and Ethiopic versions, nor in the Greek Bible. He later remarks on how essential the text is for the orthodox concept of the Trinity: “the whole doctrine of the trinity seems to have been wrested primarily from this one sentence, which is almost the only foundation for it.” See Campbell et al. (2007), ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

2 John. Book of the New Testament. This second epistle attributed to the apostle John is a very short text, a mere thirteen verses, addressed, enigmatically, to “the elect lady and her children” (v. 1). Milton cites it ten times in De Doctrina Christiana over a range of topics, though never with any close discussion. See Bauman (1989), ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

3 John. Book of the New Testament. This third epistle attributed to John, a mere fourteen verses addressed to the “well-beloved Gaius,” consists largely of moral exhortation and the censure of one Diotrephes (unidentified). Milton cites it in De Doctrina Christiana on various topics, mostly to do with church discipline, though without comment. See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

John [ Jan] III Sobieski (1629 –1696). Soldier and king of Poland. He achieved distinction in 1671 as “Crown General” against Tatar and Cossack incursions into Poland, and in 1673 he led to victory the Polish armies sent to halt and reverse a major Ottoman invasion. Poland had a complex constitution in which a house of electors chose the king from within a ruling elite (to which Sobieski belonged).

Jones, Inigo

After the throne fell vacant on the death of Michael I, the house of electors was assembled, and in May 1674 it elected him John [ Jan] III. His greatest achievement, the victory at the Battle of Vienna (1683), finally halted Ottoman attempts to open Europe through its southeastern flank. The Polish constitution had some interest for English opponents of the government of Charles II in the 1670s because it demonstrated an alternative to the strict application of the principle of heredity, which required that the Catholic James, Duke of York (the future James II) be next in line for the English throne. Milton’s last in vita publication, A Declaration, or Letters Patents, published in July 1674, relates to this line of attack, a precursor to the fully developed Exclusion Crisis, which rocked the regime in the later 1670s and early 1680s. Thomas N. Corns

John of Leiden [ Jan Beuckelszoon] (c. 1509 – 1536). Preacher and revolutionary. He was born near Münster, but his mother raised him in the Low Countries. As a young man with few prospects, he traveled through western Europe and even to England before marrying a prosperous widow and settling in Leiden to operate a tavern. He came under the influence of the Anabaptist Jan Matthias and abandoned his adopted town to return to Münster, where he hoped to witness the Apocalypse. John found the chaos there ripe for charismatic leadership and sent for his mentor. Taking control of the triumphant Anabaptist cause in the city, Matthias dismantled trappings of religious order, burned the town’s books, and abolished private property. On Easter Sunday 1534, Matthias sallied out of Münster to fight a besieging army and was defeated, leaving John of Leiden in control of the city’s remaining Anabaptist rebels. He ruled Münster for another year, harnessing the Anabaptists’ millenarian visions (including his own of triumphing by the following Easter) to buttress his authority. Further rejecting established religious practices, he annulled marriages and instituted polygamy, personally marrying sixteen women. As “King of Münster,” he terrorized detractors and violently suppressed a rebellion against his authority. His failure to achieve victory by Easter 1535 caused many of his doubting followers to desert. The prince-bishop’s army conquered Münster in June 1535 and captured John of Leiden alive. He suffered a gruesome execution in January 1536. His remains were left to rot in a cage hanging from the Münster cathedral.

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The misrule of which he was apparently the lord fascinated western Europe for more than a century. What was believed is well represented in an anonymous tract, A Short History of the Anabaptists of High and Low Germany, first published in London in 1642 and reprinted at least twice thereafter. It is a narrative of a world turned upside down for the benefit of “the poorest and idlest sort.” “John of Leiden” was used widely as an epithet or a point of comparison for the more threatening religious radicals of the 1640s and 1650s, and Milton, as apologist for the republic, occasionally had to rebut the term. Andrew Fleck

Johnson, Samuel (1709 –1784). English poet, lexicographer, popular essayist, editor, and literary critic, generally known as Dr. Johnson. Born in Lichfield, he made most of his famous remarks on Milton in six essays from his periodical the Rambler (1750 –1752) and his “Life of Milton” in Lives of the English Poets (1779 –1781). See critical tradition in Milton studies. William W. Walker

Jonah. Book of the Old Testament. Although it is counted among the twelve books of the “minor prophets,” it differs formally in that it is the narrative of the life and work of Jonah, rather than primarily Jonah’s own minatory lament, although the prophecies he is reported as making align broadly with those of the other prophetic books. Jonah, however, is an unusual prophet, in that he does not always obey God’s command; he is described experiencing a fantastic adventure (swallowed and then vomited forth by a mighty fish); and his major prophecy, delivered as instructed, does not come true. He prophesies the destruction of Nineveh, the Assyrian capital; the people repent, God changes his mind, and Jonah is described as responding angrily (chapters 3 and 4). For Milton in De Doctrina Christiana the incident serves to illuminate the provisional nature of divine promises and prophecies and to set a limitation on reasonable zeal (a limit that Jonah’s pique is judged to have exceeded). See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

Jones, Inigo (1573 –1652). English architect, artist, and stage designer. He was born in London, the son of a cloth worker; nothing is known of his early

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life. In 1603 he is listed as a “picturemaker” in the Earl of Rutland’s accounts, and in 1605 he was employed by Queen Anne to design sets and costumes for her Twelfth Night Masque of Blackness (text by Ben Jonson). He had by this time visited Italy and perhaps seen masques and other spectacles at the Florentine court, on which he drew throughout his career. He had also apparently accredited himself as an architect. He was made Prince Henry’s surveyor in 1611 and, after again visiting Italy in the Earl of Arundel’s service in 1613 –1614, became surveyor of the King’s Works in 1615. In ever more favor under James I and Charles I, he undertook numerous projects throughout their reigns, designing increasingly elaborate court masques until 1640, and working with various poets after quarreling with Jonson in 1631 over creative precedence. His spectacular device of a temple rising from the ground in Britannia Triumphans (1638) may be recalled in Milton’s description of the rise of PandAemonium in Paradise Lost book 1. He introduced perspective sets, cloud machinery, and other novel stagings into England and was the first English theorist and practitioner of an Italianate and classically inspired architecture derived from Vitruvius and, especially, Andrea Palladio. Among his significant buildings were the Queen’s House at Greenwich, the rebuilt Banqueting House at Whitehall, the chapel at St. James’s Palace, the square and church in Covent Garden, and the renovated exterior of St. Paul’s Cathedral, including a Corinthian portico at the west door. From 1638 he was engaged in designs for the massive demolition and reconstruction of Whitehall Palace. His commitment to classical architecture was so thoroughgoing that he identified Stonehenge as a Roman temple. During the First Civil War he was fined and his property was confiscated, but it was restored in 1646. He lived afterwards in retirement. See also masque. Tom Bishop

Jones [née Boyle], Katherine, Viscountess Ranelagh (1615 –1691). Noblewoman. She was the fifth daughter and seventh child of Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork. In 1630 she married Arthur Jones, later Second Viscount Ranelagh. During the 1640s and 1650s she lived in London. She was a member of the circle of Samuel Hartlib and a friend of Milton (and of several of Milton’s closer friends). Milton for a while educated her only son, Richard Jones. Thomas N. Corns

Jones, Michael (d. 1649). Son of the bishop of Killaloe. He was educated at the Inns of Court. His Anglican upbringing prompted him to return to Ireland, upon the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, to serve in Charles I’s army. However, after the negotiations for the cessation of arms in 1643, during which Jones served as a representative of Irish Protestants at Oxford, he lost his faith in the king for his willingness to negotiate with the Catholic Confederacy of Kilkenny. Now believing that Parliament would best preserve the Protestant interest in Ireland, Jones declined to bring his army to England to serve with the king’s forces. Instead, he went over to Parliament and saw action in England, becoming governor of Chester in 1646. Shortly thereafter, and probably because of his local knowledge, Jones was ordered to return with his army to Ireland, where he was appointed governor of Dublin in 1647. An excellent cavalry commander, Jones was victorious in two key encounters: the Battle of Dungan’s Hill in August 1647 and his crushing defeat of the forces of James Butler, Twelfth Earl and First Duke of Ormonde, at Rathmines on 2 August 1649. Five months before this battle Jones had rejected Ormonde’s appeal to join forces with the royalists, a decision Milton praised in Observations upon the Articles of Peace as demonstrating the “discretion and true worth of that Gentleman.” The victory at Rathmines shored up the situation for Oliver Cromwell’s landing later that month. Jones fought alongside Cromwell at Wexford and Waterford before dying of fever. Jim Daems

Jones, Richard, Earl of Ranelagh (1641–1712). Politician. He was the son of Arthur Jones, Second Viscount Ranelagh, and Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh, a friend of Milton’s. Richard was tutored for a time by Milton himself and thereafter by Milton’s friend and correspondent Henry Oldenburg, who supervised Jones’s brief time at Oxford and who accompanied him on travels through continental Europe. Milton exchanged letters with Jones, four of which, from 1656 to 1659, are included in his Epistolae Familiares [Familiar Letters]; by the time of the publication of Epistolarum Familiarum Liber Unus [Book I of the Familiar Letters] in 1674, Jones was a man of some standing. During the Restoration he assumed an active role in Irish politics before switching to England in the 1670s. He was a senior officeholder

Judgement of Martin Bucer

under James II, though he changed loyalties at the Williamite Revolution, becoming a privy councilor in 1692.

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Castle (Comus) benefited from the example of Jonson’s masques. Christopher Baker

Thomas N. Corns

Jonson, Ben [Benjamin] (1572 –1637). Playwright, poet, and critic. His achievements in poetry, acting, drama, and criticism place him ahead of Christopher Marlowe as William Shakespeare’s closest literary rival. The stepson of a bricklayer, he became the cornerstone of the Jacobean neoclassical style and a patriarch of the later Augustans. Benefiting from an excellent early education under William Camden at Westminster School but having never attended a university, Jonson sought the social and critical attention of court and literary circles in London, distinguishing himself with satiric comedy starting with The Isle of Dogs (1597, with Thomas Nashe; now lost). This was followed by Every Man in His Humour (1598), Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), Cynthia’s Revels (1600), and Poetaster (1601). The first two employed “humour comedy” to depict characters driven by a dominant personality foible; the third revealed Jonson’s early mastery of the masque, a genre he perfected; the last mocked his theatrical competitors John Marston and Thomas Dekker. His Roman plays Catiline (1611) and Sejanus (1603), burdened with historical detail, confirmed comedy as his métier. The finely constructed Volpone (1606), Epicoene (1609), and The Alchemist (1610) are his masterpieces, followed by the carnivalesque Bartholomew Fair (1614). Jonson’s varied poetic forms display the lapidary traits of his “plain style.” His closely edited first folio (1616) helped move the dissemination of English poetry toward professional publication and away from the private circulation of coterie manuscripts. His critical judgments expressed in the posthumously published commonplace book Timber, or Discoveries (1641) reveal an intimate acquaintance with classical models and a notable critique of Shakespeare. Jonson influenced Milton’s early career; both shared a deep knowledge of the classics, worked in similar poetic genres, and cultivated a discriminating aesthetic temperament. Milton’s reference in “L’Allegro” to “Jonson’s learned sock” (132) records this formative indebtedness, and “On the University Carrier” and “Song. On May Morning” display a Jonsonian formality. Milton’s sonnet “On Shakespeare” could well have been influenced by Jonson’s commendatory poem to the First Folio (1623), while A Masque Presented at Ludlow

Joshua. Book of the Old Testament. It is largely the narration of the history of the Israelites from the death of Moses to the death of Joshua, his successor. It gives a prolonged account of military successes, which include the fall of the walls of Jericho (chapter 6) and the event in which, at Joshua’s word, the sun and moon stood still over the stronghold of Gibeon (chapter 10). Joshua, “whom the gentiles Jesus call” (PL 12.310) (the names are etymologically identical), functions as a type for the Son both in De Doctrina Christiana and in Paradise Lost. See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

Jude. Book of the New Testament. Consisting of twenty-five verses, it is designated a “Catholic” epistle, in that it is addressed universally rather than specifically to a particular individual or early church. Patristic commentators identified “Jude, the servant of Jesus Christ, and brother of James” (v. 1), with the apostle “Judas the brother of James,” distinguished in the gospel of Luke (6:16) from Judas Iscariot. It offers a generalized denunciation of false teachers. One minatory verse offers something of Miltonic resonance in that it rehearses the fate of the fallen angels “reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day” (v. 6), and several of Milton’s citations of the epistle in De Doctrina Christiana relate to the characteristics of fallen angels. See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

Judgement of Martin Bucer. Work of prose attributed to Milton; full title, The Judgement of Martin Bucer, Concerning Divorce, Writt’n to Edward the Sixt, in His Second Book of the Kingdom of Christ. And Now Englisht. It was printed by Matthew Simmons and published in midsummer 1644. George Thomason dated his copy “Aug: 6th.” Publication observed the requirements of the Licensing Order (1643). John Downham, an appointed licenser, examined and approved it for publication, and it was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 15 July. Milton’s name does not appear on the title page; however, the authorship of The Doctrine

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and Discipline of Divorce, already into the second edition and evidently selling well—two other editions followed in 1645 —would have been well known, and that title page associates The Judgement with that tract. The epistle “To the parliament“ is signed with Milton’s name. The tract demonstrates that the author does not merit the notoriety his views on divorce had provoked by showing that divorce for reasons other than adultery or sexual incapacity had been advocated by Martin Bucer, or Butzer, an Alsatian Protestant reformer who was invited to England by Thomas Cranmer in 1549 and appointed regius professor of divinity. Bucer is particularly useful because, though he had died before the accession of Mary I, his body had been exhumed and destroyed and his tomb desecrated at the return to Catholicism, and he had attained the status of a Protestant martyr. Thomas N. Corns

is its Christian typology. Hebrews chapter 11 cites Samson and Barak as heroes of faith, establishing Samson as a type of Christ. While F. Michael Krouse and others see a compatible typology between Samson and Christ, Joseph Wittreich sees a contrastive, ironic typology with ethical consequences for readers. The fourth literary feature is thematic. Thematically complex, Judges explores providential purpose, human fallibility, fallen history, political leadership, and holy war. It also connects gender and violence in episodes such as the sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter (11:30 – 40), the murder of Samson’s bride (15:6), and the rape of the Levite’s concubine (19:22 –30). Samson Agonistes incorporates all of the themes in Judges. The whole of Judges, and not only the Samson narrative, is therefore a necessary context for reading Milton’s poem. See Gay (2002), Hill (1993), Krouse (1963), Wittreich (1986).

David Gay

Judges. Book of the Old Testament. A “judge” is a military and political leader. The historical period of the judges occurs between the invasion of Canaan by Joshua, the successor to Moses, and the establishment of monarchy by Samuel, the last judge. The text anticipates monarchy in its final verse (20:25). The most prominent of the judges are Deborah (Milton named one of his daughters Deborah), Barak, Gideon, Jephthah, and Samson. Unlike other judges, who all raise armies, the biblical Samson fights alone, although Milton’s Samson is frustrated that Israel never joined with him against the Philistines. Opposing monarchy, Milton cites Gideon’s refusal of the crown in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio and Brief Notes upon a Late Sermon. In Paradise Regained Jesus notes the humble origins of Gideon and Jephthah when refusing the kingdoms of the world (2.430 –39). At least four literary features of Judges influence Samson Agonistes. The first is its narrative framework. Judges emphasizes a cyclical pattern of apostasy and deliverance as Israel defects from God to follow other gods and then repents and petitions God for deliverance from ensuing subjugation. Milton’s Samson embodies this pattern as both a promised deliverer and an abject slave. The second is its internal typology. Readers can compare the extent to which the judges fulfill or fail their divine mandate. The Chorus compares Samson to “matchless Gideon” and Jephthah (277– 89); Dalila compares herself to Jael ( Judg. 5), who “Smote Sisera sleeping through the temples nailed” (990). The third

Junius, Franciscus (the younger) (1589 –1677). Dutch antiquarian, lexicographer, and linguist. Though of French descent, he was born at Heidelberg; shortly thereafter, his father, a prominent Protestant theologian, took a position at the University of Leiden. Junius studied for the ministry but served only briefly before leaving the Netherlands for France, and subsequently, England, where he served as librarian and tutor in the household of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, from 1621 to 1642. He continued to spend considerable time in England up until his death. In the early 1650s he acquired a manuscript from Archbishop James Ussher from which he produced his own edition, the Cædmonis Monachi Paraphrasis Poetica Genesios in 1655; the manuscript came to be known as Junius 11 in his honor. Among the other Old English biblical paraphrases it contains is the Genesis B poem, a work some scholars have compared to Milton’s Paradise Lost. Junius’s ground-breaking study of AngloSaxon materials was of ideological significance in the years preceding the Commonwealth, to both royalists and republicans. Evidence of Milton’s friendship with Junius exists in the correspondence of the latter’s nephew, Isaac Vossius. T. Ross Leasure

Justa Edovardo King Naufrago [Obsequies for Edward King, Lost at Sea]. A quarto of thirtysix collected poems published in 1638 to honor the

Justa Edovardo King Naufrago

late Edward King, a Cambridge student and fellow who had drowned 10 August 1637 at age twentyfive. King’s death is described in a Latin panegyric at the volume’s opening under the letters “P.M.S.,” or “ ‘Piis manibus sacrum’ (‘Consecrated to his pious shade’).” The description notes the ship striking a rock and splitting and depicts King kneeling in prayer until sinking with the craft into the waves. The volume is divided into two sections. The first (and larger) portion includes twenty-three poems in Latin and Greek (recently translated into prose in a

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special issue of Milton Quarterly). The second section, written in English and titled Obsequies to the Memorie of Mr. Edward King, features at its close the first publication of Milton’s poem “Lycidas.” Of the known contributors, only three others were later renowned: John Cleveland, Joseph Beaumont, and Henry More. Milton may have read at least a selection of these verses before writing “Lycidas,” as several of his lines echo other works. Eric C. Brown

K Keats, John (1795 –1821). Poet. Like his fellow Romantic poets, he was fascinated by the example of Milton. Keats was educated at Enfield School in London, bringing him into contact with liberal nonconformity and English republican ideas. His later association with ( James Henry) Leigh Hunt and the reformist group linked with the journal the Examiner reinforced this. One of his poems written on the anniversary of the execution of Charles I decried the habit of national remembrance of regicide in favor of a celebration of English republican virtue. Though sympathetic to Milton’s politics, Keats’s relationship with Milton was problematic and complex. He famously illustrated the workings of the poetic imagination by comparing it to “Adam’s dream” in Paradise Lost (8.452 –90)—“he awoke and found it truth.” His assumed poetic persona often tended to the passive and self-effacing, and he thus found Milton’s poetry to be egotistical and less easy to assimilate into his own poetic styles and concerns. He discerned a remoteness from the human in Milton’s work. In 1818 –1819 Keats began a close study of Paradise Lost as a prelude to composing his own revised Miltonic epic, Hyperion. He had chosen the form of the Miltonic epic in an attempt to discipline his poetic style after the criticism of his first major publication, Endymion (1817), and selected the classical narrative of the end of the Titans and their replacement by the Olympian Gods as a suitably Miltonic subject. He was, however, unable to complete the third book of the poem and published the work as “Hyperion. A Fragment” in 1820. Keats blamed his inability to continue with the poem on what he perceived as the unnaturalness of the Miltonic idiom. In a number of letters he commented on the difficulties of writing Miltonic epic. “Miltonic verse,” he argued, “cannot be written but in an artful or rather artist’s humour,” and Paradise Lost constituted for him both a corruption of language and a “beautiful 200

and grand curiosity.” Ultimately, Keats found the Miltonic style uncongenial for his own poetic voice, commenting that “Life to him would be death to me” and such verse could be written only “in the vein of art.” When Keats returned to the Hyperion myth, he recast its form into a Dantesque dream vision, “The Fall of Hyperion. A Dream.” Ironically, the second version of the poem is closer to its Miltonic origins as Keats interrogates his own poetic vocation in a postparadisial world, himself visiting the ruins of Eden. The goddess Moneta affords the poet a vision of the fall and suffering of the Titans, in the manner of Adam’s vision; however, for Keats the progress of history is conceived as cyclical, and not eschatological, as is the case in Milton’s epic. See Newlyn (1993).

Peter J. Kitson

kenosis. A Christian doctrine, formulated in patristic sources, pertaining to Christology, which examines the relation between Christ’s divine and human natures. Christ voluntarily empties himself of his divinity (kenosis is from the Greek “to empty”) in order to confront temptation, suffering, and death in his human nature. Milton affirms the Incarnation as kenotic. Christ willingly relinquishes heavenly glory in the proem to “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” In “Upon the Circumcision” Christ is said to have “Emptied his glory, even to nakedness” (20). In Paradise Lost the Son’s narrative of his descent to earth and return to heaven includes the kenotic moment (3.238 – 40). Kenosis is a premise in Paradise Regained, as Jesus prevails over Satan in a sinless human nature empowered by virtue and scripture and without recourse to the divine power Satan provokes. See Lieb (1970).

David Gay

Kings Cabinet Opened

King, Edward (c. 1612 –1637). Academic, churchman, and minor poet. He was born in Connaught, Ireland, to a well-connected family. His father had grown rich while holding several administrative posts in Ireland. His uncle was the bishop of Elphin. He entered Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1626 (B.A. 1630, M.A. 1633) and was assigned to Milton’s first tutor, William Chappell. He probably took holy orders about 1633. In the summer of 1630 he was appointed to a recently vacated fellowship by royal mandate. In the summer of 1637 he resolved to return to Ireland to visit family and friends and the grave of his recently deceased father. His ship left Chester on 10 August and foundered on rocks off the coast of Anglesey. King drowned, and his body was never recovered. He had published ten Latin poems, mostly royal panegyrics. His friends and colleagues commemorated him in a double volume, Justa Edovardo King Naufrago and Obsequies to the Memorie of Mr. Edward King; the latter concludes with Milton’s poem “Lycidas.”

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David and the accession of Solomon, followed by his building of the temple at Jerusalem. It concludes with the reigns of his immediate successors. These events contribute to the narrative of Paradise Lost (12.332 – 42), demonstrating that kings are variously good and bad and that the social and political consequences of bad ones are disastrous. The building of the temple inspired one of the most elaborate images in Areopagitica. See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

2 Kings. Book of the Old Testament. 1 Kings and 2 Kings were not presented as two books until early Greek translations. 2 Kings continues the narrative of the depravities of the monarchs who followed Solomon, culminating in the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar, events tersely narrated in Paradise Lost (12.338 –343). See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

See ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

King Arthur. Legendary British king and head of the Knights of the Round Table immortalized in medieval romances. Arthur is referred to in Y Gododdin (early in the seventh century) and by Nennius (in the tenth century) as a Celtic warrior who defeated the Saxons on twelve occasions. Annales Cambriae (900s) describes Arthur leading the Welsh against the Saxons, resulting in his victory at Mount Badon. By 1100 the Arthurian legends were given historical status by Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Norman poet Wace. The earliest Arthurian adaptations came from the French and German traditions, and English versions following Layamon’s Brut include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Although Milton mentions Arthur as a possible subject for his English epic in “Mansus” (80 – 84) and “Epitaphium Damonis” (166 – 68), he rejects the historical Arthur: “who Arthur was, and whether ever any such reign’d in Britain, hath bin doubted heertofore, and may again with good reason” (History of Britain). Philip E. Phillips

1 Kings. Book of the Old Testament. 1 Kings and 2 Kings were not presented as two books until early Greek translations. 1 Kings describes the death of

Kings Cabinet Opened. Highly damaging and embarrassing publication of the correspondence of Charles I; full title, The Kings Cabinet Opened or Certain Packets of Secret Letters & Papers, Written with the Kings Own Hand, and Taken in His Cabinet at Nasby-field June 14 1645. By Victorious Sr Thomas Fairfax . . . Together, with Some Annotations Thereupon. The correspondence was captured after the Battle of Naseby and entered into the Stationers’ Register on 9 July 1645. The captured letters included not only incriminating contents—such as negotiations to bring in foreign Catholic armies, promises of toleration for Irish and English Catholics, dissembling in negotiations for peace, Charles’s sniping at members of his own court and at the Oxford Parliament, and his deference to his French Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria—but unciphered copies and additional ciphers by which most of the codes could be broken. Recognizing the potential publicity value of the letters, both Houses of Parliament endorsed their publication, together with annotations, most likely by Henry Parker, John Sadler, and Thomas May. The publication produced a storm of printed attacks and defenses, including the king’s own defense in Eikon Basilike and Milton’s corresponding critique in Eikonoklastes. Laura L. Knoppers

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Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb (1724 –1803). Eighteenth-century poet whose works brought German, Dutch, and Scandinavian interest in Milton to its height. Introduced to Paradise Lost by Swiss scholar and translator J. J. Bodmer, Klopstock was inspired while still at university to begin writing his best-known work, Der Messias (1749), a religious epic in hexameters based on the life of Jesus. The work demonstrates parallels to Milton’s poetry in its avoidance of smooth meter and its reach for the sublime. Curtis L. Whitaker

Knox, John (c. 1513 –1572). Scottish reformer. Educated at Glasgow, he was converted to Protestantism in the 1540s and began a preaching ministry at St. Andrews in 1547. In 1551 he was made a chaplain to Edward VI and was probably responsible for the “Black Rubric” in the second Edwardian Book of Common Prayer. On the accession of Mary I he withdrew to the Continent. He met Jean Calvin and in 1556 became minister to the English church at Geneva, publishing, among other tracts,

The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment [Reign] of Women (1558) as represented in Scotland by Mary of Guise, the mother of Mary, Queen of Scots, and in England by Mary I. On the death of Mary of Guise in 1560, Knox returned to Scotland to lead the reforming Presbyterian party. In The Scottish Confession of Faith (1560) that he drew up; in the exposition of a Presbyterian polity in The Book of Discipline (1560), of which he was one of five authors; and in The Book of Common Order (“Knox’s Liturgy”), compiled and revised between 1556 and 1564, he provided the Reformed Church of Scotland with its defining documents until these were superseded by the formularies of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. His History of the Reformation . . . within . . . Scotland (1587; full text 1644) is a masterful exercise in partisan historiography. In The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Milton cites this “famousest” of Scots divines, “the Reformer of a Kingdom,” on the legitimacy of resisting evil rulers. See ODCC, ODNB.

N. H. Keeble

L Labadie, Jean de (1610 –1674). French Protestant minister. He trained with the Jesuits but was converted to Protestantism in the 1640s. He established a separatist congregation committed to a life of simplicity, communal ownership of property, and an enthusiastic and revivalist piety. He and his followers, who came to be known as Labadists, were harassed by ecclesiastical authorities at a number of locations in the Netherlands and Germany. In the late 1650s Labadie apparently wrote to Milton with a copy of his Lettre à ses amis de la Communion Romaine (1651), an account of his conversion and subsequent experiences. In April 1659 Milton replied in a letter that invited Labadie to succeed Jean D’Espagne as minister of the Independent French church meeting in Westminster. It is clear from the letter that Milton had spoken personally to the members of the church and that he wrote with their authority. N. H. Keeble

Lactantius, Firmianus (c. 250 – c. 330). African church father and the “Christian Cicero.” His major works are the Divinae Institutiones, De Ira Dei, and De Opificio Dei. Throughout these works, Lactantius was concerned particularly with the problem of the origin of evil and God’s relation to it. To him was also ascribed a popular Latin poem on the phoenix. Milton read Lactantius carefully, as references in the prose works and in the Commonplace Book demonstrate. Unsurprisingly, Lactantius’s keen interest in theodicy particularly influenced Milton: in Areopagitica the opposition of “fugitive and cloister’d vertue” to the virtue that actively seeks out trial, for instance, is thoroughly Lactantian and derives from the notes on Lactantius that begin Milton’s Commonplace Book. William Poole

“L’Allegro.” Poem by Milton; companion poem to “Il Penseroso.” The two poems were probably written during the Milton family’s residence at Hammersmith in the 1630s, though an earlier date has sometimes been postulated. The coherence of the structure seems to indicate that they were composed as interrelated parts of a single poetic endeavor. The hellish imagery of darkness, shrieks, unholy parturition, and an “uncouth cell” at the beginning of “L’Allegro” transforms into that of the peaceful, starlit “mossy cell” at the end of “Il Penseroso,” a resolution that replaces the infernal confusion of a noisy opening with the tranquility and heavenly perception of a serene conclusion. They remained unprinted until the publication of The Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645), when, crucially positioned midway between “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” and “Lycidas,” they provided a diptychlike centerpiece to the English and Italian poems in Milton’s first volume of collected verse. In such a context the giving of Italian titles to English poems was particularly apt. Superficially, it may appear that these two poems offer the reader (and their author) an evenhanded choice between two contrasted modes of life—“L’Allegro” presenting the experiences of the carefree, cheerful man and “Il Penseroso” those of the thoughtful man—but four possibilities are in fact presented, two in enjoyably extensive positive terms and two in briefer negative and dismissive terms. Close comparison of the way the detached concluding couplet in each poem is handled reveals that Milton’s choice of “Melancholy” in “Il Penseroso” is more purposefully optative than was his conditional expression of attachment to “Mirth” in “L’Allegro.” There is an imbalance, too, in length, the weightier “Il Penseroso” having twenty-four extra lines. In these two poems Milton makes his most resourceful attempt to position himself as a youthful

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poet in the native tradition of Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser. They glance at many varied precursors but principally align themselves with the tradition of the dream poem. In the main body of each the speaker passes from one sharply realized experience to another by melting, dreamlike transitions or strange juxtapositions that carry the reader forward with the shifting logic that is acceptable only in dreams. Like a dreamer, the reader seems to drift across the poetic landscape observing rather than being observed. H. Neville Davies

Lamentations. Book of the Old Testament. Traditionally termed the Lamentations of Jeremiah, it offers what have been regarded as the lamentations of the author of the Book of Jeremiah. Its five chapters deal with the desolation of Judah after the destruction of Jerusalem (events foretold in the Book of Jeremiah). Milton draws on it infrequently in De Doctrina Christiana, presumably because it contains no major themes or theological cruxes. See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

languages of Milton. During the seventeenth century, every humanist was by definition bilingual, learning a mother tongue and Latin. Next it was natural to qualify as a multilingual by adding Greek. The serious humanist theologian would tackle Hebrew, along with Aramaic. One sign of an unusually serious linguist was when Syriac was added to the sacred tongues, another when a further two or three modern languages were added. Milton was unusual among his compatriots in that he had about ten languages (in probable order of learning): English (probably not Old English), Latin, Greek, French, Italian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Spanish, and Dutch (or German). What he did with his languages matters more than their acquisition. His multilingualism is neither equal nor identical across his languages. Milton gives an account of his language acquisition in “Ad Patrem.” As to Latin, “at your expense, excellent father, I had become fluent in the language of Romulus, the charms of Latin” (78 – 80). Latin is at once linked to origins and to beauty, that is, to a historical sense and to developed eloquence. These attributes were not merely the young man’s naive or arbitrary selections. Lifelong, he read much history in Latin and thought about it in terms of Roman models. He exults to tackle its countless genres,

whether addressing a public audience or a single person. Under the same impetus he became fluent, too, in “the lofty words of the eloquent Greeks, fit for the mighty lips of Jove himself ” (80 – 81). The Greeks had invented and defined the eloquence that Rome took over, and the tribute to Greek suggests something more divine than is found in Latin. Milton’s most magisterial encounter with Greek is in his marginalia to Greek poets, above all Euripides. The next language paid for by his father was French, epitomized by “the flowers which it glories in” (82). As often, Latin compliments leave exact denotation unclear, which is all the more a pity because Milton’s engagement with French is mysterious, to the point of problematic. He cites French authors in his Commonplace Book but does not summarize them in French. Italian is a prolonged and overt and acknowledged influence on his poetic taste and his own creativity. The Italian ancestry of his closest friend Charles Diodati must have had something to do with this, since he even makes Diodati a character in his little sequence of sonnets composed in Italian to an unidentified and perhaps imaginary Italian lady (see “Sonnet II” through “Sonnet VI”). Although Milton calls Italian “the language the modern Italian pours from his degenerate mouth—testifying in his speech to the barbarian invasions” (“Ad Patrem” 83 – 86), this seems more a praising of Latin and a philological gloss than dispraise of Italian, as he stayed in Italy for months in 1638 –1639 with utter relish. During that residence he exhorted the Florentine language scholar Benedetto Buonmattei to expedite his Italian dictionary. Milton also refers to Hebrew in “Ad Patrem”: “the mysteries uttered by the Hebrew prophet” (85). This betokens respect and liking for Hebrew poetry, such as he places on the lips of the hero of Paradise Regained. The exaltation of the praise is noteworthy, as is his placing it last in the list of his five second languages. Hebrew was exemplary and crucial in another way, as it was Milton’s access to the Bible’s meaning. He claims linguistic competence and even authority when, in his prose defenses and in De Doctrina Christiana, he argues about the meaning of key Hebrew words. On the other hand, he takes them singly, not in phrases or sentences, and relies on the scholarship of others. Nonetheless, he translated the Psalms four times in his life. Milton’s languages, but especially his Latin (see Latinisms), give his English verse style one of its greatest distinctions, namely, that it absorbs and

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exploits them all, domiciling them within his epic style for special effect. See Hale (1997).

John K. Hale

Latimer, Hugh (c. 1485 –1555). Reformation bishop and preacher. He took his B.A. at Cambridge University in 1510, but his adoption of Protestant principles led to conflict with the ecclesiastical authorities in the 1520s. When Thomas Cranmer became archbishop of Canterbury, Latimer returned to favor; in 1535 he was appointed bishop of Worcester, but in 1539 he resigned in protest at the religious conservatism of the last years of Henry VIII. Though he refused to return to the episcopal bench, during the reign of Edward VI he became the preeminent preacher of the English Reformation. On the accession of Mary I in 1553 he was committed to the Tower of London, and in 1555 he was martyred by burning at Oxford. Despite Latimer’s trenchant anticlericalism and derision of Rome, Milton included him among those Reformation bishops whom he scorned in Of Reformation for their self-serving worldliness. See OCEL, ODCC, ODNB.

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Latinisms. “An idiom or form of expression characteristic of the Latin language, especially one used by a writer in another language” (OED). The term was first used of Milton by Joseph Addison in the Spectator (essay 285): “Milton . . . has infused a great many Latinisms, as well as graecisms . . . into the language of his poem.” Milton’s use of “omnific,” which he coined in Paradise Lost to mean “allmaking” God, is a straightforward instance (7.217). But when Satan “writhed him to and fro convolved” (PL 6.328), the effect is more complex; for although “convolved” translates “writhed,” its altered vowels intensify the writhing, and since the Latin convolvere applies in a special way to snakes—and does “to and fro” connect with the native “writhed” or forward to the import “convolved”?—the Latinism combines onomatopoeia with fertile ambiguity. The line writhes. Milton is equally fertile with his Latinate word order and its compressed syntax. Latinisms were dear to the heart of classically trained editors and readers of Milton until T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis. For these two, however, not only was Milton a bad influence on English poetry, his language in particular was alien: Latinisms became deplorable (see critical tradition in Milton studies and editors of Milton). See Hale (1997), Milton (1968).

N. H. Keeble

Latin. The volume and range of Milton’s Latin writings are enormous—almost half of his oeuvre, in countless genres emulating antiquity. He composed profusely in prose and verse during his formal education, where exercises required it and it was the natural route to reputation. After leaving Cambridge University, he wrote in Latin less, though he could choose his own occasions. In Italy, Latin became Milton’s passport to the Italian academies and friendships. In the 1640s he edited his verse in both Latin and English, on terms of conscious equality, but wrote little else in Latin. His attention swung back to Latin prose in the 1650s as he wrote the three defenses: Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda, and Pro Se Defensio. His longest work of all was the Latin De Doctrina Christiana. During his last decade Milton published his Latin grammar, Accedence Commenc’t Grammar (1669), Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio, and a last few letters. See languages of Milton. John K. Hale

John K. Hale

Laud, William (1573 –1645). Archbishop of Canterbury. He was born in Reading, the son of a tailor, and was educated at St. John’s College, Oxford. He took an M.A. in 1598, was ordained in 1601, earned his doctorate in divinity in 1608, and became president of St. John’s College in 1611, thus beginning his climb up the church hierarchy. He antagonized Puritans in his promotion of Arminianism and in his ceremonial style of worship and his fierce defense of a hierarchical episcopacy. In 1616 he became dean of Gloucester, angering many there by moving the communion table to the east end of the choir, thus clearly differentiating the roles of the clergy and the laity during worship. Gaining favor with Charles I, he was successively appointed dean of the Chapel Royal (1625), bishop of Bath and Wells (1626), bishop of London (1628), and archbishop of Canterbury (1633). Laud’s convictions were immediately apparent in changes to church liturgy and polity; he promoted to church offices like-minded Arminian clerics, commanded the wearing of vestments, and required close adherence to prayer-book rubrics. In his debate with the Jesuit John Fisher over the Countess of

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Buckingham’s conversion to Catholicism, he allowed that the Roman Church was valid, yet he opposed papal authority. As a judge in the Court of Star Chamber, he sternly enforced uniformity. Laud was impeached in 1640 (having opposed the impeachment that year of the king’s advisor Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford) and beheaded in 1645. Laudian practices provide the immediate context for Milton’s antiprelatical tracts. See also Laudianism. See Lake (1993), ODNB.

Christopher Baker

Lauder, William (c. 1710 – c. 1771). Editor and forger. In the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1747 he accused Milton of plagiarizing Paradise Lost from little-known neo-Latin works, quoting the “originals” alongside Milton’s text. Samuel Johnson was led to contribute a preface and a postscript to the collected version of the essays, Essay on Milton’s Use and Imitation of the Moderns. Only when John Douglas, later bishop of Salisbury, checked the cited editions did he discover that Lauder had interpolated passages from William Hog’s Latin Paradise Lost into Milton’s supposed sources. Douglas’s exposé, Milton Vindicated from the Charge of Plagiarism, revealed the imposture and left Lauder with no defense. His reputation in tatters, Lauder emigrated to Barbados, where he died in poverty. Jack Lynch

Laudianism. Doctrinal and organizational program of the Caroline Church of England. Most closely associated with Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud, two elements of Laudianism are of particular interest to Milton scholars, as they were for Milton himself. As part of the church’s adherence to the “beauty of holiness” (Ps. 96:9), Laud and Charles I emphasized the ritual and symbolic elements of the church and its services, encouraging the use of stylized priestly vestments, the renovation of church buildings, and a greater attention to the ceremonial elements of worship, including the eastern placement of the altar and kneeling during communion. To ensure that the church remained unified around this program, Laud insisted on conformity to the Prayer Book and episcopal authority, placing him in direct conflict with more reformminded members of the laity and ministry. See Lake (1992).

Todd Butler

Lawes, Henry (1596 –1662). English singer, musician, and composer. Born at Dinton, Wiltshire, he was early employed by John Egerton, First Earl of Bridgewater, as music tutor to his children. He was appointed to the Chapel Royal in 1626 and made one of Charles I’s musicians for lutes and voices in 1631. He and his younger brother, William Lawes, took part in court masques of the 1630s (see masque), and Henry may have written music for them, though none survives. He also provided music for plays given before the court at Oxford in 1636, including William Cartwright’s The Royal Slave. Through his connection with the Egerton family, he may have been responsible for approaching Milton to write Arcades and A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus) (1634), for which he set the songs. He also played the Attendant Spirit in the latter and afterwards (1637) published a text of it dedicated to John Egerton, Viscount Brackley, Second Earl of Bridgewater. Milton’s “Sonnet XIII” (“To Mr. H. Lawes, on His Airs”) praises Lawes for “tuneful and well-measured song,” noting especially his achievements in fitting music to text. During the Commonwealth, having lost his court appointments, Lawes taught privately, held well-patronized concerts at his house, and contributed in 1656 to William Davenant’s revived theatricals, including The Siege of Rhodes, the first English opera. At the Restoration he was reinstated to his old court posts, and his setting of “Zadock the Priest” was sung at the coronation of Charles II. Lawes was a prolific and innovative songwriter, above all in the setting of English verse. In addition to Milton, he set George Sandys’s metrical psalms to tunes that are still in use, and poems by, especially, Thomas Carew, as well as Robert Herrick, John Suckling, Edmund Waller, Richard Lovelace, Aurelian Townshend, and Henry Hughes. In all, 433 songs are known. He published three books of airs during his lifetime, and more appeared after his death. Manuscript versions also survive, including a large autograph songbook. He was a prominent champion of English music who repeatedly criticized the contemporary preference for Italian and once satirically passed off his setting of a table of contents as an Italian song. Tom Bishop

Lawes, William (1602 –1645). English composer and musician, brother to Henry Lawes. Born in Salisbury, he likely received training in the cathedral choir there. Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford,

L’Estrange, Sir Roger

apprenticed him to Giovanni Coperario (born John Cooper), a leading figure in English music. A manuscript of Coperario’s treatise Rules How to Compose was owned by John Egerton, First Earl of Bridgewater, and father of the children whom Henry Lawes tutored in music. William eventually joined his brother in the king’s service. He was chosen as composer for James Shirley’s Triumph of Peace, presented to Charles I by the Inns of Court in 1634, the same year in which Henry joined forces with Milton on A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle. Like his brother, William was celebrated for settings of poetry; these include works by Thomas Carew, William Davenant, Robert Herrick, and Sir John Suckling. In 1636 the brothers collaborated on Davenant’s masque The Triumphs of the Prince d’Amour. A devout royalist during the civil wars, William fought and died during the siege of Chester in 1645. He has been recognized as a stylistic innovator, anticipating techniques used by Matthew Locke and Henry Purcell. Henry Lawes praises his brother—and their royal patron—in Choice Psalmes (1648), the first publication of any of William’s music. Choice Psalmes includes compositions by both brothers and several friends, along with the first version in print of Milton’s “Sonnet XIII” to Henry. Stephen M. Buhler

Lawrence, Henry (1600 –1664). Politician, appointed Lord Lawrence under the Protectorate. An unorthodox Puritan thinker, he spent the early 1640s in the United Provinces. He joined the Long Parliament in 1646 in a recruiter election. Although a close ally of Oliver Cromwell and a kinsman, he did not support the trial and execution of Charles I. He was critical of the conduct of the Purged Parliament and emerged to prominence on its dismissal. He was appointed to the Council of State under the first Protectorate and shortly became its Lord President, chairing its meetings. He continued to hold high office until 1659. At the Restoration he retired to his country estate, untroubled by prosecution. Milton chose Lawrence for particular praise in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda. Milton also alludes to him favorably in the opening line of “Sonnet XVII,” “Lawrence of virtuous father virtuous son,” which is addressed to Edward Lawrence. See ODNB.

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Leighton, Alexander (1568 –1649). Physician and Puritan controversialist. He was educated at St. Andrews and at Leiden, where he took his M.D. In 1624 he published the fiercely anti-Romanist Speculum Belli Sacri, or, the Looking Glass of the Holy War (1624). His no less ferociously antiprelatical An Appeal to Parliament, or Sion’s Plea Against the Prelacie (1628) led in 1630 to his arrest and sentence by the Court of Star Chamber to mutilation by branding, nose slitting, and ear cropping and to lifelong imprisonment. In 1640 he was released by the Long Parliament and granted £6,000 compensation. He published an Epitome of his sufferings in 1646 and died three years later. Joseph Hall charged that the review of English episcopacy in the “Postscript” to Smectymnuus’s Answer to a Booke Entituled, An Humble Remonstrance (1641) was plagiarized from Sion’s Plea. To this, Milton, who was probably the author of the “Postscript,” retorted in Animadversions that Hall thereby revealed his “wonted course . . . upon the like occasion.” N. H. Keeble

Lemon, Robert (1779 –1835). Archivist. As deputy keeper of His Majesty’s State Papers he discovered in a “press” (that is, a large cupboard) in the Old State Papers Office in the Middle Treasury Gallery in Whitehall two manuscripts of Miltonic provenance, now held in the National Archives at Kew. One is now known as De Doctrina Christiana; the other was a collection of transcriptions of Milton’s Letters of State. They had been placed there on the instructions of Sir Joseph Williamson, probably in 1677. Lemon was quick to identify the probable author of the theological treatise and played an active role in bringing it to the attention of a wider public through its transcription and translation. See Campbell et al. (2007), ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

L’Estrange, Sir Roger (1616 –1704). Author and press censor. Third son of Sir Hamon L’Estrange, Hunstanton Hall, Norfolk, he attended Westminster School, Cambridge University, and Gray’s Inn. L’Estrange was imprisoned in 1643 for almost four years and sentenced to death for involvement in the siege of King’s Lynn but was reprieved and went into exile on the Continent until 1653. After the restoration of Charles II he was given the duties of surveyor of the press and some years later the role of licenser of the press. L’Estrange launched a

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hostile attack on Milton’s Brief Notes upon a Late Sermon (London, 1660) in the short pamphlet No Blinde Guides (London, 1660), criticizing Milton’s “Factious Labours.” His pamphlet Considerations and Proposals in Order to the Regulation of the Press (London, 1663) called for broad powers of licensing and strict controls over authors, printers, and booksellers. He included The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (London, 1649) in his list of “Pamphlets containing Treasonous and Seditious Positions.” Despite his animadversions on Milton’s prose works, L’Estrange subscribed to Jacob Tonson’s 1688 folio edition of Paradise Lost. Peter Hinds

Letters of State. With Milton’s employment as Secretary for Foreign Tongues (15 March 1649 – c. October 1659) came a decade of humanist state service that drew on his skills as a superb Latinist. His job was chiefly to translate governmental letters to foreign states into Latin, the international language of the day, and Latin documents into English. His “Letters of State” may be understood three ways. First are the Literae, the selection of letters and related government documents that he translated or composed and that he sought to publish belatedly in the Restoration as Latin prose models or templates for diplomatic correspondence, testimony also to his own Latinity and the vigor of the interregnal foreign policy in which he had been involved. Second are all the letters, treaties, and related documents he composed, translated, and/ or revised while Latin secretary successively to the Commonwealth (in particular the Council of State, 1649 –1653), the Protectorate (of Oliver Cromwell, 1653 –1658, and then Richard Cromwell, 1658 –1659), and then the restored Purged Parliament (in 1659). Third are all the letters from the 1650s that Milton kept even after the Restoration, whether of his own or others’ composition. Thus the Literae published posthumously (1676) is but a selection from the fuller store of materials Milton had available for that purpose, which in turn seems to have been but a selection of Milton’s larger output as a state servant. The other documents in his keeping but not of his composition or translation included some transcription of state papers, later given to his Quaker friend Thomas Ellwood and first published as Original Letters and Papers of State, Addressed to Oliver Cromwell . . . Found Among the Political Collections of Mr. John Milton (1743). Milton’s state letters are distinguished by their Latinity, which is of notable fluency and complex-

ity, more classically correct and freer of neologisms than that of others in the secretariat. Even so, students of the state letters are not entirely agreed on which of these very many documents are his, a judgment complicated by their often corporate origin and revision. The authorship even of those materials selected for the Literae has been questioned: how far did Milton Latinize documents of others’ devising, or how far and in what circumstances might he be thought the author of the documents in question, signed by others? In the case of treaties, for example, the translator drew on others’ articles and must have been kept on the tightest of reins. With other correspondence, Milton seems likely to have had more independence in composition, generating letters based on instructions or discussions recorded or remembered, with sometimes more and sometimes less supervision of the final document. These were not letters for his own signature, of course. His hand features in only a few of the known documents even before his final blindness (early in 1652) and then only in holograph corrections of texts in scribal hands, or signed attestation that his was a verbatim translation. Milton seems first to have intended the Literae as part of the volume that eventually appeared as Epistolarum Familiarum Liber Unus (1674). In the event, these state papers were found too controversial to publish at the time of the third of the Anglo-Dutch Wars, after which came what may be styled a “second” Restoration (marked by the ascendancy of the Earl of Danby and a revival of the bishops’ political power). Instead, Milton’s youthful Prolusions filled out an otherwise slim octavo of personal correspondence. Thereafter, Secretary of State Joseph Williamson also prevented the state letters’ separate publication in Holland by Daniel Skinner, who had been Milton’s scribe during his last years. Skinner had made a fuller transcription of Milton’s letters, which Williamson impounded. Even so, a Dutch press published from another source Literae Pseudo-Senatûs Anglicani, Cromwellii . . . Conscriptae a Joanne Miltono, with only a preface to apologize for Milton’s involvement in the infamous English governments of the Interregnum (Amsterdam, 1676, with another printing in Brussels the same year; a third followed in Germany in 1690). Literae found English translation and clandestine publication in the Whiggish Miltons Republican-Letters (1682) and were again translated by Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips in Letters of State (1694; republished in collections of Milton’s prose in 1698, 1738, 1753, and so forth). Another major early transcription of Milton’s Let-

Levellers

ters of State is the Columbia Manuscript, which remained in private hands until the twentieth century (Columbia University Library). In addition to the drafts and copies preserved in English archives, many of the original letters also survive in the national archives of the countries to which they were addressed. In the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, other English and continental compilations also printed various of the state letters, with and without mention of Milton’s part in writing them. Modern editors have added significantly to the Literae, discovering documents often cognate but sometimes entirely separate from those known previously, some of which “new” material is plainly Miltonic on internal and external evidence. Miltonic state letters old and new have found publication in Latin and English in WJM 13 (edited with translation by Thomas Ollive Mabbott and J. Milton French), and in English translation with copious annotation in CPW 5, part 2 (edited by J. Max Patrick and translated by Paul Blackford). Moreover, by showing Milton’s part in negotiations not otherwise much revealed in the Literae (the failed attempt at Anglo-Dutch reconciliation in 1652, for instance, or Milton’s encountering the demands of Hermann Mylius, agent to London from Oldenburg), recent scholarship has shown Milton responsible for still more documents, some as yet unlocated. His role in such state service has been obscured wherever materials were not kept by him or did not lend themselves to publication in the Literae, perhaps owing to their political sensitivity, or more often to their repetitiveness, technicality, or too great need of contextualization. Even so, the Letters of State give witness to Milton’s Latinity and his commitment to his public employment during the Interregnum; they also reveal the challenges met by the young republic and Protectoral England’s status in international affairs. See Fallon (1993), Miller (1985, 1992), Shawcross (1984).

Nicholas von Maltzahn

Letter to a Friend. Milton, work of prose; full title, Letter to a Friend, Concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth. Dated 20 October 1659, it was first published by John Toland in A Complete Collection (1698) and transcribed in the Columbia Manuscript. After a conversation with an unnamed friend, Milton offers advice to save the fracturing republic. The suppression of Booth’s Rebellion in August 1659 brought not new unity but increased

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tensions between the Purged Parliament and the army that had restored it in May 1659. When in October 1659 Parliament cashiered nine senior officers, John Lambert once again turned the Parliament out of doors. Milton denounces the forced dissolution, blaming the ambition and self-seeking of the army officers. To preserve the republic, he urges that the Parliament (or a new council) be readmitted as a grand senate, upon the terms of liberty of conscience to all professing scripture as their rule of faith and worship and the adjuration of a single person. Recognizing the need for unity between the army and Parliament, Milton asks (though does not insist) that both officers and parliamentary members be assured of their places for life. As the crisis altered and deepened, Milton further developed and published this proposal in The Readie and Easie Way. See Corns (1992).

Laura L. Knoppers

Letter to a Friend (1633). Letter by Milton, found in the Trinity Manuscript. It exists in two drafts, the fair copy containing a copy of “Sonnet VII.” Although the date of 1633 has been disputed, the letter’s contents and the overall context of Milton’s early work suggest that it was written during his time of studious retirement, beginning after July 1632. The letter is written to answer a letter (no longer extant) from an old friend and mentor who chides Milton for not having entered the ministry, thus making what the friend considers an appropriate use of his education. The friend may have been Milton’s former tutor Thomas Young or John Lawson, the rector of All Hallows on Bread Street. Milton refutes the implication that he has been wasting his time and education, as well as the suggestion that the work of a poet is not “credible employment.” Julia M. Walker

Levellers. Members of a radical movement of the late 1640s and early 1650s. The movement had its origins in the New Model Army, where junior officers and the rank and file found common cause around issues relating to pay and the conditions of service, and among civilian activists pressing for a widening of the electoral franchise, to include all adult males who were not in the service of others. Until the coup of Pride’s Purge was effected, Oliver Cromwell and the senior officers close to him attempted to retain some dialogue with the

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Levellers. Thereafter, their conduct to them was much less emollient. The Burford Mutiny of May 1649 was the last defiant gesture of the army Levellers and was crushed by troops loyal to Cromwell. The civilian Levellers, among whom Richard Overton and John Lilburne were prominent, were frequently incarcerated, though they continued to pamphleteer against the new government of the Purged Parliament. Milton nowhere engages in controversy with them, despite an instruction to him from the Council of State to confute two pamphlets by Lilburne. Thomas N. Corns

of book censorship in England until the lapsing of the terms of the Licensing Act (1662) in 1695. The increasing number and diversity of printed items prompted first the delegation of licensing duties and later the appointment of licensers for specific categories of books: the Licensing Order (1643), for example, named separate licensers for books on religion; common law; civil and canon law; medicine; heraldry; philosophy, history, poetry, and the arts; parliamentary declarations, ordinances, and sermons; mathematics, almanacs, and prognostications; and even “small Pamphlets, Portractures [sic], Pictures and the like.” Ian Gadd

Leviticus. Book of the Old Testament, the third “book of Moses.” It opens with detailed instructions on burnt offerings, and, as the title suggests, often describes procedures for the priests from the tribe of Levi. Along with ceremonial laws related to cleanness and uncleanness, guilt and ritual atonement, are wider ethical concerns: justice in everyday dealings, charity to strangers, and the scrupulous fairness of “eye for eye” (24:20). Both history and a “holiness code” separate the Israelites from other nations. A recurrent (slightly varied) formula, “And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel,” establishes the authority of Mosaic Law, or what Milton calls in the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce “the divine testimonies of God himself, lawgiving in person to a sanctify’d people.” Kay Gilliland Stevenson

Ley, Lady Margaret. See “Sonnet X.”

licenser. An authorized individual, often but not always a member of the clergy, who approved texts before printing. As Milton notes in Areopagitica, preprint licensing was first imposed throughout Christendom by Pope Leo X in 1515, who ordered that all books be approved by the relevant local bishop before printing. The first acknowledgment of this system in England was made by Henry VIII in proclamations in 1529 and 1530; a 1538 proclamation secularized the process by including the king and his privy councillors as licensers. Successive proclamations, ecclesiastical injunctions and canons, Court of Star Chamber decrees, and finally parliamentary ordinances and statutes confirmed and refined the system as the primary form

Licensing Act (1662). Act of Parliament that reenacted and strengthened the various acts, decrees of the Court of Star Chamber, ordinances, and procedures of the Stationers’ Company by which prepublication censorship had been imposed throughout the Tudor and Stuart periods; full title, the Act for Preventing the Frequent Abuses in Printing Seditious, Treasonable and Unlicensed Books and Pamphlets, and for Regulating of Printing and Printing Presses. It received the royal assent on the same day as the Act of Uniformity (1662), 19 May. By the Licensing Act, all intended publications were to be “entered” in Stationers’ Register. This entry constituted a record of copyrights held by company members, but manuscripts could be so entered only after having been previously “licensed” by the appropriate authority (that is, approved by a censor). Since an unentered book would also be an unlicensed book, in seeking out the former to protect its own interests, the company performed the government’s work by seeking out the latter. The act empowered the company to search private property in pursuit of illegal presses or stocks of unlicensed books, and it authorized the secretaries of state to issue general search warrants for the same purpose. The appointed censors were, for books on law, the chief justice or chief baron; on history or affairs of state, a secretary of state; on heraldry, the Earl Marshall; for books printed at Oxford or Cambridge, the respective university chancellor; and for all other books, the archbishop of Canterbury or the bishop of London. In practice, the vast majority of publications were licensed by one of the bishop of London’s chaplains. The license was to be printed at the beginning of every book (whence “Licensing Act”). The act limited to twenty the total number of master printers (with a maximum of two presses and two printers each) permitted to work

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in Oxford, Cambridge, or London and to four the number of type founders, all to be appointed by the archbishop of Canterbury or the bishop of London. After a temporary lapse in 1679, the act expired in 1695. The act’s provisions were vigorously enforced by the Stationers’ Company and by the surveyor of the press, Sir Roger L’Estrange, but they failed to crush the resilience and resourcefulness of radical (republican and nonconformist) underground printers; to restrain the ingenuity of authors who circumvented the censors by a variety of allusive, oblique, or ambiguous rhetorical strategies; or to prevent a vigorous trade in unlicensed books. The means by which this act sought to restrict the volume of publication, to control the means of publication, and to prevent the appearance of any title of which the government did not approve were essentially those that had been adopted by the 1643 Ordinance for the Regulation of Printing (see Licensing Order [1643]). Since this had been the occasion of Milton’s Areopagitica, his view of the Licensing Act can readily be inferred. The token objection of Thomas Tomkins, chaplain to Gilbert Sheldon, archbishop of Canterbury, to the allegedly treasonable implications of Paradise Lost 1.594 –99, and an objection to a passage in The History of Britain, are the only recorded instances of the act’s impinging directly on Milton’s work, though Christopher Hill attributes the relative political and doctrinal reticence of Paradise Lost and the apparent moderation of Of True Religion to the exercise of self-censorship on Milton’s part so that he could secure a license. N. H. Keeble

Licensing Order (1643). Parliamentary ordinance reestablishing licensing in England; full title, Ordinance for the Regulation of Printing. The abolition of the Court of Star Chamber and the High Commission in 1641 swept away much of the legal framework upon which effective regulation of the English book trade depended. Following a petition by the Stationers’ Company in April 1643, the Licensing Order was issued by Parliament on 14 June. Its primary purpose was to reestablish the system of licensing that had operated since Henry VIII and that had been most recently articulated by Star Chamber decree in 1637. The ordinance ordered that nothing could be “printed, bound, stitched or put to sale . . . unless the same be first approved of and licensed” by a named licenser; a list of these individuals and their areas of

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jurisdiction was appended. All printed items were to be “entered” into the Stationers’ Register, and no one was to print or import any item already entered in the register without seeking the prior consent of its owner. Ian Gadd

life and works of John Milton. John Milton was born 9 December 1608 on Bread Street, close to Cheapside in London. His father, John Milton, Sr., was a scrivener, combining some functions of a notary, financial advisor, moneylender, and contract lawyer, as well as a respected composer of madrigals and psalm settings. His mother, Sara Jeffrey Milton, was celebrated, Milton wrote, for her acts of charity. He had an older sister, Anne Milton, and a younger brother, Christopher Milton. Much of his childhood was given over to study, with his father providing tutors in several subjects and several languages (see languages of Milton). With one tutor, the Presbyterian cleric Thomas Young, Milton maintained a good relationship over many years. Probably in 1620, at age twelve, he began attending St. Paul’s School, where he met his dearest friend, Charles Diodati. Milton exchanged letters, poems, and literary critiques with Diodati over several years, as he did also with another friend, Alexander Gil, the younger. Milton reportedly wrote poetry from the age of ten, though he preserved only a few Latin school exercises, chiefly verses. In Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645) he included free paraphrases in English of Psalm 114 and Psalm 136, dating them “at fifteen years old” and adding original lines that sound themes he would often reiterate: the people’s hard struggle for liberty and God’s power to destroy tyrants. At age sixteen, in Easter term 1625, Milton entered Christ’s College, Cambridge, paying fees of about £50 a year as a “lesser pensioner.” The college had some 265 members and strong reformist traditions. The curricular emphasis was on Aristotelian logic, rhetoric, ethics, and metaphysics. Rhetoric was mastered chiefly through memorized and extempore public orations and disputations in Latin. Milton’s seven surviving orations, the “Prolusiones” (see Prolusions), often inveigh against the curriculum and comment, sometimes with pity, often with scorn, on the ill-educated students it produced. At some early stage he had a serious altercation with his tutor William Chappell, resulting in a brief rustication at home. A Latin verse letter to Charles Diodati, “Elegia Prima,” wittily

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describes his delightful exile in London. At his return to Cambridge he was given a new tutor, Nathaniel Tovey. Many poems of Milton’s university years (1625 –1632) cannot be precisely dated, and some dates Milton assigned are too early. Most of his undergraduate poems are in Latin, influenced by and freely transforming Ovid and many other classical and neoclassical poets: a verse letter (“Elegia Quarta”) to his former tutor Thomas Young; two funeral elegies (“Elegia Secunda” for the university beadle and “Elegia Tertia” for Lancelot Andrewes, bishop of Winchester); an erotic celebration of spring (“Elegia Quinta”); an Ovidian love elegy about a springtime adventure in London (“Elegia Septima”); and funeral poems on the vice chancellor, John Gostlin, and Nicholas Felton, bishop of Ely. He wrote epigrams on the Gunpowder Plot (see epigram) and in 1626 a satiric mini-epic on Guy Fawkes Day, “In Quintum Novembris,” with a sinister Satan; it exudes Virgilian aspiration and Protestant zeal. During 1627–1628, Milton wrote an English funeral ode for his sister Anne’s daughter, “On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough.” In July or August 1628 he was chosen as “Father” (writer and presenter) of the annual vacation festival at Christ’s College, which called for a skit and a Latin oration; his “Prolusio VI” is filled with pungent satire, scurrilous puns, and boisterous humor but also points jests about his change of title from “Lady” to “Father”—alluding to the nickname, “the Lady of Christ’s,” given to this slender, refined, defiantly chaste, highly intellectual, and artistically inclined adolescent. He ends with a poem, “At a Vacation Exercise in the College.” He received the B.A. degree 26 March 1629 and continued three years’ further study for the M.A. In December 1629 he sent his first major English poem, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” to Charles Diodati, along with a Latin verse letter, “Elegia Sexta,” that wittily associates Diodati’s supposed festive life with writing light elegy and his own present abstemious life with epic or sacred subjects. He attempted a companion poem, “The Passion,” and published it as a fragment (1645). Plague closed the Cambridge colleges in spring 1630, at which time Milton may have written the lighthearted English aubade “Song. On May Morning”; his first English sonnet, “O nightingale” (“Sonnet I”); and his Petrarchan mini-sonnet sequence in Italian—two sonnets, a one-stanza canzone, then three more sonnets. The love experience it recounts (perhaps real, perhaps imaginary)

employs familiar Petrarchan topics but resists conventional Petrarchan roles for his sonnet lady or himself. His first published poem was included unsigned in the 1632 Second Folio of William Shakespeare’s plays (see “On Shakespeare”). In 1631 he wrote two whimsical English epitaphs on Thomas Hobson, “On the University Carrier” and “Another on the Same,” and also a seventy-five-line “Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester,” twenty-three-year-old Jane Paulet. The graceful, evocative companion poems “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” probably the poetic fruits of the summer of 1631, explore the ideal values, pleasures, and genres appropriate to contrasting lifestyles—“heart-easing Mirth” and “divinest Melancholy.” In Prolusion VII (?1632), “Learning brings more Blessings to Men than Ignorance”—presumably his master’s oration—he looks forward to “cultured and liberal leisure” devoted to self-directed study and poetry. He took his M.A. cum laude on 3 July 1632. For nearly six years (1632 –1638) Milton lived at his parents’ country residences, first in Hammersmith and at least by May 1636 in Horton. He read classical literature, philosophy, early church history, and western history and made excursions to London to keep up with new developments in music and mathematics. He began the Trinity Manuscript and a Commonplace Book. His poetic entertainment Arcades (written c. 1632) honors seventy-three-year-old Alice Spencer, Countess of Derby, matriarch of a large family recently touched by a notorious sex scandal, and patron of a long line of writers, including Edmund Spenser. About the time of his twenty-fourth birthday (9 December 1632) Milton wrote the anxious “Sonnet VII,” “How soon hath time the subtle thief of youth, / Stol’n on his wing my three and twentieth year!” He included it in a 1633 letter to an unidentified older man who had criticized his delay in taking ecclesiastical orders. He also wrote three short odes in complex metrical patterns—“Upon the Circumcision,” “On Time,” and “At a Solemn Music”— celebrating the conjunction of sacred vocal music and poetry, which can transport the hearer to heaven. Milton’s Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, also known as Comus, was performed on Michaelmas night (29 September 1634) in the great hall at Ludlow Castle to celebrate the appointment of John Egerton, First Earl of Bridgewater, as Lord President of the Council of Wales and the Marches and Lord Lieutenant of Wales and the border counties. Henry Lawes, music master to

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the Egerton children, provided the music and probably solicited Milton’s text, which features the earl’s three unmarried children (see Alice Egerton, John Egerton, Viscount Brackley, Comus, and masque). The chef d’oeuvre of Milton’s early poetry, the pastoral elegy “Lycidas” (written November 1637), was published in a Cambridge memorial volume, Justa Edovardo King Naufrago (1638), for his college contemporary Edward King, who died in a shipwreck. “Lycidas” is the last and longest poem, signed only with Milton’s initials. The poem sounds the leitmotifs of reformist politics: the dangers posed by a corrupt clergy and church, the menace of Rome, the adumbrations of apocalypse. The Latin verse epistle “Ad Patrem” (written c. 1637) is in part a praise of Milton’s father for fostering his education and self-education, in part a defense of poetry against his father’s supposed disparagement of it, and in part a deft persuasion to his father to accept his forthright claim to the role of poet as the essence of his self-definition and to continue to support him in it. Perhaps in response, Milton Sr. financed a European tour for his son. He set off with his gentleman servant in late April 1638, spent a few days in Paris, proceeded to Nice, traveled by boat to Genoa and Leghorn (Livorno), stayed in Florence from early July to mid-September 1638 enjoying the architecture and the Italian academies, and remained in Rome for October and much of November where he saw the antiquities and dined (as travelers often did) at the English Jesuit College in Rome. He spent about a month in Naples but says he abandoned plans to visit Sicily and Greece upon hearing news of war preparations in England. Though he reports a warning about a plot by Jesuits against him in Rome, he spent January to late March 1639 there, and especially enjoyed the solo song of the famed soprano and composer Leonora Baroni, to whom he paid lavish tribute in three Latin epigrams, “Ad Leonoram Romae Canentem” and “Ad Eandem.” Then he returned to Florence for March and April 1639, taking a side trip to Lucca where, reputedly, the purest Italian was spoken. He spent about a month in Venice (c. May 1639), shipping off books, hearing the new music of Claudio Monteverdi, and observing that long-lived aristocratic republic. He crossed the Alps; stayed some time in Geneva, where he could observe the Swiss republic with its loosely federated cantons; and then returned home through France. He had cordial conversations with some great men of the era: Hugo Grotius in Paris; the seventy-

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five-year-old Galileo under house arrest at Arcetri, near Florence; Lucas Holstenius, librarian of the Vatican collections, who gave him a tour through that library; Cardinal Francesco Barberini, who received him warmly at a comic opera at the Barberini Palace and at a private audience; and seventy-eight-year-old Giovanni Battista Manso— statesman, author, and patron to Torquato Tasso and Giovan Battista Marino—who showed him around Naples and to whom he offered a Latin verse letter, “Mansus,” presenting himself as a poet in Tasso’s line, contemplating an Arthuriad. In Geneva he visited Giovanni Diodati, theologian, biblical scholar, and translator, and uncle to Charles Diodati, who had died suddenly in August 1638. He was welcomed by the literati throughout Italy, but chiefly he loved Florence and its academies, the Svogliati and the Apatisti. His academy friends included Jacobo Gaddi, Pietro Frescobaldi, Agostino Coltellini, Benedetto Buonmattei, Valerio Chimentelli, the poets Antonio Francini and Antonio Malatesti, and Carlo Roberto Dati (apparently his closest friend in Italy). He attended at least one of the Roman academies, the Fantastici, and wrote a forty-one-line Latin verse epistle, “Ad Salsillum,” for one of its members, the lyric poet Giovanni Salzilli. He used tributes from Manso, Dati, Francini, Salzilli, and Matteo Selvaggio (alias of David Codner) to preface the Latin/Greek section of his Poems (1645). At his return to London, in late July or early August 1639, he took lodgings in St. Brides Churchyard near Fleet Street. A pastoral elegy for the recently deceased Charles Diodati, “Epitaphium Damonis” (c. 1640), voices Milton’s anguish as he questions how he can go on with his life, his duty to God and country, and his plans for an epic Arthuriad given his terrible loneliness at the loss of his dearest companion. In the Trinity Manuscript he listed ideas for literary projects, mostly dramas, nearly one hundred subjects drawn from the Bible and British history including five sketches for a tragedy on the Fall of man. He began teaching a few private pupils. His nephews John Phillips and Edward Phillips were with him for about six years (1640 – 1646), and other pupils came at various times, among them Cyriack Skinner, Thomas Gardiner, Richard Barry, Second Earl of Barrymore—sent by his aunt, Milton’s friend Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh—and later her son, Richard Jones. In October or November 1640 he rented “a pretty Garden-House” in Aldersgate Street, where he continued his school and his private studies in British history, church history, literature, political

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theory, and other subjects. To aid his pedagogy Milton probably drafted three works published decades later with some additions: Accedence Commenc’t Grammar (1669), Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio (1672), and A Brief History of Moscovia (1682). He soon joined the polemical battle to eradicate bishops “root and branch” from both Parliament and the church (see Root and Branch Petition). He contributed an appendix to a treatise by five divines, among them Thomas Young, writing under the acronym Smectymnuus, and then wrote five so-called antiprelatical tracts. The first three are anonymous: Of Reformation (late May 1641), Of Prelatical Episcopacy ( June or July), and the sharply satiric and sometimes scurrilous Animadversions ( July). The Reason of Church-Government ( January/ February 1642) carries Milton’s name, and in a lengthy preface to book 2 he describes his education, his felt duty to serve the church by writing polemics after being “church-outed” by the Laudian prelates, his true vocation as a bardic poet, and his poetics. An Apology Against a Pamphlet (April 1642) is Milton’s anonymous answer to an anonymous attack on Animadversions. Like many Puritans in the 1640s he voices millenarian expectation in occasional bursts of prophetic and poetic fervor. Around 29 May 1642 Milton paid a visit (probably to collect a debt) to Richard Powell, Sr., of Forest Hill, near Oxford, and after a month married his daughter Mary Powell. They were clearly incompatible; Mary returned home for a visit after a month of marriage and stayed for three years. In late October, responding to a threatened attack on London, Milton wrote a sonnet (“Sonnet VIII”) imagined as a paper placed “On His Door When the City Expected an Assault,” as his headnote to the draft in the Trinity Manuscript put it. Sometime in the years 1642 –1645 he wrote two sonnets praising women in non-Petrarchan terms: “Sonnet IX” (“Lady, that in the prime of earliest youth”) describes an unknown or perhaps fictional young women who has given herself to religious study, reprising biblical roles; “Sonnet X” (“To the Lady Margaret Ley”) addresses a woman friend of wit and intellect. In April 1643 Milton’s father (then about eighty years old) came to live with him. Milton took the Solemn League and Covenant adopted by Parliament in late September 1643. During 1643 –1645 Milton published a series of tracts relating to marriage and divorce (see divorce tracts), prompted by his own experience of marital incompatibility, which he thought typical. Divorce for incompatibility with right to remarry was vir-

tually unheard of except in Jewish law, and Milton made increasing use of Hebraic scholarship on this point. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1 August 1643), anonymous and unlicensed, makes the core argument that God’s declaration in Eden—“It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him” (Gen. 2:18)—locates the essence of marriage in fellowship of the mind and spirit, not (as most believed) in procreation or the relief of lust. The much expanded second edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (2 February 1644) carried his name. The Judgement of Martin Bucer (6 August 1644) sometimes translates and sometimes epitomizes parts of Bucer’s De Regno Christi, but Milton insists vigorously that he developed his ideas before discovering Bucer and other somewhat supportive authorities. Tetrachordon (c. 4 March 1645), his most extensive discussion of marriage, divorce, and related gender issues, offers a scholarly exegesis of four relevant scripture passages; Colasterion, published at about the same time, is a furious diatribe against the anonymous “serving man turned solicitor” who answered his first divorce tract. Interrupting the divorce sequence, Milton’s tractate Of Education (c. 5 June 1644) is couched as a letter to the emigré scholar and promoter of scholarly exchange Samuel Hartlib. Areopagitica (c. 23 November 1644), prompted by the licensing problems and vociferous denunciations visited upon Milton’s divorce tracts, calls on Parliament to replace its new order for prior censorship of books with one that simply requires registration of authors’ or printers’ names. In early summer 1645, Milton and Mary Powell were reconciled at a meeting stage-managed by Milton’s relatives the Blackboroughs and by the Powells, now vulnerable in the wake of the declining fortunes of King Charles I. Soon after, Milton moved to a large house, No. 17, the Barbican. Late that year the bookseller Humphrey Moseley published Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin, which stages Milton’s development as a reformist poet who revised several genres dominated by Cavalier lyricists and also claimed a poetic mode shunned by them, prophecy. In retaliation for the frontispiece, an engraved portrait by William Marshall that makes him look old and crabbed, Milton caused Marshall, who knew no Greek, to inscribe a Greek epigram ridiculing it. He sent his published works to the Bodleian Library at the invitation of John Rouse, its librarian; an elegant Latin verse letter, “Ad Joannem Rousium” ( January 1647), accompanied a replacement copy of Poems, lost in

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transit. He wrote several sonnets in 1646, one of which (“Sonnet XIII,” 9 February) praises Henry Lawes as the first in England to set off a poet’s sense “with just note and accent,” eschewing harmony and counterpoint. Two others respond to those who attacked or ignorantly dismissed his divorce tracts: “Sonnet XII” (“I did but prompt the age”) and “Sonnet XI” (“A book was writ of late”). A sonetto cauduto, or sonnet with a coda or tail, “On the New Forcers of Conscience,” chastises the Presbyterians for persecution, hypocrisy, and corruption. The death of Catharine Thomason, wife of the bookseller George Thomason (both friends of Milton), prompted an epitaph-sonnet (“Sonnet XIV”). The end of the First Civil War in late summer 1646 subjected Milton to an inundation of his Powell in-laws dispossessed of their Forest Hill property: at least five children younger than sixteen, their parents, and perhaps some older children. On 29 July 1646 Milton’s wife Mary gave birth to her first child, Anne, who proved to have lifelong lameness and defective speech. When Richard Powell, Sr., died in late December 1646, his unpaid debt gave Milton a claim on the Powell estate of Wheatley, enabling him to settle his in-laws there. The death of Milton’s own father in March 1647 brought an inheritance that allowed him to close his little academy and move to a smaller house in High Holborn. During the Second Civil War (April–August 1648), he translated “Psalms lxxx– lxxxviii,” crying out to God with the psalmist to save a new Israel and a new prophet beleaguered by enemies. In July or August he addressed a sonnet to the army’s commander-in-chief, General Thomas Fairfax (“On the Lord General Fairfax at the Siege of Colchester”). On 25 October Milton’s second child was born, a daughter named Mary after her mother. During December 1648 and January 1649, as a commission tried, condemned, and executed Charles I, Milton wrote The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (c. 13 February 1649; second enlarged edition, September). He castigates the backsliding Presbyterians, defends tyrannicide, and supports the new republic with a political theory based on social contract and the right of the people to choose and change their government at will. Whenever he began The History of Britain, he completed books 1–3 and part of book 4 by mid-March 1649. The Digression in book 3 compares the chaos, vice, and corruption in Britain after the Romans left to similar conditions under the Long Parliament that undermined the opportunity for a free commonwealth to be settled.

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Milton was forty years old and already blind in his left eye (see blindness) when he was appointed on 15 March 1649 Secretary for Foreign Tongues at a salary of about £288 a year; he retained that post until May 1659. His chief responsibility was to put into elegant Latin official English drafts of letters to foreign states, to translate letters from foreign governments, and to interpret in treaty negotiations and diplomatic exchanges with foreign envoys. Other duties included examining the papers of some suspected enemies of the government and authorizing the weekly government newsbook Mercurius Politicus as well as an occasional foreign book. On 10 August 1650 he authorized the Socinian Racovian Catechism, with its “heretical” denial of Christ’s divinity; later (February or March 1652) he defended that action to the Council of State by referring to Areopagitica. He counted as friends John Bradshaw (the council president), Henry Vane, and Marchamont Nedham, the volatile editor of Mercurius Politicus. On 19 November 1649 the council granted Milton lodgings in Whitehall. For the republic he wrote three major polemic treatises. Observations upon the Articles of Peace (c. 16 May 1649) pertains to the uprising in Ireland in support of Charles II (see Irish Rebellion). Eikonoklastes (c. 6 October 1649; enlarged 1650) attacks the enormously popular Eikon Basilike. Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (24 February 1651) answered the Latin Defensio Regia (1649) of the famous European scholar Claudius Salmasius, who denounced the regicide and called on the kings of Europe and royalists in England to place Charles II on his rightful throne. Milton’s son, John, was born 16 March 1651. Milton was away from London in the fall of 1651, reportedly trying barbaric but ineffective measures to stave off blindness. On 17 December 1651 he moved “for the sake of my health” to a house with a garden in Petty-France (York Street) in Westminster. The Tagebuch of Hermann Mylius, an emissary from Count Anthon of Oldenburg, provides detailed information about the deteriorating state of Milton’s health and vision during these months, the quotidian diplomatic duties and frustrations of his busy public life, and the fact that on 6 March 1652 he was totally blind. On 2 May 1652 his daughter Deborah was born, and three days later his twentyseven-year-old wife Mary died; his son John, fifteen months old, died about six weeks later. Milton’s great “Sonnet XVI,” beginning “When I consider how my light is spent, / Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide” (1652), fuses emotional intensity and high art, as Milton wrestles with a painful

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dilemma: blinded in the prime of life, he cannot now work as he would have wished in the service of God and country, although it is evident that coping strategies and a good support network soon allowed him to continue his labors. His sonnet “To the Lord General Cromwell” (May 1652) responds to proposals by prominent Independent ministers to enforce belief in fifteen fundamental doctrines. A sonnet to his friend Sir Henry Vane (“To Sir Henry Vane the Younger”) praises him especially for knowing that religion and civil order must be separate. About this time Roger Williams, denounced in England and New England for supporting complete religious toleration, taught Milton Dutch and learned from him “many more languages.” In August 1652 the anonymous Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum Adversus Parricidas Anglicanos [The Cry of the Royal Blood to Heaven Against the English Parricides] appeared, supporting Salmasius and viciously attacking Milton. Generally attributed to Alexander More, pastor and professor of church history in Amsterdam, its true author was the English royalist Peter [Pierre] Du Moulin, the younger. In English versions of “Psalms i–viii” (8 –15 August 1653) Milton cries out with the psalmist for God’s protection for his nation and for himself against slandering enemies. Preparing his answer to More, Milton collected salacious tidbits of international gossip about More’s seductions of Salmasius’s maidservant and others; he did not credit his few correspondents who questioned or denied More’s authorship. Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda (c. 30 May 1654) mixes diatribes against More, Salmasius, Charles I, and the English royalists with autobiographical passages that answer the Clamor’s attacks; it also mixes praises of Oliver Cromwell as worthiest to rule along with admonitions to him to support church disestablishment, broad toleration, and press freedom. With extended praises of other named and unnamed worthies as deserving to share power, Milton reimagines the Protectorate as an aristocratic republic. His Pro Se Defensio (8 August 1655) responds to More’s self-defense in Fides Publica and its Supplement with relentless denigration of More as a womanizing scoundrel and an awkward defense of the mistaken attribution of Clamor. Milton wrote for Cromwell impassioned denunciations and calls for Protestant unity in many letters and speeches to foreign governments, occasioned by the slaughter of the Waldensians by the Duke of Savoy in April 1655. His great “Sonnet XV” (“On the Late Massacre in Piedmont”) (May–June 1655) conflates graphic details from eyewitness re-

ports of the fighting, burning, pillaging, and savage butchery of men, women, and infants with echoes of biblical prophetic denunciation. He transforms the sonnet into a jeremiad responding to an event of tragic or epic proportions. During the Protectorate Milton received visits from friends and former pupils, some of whom served as occasional amanuenses: Lady Ranelagh, Cyriack Skinner, Richard Jones, Andrew Marvell, and Marchamont Nedham. He met and corresponded with scholars from England and abroad: Moses Wall, Henry Oldenburg, Emery Bigot, Lieuwe van Aitzema, Leonard Philaras, Peter Heimbach, Johan Lassenius, and Henry de Brass, who invited Milton’s opinion of Tacitus and Sallust when he was probably completing The History of Britain to the Norman Conquest. In the winter of 1655/56 Milton wrote sonnets to Cyriack Skinner (“Sonnet XVIII”) and Edward Lawrence (“Sonnet XVII”), son of Henry Lawrence, the president of Cromwell’s Council of State, praising the delights and value of recreation and affording a glimpse of his social evenings with these young friends. Another sonnet to Skinner on the three years’ anniversary of Milton’s total blindness (“To Mr. Cyriack Skinner upon his Blindness”) affirms his pride in having sacrificed his eyes in the service of liberty. On 12 November 1656 Milton, nearly forty-eight years old, married twenty-eight-year-old Katherine Woodcock. On 19 October 1657 she gave birth to a daughter but died in early February 1658; on 17 March the infant, named for her mother, died. If Katherine was, as is probable, the subject of Milton’s “Sonnet XIX” (“Methought I saw my late espoused saint”), he found in her “Love, sweetness, goodness” and delight. The final two lines, arguably the most poignant in all of Milton’s poetry (“But O as to embrace me she inclined / I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night”), underscore profound ironies: night and sleep allowed a partial escape in vision from sightlessness and lost love; the new day brings back the dark night of absence, blindness, and desolation. In September 1657 Milton obtained the assistant he had earlier requested, Andrew Marvell. That he felt some ambivalence toward Cromwell is suggested by the fact that he offered no word of praise or advice to him after 1654, and perhaps by his publication of The Cabinet-Council (May 1658), a collection of Machiavellian political maxims erroneously attributed to Sir Walter Ralegh. Also, while Marvell and John Dryden (who also worked for a time in Cromwell’s secretariat) produced laudatory funeral elegies at Cromwell’s death on 3 September

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1658, Milton’s muse did not even rise to an epitaph. He was allotted nine shillings, six pence to buy mourning attire and may have walked in the funeral procession, led by Marvell. After Cromwell’s death and the succession of his son Richard Cromwell as Protector, Milton brought out a new edition of Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (early October 1658), reiterating republican theory and with a postscript asserting the work’s usefulness to teach Englishmen now to value their “civil freedom” won a decade ago. Though he thought the Purged Parliament imperfect, he welcomed its restoration on 6 May 1659 by a faction of army officers “after a short but scandalous night of interruption”—apparently indicating his disillusionment with Oliver and preference for the republic, “without single person or house of lords” (The Readie and Easie Way). Also, Milton soon prepared two treatises urging his radical views on the separation of church and state. A Treatise of Civil Power (c. 16 February 1659) defends religious liberty for all Protestants, and the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings (August 1659) argues forcefully for the abolition of tithes. After May 1659 Milton proposed five models of government geared to the rapidly changing circumstances and concerned above all with staving off a Stuart restoration to the throne, which would abolish religious liberty. He proposed to perpetuate whatever legislature or council was in place, however faulty, along with some kind of federal system as a hedge against tyranny by the perpetual legislature and as a means of shaping a republican culture and citizenry. It would diffuse to the regions the administration of civil justice, election of judges and other officers by the (well-affected) people, reform of the law, and maintenance of schools for teaching all arts and sciences. His unpublished Letter to a Friend, written after the army expelled the Purged Parliament again on 13 October 1660, reluctantly proposed a plan like the one the army put in place. His unpublished Proposalls of Certaine Expedients (late November or early December) joined a chorus of calls for restoring and filling up the Purged Parliament. The first version of The Readie and Easie Way (early March 1660) would have the Purged Parliament, which had been restored once more on 26 December 1659, co-opt other members and become the perpetual legislature; but after General George Monck on 21 February 1660 brought back the members of Parliament excluded in Pride’s Purge, Milton added a preface urging that the reconstituted Long Parliament become a perpetual legislature. An (unpublished) letter to Monck, the

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“Present Means, and Brief Delineation” (March 1660), urges him to bypass his recent order calling for writs for new elections on traditional lines and instead to have local councils of the well-affected select members of Parliament for a permanent Grand Council. Brief Notes upon a Late Sermon (c. 7–15 April) comments on an inflammatory sermon by Matthew Griffith that blatantly asserted regal absolutism and divine right; here, reluctantly, Milton joins with those urging Monck to become protector or king for “the space of a reign or two.” On the eve of the Restoration Milton published at his own expense from a clandestine press the much enlarged second edition of The Readie and Easie Way. He ends with an impassioned jeremiad. After Parliament voted the king’s restoration on 1 May 1660, Milton lost his savings, about £1,200, and stood in danger of losing his life. He went into hiding at the home of an unidentified friend in Bartholomew Close until Parliament decided who to exempt (ultimately 102 people) from the amnesty that the king had promised at Breda (see Declaration of Breda). Milton’s name was floated as one to be exempted but was dropped, thanks to maneuvers by friends. After the amnesty was proclaimed on 29 August, Milton took temporary lodgings in Red Lion Square, Holborn, but was arrested and imprisoned for some weeks that autumn; he applied for a pardon under the Act of Oblivion and was released around 17 December, with large fees of £150 assessed. He moved to Jewin Street with his daughters: Anne, fifteen; Mary, thirteen; and Deborah, nine. Edward Phillips implies that all of them could read and states that Milton taught the two younger ones to read to him in several languages—Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, and French—with exact pronunciation though without understanding. Milton’s finances were strained and his daughters resented the reading and their condition, deprived of youthful pleasures, comforts, and prospects for marriage. They rebelled openly in 1662, stealing from the household expenses and selling their father’s books. When his good friend Sir Henry Vane was beheaded in June 1662, George Sikes’s biography, published almost immediately, featured Milton’s sonnet to Vane. On 24 February 1663, at St. Mary Aldermary, fifty-four-year-old Milton married Elizabeth Minshull, then twenty-four; reportedly, she could read and write well. Though their union began as a marriage of convenience arranged by Milton’s physician, Nathan Paget, it seems to have been happy. Milton then moved to a house with a large garden in Artillery Walk leading to Bunhill

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Fields, his London residence for the rest of his life. Reportedly, he took pleasure in long walks, in conversation and repartee, and in playing the organ. He continued to write, and Paradise Lost was taking shape. Edward Phillips claims that Milton began the poem around 1658 and finished it around 1663, though he probably continued to make revisions; Phillips also claims responsibility for correction and oversight of the manuscript. Milton’s program of reading and writing was subject to the chance visits of friends and students; Thomas Ellwood, a young Quaker, read and wrote for him in exchange for Latin lessons in 1662 and 1663, between periods of imprisonment. Reportedly, upon waking in the morning Milton would call out to be “milked” of the lines he had ready — sometimes forty at a time. Milton claimed that his poetic vein flowed only for six months of the year, leaving time for his other major project, De Doctrina Christiana. It reprises, often in very similar terms, the heterodox doctrines (antitrinitarianism, Arminianism, monism, and creation ex deo), the several extreme positions (divorce for incompatibility, strict separation of church and state), and the basic principles (reason, liberty, charity) that inform his earlier prose works and his epic poetry. In the summer of 1665 the return of plague prompted a general exodus from the city. Milton’s area was one of the hardest hit. He moved in July with his family to a small cottage in Chalfont St. Giles (see Milton Cottage), found for him by Thomas Ellwood, who was given the manuscript of Paradise Lost to read sometime after 1 August. In February or early March 1666 Milton returned to Artillery Walk; sometime after 25 June, Ellwood visited him and was shown part or all of Paradise Regained. The great fire that raged 2 – 6 September 1666, destroying two-thirds of London, was stopped by the city wall not far from Milton’s street. Paradise Lost, a Poem in Tenne Bookes was available by November 1667. Milton and his publisher Samuel Simmons signed the first recorded contract about author’s rights: it called for immediate payment of £5 to Milton and £5 more when each of the first three editions reached fifteen hundred. Simmons made the second payment on 26 April 1669. The licenser, Thomas Tomkyns, suspected treason in lines 594 –99 of book 1 referring to eclipses that augur changes and perplex monarchs, but he was prevailed upon to give his Imprimatur. At some point Milton decided on a ten-book format, distinguishing his poem from the twelve-book Virgilian epic of conquest and empire and the Virgilian he-

roic mode appropriated by royalists before and after the Restoration, and associating it instead with Lucan’s Pharsalia, or the Civil War and its republican heroes. In 1669 or 1670 Milton’s daughters left home; Anne and Mary were apprenticed to learn embroideries in gold and silver, and Deborah became a companion to an Irish aristocrat, Lady Merian. In part to realize additional income, Milton published Accedence Commenc’t Grammar, Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio, and The History of Britain (c. 1 November 1670), which had some material censored and the Digression omitted; its frontispiece is William Faithorne’s engraved portrait of Milton at age sixty-two. Milton appreciated the attentive care of his wife Elizabeth and left his entire estate to her, about £1,000. Milton’s daughters had resented Elizabeth, fearing just this event. By all accounts, Milton suffered cheerfully painful attacks of gout that increased in frequency and duration. Paradise Regain’d. A Poem in IV Books. To Which Is Added Samson Agonistes (licensed in 1670) contains the brief epic that Ellwood saw in 1666 and a biblical tragedy with agons and choral odes in the Greek manner that was probably written soon after. Milton’s hero provides a model of nonviolent yet active and forceful resistance to the Restoration church and state. In Samson Agonistes, a warrior hero undergoes a painful process of self-analysis and repentance, culminating in a catastrophic act that destroys his people’s enemies. Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence for Roman Catholics and some dissenters (March 1672) prompted Milton’s Of True Religion (c. 6 May 1673). It identifies Catholicism as a clear and present danger for political and religious reasons but urges an inclusive toleration of Protestant dissent, specifically including Milton’s own heterodoxies—Arianism, Arminianism, and Anabaptism. A new edition of his shorter poems (Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions, c. 24 November 1673) retains those published in 1645 and adds twenty-two new English poems and two in Latin, as well as Of Education, but the sonnets to Fairfax, Cromwell, Vane, and Skinner could not be included. Early in 1674 Milton published his college Prolusiones as well as thirty-one private letters from 1625 to 1656. That summer he translated an official Latin document announcing the election of John [ Jan] III Sobieski as king of Poland, emphasizing the elective monarchy, a king replete with all military and civic virtues, and especially the coronation oath guaranteeing the people’s liberties. A new edition of Paradise Lost in twelve books (6 July 1674)

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places that epic in the Virgilian tradition, contesting Virgil’s appropriation by court poets. The front matter contains a portrait by William Dolle from the Faithorne engraving and two commendatory poems: “Paradisum Amissam Summi Poetae” [On the Paradise Lost of John Milton Consummate Poet], by the physician Samuel Barrow, and “On Paradise Lost,” by Milton’s good friend Marvell, who casts himself as a skeptic won by degrees to recognize the sublimity of Milton’s achievement. Milton died on 9 or 10 November 1674, evidently from renal failure associated with gout. He was buried on 12 November in St. Giles Without Cripplegate. See Campbell and Corns (2008), Hill (1977), Lewalski (2003), Masson (1859 –94), Parker (1996).

Barbara K. Lewalski

Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings. Milton, work of prose; full title, Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church. Wherein Is Also Discours’d of Tithes, Church-fees, Church-revenues; and Whether Any Maintenance of Ministers Can Be Settl’d by Law. Printed by “T.N.” in early to mid-August 1659 and published by Livewell Chapman, it participates in the renewed debate over tithes that had greeted the restoration of the Purged Parliament. Although the Parliament had voted on 27 June for the continuation of tithes, Milton may have felt that the question was still open or he may in fact have composed his tract earlier. In its argument against the corrupting influence of tithes or compulsory maintenance of the clergy, the tract is a companion piece to Milton’s Treatise of Civil Power, on the dangers of force in religion. Milton dedicates the Likeliest Means to the restored Purged Parliament, which he praises lavishly as “authors and best patrons of religious and civil libertie,” despite his earlier harsh strictures on them and despite their own disinclination to provide the kind of toleration and separation of church and state that he envisions. Grounding his argument largely on scriptural exegesis, Milton delineates the abuses of the “Simonious decimating clergy” and proposes a purely voluntary system of support, modeled on Christ and the apostles, who went about preaching by faith alone. The plain style of the tract underscores its main point: scripture is open and apparent to all, hence negating the need for a hierarchy of learned clergy. Milton insists that there is no scriptural warrant for enforced tithes.

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Milton also moves away from strict scriptural exegesis to note that England is the only Protestant country to continue with enforced tithes and to propose that the clergy could take up trades like everyone else. While restating sectarian arguments against tithes, Milton focuses uniquely on the corrupting influence of hire and evinces a strain of harsh anticlericalism seen from his earliest antiprelatical tracts. See Corns (1992, 1998).

Laura L. Knoppers

Lilburne, John (c. 1614 –1657). Pamphleteer, public dissident and agitator, and champion of legal rights and liberties. He was first imprisoned in 1638 for importing forbidden books from Holland. Released on the eve of the First Civil War, he fought for Parliament and became a lieutenant colonel. Lilburne sided with the Puritans and the Independents until 1646 when he formed what would become the Leveller movement, represented by left-wing politicians and populist radicals (see Levellers). Their belief in universal grace and human rights gave rise to a radical social philosophy that anticipated the fundamentals of modern democracy. After the collapse of the Leveller movement, Lilburne was tried for treason in 1649 but was acquitted. In 1652 he was exiled to the Netherlands but returned illegally to England in 1653 and was tried and imprisoned the same year. Lilburne died a convert to Quakerism (see Quakers) shortly after his release from prison. Significant differences between Lilburne and Milton exist. The Order Book of the Council of State, which outlines Milton’s tasks from 22 March 1649 at the beginning of his post as Secretary for Foreign Tongues, indicates he was “appointed to make some observations upon a Paper lately printed, called Old and New Chains,” that is, Englands New Chains Discovered and The Second Part of Englands New-Chaines Discovered. The latter appeared two days before the parliamentary order. These manifestoes attack the new regime that betrayed the revolutionary cause and failed to implement the recommendations in the “Agreement of the People.” In 1652 Lilburne commended to Oliver Cromwell and Parliament A Defense of the People of England by the “valiant and learned Champion Mr. MILTON.” He quoted a substantial section from Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio in English, a passage that resonates with pleas for the preservation of national liberties, though in a critique of the

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Cromwellian republican government, which Milton at this time would not have endorsed. See Loewenstein (2001), ODNB.

Elizabeth Sauer

Lipsius, Justus [Lips, Joost] (1547–1606). NeoStoic scholar. He was born in the Brabant, the son of the Overijsche town bailiff. Educated at the Jesuit college in Cologne and at Louvain, he abjured his Catholicism to take the chair of rhetoric and history at the Lutheran University of Jena in 1572. He returned to Cologne in 1574, completing that year his edition of Publius Cornelius Tacitus. Now a Calvinist, Lipsius began a twelve-year tenure at the University of Leiden as professor of history and law. He reaffirmed his Catholicism in 1592 as professor of Latin and history at Louvain and in 1605 became an honorary member of the Brabant state council. In humanist fashion, Lipsius sought to reconcile classical Stoicism with Christianity; the resulting neo-Stoicism, promulgated in De Constantia (1584), was his effort to mediate the political and religious conflicts of his era. Milton’s direct references to Lipsius are few. Although Milton’s virtuous characters are Stoic in their willingness either to contend against spiritual oppression or defiantly to endure it, he parts with Stoicism by believing that self-reliance is finally self-defeating because true constancy means reliance upon God alone. Christopher Baker

Livy [Titus Livius] (59 B.C.– A.D. 17). Roman historian. Born in Patavium (present-day Padua), he witnessed the transition of Rome from republic to imperial state, which profoundly affected his approach to Roman history. He began writing Ab Urbe Condita [From the Founding of the City] around 29 b.c., as Octavius Caesar—soon to be officially titled Augustus— consolidated his power. Livy incorporates myths into his historical accounts, expressing and examining Roman identity, and occasionally refers to contemporary events. Thirty-five of Livy’s 142 books survive; fragments of several books and notes on all but three still exist. Caesar Augustus may have provided patronage for the project, despite his concern—noted later by Publius Cornelius Tacitus—that Livy sympathized with his rivals (Annals 4:34). Livy laments his nation’s ethical decline and sees the Rome of his time as working its own downfall (Ab Urbe Condita 1), powerfully conveying nostalgia for the republic. He died in his native city.

Several early modern writers found his tributes to republicanism attractive, including Niccolò Machiavelli in his Discorsi [Discourses] (completed 1517, published 1531) on the first ten books of Livy’s history. Passages from the Discorsi feature prominently in Milton’s Commonplace Book, notably on the subject of kings. According to John Aubrey, Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips considered his uncle’s “being so conversant in Livy and the Rom[an] authors” a primary source for Milton’s attacks on monarchy. In Areopagitica, Milton cites Augustus’s reported refusal to suppress Livy’s work. He notes the ancient historian’s social contract view of the deposition of monarchs in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, drawing upon the beginning of Ab Urbe Condita 2. Livy is Milton’s authority in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio for establishing the sovereignty of the Roman people. Livy also provides a precedent for Milton’s use of legendary materials in his History of Britain. Stephen M. Buhler

Locke, John (1632 –1704). Philosopher. Born in Wrington, Somerset, he was educated at Westminster and Oxford University (B.A. 1656, M.A. 1658, M.B. 1675). During the 1660s he was a close associate of Robert Boyle and Thomas Sydenham, and in 1668 he became a member of the Royal Society. Shortly after meeting Anthony Ashley Cooper (later First Earl of Shaftesbury) in 1666, he entered his household in London and, abandoning positions he expressed in earlier unpublished writings, wrote but did not publish An Essay Concerning Toleration (1667). Supporting the toleration of dissenters (but not Catholics) championed by Ashley Cooper, Locke’s argument in this essay has much in common with protoleration arguments of the Levellers, Roger Williams, and John Goodwin. Wishing to participate in broader European discussions of epistemology, theology, and natural science but also to provide a foundation for some of his political commitments, Locke in 1671 drafted a work he revised and expanded before having it published anonymously as An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689; dated 1690). In 1689 Locke’s major explicitly political work also appeared anonymously. He had written most of Two Treatises of Government (dated 1690) during the Exclusion Crisis (1679 –1682), aiming to establish a position within the juridical tradition of political thought and to support the political movement of Shaftesbury and his followers, who at this time came to be known as Whigs. Working within a framework

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of Christian natural law, Locke argues against Robert Filmer and others that political power derives from those who are to be subject to it, and that it is properly exercised to preserve their “Lives, Liberties and Estates.” Should this power be improperly used, it devolves from government to the governed, who may then rightly entrust it as they see fit. The argument is interrelated with Locke’s epistemology and his celebrated presentation of arguments from his earlier unpublished protoleration essay in the Epistola de Tolerantia (Gouda, 1689), translated and published by William Popple as A Letter Concerning Toleration (London, 1689). Though Locke has commonly been seen as the father of an Enlightenment that rejected the thinking of Puritan revolutionaries such as Milton, the two authors agree on several important religious and political points. Defending the regicide in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), for example, Milton asserts that all men are naturally free; that all men are naturally endowed with rights or powers of self-preservation and self-defense; that political power resides naturally in the people who may entrust it to their governors with the aim of protecting themselves; and that those to whom it is entrusted are to exercise it solely for the common good. All of these assertions may be found in Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. Locke, however, wished to distance himself from Milton’s argument that even after the people have entrusted power to magistrates, the people retain the right to “reassume it to themselves” and alter government as they see fit, regardless of whether or not the magistrates have violated that trust. There is also considerable agreement between Locke and Milton on the crucial issue of toleration. William W. Walker

Lollards. Specifically, followers of John Wycliffe (fourteenth century). In early modern parlance, however, the term also more generally referred to any heretic—as when Christopher Marlowe mentions “loathed Lollards” in Dr. Faustus. Invoking the specific sense, John Foxe fashioned the Lollards as a Reformation vanguard, and Milton held them in a similar esteem. As a movement, Lollardy remained strong from Geoffrey Chaucer’s time to the sixteenth century, and the Interregnum relaxation of print regulations created a renaissance in Lollard literature. This literature, however, likely shared little with Wycliffe’s Lollardy: the only defining tenet of Lollardy is its lack of defining tenets. Thus, any overlaps between Milton and Lollardy—the

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repudiation of images, the primacy of scripture— are overlaps that bridge most Protestant sects. Milton refers to Lollards rarely and ambiguously. In The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings, he mocks a sanctimonious “divine” who acts “lollard indeed over his elbow-cushion.” In The Reason of Church-Government Milton remembers those “call’d Lollards and Hussites” are now “term’d Puritans and Brownists,” constructing a continuum of nonconformist belief. Following his use of Wycliffe, Milton suggests the Lollards’ best virtue is not doctrinal, but national—Englishness. Despite the link of nationalism, Milton seldom mentions the Lollards, especially when compared with his interest in similar groups, such as the Waldensians. Craig T. Fehrman

London. In Milton’s time, the City of London proper stretched along the north bank of the River Thames for about a mile—its suburbs nearly trebled this. Its total population rose from around 200,000 in 1600, to 375,000 in 1650, to 490,000 in 1700. Cheap new housing was in the east, while elite developments grew westwards along the Strand. By the turn of the eighteenth century London rivaled Paris as the largest European city and outsized other British cities by a factor of ten. Most new citizens were young, single, and mainly male migrants from rural areas (an average of six thousand moved to the city yearly), whose numbers offset the effects of plague outbreaks in 1603, 1625, 1636, and 1665, when about one in five citizens died. The higher ranks of society came in response to London’s unique dual role of capital city and great port; in the city, they had access to the highest law courts, the Exchequer, and church and court patronage. By 1625 the number of gentle postholders at court had tripled, as had the number of peers resident in the city (thirty in the 1560s); one thousand students were registered at the Inns of Court; and the number of members of Parliament nearly doubled to five hundred. Parliaments sat longer and more frequently, and each member arriving in London would bring an average household of ten. City government was nominally split by religious, civic, and trade functions but tended to act through the parish. There were 111 parishes, governed each by churchwardens selected by vestries open to parishioners. The Court of Common Hall, composed of all liverymen, nominated candidates for the position of Lord Mayor; the Court of Lord Mayor and Aldermen acted as the executive body

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London

in civic affairs. City ordinances were made by the Court of Common Council, elected yearly at the wardmote by all freemen. Trade inside the city walls was governed by the twelve great livery companies and up to one hundred smaller liveries and guilds, each of which required a master, a number of wardens, and numerous assistants. Such institutional layering gave citizens substantial and varied representation, and householders could expect to hold office at some level. For parliamentary elections the city had a freeman franchise: nearly half the adult male citizens voted. The fact that contested parliamentary elections were not uncommon attests to the city’s developed political understanding. Though the problems of the capital were those of the ghetto—high mortality, unemployment, crime—London’s institutions proved able to absorb dissent without bloodshed, even when opinion was split in the early 1640s over support for crown or Parliament. A high level of education powered London’s mercantile success: by 1620 about 70 percent of men and 20 percent of women were able to sign their names. At a more advanced level, institutions such as Gresham College, the City Companies, and the Inns of Court provided—with the universities— centers for mercantile and speculative mathematics, the new experimental science, and medical research. Its citizens proudly reflected on this Troynovant, in topographies and histories, satires and sermons on its faults, cony-catching tracts and ballads on its new immigrants, citizen and city comedies on its mercantile spirit, and the Lord Mayor’s pageants and spectacles. Except for Milton’s college and continental years, he lived all his life in the cities of London and Westminster (the latter when he was a public servant). He was born in Bread Street, Cheapside, and attended St. Paul’s School from 1620 to 1625. When the family moved to Hammersmith (1632) and then Horton (1635), he continued to visit the capital for mathematics and music lessons. After his return from the Continent in late 1639, he stayed initially in St. Bride’s Churchyard, then moved to more spacious lodgings in Aldersgate Street in 1640. The reconciliation with his first wife Mary Powell in 1645 was marked by leasing a large house in the Barbican, which had room for pupils and in-laws. In 1647, when the latter left, Milton took a smaller house in High Holborn, backing on to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. His appointment as Secretary for Foreign Tongues in 1649 gave him chambers in Whitehall, but their reallocation at the end of 1651 forced Milton to move to a house

in Petty-France, Westminster. At the Restoration, Milton was concealed in a house at Bartholomew Close, Smithfield, for four months; liberty saw him briefly at a house in High Holborn, near Red Lion Fields, then one in Jewin Street, St. Giles Without Cripplegate. His final move, about 1670, was to nearby Artillery Walk, Bunhill Row; he was buried in the church of St. Giles Without Cripplegate. Though Milton was a Londoner and his father was extensively involved in the Scriveners’ Company, he never held office in the city. Ceri Sullivan

Long Parliament. Parliament called by Charles I on 3 November 1640. Its length, viewed strictly, extended until its eventual dissolution in 1660. Charles had dissolved the Short Parliament soon after it had assembled, but the continuing disasters of his aggressive policy toward his Scottish subjects constrained him to try again to seek from Parliament the vote of supply that he required in order to fund his war effort. The body that assembled on 3 November was no more inclined to be helpful without some redress of the malpractices allegedly committed during the 1630s and some consideration of a further reformation of the Church of England. This body sat through the worsening of relations between king and Parliament and the eventual outbreak of the First Civil War and put in place the machinery of government necessary to fund and administer the war effort. As relations with the king deteriorated, royal sympathizers among its members withdrew from both the House of Lords and the House of Commons, leaving the former depleted. Those who were left were for the most part skeptical about the toleration of more heterodox and radical sects, although there were reservations, founded on the Erastianism of influential members, about instituting the Presbyterian church government advocated by a majority of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, which it had established to advise on the further reformation of the Church of England. It oversaw the remodeling of the parliamentary armies into the highly effective New Model Army, under the command of Thomas Fairfax, assisted by Oliver Cromwell. However, as the First Civil War drew to a close in 1646, Parliament turned its attention to downscaling the armed forces. This measure, together with its resistance to widening toleration, put it on a collision course with the army leadership around Cromwell. Once Charles I was in custody, the issue of how best to proceed against him forced

Lucan [Marcus Annaeus Lucanus]

a crisis. Pride’s Purge in December 1648 excluded members resistant to the notion of the king’s trial, leaving the Purged Parliament, the body that came, much later, to be known as the Rump Parliament. It was this body that first employed Milton as a public servant. As the Restoration approached, the Purged Parliament was recalled, and in February 1660, under pressure from George Monck, it readmitted those surviving members who had been excluded in 1648. This body, the reconstituted and reconvened Long Parliament, dissolved itself in March 1660, preparing the way for new elections, which led in turn to the Convention Parliament and the return of Charles II. Those events provide the backdrop to Milton’s Readie and Easie Way. See Russell (1995).

Thomas N. Corns

Louis XIII (1601–1643). King of France (1610 – 1643). After his father’s assassination, his mother, Marie de’ Medici, governed as regent. Louis struggled against her domination, finally sending her into exile in 1631. In 1615 he had married the Spanish Infanta, Anne of Austria; however, in 1635, he and Cardinal Armand Richelieu offered an alliance to the Dutch against the Spaniards, while Protestant England signed a treaty with Catholic Spain to invade the United Provinces, which Milton found unsafe, unwary, and unchristian in Of Reformation and imputed to Archbishop William Laud. In a letter to Carlo Dati dated 21 April 1647, Milton said he was reading with pleasure his description of the funeral of Louis XIII. Christophe J.-B. Tournu

Louis XIV (1638 –1715). King of France (1643 – 1715). When his father, Louis XIII, died, his mother, Anne of Austria, assumed the regency, not without difficulty because of the Fronde of the Parliament of Paris (1648 –1653), which led him to a strong assertion of kingship. After Cardinal Jules Mazarin’s death in 1661 he governed alone through expert ministers he used as agents. Absolutism reached its height during his reign: Louis XIV perfected a complete reorganization of the kingdom, which was marked by a centralized bureaucracy, a flourishing economy, a reformed military, an aggressive foreign policy, and an extraordinary blossoming of culture. Yet after 1688, France was entangled in European wars, and his reign ended in disaster. As Latin secretary, Milton wrote several letters to Louis XIV. In 1655 he asked him to intercede in

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Savoy to stop religious persecutions, and again in 1658. Most often he complained about the illegal seizure of ships following the Treaty of Westminster (3 November 1655). Milton adroitly associated Louis XIV’s authority with justice. The tone is always reverential, and Louis XIV was deemed “our dearest Friend and Ally,” England being ready to promote both his public and private good. Christophe J.-B. Tournu

Lucan [Marcus Annaeus Lucanus] (39 – 65). Roman poet. He was born in Spain of an aristocratic family that included the philosopher Seneca. He became a favorite of the young emperor Nero. He published the first three books of his epic poem De Bello Civili [The Civil War] (later known as Pharsalia) two or three years before 65, when Nero forced him to commit suicide for his part in the Piso conspiracy. The epic, in ten books, survived unfinished. Until recently Lucan drew almost no attention as a Miltonic source, surprising in view of the shared theme of liberty between the two epic poets. Caesar, the boundlessly energetic villainous hero in Lucan’s poem, obviously resembles Satan in Paradise Lost. Indeed, Milton’s representation of Satan mirrors Lucan’s Caesar as early as “In Quintum Novembris” (48; Lucan 1.183). Satan’s voyage through Chaos echoes Caesar’s boat ride over the stormy Adriatic to Italy (book 5). The indeterminate matter of Chaos may originate in the mucky Syrtes on the Libyan coasts (book 9). The same book also contains a catalogue of fabulous serpents, the likely source of Milton’s Paradise Lost 10.521–33 (for example, Milton’s “amphisbaena dire,” PL 10.524, and Lucan’s “gravis amphisbaena,” 9.719). In The History of Britain Milton seems pleased to report Lucan’s claim that Caesar “turned his back in panic to the Britons.” No link between Lucan and Milton was made before the oddly perfunctory article by William Blissett in 1957, which remained unnoticed until Charles Martindale’s account. Neglect is no doubt owing to the exclusion of Lucan from received notions about epic since the nineteenth century. David Quint compares Lucan’s defeated republicans with Jesus in Paradise Regained; David Norbrook offers the fullest discussion of Lucan and Milton in the seventeenth-century political context. See Martindale (1986), Norbrook (1999a), Quint (1993).

Richard F. Hardin

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Lucretius [Titus Lucretius Carus]

Lucretius [Titus Lucretius Carus] (c. 99 – c. 55 B.C.). Roman poet. His major and only surviving work is De Rerum Natura [On the Nature of Things], which presents an overview of Epicurean philosophy. The precepts of Epicurus view civic religion and superstition as causes of social iniquities and individual anxiety; materialistic explanations of natural events offer correctives to these ills. During the Renaissance, the quality of the poem’s verse meant that its ideas could not be easily dismissed. Milton makes De Rerum Natura part of his Latin curriculum in Of Education. In Areopagitica he observes that Cicero, no friend to Epicureanism, nevertheless ensured the poem’s publication after Lucretius’s death. Like other Christian poets interested in cosmology and creation, such as Guillaume de Salluste, Seigneur Du Bartas, and Edmund Spenser, Milton felt compelled to imitate Lucretius’s verse and to refute his arguments. Borrowings from Lucretius are evident in Paradise Lost 1.507, where Milton quotes a phrase from the account of how lovers idealize the objects of their desire (De Rerum Natura 4.1170) in his catalogue of false gods, in the description at 7.453 –74 of life forms emerging from the earth (see De Rerum Natura 5.788 – 806), and in the depiction of how humankind first discovered metals in 11.564 –73 (see De Rerum Natura 5.1241– 68). Stephen M. Buhler

Luke. Book of the New Testament. This third gospel is traditionally and still generally ascribed to “Luke, the beloved physician” (Col. 4:14), gentile associate of the apostle Paul and probable author of Acts of the Apostles (cf. Acts 1:1–2, Luke 1:1– 4). Usually dated between a.d. 63 and 80, Luke derives much material from the gospel of Mark; many argue that Luke’s other primary source is the hypothetical document Q. In any case, Luke displays meticulous research and contains significant information not present in the other gospels, including certain events surrounding John the Baptist’s birth and Jesus’s birth and early life, Jesus’s sending out the seventy disciples, Mary and Martha’s home (10:38 – 42), Zacchaeus the tax collector, and the repentant thief. The parables of the Good Samaritan, the Lost Sheep, the Prodigal Son, the Rich Man and Lazarus, the Persistent Widow, and the Pharisee and the Publican are also unique to Luke. Milton’s use of Luke is most prominent in Paradise Regained, whose structure is based on Luke’s account of Satan’s temptation of Jesus and whose portrayal of Mary, mother of Jesus, is derived from Luke. James Sims finds seventy references to Luke in Paradise Regained and fifty in Paradise Lost; De Doctrina Christiana contains three hundred according to Michael Bauman. “Sonnet IX” clearly alludes to Luke 10:42 and Mary’s choice of “that good part.” See Bauman (1989), Haskin (1994), Sims (1962).

David V. Urban

Ludlow. Castle and town at the confluence of the Tene and Corve rivers in Shropshire, fortified since at least early Norman times. Ludlow Castle was the largest of the thirty-two castles along the Welsh border and the strategic center of the region. During the Tudor-Stuart period it was the seat of the Council of Wales and the Marches, the residence of the Lord President, and the chief legal and administrative site of western England and Wales. In 1633 John Egerton, First Earl of Bridgewater, was appointed Lord President by Charles I and took up residence in the castle the following year. To celebrate his arrival, a masque by Milton (A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle) was performed on Michaelmas night (29 September), probably in the Great Hall of the castle, and was attended by representatives of the town. The Council of Wales and the Marches was dissolved by the Long Parliament in 1641, and the castle changed hands several times during the war that followed. Tom Bishop

Luther, Martin (1483 –1546). Founder of the German Reformation. He was born in Eisleben in Saxony and educated locally before moving to Magdeburg and thereafter the University of Erfurt. He was ordained a priest of the Roman Catholic Church in 1507 and in 1508 became a lecturer in moral philosophy at the newly founded University of Wittenberg. After a visit to Rome, he returned to a chair in biblical studies at Wittenberg, which he retained for the rest of his life. Wittenberg was his power base and his place of refuge. In 1517 he issued ninety-five theses against the church’s sale of indulgences (and the concept of salvation implicit in the process). His rift with Rome rested on both a critique of alleged malpractices and major differences in soteriology. He was excommunicated in 1521 and spent some time in hiding. Thereafter, starting with Saxony, his reformed Christianity widely influenced the religious practices of northern Germany and beyond. Luther established the critical schism from Rome, and the points of distinction between Lutheranism

“Lycidas”

and Catholicism— on salvation through faith alone, on purgatory (or its absence), on married priests, on vernacular translation of the Bible, on the responsibilities of individual believers—pervaded all subsequent forms of European Protestantism and were simply assumed by Milton to be correct. See also Philipp Melanchthon. See ODCC, ODR.

Thomas N. Corns

Lutheranism. Both a reform movement within the Roman Catholic Church and the orthodox Protestant Church which grew from that movement. The name comes from Martin Luther, who initiated Lutheranism on 31 October 1517 when he nailed his famous ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenberg, where he was a professor of biblical studies. Luther advocated three main tenets, all of which can be understood within the context of his criticism of the papacy. First is sola scriptura, or the belief that the scriptures—as opposed to tradition or the church—are the only authority necessary in matters of salvation. The Bible, according to Lutheranism, is the inspired word of God and possesses perfection (it is complete and absolute), perspicuity (it is clear and plain to all readers), and efficacy (it is meaningful in and of itself ). Anything not found in the Bible, therefore, either is not essential to salvation or is an active hindrance to salvation. Second is sola gratia, or the belief that one is saved by God’s grace and that that grace preexists any meritorious action on the part of an individual. This leads to the third of Luther’s tenets, sola fide, or the belief that salvation comes only through an individual’s faith and not through good works. Subtending both sola gratia and sola fide is Luther’s staunch anti-Pelagianism, his belief that humankind, without God’s grace, is wholly sinful and incapable of good works. Although Lutheranism was the seminal movement of the Reformation, it walked and continues to walk a middle line between the radical, reformed churches that succeeded it and the Roman Catholicism it sought to reform. Lutheranism affirms the authority of scripture and accepts the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds. It rejects any symbolic interpretation of the Bible or spiritualist theologies, such as were prevalent in those reformed churches that trace their lineage through Ulrich Zwingli or Jean Calvin. Milton does not seem to have been directly influenced by Lutheranism, although his theology, like all Protestant and Puritan theologies, bears the stamp of Luther’s importance. Most notably, per-

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haps, Milton shares with Lutheranism a belief in the primacy and authority of scripture. Linda B. Tredennick

“Lycidas.” Pastoral elegy by Milton. It was first published in Justa Edovardo King Naufrago (Cambridge, 1638), a commemorative collection of Greek, Latin, and English verse written by friends of Edward King, a fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, who drowned on 10 August 1637 and whom Milton had known while at the university. The second part of the volume (which bears a separate title, Obsequies to the Memorie of Mr. Edward King) presents thirteen poems in English, of which “Lycidas” (at 192 lines) is the longest and, presumably by design, the last. Only the initials “J.M.” were appended to the poem. “Lycidas” was published twice more during Milton’s life, though never again anonymously, first in Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645) and again in Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions (1673). These latter versions include some significant corrections of, and amendments to, the 1638 poem (incorporating an extra line: line 177), and they are also distinguished by the addition of a brief headnote explaining that “Lycidas” is a “monody” (a funeral song or ode performed by one person) in which “the author bewails a learned friend, unfortunately drowned” at sea in 1637, and which, “by occasion,” also “foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy then in their height.” This prefatory declaration is not published in the Justa volume, though a similar headnote (without reference to “corrupted clergy,” however) is extant in the Trinity Manuscript version of the poem, which also bears the inscription “Novemb: 1637,” suggesting when it was originally composed. King’s death may have provided the “occasion” for which Milton wrote “Lycidas,” but the poem’s visionary breadth and its unconventional style, with its digressions and disruptions, its irregular rhyme scheme, and its enigmatic shift from first to third person (as well as to a more regular meter and rhyme scheme) in the last eight lines, take it far beyond any occasional or typical versification of personal grief. The fact that “Lycidas” is a pastoral elegy enabled Milton to distance himself (and his reader) from any actual grief he may have felt over King’s death, through its self-conscious, highly artificial style. Lycidas is the name of a shepherd in Theocritus’s seventh Idyll, and it appears in the ninth of Virgil’s Eclogues, among other places. The poem conspicuously follows a long train of classical, Renaissance, and English sources, the identification

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“Lycidas”

of which scholars have found almost inexhaustible: among them are Theocritus’s first Idyll, Bion’s Lament for Adonis, The Lament for Bion, Virgil’s fifth and tenth Eclogues, Petrarch’s sixth and seventh Eclogues, and Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender. Michael Davies

Lycurgus (seventh century B.C. [traditional dates are earlier]). Spartan lawgiver (perhaps mythical). He was the subject of an ancient life by Plutarch, who paralleled his achievements with those of Numa, Rome’s second king. Milton in The

Reason of Church-Government avers that Lycurgus’s “statutes” proved “durably good to many ages” and conjectures that “Minos, Lycurgus, Numa” were “truly inspir’d as Moses.” In Eikonoklastes he applauds “the most just and renowned Laws of Lycurgus” for putting tyrannical kings to death. In Areopagitica (following Plutarch) Milton credits Lycurgus with first writing down Homer’s epics and with inviting the poet Thales to come to Sparta from Crete. He expresses surprise that the Spartans were “muselesse and unbookish” when Lycurgus himself “was so addicted to elegant learning.” John Leonard

M Machiavelli, Niccolò (1469 –1527). Public servant and political philosopher. A high-ranking public servant and diplomat when Florence was under republican government, he was dismissed on the restoration of ducal control under the Medici family. In retirement, he wrote Il Principe [The Prince] (1513), Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Livio [Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy] (c. 1515 – 1519), Dell’arte della Guerra [On the Art of War] (1519 –1520), and Istorie Fiorentine [A History of Florence] (c. 1520 –1525). Machiavelli writes from the assumption that republicanism is the best form of government, but his secular, nonprovidential perspective on political conduct focuses on Realpolitik. He soon acquired a hostile image, and his name became synonymous with “unscrupulous scheming villain.” However, his writing was studied carefully by the more intellectual English republican thinkers. In his Commonplace Book Milton drew most heavily on the Discorsi and was plainly studying it in the early 1650s, but some notes have been attributed to the early 1640s. Milton is very guarded about acknowledging Machiavelli in his published writing, however, and in An Apology Against a Pamphlet he alludes to the populist, negative view of “Machiavell.” See ODR.

Thomas N. Corns

Magna Carta [Magna Charta]. The charter of English personal and political liberties, obtained from King John in 1215. Frequently invoked in later disputes between monarchs and their subjects, it set limits to the executive powers of the crown and thus provided a basis for arguing that England’s Ancient Constitution was a mixed one and that royal absolutism on the model of much of continental Europe was alien to it. It affirmed that the powers of the monarch were bound by the laws of the land. Milton invokes it less frequently than one

would expect. A comment added to the second edition of Eikonoklastes perhaps suggests that his reservations rest in an appreciation of how difficult it was to hold monarchs to it without military or political strength. As he argues against Charles I’s claim to control the militia, he observes that “our Magna Charta . . . were but weak resistance against an armed Tyrant.” Thomas N. Corns

Malachi. Book of the Old Testament. One of the twelve “minor prophets,” it concludes the Old Testament in the English version. It seems to date from the late sixth century b.c. and apparently postdates the second building of the temple in Jerusalem. One verse assumed particular importance in the Christian tradition, since it was interpreted as a prophecy of the mission of John the Baptist (3:1). Milton returns to the text seven times in De Doctrina Christiana, and in substantial discussions he disputes the customary interpretation. See Bauman (1989), ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

Malatesti, Antonio (d. 1672). Florentine poet. Milton met him at the Florentine academy of the Svogliati during his visit to Italy in 1638 –1639. In September 1637 Malatesti composed an erotic sonnet sequence called La Tina equivoci rusticali and later decided to dedicate the collection al grande poeta inghilese Giovanni Milton Londra. The work seems to have remained in manuscript until the eighteenth century. Milton clearly remembered the compliment; he sent cordial greetings to Malatesti in a letter to Carlo Roberto Dati written nine years later. Thomas N. Corns

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Mammon

Mammon. Originally a Hebrew word signifying riches or profit, it became popularized as their embodiment in Christ’s Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 6:24). In Paradise Lost Mammon is “the least erected spirit that fell / From heaven” (1.679 – 80), so consumed with a desire for the gold serving as heaven’s pavement that he walks hunched or “downward bent” (1.681). He leads the excavation of hell, pleased to discover that the infernal soil truly contains in abundance the roots of all evil, or “treasures better hid” (1.688). This surfeit of everything Mammon covets informs his speech to the Satanic council, when he argues for contentment with the “hidden lustre, gems and gold” of hell (2.271) rather than for the “servile pomp” of heaven (2.257). His declining aspect may also suggest Robert Burton’s location of Mammon as prince of the lowest order of devils—“tempters in several kinds” (The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1927). Elsewhere, Milton evokes this temptive sense, as in Animadversions, and when, in Areopagitica, he recalls Edmund Spenser’s Mammon in book 2 of The Faerie Queene. Eric C. Brown

Manoa. The father of Samson; he appears as a character in Milton’s tragedy Samson Agonistes. In the biblical account the name of Samson’s father is first given in Judges 13:2 and is usually transliterated as “Manoah.” According to the Judges narrative, Manoah, in contrast to his wife, seems to have multiple difficulties understanding the angelic visitations that announce Samson’s birth ( Judg. 13:15 –25). In Samson Agonistes, the meeting between Samson and Manoa is the second of the five main encounters that make up the tragedy. Manoa’s aim is to “redeem” Samson from slavery by payment of money to the Philistine rulers. The play’s climactic action, in which Samson destroys himself and the Philistine nobility by pulling down the temple of Dagon, thus has the further consequence of rendering Manoa’s financial scheme futile. Phillip J. Donnelly

Manso, Giovanni Battista (1561–?1647). Poet and patron of the arts. He was the most distinguished of the closer acquaintances Milton made in Naples during his sojourn in Italy during 1638 – 1639. Manso escorted Milton around the city and accompanied him to the Palazzo Reale. Manso was a significant patron, of artists (including Caravaggio) and writers, most eminently Torquato Tasso

and Giovan Battista Marino. He was the founder of the Accademia degli Oziosi, whose name reflects a commitment to the learned leisure of classical otium. The particular enthusiasm of the Oziozi was experimental poetry. Manso composed a Latin distich in Milton’s honor, which Milton printed with other testimonia in Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645). Milton responded with a fine Latin poem, “Mansus.” In “Epitaphium Damonis” Milton again mentioned Manso’s kindness toward him (line 181). See Haan (1998).

Thomas N. Corns

“Mansus.” Poem by Milton. Composed in December 1638 before Milton’s departure from Naples, it is his panegyric of Giovanni Battista Manso, Marquis of Villa. Founder of the rigorous Accademia degli Oziosi, which met at his villa (at Puteoli), Manso was also in his day a famous poet and biographer (of Torquato Tasso and Giovan Battista Marino), as well as a Neapolitan Maecenas. In Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda Milton outlines the hospitality he received from Manso, which included a tour of Naples and the vice regent’s court as well as Manso’s visiting him at his lodgings. Manso was in the habit of presenting copies of his own works to departing visitors (as attested by Jacopo Gaddi), and in “Epitaphium Damonis” Milton recounts that he received from him “bina . . . pocula” (181-83), a likely reference to two books according to Michele De Philippis: Manso’s Erocallia (1628) and Poesie Nomiche (1635). Appended to the latter are Italian poems in Manso’s honor, to which “Mansus” bears some resemblances, while also responding to Manso’s two-line Latin “written Encomium” (Reason of Church-Government) composed in Milton’s honor and prefixed to Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645). See Haan (1998).

Estelle Haan

Mantovano, Battista [Mantuan] (1448 –1516). Neo-Latin poet. His ten Latin pastoral eclogues, first published in 1498, were widely influential. They helped to shape Edmund Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar, which Milton drew on in “Lycidas.” Milton had since childhood known Mantovano’s writing. His “Apologus de Rustico et Hero” closely imitates one of Mantovano’s fables. Thomas N. Corns

Marlowe, Christopher

marginalia. Milton’s handwritten marginalia are not widespread but concentrated in his copies of three Greek poets: Lycophron, Aratus, and above all Euripides. Printed marginalia in his own works are not his frequent practice and represent a smaller range of interaction between text and margin. They only explain or call witness, and do so in only two works. Those that accompany “Psalms lxxx– lxxxviii” (1648) seek to demonstrate his fidelity to the Hebrew (first eighteen side notes), then move toward interpretation, disambiguation, and appropriation (last eight). The many that accompany his History of Britain name sources. Each set of Milton’s marginalia fulfills its own purposes, with the outstanding purposes being those of the handwritten marginalia to the Greek poets. Whereas the marginalia to the Psalms explain source-text and version in a workmanlike way, and the historical and theological ones document authorities, those to Euripides—written when Milton first read his copy in the 1630s and then again in the 1640s—record a detailed and prolonged grappling with the meaning of an author whom he admires and respects, subjugating his own opinions and preferences to those of the ancient Greek master poet. The two volumes of Milton’s copy of Paulus Stephanus’s edition (1602) survive in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, albeit intertwined with the emendations of their next owner, Joshua Barnes, who in editing Euripides pays Milton the compliment of appropriation. See Hale (1997).

John K. Hale

Mark. Book of the New Testament. This second and shortest gospel has traditionally been attributed to Mark, an evangelist and associate of Peter. Later scholarship has inclined to see it as the earliest gospel and a possible source for Matthew and Luke. Milton cited it least of the gospels in De Doctrina Christiana, though he is drawn to discuss one verse in particular (13:32): “[Heaven and earth shall pass away. . . .] But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.” The text has implications for the inequalities between Father and Son (see PL 7.122 –23). But the passage also points toward the refusal of the Son in Paradise Regained to engage with Satan’s challenge to specify when or how his kingdom will come into being. Mark also supplies a clear formulation of the nature of saving faith associated with the role of baptism: “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth

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not shall be damned” (16:16), of which Milton remarks, somewhat optimistically, in De Doctrina Christiana, “Imagine that you hear God voicing his predestination in these terms: by this one sentence you will dispose of countless controversies.” See Bauman (1989), ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

Marlowe, Christopher (1564 –1593). Playwright and poet. His plays, successful in his own lifetime, include Tamburlaine the Great (first performed ?1587) and its second part (?1587), The Jew of Malta (1588), and Dr. Faustus (?1594). He was stabbed to death in circumstances that remain uncertain and controversial. His importance for Milton is a matter partly of style, partly of moral judgment. Both poets invest blank verse with a sense of heroic aspiration. This is largely due to the frequent masculine endings. But Marlowe’s “mighty line” differs from Milton’s “grand style” in one notable respect: Marlowe’s lines are mostly end-stopped, whereas Milton’s are run-on. Milton sustains long verse paragraphs by varying the placement of the caesura. Such variety is seldom found in Marlowe’s plays, but he does anticipate the Miltonic effect in his translation, Lucan’s First Book, especially in the epic catalogue. Marlowe also anticipates Milton in the way he uses similes simultaneously to exalt and undercut his antiheroes. Like Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Julius Caesar, Milton’s Satan is both rebel and tyrant—an overreacher who pushes blank verse to its limits as he bends language to his will. Adam and Eve share Faustus’s desire for forbidden knowledge. Critics have suspected both Marlowe and Milton of sympathizing with their hero-villains. William Blake famously wrote that Milton “was of the Devils party without knowing it.” Marlowe (who was suspected of atheism even in his own lifetime) may have been consciously hostile to Christianity. William Empson has praised both Marlowe and Milton for their alleged antipathy to Christianity. Other critics have tried to rescue both poets for orthodoxy. The issue is still contended. Milton’s allusions to Marlowe suggest that he was both thrilled and disturbed by the Elizabethan poet’s insolent hyperbole. Several allusions try to sanitize Marlowe. In his narrative poem Hero and Leander, Marlowe describes Hero’s beauty in terms that are comically hyperbolical: “And hands so pure, so innocent, nay such / As might have made heaven stoope to have a touch” (365 – 66). Milton echoes these lines at the end of A Masque Presented at

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Ludlow Castle (Comus) when he avers: “Or if Virtue feeble were, / Heaven itself would stoop to her” (1021–22). Milton’s heaven stoops with irresistible grace; Marlowe’s stoops to touch Hero up. In Paradise Lost, Milton appropriates Marlowe’s phrase “naked glory.” Marlowe had used these words to describe Venus’s comic (because futile) seductiveness (Hero and Leander, 12 –14). Milton invests Marlowe’s comic hyperboles with high seriousness. John Leonard

Marprelate, Martin. Name used by an anonymous author or authors between October 1588 and September 1589 on seven secretly printed pamphlets: The Epistle, The Epitome, Certaine Minerall and Metaphysicall Schoolpoints, Hay Any Worke for Cooper, Theses Martinianae, The Just Censure and Reproofe of Martin Junior, and The Protestatyon of Martin Marprelate. Debate over Marprelate’s identity has been vigorous: John Udall, John Penry, Job Throkmorton, and a collaboration of authors have all been linked to the tracts. Marprelate emphatically challenged the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England, and especially the rationales for that doctrine and discipline presented by John Bridges in A Defence of the Government Established in the Church of England (1587), by Thomas Cooper in An Admonition to the People of England (1589), and by John Whitgift in The Defense of the Aunswere (1574). Marprelate did not develop innovative theological positions, but instead popularized the reformist agenda familiar since the 1570s, with its emphasis on the lack of qualified episcopal clergy, the problems of nonresidency and pluralism, and the corrupt practices of clerical promotion. He advocated a Presbyterian system of church government that granted spiritual authority to pastors, doctors, elders, and deacons alone. Though Marprelate’s doctrines were commonplace, his satiric strategies proved sophisticated and influential, fusing mocklogic and wordplay with harsh invective and impassioned pleading. Occasionally, he impersonated the naive but earnest observer, sometimes the country bumpkin, and sometimes the zany, jesting fool. After attempting to silence or discredit him with statesanctioned sermons, speeches, and proclamations, episcopal authorities tried to outwit him by hiring literary mimics, notably John Lyly, Robert Greene, and Anthony Munday, to turn his own style and manner against him. Anti-Martinist writing, which may have begun as stage burlesques, eventually took the forms of prose and poetry as well.

Marprelate’s name and manner were frequently invoked in the seventeenth century, notably during the 1640s, when both republicans and royalists adopted his strategies. In 1640 A Dialogue Wherein Is Plainly Laide Open the Tyrannicall Dealing of L. Bishopps Against Gods Children, a pamphlet long associated with Marprelate, was republished and then reissued as The Character of a Puritane in 1643. In 1641 Marprelate’s Hay Any Worke for Cooper was republished under the title Reformation No Enemie. Both of these, along with the series of Marpriest tracts issued from 1645 through 1646, have been attributed to Richard Overton. Perhaps the most celebrated use of the Marprelate idiom occurred in the first (1672) and second (1673) parts of Andrew Marvell’s The Rehearsal Transpros’d. Milton’s own polemic career coincided with the Marprelate revival in the 1640s, and several of his early pamphlets, including Of Reformation (1641), Animadversions (1641), and Colasterion (1645), may contain Marprelate devices. See Anselment (1979).

James Egan

Marshall, Stephen (?1594 –1655). Church of England clergyman. With Edmund Calamy, he played a pivotal role in organizing in the early 1640s moderate Puritan opposition to William Laud and the Arminian and ceremonialist emphases of the Caroline church during the Personal Rule of Charles I, although he escaped the attention of the church authorities. He was nominated as preacher to both the Short Parliament and the Long Parliament. He was prominent among the godly ministers who met in Calamy’s house in Aldermary, London. From this group emerged the writing syndicate that published under its acronym Smectymnuus. Milton probably knew the group through Thomas Young, and in their defense he wrote Animadversions. Moderate Puritans like Marshall, Calamy, and Young espoused the cause of Presbyterian church government and formed a dominant group within the Westminster Assembly of Divines. However, the broad coalition of Puritan opponents of Laud began to break up, with less temperate voices, such as that of Thomas Edwards, calling for the suppression of alleged heresies. Despite the differences that emerged between them, Marshall never attacked Milton (nor, indeed, did Milton assail Marshall). Marshall remained a relatively irenic figure, seeking out accommodation with Independents and Erastians when possible. Although he certainly op-

Marvell, Andrew

posed the execution of Charles I, he worked to reconcile Presbyterians to subsequent regimes. He was buried, with full honors, within Westminster Abbey. At the Restoration his remains were exhumed and dumped in a common pit. Thomas N. Corns

Marshall, William (fl. 1617–1649). British engraver and illustrator. Some 254 prints are attributed to him, including ones of Francis Bacon, John Donne, Milton, and William Shakespeare. The engravings divide fairly evenly between portraits and title pages. Marshall’s most studied work is the frontispiece to the sensationally popular Eikon Basilike, subtitled The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings (1649; reprinted often thereafter), which Milton promptly and vehemently attacked in Eikonoklastes. Although Milton’s response was, in this instance, ideologically motivated, Marshall had earlier earned Milton’s ire for the inept portrait he had engraved of the author for the frontispiece of Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645). Milton somehow had access to the portrait before publication and placed under it, in Greek, a language Marshall presumably could not read, the following risible epigram (as translated in Parker [1996]): You, who really know my face, Fail to find me in this place. Portraiture the fool pretends; Laugh at the result, my friends. Richard Contreras, Jonathan F. S. Post

Martial [Marcus Valerius Martialis] (c. 40 – c. 103). Poet. He was born in Spain, like several writers and political figures prominent in Rome during the second half of the first century. He displayed a complete mastery of the epigram, producing more than fifteen hundred. Some are panegyrics, directed particularly to the Emperor Domitian. Many are satirical, though he ridicules the failings of types rather than recognizable individuals— or at least individuals recognizable to posterity—and some are obscene. Martial’s influence was powerful among witty poets of the Caroline period, strongly felt in Ben Jonson and Robert Herrick, for example. In A Modest Confutation of Milton’s Animadversions the anonymous author slightingly suggests that Milton is hoping to marry a rich widow, “your Maronilla,” an allusion to Martial (Epigrams, I, 10).

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Milton responds to the jibe in An Apology Against a Pamphlet. Milton read Martial attentively. In the first of his Prolusions he adapts and attributes explicitly a line from Martial (Epigrams, VIII, 35). He drew on him again in The History of Britain, citing his praise of Claudia Rufina, “Daughter of a Britain,” in Epigrams, XI, 53, as one thus made “famous . . . for beauty, wit, and learning.” In “On that sort of dramatic poem which is called tragedy,” part of his headnote to Samson Agonistes, he notes, “though ancient tragedy use no prologue, yet using sometimes in case of self-defence, or explanation, that which Martial calls an epistle”—a reference to the epistle to Epigrams, II. See OCCL.

Thomas N. Corns

Marvell, Andrew (1621–1678). Poet, politician, and political and religious writer. He was born in the rectory at Winestead, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, and educated in the Grammar School of Kingston upon Hull and Trinity College, Cambridge University. The 1640s were an unsettled decade for him; he was deprived of his Cambridge scholarship in 1641, the same year his father died, and he had no certain employment. He spent the mid-1640s traveling in Holland, France, Spain, and Italy. Back in England by late 1647, Marvell clearly had strong royalist connections during these years, but he was prepared to accommodate to the new Commonwealth regime. Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” belongs to this period. It seems from echoes in his writings that Marvell was familiar with two important republican pens who were, for a while, fellow travelers of Milton: Marchamont Nedham and John Hall. However, his first known employment during the Commonwealth years was in the Yorkshire household of Sir Thomas Fairfax as tutor to his daughter Mary. Here began another period of intense but different creativity, from which the “mower” poems and “Upon Appleton House” emerged. At this time, or just before it, Marvell met Milton, who was eager to secure the younger man’s services for the Commonwealth. “The Character of Holland” was written in early 1653 with such an aim in mind, and possibly at the suggestion of Milton (Milton wrote to John Bradshaw, president of the Council of State, on 21 February to request that Marvell be employed in the Office of Foreign Tongues), but Marvell had to settle for service as a household tutor again, this

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time at Eton in the house of John Oxenbridge, to William Dutton, a ward of Oliver Cromwell. During these years Marvell’s acquaintance with Milton grew: they were clearly reading each other’s work, and each began to reflect the work of the other in their poetry and prose—it has been suggested that Milton’s sonnet “To the Lord General Cromwell” was influenced by Marvell’s “Horatian Ode,” and Milton was probably influenced in 1654 by Marvell’s portrayal of Queen Christina of Sweden in “A Letter to Dr. Ingelo.” This was another rich period of creativity for Marvell (“Bermudas,” “A Letter to Dr. Ingelo,” “The First Anniversary of the Government of the Lord Protector”) and involved him in the production of diplomatic poetry for Cromwell, travel to Paris and Saumur in 1656 (during the course of which he helped to disseminate Milton’s works in France), and the appointment, in the autumn of 1657, as Latin secretary to John Thurloe. It is usually supposed that Milton’s blindness meant that Marvell was kept busier than might otherwise have been the case. Apart from the translation of documents, he attended foreign dignitaries in London as a translator, and on 18 February 1658 Marvell substituted for Milton (who is supposed to have been indisposed because of the death of his second wife on 8 February) in the rendering into Latin of a letter from Cromwell to the elector of Brandenburg, Friedrich Wilhelm. One year later Cromwell died, and Milton, Marvell, and John Dryden walked in Cromwell’s funeral procession. Marvell penned an important elegy for Cromwell and progressed to being a member of Parliament for Hull ( January 1659), but the collapse of the Protectorate in the spring meant that Marvell lost his seat, although he remained in Whitehall as Latin secretary. At the Restoration Marvell regained his parliamentary seat but was now effectively an outsider and spent the remaining eighteen years of his life playing a key role in the foundation of what would become the first Whig Party. In December 1660 he was rebuked when he offered a complaint on the treatment of Milton, whom he had defended while his life was at stake during the indemnity debates. Marvell spent two periods abroad: one in Holland (1662 –1663) and one as secretary on an embassy to Russia (1663 –1665). Both times he served the Earl of Carlisle, who had formerly compromised with Cromwell and who remained a protector of dissenters during the 1660s. In the late 1660s Marvell played a key role in the emergence of critical opposition to the regime of Edward Hyde, First Earl of Clarendon, notably in the context of English embar-

rassment during the second of the Anglo-Dutch Wars (1664 –1667). While working hard in Parliament, in the debating chamber, and on committees, Marvell was also involved in the surreptitious production of salacious and defamatory poetic satires of Clarendon, that is, a substantial number of the group of poems known as the “Advice to a Painter” poems. His counsel was respected by various anticourt aristocrats. In their turn, they provided support, access to libraries, and protection, especially when Marvell began his defense of religious toleration in a series of sensational prose pamphlets, nearly all of them published anonymously: The Rehearsal Transpros’d and Mr. Smirke are the most famous. The coincidence of Charles II’s attempt to introduce religious toleration (the Declaration of Indulgence of 1672) with the publication of The Rehearsal Transpros’d, Part I, meant that the king also protected the tract and prevented its suppression. Its target was Samuel Parker, later bishop of Oxford, whom Marvell had first met in Milton’s house in 1662 –1663, before the zealous young dissenter had conformed. The concern with religious liberty continued, and Marvell’s republican/Whig associations strengthened toward the end of his life, as Charles II appeared to be listing toward a Frenchstyle absolutist government. Marvell died of a fever after returning from a visit to Hull and was buried in the church of St. Giles in the Field. The two most significant pieces of Marvellian writing relevant to Milton are the prefatory poem to Paradise Lost and the brief passage concerning Milton in The Rehearsal Transpros’d, Part II (1673). The former, first published with the second edition of Milton’s epic in 1674, is an interrogation of Milton’s intent and ambition that both praises and does not withhold from some understated reservation. At the same time, Marvell disapproves, in a scarcely veiled way, of the attempt by John Dryden to turn Paradise Lost into a rhymed heroic drama, The State of Innocence, and comments negatively on Dryden’s assertion of the supremacy of rhymed verse, even as Marvell reveals himself to be a rhymer. The passage from The Rehearsal Transpros’d, Part II was a response to Parker’s Reproof to Marvell. Parker alleged of Marvell that “if we take away some simpering phrases, and timorous introductions, your Collection will afford as good Precedents for Rebellion and King-killing, as any we meet with in the writings of J. M. in defense of the Rebellion and the Murther of the King.” This made Marvell as well as Milton in Parker’s eyes part of the grand master plot of the English Revolution; similar perceptions were advanced anonymously

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by Samuel Butler. Marvell’s reply denies the charge that Milton had any part in Marvell’s tract (another charge made elsewhere that Marvell had helped Milton write Eikonoklastes in 1649 –1650 is also almost certainly groundless) although it is certainly true that Marvell splendidly incorporated the rhetoric of Milton’s Areopagitica in order to attack Parker’s calls for press censorship. Marvell also distanced himself from Milton more than the evidence bears out and suggests that Milton had kept silent since the Restoration, which is again not the case. The disingenuousness arises from the context of the polemical exchange. Other parts of The Rehearsal Transpros’d are indebted to Milton’s The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings (1659), while the tracts of the later 1670s apparently bear the traces of Milton’s last published prose tract, Of True Religion (1673). See ODNB.

Nigel Smith

Marx, Karl (1818 –1883). German economist and socialist thinker. Despite his show of relative disdain in The Eighteenth Brumaire for the bourgeois seventeenth-century Puritan English Revolution, he maintained a laudatory tone with respect to Milton in Theories of Surplus Value. Within the discussion of productive and unproductive labor, Marx asserts that Milton—who was paid £5 for the printing of Paradise Lost—is an example of unproductive labor when contrasted with the more productive “writer who turns stuff out for his publisher in factory style.” However, Marx points out that Milton produced Paradise Lost as “an activity of his nature,” illustrating the division between this type of labor activity and the type that is based solely on the further growth of capital.

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Joseph. As the Lord’s handmaid (Luke 1:38, 48), she is characterized as highly favored and blessed among women (Luke 1:29, 42), as she confirms in the Magnificat (Luke 1:46 –55). Church patriarchs, including Jerome, St. Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas, accorded Mary an increasingly significant role, and by the medieval era, Europe witnessed widespread Marian devotion. English Calvinists resisted the Catholic veneration of Mary and the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption, while still accepting the biblically based concept of the virgin birth. Milton’s representation of Mary is divorced from doctrinal views on her, which he makes a point of discrediting in Of Prelatical Episcopacy. He invokes Mary’s marriage to Joseph in The Judgement of Martin Bucer and Tetrachordon in support of the larger argument that the essence of marriage is communication and “meet help,” not sexual relations. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates mentions Mary’s song from Luke chapter 1. Milton’s poetic allusions to Mary are less invested in statements about church politics. The typological identification of Mary as second Eve, which dates back to the patristic era, appears in Paradise Lost (5.387, 10.183). The virgin birth is cited in “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (3), invoked in the salutation “virgin mother, hail” (PL 12.379), and reported by God in Paradise Regained (1.134 –35). Otherwise focused on Jesus’s temptations, the brief epic ascribes to Mary a role of some importance: she recounts the chief events of her life and is given a sense of interiority, expressed through her soliloquy (PR 2.61–108). As a bearer of the word, Mary gives birth to the Son and mediates the information that informs his mission; she thus serves him as an instructor and model disciple. Elizabeth Sauer

Ryan C. McCarty

Mary, mother of Jesus. All four gospel narratives refer to Mary. Isaiah’s prophecy of a virgin bearing the savior (Isa. 7:14) is quoted in Matthew (1:23). The annunciation is described in Luke’s gospel (1:26 –38), which also sketches out the various experiences involving her life with Jesus, from the nativity through his public mission. Mark’s is one of three gospels that include the summoning of Jesus by Mary and Jesus’s “brothers” (3:31–35). John reports Mary’s presence at the Crucifixion (19:25 –27), and the Acts of the Apostles (1:14) indicates her attendance at Pentecost. Most often identified as the mother of Jesus, Mary is also called the wife of

Mary I (1516 –1558). Queen of England and Ireland. Her accession in 1553 on the death of Edward VI was, in the English Protestant historiographical tradition, perceived and represented as the closure of a golden age of the English Reformation and the initiation of a dark night of a Catholic persecution. Protestant polemicists for centuries after alluded to the reintroduction of “popery” and the associated prosecution of lay and clerical Protestants as evidence of what would once more await England should a Catholic monarch ascend the throne. Her reputation was further damaged by recollection of her marriage to Philip II of Spain. Marriage to Catholic spouses became a highly

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sensitive issue during the attempts of James I to marry the future Charles I to a Spanish princess (the so-called Spanish Match); during the reign of Charles I, who had married the French Catholic princess Henrietta Maria; and again in the 1670s when the Catholic faith of James, Duke of York, the future James II, became evident. Milton’s own allusions to Mary are infrequent and rest on the usual Protestant assumptions. Thomas N. Corns

masque. The principal large-scale genre of ceremonial entertainment of the early Stuart aristocracy. It comprised a mildly heterogeneous array of forms, having in common the entrance of disguised “strangers,” speeches, some symbolic or emblematic disorder overcome, and a set of dances into which audience members were drawn by the masquers. The most famous examples are the evermore-spectacular festivals presented at court, in particular for Twelfth Night and Shrovetide, in most years between 1604 and 1640. These soon came to be dominated by the designs and theatrical inventions of Inigo Jones, first in collaboration with Ben Jonson and later with other poets. Adulatory in tone, diplomatic in employment, Platonic in temper, crippling in cost, masques became a prime focus of aestheticized political expression and to some extent contestation at court. However, they were also mounted away from court, in aristocratic households both urban and rural: the Earl of Essex held one at Coleorton in 1618, and Milton’s Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus) was performed in 1634 to mark the installation of John Egerton, First Earl of Bridgewater, at Ludlow as Lord President of the Council of Wales and the Marches. The masque form stems from the fusion of Italianate dance entertainments with the medieval inheritance of allegorical pageants and festive disguisings. It was thus related to such other display forms as tournaments, barriers, and royal entries and welcomes. Under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I it became common for suites of costumed masquers to visit court festivities and dance, both among themselves and with other revelers. Jonson and Jones, in particular, reframed these exotic disguisings as emblematic actions expressing some particular poetic and visual “device” in praise of the monarch, featuring members of the court supported by professional entertainers—singers, musicians, actors, and dancers. In particular, they introduced a proscenium stage and machinery to enable complex illusionary

effects, and the provision of one or more grotesque “antemasques” or “antimasques” to provide a symbolic foil for the courtier masquers that followed. Thus, in Queens (1609) virtuous female monarchs overthrow a coven of witches, and in Oberon (1611) unruly satyrs are overawed by a fairy prince. The audience for a masque at court consisted of the king or queen, as principal spectator, seated facing the stage at the focal point of the perspective design and surrounded by the principal guests and court dignitaries, often including selected ambassadors. On three sides of the hall, risers were set up for the throng of standing spectators, and in the midst was a dancing floor reached from the stage by steps. Musicians were usually hidden within the stage apparatus, which often rose high toward the ceiling to conceal machinery. The dramatic action, a small fraction of the total evening, was performed by professionals and introduced the discovery of the courtly masquers, who executed two or three elaborately choreographed and muchrehearsed dances before descending and inviting spectators to dance in revels that often extended well into the early morning. At last, the masquers were recalled onto the stage, which closed upon them in conclusion. Disorder usually attended the breakup of the evening, with reports of lavish banquets overturned and theft and other riotous behavior not uncommon. Under the Stuarts, the court masque grew progressively in scope and elaborateness, becoming ever more spectacular and adulatory. James I seems to have maintained a certain distance—he never himself danced. But Charles I and Henrietta Maria were enthusiastic participants, offering to one another complementary worlds of glory and love, such as Albion’s Triumph and Tempe Restored (1632) or Britannia Triumphans and Luminalia (1638), as symbolic performances of their respective political aspirations and ideologies. Masques were not solely flattery or delusion, however. They could have a distinct political edge on current events. The Golden Age Restored (1616) moralized the fall of Somerset, while The Triumph of Peace (1634) praised Charles I but also invited him to defend the law. See Bevington and Holbrook (1998), Lindley (1984).

Tom Bishop

Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, A. Milton’s masque, frequently known after its later adaptation (1738) by the name of its villain, Comus. It was written to mark the opening of the regime of John Egerton, First Earl of Bridgewater, as Lord

materialism

President of the Council of Wales and the Marches and Lord Lieutenant of Wales and the border counties, and was performed at Ludlow Castle, probably in the Great Hall, on Michaelmas night (29 September) 1634. Prominent members of the Ludlow town citizenry attended the performance. It is not known who commissioned Milton to write the work, but he had already written an entertainment, Arcades, as part of another celebration within the Egerton family in 1633. His friend Henry Lawes, who was tutor to the Egerton children from 1626, may have arranged the commission. Three Egerton children played central roles in the masque, which served, among its purposes, as a family celebration. Alice Egerton played “the Lady,” and two younger Egerton boys played her brothers. Lawes wrote surviving music for the masque and took the coordinating role of the Attendant Spirit/Thyrsis in the performance. It is not known who played the role of Comus. Milton’s masque is notable within its genre for its inclusion of elements of pastoral drama and for its vigorous rhetorical elaboration, with numerous and substantial speeches of argumentation, particularly between Comus and the Lady. In this it differs from most contemporary masques, which tend to musical, choreographic, and visual rather than to verbal display. This emphasis on argument, together with the comparative restriction of means and occasion at Ludlow, enables Milton implicitly to contrast the severity of his celebration of chastity with the contemporary court masque and its promotion, especially through Queen Henrietta Maria’s influence, of a Neoplatonizing language of love and beauty in works such as Tempe Restored (1632). In this respect, Milton’s masque engages with the politics of the standard form of aristocratic entertainment of the day and may suggest the temper of the new Lord President’s regime. More specific political contexts have been suggested through the connection made by some critics between the masque’s subject, chastity, and the recent scandal around the Second Earl of Castlehaven, a relative of the Egertons (see the Castlehaven scandal). The connection remains disputed, however, and other critics have read chastity in the masque as quite differently figurative. The Ludlow masque survives in several versions, including two early manuscripts. It appears, with revisions, in the Trinity Manuscript in Milton’s hand and also in a separate manuscript (“the Bridgewater Manuscript”) in the hand of an unknown scribe. The masque was first published in 1637 and then included in Poems of Mr. John Mil-

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ton (1645) and again in Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions (1673). Tom Bishop

materialism. The belief that nothing exists except matter, a view that gained in popularity during the middle decades of the seventeenth century. Mechanist materialism, famously espoused by Thomas Hobbes, further held that matter was inert and that it moved only because of collision with other bodies. Even thoughts, according to Hobbes, were corporeal motions and the end result of a chain of causes. Animist materialism, on the other hand, was the theory that matter was infused with spirit and that it contained within it agents of motion. This theory explained the growth of plant and animal matter, the fertility of the earth, and the supposed evolution of metals under the earth’s surface. Both forms of materialism were formulated in opposition to the dualistic Platonic belief that body and soul were distinct. In the 1630s and early 1640s Milton appears to have accepted the Christian Platonic distinction between an immaterial soul and a material body. In “Il Penseroso” (see “L’Allegro”), he uses the standard Platonic image of an “immortal mind” trapped in the “fleshly nook” of the body (91–92). There are, however, signs in Milton’s early poetry that he was influenced by the Neoplatonic idea that all creatures emanate from God along a hierarchy of material refinement (see Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, lines 459 – 69), and Milton argues for the unity of spirit and body in the divorce tracts of the 1640s. By the late 1650s Milton had adopted a monistic conception of body and soul, according to Stephen Fallon. This monistic materialism is most fully expressed in Paradise Lost (1667). The angel Raphael instructs the unfallen Adam that all things are created from (and consist of ) “one first matter” (5.472), elsewhere depicted in the poem as the unformed matter of Chaos and an aspect of God himself. As in Neoplatonism, all things “proceed” from God “and up to him return” (5.470), but this is a material process where things become “more refined, more spirituous, and pure, / As nearer to him placed or nearer tending” (5.475 –76). Spirit, then, is material, and even reason is the product of the body’s refinement of food (5.482 –90). See Fallon (1991).

Juliet L. Cummins

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Matthew

Matthew. Book of the New Testament. This first gospel and opening book of the New Testament was traditionally considered the earliest gospel, but most scholars now believe Mark to be the earliest, citing Matthew’s probable dependence on Mark. Because of its likely implicit reference to the destruction of Jerusalem in a.d. 70, Matthew is generally dated after that year; a composition date of a.d. 75 – 85 is widely accepted. Matthew’s immediate audience was Jewish Christians, and the book’s emphases on Jesus as Messiah, his relationship to the Mosaic Law, and the primacy of his mission to the Jews all attest to its Jewish character. Milton’s use of Matthew is plentiful, including some 64 references in Paradise Lost, 79 in Paradise Regained ( James Sims), and 631 in De Doctrina Christiana (Michael Bauman). Milton addresses the apparent prohibitions against divorce in Matthew 5:31–32 and 19:3 –11 throughout his divorce tracts. Matthew’s parables figure prominently in a number of Milton’s writings, most notably the parable of the Talents (Dayton Haskin); Milton himself identifies with the Unprofitable Servant of that parable in “Sonnet VII” and “Sonnet XVI,” as well as in “Ad Patrem” (in a lighthearted manner) and The Reason of Church-Government (employing a tone of extreme anguish). In the above sonnets, the parable of the Laborers (20:1–16) mitigates the severity of the parable of the Talents. The parable of the Householder (13:52) appears on the title page of both editions of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and is portrayed as a prominent motivation for Milton’s writing of De Doctrina Christiana, while Milton uses the parables of the Tares (13:24 –30, 36 – 43) and the Dragnet (13:47–50) to illustrate his argument in Areopagitica. Milton alludes to the parable of the Sower (13:1– 8, 18 –23) in “Sonnet XV,” predicting a “hundredfold” harvest to result from the martyred Piedmontese, and he uses the parable of the Virgins to describe the virtuous addressee of “Sonnet IX.” In his sonnet “To the Lord General Cromwell” Milton alludes to Matthew 7:15 as he warns against “hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw” (cf. “Lycidas” 114 –22). See Bauman (1989), Haskin (1994), Sims (1962).

David V. Urban

May, Thomas (c. 1596 –1650). Writer and historian. He was educated at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (B.A. 1613), and was admitted in 1615 to Gray’s Inn. His inclinations, however, were wholly

literary, and he wrote for the late Jacobean and the Caroline stage, moving for the most part among men of letters. He translated enthusiastically from Latin and neo-Latin authors, and his renderings of Lucan’s Pharsalia are his most abiding literary accomplishments, reprinted several times in the seventeenth century. He entertained hopes of acceding to Ben Jonson’s position as poet laureate on Jonson’s death in 1637; contemporaries sometimes attributed May’s subsequent antipathy to Charles I to this disappointment. At the development of civil war hostilities, he sided with the Long Parliament, writing prose propaganda in its defense. In 1646 he was appointed one of the two secretaries of Parliament. Instructed to defend its conduct in its dealings with the king, he published in 1647 The History of the Parliament of England Which Began November the Third, 1640. Milton may have made some use of this detailed account in Eikonoklastes. After May died, he was granted a state funeral and buried in Westminster Abbey. His remains were exhumed in 1661 and reburied in a common pit. Had he lived longer, he would perhaps have challenged Milton’s own status as the most distinguished man of letters in the service of the English republic. See ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

Mazarin, Jules [Mazzarino, Giulio Raimondo] (1602 –1661). Cardinal and statesman. He was born in Pescine in Italy, and educated in Rome and Spain. In 1634 he came to the French court as papal nuncio and entered the service of Louis XIII in 1639. Under the patronage of Cardinal Armand Richelieu he was promoted to cardinal, and on Richelieu’s death Mazarin succeeded him in the role of chief minister, which he retained on the accession of the infant Louis XIV. He weathered a series of civil wars and the Frondes and retained his post until his death. He aligned France with England against the United Provinces and Spain. Milton prepared correspondence to him on behalf of the English state over the period 1655 –1659. See Fallon (1993).

Thomas N. Corns

Mede [Mead], Joseph (1586 –1638). Biblical scholar. Born at Berden, Essex, he became fellow and lecturer in Greek at Christ’s College, Cambridge, during Milton’s attendance there. Though his work shows an erudition ranging from ancient

Melville, Herman

religion to contemporary physics, he is most famous for his exegesis of the book of Revelation, The Key of the Revelation (Clavis Apocalyptica, 1627). This interpretation rests largely on philological arguments drawn from the Septuagint and Targum. Mede’s basic claim in unpacking the dense symbolic structure of Revelation is that biblical language is entirely consistent: if a falling star in Isaiah 14:12 symbolizes a deposed monarch, the same must be true for Revelation 8:10. Drawing on Irenaeus, he also develops a complex set of synchronisms to explain the chronology of apocalyptic events. In applying his method, Mede sustains the standard Protestant identification of the Pope as Antichrist. Though Mede’s assertion of a thousand-year reign of Christ held especial appeal for the Fifth Monarchists and others on the far left of the Reformation, he opposed religious radicalism. His views on ceremonies indicate his sympathy with high churchmanship. Parallels between Mede’s views on the Apocalypse have been found in De Doctrina Christiana and Paradise Lost; it has also been argued that Mede is “old Damaetas,” the Cambridge tutor affectionately mentioned in “Lycidas” (36). See ODNB.

Feisal G. Mohamed

medicine. Although Milton lived in a century that saw many medical advances, his ideas about medicine were largely derived from classical and medieval philosophers. The central theme of this ancient medicine is the Galenic concept of the four humors— choler, phlegm, blood, and melancholy. Both physical illness and psychological proclivities were explained in terms of the preponderance of these four bodily fluids. Intemperate conduct was thought to produce an imbalance among these four bodily fluids, an imbalance that would induce disease. Temperate conduct was in turn imagined as an avenue to health. Therapeutic treatments of illness involved either purging the excess humor or altering the diet and conduct in order to achieve humoral balance. Under this paradigm, both health and disease accrue powerful moral meanings. Indeed, it is critical that Milton, whose major epic revolves around a dietary transgression— eating the forbidden fruit—inherited such a deeply moralized notion of diet. This moralized account of health placed immense pressure on Milton’s attitude to his own blindness, which he linked in a letter to Leonard Philaras to failures of his digestion. Raphael, moreover, explains to Adam in Paradise Lost the

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animating principle of the universe in digestive terms (5.409 –25). See Rogers (1996), Schoenfeldt (1999).

Michael Schoenfeldt

Melanchthon [Schwarzert], Philipp (1497– 1560). Theologian. He was educated at the universities of Heidelberg and Tübingen and from 1518 was professor of Greek at Wittenberg. He worked closely with Martin Luther and was acting leader of the movement toward reformation during Luther’s incarceration. He came to differ from Luther in some areas of doctrine and was perceived by the followers of Jean Calvin to share important common ground with Calvin, though he remained personally allied to Luther throughout. Melanchthon’s scholarly reputation rested largely on his work on the Greek New Testament, in which he corrected Luther’s translation, and on his systematic theology, Loci Communes Rerum Theologicarum, first published in 1521. His status among a broad range of English Protestant divines remained high in the seventeenth century. Milton cites him occasionally in his divorce tracts. He establishes Martin Bucer’s eminence by quoting a contemporary view that he was an even better theologian than Melanchthon, although the latter was “in human learning . . . wondrous fluent” (The Judgement of Martin Bucer). As he assembles a range of respected founding fathers of the Reformation, Milton introduces Melanchthon as “the third great luminary of the reformation” (after Luther and Calvin), adducing him as one who “grants divorce for cruel usage, and danger of life” (Tetrachordon). See ODR.

Thomas N. Corns

Melville, Herman (1819 –1891). American novelist and poet. His works (especially Typee, MobyDick, Pierre, The Confidence-Man, Battle Pieces, Clarel, and Billy Budd) evince a suggestive and deliberate Miltonic allusiveness, frequently comprising a detailed, transmuted echoing of significant themes, scenes, symbols, images, and characters (especially the depiction of Satan), most notably from Paradise Lost. Evidence from Melville’s oeuvre, as well as marginalia found in Melville’s recently discovered personal copy of The Poetical Works of John Milton, suggests that Melville was a “Romantic” reader who perceived the poet as secretly “bitter and impious,”

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notes Robin Grey, deliberately undercutting the very Christianity that the narrator was ostensibly trying to “justify” in Paradise Lost. See Grey (1997).

Leslie E. Sheldon

Mercurius Aulicus. Royalist newsbook, printed in Oxford and often reprinted in London, which appeared on Sundays or Mondays between January 1643 and September 1645 (with many imitators, and some appropriations of the title). The first editor, Peter Heylin, was soon replaced by John Berkenhead, whose more aggressive style was suited to the task of attacking London newsbooks and cultivating the sympathy of the reading public. This was achieved principally by challenging and correcting the assertions and reportage of the parliamentarian newsbooks, and by spreading stories of parliamentarian atrocities and satirizing the low social status of parliamentarian members of Parliament and military commanders. At this Aulicus was effective. It was also, however, a fairly reliable source of news, and many Parliament sympathizers sought illicit copies in order to enhance their sources of information. Milton mentioned it, though not by name, in Areopagitica, as evidence of the impracticality of entirely effective censorship. Joad Raymond

Mercurius Britanicus. Parliamentarian newsbook of the English civil war. One of the wittiest, it was edited by Marchamont Nedham, jointly with or assisted by Thomas Audley during the first year; it appeared on Mondays between August 1643 and May 1646 and offered a mixture of editorial opinion, domestic news, and counterpropaganda. Its main adversary was the Oxford royalist newsbook Mercurius Aulicus, and the two publications frequently identified each other’s faults and misinformation. After the end of the First Civil War Britanicus [sic] became increasingly antimonarchical. When a cabinet of the king’s private correspondence was seized at the Battle of Naseby and printed as a pamphlet, the Kings Cabinet Opened (1645), some of the letters were republished with caustic annotations in Britanicus; the editor and his journal were forced to make a public apology for the concluding issue in this series in August 1645, which contained a facetious “hue and cry” after Charles I, mocking the king’s stammer. The newsbook was finally closed by the House of Lords in

May 1646, following an issue that accused the king of being a tyrant. Joad Raymond

Mercurius Politicus. Official weekly newsbook of the Commonwealth and Protectorate. Edited by Marchamont Nedham, it appeared on Thursdays between June 1650 and April 1660. The Council of State appointed Milton as licenser to Politicus in 1651, a year before he was fully blind; he fulfilled the role for about a year. Though his signature appears in the Stationers’ Register in association with this activity, there is little to suggest that Milton took an active role in contributing to, shaping, or restricting the content of the newsbook. During this period, however, Nedham took pleasure in reporting on Milton’s triumph over Claudius Salmasius in their polemical exchanges and the deleterious effects this had on Salmasius’s international reputation. Politicus offered a shifting mix of domestic and foreign news, editorial opinion, and advertising. Nedham’s editorials are important works of republican political theory, drawing on Niccolò Machiavelli, the Duc de Rohan, Tacitus, Livy, and Sallust. They are written in a popular form, through which he tried to convert his readers to classical republicanism. The political theory of the editorials simultaneously offered a framework for reading and interpreting the news that followed. Between September 1650 and October 1651 these editorials serialized Nedham’s The Case of the CommonWealth (May 1650); thereafter, until August 1652, he offered a series of editorials that later appeared as The Excellencie of a Free State (1656), a work that has been seen as part of the republican opposition against Oliver Cromwell of the summer of 1656. Later editorials were infrequent, and this has been interpreted, perhaps ungenerously, as evidence of a decline in Nedham’s republican ideals in favor of a Cromwellian compromise. Nedham was able to use the extensive news networks of his supervisor, John Thurloe, to inform Politicus, in addition to which he maintained his own network of correspondents. News from all over Britain and Ireland, and from Europe and elsewhere, appeared in its pages. This frequently reflected a confidence in the fortunes of the republic and its reputation among foreign princes; there is much evidence that Politicus was widely read overseas, especially in the Low Countries and in France, among royalist exiles, and by foreign nationals interested both in the fortunes of the British repub-

Michael

lic and in alternative sources for news of their own countries. Politicus also developed the role of advertising in newsbooks, especially for books that were also sold by its publisher, Thomas Newcombe, but also for politically sympathetic books—including Milton’s—and for products and services sold in and around London. In this judicious and pioneering mix of editorial, news, and advertising, Politicus established a model for news publications for decades to come. In September 1655 the Protectorate introduced new press legislation that gave Politicus a near monopoly in the British news market until March 1659. In October Nedham took advantage of this by establishing the Publick Intelligencer, a Monday weekly that substantially overlapped with Politicus. For much of the latter part of the decade—until the dawn of new republican hopes after the death of Cromwell—Politicus and the Publick Intelligencer focused on overseas news. Some suggest that this was to draw attention from, or at least not to publicize, domestic news unflattering to the Protectorate; there is a clear parallel with corantos under Charles I and the London Gazette (1665 –) under Charles II. This suggests that Politicus was a narrow form of state propaganda, which probably understates its richness and the ideological complexity of its editor. Moreover, the foreign news was excellent and reflects republican ambitions in and concerns with a European context. Upon the failure of Richard Cromwell’s Protectorate, competition returned to the newsbook market. In May 1659 the reconvened Purged Parliament suspended Nedham from his editorship and appointed John Canne in his place; in August Nedham was reinstated and continued until April 1660 when Politicus was abandoned in the face of the imminent Restoration. Joad Raymond

Mercurius Pragmaticus. Royalist newsbook; it appeared on Tuesdays between September 1647 and May 1649 and was succeeded by Mercurius Pragmaticus ( for King Charles II) on Tuesdays between April 1649 and May 1650. In the autumn of 1647, before the outbreak of the Second Civil War, there appeared a flurry of royalist newsbooks. These were even more polemically fierce than those of the early 1640s, retailing a mix of royalist sentiment, strained optimism, and antiparliamentarian satire with a literary flavor. Mercurius Pragmaticus and probably some of its sequels were edited by Marchamont

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Nedham, though both were subject to counterfeits, perhaps edited by the royalist poets and satirists John Cleveland and Samuel Shepherd. The same may also have assisted Nedham: the bibliographical history of these newsbooks is complex, and it results from underground collaboration by a number of royalist sympathizers based in London. Nedham probably stopped Pragmaticus in January 1649, and someone else took over; he may have been responsible for the appearance of the sequel in April, and he might already have relinquished it to another’s hands by June 1649, when he was arrested and imprisoned. Joad Raymond

Micah. Book of the Old Testament. One of the twelve “minor prophets,” it follows the usual prophetic paradigm of pronouncements of imminent destruction and promises of eventual reconciliation with God and reestablishment of Israel. Its emphasis is on the northern Jewish settlements of Samaria, although the destruction of Jerusalem also figures in its prophecies. In De Doctrina Christiana Milton cites it twenty-six times, typically alongside consideration of other prophetic texts. See Bauman (1989), ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

Michael. Archangel. In biblical tradition, he is the greatest and chief of all the angels and archangels whose name, “Who is like God,” is both a description of his person and a challenge to Satanic power. Iconographical tradition always depicts him as a youthful winged warrior, with sword unsheathed, scales of justice in hand, and foot firmly planted against the head of the Dragon. Prince of the celestial armies in Paradise Lost (6.44), Michael is first mentioned in book 2, an object of hatred and dread as the fallen angels recall their fear of “thunder and the sword of Michael” (2.294). Milton’s repeated reiterations of Michael’s eschatological role in the poem deeply reflect his vice regent status in the Book of Daniel, the Epistle of Jude, and the book of Revelation, all emphasizing the archangel’s eternal conflict with Satan and his ascendancy in the order of created beings. But although martial might defines Milton’s Michael in book 6 of the poem as Prince of the Presence and traditional guardian of Israel, he is also known as the angel of repentance, righteousness, mercy, and sanctification (Gustav Davidson, A Dictionary

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of Angels, 1967). He is considered the angel of humankind and the revealer of eschatological secrets (M. Mach, in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, 1999). Whereas in book 6 Michael clearly evinces the justice of God, in books 11 and 12 God sends him to Adam and Eve after the Fall as an emissary of mercy. He is commissioned to “all terror hide” (PL 11.111) and to “Dismiss them not disconsolate” (11.113) but send them forth “sorrowing, yet in peace” (11.117). Despite his military garb, he encounters the fallen couple not in “his shape celestial, but as man / Clad to meet man” (11.239 – 40)—reminiscent of the Son’s merciful judgment upon the pair as God and man in book 10. The first words Michael utters in Milton’s entire poetic canon are “Author of evil” (PL 6.262), an accusation against the adversary of God and man; but his last words—“With meditation on the happy end” (PL 12.605)—are of hope and promise. In a sense, Michael brings Adam and Eve back home, as he does Lycidas—“Look homeward angel” (“Lycidas” 163)—a special role appointed to him by God as guardian and deliverer of souls. Milton’s Michael is a richly nuanced, complex figure, manifesting the various attributes of deity, a visible reflection of both the Son’s infinite mercy and the Father’s ultimate justice in the scheme of creation and a reminder of the ultimately benevolent designs of God’s providential end. Marc Ricciardi

millenarianism. In its broadest definition, the belief that God’s plan for the end of time has already started to unfold. The term is derived from Revelation chapter 20, which speaks of Christ’s thousand-year rule as one of the precursors to the Apocalypse. Other such precursors, or last things, are drawn from Revelation and Daniel and include the conversion of the Jews, the destruction of the Antichrist, God’s pouring of the seven vials of wrath, the wrath and the binding of Satan, the second coming or parousia, the Day of Judgment, and the destruction of the fourth earthly monarchy or empire and establishment of the spiritual and final Fifth Monarchy. Stricter definitions of the term include a belief in the imminent second coming; a belief that the millennium is in the future (and not, as Augustine and Catholic and Protestant orthodoxy held, symbolic of the spiritual reign of Christ, beginning with his Resurrection or with the conversion of Constantine and extending to the rise of the Antichrist); and an engagement in political ac-

tivity based on millenarian expectation, also known as Fifth Monarchism. Recent scholarship suggests that millenarian views were far more mainstream and prevalent than previously believed. The extent, exact nature, and endurance of Milton’s millenarian beliefs are matters of considerable debate. The traditional assessment is that Milton held millennial ideas during the 1640s and 1650s, when optimistic millenarianism was at its height nationally, and then increasingly distanced himself from such beliefs as the Puritan cause failed. Increasingly, scholars downplay the radical, Fifth Monarchist nature of his millenarian statements from the 1640s and 1650s while arguing that his millenarian beliefs and interests are consistent throughout his career. See Cummins (2003).

Linda B. Tredennick

Millington, Edward (c. 1636 –1703). Auctioneer and bookseller. By the late 1670s he had achieved some status as an importer and seller of scholarly works of a continental provenance and as an auctioneer of works of art, though in his earlier career he seems mainly to have specialized in selling second-hand books. Milton evidently knew him quite well. Indeed, on the account of Jonathan Richardson the elder, at some point in 1670 Milton moved temporarily into Millington’s house, which, with his shop, was then at the Pelican in Duck Lane, off Little Britain. The circumstances of this temporary residence are not known. The move may have been connected with Milton’s decision to sell a large part of his library on the grounds that the collection would be of no use to his heirs, and that, as John Toland explained in his biography of Milton, “he thought he might sell it more to their advantage than they could be able to do so themselves.” Thomas N. Corns

Milton, Anne (fl. 1623 –1639; d. ?1640). Sister of Milton the poet and the only daughter of John Milton, Sr., and Sara Jeffrey Milton. In November 1623 she married Edward Phillips, a Chancery official. The marriage settlement records a substantial dowry payment of £800 by John Milton, Sr., to Phillips. Shortly before Milton returned from Cambridge University for the beginning of the Lent term in January 1628, Anne Phillips, his niece and the daughter of the union, died. It is often surmised, though evidence is uncertain, that the trag-

Milton, John

edy provided the occasion for Milton’s poem “On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough.” Edward Phillips died in August 1631. Anne by then had a one-year-old son, also called Edward Phillips, and was pregnant with John Phillips, who would be born in October. In January 1632, Anne married Thomas Agar, a widower who had succeeded her late husband as deputy clerk of the Crown Office in Chancery. After Anne died Milton assumed responsibility for the education and upbringing of her sons. See Campbell and Corns (2008).

Thomas N. Corns

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Restoration. He recorded his brother’s nuncupative will and sorted out his financial affairs, on behalf of Elizabeth Minshull Milton, after his death. He was a source of information for John Aubrey as he compiled biographical evidence about the poet. In the 1680s he may have converted to Roman Catholicism. James II appointed him serjeant-in-law and baron of the exchequer and thereafter justice of the common pleas. The accession of William III and Mary II may have precipitated the rapid decline of his legal career. He retired in 1688 and lived quietly in Ipswich until his death. See Campbell and Corns (2008), ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

Milton, Christopher (1615 –1693). Royalist activist and judge, younger son of John Milton, Sr., and Sara Jeffrey Milton, and younger brother to Milton the poet. He followed his brother to St. Paul’s School and then to Christ’s College, Cambridge, though he left without graduating and was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1632. Such an educational pattern was common among men who intended to pursue a legal career. He married Thomasine Webber in 1638 and moved his wife, who was probably already pregnant, to his father’s home in Horton. Their first child was short-lived. In 1640 he was called to the bar. By 1641 he, with his wife and father, was living in Reading, which in 1642 was occupied and garrisoned by the royalists, with whom he evidently sided. He is listed on the muster roll and may have carried arms in the interest of King Charles I. On the fall of Reading, his wife returned to her family in London, Milton Sr. joined his elder son, and Christopher took an administrative role in the royalist war effort, living an itinerant life as a commissioner of sequestrations, exacting fines from supporters of Parliament in territory captured or held by the forces of Charles I. With the collapse of the royalist cause as the First Civil War drew to a conclusion, he accepted defeat and sued to be allowed to compose, that is, to pay a substantial fine in return for pardon. His brother seems to have helped in that process. He lived on in London in legal practice until 1652, at that point moving to Ipswich and dividing his practice between there and the metropolis. At the Restoration his fortunes improved. He became a senior member of the Inner Temple, a justice of the peace for Suffolk, and a deputy recorder. His loyalty during the 1640s not only earned him advancement, but also may have allowed him to contribute to the efforts of those who worked to ensure that his brother escaped imprisonment or execution at the

Milton, Deborah (1652 –1727). Youngest of Milton’s three daughters with Mary Powell (who died three days after Deborah’s birth). She worked as one of her father’s amanuenses, reading to him in several languages (apparently without understanding, although according to William Parker and Barbara Lewalski, Milton may have taught her some Latin). She received ill treatment from either Milton or her stepmother Elizabeth Minshull. She went to Ireland and met weaver Abraham Clarke; they married in Dublin on 1 June 1674 and had ten children. Clarke died after 1687 (possibly around 1702). Deborah returned to England sometime between 1688 and 1698. Between 1704 and 1708 she was describing herself as destitute; she became a schoolmistress. She often remarked on her physical resemblance to her father, and in an interview with George Vertue in 1721 she attested to the truthfulness of the portrait of her father by William Faithorne (see portraits of Milton). See Lewalski (2000), Parker (1996).

Valerie A. Cullen, Jonathan F. S. Post

Milton, Elizabeth. Milton’s third wife; see Elizabeth Minshull. Milton, John (1651–1652). Only son of Milton the poet. He was born on 16 March in Whitehall, in the accommodation that his father had been granted by the Council of State in his capacity as a public servant. His mother was Milton’s first wife, Mary Powell. Mary died on or about 5 May of the following year, and the boy died about six weeks later. Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips recalled much later that he had died because of “the ill usage or bad constitution of an ill-chosen nurse,” the latter

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speculation perhaps implying that he had contracted a disease from a wet nurse. Thomas N. Corns

Milton, John, life and works of. For a general overview of the life and works of the poet John Milton (1608 –1674), see life and works of John Milton. Milton, John, Sr. (1562 –1647). Scrivener and composer, father of Milton the poet. Born near Oxford, he may have received musical training at Christ Church, Oxford. His Protestant convictions estranged him from his father, Richard Milton, and he moved to London in 1585. By 1600 he had achieved full membership in the Scriveners’ Company and had married Sara Jeffrey. Their sons John and Christopher Milton were born in their house, the Spread Eagle, on Bread Street near Cheapside, in 1608 and 1615, respectively; it is uncertain when their daughter Anne Milton was born. Milton Sr. was sufficiently successful as a scrivener—a trade combining functions of notary public and loan officer—to send John and Christopher to Cambridge University and later to train Christopher for the law; he commanded sufficient respect among his peers to be elected in 1634 to the mastership of the company, an office he did not accept. He was also highly regarded as a composer. His works appear in four important collections of early seventeenth-century English music: Thomas Morley’s The Triumphs of Oriana, presented to Queen Elizabeth I in 1601 and published in 1603; William Leighton’s The Teares or Lamentacions of a Sorrowfull Soule in 1614; Thomas Myriell’s Tristitiae Remedium, compiled in manuscript in 1616; and Thomas Ravenscroft’s The Whole Book of Psalmes in 1621. His compositions range from harmonizations of metrical psalms to intricate contrapuntal settings; Edward Phillips credits him with an In Nomine for forty voices, and John Aubrey refers to a “Song” with eighty vocal parts. Two contributions to Myriell’s collection are particularly admired today: “When David Heard,” depicting King David’s grief over the death of Absalom, and “O Woe Is Me for Thee,” his lament for Jonathan. In 1632 Milton Sr. retired from business and settled in Horton, Buckinghamshire, where his son John joined him after receiving his M.A. from Christ’s College, Cambridge. Sara died in 1637, and John embarked on his Italian travels the next year; Milton Sr. invited Christopher and

his new bride, the former Thomasine Webber, to stay with him at Horton. In 1640 he moved with Christopher’s family to Reading. After Reading was besieged by parliamentary forces in 1643, Christopher moved to Exeter, while Milton Sr. joined his older son’s household in London and stayed there until his death. Father and son seem to have been on cordial terms. Before John returned to England in 1639 from his continental travels, he sent ahead, according to Phillips, a shipment of “choice musicbooks of the best masters” from Italy; surely this was meant for the benefit of them both. In “Ad Patrem,” the poet expresses gratitude for the education that his father made possible and respect for his father’s musical talents. See New Grove.

Stephen M. Buhler

Milton, Katherine. Milton’s second wife; see Katherine Woodcock.

Milton, Mary. Milton’s first wife; see Mary Powell.

Milton, Mary (1648 –?1678). Milton’s second daughter, born to him and his first wife, Mary Powell, on 25 October. Some estrangement between father and daughter seems to have followed on her mother’s death in 1652. She was reported by a former household servant as remarking, when informed of her father’s intention to marry again, “that it was no news to hear of his wedding but if she could hear of his death that was something.” The same account noted that Milton’s children “had made away some of his books and would have sold the rest to the dunghill women.” Milton had intended that each of his three daughters should on his death receive a proportion of the dowry still outstanding from his first marriage settlement. In the event, Mary seems to have settled with Milton’s third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, to forgo further claims on the estate in return for £100. Thomas N. Corns

Milton, Sara Jeffrey (c. 1572 –1637). Mother of Milton the poet. She was the elder daughter of Ellen and Paul Jeffrey(s); her father was a merchant tailor of St. Swithin’s parish, London. John Aubrey claimed that Sara’s maiden name was Bradshaw, and Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips asserted that she

Minshull, Elizabeth

was “of the family of the Castons.” Both claims have been questioned. She was approximately nine years younger than the poet’s father, whom she married sometime before May 1601 (when an infant born of that union was buried at All Hallows). The poet mentions his mother directly only once, in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda, remarking that she was “a woman of purest reputation, celebrated throughout the neighborhood for her acts of charity.” Cyriack Skinner adds that she was “a prudent, virtuous wife”; Phillips, that she was “a woman of incomparable virtue and goodness”; and Aubrey, that she “had very weake eies, & used spectacles p[re]sently after she was 30 years of age.” Little else is known of her, other than the fact of her death and burial “beneath a plain blue stone in the floor of the chancel of Horton Church” at the age of approximately sixty-five. Carol Barton

Milton Center of Japan. Operating in its present form since 1975, it promotes Milton studies in Japan through an annual conference and more frequent symposia. It supports a periodical, MCJ News, which carries abstracts of papers presented at its meetings.

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Coon, then editor of Seventeenth-Century News, it has almost six hundred members in the early twentyfirst century, chiefly in the United States and Canada but also in eleven other countries. The elected officers include a president and vice president; appointed officers are the secretary and treasurer; and there are six members on the executive committee, each of whom is elected to a three-year term. The constitution of the society states that the organization will “further scholarship on John Milton,” convene scholars at an annual dinner and meeting, select “outstanding scholars for honor,” publish an annual booklet that summarizes the works-in-progress of members, and promote the active “exchange of ideas in the field of Milton study.” Albert C. Labriola

Milton Society of Korea. Founded in 1990 to hold conferences and in other ways to promote Milton studies in Korea, it held its first international conference in 2000. It supports the periodical Milton Studies [in Korea]. Recently it extended its remit to consider a wider range of early modern literature in English and adopted the name Association of Milton and Early Modern English Studies of Korea. Thomas N. Corns

Thomas N. Corns

Milton Cottage. Cottage in Chalfont St. Giles, Buckinghamshire, where Milton withdrew in 1665, presumably with his dependents, to escape the plague in London. The move was arranged for him by Thomas Ellwood. He stayed there until the plague abated. The property today is open to the public. Carol Barton

Milton Quarterly. Scholarly single-author journal. Established in 1966 as the Milton Newsletter (first volume 1967) by its first editor Roy Flannagan, it became the Milton Quarterly in 1970. In the first issue of the Quarterly, Flannagan listed his aim to maintain the tone of the journal as “relaxed and not vindictive or caustic” and to keep all operations at the journal “efficient in a most un-academic way.” Roy Flannagan

Milton Society of America. Founded on 27 December 1948, at the recommendation of Arthur

Milton Studies. Journal published annually by the University of Pittsburgh Press as a forum for scholarship on Milton. On the occasion of the tercentenary (1967) of Paradise Lost, James D. Simmonds of the University of Pittsburgh invited several distinguished Milton scholars to give lectures on Milton. The first volume of Milton Studies, published in 1969, included those lectures and other invited submissions. Albert C. Labriola

Minshull, Elizabeth (1638 –1727). Third wife of Milton the poet. She was introduced to him by his friend Nathan Paget and was the granddaughter of Paget’s aunt. From a minor gentry background, her family connections for the most part were around south Cheshire. Nantwich was her own place of origin, to which she retired in widowhood. It is uncertain what brought her to London. When she married Milton at age twenty-four she was not living with Paget, which perhaps implies that she was in some sort of employment, perhaps as a governess or housekeeper. Milton evidently could benefit from a wife assuming both of these roles within his

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own household, as his three daughters were proving troublesome, allegedly engaging in petty theft from their father. The marriage ceremony took place on 24 February 1663 at St. Mary Aldermary. She and Milton had no children. At his death in 1674, Milton made Elizabeth his sole heir, entrusting his daughters to the support of their maternal uncle, Richard Powell, Jr., though in the subsequent legal wrangling, in which Elizabeth’s part was defended by Milton’s brother Christopher Milton, a compromise was reached. Elizabeth is buried in Nantwich. The inventory of her estate suggests straitened but not impoverished circumstances, nor had she disposed of all her Miltonic memorabilia; it lists among her possessions “2 Books of Paradice.” She had, however, disposed of Milton’s papers, entrusting them to the care of Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips. See Campbell and Corns (2008).

Thomas N. Corns

Mirabeau, Comte de [Riqueti, Honoré Gabriel Victor] (1749 –1791). French lawyer and statesman. After the States-General were summoned in 1788, he was elected a member of the Third Estate for Aix. A brilliant orator, he owed his popularity to the Tennis Court Oath. In 1791, shortly before his death, he became president of the National Assembly. In 1788 he adapted Milton’s Areopagitica as Sur la liberté de la presse [On the Liberty of the Press]. In 1789 he rendered John Toland’s edition of Milton’s Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (1695) as Théorie de la royauté, d’après la doctrine de Milton, which was ominously reissued at Valence in 1792 as Défense du peuple anglais sur le jugement et la condamnation de Charles Ier, roi d’Angleterre, par Milton. Ouvrage propre à éclairer sur la circonstance actuelle où se trouve la France [Defense of the English People over the Judgment and Condemnation of Charles I, King of England, by Milton. The right volume to illuminate the current circumstances wherein France finds itself ]. Christophe J.-B. Tournu

Modest Confutation, A. Anonymous work of prose; full title, A Modest Confutation of a Slanderous, Scurrilous Libell, Entituled, Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defense Against Smectymnuus. The forty-page pamphlet, structured in the conventional format of quotation and reply, was probably published during the first three months of 1642. Beginning with Milton’s own uncertainty, the author-

ship of A Modest Confutation has remained conjectural. Milton sometimes refers to the author as the Remonstrant (Joseph Hall), sometimes as a young man (perhaps one of Hall’s sons, Robert or Edward), and sometimes assumes that A Modest Confutation is a collaboration by several supporters of Hall. The Confutant’s rebuttal seems thoroughly familiar with the issues that Milton had treated in Animadversions (1641). He accuses Milton of oversimplification for imputing the personal faults of divines to the system of church government and the moral shortcomings of others to Hall, and for deliberately minimizing the central importance of sinful human nature in the episcopal controversy. The Confutant includes a detailed defense of Hall’s integrity and practices of church government, incorporating into this defense a lengthy justification of set forms of prayer in a national church. Critical interest in A Modest Confutation centers on the ways in which the tract engages the questions of language, style, and decorum that Milton had raised in Animadversions. A Modest Confutation doubts the appropriateness of Milton’s language for the topic of controversial theology and labels Milton’s jesting and his entire manner of writing as scurrilous. See Anselment (1979).

James Egan

Moloch. Idol of ancient Canaan. The violent worship of “sullen Moloch” is hinted at in “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (Nativity Ode), where he flees from his own “burning idol all of blackest hue” and from the “cymbals’ ring” that accompanied his invocations (207– 8). George Sandys had described in vivid terms the purpose of such din: to drown out the cries of children sacrificed in his “furnace blue” (Nativity Ode 210), “lest their lamentable shrieks should sad the hearts of their parents.” The association of Moloch with the death of children, particularly in the valley of Gehenna visited by Sandys, makes his an especially fitting expulsion in Milton’s ode on the birth of Christ. The birth manifests the reform of Moloch’s worship in Leviticus chapter 21 and 2 Kings chapter 23: “so that no man might make his son or his daughter to pass through the fire to Molech” (2 Kings 23:10). When Moloch appears in Paradise Lost, he is “besmeared with blood / Of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears” (1.392 –93). In the council of hell he speaks first, though he “recked not” (2.50) and is immediately for “open war” (2.51). Milton sounds over and over the idolatrous designation of Moloch

monism

as “king” (the literal meaning of his name: he is variously the “grisly king,” “sceptered king,” “furious king”). Eric C. Brown

Monck, George, First Duke of Albemarle (1608 –1670). English general. Born in Devonshire, he trained as a soldier in the United Provinces. During the civil wars he initially fought for Charles I, but after being captured and imprisoned he served Parliament, republic, and Protectorate faithfully in Ireland, in Scotland, and at sea in the first of the Anglo-Dutch Wars. Monck was an enigmatic general who played a crucial role in the restoration of the Stuarts. Monck was much trusted by Oliver Cromwell and remained loyal to Richard Cromwell. He initially acquiesced in the army’s overthrow of Richard and the restoration of the Purged Parliament (the Rump) in May 1659, but as tensions escalated, he sided with the Rump and parliamentary rule. Monck denounced the second army coup against the Rump in October 1659, writing to John Lambert that “the Nation of ENGLAND will not endure any Arbitrary Power . . . so that such a Design will be ruinous and destructive.” Renewed civil war between Monck and Lambert was averted when the newly installed Committee of Safety crumbled in the face of widespread opposition and members of the Rump once again returned on 26 December. But on New Year’s Day 1660 Monck nonetheless began to move his army southward toward London. Once in London, he initially carried out parliamentary commands, including destroying the city’s defenses and arresting members of the Common Council. But then he rounded on Parliament, insisting that it enact the end of its own sitting as promised and set the conditions for a new election. When these qualifications, as was predictable, proved impossibly stringent, Monck implemented (on 22 February) the readmission of the members excluded during Pride’s Purge in December 1648. Although this readmission was widely seen as the first major step back to monarchy, Monck still publicly professed allegiance to republicanism. But how much of this was simply to forestall opposition from republican elements in the army and elsewhere is unclear. Milton, however, took Monck at his public word. His Letter to a Friend, written to avert renewed civil war during the November standoff between Monck and Lambert, assumes that Monck will reinforce the Rump Parliament. The first edition of The Readie and Easie Way un-

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doubtedly targets Monck as well as other Presbyterians in its plea to stave off monarchy. Milton then addressed a letter to Monck, “Present Means, and Brief Delineation,” advising him on how to manage the elections (with the implicit threat of force, if necessary) to secure the republic. In the second edition of The Readie and Easie Way, an epigraph to the Roman military general Sulla, whose brutal regime paved the way for the Caesars, most likely reflects Milton’s bitter disappointment in Monck. As late as the first ten days of April, however, Milton still professed hopes in Monck’s preservation of the republic, when he published Brief Notes upon a Late Sermon, rebuking Matthew Griffith’s presumption in dedicating a vindictively royalist sermon to Monck and encouraging him to act upon his public declaration so as to prevent future misjudgment. But Milton also, more desperately, suggests in Brief Notes that if the nation is bent on monarchy, better one loyal to the cause, that is, better King George than King Charles II. By mid-March, however, Monck was in direct contact with Charles II, and partly because of his shrewd advice—that Charles move from Spain (still at war with England) to Breda, promise general indemnity except for those whom Parliament exempted, and guarantee freedom of conscience for those who lived peaceably—the Restoration was not only bloodless, but unconditional. Much lauded in print as heroic Saint George of England, Monck was duly honored as Duke of Albemarle. He served in the second Dutch war and was buried with honors at Westminster Abbey. See CPW 7, Knoppers (2001), ODNB.

Laura L. Knoppers

monism. The belief that reality consists of a single substance. In Milton’s writing, some potential confusion arises from the fact that De Doctrina Christiana uses the term “substance” in two distinct senses: (1) to indicate “essence,” understood as individuated being; and (2) to indicate the “first matter” that comes from God and out of which all creation is formed. This twofold usage is consistent with the distinction that Milton makes in Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio [A Fuller Course in the Art of Logic] between “proper form” (individuation) and “common form” (material cause). In the latter sense of “substance,” as common essence, Milton certainly is a monist. Within De Doctrina Christiana, this distinction allows the claim that all creation is formed from God’s own “substance,” or matter, while avoiding the charge of pantheism

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by insisting that God’s proper essence, or form, is not communicable. Paradise Lost presents most clearly Milton’s view that reality consists of a single, gratuitous, suprasensible, and conditional “matter” that comes from God (5.469 –505; cf. 5.407–21). Milton’s position contrasts with various kinds of dualism and monism that were offered by philosophers of his day. Milton’s monism is unique in its emphasis on the conditional character of the divine plenum out of which creation is formed: the first matter returns to God only “if not depraved from good” (PL 5.471). That conditional character is consonant with his insistence on the ontological priority of divine love and the potential for freedom that such love entails for rational creatures. In view of the intellectual aims of Paradise Lost, Milton’s position is thus most importantly an ontological monism that stands in contrast to the dualist descriptions of good and evil as two aspects of the same ultimate reality. See Fallon (1991), Rogers (1996).

Phillip J. Donnelly

monopolies. The rights to the exclusive provision of goods and services, granted by English monarchs, often in return for revenue. The history of English patents of monopoly reaches back to the Tudor and Stuart eras when people were urged to seek opportunities and develop profit-generating projects, “ingenuities,” and inventions. Monarchs relied heavily on the promotion of corporations and monopolies and the sale of charters as sources of revenue. Most lucrative for Charles I were the wine and tobacco licenses and the soap monopoly. Monopolies could be judicial, administrative, or associated with territory conferred by “letters patents.” Merchant Edward Misselden summarized the complex etymology of “monopoly” as “Singularis Negotiatia, a diverting of Commerce from the naturall course and use thereof into the hands of a few.” Jurist Sir Edward Coke judged that monopolists deny people “any freedome, or liberty that they had before . . . in their lawfull trade.” In 1640 the Long Parliament acted on such criticisms by expelling monopolists from the House of Commons and canceling many monopolies. Antimonopolist literature of the time defended community rights and what John Lilburne and his fellows later described as the equal entitlement to “the liberties of the Nation.” Milton’s own antimonopolist position is informed by that of Samuel Hartlib’s circle, which formulated projects for reorganizing the economics

of intellectual culture. The corresponding literal and figurative co-option of truth through print regulations establishes a vital context for interpreting Areopagitica. Milton’s anticensorship arguments are infused with anti-Catholic sentiment as he attacks the monopolization of power by “the Popes of Rome [who] engross[ed] what they pleas’d of Politicall rule into their owne hands.” In his defense of intellectual labor, Milton insists that truth cannot be reduced to a cheap commodity whose manufacture and sale are subject to exclusive control. Elizabeth Sauer

Montagu, Walter (c. 1603 –1677). English diplomat, author, and priest. Born the second son of Sir Henry Montagu, later Earl of Manchester, he attended Cambridge University and afterwards was secretly employed by George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, in marriage negotiations between Charles I and Henrietta Maria, who became his friend. In 1632 he wrote for the queen and her ladies a long and precious pastoral play, The Shepherd’s Paradise. This was performed at Somerset House in January 1633 in a specially built theater in the lower courtyard. Stage and costume designs by Inigo Jones survive. In the same vein of Neoplatonic courtly love, Montagu also translated Jacques Du Bosc’s L’Honneste Femme (1632) as The Accomplish’d Woman (1656). He was much engaged in diplomatic and other political activity in France, where he converted to Catholicism in 1635, causing a scandal in England. He took orders the following year. During the First Civil War he was an agent of the queen and was captured, convicted of carrying letters from France, and imprisoned in the Tower of London from 1643 to 1647. Montagu was banished from England in 1649 and later became abbot of St. Martin’s, Pontoise. Elements of the courtly pastoral drama he developed are to be discerned in Milton’s Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle. See ODNB, Veevers (1989).

Tom Bishop

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533 –1592). French humanist and skeptic. Born near Bordeaux, he studied law in Toulouse and between continental travels served in various local and regional governmental offices. Montaigne is best known for his “Apology for Raymond Sebond” and the multivolume Essais. In 1603 his essays were translated into English by John Florio, who acknowledged Theo-

More, Henry

dore Diodati, the father of Milton’s friend Charles Diodati, in his dedication. Milton’s links to Montaigne’s writings are similarly suggestive though elusive. An apparently lost copy of Florio’s translation bearing Milton’s signature is mentioned by William Riley Parker, who also sees a possible echo of Montaigne in the last of Milton’s Prolusions defending learning. Todd Butler

Monteverdi, Claudio (1567–1643). Italian composer. Born in Cremona, he served the Gonzaga Court at Mantua for much of his early career. Influenced by theorists seeking to revive ancient Greek musical and dramatic practice, he produced his opera L’Orfeo in 1607. Its revolutionary techniques abandon traditional polyphonic structure and use music to highlight language, by relying on a dominant melody, and emotion, through chordal color and dissonance. In 1613 he was named music director at St. Mark’s in Venice. After public opera houses opened there, Monteverdi debuted Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (1640) and L’incoronazione di Poppea (1642 –1643 season). He died in Venice. Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips notes that Monteverdi is one of the composers whose works Milton collected during his Italian travels in 1638 –1639. See New Grove.

Stephen M. Buhler

More [Morus], Alexander (1616 –1670). Churchman, theologian, and controversialist. He was the son of a Scottish minister, who was principal of the Protestant college at Castres, France, and a French mother. He was educated at Castres and at the University of Geneva, where in 1639 he became professor of Greek and, after ordination, professor of theology. However, he acquired a reputation for both Arminianism and sexual immorality, and in 1648, he resigned and moved to a living in Middelburg in the United Provinces. A frequent guest in the household of Claudius Salmasius in Leiden, he was named by Elisabet Guerret, a servant there, as the father of her child. The suit was neither upheld nor rejected, and the scandal followed him through the rest of his career. In 1653 More helped to bring to press the anonymous tract Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum [Cry of the Royal Blood to Heaven], a response to Milton’s Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio. Milton responded with Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda, attributing the whole responsibility for the Clamor to More and making much of

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his recent disgrace. More defended himself in 1654 with Fides Publica Contra Calumnias Joannis Miltoni [Public Assurance Against the False Report of John Milton] and added to it a Supplementum, which Milton answered in Pro Se Defensio, in which he persisted in his tactic of pillorying More, despite the strong evidence that Milton had received about the error he had made in his original attribution to More. More left the United Provinces for a long sojourn in Italy, returning in 1657 to Charenton, near Paris, where from 1659 to his death he held the living of its Protestant pastor. See ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

More, Henry (1614 –1687). English philosopher and moralist, one of the leading Cambridge Platonists. His first year at Christ’s College, Cambridge, was Milton’s last; unlike Milton, More was to spend his career as a fellow of Christ’s. Like Milton, he opposed Thomas Hobbes’s mechanist and materialist determinism and championed freedom of the will. In early writings, More enlisted under the banner of Cartesianism (see René Descartes), finding in res cogitans a substance immune from the mechanical causation universal in Hobbes. Later references to Descartes suggest a growing concern that Descartes was a mechanist in sheep’s clothing. More’s dualism diverges from Descartes’s; for More, extension is a characteristic of spiritual substance as well as corporeal substance. Spirit for More is extended and self-active, and it accounts for all motion in the world. To demonstrate this fact, More turned to demonology, relying in An Antidote Against Atheism (1653) on reports of witchcraft and the activity of spirits as evidence of the existence of incorporeal substance and, by extension, of God. Nearly a century ago Marjorie Nicolson argued for parallels between More’s spiritual substance, his sleeping souls, and Milton’s angels. More, like Milton, but more exhaustively and explicitly, addressed the metaphysical foundations of free will. He left a considerable body of poetry in English, Latin, and Greek, including a Greek poem in Justa Edovardo King Naufrago. His major poetical work, A Platonick Song of the Soul (1642; rev. 1647), relates in Spenserian stanzas and in copious and often confusing detail his idiosyncratic philosophy of soul and body. See Fallon (1991).

Stephen M. Fallon

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Morley, Thomas

Morley, Thomas (c. 1557– c. 1602). English composer and musical theorist. Born in Norwich, he became a noted organist first at Norwich Cathedral and, by 1590, at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. It is likely that he studied with William Byrd. He was named a gentleman of the Chapel Royal in 1592 and soon after began publishing the compositions, treatises, and collections that established him as a highly influential figure in Elizabethan music. The last publication that Morley oversaw was The Triumphs of Oriana (1601), a collection of madrigals celebrating Queen Elizabeth I, the “Oriana” of the title; one of the contributors is John Milton, Sr. Works by both Morley and Milton Sr. appear in Thomas Myriell’s manuscript anthology Tristitiae Remedium (1616). See New Grove.

Stephen M. Buhler

mortalism. Three views of the soul that opposed the dominant opinion that the personal soul was by its nature immortal. All were advocated by Christians who believed their views were scripturebased. Only one view, annihilationism, actually challenged the doctrine of a personal immortality by teaching a realized eschatology, in which death, judgment, heaven, and hell were all words that referred not to future states, but to spiritual realities in this life. Thus, to be resurrected was to enjoy the heaven of living in Christ’s love, hell was to be ignorant of that love, and to be saved was to be freed from personhood as one merged into the Divine, like a drop of water in the ocean. In England these views were often associated with the Familists and later the Ranters. The other forms of mortalism expected an immortal life in heaven or hell, but those states would not begin until the Second Coming of Christ and the General Judgment. Soul-sleeping (or psychopannychism) taught that the soul of a dead person is not in heaven, hell, or purgatory but asleep in some intermediate state until the General Judgment. Martin Luther and William Tyndale taught it, liking how it subverted the Roman abuses relating to purgatory, indulgences, the saints, and masses for the dead. Milton was committed to the more thorough rejection of Greek ideas, to what has been called “thnetopsychism,” a materialism that viewed “soul” as merely a word for the “body alive,” as the animating feature of a living person that died utterly with the body and would be resurrected by the power of the Creator, according to the Promise and not by

its “own quickening power.” It was a position held by Sir Thomas Browne in his youth, by Richard Overton and Thomas Hobbes, and by many General Baptists and other sectarians. Indeed, Milton sees himself as contributing to a “controversy.” In the eighteenth century Joseph Priestley vigorously argued the thnetopsychist position. More recently, the millenarian Seventh-Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses together with such leading theologians as Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, Oscar Cullmann, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr view thnetopsychism as the true scriptural doctrine uncorrupted by Greek philosophy. Milton argued for thnetopsychism only in De Doctrina Christiana. His early poems assume the traditional, immortalist position: Lycidas, for instance, is not dead but is being entertained by “all the saints above” (“Lycidas” 178), and later poems give no clear signal that Milton has abandoned that position. It is a fallen Adam in Paradise Lost who reasons that death will destroy the soul as well as the body (10.782 –93), but the poem does not urge mortalism. In De Doctrina Christiana Milton allows that the state of the soul after death is adiaphorous, not mattering to one’s faith whichever side one takes. Nevertheless, he vigorously argues for the mortalist view, establishing first his materialistic monism and the indivisibility of soul and body and later urging (with some appeal to reason) the scriptural evidence for mortalism. As we have seen, Milton is far from original in these opinions, but he argues with his familiar force and directness on behalf of unpopular views. See Burns (1972), Hill (1977).

Norman T. Burns

Moschus (fl. 150 B.C.). Poet. He lived in Syracuse, Sicily, and wrote poems, a few of which survive. To him at various times was attributed the Lament for Bion, a pastoral elegy with some formal similarities to Milton’s “Lycidas,” which evidently drew on it, not least in its invocations to the muses. The attribution is now regarded as untenable. See OCCL.

Thomas N. Corns

Moscovia [Muscovy]. The Grand Duchy of Moscow and the extensive Russian lands it controlled. In the seventeenth century, it was generally isolated from the major currents that had shaped western Europe, cut off from the Reformation and the

Mount St. Michael

Counter-Reformation by its strict adherence to orthodoxy, by its political instability, and by its geography. English merchants organized themselves into the Muscovy Company in 1555 and continued to control trade between Moscovia and England through the following century. Communications were plainly difficult with the resident colony of traders. Anglo-Russian relations were strained by the execution of Charles I. Czar Alexis in reprisal banished English merchants resident in Moscow and elsewhere to Archangel. The Council of State of the Purged Parliament responded with a letter of protest and the appointment of a special envoy, though the mission never took place. A second envoy did travel to Moscow in 1654, followed by a third in 1657 (though he was detained in Riga). For this final republican mission Milton drew up the official letter from Oliver Cromwell to the czar. Andrew Marvell served as secretary to the Earl of Carlisle on the first Restoration mission in 1664 –1665. Milton gathered from printed sources much of what was known about Moscovia by the early Stuart period in his Brief History of Moscovia. Thomas N. Corns

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death. His wife Anne (d. 1673) continued the business for a further three years. See ODNB.

Ian Gadd

Moses. Founder and lawgiver of Israel. Until the nineteenth century his historical authenticity and authorship of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, were not significantly disputed. As author of Genesis he figures in the opening invocation of Paradise Lost as “That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed, / In the beginning how the heavens and earth / Rose out of chaos” (1.8 –10), a process that Milton seeks to emulate with the aid of the same “heavenly Muse” that inspired Moses (line 6). The history of Moses and the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt is retold in book 12. In Milton’s prose, as the bringer of the Ten Commandments to the Israelites and other pronouncements of the Law, Moses is often alluded to as the lawgiver. His ruling on the permissibility of divorce and remarriage in Deuteronomy 24:1–2 is central to Milton’s argument in his divorce tracts and one of the four texts he explicates in Tetrachordon. See ODCC.

Moseley, Humphrey (d. 1661). London bookseller. He was apprenticed to the London bookseller Matthew Lownes in 1620 and “translated” into the freedom of the Stationers’ Company from the Cooks’ Company (of which his father Thomas was a member) in 1627. For the first seven or so years of his career he was a partner with his nearcontemporary, the bookseller Nicholas Fussell, before establishing his own business in St. Paul’s Churchyard, the center of the London trade. From 1638 he was based at the Prince’s Arms there. Moseley flourished, becoming one of the leading booksellers of the period, notable as much for his publication of literary works (which included Poems of Mr. John Milton [1645] and titles by Richard Crashaw, John Suckling, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, Abraham Cowley, Henry Vaughan, and Thomas Middleton, among others) as for his royalist sympathies, promoting “his own role as ‘the preserver of an endangered Royalist or loyalist body of texts’” (Robert Wilcher quoting Arthur Marotti [1995]). This, however, does not seem to have prevented him from enjoying professional success; he was elected to the governing body of the Stationers’ Company in 1651 and served a term as its second highest officer in the year before his

Thomas N. Corns

Mountain [Montaigne], George (1569 –1628). Archbishop of York. A highly successful churchman and table companion and minor favorite of James I, his career continued its upward trajectory after the succession of Charles I. He held in turn the deanery of Westminster; the bishoprics of Lincoln, London, and Durham; and the archbishopric of York. His translation to Durham allowed Charles to appoint William Laud to the see of London. His closest associates within the church were Arminians, among them Lancelot Andrewes, and as bishop of London, with responsibility for press control, he was in a position to facilitate the printing of Arminian publications. He had among contemporaries a reputation for neglect of his episcopal duties and on occasion was known to entertain lavishly. In Of Reformation Milton sees him as exemplifying the worldliness of contemporary prelacy, characterized by his “canary-sucking, and swan-eating palat.” Thomas N. Corns

Mount St. Michael. A rocky hill in Cornwall, separated at high tide from the mainland. Milton

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alludes to it in “Lycidas”: “Where the great vision of the guarded mount / Looks toward Namancos and Bayona’s hold” (lines 161– 62). Thomas N. Corns

Mr. John Miltons Character of the Long Parliament . . . . See Character of the Long Parliament.

muses. In Greek mythology, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, or Memory, associated with poetic inspiration. Their original seats of worship were Pieria near the Thessalian Olympus and Mount Helicon in Boeotia, and thus they came to be known as the Pierian or Heliconian muses. The fountains of Aganippe and Hippocrene were sacred to them. They were usually considered feminine and invoked by poets as “Nymphs,” “Sisters,” “Virgins,” “Goddesses,” and “Daughters of Memory.” The Sicilian poets associated the muses with their own countryside, and Milton, following the example of Moschus and Virgil, transplanted the “Sicilian Muses” into his own English pastoral landscape in “Lycidas” and “Epitaphium Damonis.” It was not until late Roman times, however, that poets began to distinguish between the various intellectual functions of the different muses and to call upon their particular attributes in epic and lyric poetry. Traditionally nine in number, the muses came to be regarded as the goddesses associated with the various arts: Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Erato (love poetry or the lyre), Euterpe (lyric poetry or flute playing), Melpomene (tragedy), Polyhymnia (songs of praise to the gods), Terpsichore (dancing), Thalia (comedy), and Urania (astronomy). The prevailing conception of the muses and their canonical number of nine come from Hesiod’s Theogony. The muses are most famously associated with the conventions of epic poetry. The epic invocation of the muse begins with Homer’s Olympian muses, who function both to inspire the poet’s song and to serve as the poet’s memory, supplying for him epic catalogues and other such information that lies beyond mortals’ memory. Because of the examples of Hesiod and Homer, invoking the muse to begin an epic poem became a convention by the time of Virgil, who invoked his muse to establish the theme of his Roman epic and to demarcate transitions in his epic. With the advent of Christianity and the decline of paganism, the concept of the muses came under increasing attack, and their rejection became a to-

pos in itself in Christian poetry from the fourth to the seventeenth centuries, when many religious poets preferred to invoke the Holy Spirit, Christ, or God. Perhaps the most famous example of the rejection of the muses comes in Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae, in which Lady Philosophy banishes the muses of poetry for clouding reason, inciting passion, and acclimating her student to his ills, although she uses poetry herself in her own consolation. Nevertheless, the muses survived the Middle Ages and remained connected with the epic form well into the Renaissance. In the seventeenth century the French critic René Le Bossu argued in Traité du poëme epique (1675) for the necessity of including the invocation of the muse and the proposition, whether mixed or separated, at the beginning of the epic poem. Poets writing about history or origins in a public form such as the epic accepted the practice of invoking an authority for their version of historical events, and that authority outside history was the muse. In Paradise Lost Milton confronts the “meaning” and the “name” of his muse in his four proems (books 1, 3, 7, and 9). While Milton never fully rejects his muse’s pagan past, the speaker increasingly emphasizes his muse’s Christian “meaning” (associated alternately with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit [see God]) over the “name,” presented by Milton as the “heavenly Muse” and “Urania,” the same used by Guillaume de Salluste, Seigneur Du Bartas. While Milton’s muse can be seen as a function of the Holy Spirit, she may also personify the feminine Greek goddesses invoked by Hesiod and Homer. In the end, Milton’s muse seems to balance her pagan and Christian attributes. By the opening of book 9, Milton’s celestial patroness no longer requires the poet’s invocation. But while her pagan origins remain a vital part of her identity, the muse comes to represent divine inspiration and the source of all creation. Her gifts, when requested by God’s chosen poet-prophet, are granted to the poet with “upright heart and pure” (1.18). The muse’s true identity, even when her “nightly visitation” comes “unimplored” (9.22), remains ambiguous. It is through his reestablishment of the muse’s ambiguity and his creative use of classical forms that Milton breathes new life into the convention of invoking the muses. See OCD.

Philip E. Phillips

Mylius, Hermann [Hermann Müller or Möller] (1600 –1657). Diplomat. He was educated at the universities of Rostock, Strasbourg, Tübingen, and

Myriell, Thomas

Basel and entered the service of Anthon Günther, Count of Oldenburg, a small German principality between the estuaries of the Weser and Ems rivers. In 1651–1652 he visited England under the Purged Parliament to secure for his small Baltic state a salvaguardia, or safeguard, which would guarantee the neutrality of Oldenburg’s shipping in case of hostilities with adjacent countries and would also recognize the ancient right of Oldenburg to collect tolls on river traffic on the Weser, a source of conflict with the more powerful city-state of Bremen, which occupied the opposite bank. The count had received such an undertaking from Charles I and recognized the need to renew it under the changed political circumstances. Mylius’s mission brought him into frequent professional contact with Milton. Alone of all the people who met Milton, Mylius kept a diary. From it we learn of Milton’s status within the government machinery and of his working practices as a public servant.

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Myriell, Thomas (c. 1580 –1625). Clergyman and musician. Identified by Pamela J. Willetts as rector of St. Stephen Walbrook, London, 1616 –1625, and chaplain to George Abbot, who was appointed archbishop of Canterbury in 1611. His manuscript Tristitiae Remedia includes works by Milton’s father: the madrigal “Faire ORIAN”; Precamur Sancte Domine, a Latin motet in six parts; and seven anthems—“O Lord behold my miseries,” “If that a sinner’s sighs,” “Thou God of might has chastened me,” “When David heard,” “O woe is me for thee, my brother Jonathan,” “I am the Resurrection,” and “How doth the holy City remaine solitary” with “She weepeth continually.” The last pair, a kind of text often set by recusants, shows that music mourning the division of the city of God was sung by both Catholics and Protestants. John Milton, Sr., is in good company: Myriell included works by the best English composers of his time and many continental ones. See GMO.

See Miller (1985).

Thomas N. Corns

Diane Kelsey McColley

N Nahum. Book of the Old Testament. One of the twelve “minor prophets,” it was written relatively late, probably shortly before the end of the seventh century b.c. Though it follows the familiar pattern of threats and promises, the primary object of its prophecy of doom is not Jerusalem but the Assyrian city of Nineveh. In De Doctrina Christiana Milton cites it only once, among numerous references to other prophetic books. See Bauman (1989), ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

Naples [Napoli]. Kingdom in southern Italy and name of its principal city. It was acquired in 1502 by Spain and remained a Spanish possession, governed by a Spanish viceroy, until 1707. Milton visited it in December 1638, making the acquaintance of Giovanni Battista Manso and visiting the Accademia degli Oziosi. Thomas N. Corns

Nashe [Nash], Thomas (1567– c. 1601). Elizabethan writer. He attended St. John’s College, Cambridge University, and began working in London in 1588. His known works include satires, plays, and a vigorous picaresque novel, The Unfortunate Traveller. Nashe contributed to the Martin Marprelate exchange, perhaps at the request of the church, as an opponent of the anonymous Puritan Marprelate, who was a cutting and brilliant satirist. Nashe’s pamphlets are the most energetic and witty contributions on the church side. He wrote later lampoons aimed at the Puritan scholars Richard and Gabriel Harvey. Both Marprelate and Nashe anticipate Milton’s scathing antiprelatical satire in works like Animadversions and Apology Against a Pamphlet. Henry S. Limouze

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nationalism. A sense of nationhood; a partiality toward one’s own nation; the political philosophy supporting such views. Writing in August 1666, Milton makes it clear that for much of his career he had been a nationalist. But patriotism, he reflects in a private letter to Peter Heimbach, had not rewarded him: “after having allured me by her lovely name, [patriotism] has almost expatriated me, as it were.” In the same way that so long before he felt himself church-outed by the prelates, that is, excluded from his vocation as a minister of the church because of its episcopal government, he now feels himself ex-patriated by the country he had served so passionately and concludes philosophically that “One’s Patria is wherever it is well with him.” Milton’s nationalism is articulated in surprisingly different forms at different times throughout his career. Even at the height of his optimism for England’s future in the early 1640s, this diversity is apparent. At times, his nationalism is intensely ethnic, rooted most positively in a sense of the native vitality of the English language: since English is “the language of men ever famous, and formost in the atchievements of liberty,” he writes in Areopagitica, “[it] will not easily finde servile letters anow to spell such a dictatorie presumption [as imprimatur in] English.” At other times, it is religious, not a matter of nature but of divine election: had not England through God’s grace been the first to “set up a Standard for the recovery of lost Truth, and blow the first Evangelick Trumpet to the Nations, holding up, as from a Hill, the new lampe of saving light to all Christendome”? (Of Reformation). At still other times, his nationalism is distinctively secular, revealing a sophisticated grasp of the intellectual energy and demanding dialogism necessary for a civic nation to be truly free: if citizens are to “advance truth in others, and from others to entertain it,” then the Commonwealth must encourage open public discourse (Areopagitica). Perhaps most famously, Milton’s nationalism is literary. In The

Nedham, Marchamont

Reason of Church-Government, he explains that his vocation is not simply to be a poet, or even a religious poet, but a national poet: “Content with these British Ilands as my world,” he says, his purpose is not simply God’s glory, but “Gods glory by the honour and instruction of my country”—his purpose is to write a poetic work “doctrinal and exemplary to a Nation.” Milton has to some extent always been identified with the nation. From the end of the seventeenth century on, he seems inseparable from England’s sense of its self. For John Dryden’s “Achitophel,” the First Earl of Shaftesbury, for instance, writing before his death in 1683, Milton is already “our great Poet.” For most people, it was Paradise Lost that assured Milton a central place in England’s national imaginary. The poem’s sublimity became England’s. According to Joseph Addison, for instance, writing in 1712, no man was a greater master of the sublime than Milton, and in this his poem “does Honour to the English Nation.” For many, the sublimity of Paradise Lost became inseparable from Milton’s political writing and its advocacy of individual liberty. Since the early 1980s “nations and nationalism” as a category for literary analysis has moved to center stage, and the debate over Milton’s nationalism is clearly one that is likely to become more intense. See Loewenstein and Stevens (2008), Maley (2003).

Paul Stevens

Nativity Ode. See “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.”

“Naturam Non Pati Senium” [That Nature Does Not Suffer from Old Age]. Poem by Milton. It was first printed in Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645) and is usually ascribed to Milton’s student years, probably 1627–1628, owing to the publication in 1627 of George Hakewill’s influential Apologie of the Power and Providence of God. Hakewill opposed Godfrey Goodman’s The Fall of Man, or the Corruption of Nature (1616), which had argued that the world was in a state of decay and that the universe had gradually been collapsing into disorder ever since the Fall. Conversely, Hakewill maintained that neither the universe nor its inhabitants were in decline and that modern poetic and scientific inventiveness equaled that of the ancients and should be accordingly celebrated. Milton’s poem argues Hakewill’s topical case (65 – 67).

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The world will end, therefore, in a conflagration, but only in a sudden, divinely visited apocalypse; otherwise, the world in all ages has and will obey the same laws. The modernity of “Naturam,” however, is qualified: Milton’s heavens follow the Ptolemaic model (37–51). William Poole

Nebuchadnezzar (605 –562 B.C.). King of the ancient city of Babylon. God uses him to punish Judah as a nation gone astray (Ezra 5:12; Jer. 25). The Book of Daniel (1:1) and 2 Kings chapter 24 mention Nebuchadnezzar’s conquest of Jerusalem. The most developed narrative of Nebuchadnezzar features Daniel/Belteshazzar, who was chosen to serve under Nebuchadnezzar, as the interpreter of the king’s dreams of the composite statue of four metals symbolizing four world empires (Dan. 2) and of the tree that grew into the heavens and was ordered to be cut down (Dan. 4). Nebuchadnezzar appears most frequently in Milton as an unrepentant figure of idolatry, pride, and tyranny (for example, in Eikonoklastes), thus deviating from Christianized hermeneutical and literary traditions that accommodate a redeemed Nebuchadnezzar (Dan. 4:31–34). In attacking the prelates in Animadversions, Milton as iconoclast urges the destruction of the “Babylonish gold’n Image” of Daniel chapter 3: “throw down your Nebuchadnezzars Image and crumble it like the chaffe of the Summer threshing floores.” While tempting the Son in Paradise Regained to liberate an enslaved Israel, Satan alludes to Nebuchadnezzar as the rebuilder of Babylon “who twice / Judah and all thy father David’s house / Led captive, and Jerusalem laid waste” (3.281– 83). Elizabeth Sauer

Nedham, Marchamont (bap. 1620, d. 1678). Journalist and pamphleteer. He was born in Burford, Oxfordshire, and educated at All Souls’ College and St. Mary’s Hall, Oxford, before becoming an usher or undermaster at Merchant Taylor’s School and then an under clerk at Gray’s Inn. In 1643 he became a prototype journalist, editing the weekly parliamentarian newsbook Mercurius Britanicus. Hostility to royalists and Presbyterians earned Nedham many enemies. His mocking of Charles I’s speech impediment in 1645 brought a parliamentary reprimand and national notoriety. In May 1646 he labeled the king a tyrant, was sent to Fleet Prison, and was required to forswear writing pamphlets. He

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was quickly forsworn. Obtaining forgiveness from Charles, he launched a royalist newsbook Mercurius Pragmaticus (September 1647 to May 1649), printed underground in London. This combined sharp satire with detailed reporting of parliamentary proceedings. Nedham denounced the trial and execution of the king and was finally apprehended in June 1649. He published a retraction, was released from prison, and took the engagement oath (see Engagement Controversy). Case of the Common-Wealth of England Stated was published on 8 May 1650. It declared Nedham’s conversion to republicanism and combined political analysis with theory, developing and extending his earlier pamphlets and journalism, which had espoused reason of state and interest theory, using both to analyze the dynamic between various political groups. The treatise stands alongside Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio as a statement of the principles of the republic. Nedham was rewarded with a salary and launched a new newsbook, Mercurius Politicus ( June 1650 to April 1660), which combined essays of political theory and analysis with extensive news, much from foreign correspondents and from John Thurloe’s office in the Council of State. From January 1651 it was licensed by Milton (it is not known when this arrangement ended). Nedham and Milton grew to be friends during these years. Nedham also published A True State of the Case of the Commonwealth (1654), a work that has parallels to Milton’s Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda; translated John Selden’s Mare Clausum as Of the Dominion, or the Ownership of the Sea (1652); and worked as a government spy. His Excellencie of a Free State (1656) is a key text in British republicanism and can be seen as a critique of the increasingly antirepublican Protectorate. In 1655 Nedham was involved in the reform of press controls that gave him a news monopoly and introduced the Publick Intelligencer, appearing on Mondays as a partner to Thursday’s Politicus. Like Milton, Nedham opposed the Restoration and published against it until the last minute before going into hiding. He escaped execution and obtained a pardon. He wrote some royalist propaganda and practiced as a physician. His Medela Medicinæ (1665) opposed Galenic tradition and commended experimental chemical medicine. In his final years, 1676 –1678, he wrote three anti-Shaftesbury pamphlets and two anti-French, pro-war pamphlets. Despite this surprising transformation, he was,

according to Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips, a “particular friend” and visitor of Milton during the Restoration. He was buried in St. Clement’s Danes. See Frank (1980), ODNB, Worden (2007).

Joad Raymond

Nehemiah. Book of the Old Testament. It describes the completion of the work of Ezra under the leadership of Nehemiah, cup-bearer to the Persian king Artaxerxes. It narrates the events around the rebuilding and fortification of Jerusalem and his purification and promulgation of the Law to the Jews. Milton draws on this account to complete his brief description of the postexilic settlement in Paradise Lost (12.347–53). See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

Neile, Richard (1562 –1640). Archbishop of York. Son of a Westminster candle maker, he eventually attained the archbishopric, one of the most important offices in the Church of England. Neile’s defense of restored church ceremony links him with the rise of Arminian tendencies in the church. Initially William Cecil’s protégé, Neile received important ecclesiastical offices through his friendship with James I. He was an early patron of William Laud. The decade Neile spent as bishop of Durham, culminating in his elevation to Charles I’s Privy Council, may have been the most important in his career. His controversial interventions on behalf of Arminians at Cambridge University during the 1620s, when Milton was there, were significant, as were his cultivation of Catholic gentry and his persecution of radical Protestants. See ODNB, Tyacke (1987).

Andrew Fleck

Neoplatonism. A complex and multifaceted philosophy based on a reworking of the thought of Plato. Three historical phases in Neoplatonic thought are evident in the poetry of Milton and some of his contemporaries. Early philosophical studies in emulation of Plato became centered at Alexandria during the early Roman empire. There, Plotinus and others sought to systematize Plato and added a religious dimension, emphasizing the oneness of God and the yearning of the soul to ascend

Newcomen, Matthew

to the divine. Early Neoplatonism was syncretic: in addition to drawing upon Plato, it incorporated elements from pagan mystery religions, the Jewish kabbalah, and magic. Characteristic of this syncretism were the works attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, who was thought to have educated Moses, to have enlightened the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, and to have prophesied the coming of Christ. Although Neoplatonism had not disappeared entirely from medieval Europe, the work of Marsilio Ficino in fifteenth-century Florence did much to revive it among intellectuals, poets, and artists, who gave Neoplatonism a humanistic flavor. Under the instruction of Cosimo de’ Medici, Ficino translated into Latin the corpus of Neoplatonic manuscripts—Alexandrian in origin—that had come into Cosimo’s possession after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Cosimo had also acquired many works of Plato that had been lost to the west for centuries, but he directed Ficino to translate the Neoplatonic works first, specifically those attributed to Hermes Trismegistus because they seemed to share directly in the revelation of Christ. Although the works attributed to Hermes Trismegistus were later found to be a pious fraud, they continued to exert influence over later Neoplatonic thinking. There was a concerted renewal of interest in Plato alongside the Neoplatonics at Cambridge University in the seventeenth century. The Cambridge Platonists—principally Benjamin Whichcote, Henry More, and Ralph Cudworth—were Milton’s contemporaries. Neoplatonic thought is widely dispersed through Milton’s poetry, especially Paradise Lost. Here, in the tradition of early Neoplatonism, evil verges on nonbeing as a shadowy inversion of the Good: this makes for a Satan who is a parodic opposite to Christ. The desire of lower beings to ascend toward the divine, developed from Plato by Renaissance Neoplatonists into a triad of divine intervention by emanation– conversion–return (as in Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola), is inverted by Satan: his irruption into paradise signals a mock-triad of intrusion–perversion–descent. The Neoplatonic motif of ascent to the refinement of the sublime through education, prefigured in A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus) and proclaimed by Raphael in Paradise Lost, is a feature of Renaissance Italian thought and the Cambridge Platonists. The later Milton’s turning away from the Calvinist predestinarian thought in favor of free will under the power of reason is concomitant with a parallel development among the Cambridge Platonists. The

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emphasis on free will becomes an insistent theme in Paradise Lost. Christopher Wortham

Newcombe [Newcomb], Thomas (c. 1627– 1681). London printer. He was apprenticed to the London printer Gregory Dexter from 1641. Newcombe’s marriage in 1648 to Ruth Raworth, widow of the London printer John Raworth and printer of Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645), led to his succeeding to Raworth’s business. A notable publisher of Interregnum newsbooks and periodicals, Newcombe also printed a number of Milton’s prose works up to 1660, including Eikonoklastes (1650), Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda (1654), Pro Se Defensio (1655), and The Readie and Easie Way (1660). Dobranski (1999) suggests that Milton may have influenced the decision by the Council of State to employ Newcombe as a printer; Raymond (2002) argues that the two men were at least acquaintances. At the Restoration Newcombe became the manager of the reestablished King’s Printing House, which moved to new premises at the Savoy after the Great Fire. Printer of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society between 1665 and 1670, of the London Gazette from 1666, and of numerous literary works, Newcombe became one of the dominant figures in the London trade. He and Henry Hills were formally named as King’s Printers in 1677. When Newcombe died, his body was laid in state in Stationers’ Hall. His son, also Thomas Newcombe, succeeded to the business. See Dobranski (1999), ODNB, Raymond (2002).

Ian Gadd

Newcomen, Matthew (c. 1610 –1669). Presbyterian divine, one of the five acronymic authors who constituted Smectymnuus and with whom Milton allied himself in 1641–1642. He was born in Colchester and educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge University, taking his B.A. in 1630 and M.A. in 1633. (Milton attended Christ’s College, Cambridge, from 1625 to 1632, but there is no evidence that the two men met.) Newcomen was licensed as a curate in the early 1630s, but there is some doubt whether he received episcopal ordination. In 1636 he succeeded the eminent Puritan John Rogers as lecturer (that is, a minister without a pastoral charge and so not subject to episcopal authority) at Dedham, Essex, and became a

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leader of the Puritan movement in that county. He was a member of the group of ministers who met regularly at the London home of Edmund Calamy, whose first wife’s sister he had married. It was from these meetings that the antiepiscopal Smectymnuan tracts emerged. As a member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, Newcomen worked for a Presbyterian church settlement, and as one of the series of Puritan ministers who preached before Parliament in the early 1640s, he called for reform of the Church of England. Following the Act of Uniformity (1662), he emigrated to become the pastor of the English church at Leiden, where he died of the plague. N. H. Keeble

New Model Army. Army formed by the Long Parliament in 1645 to make the army more professional and more ready to serve in any theater of war. Its officer cadre was purged of those holding seats in Parliament (with the exception of Oliver Cromwell), and it was placed under the command of Thomas Fairfax, a field officer of great ability, with Cromwell as his deputy. It secured victory at the Battle of Naseby, which destroyed the last major royalist field army in the First Civil War. It met with some facility the challenges posed by renewed royalist activity in the Second Civil War and Third Civil War. Its fragmentation in the early months of 1660 was a major factor in hastening the Restoration. See also “To the Lord General Cromwell” and “On the Lord General Fairfax at the Siege of Colchester.” Thomas N. Corns

newsbooks. See Mercurius Aulicus, Mercurius Britanicus, Mercurius Politicus, and Mercurius Pragmaticus.

Nicetas Choniates [Acominatus] (after 1140 – 1213). Historian and statesman. He was educated in Constantinople and held senior posts in the imperial administration. His history Imperii Graeci Historia, in twenty-one books, relates events from 1118 to 1206. Milton draws on it sparingly, probably using the edition published in Paris in 1647. There is one note in his Commonplace Book. In Eikonoklastes Milton’s onslaught on the reading practices of Charles I carries the aside that “Andronicus Comnenus the Byzantine Emperor, though

a most cruel Tyrant, is reported by Nicetas to have been a constant reader of Saint Pauls Epistles.” Thomas N. Corns

Nimrod. Descendant of the biblical Ham, whose kingdom is said to be Babel (Gen. 10:8 –10). Charles Stephanus’s Dictionarium identifies “Nimrod” as a derivative of marad (Hebrew for “rebellion”) (PL 12.36). Interpretations of Babel and Nimrod by Josephus; Philo; Augustine; Gregory the Great; Isidore of Seville; Jerome; Bede; Dante; Giovanni Boccaccio; Guillaume de Salluste, Seigneur Du Bartas; John Lydgate; Jean Calvin; Martin Luther; Edmund Spenser; and Walter Ralegh established a nonbiblical tradition for Milton’s account. Milton’s Nimrod, a figure of monarchical pride, is the first postlapsarian king (for example, see Eikonoklastes) and tyrant (see Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio). In Paradise Lost, Nimrod is the builder of Babel and a “mighty hunter” (12.33) of people who refuse his domination. Milton’s description of Bacchus (from Greek “to revel”) in Paradise Lost 7.33 –34 complements the account of the unfinished tower left “ridiculous” (PL 12.62) and of Nimrod, whose name is also linked to that of Bacchus as lawgiver and corrupt monarch. Elizabeth Sauer

nonconformity. Religious dissent. Before the English civil wars the term “nonconformist” was used of ministers in the established episcopal Church of England who declined to observe all the rituals and procedures prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer. Refusal to wear the surplice, to use a ring in the wedding ceremony, to insist on kneeling at the Lord’s Supper, and to make the sign of the cross during baptism were characteristic examples of such noncompliance with what nonconformists regarded as Romish practices. The conscientiousness (scrupulosity to its opponents) that lay behind this nonconformity commonly carried over into other aspects of the religious life. Nonconformity was coupled with a Puritan preference for preaching over sacraments, with heightened moral sensitivity and habits of spiritual self-examination, and often (though not invariably) with opposition to episcopacy and a preference for Presbyterianism or for congregationalism or Independency. The terms “nonconformist” and “Puritan” were hence often used interchangeably, as Milton does in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates.

Numbers

Since Elizabethan times the episcopal hierarchy, and successive archbishops of Canterbury, had exercised themselves to promote the standardization of worship required by the Act of Uniformity (1559). The renewed determination of Archbishop William Laud to stamp out nonconformity was a significant factor in generating the tensions that led to civil war. Such opposition drove some nonconformists into separation from the Church of England (which is why Milton can suppose, in The Reason of Church-Government, that the terms “Puritan” and “Brownist” are synonymous). Many other nonconformists sought in exile the freedom to worship according to their consciences. William Ames, for example, emigrated to the Low Countries and John Cotton to New England in what came to be known as the “Great Migration” of the 1630s. By creating a schism in the English church, the much more stringent Restoration Act of Uniformity (1662) gave to “nonconformity” a quite new meaning. Any minister who lacked episcopal orders, who did not abjure the Solemn League and Covenant, or who failed to make a public declaration of his assent to everything in the Book of Common Prayer was deprived of his benefice. Nearly two thousand ministers left the Church of England on or before Black Bartholomew Day (1662). Hence, nonconformity no longer consisted in the noncompliance of members of the established church but in separation (though often unwillingly) from that church. The intention of this act and of the ensuing legislation of the Clarendon Code was further to deprive such “ejected” ministers of the means of livelihood and, through persecution, to disperse their adherents. The effect was instead to confirm them and their congregations in their commitment, thus winning recognition for the principle of the toleration of diversity of Protestant religious practice (recognized in law by the Act of Toleration, 1689) and establishing “dissent” (the term that came to supersede “nonconformity” during the last quarter of the century) as a permanent feature of English religion. With his contempt

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for episcopacy and commitment to liberty of conscience, Milton was consistently sympathetic to nonconformity in both its prewar and Restoration forms. N. H. Keeble

Norman Conquest. Military campaign of William, Duke of Normandy (William the Conqueror), that started in 1066 and led to the conquest of England by the Normans. The closing pages of Milton’s History of Britain are largely concerned with events leading to William’s victory over Harold II and his army. Milton declines the argument, familiar among political radicals, that the conquest overthrew the liberties of a free people, protected by a representative political system, and imposed the Norman yoke of authoritarian and tyrannical monarchy. Indeed, Milton is nowhere drawn to the Norman yoke theory in its most developed form. Thomas N. Corns

Numbers. Book of the Old Testament. It traditionally is attributed to Moses. Its curious name (in the Christian tradition) arose from its two records of a census (in chapters 1– 4 and 26), although in Hebrew its title reflects more closely its content, which has to do with the wanderings of the Israelites in the wilderness after their flight from Egypt. Milton discusses a handful of passages in De Doctrina Christiana. One incident, as the Israelites lost confidence in their migration, produced the resonant verse, “And they said one to another, Let us make a captain, and let us return into Egypt” (13:4). Milton movingly echoes the text in The Readie and Easie Way (second edition) as he laments that his compatriots, in contemplating the restoration of the monarchy, “seem now chusing them a captain back for Egypt.” See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

O oath ex officio. Developed initially in the thirteenth century by the ecclesiastical courts and the King’s Council, it compelled individuals being questioned to disclose the full extent of their knowledge regarding any matters they might be questioned upon. Before the oath’s administration, the subject was denied knowledge of the nature of the charges and questions to be asked, and answers that contradicted previously discovered evidence were used to force an admission of guilt from defendants. During the years preceding the English civil wars the use of the oath became a potent symbol of monarchical tyranny. Parliament finally abolished it along with the Court of Star Chamber and the ecclesiastical Court of High Commission on 5 July 1641. Milton’s particular hostility toward the oath lay with its use by the Laudian church as an instrument against reformers. Responding to the Remonstrant in Animadversions, Milton sneeringly describes the High Commission. See also An Apology Against a Pamphlet. Todd Butler

Obadiah. Book of the Old Testament. One of the “minor prophets,” it is the shortest of the Old Testament. Its apparent allusion to the destruction of Jerusalem (verse 11) points to a relatively late date. Its principal themes match in miniature those of other prophetic books. Milton cites it only once in De Doctrina Christiana in a passage that draws heavily on the other prophetic books. See Bauman (1989), ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

Obsequies to the Memorie of Mr. Edward King. Second part of Justa Edovardo King Naufrago, published in Cambridge in 1638 as a memorial collection for Edward King after his death. The first part contains poems in Latin and Greek; this sec258

ond part, which has a separate title page, ends with Milton’s “Lycidas.” The second part starts on a new sheet, but there is no evidence that it ever circulated separately. Thomas N. Corns

Observations upon the Articles of Peace. Work of prose by Milton, although neither his name nor his initials appear on the tract; full title, Observations upon the Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels, on the Letter of Ormond to Col. Jones, and the Representation of the Presbytery at Belfast. It was published by Matthew Simmons late in the spring of 1649; George Thomason dated his copy May 16. The Articles of Peace had been proclaimed in Ireland by James Butler, Twelfth Earl and First Duke of Ormonde, thirteen days before Charles I’s execution. On 28 March the Council of State appointed Milton “to make some observations . . . to be printed wth the papers out of Ireland wch the House hath ordered to be printed.” He followed these instructions to the letter—the tract contains the Articles of Peace, Ormonde’s letter to Col. Michael Jones, Col. Jones’s reply, and A Necessary Representation, followed by Milton’s observations. He moves through each of these documents in order to build the Commonwealth’s case by progressively linking together royalist, Catholic, and Presbyterian interests and the dangers they pose to the fledgling regime in England. The tract’s aim is to present to readers the Commonwealth’s official line regarding Ireland and to persuade them of the pressing necessity of such a policy. At one point, Milton stresses the immediacy of the threat from Ireland. Observations is a call to avenge “the mercilesse and barbarous Massacre of so many thousand English” following upon the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion in 1641. Milton puts forth the justness of an English reconquest of a barbaric and treacherous Ireland. Indeed, no “true”

Of Reformation

Englishman can read the Articles of Peace and accompanying documents without “indignation and disdaine.” Jim Daems

Of Civil Power. See Treatise of Civil Power. Of Education. Milton, work of prose; full title, Of Education, To Master Samuel Hartlib. It was anonymously published in summer 1644. The eight-page quarto was registered in accordance with the law to Thomas Underhill (see stationers), a bookseller and publisher. The tract originally appeared without a title page and therefore without a date or the author’s name. However, George Thomason attributed the work to “Mr. John Milton” and dated his copy “5 June.” The second edition was published at the back of the 1673 volume of Milton’s minor poems, Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions; the title page reads, “Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions. By Mr. John Milton: Both English and Latin, &c. Composed at several times. With a small Tractate of Education to Mr. Hartlib.” Of Education is presented as a letter to Samuel Hartlib, who apparently asked Milton to record his views on education but whose reaction to them is much disputed. That Hartlib decided against publishing the tract suggests that he may have been offended by Milton’s jab at his favorite pedagogue, John Amos Comenius, author of one of the “many modern Janua’s and Didactics” Milton disliked. Milton offers in the tract two explicit definitions of the purpose of education. First he claims that the aim is “to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him.” Later, however, Milton calls a “compleate and generous Education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices both private and publike of peace and war.” Whereas the statements would appear to contradict one another in their respective emphases on either more high-minded or practical goals, Milton followed Christian-humanist reformers such as Juan Luis Vives, who stressed the importance of cultivating the outer as well as the inner man. Gregory M. Colón Semenza

Of Prelatical Episcopacy. Milton, work of prose; full title, Of Prelatical Episcopacy, and Whether It May Be Deduc’d from the Apostolical Times by Ver-

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tue of Those Testimonies Which Are Alledg’d to That Purpose in Some Late Treatises. The second and shortest of Milton’s five antiprelatical tracts (see also Of Reformation, Animadversions, Reason of Church-Government, and Apology Against a Pamphlet), it was printed in June or July of 1641 by Richard Oulton and Gregory Dexter for Thomas Underhill. The title page carried neither Milton’s name nor his initials. It was a response to The Judgement of Dr. Rainoldes Touching the Originall of Episcopacy (1641) by James Ussher, the archbishop of Armagh. Another among the “Late Treatises” it answered was probably Episcopacie by Divine Right (1640) by Joseph Hall, whom Milton was to attack directly in his next publication, Animadversions, and with whose work he was certainly familiar. The date is uncertain, but Ussher’s pamphlet appeared in May 1641, and George Thomason purchased his copy of Milton’s work in July, so June or early July publication seems likely. Though brief, Of Prelatical Episcopacy is a dense and detailed review of early church testimony and practice designed to show that arguments for episcopacy based thereon are falsely grounded. As with Of Reformation and his other antiprelatical works, Milton paradoxically uses historical scholarship to dismiss history and refer all questions of church government to scripture. See Corns (1992, 1998).

Henry S. Limouze

Of Reformation. Milton, work of prose; full title, Of Reformation Touching Church-Discipline in England: And the Causes That Hitherto Have Hindred It. It was Milton’s first published prose work (except, probably, for the Postscript to the first tract by Smectymnuus) and the first of his five antiprelatical tracts (see also Of Prelatical Episcopacy, Animadversions, Reason of Church-Government, and Apology Against a Pamphlet). It was printed by an unknown printer for Thomas Underhill in May 1641. The work is in two books addressed “To a Freind [sic]”; Milton’s name is not on the title page. It appeared during the pamphlet war between Joseph Hall and Smectymnuus, to which Milton was to contribute directly in later writings. However, Of Reformation was not apparently a response to any particular argument on the episcopal side, although one section closely parallels the Postscript (possibly by Milton) to Smectymnuus’s first reply to Hall, An Answer to . . . An Humble Remonstrance, which had appeared in March. Milton refers obliquely to Hall early in the tract, and a section at the end of book 2

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seems to respond directly to arguments by George Digby, Second Earl of Bristol, and others against the radicalism of sudden reformation. Milton proposes to investigate the historical and present-day reasons why reformation has been hindered in England, and nearly all his arguments involve detailed historical summaries and arguments. In examining Tudor history, Milton derides the Protestant martyrs Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer, and Nicholas Ridley as enemies of a full reformation under Edward VI, a shocking claim for many Anglicans and Presbyterians alike. Thomas Fuller attacked this passage in The Holy State (1642), as did Bishop John Bramhall in The Serpent Salve a year later. In examining the present day, Milton divides the enemies of reform into antiquarians, libertines, and politicians. He responds to the antiquarians with a survey of early church history, wherein he condemns the influence of Constantine, another point of difference from Smectymnuus, and concludes with an argument for the self-evident clearness and sufficiency of scripture. His political argument for reformation in book 2 takes on James I’s “no bishops no king” equation. Besides responses by Fuller and Bramhall, Of Reformation was criticized for its treatment of Irenaeus by “Peloni Almoni,” the anonymous author of A Compendious Discourse, published late in May 1641. Much of Milton’s historical scholarship paradoxically shows the irrelevance of history in the face of “the Scriptures protesting their own plainnes,” an approach developed in the other antiprelatical tracts. Milton later reversed his views on monarchy. See Corns (1992, 1998), Fish (1990).

Henry S. Limouze

Of True Religion. Milton, work of prose; full title, Of True Religion, Hæresie, Schism, Toleration, and What Best Means May Be Us’d Against the Growth of Popery. It was written and published in the spring of 1673, likely after the royal proclamation of the Test Act on 13 March. The title page identifies the author as simply “J.M.” and does not name a printer or bookseller. However, as William Riley Parker records, the unregistered tract was advertised for sale by the bookseller Thomas Sawbridge, who gives the author’s full name in his spring catalogue that was registered 6 May 1673. The political occasion for Milton’s last polemical tract gives the argument a rhetorical shape quite different from his other treatments of religious toleration. In the years since the Restoration,

Protestant dissenters had been suppressed by means of legislation ranging from financial penalties to imprisonment or exile to the colonies. King Charles II attempted, through his Declaration of Indulgence (15 March 1672), to link the toleration of such nonconformists with the toleration of Catholics. By the following year, the public outcry against the declaration (and the king’s suspected crypto-Catholicism) resulted in Parliament passing the Test Act (12 March 1673), which effectively barred Catholics from public office. In response to that crisis, Parliament also began to debate a bill that would have extended toleration to dissenters. Milton’s aim in Of True Religion is to support that prospect (which remained hopeful when Parliament adjourned on 29 March) while drawing support from the “No Popery” protests. Although not explicitly addressing himself to the House of Commons, Milton demonstrates his understanding of the Cavalier Parliament, whose members would be his intended audience, by citing the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles to support his claims. See Corns (1998), CPW 8, Lewalski (2000).

Phillip J. Donnelly

Oldenburg, Henry (1619 –1677). Native of Bremen, Germany, diplomat, and first secretary of the Royal Society. After a period probably acting as tutor to English families resident in the Netherlands, in 1653 he was appointed Bremen’s representative to Oliver Cromwell and the English Parliament and ended up settling in England. There he launched his vast international correspondence and founded the Philosophical Transactions in 1665. Oldenburg also translated into English Nicolaus Steno’s Prodromus (1671), the first sustained argument for the organic nature of fossils. Richard Jones, Milton’s pupil and the son of Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh, became Oldenburg’s pupil in 1656, though Jones proved idle. Milton and Oldenburg had been acquainted for at least two years, but it was on account of Jones that the two men developed their brief correspondence, and Oldenburg, not Milton, initiated it. Oldenburg wrote to Milton on such topics as biblical chronology, the pre-Adamite hypothesis, and Julius Caesar Scaliger although Milton, on the extant evidence, was interested only in news of Claudius Salmasius and Alexander More. Oldenburg does imply, however, that Milton had read Samuel Desmarets’s Refutatio Fabulae Praeadamiticae (1656). References in John Beale’s correspondence with John Evelyn suggest that Oldenburg and Milton were

“On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”

still in touch after the Restoration, and Oldenburg may have passed on Beale’s peculiar request that both Milton and Thomas Sprat be enlisted to write poems praising the Royal Society. Unsurprisingly, Milton did not comply. William Poole

Old English. A term in Milton’s age for a period of the language now separated into Old and Middle English. Scholarly interest in Anglo-Saxon, the preconquest stage of English, blossomed throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly for its usefulness in theological, legal, and historical debates. Type imitating Anglo-Saxon minuscule was founded in 1566; landmark Old English publications include the Gospels in 1571 and Abraham Wheelock’s 1643 edition of Bede. The first poetic text to be printed was Genesis, published in Amsterdam by Franciscus Junius in 1655. Although Milton’s History of Britain required close study of Anglo-Saxon history, he probably could not read Old English. William Poole

“On Shakespeare.” Poem by Milton. Originally published as “An Epitaph on the Admirable Dramaticke Poet W. Shakespeare” in the 1632 Second Folio of William Shakespeare’s collected works, in which Milton’s authorship is not identified, it was subsequently printed in Shakespeare’s 1640 Poems and initialed “I.M.” By the time of its inclusion in Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645), minor variations had altered the poem somewhat from its first appearance, most notably the use of “weak” for “dust” in line 6, “live-long” for “lasting” (8), and “heart” for “part” (10). Milton dates the poem 1630. Though most of those writing verses for Shakespeare’s folios were well known already, “On Shakespeare” was the first of Milton’s English poems to be published. Eric C. Brown

“On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough.” Poem by Milton. It is one of his earliest surviving English poems, written, according to his nephew Edward Phillips, on the occasion of the death of his sister Anne’s infant daughter. Both the identity of the infant and the date of composition have been questioned, but 1627 or 1628 are the likely years of composition. Numerous stylistic influences can be detected in the poem. The

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leisurely movement of the verse and rich descriptions recall Edmund Spenser; the many compound adjectives—there are thirteen—are an inheritance from Josuah Sylvester; the seven-line stanza concluding with an alexandrine may be derived from Phineas Fletcher. There are echoes of William Shakespeare, too: Venus and Adonis is surely the source of the “thought to kiss / But killed alas” motif that opens the poem; the opening also recalls lines in “The Passionate Pilgrim,” attributed to Shakespeare. A Midsummer Night’s Dream contributes another phrase. The poem was first published in Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions (1673). See Revard (1997).

Graham Parry

“On the Lord General Fairfax at the Siege of Colchester.” Sonnet by Milton, titled “On ye Lord Gen. Fairfax at ye seige [sic] of Colchester” in Milton’s hand in the Trinity Manuscript. It was first published by Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips in Letters of State (1694) (see Letters of State). Milton addresses Sir Thomas Fairfax, commander in chief of the New Model Army, after renewed civil war had broken out in 1648. The king had escaped to the Scots, who invaded England on his behalf, hence breaking the Solemn League and Covenant that they had made with England in 1643; the invasion coincided with several royalist uprisings in England. Fairfax, in response, had driven the royalist troops into Colchester and was laying siege to the town at the time Milton wrote his sonnet: Fairfax took the city on 27 August 1648. As in his later sonnet to Oliver Cromwell (see “To the Lord General Cromwell”), Milton both lauds the military victories and stresses their limitations, offering both praise and advice. Laura L. Knoppers

“On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” Poem by Milton, also known as the Nativity Ode. Dated 1629, when Milton was twenty-one years old, and given pride of place in the English set of Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645), it opens with insistent immediacy but encompasses all time. It presents itself as “humble” but also, ambitiously, as an ode—a gift worthy to precede those of the Magi. In his account of the poem for his friend Charles Diodati, in “Elegia Sexta” (Sixth Elegy), Milton touches on oppositions within the Nativity Ode: the king of realms above stabled under a mean roof, the bringer of peace whose appearance involves sudden

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“On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”

destruction. He describes the poem as a double gift, brought to him by the first light of dawn, brought by him to Christ. His own singing is superimposed on that of the angels. Throughout the poem, opposition or doubling is important. Light and music, with their opposites darkness and discord, are major themes. Four stanzas, in rhyme royal modified by a Spenserian final alexandrine, serve as proem. The significance of Christ’s birth, “Our great redemption,” is announced in the middle line of the first introductory stanza. For the hymn of twenty-seven stanzas, Milton devised a lilting eight-line structure (by syllable count: 6, 6, 10, 6, 6, 10, 8, 12, rhyming a-a-b-c-c-b-d-d); major pauses tend to fall at the end of the three longer lines. In the overall organization of materials, he plays with symmetries, such as the Magi approaching and pagan deities fleeing, but the combination of proem and hymn interestingly complicates the question of what is at the center. By any count, stanzas XII–XIV are important, ringing with music of the past, present, and future, reaching from the creation to the Last Judgment. Luke, who provides the only gospel account of stable, shepherd, and angelic song (2:1–20), also supplies the image of the divine dayspring bringing “light to them that sit in darkness” (1:78 –79). With the gospel account, Milton mingles images from Psalms, Job, and Revelation and interweaves classical material, including the Golden Age of Virgil’s fourth eclogue and the tradition of silenced oracles going back to Plutarch. Apollo appears in the catalogue of vanquished deities, but both the shepherd god Pan and the serpent-strangling infant Hercules are associated with Christ. Mother and child are less prominent than in many other nativity poems. The virgin appears briefly in the first and final stanzas of the poem as a whole. Christ is seen as a baby only three times, in the first and last stanzas of the hymn and in stanza XVI when “smiling infancy” is juxtaposed to “the bitter cross.” Milton’s choice of further characters, beyond the shepherds and angels who might be expected, suggests the court masques habitually presented in a high palace hall at the conclusion of Christmas festivals (see masque). The entries of Peace, Truth, Justice, and Mercy, in stanzas III and XV, are like those that could be dramatized with elaborate stage machinery, while the rout of the pagan gods in the final third of the hymn resembles an antimasque. In the mass of critical comment on the poem, there are two particularly useful approaches: discus-

sions of its intricate, even numerological, structure; and comparisons with nativity poems by Milton’s contemporaries, which illuminate both commonplaces and originality. Kay Gilliland Stevenson

“On the New Forcers of Conscience.” Poem by Milton; full title, “On the New Forcers of Conscience Under the Long Parliament.” Written in the spring or summer of 1646, it records a major ideological turning point for Milton, away from the Presbyterians, whose policies on church government he had generally supported early in the 1640s, and toward the Independents, whose strength in the House of Commons steadily increased as 1646 wore on. In particular, Milton indicts Presbyterian pamphleteers and members of the Westminster Assembly of Divines and Parliament, such as Adam Stewart and Samuel Rutherford. His quarrel with the Presbyterians has at least a double origin. Clearly, Milton objects to their practicing a tyranny over conscience increasingly like that which had driven him to write against episcopacy early in the 1640s. Moreover, Presbyterians had spoken loudly against Milton’s position on divorce in several prominent public denunciations. Following the Italian form of the sonetto caudato, “New Forcers” has two “tails” (lines 15 –17, 18 –20), each made up of a half line and a couplet, meant to scourge or flog the Presbyterians with insult, thereby calling public attention to their abuses. See Presbyterianism. James Egan

“On the University Carrier.” Poem by Milton. The university carrier was Thomas Hobson, whose wagon plied between Cambridge and London every week. Born in the reign of Henry VIII, he was about eighty-six when he died on 1 January 1631. The length and regularity of his working life had made him seem an unvarying part of the university scene. Milton’s two poems on Hobson, this and “Another on the Same,” belong to an effusion of student versifying caused by Hobson’s death. The characteristic tone of these poems is witty and affectionate: the subject no doubt offered welcome relief from the unremitting high seriousness of the elegies for eminent public figures that students habitually composed. Here is Milton writing in an easy, jocular strain that he rarely touched: familiar, colloquial, and direct. The imagery of everyday life, of the carrier’s trade and hostelries, is wryly apt for the subject. The poem was first printed in Poems

Orpheus

of Mr. John Milton (1645) and appeared in the anthology Wit Restor’d (1658) in a garbled version. Graham Parry

“On Time.” Poem by Milton. Dating from c. 1633, it is written into the Trinity Manuscript, where it bears the subheading “To be set on a clock case.” Though the line is crossed out, the poem maintains a sense of the materiality of time-keeping: the “heavy plummet’s pace” of line 3 refers to the weighted mechanism moving the inner clockworks. The form of the poem is that of an Italian madrigal—a simple, often pastoral verse style, the kind of poem composed by the shepherd Thyrsis in A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus). The general subject follows the widespread Renaissance tradition of regarding time as a devouring force, tempus edax, but Milton subordinates the power of time to that of eternity. It was first printed in Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645). Eric C. Brown

Ordinance for the Regulation of Printing. See Licensing Order (1643). Origen (c. 185 – c. 254). Church father. Like Clement of Alexandria, a major church father from the cultural center of the eastern Roman empire in the period before the Council of Nicea, he produced a variorum Old Testament (the Hexapla), systematic theology (De Principiis and Contra Celcus), voluminous homilies, and biblical commentaries. His reputation as “erroneous” (in Of Reformation) or heretical, particularly on the Trinity and universal salvation, is complicated by questions about how accurately his writings were transmitted; translations into Latin by Rufinus diverge from the Greek texts. Milton takes Origen as a positive precedent for a layman’s expounding scripture (in The Reason of Church-Government) but opposes “pretious literalism” in biblical interpretation by alluding to the tradition that Origen mutilated himself on the basis of Matthew 19:12 (in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce). Kay Gilliland Stevenson

original sin. In Christian reformed thought, original sin (peccatum originale) afflicts all of Adam’s progeny as a result of the Fall. It also incriminates all humans in Adam’s sin, as we are judged to have

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been seminally present in Adam “in whom all have sinned” (“in quo omnes peccaverunt”), as the Old Latin Bible mistranslated the Greek of Paul’s epistle to the Romans (Rom. 5:12). As a result of this crime (culpa), we are all justly damned, but for the free grace of God, working to save the elect. This twin tradition of original sin as both ineradicable and incriminatory persisted in western thought in strongly Augustinian enclaves (see Augustinianism) and was staunchly reasserted by both Martin Luther and Jean Calvin. In England, the ninth and tenth of the Thirty-Nine Articles rehearse the Calvinist position. Even baptism cannot wash off such a curse: “And this infection of nature doth remain, yea in them that are regenerated,” as the ninth article stated. This was a dearly held enough belief that the supporters of the Root and Branch Petition of 1640 cited as an example of “the faintheartedness of ministers” their failure to preach “of original sin remaining after baptism.” The ThirtyNine Articles hedge a little: we are “very far gone from original righteousness”; the extent of that “very” is, however, left unquantified. Milton’s view of original sin was orthodox. In the earlier prose he speaks of the “originall Spot” or “the grosse distorted apprehension of decay’d mankinde” (Of Reformation; see also The Reason of Church-Government and Apology Against a Pamphlet). This is reaffirmed in De Doctrina Christiana (book 1, chapters 7, 10, 11), as it is in the invocation to Paradise Lost (1.1– 4). Furthermore, Milton’s later Arminian sympathies would only slightly inflect such a conception of original sin, as, of the issues controverted by the Remonstrants and the Calvinists, that of original sin remained the sole site of basic agreement. See Arminianism. William Poole

Orpheus. Mythological poet-prophet. In his most famous myth, he descends to the Underworld after Eurydice, his wife, dies from a serpent’s bite. There, his song softens the heart of Hades, causing even the Furies to weep. Hades frees Eurydice on the condition that Orpheus look at her only after they surface; but in his joy, Orpheus glances back and Eurydice vanishes. After this second loss, Orpheus sings laments and spurns females until jealous Thracian women dismember him, sending his head and lyre down the River Hebrus. Perhaps Milton’s favorite myth, the Orpheus story appears often, especially in Milton’s early poetry: “Ad Patrem” 53 –55, “Lycidas” 58 – 63, “L’Allegro” 144 –50, “Il Penseroso” 105 – 8, and Paradise Lost 3.17 ff.

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and 7.32 –37. Other allusions occur in various Prolusions, Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, and the second edition of The Readie and Easie Way, among others. Craig T. Fehrman

Outlines for Tragedies. Seven pages of untitled notes in Milton’s Trinity Manuscript. The most developed is the first, for “Paradise Lost,” which has three lists of dramatis personae and, with the third, a division into acts and possible contents. A fourth draft, called “Adam unparadiz’d,” offers a possible “argument” to such a play. There are fifty-two other possible tragedies on Old Testament themes, and seven from the New Testament, together with thirty-three British tragedies, drawn from the periods later related in The History of Britain, and five “Scotch stories or rather Brittish of the North Parts,” including a version of the history of Macbeth in which “the matter of Duncan may be express’t by the appeering of a ghost.” The composition of the notes is usually attributed to the period 1639 –1642. See TMS.

Thomas N. Corns

Overton, Richard (c. 1600 –1664). Leveller and pamphleteer. He studied at Cambridge University and became a central figure in the Levellers movement. Apart from his most notorious tract, Mans Mortalitie (1644), an argument for the mortality of the soul that was loudly denounced as heretical by members of Parliament and the Westminster Assembly of Divines, Overton achieved historical significance for his association with the revival of the Martin Marprelate tradition during the 1640s. As a printer and fledgling pamphleteer, Overton may have been involved in the reissuing of two Marprelate tracts, A Dialogue Wherein Is Plainly Laide Open . . . (1640) and, under the title Reformation No Enemie (1641), Hay Any Worke for Cooper. Other antiepiscopal pamphlets commonly attributed to him include Vox Borealis (1641), which claims to be “Printed by Margery Mar-prelat,” and Roger the Canterburian (1642). While these two are attributions, the seven Marpriest satires of the mid-1640s, all of them anti-Presbyterian, are clearly Overton’s: The Araignment of Mr. Persecution (1645), A Sacred Decretall (1645), Martins Eccho (1645), The Nativity of Sir John Presbyter (1645), The Ordinance for Tythes Dismounted (1645), Divine Observations (1646), and An Arrow Against All Ty-

rants (1646). These Marpriest pamphlets represent a reworking of the conventions of the original Marprelate tracts (1588 –1589) in the direction of more fully sustained fictions, characterization, and dramatic verisimilitude. Several of Milton’s early prose polemics contain Marprelate devices, and Milton’s own strategies may in turn have influenced Overton. Mans Mortalitie was frequently linked with Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce in Presbyterian denunciations of Independency and more heterodox thinkers. James Egan

Overton, Robert (c. 1608 – c. 1678). Parliamentarian army officer. He attended St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1627 and was admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1631. During the First Civil War he fought with Thomas Fairfax and later was appointed a colonel in the New Model Army. He was governor of Hull at the time of the trial of Charles I and did not participate in the process. He commanded a brigade under Oliver Cromwell at the Battle of Dunbar (1650). Milton refers to Overton in the section of Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda that praises Cromwell’s senior officers. The other names are predictable: Charles Fleetwood was Cromwell’s son-in-law; John Disbrowe was his brother-in-law; Edward Whalley was his cousin. The inclusion of John Lambert, widely acknowledged as architect of the coup that ushered in the Protectorate, is an unequivocal endorsement of the regime. Overton is the exception. He had appeared critical of Cromwell’s recent conduct and seemed to dislike the establishment of the Protectorate. Cromwell both mistrusted him and wanted to win him over during the spring of 1654. They met, and Cromwell confirmed his appointment to the military government of Scotland, where he was to assist George Monck. Overton left assuring Cromwell that he would serve him loyally though on the condition that Cromwell put the interest “of these nations” above “the setting up of himself.” Milton’s comments serve well the moment. But Overton’s rehabilitation proved shortlived. By the end of the year, he was accused of conspiracy against the Protectorate and committed to the Tower of London. He spent the next four years in prison without trial. Milton never again mentions him. Thomas N. Corns

Oxford University

Ovid [Publius Ovidius Naso] (43 B.C.– A.D. 17). Roman poet. Widely read in his own day and one of the most influential classical writers, he authored such works as the Amores (love elegies), the Ars Amatoria (the “art of love”), the Heroides (love letters from famous heroines), the Fasti (a poetic Roman calendar), and that most widely read work of mythological transformations, Metamorphoses. The latter, construed allegorically throughout the Middle Ages as the Ovide Moralise, was available to Milton in translations by Arthur Golding (1567) and, more readily, George Sandys (whose 1632 edition also “moralizes” the Ovidian myths). Though late in his career he was exiled by Caesar Augustus to the Black Sea, perhaps for Ars Amatoria, Ovid continued to produce poetry (including the lamenting Tristia) until his death. Ovid’s writings were a principal source of allegorized mythologizing in early modern England, in turn a powerful component of Milton’s writing, especially in his early poetry. Eric C. Brown

Owen, John (1616 –1683). Congregational clergyman. He was educated at Queen’s College, Oxford University, taking his B.A. in 1632 and his M.A. in 1635 (he was created D.D. in 1653). As rector of Fordham (1643) and then Coggeshall (1646), both in Essex, and in large part as a result of the influence of the writings of John Cotton, he adopted Independent (or congregational) views. He became a chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, accompanying him to Ireland in 1650, and then dean of Christ Church, Oxford (1651–1660), and vice chancellor of the university (1652 –1658). Now at the heart of the intellectual and religious life of the nation, he was staunchly Calvinist in theology (see, for example, Salus Electorum, Sanguis Jesu; or, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ [1647]) and congregational in ecclesiology (see, for example, Eschol [1648]). He defended these positions against the Unitarian John Biddle in Vindiciae Evangelicae or the Mystery of the Gospell Vindicated and Socinianisme Examined (1655), against the modified Calvinism of Richard Baxter in Of the Death of Christ (1650), and against the episcopalian Henry Hammond in Animadversions (1654). He played a prominent part in the Savoy conference of 1658 convened to draw up a congregational confession of faith (see Independency). At the Restoration he lost his position at Christ Church, and, though invited to become pastor to the church at Boston, Massachusetts, he settled in London, ministering to congregations in several lo-

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cations before, in 1673, succeeding Joseph Caryl as pastor to the congregation meeting in Leadenhall Street. He was the preeminent figure among congregationalists and a recognized leader of nonconformity. He repeatedly defended liberty of conscience, arguing for toleration as a fundamental religious principle in such works as his answer to Samuel Parker, Truth and Innocence Vindicated (1669). Owen’s Independency and prominent role during the Interregnum, his commitment to liberty of conscience, and his contribution to the Restoration debates on toleration might all recommend him to Milton. In the Socinian controversy, however, Milton’s antitrinitarianism sets him with Biddle rather than with Owen, and Owen’s conception of orthodoxy was in general far more restricted (and restrictive) than Milton’s (or Baxter’s). In 1652 Owen was one of the authors of The Humble Proposals to the Purged Parliament to safeguard Christianity through the exercise of civil power. In the second edition of The Humble Proposals (also 1652), fifteen “principles” defined this Christian religion that it was the state’s duty to defend. This move to enforce orthodoxy was what provoked Milton in May 1652 to implore Cromwell, “our chief of men,” to “Help us to save free conscience from the paw / Of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw” (“To the Lord General Cromwell” 13 –14). N. H. Keeble

Oxford University. In the seventeenth century, England had two universities, at Oxford and at Cambridge, though the Inns of Court were also institutions with an educational role. In scale, organization, and curriculum, Oxford broadly resembled Cambridge University. Though Arminianism certainly had a considerable presence in the Cambridge of Milton’s student days, Oxford was usually regarded as its stronghold, and with reason. James I had encouraged and promoted the appointment of leading Arminians to key posts. The appointment of William Laud to the presidency of St. John’s College was a pivotal moment in the development of the movement in the university. In 1630 he was elected chancellor of the university and, with a pious zeal, set about reforming it along lines consonant with his long-held views. Milton’s relationship with the university was intermittent and relatively superficial. In 1635, perhaps because Horton, where he was living, is fairly near to Oxford, he was incorporated M.A. at Oxford on the strength of his Cambridge M.A. (a reciprocal arrangement that survives

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Oxford University

to this day). This would have given him easy access to the Bodleian Library and would also have allowed him to read for the degree of B.D. there, had he chosen to pursue a career in the church. In 1646, he supplied John Rouse, the Bodleian’s librarian, with eleven of his prose works and later presented the library with other works. During the First Civil War, when Oxford was Charles I’s provisional capital, the colleges were taken over to house the court and part of the garrison. The king stayed

at Christ Church; Henrietta Maria’s household was adjacent, at Merton College. In 1683 the convocation of the university issued a “Judgment and Decree” that included Milton among the authors of those books “destructive of kingly government” and required the books to be burned in the Schools Quadrangle of what is now the central Bodleian Library (see book burning). Thomas N. Corns

P Pacification of Berwick. Peace treaty agreed between the Scots and English at Berwick-uponTweed on 18 June 1639. Charles I, continuing his father’s policy of reestablishing episcopacy in Presbyterian Scotland, in 1637 commanded a version of the English Book of Common Prayer to be used in Scotland by the authority of the royal prerogative (it never received parliamentary approval). This provoked widespread outrage, culminating in the National Covenant, an undertaking to defend the reformed religion and the liberties of the Scots signed throughout Scotland during 1638. When Charles marched north to subdue this rebellion, he was humiliatingly compelled to sue for peace at Berwick. His failure to return to Scotland to ratify the resolutions of the Scottish Parliament and the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, as agreed in the treaty, led in 1640 to the second of the Bishops’ Wars. N. H. Keeble

Paget, Nathan (1615 –1679). Medical doctor. He was educated at Edinburgh and Leiden and described by John Aubrey as a “familiar Learned acquaintance” of Milton. Paget recommended to Milton both Milton’s pupil Thomas Ellwood and his third wife Elizabeth Minshull, who was Paget’s cousin. Paget owned a remarkable and heterodox library, auctioned after his death; the printed catalogue lists many Socinian and even Ranter texts. William Poole

Pagitt, Ephraim (c. 1575 –1647). Ecclesiastic and heresiographer. He matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford University, in 1593. His first publication, at the age of eleven, was a translation from the Latin of Ludwig Lavater’s sermons on Ruth. In 1638 he also composed a number of letters addressed to, among others, the reforming Orthodox leader Cyril

Lucaris, patriarch of Constantinople. Upon the ascendancy of the Long Parliament, Pagitt, now an old man, retired from his London living of St. Edmund, Lombard Street, to Deptford in Kent. He was most famed for two publications—Christianography (1635) and Heresiography (1645), the former a description of all the Christian churches in the world, the latter, after Pagitt’s retreat, a contrasting account of the heresies “of these latter times.” Both went through many editions. Pagitt’s carefully documented taxonomy of heresy, like all heresiographies, imposes more order on phenomena than they perhaps possessed but is highly instructive of how an educated, hostile ecclesiastic of the time interpreted the maelstrom of heterodoxy. In his first edition Pagitt coupled with Roger Williams’s Bloudy Tenent an anonymous “tractate of divorce”; by his second edition, the tract had become sect: “These I terme Divorsers.” The third edition of 1647 finally named “Mr. Milton” as the fount of that heresy, and the following three editions, appearing in 1647, 1654, and 1662, the last two after Pagitt’s death, repeated the material developed in the first three. William Poole

Palatinate crisis. Political and military crisis of the early 1620s occasioned by the forcible expulsion of the legitimate ruler of the Palatinate. It arose over the actions of Frederick V, a Protestant elector in the tightly balanced electoral college that determined the Holy Roman emperor. In 1619 Frederick accepted the crown of Bohemia without sanction from the Emperor Ferdinand II. Frederick’s forces were then defeated by Catholic forces at the Battle of White Mountain (1620), forcing Frederick to flee to The Hague as his lands were occupied. Frederick had married Princess Elizabeth, daughter of James I, in 1613. Restoring Frederick and then his son Charles Louis to their lands became a significant interest for English foreign policy under 267

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Charles I. The English had only limited influence on the Continent, and Charles I’s hope lay primarily in convincing the Spanish to withdraw and put pressure on Bavaria to do likewise. The May 1635 Peace of Prague, however, concluded hostilities between the powerful Protestant elector of Saxony and the Emperor Ferdinand, and with its recognition of the Duke of Bavaria as the elector for the Palatinate, the treaty also ended practical hopes for Charles Louis’s restoration. Perhaps under pressure from the arrival of Charles Louis to the English court in November 1635, Charles attempted once more to intercede with Emperor Ferdinand, offering either to broker peace among Sweden, France, the United Provinces, and Spain or to support the emperor against any noncompliant party. Like the others before them, the 1636 negotiations failed to bring about any redress. The warfare over the Palatinate forms the backdrop to Milton’s “Elegia Quarta,” which was addressed to Thomas Young, a former tutor of Milton’s then living and working in Hamburg. Milton describes Young’s family as seeking the safety and religious sustenance that their homeland could not provide. See Sharpe (1992).

Todd Butler

Palmer, Herbert (1601–1647). Presbyterian clergyman; member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. During the English civil wars, he preached widely, including several monthly fast sermons and sermons on days of humiliation before both the House of Lords and House of Commons. In a sermon to the Commons delivered on 13 August 1644 titled “The Glasse of Gods Providence,” Palmer attacked Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1644), as a “wicked booke . . . abroad and uncensured, though deserving to be burnt, whose author hath been so imprudent as to set his Name to it and dedicate it to your selves.” Milton partly intended Areopagitica (1644) as a reply to Palmer, and both Tetrachordon and Colasterion (both 1645) may be read as calculated exegetical, stylistic, and comic antidotes to Palmer’s sermon rhetoric. James Egan

Pamela’s Prayer. The first of four “Prayers Used by His Majesty in the Time of His Sufferings” appended to William Dugard’s edition of Eikon Basilike [The King’s Book], which appeared 15 March 1649 and was included in subsequent editions. Milton recognized that what purported to be the

king’s prayer was, in fact, Pamela’s prayer from Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (book 3, chapter 6, 1590). Thus, adding the charge of plagiarism to his attack on the King’s Book, he writes in Eikonoklastes that “this King . . . hath as it were unhallow’d, and unchrist’nd the very duty of prayer it self, by borrowing to a Christian use . . . a Prayer stol’n word for word from the mouth of a Heathen fiction praying to a heathen God; & that in no serious Book, but the vain amatorious Poem of Sr Philip Sidneys Arcadia.” The plagiarism also provides an opportunity for Milton to return to the question of an author’s proprietary interest in his text, which Milton had asserted in Areopagitica. The theft of “Pamela’s prayer” is “a trespass also more then usual against human right, which commands that every Author should have the property of his own work reserved to him after death as well as living.” In the 1697 edition of his defense of the king’s authorship of Eikon Basilike against the claims of John Gauden, Thomas Wagstaffe produced the testimony of Dr. Thomas Gill and Dr. Francis Bernard, physicians to the printer, Henry Hills, that Pamela’s Prayer was not among the prayers used by the king but was “an Artifice of John Bradshaw or Milton or Both, and by them surreptitiously thrust into the King’s Works to discredit the whole.” This charge, which proposes the subornation of Dugard in return for his release from arrest and requires Milton and Bradshaw to abet the circulation of a book greatly inimical to their interests, remained a matter of critical dispute even after its implausibility was amply demonstrated by Merritt Hughes in 1952. It should be noted too that the king’s use of the prayer, although scandalous to Milton’s abhorrence of rote prayers of any type, would not in itself have been preposterous or even unusual. It became an issue only after Milton made it one. See Madan (1950).

Marshall Grossman

Pan. Greek god of shepherds and of flocks, for whose fertility he was responsible. He figures in pastoral poetry in the Greek tradition and thence among later poets writing in the pastoral mode, among them Edmund Spenser. Classical mythology associated him with the nymphs Syrinx, turned into a reed in order to escape him, and Echo, who became a voice that can speak only the last words spoken to her. Milton alludes to the former legend as part of the formal compliment of Arcades (lines 104 –9). He also figures in A Masque Presented at Lud-

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low Castle, as part of the pastoral trappings (176, 268). Other allusions are more complex. In “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” Milton casts the events the shepherds witness into their own terms of reference: “Full little thought they then, / That the mighty Pan / Was kindly come to live with them below” (87– 89). He draws, too, on an ancient identification, to be found also in Spenser, of Christ and the great Pan. In his description of prelapsarian Eden in Paradise Lost, Milton weaves references to Pan and other pastoral deities into the account of the bower of Adam and Eve (4.707). In Paradise Regained Milton has Satan remind Belial that he had sometimes assumed the name and form of Pan (among others) to “waylay / Some beauty rare” (2.185 – 86). See OCCL.

Thomas N. Corns

Pandæmonium. “The abode of all demons; a place represented by Milton as the capital of Hell, containing the council-chamber of the evil spirits” (OED). Milton created the Greek name Pandæmonium out of pan (all) and daimonion (evil spirit), a play on pantheion, or temple of the gods. Constructed at the end of book 1 of Paradise Lost, Pandæmonium was the fallen angels’ first effort to make a “heaven of hell” (1.255); it had “starry lamps” and “light / As from a sky” (1.728 –30). It is also described as exceeding in “magnificence” the structures of “Babylon” and “Alcairo” (1.717–18), although the model for the description is likely St. Peter’s, which Milton saw while in Rome. This identification is often based on architectural and linguistic evidence. Architecturally, the pilasters, embossed and gilded roof, naphtha lights, and brazen doors all suggest St. Peter’s. Even more suggestive is the bee simile—the bee being the papal symbol of Urban VIII, with his followers often referred to as bees. Milton had used this association in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (1651), accusing Claudius Salmasius of affirming an argument by using the example “of the bees to support the rule of the pope” employed by “some scholars at Trent.”

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her name, “all gifts.” She was sent, not to Prometheus, but to his dimmer brother, Epimetheus, since he was less likely to respond with the appropriate circumspection. With her came a jar containing evils and diseases that, once let out, would plague humankind henceforth. The analogies with the story of Eve were obvious to early modern mythographers. Milton first picked up the parallels in a passage added to The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. In Paradise Lost, Eve is “More lovely than Pandora,” but he adds, in a tragic prolepsis, like Pandora, “In sad event,” she was to ensnare humankind “with her fair looks” (4.713 –19). Thomas N. Corns

paradise. From the Old Persian pairidaéza, meaning an orchard or royal park, an oasis-like enclosure. It was taken over through Hebrew and Greek into Judeo-Christian tradition; the adaptation paradeisos was used in the Greek translation (third century b.c.) of the Pentateuch to refer to the Garden of Eden of Genesis. In the 1611 King James Bible Luke records Christ using the word “paradise” to refer to heaven (23:43), and Paul also uses it in this way (2 Cor. 12:4), but its principal signification remained the Garden of Eden. Since its origins in the ancient Middle East, paradise has been imagined as a garden to delight all the senses, relating closely to the traditional European locus amoenus documented by Curtius; remote in time and/or location, it is also a haven of spiritual joy where life is blessed. Milton was early attracted to the paradise archetype, evoking an apocalyptic vision of the Golden Age in “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (133 – 48). In A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, the Hermes-like Attendant Spirit dwells in a classical paradise (975 –1010). The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce emphasizes that marriage as a remedy for loneliness was instituted in paradise. That prospect is made substantial and dramatized in Paradise Regained. Jesus’s solitary quest into the wilderness and victory over Satan may be interpreted as his attainment of a “paradise within.” Beverley Sherry

David Boocker

Pandora. In Greek mythology, the first woman, created as an act of revenge for the theft of fire by the Titan Prometheus and for his other acts of kindness toward men. She was fashioned out of clay by Hephaestus, Athena breathed life into her, and other gods endowed her with every charm; hence

Paradise Lost. Poetic work by Milton. His bestknown masterpiece, it was likely composed between 1658 and 1663. Milton combined epic form and sacred themes to create a highly original poem retelling the most universal of biblical subjects: the Fall of humankind. His epic poem rivals its classical and Renaissance precursors, as well as the Bible.

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Its vast narrative of more than ten thousand lines reimagines the story of the Fall and the struggle between the forces of Satan and God with freshness and psychological nuance. Its ambitious scope is cosmic—including heaven, hell, and earth—as well as intensely domestic—the story of the first human couple, Adam and Eve, and their tragic disobedience and its long-range consequences in human history. COMPOSITION AND SUBJECT

The period of the poem’s composition was a transitional and politically uncertain time in Milton’s life; he was concluding his career as a controversial pamphleteer and living and writing as a dissenter during the Stuart Restoration. By the time Milton wrote Paradise Lost, he was a blind man in his fifties, disappointed with church and national reformation and yet aspiring to write a new kind of epic poem focusing on sacred truths and attempting, after the years of the English civil wars, to “assert eternal providence, / And justify the ways of God to men” (PL 1.25 –26). “Long choosing, and beginning late” when it came to his “subject for heroic song” (9.25 –26), Milton considered numerous biblical subjects and sketched during the early 1640s four drafts of a projected drama on the Fall of man, two of them titled “Paradise Lost” and “Adam unparadiz’d” (see Outlines for Tragedies). Significantly, Milton first thought of the Fall in dramatic and tragic terms, but even by the early 1640s he had not decided firmly on the form or subject of the serious heroic poem he wished to compose on an exalted subject. In his antiprelatical tract The Reason of Church-Government (1642), Milton explored further his poetic and prophetic ambitions. For his poetic project, “doctrinal and exemplary to a Nation,” he considered three forms: the long epic modeled on the poems of Homer, Virgil, and Torquato Tasso; the brief epic modeled on the Book of Job; and Greek tragedy, with Sophocles and Euripides as his chief models. The latter two models would eventually form the basis of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. In early poems, including “Mansus” and “Epitaphium Damonis,” Milton had in mind for his subject the heroic King Arthur and his Round Table, as well as legendary British history from the time of the Trojan settlement under Brutus (greatgrandson of Aeneas and legendary founder of Britain). Yet sometime after 1639 and before he began writing Paradise Lost, Milton rejected the idea of writing an Arthuriad because of increasing skepticism during his age about the old fables of legend-

ary British history and a preference instead for the truths and authority of sacred history. The story of King Arthur, moreover, had been associated with royal propaganda from Tudor to Stuart times, whose monarchs claimed to be derived from him. So Milton settled on a more universal theme: the story of Adam and Eve and the Fall of humankind. His biblical subject was not only historically sound, but international in interest. Rather than choosing a real or legendary national hero or an earthly monarch to place at the center of his epic, Milton chose mythic figures not bound to any one national history or heritage. Milton’s nephew and early biographer Edward Phillips told John Aubrey (another early biographer) that Milton “began [Paradise Lost] about 2 years before the King [Charles II] came in, and finished about 3 years after the King’s Restoration.” Phillips noted that several years before the poem was begun (Aubrey suggests fifteen or sixteen years before), his uncle showed him lines from Satan’s soliloquy on Mount Niphates (4.32 – 41), then considered “the very beginning” of the tragedy. Milton composed and dictated as many as forty lines of the epic during the winter nights and mornings —he refers to the muse’s “nightly visitation” in his poem (9.22; cf. 7.28 –30)—which he would then cut down to half that number; Phillips visited on occasion to look over the manuscript and correct spelling and punctuation. Thomas Ellwood claims to have seen the complete poem in 1665. Delayed by the plague in 1665 and the Great Fire in 1666, the publication of Paradise Lost finally occurred in 1667. The 1667 quarto edition contained no front matter, no dedicatory or commendatory poems, and no epistles from the author or publisher: Milton was avoiding the apparatus of courtly publication. Paradise Lost was first published in ten books, a structure resembling Lucan’s republican epic Pharsalia about the tragic defeat of the Roman republic; it was reissued in 1668 and 1669 with the addition of the prose Arguments and a defiant note on verse explaining why the poem does not rhyme and conform to Restoration cultural expectations. It was then published in 1674 in twelve books, a modified design more closely following Virgil’s epic. VISIONARY EPIC

In Paradise Lost Milton composed and revised what was by far the most ambitious, expansive, and encyclopedic of all literary genres: the epic. Renaissance poets and critics regarded the epic, or “the Heroical,” as the highest form of literature—“the

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best and most accomplished kind of poetry,” as Sir Philip Sidney put it in Defence of Poetry (1595). Milton is acutely self-conscious writing in this ambitious and comprehensive literary form and attempting to do something new with it. Already by the age of Virgil the epic as genre had been well established, with such features as the beginning in “the midst of things” (as Milton’s Argument to book 1 puts it), the invocation of a muse, the emphasis on aristocratic and martial themes, the legendary heroes and exploits, the epic journey, the use of long similes and epic catalogues, and the intermixing of the deeds of gods and humans. Milton incorporates these features into his poem as he challenges and revises many of the themes of the classical epic, including its emphasis on the heroic and martial pursuit of glory. Moreover, Milton diverges from both classical and Renaissance models—Virgil, Edmund Spenser, the sixteenth-century Portuguese poet Lui´s Vaz de Camões, and others—by choosing not to write an epic on a more traditional national and imperialistic theme and instead giving his long narrative poem a more universal subject matter and much greater interior emphasis. The character in Paradise Lost who embodies the old-style martial virtues and heroic ideology of the epic tradition— as he manifests the rage and impulse for revenge of Achilles and the skill and cunning of Odysseus—is Satan in his unwavering pursuit of personal glory and imperial ambitions. The sacred subject matter of Milton’s poem is “Not less but more heroic” (9.14) than that of his classical precursors, whose heroic values his poem continually challenges, subverts, and transcends. Milton’s focus is startlingly new: he writes an epic about a great sacred theme, and the sweep of the poem moves typologically from the Old Testament to the New Testament, from the first Adam to the second—the Son, that “one greater man” (1.4). Paradise Lost is a prophetic Protestant epic that moves, like the Bible itself, from the creation to the end of time. As he promises to sing of “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme” (1.16), Milton seeks to raise the name of epic to a new height, as he ironically echoes a similar claim to novelty made by Ludovico Ariosto in 1516 in his romance epic Orlando Furioso (“Cosa non detta in prosa mai, ne in rima,” Canto 1.2). Unlike Ariosto, whose poem combines chivalric and epic materials, Milton soars beyond his classical and Christian epic precursors and even beyond the Mosaic text itself. Yet the drama of this poem’s action is not only the entire cosmos, but the mind and heart of the Protestant individual. Milton’s Puritan epic takes a radical

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turn inward, not only by rejecting the martial and imperial values of its pagan and Renaissance epic models, but by rejecting all external and human religious authorities, as the blind prophetic poet seeks to “see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight” (9.54 –55). THEOLOGICAL EPIC

Paradise Lost dramatizes major theological issues— including predestination, free will, and providence— central to both the religious controversies that grew out of the Reformation and the religious ferment of the mid-seventeenth century. Paradise Lost is a daring poetic theodicy, as the poet tries to “justify the ways of God to men” (1.26) rather than attempting (as readers might expect) to justify the ways of men to God. Theology and theological debate are therefore central to Milton’s poem in a way that they are not in any other Renaissance epic. In his major work of literary criticism, Discourses on the Heroic Poem (1594), Tasso had suggested that a poet “is not to show himself ambitious in theological questions,” leaving such matters to schools of theologians. Milton, however, clearly does not follow such advice: writing as both artist and theologian, he revitalizes controversial doctrinal themes in his radical Protestant poem, treating them with power and drama. The council in heaven in book 3, an imaginative revision of the celestial council found in classical epics, enables Milton to present, as he puts it in De Doctrina Christiana, “that play-acting of the persons of the godhead.” In Paradise Lost both Father and Son appear as dramatic characters as they address, in their dialogue, central theological issues. There is a tension at the very heart of Milton’s theology, and one powerfully dramatized in his poem: this is a Protestant poet who attempts imaginatively to highlight the freedom of human agency, though without ever abandoning a belief in God’s omnipotence. Milton’s God can speak defensively as he righteously justifies his own ways to his Son (3.96 –99) (see God). Milton’s belief in the exercise of free will in the achievement of salvation is a radical form of Arminianism and a rejection of the stark determinism of Calvinism that prevailed in early seventeenthcentury orthodox Protestant theology and that was common among Calvinist Puritans. God may have foreknowledge in Paradise Lost, but he has in no sense predetermined the Fall of humankind (see 3.112 –19). The issue of freedom thus enables Milton’s theodicy to exonerate God from responsibility for the Fall. The freedom of choice in determining

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one’s spiritual destiny is central to Milton’s poetics of temptation in Paradise Lost. MATERIAL COSMOS

In Paradise Lost Milton presents a complex vision of heretical monism: the poem emphasizes creation ex materia rather than creation ex nihilo. All is created not from a void, but from primal matter that God infuses with his vitality (see, for example, 7.232 –37). Milton’s materialism is essential to the imaginative world of Paradise Lost, where orthodox dualisms are continually challenged and where Milton envisions a tangible universe interconnected by “various degrees / Of substance” (5.473 –74). Lucretius’s Latin poem De Rerum Natura [On the Nature of Things] was also concerned with a materialist philosophy and with the material nature of the universe and all being. Milton’s vital materialism, however, highlights his poem’s heterodoxy in relation to traditional Christianity. The poem breaks down the orthodox Christian division between matter and spirit; instead, it imaginatively explores their interconnection and suggests Milton’s this-worldly perspective. Book 5 offers an illustration of Milton’s material cosmos. The philosophical discourse between the sociable angel Raphael and Adam in the Garden underscores the dynamism of Milton’s paradise by exploring the relation of spirit to matter, earth to heaven, and the phenomenal world to the world of ideas. In Milton’s cosmos angels eat “with keen dispatch / of real hunger” (5.436 –37), digest their food, and even excrete what they cannot use; human and angel thus share substance between them. Milton recognizes that this representation of corporeal angelic behavior diverges from Christian orthodoxy and will not conform to “the common gloss / Of theologians” (5.435 –36). “One first matter all” (5.469 ff.) proceeding from God is the essential lesson regarding vital materialism in Milton’s heterodox universe. GENDER AND SEXUALITY

Paradise Lost valorizes the life of the senses, human eroticism, and passion: all are essential to Milton’s paradisal ideal. Yet the poem’s representation of sexual hierarchy has sometimes troubled modern readers (see gender, Milton’s representation of; Eve; and women, Milton’s representation of). Certainly, some passages in the poem are patriarchal in emphasis; nevertheless, this passionate and sensuous poem cannot be categorized so easily, for it vacillates between patriarchal and egalitarian models of sexual relations. The poem also explores the

intense mutuality of Adam and Eve’s prelapsarian sexual relationship. The poet describes the intimate act of lovemaking that takes place in the “inmost bower” of Adam and Eve at night (see 4.736 –75). Only “hypocrites,” the poet insists, would deny the purity, innocence, and satisfactions of Edenic sexual love that the poem treats as holy and worthy of “mysterious reverence” (8.599). In Paradise Lost Milton often writes as the unabashed poet of paradisal eroticism. THE FALL AS TRAGEDY

Central to the narrative of Paradise Lost is the domestic human tragedy of the Fall. From the terse, elliptical, cryptic account in Genesis, Milton elaborates in books 9 and 10 a tragic drama of separation, temptation, and falling, followed by the psychological and emotional torment that Adam and Eve suffer. The modulation to tragedy in Paradise Lost signals a break in the poem’s design as the poet changes his “notes to tragic” (9.6) now that the philosophical, intellectual, and social discourse between human and angel is finished (the subject of books 5 – 8). Milton treats the Fall with pathos and feeling, though his poem repeatedly reminds us that there is no doubt that Adam and Eve were wrong— the sole and simple prohibition was “easy,” as Adam tells Eve (4.433) and as the poet himself suggests (7.47– 48). The fruit itself—a thing neither good nor evil—was symbolic of their obedience freely observed. Yet the Fall of Adam and Eve does differ from the titanic fall of Satan: their disobedience and rebellion is not prompted by meditated revenge, willful maliciousness, or hatred; unlike the rebel angels, their Fall is not brought on “by their own suggestion” as if they were “Self-tempted, selfdepraved” (3.129 –30). In elaborating the domestic drama between Adam and Eve, Paradise Lost registers emotional tensions that exist even in the unfallen state. In book 9 Milton invents a marital debate that revolves at first around economic efficiency but that also allows Milton to explore the complex emotional relations between Adam and Eve, as well as their vulnerabilities. The domestic drama enables the poet to explain why Eve was alone when the serpent tempted her (Genesis is ambiguous on this point). Moreover, the poet suggests Eve’s attractiveness and vulnerability when he describes her in pastoral and elegiac terms at the moment that Satan discovers her alone (see 9.423 –33). Milton also elaborates on the temptation by having the guileful Satan tempt Eve with the language of Renaissance love poetry (much different from

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the martial oratory that characterizes his impressive speeches in the poem’s early books). Satan’s extravagant language—such as when he addresses her with the daring oxymoron “Goddess humane” (9.732)—is meant to provoke the vulnerable Eve (who tends toward vanity, while Adam tends toward uxoriousness) to aspire beyond her human condition. The most brilliant feature of Satan’s temptation is his autobiographical narrative (9.571 ff.), the last autobiography in the poem (Eve’s is in book 4 and Adam’s in book 8) and a highly imaginative addition to the biblical story. Satan essentially tells Eve a fictional story of self-creation—how he rose a notch in the chain of being by eating the alluring fruit. Milton dramatizes a complex process of temptation: Eve’s reason continues to operate, but she is gradually taken in by Satan’s skillful rhetoric and seductive language. The poet, however, takes only two lines (9.780 – 81) to narrate the key action whose tragic consequences for humankind are so immense. Milton invests his story with considerable pathos as he presents the fallen Eve idolizing the fair tree, giving it her maternal care, showing a new concern for role-playing, and expressing a new sense of female inadequacy and a fear of displacement. Unlike Eve, Milton’s Adam is not deceived at all; yet in his fall, he reveals that he, too, is emotionally vulnerable. Milton’s uxorious Adam cannot imagine life without Eve (9.896 ff.) and certainly never considers divorcing her. His emotional response is heroic and chivalric, but their marriage is also being crucially redefined so that spiritual companionship is lost; the union of their fallen marriage now entails “one guilt, one crime” (9.971). The postlapsarian lovemaking of Adam and Eve is perfunctory, and Milton, diverging again from the Bible, emphasizes their psychological nakedness and unrest (9.1054 ff.) by focusing on their faces rather than their genitals (9.1077–78). Book 9 ends tersely, and on a note of unresolved bitterness. Only after much painful struggle and inward torment do Adam and Eve make peace with each other in the fallen world. Crucially, it is Eve who is the first repentant human being and who plays a major restorative role by leading Adam out of his mazelike psychological state. Her redeeming softness (see 10.865) triumphs over his bitterness and misogynistic accusations and establishes a new kind of heroism in the fallen world, bringing the fruitless battle between them to an end. The tragedy of the Fall, Paradise Lost suggests, will also have significant implications in postlapsarian history as Milton explores the long-range effect of

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Adam and Eve’s disobedience on human religion and politics. POLITICS AND POSTLAPSARIAN HISTORY

Milton may have rejected the idea of writing a nationalistic poem in Paradise Lost, but there is much to suggest that the poet-polemicist who spent twenty years writing controversial pamphlets did not simply turn away from politics in his great epic. Nonetheless, the precise relation of Paradise Lost to the political worlds of the mid-century conflict and the Restoration remain the subject of scholarly debate. How closely does Satan, in his political rebellion and military campaign, recall the rebellion of the civil war and Interregnum years? Do the kingly politics of Milton’s heaven recall the politics and tyranny of Stuart kingship, especially Charles I? Does Milton express his disillusionment with Oliver Cromwell by suggesting parallels between Satan and the great Puritan leader? To what degree can Paradise Lost be considered a republican epic? The first two books of Paradise Lost are full of political language; at points, Satan seems to echo the language of Milton’s own political tracts as he decries “the tyranny of heaven” and scorns the idea of assuming the idolatrous posture of sycophantic courtier who must “bow and sue for grace / With suppliant knee” and “deify” a king’s power (1.124, 111–12). On the eve of the Restoration, Milton too, in The Readie and Easie Way, had spurned “the base necessitie of courts flatteries and prostrations” and “the perpetual bowings and cringings of an abject people . . . deifying and adoring” a new Stuart king. The “great consult” (1.798) of fallen angels in book 2 may suggest that the politics of hell are closer to those of revolutionary England, where liberty of political debate often flourished and conflicting opinions were aired. In the rebellion in heaven, Satan can also employ the language of revolution as he urges his fellow rebel angels “to cast off ” the “yoke” imposed by God as he elevates the Son (5.772 – 802). Satan, however, is a protean character (see 3.604) and easily manipulates political language to achieve his ends. Full of impressive political rhetoric, the debate in hell turns out to be rigged, and Satan will allow no further dissent (see 2.466 – 67) once he accepts his heroic role as emissary to earth. And the poet observes that in the rebellion in heaven, Satan speaks “with calumnious art / Of counterfeited truth” (5.770 –71): his stirring language of revolution is slippery and full of contradictions as he also makes his case (much as a royalist would) by appealing to the authority of “those imperial titles” that manifest the right of his

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legions “to govern, not to serve” (5.801–2). Political language in Paradise Lost needs to be read especially carefully; even revolutionary language can be manipulated, and so the poem’s reader, as the early biographer Jonathan Richardson acutely observed, “must be Always upon Duty.” The poem’s reader also needs to be wary of making simple equations between Satan and the Puritan revolutionaries, including Cromwell. Rather, as John Toland suggested in his life of Milton, “the chief design” of Paradise Lost is “to display the different Effects of Liberty and Tyranny”: Milton’s poem dramatizes again and again how malicious and tyrannical designs manifest themselves through artifice, as well as through subtle forms of verbal and political equivocation. Nor do we need to see the politics of Milton’s heaven as oppressive. The Son is elevated by “merit more than birthright” (3.309)—an act in heaven that confirms Milton’s vision of a meritocracy of virtue and that diverges crucially from Stuart divine right theory. Furthermore, Abdiel, the lone fiery angel who confronts Satan during the rebellion in heaven, challenges Satan’s account of heavenly politics, not on a theoretical level, but on the basis of experience (see 5.826 –29). In his first soliloquy (a crucial passage not addressed to any of Satan’s fellow rebel angels) Satan himself recalls that God’s mild monarchy was no state of tyranny and arbitrary power: “all his good proved ill in me,” Satan observes, “nor was his service hard” (4.48, 45). Abdiel’s vehement response to Satan’s provocative public assault on God’s tyranny reminds the poem’s discerning readers of heaven’s political circumstances: God’s kingship is unlike any other kind of kingship and certainly does not resemble an earthly Stuart monarchy. Nevertheless, the tragedy of the Fall, Milton’s poem reveals, has disturbing consequences for human history and politics. The last two books, in which the archangel Michael presents often dispiriting visions and narratives of human history characterized by human tribulation, often evoke the turbulent world of Milton’s revolutionary England, as well as the religious tensions of the Restoration. These final books depict a handful of faithful individuals—for example, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, and Moses—who emerge in the midst of dark periods of lawless tyranny, warfare, and heavy religious persecution “in a world perverse” (11.701). As Adam struggles to interpret the history lessons presented to him (without having read any of Milton’s antimonarchical tracts), his vehement response,

especially to the aggressive tyranny of Nimrod, is instinctively republican (see 12.64 –71) as he recognizes—much as John Locke would in Two Treatises of Government (1690)—that God’s donation in Genesis 1:28 did not give him monarchical power over those of his own species. Milton, not the Bible, has dared to imagine Adam’s response to such matters as absolute power and sovereignty, political servility, natural freedom, and republicanism. The final books of the poem address a sad consequence of the Fall in human history: earthly monarchy and tyranny, along with the loss of inward and outward liberty. Nonetheless, after the often sorrowful lessons of postlapsarian history, Adam can speak of a subversive weakness that would have had pointed resonance for the besieged godly of the 1660s: “by things deemed weak / Subverting worldly strong, and worldly wise / By simply meek” (12.567– 69). Paradise Lost, moreover, offers at the end the consolation of the “paradise within” (12.587), a replacement for the lost earthly paradise (certainly “happier far” than the wreckage of fallen Eden that Adam and Eve leave behind them) and a reminder that the only true church—like God’s “living temples, built by faith to stand” (12.527)— lies within the self. The “paradise within” underscores how radically inward Milton has made his epic poem. Despite the universal appeal of Paradise Lost, as it imaginatively and freshly retells the story of the Fall of humankind, its emphasis on the “paradise within” the individual believer also speaks to a generation of dissenters whose unorthodox and polemical writings had challenged all forms of external and institutionalized religion as they sought, like Milton himself, guidance instead from the inner spirit or light. See Achinstein (1994), Corns (1994), Fallon (1991), Lewalski (1985), Loewenstein (1993, 2001), Norbrook (1999a), Turner (1987).

David Loewenstein

Paradise Regain’d. A Poem. In IV Books. To Which Is Added Samson Agonistes (1671). Book by Milton. On 2 July 1670 Paradise Regained was licensed for publication by Thomas Tomkins, who had earlier licensed Paradise Lost. On 10 September it was registered for publication, together with Samson Agonistes. John Starkey was the bookseller. There was no second edition. See stationers. Thomas N. Corns

Paradise Regained

Paradise Regained. Poetic work by Milton, probably his last, composed after the completion of the first edition of Paradise Lost. It was consciously fashioned as a response to the earlier poem: Eden is recovered to humankind through Christ’s triumph after its initial loss as a literal paradise. It was published along with Samson Agonistes in 1671 (Paradise Regained comes first in the volume), having been licensed in July 1670 and entered in the Stationers’ Register the following September. Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips reports that the poem was composed quickly, especially when compared with its epic predecessor, and that Milton felt it to be as important as his masterpiece, being unable to bear any judgment that it was inferior. Milton’s friend and sometime assistant, Thomas Ellwood, claimed a major part in suggesting the idea for the poem, mentioning the need for a consideration of “Paradise found” after reading the manuscript of Paradise Lost. In Ellwood’s account, Milton told Ellwood he had been the poem’s inspiration; however, claims have been made for a slightly earlier composition and, as a play, a much earlier composition (1640 –1642, 1646 –1649, or 1656 –1658), with the play finally being turned into an epic. The poem is concerned with Christ’s temptation or, as Milton terms it, trial, in the wilderness and prefers as a source Luke 4:1–13, rather than Matthew 4:1–11 (although Milton does follow Matthew in placing the temptations after the Son’s forty-day fast). Throughout the poem New Testament language is carefully set within Miltonic blank verse. In its four books, and after introductory scenes in hell and heaven, Paradise Regained is divided into the temptations of lust, hunger, kingship, empire, and false learning. The central questions are who is the Son of God, and what does it mean to be a son of God? Satan thinks he is the Son of God and finds out he is not; the Son’s words and deeds confirm his identity, and there are clear signals in the poem with regard to how believers may also partake of the sonship of God. Paradise Regained was once excluded from the category of epic, but the predominant view for the past forty years is that Milton considered it to be a “brief epic” on the model of the Book of Job, a generic category he identified in The Reason of Church-Government. The poem shares characteristics with previous epic versions of the story of Job: heavenly and hellish councils, trials inflicted by Satan, the spread of worldly kingdoms and descriptions of cities, the account of the hero’s reading and education, and the four-book division. There were

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very few epics based on Job but concerned with other characters, and only one that takes the temptation of Christ as its subject—Jacobus Strasburgus’s Orationes Duae Carmine Heroico Scriptae . . . (1565). Milton’s Son is extremely unusual in that he has so much psychological interest. Other adduced sources and antecedents include the gospel of John, the book of Revelation, Socrates as he appears in Plato’s dialogues, Apollonius of Rhodes’s Argonautica, Thomas Malory’s Le morte d’Arthur, Jean Michel’s Le mystère de la Passion, Jacopo Sannazaro’s De partu Virginis, Marco Girolamo Vida’s Christiad, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene II.vii, Giles Fletcher’s Christ’s Victorie on Earth, seventeenthcentury commentaries on Job and Revelation, and a sermon published in 1653 by the radical and mystic John Everard. In stylistic terms Paradise Regained is far more taut than Paradise Lost, as befits a heroism “above heroic” but “in secret done, / And unrecorded left through many an age” (PR 1.15 –16). Sentence length is abbreviated, and this is particularly associated with the Son. Satan often talks in longer sentences; the Son is enigmatic and laconic, perhaps even to the extent that he sometimes influences Satan. In Paradise Lost Milton had already downplayed the Crucifixion as the most important part of the Son’s atonement. In Paradise Regained firm emphasis is placed on Jesus’s manifestation of himself as Son of God on earth and how this provides the key to the finding of post-Fall paradise for Christians. Satan’s inability to discern who is the Son of God makes him the Son’s foil, but one who is often confused; who accepts his sentence of defeat by God (PR 1.52 – 63), hoping only for a share in the kingdom of the earth; and who, we are taught, may finally be overcome. There are elements of knowledge of the story of the “sons of God” from the apocryphal book of Enoch: angels who descended from mountains and coupled with women to produce the “sons of God”; Belial is associated with this myth (1.150 ff.). The theme of the Son of God and the theology of “filiation” or “sonship” had been a concern of patristic, medieval, and Renaissance theology, but Milton’s treatment of the temptation underlines his own antitrinitarianism, even though he had claimed in De Doctrina Christiana that the question of the mixture of divine and human in Jesus was too mysterious to be explained by any human. The Son is thus the “perfect man” (PR 1.166), and the “living oracle” (1.460), emphasizing his role as prophet and a counterpart to the

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“inward oracle” (1.463), paradise provided by the indwelling Holy Spirit. The Son’s apparent pacifism has led to a common assumption that the poem recommends political quietism or is antipolitical. This is now generally rejected: the Son’s abstention is a form of action that must be seen in the context of the harsh treatment of dissenters during the Restoration. Milton therefore speaks in his poem to disempowered Puritans and gives them formulae for further action. The list of bad kings in book 2 is substantial, and there are phrases and biblical characters that reflect the contents of dissenting literature. There are also places where the commitment of action (for instance, in Niccolò Machiavelli’s sense of “occasione” [2.173 ff.]), the right time to act, predominates over the sense of suffering in trial as a mode of action, and there are further echoes of Fifth Monarchist millenarian themes (see millenarianism). Seen in its proper historical context, Paradise Regained is as intelligently engaged in the Puritan predicament as any of Milton’s works. See Achinstein (2003), Lewalski (1966), Shawcross (1988).

Nigel Smith

“Paraphrase on Psalm cxiv, A” and “Psalm cxxxvi.” Poems by Milton, first published in Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645). According to the headnote Milton supplies, they were composed when he was fifteen years old, that is, in 1624. The term “paraphrase” was not clearly distinguished from the term “translation.” Since Milton was studying Hebrew at St. Paul’s School in 1624, he was probably working from the Hebrew text. Both poems are strikingly indebted to Josuah Sylvester’s translation of Guillaume de Salluste, Seigneur Du Bartas. Though “Psalm cxiv” has received little subsequent currency, “Psalm cxxxvi,” with its opening line, “Let us with a gladsome mind,” is a familiar hymn. However, the musical setting long postdates composition. The tune “Monkland” was written by the American composer John Antes in 1790. Translation and tune were not brought together until 1861. Thomas N. Corns

Pareus [Paraeus], David (1548 –1622). Theologian. Although a minor figure among the second generation of continental Protestant reformers, he was respected as a Calvinist theologian and exegete. He taught at the University of Heidelberg from

1584 until his death. Milton cites him in The Reason of Church-Government as confirming his own view that the Revelation of St. John the Divine is structured like a five-act play (part of a larger argument about the relationship of sacred and profane writing). In material added to The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Pareus appears among more prominent theologians as broadly agreeing with Milton on some aspects of divorce. In The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates Milton, once more using a respectable Calvinist in refutation of Calvinist adversaries, cites him among other orthodox figures as expressing the view that magistrates may be held to account by those over whom they have authority. Thomas N. Corns

Parker, Samuel (1640 –1688). Episcopalian controversialist. Educated at Oxford University (M.A. 1663), he became chaplain to Archbishop Gilbert Sheldon in 1667. He was, like Sheldon, an uncompromising advocate of the rights of the state over those of the subject, a vigorous opponent of toleration, and a no less vigorous proponent of the persecution of nonconformity in accordance with the Clarendon Code. His views are sufficiently caught in the full title of his Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (1670): Wherein the Authority of the Civil Magistrate over the Conscience of Subjects in Matters of Religion Is Asserted; the Mischiefs and Inconvenience of Toleration Are Represented; and All Pretences Pleaded in Behalf of Liberty of Conscience Are Fully Answered. This, and its Defence and Continuation (1670), were answered by John Owen and more memorably by Andrew Marvell. They were also implicitly answered in Milton’s Of True Religion. Parker became bishop of Oxford in 1686. N. H. Keeble

“Passion, The.” Poem by Milton. Apparently written in the spring of 1630, its opening lines refer to “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” Despite the title and the announced intention to “set my harp to notes of saddest woe” (9), Christ’s passion is as remarkably absent from this poem as it is from the rest of Milton’s writings. Comprising eight stanzas of rime royal, the poem evokes the holy sepulcher in Jerusalem but breaks off before reaching its ostensible subject. In Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645) and again in Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions (1673), the fragment is followed by a note: “This subject the author finding

Peace of Westphalia

to be above the years he had when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinished.” Milton had chosen to preserve the poem as early failure; implicitly, however, the time elapsed between composition and printings did not bring the subject within his years. Of interest in the poem apart from Milton’s failure to complete it are the reference to Ezekiel’s chariot (36 – 49), which anticipates the Son’s triumphant intervention in the War in Heaven in Paradise Lost, and the description of the “Poor fleshly tabernacle” of the incarnation (17), in reference to which, line 19 “O what a mask was there, what a disguise!” offers an early perspective on Milton’s Christology.

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the bondage of the will that necessitates the passive righteousness granted by God’s freely given grace. The Reformation’s dominant interpretation of Paul—as dualistic and relentlessly introspective— depended on dichotomous slogans, but Paul’s thinking would prove more complex. His use of the term “body” (soma), for example, mediates between the metaphysical duality of “flesh” (sarx) and “spirit” (pneuma) and complicates Milton’s views on sexuality. Likewise, the Pauline imperative to “build up” the worldly church militates against any individualistic or transcendent conception of faith and explains Milton’s persistent efforts at church reform. Gregory Kneidel

Marshall Grossman

Paul (d. c. 65). Christian apostle and theologian. The facts of his life can be pieced together from the idealized stories of his ministry in the Acts of the Apostles and from biographical remarks scattered throughout his epistles. Reformation commentators stressed the radical change effected by Paul’s famous conversion on the road to Damascus: Saul, a Jew of the Diaspora, zealous Pharisee, and persecutor of Jesus’s first followers, became Paul, the “Apostle to the Gentiles” (or more often, simply “the Apostle”) and the most successful preacher of the Christ-centered proclamation (kerygma) that would evolve into Christianity. Paul was also a Roman citizen (martyred in Rome) who wrote in inelegant common Greek though, Milton believed, he was “skillfull in all the learning of the Ægyptians, Caldeans, and Greeks” (Areopagitica). The key question for describing his life has always been: do these various religious, political, and cultural identities cohere? Or are some, or all, rejected with the acceptance of the Christian gospel? In A Treatise of Civil Power, Milton calls Paul’s epistles the “foundation of the whole gospel,” and this foundation consisted primarily of dichotomies (old/new, Law/gospel, works/grace, flesh/spirit, bondage/liberty) that, in Milton’s mind, are forever in danger of confusion. Thus Paul is a champion of religious liberty and exemplar of polemical engagement with sin, vice, and heresy. According to reformed doctrine, this aggressive, agonistic Paul was premised on his opposite, a Paul who, under the burden of law-righteousness, epitomized divided self-consciousness. Like Augustine before him, Martin Luther read Romans chapter 7 as both autobiography and anthropology, so that when Paul says “for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I” (7:15), he was describing

Paulet, Jane, Marchioness of Winchester (1607–1631). Daughter of the Catholic Thomas, First Viscount Savage. In 1622 she married John Paulet, Fifth Marquess of Winchester (?1598 – 1675). After her death Ben Jonson and William Davenant wrote elegies for her, as did several Cambridge poets, including Milton (“An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester”). She was friend and kinswoman of Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, who was chancellor of Cambridge University, and it has been surmised that a commemorative collection of verse had been projected though it never materialized. During the First Civil War her husband held, heavily fortified, his principal country seat, Basing House, for Charles I. In one of the last major encounters of that war, Oliver Cromwell took it by storm. The captured soldiers, almost entirely Catholic, were summarily executed, and the marquess was imprisoned, without trial, until the early 1650s. Thomas N. Corns

Peace of Westphalia. The outcome of the negotiations that ended the Thirty Years War on 24 October 1648. France negotiated with the Holy Roman Empire in Münster, making this city the center for most of the Catholic delegates; Sweden preferred to hold discussions with the empire in Osnabrück, where most Protestant delegates eventually resided. Two locations were necessary because papal mediators refused to speak with Protestants. Sweden, the weaker of the victors, also wished to avoid precedence disputes with France. Cardinal Jules Mazarin, France’s chief negotiator, has often been credited with making the peace a success. Through his diplomatic skill he secured a final agreement exceedingly favorable to France, which acquired the

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province of Alsace and extended its eastern border to the Rhine. The peace decentralized and weakened the Holy Roman Empire and gave its constituent states a new autonomy. Caught up in its own internal struggles of the 1640s, England was not directly involved with the Peace of Westphalia. Besides redrawing the political map of Europe, the treaty altered the role of religion in international politics. Secular concerns now outweighed religious ones, and states felt free to make alliances that crossed religious lines. Within the Holy Roman Empire itself, the equal rights of Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists were affirmed, creating some degree of tolerance. The Peace of Westphalia established the political landscape of Europe shortly before Milton’s service for the Council of State, fixing the diplomatic priorities with which he and his colleagues had to work. Curtis L. Whitaker

Peck, Francis (1692 –1743). Antiquary and minister. His contributions to the study of Milton were undermined by quirky presentation and overeager attributions. Born in Stamford, Lincolnshire, Peck took his B.A. (1709) and M.A. (1713) from Trinity College, Cambridge University. At his death he held the prebendal stall of Marston St. Laurence in Lincoln Cathedral. Peck’s New Memoirs of the Life and Poetical Works of Mr. John Milton (London, 1740) includes observations on Milton’s style; explanatory and critical notes on passages from Milton and William Shakespeare; an edition of Tyrannicall-Government Anatomized (1642); a translation of George Buchanan’s Baptistes that Peck wrongly attributed to Milton; a reprint of “The Parallel,” an anti-Laudian vision that Peck wrongly ascribed to Milton; and the first translation of the second of Milton’s Prolusions. In Memoirs of the Life and Actions of Oliver Cromwell (London, 1740), Peck translated for the first time Milton’s praise of Oliver Cromwell in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda and wrongly attributed to Milton two other Latin panegyrics. Steven Berkowitz

Pelagianism. Ascetic and reformation movement of the fourth and fifth centuries focused on the possibility of living a perfect and sinless Christian life; and a theology, specifically combated by St. Augustine and declared heretical in 431 by the Council of Ephesus. Pelagianism the theology emphasizes

free will and human reason, denies the doctrine of original sin, and is often associated with the denial of the necessity of grace, the prelapsarian mortality of Adam, and adult baptism. Furthermore, Pelagianism declares that Christ’s sacrifice was necessary as a revelation and example of sinlessness and to free sinners from condemnation for sins committed, as opposed to redeeming humankind from original sin. Although the theology is named after Pelagius, other proponents, including Celestius, Julian of Eclanum, Rufinus the Syrian, and the Sicilian Anonymous (also referred to as the Sicilian Briton), articulated its more extreme positions. Milton has been charged with Pelagianism because he too believes that all people have the ability to choose between sinlessness and sinfulness. Milton refers to Pelagianism as a heresy twice, in Eikonoklastes and in Animadversions. Linda B. Tredennick

Pelagius (c. 355 – c. 440). Christian theologian and heresiarch, probably born in Britain. He lived in Rome where he was respected as an ascetic, a moralist, and a teacher from approximately the mid-380s until the sack of Rome was imminent. He moved to Palestine via Sicily, perhaps, and Carthage, certainly. After engaging in heated disputes with both Jerome and Augustine, Pelagius was excommunicated first by Pope Innocent on 17 January 417 and again, after an appeal and brief reprieve, by Pope Zosimus on 1 May 418. Although his legacy is closely associated with the heresy that bears his name, Pelagius himself was primarily concerned with reforming the behavior of the newly converted Roman society through his message that being a Christian meant living a Christian life. Tenets of his teaching include the denunciation of riches and the exaltation of virginity over marriage, as well as the belief in the possibility of living a perfect, sinless life. Linda B. Tredennick

Perkins, William (1558 –1602). English divine. He was born in Marston Jabbett, Warwickshire, and educated, like Milton, at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he was fellow (1584 –1594); he was also “lecturer” (preacher) at nearby Great St. Andrews until his death. His Puritanism has been overstated, but he so successfully reconciled scholastic methodology with pragmatism that his numerous theological works were immensely influential and widely published. Perkins wrote on such

Peter Martyr [Vermigli, Pietro Martire]

topics important to Milton as grace and free will, vocation, equity and moderation, “oeconomy” (household management), and the combat between Christ and Satan. His practical divinity was seminal. He produced the first Protestant casuistry anywhere and the first manual of “doctrines-and-uses” preaching in England. Milton is able to refer merely to “Perkins” in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. Jameela Lares

Perrinchief, Richard (?1623 –1673). Church of England clergyman. He received his B.A. (1641) and M.A. (1645) from Magdalene College, Cambridge University, but lost the fellowship to which he was then elected under the parliamentary ordinance of 13 February 1646. At the Restoration, he became the rector of St. Mildred’s, Poultry, in London (not far from Bread Street) and earned his D.D. at Cambridge in 1663. He was staunchly royalist and was rewarded for his loyalty to Charles I and Charles II with the prebendary both of St. Peter’s (1664) and of London (Chiswick, 1667), as well as the archdeaconry of Huntingdon (1670). He died at Westminster and was buried “within the south monument door” of Westminster Abbey. Conservative and antitolerationist, Perrinchief completed William Fulman’s edition of The Works of King Charles the Martyr (1662). In his account of the reception of Eikon Basilike, he dismisses Milton as “one base Scribe, naturally fitted to compose Satyrs and invent Reproaches, who made himself notorious by some licentious and infamous Pamphlets, and so approved himself as fit for their service.” Carol Barton

Peter (first century A.D.). Disciple of Jesus and apostle. After the death of Jesus, in the gospel narratives and in the Acts of the Apostles, he emerges as, in some sense, the leader of the apostles. Ancient tradition, unchallenged by Milton, attributes to him the first significant mission to Rome, and in the Catholic tradition he is seen as the first bishop of Rome and in effect the founder of the papacy. His tomb in St. Peter’s in Rome could have been familiar to Milton from his visits to the city in 1638 –1639. Milton draws on Peter’s epistles in De Doctrina Christiana (see 1 Peter and 2 Peter). Peter figures prominently in “Lycidas” as “The pilot of the Galilean lake,” whose “massy keys” admit or exclude the saved and the damned from heaven.

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Milton also alludes to Jesus’s words to Peter, “I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matt. 16:18). See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

1 Peter. Book of the New Testament. It is directed generally to the Christian churches of Asia Minor. Its Petrine authenticity has been questioned in modern times, though not in Milton’s; its canonicity was accepted in the early patristic tradition. The epistle, on which Milton draws heavily in De Doctrina Christiana, is important in its assertion of the doctrinal centrality of the Resurrection of Christ. It also adjures passive acceptance of civil magistrates, in a formula that poses at least some difficulties for republicans such as Milton (2:13 –14). 1 Peter 1:2, which has the phrase “Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father,” became an important text in the debates within Protestantism over predestination and election. Milton engages with it in De Doctrina Christiana. The epistle also affords Milton some information about the apostolic church, which is useful for the arguments he develops in A Treatise of Civil Power and The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings against a hierarchical distinction between clergy and laity and against tithes. See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

2 Peter. Book of the New Testament. It has no specified recipients. Its Petrine authenticity was doubted since patristic times although it was accepted into the canon, and Milton cites it frequently. It contrasts the need for brotherly kindness among true believers with the importance of alertness against false teachers. It ends on a powerfully millenarian note (3:12). See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

Peter Martyr [Vermigli, Pietro Martire] (1499 –1562). Churchman and academic. He was born in Florence and entered the monastery of San Bartolomeo at Fiesole. He rose to some eminence as a churchman and academic within the Lateran

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congregation though his researches led him toward the Protestant reformation. Fearing arrest, he fled northward, accepting the invitation to take up a chair in Old Testament studies at Strasbourg, where he formed a close and lasting working relationship with Martin Bucer. As the Protestant domination of Strasbourg came under threat, Peter accepted with Bucer Thomas Cranmer’s invitation to come to England, joining a cluster of divines of international repute gathered there during the reign of Edward VI. He was appointed to the regius chair of divinity at Oxford University. On the accession of Mary I he returned to continental Europe, teaching in Strasbourg and Zurich. Over a long career he published extensively and was perhaps best known for his critique of the Catholic version of the Eucharist. Milton cites him several times in his controversial prose. In The Judgement of Martin Bucer, Peter figures in the list of testimonials to Bucer and in the postscript, where he is claimed as someone broadly concurring with Bucer (and Milton) on the issue of divorce, a position again attributed to him in Tetrachordon, where he is also cited as confirming Milton’s reading of a problematic text from Nehemiah. In his Commonplace Book Milton notes Peter’s view that officers of higher rank may be held to account by those over whom they have authority; he cites Peter again to make the same point in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Thomas N. Corns

Peters [Peter], Hugh (1598 –1660). English divine. Contemporaries cite his name as “Peters,” while he signed himself “Peter.” Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge University (B.A. 1618, M.A. 1622), he left for Holland in 1629 and in 1632 became minister to a church in Rotterdam. He later traveled to Salem, Massachusetts, where in 1635 he assumed the pulpit once occupied by the banished Roger Williams and expelled any remaining Williams supporters. Returning to England in 1641 to garner additional support for the colony, Peters became increasingly involved in English politics and ultimately became one of the most influential Independent chaplains in the parliamentary army. Peters openly advocated Charles I’s trial and subsequent execution. In 1650 he became chaplain to the Council of State; in 1660, after having been exempted from the Act of Oblivion, he was executed as a promoter of the execution of the king. Peters’s sermons and writings echo Milton’s on several points, most obviously in the demand for toleration. In Good Work for a Good Magis-

trate (1651) Peters, like Milton in Of Education, argued that Oxford University and Cambridge were poorly structured to advance the cause of the gospel. There are similarities between Peters’s text and Milton’s Readie and Easie Way, particularly in their plans for limiting the franchise in parliamentary elections. See Hill (1977).

Todd Butler

Petrarch [Petrarca, Francesco] (1304 –1374). Poet. Born in Florence, as a child he went into exile with his family to join the papacy. His sequences of sonnets to the woman whom he calls Laura were profoundly influential on western European love poetry. He also wrote neo-Latin pastoral eclogues. Milton had read and admired Petrarch’s verse before his own travels in Italy in 1638 –1639. In a letter to an unknown friend, probably written in 1633, he includes his own “Sonnet VII” (“How soon hath time”), which he terms “a Petrarchian stanza.” Petrarch’s pastorals are perhaps a minor influence in “Lycidas.” In his antiprelatical prose, Milton cites both Petrarch’s writings and an incident from his life. However, in Paradise Lost he shows some impatience with Petrarchanism, the tradition of love poetry flowing from Petrarch’s sonnets, when he contrasts the simplicities of the sexual love of Adam and Eve with the “serenade, which the starved lover sings / To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain” (4.769 –70). See ODR.

Thomas N. Corns

Petronius Arbiter (d. A.D. 65). Satirical writer. He is usually identified as a notorious voluptuary of that name at the court of the emperor Nero whose life and death would have been familiar to Milton’s age through the Annales of Tacitus. His principal surviving work, the Satyricon, is a picaresque prose narrative of the adventures of its roguish heroes in southern Italy. From such a seemingly unpromising context, the editors of Justa Edovardo King Naufrago adapted the epigraph, which reads “Si rectè calculum ponas, naufragium ubique est. Pet. Arb” [If you place the judgment correctly, shipwreck is everywhere]. The original has the phrase “bene calculum ponas,” but perhaps an alternative reading was current in the early modern period. The phrase thus decontextualized has a poignancy, generalizing the untimeliness of the death of Edward King

Philistines

into a broader challenge to human experience. That theme is certainly present in Milton’s contribution to the collection, “Lycidas,” and in some other poems of the volume.

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lomatic correspondence between the English state and Philip, particularly in the early 1650s. See Fallon (1993).

Thomas N. Corns

See OCCL.

Thomas N. Corns

Philaras, Leonard (fl. mid-seventeenth century). Diplomat and humanist. He was a Venetian of Greek origin, and when Milton knew him he worked in Paris as an agent for Ranuccio II Farnese, Duke of Parma. In June 1652 he approached Milton to urge him to use his influence to secure English aid in liberating Greece from the Ottoman empire. Milton’s reply, printed among his Epistolae Familiares [Familiar Letters] (see Epistolarum Familiarum Liber Unus), reflects the evident sympathies of a classically trained humanist, but it is on the whole discouraging. He argues that liberation would come only once the Greeks had rediscovered “their ancient courage, diligence, and endurance” manifest in their ancient republican days. In 1654, Philaras offered to approach an eminent Parisian ophthalmologist to see whether anything could be done about Milton’s blindness. Milton’s letter in response is a detailed account of the onset of the disability and the primary life record for this aspect of his biography. Thomas N. Corns

Philemon. Book of the New Testament. A mere twenty-five verses long, its Pauline authenticity is not currently subject to significant challenge. It is addressed by the apostle from prison (probably in Rome though possibly in Ephesus) to a member of the church at Colossae (see Colossians), commending Onesimus, the messenger carrying the missive, as a reliable convert to the faith. Milton uses the incident among the texts he collates on the subject of slavery in De Doctrina Christiana. See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

Philip [Felipe] IV (1605 –1665). King of Spain. Succeeding to the Spanish throne in 1621, he was the first monarch to recognize the English republic. However, English interests were more closely aligned with France, with whom Spain was at war over much of his reign, leading to national exhaustion. Milton was responsible for some of the dip-

Philippians. Book of the New Testament. It articulates Paul’s usual concerns of preserving the authority of his Christ-centered gospel and eliminating any discord within the Philippian church. But Paul’s argument is distinctively joyful and communal in outlook (these two word groups predominate). Its most controversial passage, 2:5 –11, describes Christ’s salvific kenosis or “emptying”: he emptied himself of his divinity, took the human form of a servant (cf. The Reason of ChurchGovernment), and endured a humiliating death on the Cross. The extent and nature of the Son’s kenosis is an important area of critical discussion of Paradise Regained. See Lieb (1970).

Gregory Kneidel

Philips, John (1676 –1709). English poet. The son of an Oxfordshire minister, he distinguished himself even as a boy by “superiority of his exercises; and . . . his civility and good-nature,” as Samuel Johnson reports in Lives of the Poets. His early love for Milton’s poetry led him to follow the older man’s path to Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he “was distinguished as a genius eminent among the eminent,” and in 1701 he created something of a sensation by publishing The Splendid Shilling, the “brilliant” mock-heroic parody of Milton’s Paradise Lost from which Joseph Addison adapted Tatler No. 249, calling it “the finest Burlesque Poem in the British language.” Carol Barton

Philistines. A non-Semitic people who probably immigrated from the Aegean basin to the southern coastal plain of Palestine early in the twelfth century b.c. The principal settlements, sometimes called the Pentapolis, were Ashdod (alluded to in Animadversions), Ashkelon, Gath, Ekron, and Gaza (where Samson Agonistes is set). Because of their expansion into the hinterland of Canaan, the Philistines were rivals to the Israelites, though the threat they posed faded after their defeat by David (c. 950 b.c.). The pagan gods they worshipped included Dagon, Beelzebub, and Ashtoret or Ashtaroth, toward

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whom the Israelites occasionally strayed. The last two are among the heathen deities expelled by the Incarnation in “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” Samson’s conflict with the Philistines is the principal subject of Milton’s drama. See ER.

Thomas N. Corns

Phillips, Anne. See Milton, Anne. Phillips, Edward (1630 –?1696). Milton’s nephew, pupil, amanuensis, and biographer. The elder son of Milton’s sister Anne Milton, he began boarding and studying with Milton in 1640, sometime after his mother’s death, joining his younger brother, John Phillips. Edward’s Life of Mr. John Milton (1694)—published as a preface to Milton’s Letters of State— describes their studies, which followed Milton’s Of Education. Edward recalls their curriculum and remembers Milton as an affable, approachable taskmaster kept busy by work on early versions of De Doctrina Christiana and Paradise Lost. Phillips, however, makes some errors over the dates of Milton’s life and death and Paradise Lost’s publication. Recent scholarship has argued for Phillips’s Life as Milton’s first biography, but regardless of Phillips’s influence, it is rash to trust his information: his Life is detailed yet flawed, rife with demonstrable inaccuracies, exaggerations, and his own constant reminder that readers see only “the best of my remembrance.” Phillips left Milton’s tutelage in approximately 1646, later matriculating at Magdalen Hall, Oxford. Although he never received a degree, he became an assiduous writer, lexicographer, and philologist. Although Phillips visited until Milton’s death, his visits tapered in 1663 when he began tutoring the son of John Evelyn. Phillips’s tutoring and book dedications align him with England’s aristocratic, and predominantly royalist, class, and from this many biographers infer that he was a royalist. Evelyn himself notes that Phillips was not “infected” by Milton’s antimonarchic beliefs. Indeed, Phillips wrote an ode on James II’s coronation. See ODNB, Shawcross (2004).

Craig T. Fehrman

Phillips, John (1631–?1706). Milton’s nephew, amanuensis, and pupil. The son of Milton’s sister Anne Milton, he began boarding and studying with Milton in 1640 sometime after the death of

his mother. His older brother, Edward Phillips, joined him shortly thereafter. After finishing his studies, Phillips did not attend a university, but at age twenty he published his first work, Responsio ad Apologiam Anonymi [Reply to the Anonymous Apology] (1652). Under the aegis of Milton, Phillips censured the faulty logic and Latin of John Rowland’s Pro Rege et Populo Anglicano Apologia [Apology for the King and People of England] (1651), an invective against Milton’s Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio. Supposedly, Phillips brought his text to Milton piece by piece, with Milton providing, in Edward Phillips’s words, “exact emendations.” See ODNB, Shawcross (2004).

Craig T. Fehrman

“Philosophus ad Regem” [A Philosopher to the King]. Poem by Milton. This four-line epigram in Greek is of uncertain date. Its longer title, in Latin and Greek, explains, “A philosopher on his way to execution sent these impromptu verses to a certain king who had unknowingly condemned him to death when he happened to be taken prisoner— unrecognized and innocent—in the company of some criminals.” Some commentators have identified an allusion to the plight of Alexander Gil the younger. Others, however, think it could be a school exercise. Thomas N. Corns

philosophy of music. The study, as opposed to the performance, of music in the early modern period traditionally resembled what is now termed acoustics. As such, music theory was far more obviously connected to mathematics then than now, hence their pairing in Milton’s statement in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda remembering his excursions to London during his period of private study “to become acquainted with some new discovery in mathematics or music.” The standard textbook used in the universities was that of Boethius. Music was also closely associated with magic during this period on account of phenomena like sympathetic vibration, the causes of which were hidden, or “occult.” The emphasis on proportion and ratio in philosophizing about music also recalled its Pythagorean associations, and the popular writer on music John Playford opened his Introduction to the Skill of Music—an example of a growing sense of rapprochement between musical theory and practice—by recollecting the use of music in religious service and its origins in Orpheus, who made

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beasts and trees dance, or Amphion, who levitated stones by music. Playford also quoted Augustine on music as “a Representation or Admonition of the sweet Consent and Harmony” of the divinely constructed world. Even though the advance of Copernicanism (see heliocentrism) gradually retired the old notion of the music of the spheres, the theorizing of Johannes Kepler and Marin Mersenne demonstrates that connections between astronomy, mathematics, and music remained both pervasive and persuasive. After the Restoration, Robert Hooke also conducted various innovative acoustical experiments for the Royal Society, thus uniting theoretical and experimental approaches to musical phenomena. William Poole

Picard, Jeremie (fl. 1658 –1660; d. after 1670). Amanuensis, identified as the scribe responsible for the major part of the manuscript now known as De Doctrina Christiana. His employment by Milton during 1658 –1660 is evidenced in two legal documents from that period on which his hand and signature appear, and it is found, too, in two entries in Milton’s family Bible, two entries in the Commonplace Book, and the text of “Sonnet XIX” (“Methought I saw my late espoused saint”) in the Trinity Manuscript. He was also engaged in scribal work for the English government about that time. There is some evidence that Picard may have become a patient at Bethlem Hospital at some time after leaving Milton’s service. An admissions book records the presence of a “Jeremiah Piskard” as a patient in 1700, and a German visitor in an account drafted in 1678 recorded that he had seen “a secretary of the well-known Milton” in the hospital suffering from a serious mental illness. See Campbell et al. (2007).

Thomas N. Corns

Pickering, Sir Gilbert, First Baronet. Politician. He sat in the Short Parliament and Long Parliament and was active administratively and, briefly, in arms in Parliament’s interest. He survived Pride’s Purge. He was not a regicide, although he was a friend and ally of Oliver Cromwell. He was appointed Lord Pickering and was a member of the Council of State under the Protectorate, working mainly on matters of trade and foreign relations (and as such, likely often to encounter the services of Milton). On the death of Cromwell, he was actively engaged in the complex improvisations adopted to

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forestall the Restoration. His exclusion from the Act of Oblivion seemed possible, but the influence of his brother-in-law, Edward Montague, ensured his pardon. Both were included in the list of civilian worthies celebrated by Milton in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda as glittering members of the Cromwellian state. Thomas N. Corns

Piedmont. Largely mountainous part of northern Italy. In the Peace of Câteau-Cambrésis (1559), France gave up the formerly French-governed region of Piedmont to the duchy of Savoy. In assuming control over the Piedmontese territories, the dukes of Savoy attempted to subdue the inhabitants, known as Waldensians (Vaudois), the ur-Protestant descendants of the thirteenth-century followers of Peter Waldo. In 1560 Emmanuel-Philibert, Duke of Savoy, ordered Count Costa della Trinita to reinstate Catholicism in the region. The resulting military campaign against the Waldensians was continued by Charles Emmanuel I and his two successors. In the mid-seventeenth century, Charles Emmanuel II, Duke of Savoy, sent an army led by the Marquis of Pianezza to expel them, which he did in the name of Louis XIV and Catholicism (and at the instigation of his mother, the Duchess Christina), resulting in the “Piedmontese Easter massacre” of April 1655. One of the immediate responses to the atrocities was J[ean] B[aptiste] Stouppe’s A Collection of the Several Papers . . . Concerning the Bloody and Barbarous Massacres . . . of Many Thousands of Reformed, or Protestants Dwelling in the Vallies of Piedmont (London, 1655), a popular account that fueled anti-Catholic sentiment and sympathy for the victims. In his capacity as public servant, Milton wrote letters of protest to European rulers, is said to have drafted an address delivered by Sir Samuel Morland to the court in Turin, and also composed “Sonnet XV” (“On the Late Massacre in Piedmont”). Elizabeth Sauer

plague. Specifically, the epidemic disease, now usually identified with bubonic plague, that periodically swept through Europe between 1348 and 1722. Bubonic plague is named for the hugely swollen lymph glands, or buboes, that may appear in the sufferer’s groin, neck, or armpits. The bacillus Yersinia pestis (isolated in 1894) causes both the normative form of bubonic plague and other, more deadly, variants that do not produce buboes: pneumonic,

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transmitted by infected droplets from coughing or talking, and septicemic, which infects the bloodstream. The disputed degree to which these variants were present in plague outbreaks of earlier centuries has implications for calculating rates of mortality, understanding patterns of transmission, and even identifying the epidemic disease. In its normative form, bubonic plague was probably transmitted to human beings by the rodent flea Xenopsylla cheopis, forced to seek human hosts after the plague death of its normal host, the black or house rat, Rattus rattus. Human-to-human transmission by Pulex irritans, the human flea, has also been proposed to explain some patterns of infection within families. Estimates of the mortality caused by individual plague outbreaks vary widely; parish registers and the weekly bills of mortality published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are both informative and unreliable (as plague deaths were sometimes hidden or ascribed to other causes, and deaths in some nonconformist groups were not counted). But it is generally agreed that the first plague outbreak in 1348 (the Black Death) was the most deadly and that about 20 percent of London’s population died in the last English outbreak in 1665 (the Great London Plague), which spread to other parts of England in the next two years and then, for reasons not yet understood, vanished. Measures for containing the plague (for example, quarantine, exclusion, burning of victims’ perishable possessions, immediate burial in mass graves, culling of cats and dogs) developed on the Continent early in the sixteenth century. These were put into practice in England only in the seventeenth century, and then haphazardly. Their effectiveness is the subject of ongoing research, as is the plague’s complex effect upon social, political, and religious institutions and the lives of families and individuals. Outbreaks of plague characteristically began in the early summer and reached their peak in the late summer and early autumn. On 1 August 1625 all public events at Cambridge University were discontinued during a particularly severe outbreak. In the seventh of his Prolusions Milton refers to having spent the summer in the country, which suggests that the family moved out of London during the plague year of 1630. As did many others with the means to do so, Milton left London in the summer of 1665 for the relative safety of the country, moving to a cottage in Chalfont St. Giles (see Milton Cottage), where he remained for some months. Karen L. Edwards

Plato (427–347 B.C.). Philosopher. A pupil of Socrates, he established the concept of philosophical idealism, which, Christianized, mutated into Neoplatonism, an intellectual system that had a pervasive if uneven influence in the intellectual life of early modern Europe. Plato’s apparent advocacy in his Republic of close cultural censorship and control posed something of a challenge to Milton as he developed his own more tolerant proposals in Areopagitica. Plato’s position was well known among early modern humanists. Milton’s strategy is essentially twofold: to present Plato’s ideal as intellectual high spirits misinterpreted as a serious argument, and to reduce that argument to absurdity by confronting it with the impossibility of its actual implementation. See OCCL.

Thomas N. Corns

Platonism. The philosophical tradition deriving from the works of Plato centers on his assertion that Ideas—sometimes termed Forms—are not human constructs but exist independently. Since the physical universe is subject to constant change, it merely shares (or participates) in a reality that derives from the realm of the Ideas. The ultimate Idea is that of the Good. Plato advocates dialectic inquiry to enhance understanding of the Ideas, which can lead to the reformation of individual behavior, as seen in the dialogues featuring Plato’s teacher, Socrates, and to the reconsideration of social order, as seen in the Republic. Love, along with the beauty that inspires it, is considered an initial step toward the highest Good in the Symposium. Plato’s teachings were later reformulated under the influence of Jewish, Christian, and Gnostic thought. In the third century, Plotinus taught that since the physical universe emanates from a deity known as the One or the Good, the cosmos can be considered the self-expression of the One. Individual souls can reflect upon the cosmos and sustain (or recover) an understanding of their own divine origin. Plotinus’s follower Porphyry (c. 230 –305) used the individual soul’s connections with the cosmos to rehabilitate astrology; his student Iamblichus (c. 270 –330) borrowed theurgy from hermeticism, transforming it to a largely contemplative practice. Proclus (411– 485) continued the association of Platonism with religious syncretism while emphasizing the impersonality of Plato’s concept of the divine. The fifth-century author known as [Pseudo]Dionysius the Areopagite, whose writings were

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attributed to one of St. Paul’s converts, appropriated the philosophic tradition into a mystical Christian theology. Survivals of Platonism, which declined in the west along with knowledge of Greek, are evident in Augustine and Boethius. The philosophy was overshadowed as well by the success of Thomas Aquinas in reconciling the teachings of Aristotle with those of the medieval church. In the early Renaissance, several Platonic texts were recovered and translated, many by Marsilio Ficino, inspiring renewed study and commentary. Ficino recast Plato as a philosopher of divine inspiration and of love, drawing upon the Symposium and Phaedrus. Milton’s engagements with the philosophy reflect these varied currents. The second of his Prolusions, on the music (harmony) of the spheres, and “De Idea Platonica” indicate how Platonism enabled critiques of Aristotelianism. In “Il Penseroso” (see “L’Allegro”), the hermetically minded speaker desires “The spirit of Plato to unfold / What worlds, or what vast regions hold / The immortal mind that hath forsook / Her mansion in this fleshly nook” (89 –92). The “sage / And serious doctrine of virginity” announced by the Lady in A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (785 – 86) is derived, Milton asserts in Apology Against a Pamphlet, from “the divine volumes of Plato, and his equall [contemporary] Xenophon”; Xenophon’s Memorabilia, like many of Plato’s dialogues, concerns Socrates. Milton occasionally distances himself from Platonism: in Tetrachordon, he stresses Plato’s “heathenism,” and in Paradise Regained, Christ faults the unnamed Plato because he “to fabling fell and smooth conceits” (4.295). The Platonic philosophy of love, however, deeply informed Milton’s ideas of companionship and marriage. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce borrows specifically from the Symposium and Phaedrus. Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost demonstrate a more general influence, confirmed by Raphael’s allusion to the “scale”— from scalae, ladder—“By which to heavenly love” Adam may ascend (8.591–92). Stephen M. Buhler

Plattes, Gabriel (fl. 1639 –1645). Hartlibean and agricultural writer, whose various manuals on practical husbandry were published throughout the revolutionary decades. He was also the author of the technological utopia Macaria (1641), which was once mistakenly attributed to Samuel Hartlib and which appeared upon the meeting of the Long

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Parliament. “Macaria” was also the name the Hartlibeans attached to various genuine schemes to found an ideal community. Plattes’s utopia encourages strong parliamentary government, but under a rich and beloved king. Antimonarchism is accounted treasonable “else I know not what treason meaneth.” On Hartlib’s account, Plattes “f[e]ll downe dead in the street for want of food, without a shirt to his back” in the winter of 1644 –1645, on his way to visit Hartlib, who had been supporting him. William Poole

Plautus, Titus Maccius (c. 250 –184 B.C.). Dramatist. The best known of Roman writers of comedy, his surviving works had fairly wide currency in early modern Europe, sometimes in translation. His Menaechmi provided the plot of William Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. Milton does not include him among the authors to be studied in the curriculum set out in Of Education, perhaps because his early Latin differs too much from the classical purity of the authors of the late Roman republic and early empire, but perhaps also because of the sometimes risqué content. However, in Areopagitica Milton uses Plautus as a useful example of how earlier societies had different approaches to the censorship of literature, writing that even the works of “scurril” Plautus were allowed to circulate. See OCCL.

Thomas N. Corns

plurality. One member of the clergy holding two or more ecclesiastical offices or livings at the same time. Today, the usual term is “pluralism,” a word not current in Milton’s time. It figured prominently in the complaints laid by Puritan reformers against the practices of the Caroline Church of England; Milton alludes to it in his antiprelatical tracts. Yet leading Puritan divines were often themselves pluralists. Thomas Young, for example, retained his living at Stowmarket while holding another living in London and the mastership of Jesus College, Cambridge. Such practices were commonplace. Milton assails these alleged shortcomings in “On the New Forcers of Conscience,” accusing Presbyterian ministers of throwing over Laudian episcopacy in order to take the benefices held by their adversaries. See OED.

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Plutarch (c. 46 – c. 120). Greek historian and moral philosopher. He studied Platonic philosophy at Athens and lectured at Rome but spent most of his life in his native Boeotia. His chief works are Parallel Lives (forty-six paired biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, nineteen with comparisons appended, plus four single lives) and Moralia (seventy-eight essays on various subjects). He was widely read during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and influenced the essayists Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon. Thomas North translated Lives in 1579, and Philemond Holland translated Moralia in 1603. Milton names Plutarch on just four occasions. In Of Education he twice recommends him as a teacher of virtue; in The History of Britain he briefly mentions him in a footnote; and in the preface to Samson Agonistes he names him among the “Philosophers and other gravest Writers” who “frequently cite out of Tragic Poets.” However, Plutarch’s influence on Milton is greater than this brief list suggests, being the source of numerous allusions in the poetry and prose. John Carey (Milton, 1997) finds significant allusions to Moralia 593 f. and 942 f. in the prologue and epilogue to A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus). Milton also alludes to Lysander (“Sonnet VIII” 12 –14), Alexander (“Sonnet VIII” 10 –12, PL 9.509, PR 2.196), Caesar (PR 3.39), and Crassus (PR 303 –36). Other allusions, less certain or less significant, abound. John Leonard

Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions. Second edition of Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645). It was published by Thomas Dring in 1673, sometime before 24 November, the date when it was entered in the Term Catalogues. It is a double book, the first half comprising English and a few Italian poems, the second half comprising Latin and a few Greek poems. The title page of the Latin poems identifies the printer only as “W.R.” The 1673 Poems contains more printing errors than the 1645 Poems, and the compositors of the first edition took more care in setting their copies according to Milton’s preferences. Yet this volume is significant, containing eighty-nine texts by Milton, as opposed to fifty-six in 1645. All Milton’s texts from 1645 are reprinted, along with Of Education (which first appeared separately in 1644) and thirty-two new poems: “On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough,” Sonnets XI–XIX, “The Fifth Ode of Horace, Lib. I” (translation), “At a Vacation Exercise in the College,” “On the New

Forcers of Conscience,” “Ad Joannem Rousium,” “Apologus de Rustico et Hero,” “Psalms i–viii,” and “Psalms lxxx–lxxxviii” (translations). Milton slightly revised a few poems from the 1645 collection for this new edition, and the fact that Milton’s age or the date of composition is noted with twenty of the thirty-two additional poems also suggests his involvement in the later book’s creation. As with the biographical tags in the first collection, the new headnotes in 1673 encourage readers to approach Milton’s works in terms of his poetic development. See Dobranski (1999).

Stephen B. Dobranski

Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645). Book of Milton’s poems; full title, Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin, Compos’d at Several Times. It was printed by Ruth Raworth and published by the bookseller Humphrey Moseley, who had it entered in the Stationers’ Register on 6 October 1645. The title page reads “1645,” but the book may have been distributed later, since George Thomason dated his copy 2 January 1646. In contrast to all of Milton’s earlier poetic works, which had been printed anonymously (only “Lycidas” had appeared with his initials), the 1645 Poems foregrounds Milton’s authorial presence. The collection comprises fifty-six of Milton’s works and bears the author’s full name on the title page, announcing, between two horizontal rules, that the volume was “Printed by his true Copies.” The title page also reveals that the book was “Printed and publish’d according to Order,” and it highlights one of Milton’s acquaintances at court, Henry Lawes, who served as “Gentleman of the Kings Chappel, and one of His Maiesties Private Musick.” Below Lawes’s name, a Latin epigraph hints at Milton’s ongoing poetic development; it comes from Thyrsis’s speech in Virgil’s Eclogue VII: “Baccare frontem / Cingite, ne vati noceat mala lingua futuro” (“bind my brow, / With baccar, lest an ill tongue harm the bard to be”). Opposite the title page is William Marshall’s frontispiece portrait, purportedly depicting the poet at age twenty-one. Milton appears in the center of an oval frame, seated with his arms crossed before a partially curtained window that renders half his face in shadow. One of four muses— Clio (history), Erato (lyric poetry), Melpomene (tragedy), and Urania (astronomy)—sits in each of the page’s corners, and outside the window over the poet’s shoulder a shepherdess cavorts with two shepherds. Presumably, Milton objected to the portrait’s

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unflattering likeness and thus added below it a fourline Greek verse criticizing the engraver’s “unskillful hand” and instructing his friends to “Laugh at the botching artist’s mis-attempt.” Milton in Pro Se Defensio (1655) claims that the bookseller Moseley insisted on including the portrait. The layout of the 1645 Poems deepens Milton’s authorial presence as initiated in the book’s preliminary leaves. Not only do the individual texts follow a roughly chronological organization, but the book also includes, as was common during the seventeenth century, various commendatory notices celebrating the author’s abilities. In addition to an encomiastic epistle by Moseley, the volume contains letters by Lawes and Henry Wotton, complimentary verses by Selvaggi and Joannes Salsillus, a Latin couplet by Giovanni Battista Manso of Naples, an Italian ode by Antonio Francini, and a Latin dedication by Carlo Dati. The book also frames seventeen of Milton’s poems with terse, biographical tags, demonstrating Milton’s precocious talent. Most of these tags emphasize the young age at which he composed his poems (as with “A Paraphrase on Psalm cxiv” and “Psalm cxxxvi”) or underscore the poet’s prestigious connections (as with Arcades and A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle). The tag following “The Passion” apologizes for a less successful effort, while the tag preceding “Lycidas” explains Milton’s intentions and the poem’s context. All these features from the 1645 Poems contribute to the collection’s overriding sense of the author as a learned gentleman. This more conservative image of the author would have been mutually beneficial to Milton and the bookseller Moseley. In 1645 Milton was attempting to dispel his reputation as a divorcer and to rebut the misrepresentation he had suffered in antisectarian pamphlets. Moseley, by comparison, wished to produce a lucrative book that would help him establish his reputation as a bookseller of fine literature. Publishing a volume of poems after the start of the First Civil War, Moseley decided to avoid explicit reference to the conflict and reassert traditional values. That Milton’s masque serves as the collection’s centerpiece would have suited the poet’s claims to respectability as well as the publisher’s royalist politics. It is the longest work in the book and has a separate title page, noting the occasion of its first performance, and includes a list of the Egerton children as the chief performers. Despite the care taken to print the 1645 Poems and Moseley’s efforts to emphasize Milton’s refinement and learning, the book did not sell well. Ed-

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mund Waller’s Poems, also published by Moseley in 1645, had three editions in its first year, but catalogues of Moseley’s publications as late as 1660 still include the first edition of Milton’s Poems. A second edition of Milton’s collected poetry did not appear until 1673, when Thomas Dring published Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions. See Dobranski (1999).

Stephen B. Dobranski

Poland. See John [ Jan] III Sobieski. Polybius (c. 200 –after 118 B.C.). Greek historian; author of The Histories, forty books in all, of which the first five, most of the sixth, and fragments of the rest survive. He explains how, from 220 to 167 b.c., events in all parts of the known world were in fact parts of “a single whole”—the rise of Roman domination over the world. Though granting a considerable role to Fortune in this “general history,” Polybius emphasizes in Book VI that much of Rome’s success derived from its having over time established a mixed constitution, one that combined elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. This constitution was more stable than each of these three pure forms, which he saw as being caught within anacyclosis, the natural and endless progression of constitutions from monarchy, to tyranny, to aristocracy, to oligarchy, to democracy, to mob rule, and back to monarchy. The entire account, but especially Book VI, has come to be seen as a foundational document in the tradition of republican political thought. In Of Reformation (1641), Milton claims that the mixed constitution is best and that the current constitution of England is an even better instance of it than the constitutions of Sparta and Rome, which were “so much prais’d by the wise Polybius.” In Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (1651), he cites Polybius again as “that most weighty author” who observes how the most noble citizens conspired against those kings who, pursuing their own desires, had become tyrants. William W. Walker

Polycarpus [Polycarp] (traditionally c. 69 – c. 155). Bishop of Smyrna (modern-day Izmir, Turkey). His ecclesiastic governance, insofar as it could be determined, was sometimes invoked by defenders of prelatical episcopacy. Milton’s response was to argue that the records of his church had been

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transmitted through agencies that had both the opportunity and the motive for corrupting them. Polycarpus was martyred in the stadium at Smyrna. In Of Prelatical Episcopacy, Milton reduces to absurdity the hagiographical account of his martyrdom. His argument is that, since the narrative is plainly fantastical, the other, unsubstantiated, details of Polycarpus’s life and thought should not be accepted as evidence for the practices of the primitive church. See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

polygamy. Marriage in which a person has more than one mate. The notion of a man simultaneously having a plurality of wives, or polygyny, interested Milton for much of his life. In the late 1630s he had noted in the Commonplace Book a comment of Justin Martyr “that the polygamy of the ancient Jews was by no means forbidden.” Polyandry, in which one woman has a plurality of husbands, fascinates but repels him. In The History of Britain he observes, “certain it is that whereas other Nations us’d a liberty not unnatural for one man to have many Wives, the Britans altogether more licentious, but more absurd and preposterous in thir licence, had one or many Wives in common among ten or twelve Husbands.” His comment offers a veiled assertion of the reasonableness of a man having simultaneously many wives. In De Doctrina Christiana he reflects uncensoriously on the practices of Old Testament patriarchs. Milton was not alone among Protestant theological thinkers in adopting this view, though it was decidedly a minority position. See Campbell et al. (2007), Miller (1974).

Thomas N. Corns

Pope, Alexander (1688 –1744). Poetic satirist of the Augustan era. Born to a Roman Catholic draper, he was self-educated at home, which was in Binfield in Windsor Forest. He completed his early pastorals at age sixteen, publishing Essay on Criticism in 1711. Despite debilitating tuberculosis of the bone, he became a commanding literary arbiter, especially after publication of his mock-epic Rape of the Lock (enlarged version, 1714), and was a member of the London “Scriblerus Club.” By 1721 he had moved to Twickenham and published acclaimed translations of Homer. His satiric masterpiece The Dunciad (1728; enlarged edition The Dunciad, Variorum, 1729) ridiculed dull contemporaries, as did his later Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735). His philosophical

Essay on Man (1733 –1734) addressed morality in four epistles; translations of Horace appeared in the 1730s. His pastoral Windsor Forest (1713) draws upon Milton’s portrayal of Eden, and The Rape of the Lock draws on Milton’s angelology in its “machinery” of sylphs. The Dunciad variously recalls Milton’s Satan and his kingdom. A clear Miltonic echo in the Essay on Man is Pope’s intent to “vindicate the ways of God to Man.” Christopher Baker

portraits of Milton. Most portraits of Milton derive from a series of four made during different stages of his lifetime. The first is John Milton at the Age of Ten (1618), an oil painting formerly attributed to Cornelius Janssen and now thought to be by an unknown artist. It is in the Morgan Library and Museum, New York. The second is the Onslow portrait, lost in 1827 and rediscovered around 1939; it was painted around 1629 by an unknown artist and is currently displayed in London’s National Portrait Gallery. This portrait presents Milton at the age of twenty-one while a student at Cambridge. Many drawings and engravings after this portrait have been done, including a copy by Benjamin Van der Gucht and engravings by George Vertue (1731) and G. B. Cipriani (1760). The third, an engraved frontispiece for Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645) by William Marshall, states that it also represents Milton at age twenty-one; Milton himself disapproved of the artist’s rendering of his features. John Rupert Martin suggests it is based on the Onslow portrait; Leo Miller believes it may be after another unknown c. 1629 portrait. The fourth is William Faithorne’s engraving of Milton at age sixty-two, which appeared as the frontispiece for Milton’s History of Britain (1670). Because of the authority of the Faithorne engraving, other artists imitated it, including Robert White and George Vertue, who modeled their frontispieces to the 1688 edition of Paradise Lost and the 1720 edition of Milton’s Poetical Works, respectively, on Faithorne’s engraving. The Princeton portrait (also previously known as the Richardson, Tonson, Baker, or Bayfordbury portrait) in crayons or pastels relates closely to the Faithorne engraving as well and was most likely done by Faithorne as a preparatory study for his engraving. It too became a model for future portraits, including the Hobart portrait, the Lenox portrait, and Vertue’s 1725 pen and wash drawing, which would become the design for his 1725 engraving of Milton for his series of “The Twelve Poets.” The pen and wash drawing itself became the model for

Powell, Mary

several engravings. The Princeton portrait entered the collection of Jonathan Richardson in 1734. He made a few copies, including a 1734 etching that in turn generated a mezzotint by John Simon, done sometime between 1734 and 1751. Vertue, J. Miller ( Johann Sebastian Müller), and Cipriani made engravings after the Princeton portrait as well (1750, 1759, and 1760, respectively). John Van der Gucht used it as the model for his engraved frontispiece for Paradiso perduto (1736). No large attempts were made to catalogue Milton’s portraits until 1860, when John Fitchett Marsh classified more than 150 for the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire. Columbia University and Christ’s College, Cambridge, each held an exhibition of portraits of Milton for Milton’s tercentenary in 1908. Also in 1908, G. C. Williamson published his Catalogue of the Portraits of John Milton (known as the Christ’s College catalogue), and the Grolier Club published its own catalogue. Although the Grolier Club catalogue is more extensive, each catalogue contains works omitted in the other. Valerie A. Cullen, Jonathan F. S. Post

Pound, Ezra (Loomis) (1885 –1972). American poet and critic. Along with William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot, he was a major figure of modernism, also influencing vorticism and imagism. In Literary Essays (New York, 1954), he applauds Milton’s shorter poems for their rhythm and meter and credits Milton for honing the “sonority” of English blank verse. Nevertheless, Pound, like Eliot, has few positive things to say about Milton, sardonically calling him the “worst possible food for a growing poet.” Pound’s chief complaint is that Milton loses his idiom while trying to model English on Latin, an uninflected language on an inflected one. Furthermore, Pound dismisses Milton’s poetry as overly rhetorical and derivative, teeming with excessive allusions and pedantic diction at the cost of images—surely a cardinal sin to a founder of imagism. Ironically, Pound spent the Christmas of 1912 at Milton’s Buckinghamshire cottage; he described it, predictably, as horrid. Craig T. Fehrman

Powell, Mary (1625 –1652). Milton’s first wife. She was the daughter of a gentry-class Oxfordshire landowner, Richard Powell, Sr., who had long since borrowed money from Milton’s father, in an arrangement by which the interest was paid directly to Milton the poet. It is uncertain how

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Milton came to know Mary. The banking system in England was certainly sufficiently developed to allow the transfer of money from Oxford to London without the necessity of Milton traveling in person to collect it. Details of the courtship and marriage remain unclear in the best early account, that of his nephew, Edward Phillips, who recalls, “About Whitsuntide [29 May in 1642] it was, or a little after, that he took a Journey into the Country; no body about him certainly knowing the Reason, or that it was any more than a Journey of Recreation: after a Month’s stay, home he returns a Married-man, that went out a Batchelor; his Wife being Mary, the Eldest Daughter of Mr. Richard Powell, then a Justice of Peace, of Forrest-hil, near Shotover in Oxfordshire.” We have no information about the date or place of the wedding. After Milton’s death, his brother Christopher Milton recalled that he had told him that a dowry of £1,000 had been agreed on, though none of it had been paid. Since Powell, though a considerable landowner, was cash poor, some other arrangement would have been likelier, perhaps the annual payment of interest on the outstanding principal along with the £24 he continued to pay his son-in-law. In the event, on Christopher’s recollection of his assertion, John received nothing. The young bride and some of her relatives traveled to Milton’s house in London, the bridal party returning home after a period of celebration. A month or so later, Mary returned to Forest Hill, for reasons that have attracted some speculation, even among early biographers. Shortly afterwards, the First Civil War broke out, leaving her behind royalist lines (Oxford was occupied by Charles I, who used it as his provisional seat of government). At some point in 1645 Mary returned to London. From 29 January to 22 March a truce was observed between the warring sides to allow peace negotiations to be held at Uxbridge. Possibly, she took advantage of this lull to venture across the lines and back to the capital. Alternatively, her return may have occurred in the summer of 1645, when the temporary raising of the siege once more allowed communications. Cyriack Skinner places the date of the reconciliation rather later than Phillips, after the fall of Oxford in late June 1646, though here he must err, since the first child of John and Mary was born five weeks later, on 29 July of that year. Phillips placed the reunion “within a year” of the birth. During her absence, Milton, presumably despairing of the relationship, had interested himself in the issue of divorce reform along lines that would have allowed him to remarry. Mary gave birth to two daughters, Mary Milton and Anne Milton.

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She died on or about 5 May 1652, shortly after giving birth to her third daughter, Deborah Milton, presumably of a perinatal complication or infection. Her only son, John Milton, died shortly afterwards. See Campbell and Corns (2008).

imposed upon him, and he died in Milton’s home in Barbican, leaving his affairs in considerable disorder, problems that Milton himself was constrained to address. See Campbell and Corns (2008).

Thomas N. Corns Thomas N. Corns

Powell, Richard, Jr. (?1621–1696). Royalist activist and landowner. Educated at Oxford University and admitted to the Inner Temple, he was the eldest child of Richard Powell, Sr., and from 1642 Milton’s brother-in-law. He had been in arms for Charles I during the First Civil War and was in self-imposed exile at the time of his father’s death in 1646. He returned at some point before 1653, for in that year he was called to the bar. He was involved in continuing difficulties with his father’s business affairs, and not until 1673 did the family property at Forest Hill come in full to him. But by the time of the Restoration he had evidently returned to the ranks of the Oxfordshire gentry. In late April 1660 Powell emerged among other Oxfordshire luminaries to sign a declaration, subsequently printed, that “we do declare, that we disdain, and with perfect detestation disown, all purpose of Revenge, or partial Remembrance of things past.” In his will, Milton left to his daughters the unpaid dowry of his marriage to Mary Powell of £1,000, which was still, correctly viewed, a charge against Powell’s inherited estate. See Campbell and Corns (2008).

Thomas N. Corns

Powell, Richard, Sr. (d. 1646). Landowner and Milton’s father-in-law. A member of the Oxfordshire gentry, his principal estate was at Forest Hill, near Oxford. In 1627 John Milton, Sr., lent him £300 at 8 percent interest, against a staple bond made out to John Milton the poet. Perhaps this or some other business led to the latter’s contact with the Powell family and thence to his marriage to Mary Powell. During the First Civil War the Forest Hill property was garrisoned by the royalists since it commanded a strategically important route into their provisional capital at Oxford. Toward the end of the war, Powell and his family withdrew into Oxford itself. He was deemed to be a malignant, a supporter of Charles I, and his property was denuded of timber, which was donated to Banbury to repair the war damage it had sustained. Milton helped him to arrange his affairs and to settle the fine that was

powers. One of the orders of angels in medieval and early modern angelology (see angels). The term recurs frequently in Paradise Lost, usually in the formulaic expression “Thrones, dominions, princedoms, virtues, powers” and its variants (5.601; see, for example, 3.320, 5.840). See also Colossians 1:16: “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him.” Thomas N. Corns

predestination. Christian doctrine which teaches that human beings were appointed to salvation or destruction before the creation of the world. The idea of predestination was developed by Augustine, whose principal concern was to maintain that salvation is entirely gratuitous. Augustine argued that God eternally and unconditionally elected some of the human race to salvation while decreeing to leave the reprobate in their sins and to punish them accordingly. The western church remained ambivalent toward predestination, and late medieval theology sought to synthesize Augustinian views of grace and predestination with a greater emphasis on free will. In the sixteenth century the Protestant reformers vigorously asserted an Augustinian doctrine of predestination. Martin Luther affirmed an unconditional decree of God to save some of the human race by granting them grace and faith, and Jean Calvin’s influential presentation of the doctrine, despite its emphasis on reprobation, sought above all to deepen believers’ appreciation of divine mercy. The doctrine of predestination was the center of heated controversy in post-Reformation theology. Among the Calvinists, dispute arose concerning the relation between predestination and the Fall. The supralapsarians argued that the predestination of individuals to salvation or destruction logically preceded the decree to permit the human race to fall, while the infralapsarians claimed that predestination logically followed the decree to create the

Presbyterianism

human race and permit it to fall. Reacting against the harshness of supralapsarianism, the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius argued that individuals were predestined to salvation or destruction on the basis of foreseen faith or unbelief. Arminianism spread to England, generating extensive controversy and gaining considerable power in the 1630s under the influence of William Laud. English Calvinism was definitively expressed in the Westminster Confession of Faith, which affirmed, in infralapsarian terms, the election and reprobation of a fixed number of individuals on the sole basis of the divine will. Milton did not discuss predestination in his early writings, but in the prose works of the early 1640s he broadly aligned himself with Calvinists. By the time of the late works, De Doctrina Christiana and Paradise Lost, Milton had developed his own distinct position. Like Arminius, De Doctrina argues that faith is the basis of predestination, but unlike either Calvinism or Arminianism, it denies any decree of reprobation. See Danielson (1982), Tyacke (1987).

Benjamin Myers

Preface to Ralegh’s Cabinet-Council. A preface or epistle to the reader by Milton to a prose work, of uncertain authorship, published in 1658. The Cabinet-Council (1658), a quarto-sized pamphlet, collects political aphorisms. Milton’s name appears on its title page beneath that of Sir Walter Ralegh, its supposed author. Milton may have selected the Latin epigraph that appears below his and Ralegh’s name. He also penned a brief, signed preface in which he claimed to have recently rediscovered the manuscript among his papers and realized the value of the “work of so eminent an Author [to] the Publick.” The circumstances of Milton’s acquisition of the text and any additional input he had in its publication cannot be further ascertained. Although the title page attributes the CabinetCouncil to him, Ralegh did not write it. Ernest Strathmann discovered that the text reprints a lateElizabethan manuscript, Observations Political and Civil, by an unknown “T.B.” In a ninety-two word address “To the Reader,” Milton offers a cursory account of the manuscript’s provenance, claiming to have inherited it several years previously. It then remained in Milton’s own papers for some time until he stumbled upon it again “lately by chance.” Since Milton never prefaced the publication of anyone else’s work, this unique instance may have carried its own political freight, occurring as it did in 1658

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under Oliver Cromwell’s increasingly autocratic Protectorate. See Dzelzainis (1995), Stevens (2001).

Andrew Fleck

Presbyterianism. Essentially and originally an ecclesiastical term denoting a church system based on parish churches overseen by a governing hierarchy of four church courts: the session (or consistory) of the local parish church, made up of the minister and elders elected from the congregation; the presbytery (or classis), consisting of ministers and elders from a prescribed area; the synod, made up of representatives from a number of presbyteries; and finally the General Assembly, the church’s supreme court or governing body to which ministers and elders are elected by the presbyteries. The term comes from the New Testament Greek word presbuteros, “presbyter” or “elder,” so translated in the English Bibles of the Protestant tradition, though rendered “priest” in the Roman Catholic tradition. Jean Calvin recognized elders as one of the four orders of church minister, and it was at Calvin’s Geneva that this church polity was first instituted. It was subsequently adopted by the reformed Church of Scotland under John Knox. In England Presbyterianism was the aspiration of the Puritan party, championed by Thomas Cartwright and Walter Travers, but in the 1580s the Elizabethan Puritan movement failed in its attempt to have Presbyterianism enacted in law. During the antiprelatical campaign of the 1640s, Presbyterianism again emerged as the preferred polity of Puritans. It became the official policy of the Long Parliament, which, having abolished episcopacy in January 1643, summoned the Westminster Assembly of Divines in September 1643 to effect an English Presbyterian church settlement. It issued a set of classic and enduring Presbyterian formularies: Directory of Church-Government (1644), Directory of Public Worship (1645), Confession of Faith (1648), and Larger and Shorter Catechism (1648). The assembly’s efforts, however, were frustrated by opposition from within the Puritan movement. During the 1640s the autonomous churches of Independency grew in favor, especially in the New Model Army and among the more radical members of the Long Parliament. These two rival ecclesiastical systems became associated with rival political programs, though in problematic ways: in 1938 J. H. Hexter initiated a prolonged historiographical controversy concerning the applicability and utility of the terms “Independent” and “Presbyterian” for

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an understanding of the political and parliamentary history of the period. The predominantly Presbyterian Long Parliament favored not only uniform adherence to a national church, but a negotiated settlement with the king; the Independents, increasingly influential in the army, grew more radical in their political aims, coming to favor republicanism. As the price of securing Scots military support on the parliamentarian side in the civil war, the Solemn League and Covenant committed England to working toward a reformed church on the Scottish—that is, Presbyterian—model; however, the ascendancy of the army, and the patronage of Oliver Cromwell, ensured that, despite the efforts of the Westminster Assembly and regardless of the covenant, a national Presbyterian church was never established in England. Though a number of steps were taken at the national level to secure the quality of ordained ministers and the orthodoxy of their preaching, and a number of classes were established, no one national ecclesiastical structure succeeded the episcopal Church of England. Milton’s religious and political development began in Puritan opposition to the bishops of the established church. He maintained that, in the early church, “Bishop” and “Presbyter” were “two names to signify the same order” of ministers (Animadversions; see also Of Reformation). Only subsequently, “by instigation of Satan” and “rather by custom, then any ordainment of Christ,” did a hierarchical relationship develop, with bishops “exalted above Presbyters” (Eikonoklastes) until they came to exercise the lordly and worldly power still wielded by the prelatical “wolves” of the English church (The Reason of Church-Government). This view was typical of Presbyterianism (which makes no distinction between ministerial orders), and Milton did, indeed, expound a Presbyterian church polity in The Reason of Church-Government, but his specifically Presbyterian commitment is less explicit than that of the Smectymnuans (see Smectymnuus), whom he seconded in the controversy over episcopacy, and his antiprelatical tracts demonstrate a sympathy for sectarianism and radicalism uncongenial to the majority of Presbyterians (for example, in The Reason of Church-Government). That sympathy comes to the fore in Areopagitica. Milton’s subsequent disillusion with the centralizing and antitolerationist bias of Presbyterianism, articulated famously in the concluding line to his 1646 sonnet “On the New Forcers of Conscience”— “New Presbyter is but old Priest write large”—led him to Independency.

He was no less disillusioned by what he took to be the Presbyterians’ betrayal of the revolution they had themselves begun. He regarded their desire to reach an accommodation with Charles I, and their lack of support for the regicide, as a cowardly unwillingness to face up to the logic of their own action in embarking on war against the king. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates is as much an impassioned attack on the backsliding of those who originally took away “the Kings autority” as it is a defense of regicide: “the Presbyterians, who now so much condemn deposing, were the men themselves that deposd the King, and cannot with all thir shifting and relapsing, wash off the guiltiness from thir own hands.” In 1660 Milton mocked “the new royaliz’d presbyterians” (The Readie and Easie Way), but in truth Presbyterians had always favored monarchy, and throughout the events following the death of Oliver Cromwell they remained consistent in this commitment. Recognizing that in them lay the best hopes for the restoration of monarchy, in 1659 the exiled court began to make secret approaches to eminent Presbyterian ministers and politicians. In the scornful phrase of the republican Lucy Hutchinson, Presbyterians were now “the white boys,” that is, the favorites. With the restoration of the Purged Parliament in May 1659, the Presbyterian William Prynne led a deputation demanding the reinstatement of former Presbyterian members of the Long Parliament ejected by Pride’s Purge. When this demand was finally met in February 1660 through the agency of George Monck, the Presbyterian majority in the now fully restored Long Parliament clearly signaled its willingness to treat with Charles II and, by voting its own dissolution, ensured that the majority in the succeeding Convention Parliament would represent the increasingly royalist mood of the country. In the late 1640s the Long Parliament had sought a treaty with Charles I, limiting the powers of the crown; remarkably, in the Convention Parliament no steps were taken to agree to terms for Charles II’s return. The Restoration was hence unconditional. While a number of those Presbyterians who had been instrumental in effecting the Restoration were rewarded with peerages, and there were eight Presbyterian members of Charles II’s Privy Council, Presbyterian peers were greatly outnumbered in the House of Lords; and in the House of Commons of the Cavalier Parliament, with its requirement that members take the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper according to the rite of the Book of Common

Pride’s Purge

Prayer, there were virtually no Presbyterian members. Such political and religious influence as Presbyterians could wield was brought to bear to modify the persecutory religious policy of the Cavalier Parliament (see Clarendon Code), but their aspiration to accommodate Presbyterian opinion within the established Church of England was never to be realized. Rather than a more broadly based national church, the eventual outcome was toleration of Presbyterian dissent from the Church of England (see nonconformity and Act of Toleration). N. H. Keeble

Presbyters. See Presbyterianism. “Present Means, and Brief Delineation.” Milton, work of prose; full title, “The Present Means, and Brief Delineation of a Free Commonwealth, Easy to Be Put in Practice, and Without Delay, in a Letter to General Monck.” First published “from the Manuscript” (now lost) by John Toland, in A Complete Collection (1698), undated, unsigned, and without an opening address to Monck. In this letter, written between the two editions of The Readie and Easie Way, Milton urges George Monck to bring men of substance from the localities to London to advise them on how to manage the elections to preserve the republic and prevent a return to kingship. The unfinished state of the manuscript indicates that it was a draft and may not have been sent. Milton suggests that Monck call up the chief gentlemen from each county and lay before them —as in the general’s published letters to the army and speech to Parliament—the danger of admitting kingship. Then, he advises, let them return to help elect knights and burgesses engaged for a Commonwealth to make up the permanent grand or general council, albeit with some partial rotation and certain responsibilities devolved to the localities. Milton’s recognition of the tide toward kingship is shown, however, in his implicit suggestion that Monck, if necessary, intervene with force to preserve the republic: it was a hope in which Milton would be bitterly disappointed. See Corns (1992), Knoppers (2001).

Laura L. Knoppers

Price, Richard (1723 –1791). Welsh Unitarian minister and political writer. His sermon “A Discourse on the Love of Our Country” (1789) equates

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the outbreak of the French Revolution with the beneficial political reforms of Britain’s “Glorious” Revolution (1688). Price, who names Milton among the champions of British liberty, advocated revolution as the necessary response to tyranny and corruption, whether in Britain or France. In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1789 –1790), Edmund Burke (1729 –1797) denounces Price’s radicalism and defends the ancient constitutional liberties that the Glorious Revolution had supposedly reaffirmed and restored. This debate inspired Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791–1792). Mel Kersey

Pride’s Purge. Purge of the Long Parliament on 6 December 1648 of those members who did not support the New Model Army. Relations between the army and Parliament had deteriorated steadily from about 1645, when victory in the First Civil War was assured. The issues were complex. Presbyterians in Parliament were concerned about the religious radicalism manifest among all ranks of the army. There was a conflict of interest between parliamentarians who wished to see reductions in troop numbers and soldiers reluctant to disband while wages were still outstanding. The outbreak of the Second Civil War divided the majority in Parliament who favored a prolonged negotiation with Charles I and soldiers who had grown impatient with his intransigence and the military cost they had been required as a consequence to pay. The army made various threatening moves toward London, occasionally entering and occupying it temporarily. In early December the city was again occupied, and on the morning of 6 December Colonel Thomas Pride, aided by foot soldiers of his regiment, turned away members of Parliament on a list of 143 that had been drawn up of those hostile to the army. Fifty who were defiant were arrested, although most were released shortly afterwards. The Long Parliament had lost many members when royalists withdrew, though gaps had been supplemented by recruiter elections. The Purged Parliament, numbering at first fewer than one hundred, was now made up of men prepared to countenance the trial and execution of the king. Somewhat later, this body came to be known as the Rump Parliament. Its Council of State recruited Milton into public service. Thomas N. Corns

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princedom

princedom. A term adopted by Milton in Paradise Lost synonymous with “principality,” one of the nine orders of the celestial hierarchy. See angels. See OED.

Thomas N. Corns

Princess Elizabeth (1596 –1662). Elizabeth Stuart von der Pfalz, Electress Palatine, “Winter Queen” of Bohemia. The eldest daughter of James I of England and VI of Scotland and Anne of Denmark, she was born at Falkland Castle in Fifeshire, Scotland. On 14 February 1613, she married Friedrich von der Pfalz, or Frederick V, the Elector Palatine. Six years later the Bohemian states rejected the Habsburg leader of the Roman Catholic CounterReformation, Archduke Ferdinand of Styria (later Ferdinand II); two days earlier, on 16 August 1619, they had declared Frederick, the leader of the German Calvinist princes, their ruler. Duke Maximilian of Bavaria defeated him at White Mountain near Prague in 1620. Frederick fled with his wife to The Hague and became forevermore known as the “Winter King”; Elizabeth was thus his “Winter Queen.” Elizabeth’s connection with Milton came indirectly at first, through a cordial relationship between one of her suitors and his composer father. According to John Aubrey, in 1611 John Milton, Sr., had composed a “song of fourscore parts for the Landgrave of Hesse,” that is, for Prince Otto, son of the Landgrave Maurice of Hesse-Kassel, who had come to England in the hope of winning James I’s daughter for his wife; the elder Milton received a present of some kind in return. Elizabeth and the poet also perhaps had a tutor in common ( John Tovey); the father of Milton’s friend Charles Diodati may have been the princess’s physician at Kew (William Riley Parker); and Charles I’s sister had apparently owned a complete set of Milton’s pamphlets (1641–1645). Carol Barton

Procopius (c. 500 –after 562). Byzantine historian. He was secretary to Belisarius, the general of Emperor Justinian, and accompanied him on his early campaigns in Italy and Africa; he then served as prefect of Constantinople on his return. His History of the Wars of Justinian, in eight books, covers the period 527–553 and is a major source for later historians. To this he added a two-book coda, The Secret History or Anecdota, a stinging attack on the policies of Justinian and on the sexual immorality

of the Empress Theodora. Milton knew both works. He includes a couple of notes from the History of the Wars in his Commonplace Book, drawing on the Greek edition published in Augsburg in 1607, and uses it again in The History of Britain for information on the Vandal wars as a factor in the decline of the western empire. See OCCL.

Thomas N. Corns

prolepsis. A rhetorical figure that represents something future (a name, event, condition, etc.) as already done or existing. A textbook instance occurs in book 10 of Paradise Lost when Milton likens Death to a flock of carrion birds (10.273 –78). “Living carcasses” is an oxymoron and a prolepsis. The soldiers will not die until tomorrow but are as good as dead today. The implication is that the fallen world is also as good as dead. In this case the anachronism is startling, but it does not raise disturbing questions about free will. Adam and Eve “Brought death into the world” (PL 1.3) when they ate the apple. Prolepsis is more disturbing when it imports a taint of the Fall into the unfallen paradise. Some prolepses are single words. A famous example is “wanton.” We first encounter it in hell, in the “wanton rites” (1.414) and “wanton passions” (1.454) of devil worship. After this, it is surprising to see innocent Eve’s hair fall in “wanton ringlets” (4.306) or to be told that unfallen Nature “Wantoned as in her prime” (5.295). For a deconstructionist like J. Hillis Miller, instances such as these expose innocence as a myth. “Eve’s disheveled wantonness,” Miller writes, “means that she has in effect already fallen . . . whatever Milton may say.” For Miller, the Fall was always “already.” Christopher Ricks approaches prolepsis in a different way. He thinks that words like “wanton” evoke the Fall in order to shut it out. By playing on senses that do not yet apply, Milton reaches “back to an earlier purity.” Stanley Fish takes this line of argument a step further and concludes that the evil connotations are there to humble the fallen reader: “Milton leaves him no choice but to acknowledge himself as the source, and to lament.” See Fish (1967), Miller (1991), Ricks (1963).

John Leonard

Prolusions. As part of Milton’s education at Cambridge University from 1625 to 1632, he composed a series of academic exercises, written in Latin and intended for oration, seven of which were later pub-

Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda

lished in 1674 as part of Epistolarum Familiarum Liber Unus [Book I of the Familiar Letters]. In each of these exercises, Milton borrows copiously from numerous authorities, as well as Greek and Roman mythology, and follows closely the classical division of oration into exordium, or introduction; narratio, or establishment of favorable facts; divisio, or breakdown of thesis; confirmatio and refutatio, the proof followed by rebuttal of counterargument; and finally peroration, or conclusion. Prolusio is an elastic term, as “prelude” is in music. In Milton’s time it denoted a practice or display piece of oratory, often preparatory to something else—as opposed to forensic or serious polemic. By 1682 it is found meaning a “slight literary production” (OED). Strange as they may seem read now in translation, the seven Prolusions demonstrate how, as a Latin performer, Milton “was in high esteem with the best of his time” at Cambridge (from the anonymous biography now attributed to Cyriack Skinner). Prolusions VI and VII in particular manifest a Milton at home with his studies and his colleagues by means of the starring roles that Latin proluding could offer. See Hale (2005).

Eric C. Brown, John K. Hale

Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio. Milton, work of Latin prose; full title, Joannis Miltonii Angli pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Contra Claudii Anonymi, alias Salmasii, Defensionem Regiam [Defense of the English People by John Milton, Englishman, Against the Royal Defense of Claude the Anonymous, alias Claude Salmasius]; also known as Defensio Prima or the First Defense. By 11 May 1649 Claudius Salmasius’s Defensio Regia pro Carolo I. Ad Serenissimum Magnae Britanniae Regem Carolum II. Filium Natu Majorem, Heredem & Successorem Legitimum [The Royal Defense for Charles I. To the Most Serene King of Great Britain Charles II. Elder-born Son, Heir and Legitimate Successor] (n.p., 1649) was circulating in London. The republican government, the Purged Parliament, responded only tardily. Salmasius worked in the United Provinces, and the text he wrote was first and most frequently printed there. The Council of State, through its representative, Walter Strickland, tried in late November 1649 to inhibit its production through representation to the States General. On 8 January 1650, the council instructed Milton to write a response. On 18 February 1650, noting that “several copies . . . are sent from Holland to several booksellers here,” the council ordered their “discovery

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and seizure” and the prosecution of the importers, and two days later William Dugard was imprisoned for planning to print it in England (see stationers). On 23 December 1650 Milton presented the manuscript of Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio to the council, which sanctioned its publication, and it was licensed the following week. On or about 24 February 1651 it finally appeared. Milton’s continental European reputation would be founded on this work. The imprint reads “Londini, Typis Du Gardianis,” the same William Dugard who had been arrested for scheming to print Salmasius, though evidently he had been put under sufficient pressure to change his allegiances. Milton follows the same organizing principles as he used in Eikonoklastes of 1649, confuting Salmasius chapter by chapter. The larger argument remains the same: indeed, some monarchs are fine, some states are best governed by monarchs. But there is an obvious implication that a republic is the constitutional form for a people at the height of their courage and industry. In the Defensio kings in general and Charles I in particular are treated more abrasively than in Eikonoklastes. Milton’s defense achieved very quickly a wide circulation, especially in the United Provinces, where it was soon reprinted and translated into Dutch. At least ten further editions were printed in London by the end of the year, and a pleasing notoriety soon followed. In June 1651 it was ordered to be publicly burned in Toulouse. Shortly after, it was burned twice in quick succession in Paris. See Campbell and Corns (2008).

Thomas N. Corns

Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda. Milton, work of Latin prose; full title, Johannis Miltoni Angli Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda. Contra Infamem Libellum Anonymum cui Titulus, Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum Adversus Parricidas Anglicanos [Second Defense of the English People by John Milton, Englishman. Against an Infamous, Anonymous Libel, by Title The Cry of the Royal Blood to Heaven, Against the English Parricides]; also known as the Defensio Secunda or the Second Defense. Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio was answered by the anonymous Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum Adversus Parricidas Anglicanos [The Cry of the Royal Blood to Heaven, Against the English Parricides] (1652), which was almost certainly the work of an ejected minister of the Church of England, Peter du Moulin. Alexander More, a reformed clergyman who held various prestigious

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offices in continental Europe, seems to have edited it and seen it through the press. Milton worked from the assumption that More was the principal author, a view in which he persevered despite attempts by continental well-wishers and others to correct it. Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda (published 30 May 1654) was printed by Thomas Newcombe (see stationers) and combined high politics with low scurrility. Much is made of More’s alleged sexual impropriety with one of Claudius Salmasius’s maidservants. More was conveniently vulnerable to ad hominem attack because in 1652 Elizabeth Guerret, a servant in the Salmasius household in Leiden, which More had regularly visited, brought a breach of promise suit, naming him as the father of her illegitimate child and alleging that he had seduced her under promise of marriage. The English republic was in the process of successfully fighting the first of the Anglo-Dutch Wars against the United Provinces. This tract is marked by a new assurance. Milton sticks closer to the approved message: England is not opposed to monarchs, though it reserves the right to try its own in a court of law if he transgresses and to organize its government on alternative principles. Oliver Cromwell had assumed a quasi-monarchical role. We find no hint of criticism of Cromwell in this tract; indeed, Milton offers a sustained and panegyric defense. As in the earlier Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, a diplomatic imperative shapes the argument. The immediate context was the English embassy to Sweden, which occasions a lengthy celebration of Queen Christina’s character and achievements. The tract also displays Milton’s powerful capacity for self-presentation. His name had appeared on the title page of Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, and the Clamor had assailed him with predictable insults. Of course, the biographical sections, on Italy and on his own blindness, were carefully crafted to meet the accusations of the Clamor that he had fled abroad in disgrace and that his blindness was a divine punishment. Yet the sections remain invaluable and have been quarried by biographers, from the authors of the early lives to those working in our own time. However, they should not be read ingenuously. See Campbell and Corns (2008).

Thomas N. Corns

Proposalls of Certaine Expedients. Work of prose, attributed to Milton; full title, Proposalls of Certaine Expedients for the Preventing of a Civill War Now Feard, & the Setling of a Firme Government. In the

Columbia Manuscript, it is assigned by a scribe to John Milton and is likely to have been written in November 1659 when renewed civil war seemed imminent. As the newly appointed Committee of Safety struggled to achieve stability, George Monck, commander of the army of occupation in Scotland, declared in favor of the Parliament forcibly dissolved on 13 October by John Lambert, and Lambert moved northward with armed forces. Milton urges that the Parliament be allowed to sit again under certain conditions, primarily the safeguarding of liberty of conscience and pledge against government by a single person or House of Lords. Most important was the seminal suggestion that the Parliament, renamed a grand or supreme council, be made permanent and that the chief army officers also receive their commissions for life. This Grand Council would make laws, raise revenue, declare peace or war, and oversee foreign affairs, but— reflecting Milton’s lifelong advocacy of separation of church and state—would leave the church to itself. The text contains the principles that Milton would develop and expand under even more desperate circumstances in the two editions of The Readie and Easie Way. Laura L. Knoppers

Pro Se Defensio. Milton, Latin work of prose; full title, Joannis Miltonii Angli Pro Se Defensio [Defense of Himself by John Milton the Englishman]. Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio had been answered by the anonymous Regii Sanguinis Clamor (1652). This was almost certainly the work of an ejected minister of the Church of England, Peter du Moulin, though a reformed divine, Alexander More, who held various prestigious offices in continental Europe, seems to have edited it and seen it through the press. Milton believed that More was the main author, and he continued to think so even after continental admirers and others tried to fix his misattribution. In October 1654 More responded with Alexandri Mori Ecclesiasticae et Professoris Fides Publica [The Public Faith of Alexander More, Churchman and Professor], published in The Hague. In the spring of 1655 he augmented it with Supplementum Fidei Publicae, which consisted mainly of documentary evidence. More plainly stated that he had not written the Clamor, but in the idiom of this particular debate he added both defense against the charges of sexual impropriety that Milton had leveled against him and further personal attacks on his assailant. Milton’s answer was Pro Se Defensio, which appeared in August 1655. For Mil-

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ton, attack remained the best form of defense. In the face of evidence to the contrary, he persisted in asserting More’s culpability, making much of More’s reputed affair with a serving girl, amusing his intended readership of continental humanists with sustained wordplay, often of a sexual nature. See Campbell and Corns (2008).

Thomas N. Corns

Proserpina [Persephone]. Mythical daughter of Ceres, abducted by Dis (Pluto) while gathering flowers in the garden of Henna. Much to her mother’s woe, Proserpina is taken to the underworld where she is condemned to remain for six months of the year—fall and winter—for having eaten a few pomegranate seeds. The other six months, spring and summer, she is allowed to spend aboveground with Ceres. The principal source in the Renaissance for this popular fable was Ovid’s Metamorphoses (5:383 –569) and, to a lesser degree, his Fasti (4:417– 620). For many reasons, the myth had a special resonance for Milton in Paradise Lost. The story figures in one of the poet’s richest similes describing the Garden of Eden (PL 4.268 –72). Later, in anticipation of the Fall, Milton alludes again to Proserpina at the moment when Eve separates from Adam (PL 9.396 –97). Susan E. Lewak, Jonathan F. S. Post

prosody. The study of versification, such as rhythm, meter, stanza form, rhyme, and enjambment and related aspects of versification. Milton was keenly aware of the potency of such patterning, as he writes in Paradise Regained: “There thou shalt hear and learn the secret power / Of harmony in tones and numbers hit / By voice or hand, and various-measured verse” (4.254 –56); the speaker is Satan, but the sentiment is Milton’s. It is true that when he describes what he sees as the pinnacle of a literary education, Milton says, “I mean not here the prosody of a verse, which they could not but have hit on before among the rudiments of grammar; but that sublime art which in Aristotles poetics . . . and others, teaches what the laws are of a true Epic poem, what of a Dramatic, what of a Lyric, what decorum is, which is the grand master peece to observe” (Of Education). But Milton is here relegating the grammar books’ pedantic accumulation of metrical rules and writing as a practiced reader who brought to his reading “an eare that could measure a just cadence, and scan without articulating” (Apology Against a Pamphlet). His acute concern for

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metrical niceties is evident in his amending of the text of Euripides (Maurice Kelley and Samuel D. Atkins), while in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda he gleefully mocks his enemy for two false quantities in a single word. He sees prosodic invention not as rudimentary but as integral to his self-presentation as a poet of sublime ambitions, “offering at high strains in new and lofty Measures” (Of Reformation), inserting notes to justify himself in such original writing as the anglicized “Latin measure” of Horace’s Odes 1.5, the irregular choric verse of “Ad Joannem Rousium” and Samson Agonistes, and the unrhymed verse of Paradise Lost. Throughout his career Milton was a prosodic innovator and experimenter, and there is little role in his verse for the predominant form of his day, the heroic couplet. For “The Hymn” within “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (Nativity Ode), for example, he devised an intricate stanza that ranges from the three-beat lines of popular lyricism to the elevation of the Spenserian hexameter. “Lycidas” is a poem of unprecedented freedom in its mixture of rhymed and unrhymed verse and its unpredictable sequences of rhyme, sometimes approaching but never settling into regularity until the ottava rima of the closing lines. Even when he adopts and repeatedly uses a traditional form, he is an innovator. It is exceptional, for example, that an English poet should have written so many sonnets in the mid-seventeenth century, decades after the sonnet fashion was over, and unprecedented that romantic love should have such a minor place in English sonnets. They are, moreover, Italian rather than Shakespearean in form, and Milton handles this form with a virtuoso freedom for which there is scarcely any precedent in Italian and none in English ( John S. Smart [Milton 1921]). In this way, he renewed and enriched the most durable of intricate lyric forms. As in other spheres, Milton the prosodist is radical in remaking the best of the past. In verse rhythm, for example, Milton adopts the practices established by English poets of the sixteenth century (with some precedent in Geoffrey Chaucer). All his verse is accentual-syllabic (that is, both metrical beats and off-beats have structural roles in the line), and almost all of it, like the great mass of English verse of literary ambitions for the past five hundred years (other than modern free verse), is in iambic tetrameter and pentameter. Not only are the metrics traditional, but Milton also respects the prevailing norms, norms that are best described in the work of Derek Attridge (1982, 1995) rather than traditional “foot” prosody. Fundamental to the rhythm of English speech are

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(1) isochrony—the tendency, allowing for sense “breathings,” to perceive stressed syllables as falling at equal intervals of time; and (2) duple movement—the tendency for stressed and unstressed syllables to alternate. Traditional prosody, which divides iambic verse into disyllabic “feet,” can analyze a model pentameter such as “They AL- | so SERVE | who ON- | ly STAND | and WAIT” (with the stresses in capital letters), but is otherwise of limited value. It reifies the foot as a structural presence in the line, whereas in lines of any rhythmic complexity the foot cannot be felt as a unit. For example, at A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle line 62, “And in | THICK SHEL- | ter of | BLACK SHADES | im-BOWERED,” the second and fourth feet absorb some four-fifths of the time given the line, while rhythmically the first and third feet are negligible. Moreover, traditional prosody does not make the crucial distinction between a syllable that is stressed and one that is a metrical beat (with a structural role in the line), and cannot establish criteria for distinguishing between a line that is felt as aberrant (for example, “Shoots invisible virtue even to the deep” [PL 3.586]) and a free but fundamentally regular line (for example, “Shoots far into the bosom of dim Night” [PL 2.1036]). Attridge has shown that all the variety in five centuries of regular iambics is released by only three deviations from the basic duple alternation: (1) Demotion: when three stresses occur in sequence, careful utterance gives the second the time of a stress but slightly less emphasis (as in “GOOD WHITE WINE,” where “white” would only take, or be felt as taking, full stress to mark a distinction from, say, “GOOD RED WINE”). (2) Promotion: in a sequence of three non-stresses, the second is given a little extra weight or time (at PL 4.74, “Infinite wrath, and infinite despair,” the second “infinite” is felt as drawn out by a secondary stress on its final syllable). (3) Pairing: where only two stresses are adjacent and demotion is therefore impossible, an iambic line is thrown off balance; the imbalance is kept as brief as possible by immediately following or preceding the pair of stresses with two (and only two) non-stresses (as twice in A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle 62, cited above). A demoted syllable is a stress that is not a metrical beat (that is, one of the five structural emphases in a pentameter); a promoted syllable is a beat without being fully stressed; a pairing comprises two beats and two off-beats. In addition, the pause of the line-turn is a real presence in English verse and can in defined circumstances stand in for a stressed or unstressed syllable: in iambics, the first of only two stresses at the begin-

ning of a line is demoted (“BROUGHT DEATH into the world, and all our woe”), the second of two non-stresses at the end of a line is promoted (“That to the height of this great ARG-u-ment”), and pairing occurs in the common reversed opening of a line (“ROSE out of chaos: or if Sion Hill”). It is clear from the feminine ending of the first line in a sequence such as Paradise Lost 2.255 –56 (“Free, and to none accountable, preferring / HARD LIB-erty before the easy yoke”) that the demotion of “hard” is made possible by the pause felt between lines, not by the preceding syllable. However much a line deviates from a simple iambic norm—and Milton’s pentameters vary between as many as nine and as few as two full spoken stresses—a line will not be felt as aberrant if it accords with the three deviation rules. Paradise Lost 2.1036, for example, opens in a demotion and ends in a pairing: “SHOOTS FAR into the bos-om of DIM NIGHT” (with another pairing if “into” is stressed on the first syllable and a promotion if stressed on the second), whereas Paradise Lost 3.586, “SHOOTS in-VIS-ible VIRtue EV-en to the DEEP,” is aberrant both in having more than ten syllables even after elision and in having a double reversal of stress in the first four syllables. In William Shakespeare’s later plays, fully one line in five is aberrant in some way (George T. Wright); in Paradise Lost it is only about one line in 265. Of 10,565 lines in the epic, all but about 40 fall within the deviation rules, and barely a handful are markedly aberrant. In fact, this pervasive respect for the norms is essential to the expressive freedom of Milton’s verse. The stricter a poem’s prosody, the greater the tension, and hence the expressive potential, created by any deviation. Whereas, paradoxically, a free-verse poet has to work hard for variety, even Milton’s slightest deviations can create expressive nuance. The finesse of his ear is evident from the opening of his earliest original poem in English, where the Fair Infant is described as “Soft silken primrose fading timelessly” (see “On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough”). The line is weighty, since every word bears emphasis, and yet gentle, since all initial consonants are unvoiced. The poignancy is enhanced by the demotion of “soft,” which, with its cluster of unvoiced consonants, slows the rhythm without intrusive emphasis. The sense of fading away is expressed by the promoted last syllable of “timelessly,” a weak ending that brings the line to a dying fall, especially after the slowness of the falling rhythm. Trailing syllables (as in “silken primrose fading”) are given more weight than leading syllables (as in John Donne’s “Licence my roving

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hands, and let them go / Before, behind, above, between, below”). The exception proving the rule is a gauche line in Milton’s earliest poem: “Led by the strength of the Almighty’s hand” (“A Paraphrase on Psalm cxiv” 4), where the pentameter can be maintained only by promoting the second “the,” a word not naturally given even a secondary stress. The colloquial reading of the words would indeed be: “LED by the STRENGTH of th’al-MIGHTy’s HAND,” a line of four-beat accentual verse (that is, verse whose structural principle is solely the number of beats in a line, however many unstressed syllables there may be). Over the centuries and throughout much of the world, this four-beat rhythm has been the dominant prosody in ballads, nursery rhymes, and other modes of popular verse and is always a threat in writing accentual-syllabics, a danger that Milton elsewhere eludes. Despite Milton’s adherence to established prosodic norms, he is justified in claiming his epic blank verse as “the first in English,” since it is distinct from any previous blank verse in either narrative or drama. Throughout Paradise Lost there is a paradoxical fusion of prosodic strictness and freedom. Aberrant lines are, as mentioned, remarkably few; almost every line has its five metrical beats and ten metrical syllables; not a single line falls below ten syllables and (feminine endings apart) very few have more; the so-called epic caesura of an extra off-beat inserted at the caesura, which Milton had adopted in A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, is here eschewed; lines are carefully poised, and very few cannot be scanned at sight by readers practiced in seventeenth-century stressing and syllabification (and therefore alert to forms such as “in-NUM-erA-ble”). Unlike Shakespeare’s later verse, there is a marked sense of the integrity of the individual line: almost every line ends with a fully stressed syllable, usually a monosyllable; promoted and feminine endings are rare; all paragraphs and most speeches end at the end of a line. The prosodic basis of the blank verse line is continually present to the reader. The austerity and the sense of closure are deliberate: feminine endings, for example, are much more common in Milton’s other blank verse. This is not, however, incompatible with the stress on freedom in the poet’s note on the verse. He makes pervasive use of the rhythmic flexibility made possible by promotion, demotion, and pairing, in more various and intensive ways than the few earlier writers of nondramatic blank verse (notably George Gascoigne, and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and Christopher Marlowe in their translations of ancient epic). The verse of Paradise Lost is in con-

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stant modulation, not merely for the sake of variety but for expressive aptness. To take but one instance out of thousands: there is an atypical but apt lack of rhythmic clarity in the account of indeterminate and warring causes within Chaos, “mixt / Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight” (PL 2.914)—the rhythm meanders in confusion until the eighth syllable of the line. Moreover, one is alerted from the outset to the presence of those occasional lines that trespass beyond the norms into aberrancy. In the opening line, “Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit,” the second to fourth syllables are all stressed, and this would conventionally lead to the demotion of “first.” But precisely because this is the first and all-changing sin, the word demands a full stress. There might, then, be a stress-initial pairing on “MAN’S FIRST diso-,” but the negative prefix “dis-” also demands emphasis, and we are therefore left with an abnormal sequence of three full stresses and a six-beat line. The first moral and spiritual dereliction by humans is reflected in a slight but disquieting prosodic dislocation. In such ways, almost all of Milton’s forty or so aberrant lines justify themselves by their expressiveness and confirm that the poet is no slave to his prevailing strictness. Most of these lines are versions of unbalanced pairings, where the pairs of beats and off-beats are detached from one another (as in PL 9.888: “On the other SIDE, AD-am, SOON as he heard,” emphasizing the sudden horror of Adam’s response to the falling Eve), or reversed openings where the second beat arrives on the third rather than fourth syllable and the paired off-beats are in syllables four and five (as in PL 10.111, “LOVE was NOT in their LOOKS, either to God,” where the raw alienation of the newly fallen pair is marked in the premature stress on “not”). Milton’s prosodic freedom is not limited to such rhythmic nuances. He is also, for example, exceptionally free in the placing of caesuras or pauses. These traditionally come after the fourth or sixth syllable, but in Paradise Lost more than half fall elsewhere, with fully a third of the total being “lyric” caesuras after odd syllables. In the opening invocation, for example, the sense of progression through vast events is heightened by there being twelve lyric caesuras plus one after an eighth syllable, as opposed to only six in the orthodox positions. Similarly, Milton is very ready to end sentences in midline. As a result, the verse has an incessant and unpredictable modulation of cadence and a strong continuity. It is also very free and varied in its use of elision, and this adds new permutations of rhythm, since usually the elided syllable is glided into its

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neighbor rather than cut out. The thirteen syllables of PL 3.474, “Embryos and idiots, eremites and friars,” are metrically ten through the three i-glides, but all thirteen remain audible. Moreover, some elisions can be no more than notional, since they involve syllables divided by heavy punctuation (as in PL 10.762, “Wherefore didst thou beget me? I sought it not”). These are in effect “epic caesuras” in an epic rejecting such caesuras. Milton’s fusion of austerity and license is epitomized by freedoms at the end and turn of the line. Although his note brusquely dismisses rhyme as “trivial and of no true musical delight,” he is quite prepared to use it occasionally to expressive ends (at PL 8.1–3, for example, Adam’s suspension in ecstasy is echoed in the near rime riche of “ear” and “hear”). Feminine endings are rare in most of the poem, but from the first there are just enough to make an impression, because there they are invariably associated with satanic aspiration and its terrible results (the first are at 1.38, 98, 102, 157, and 174). Consequently, it is expressively apt that books 9 and 10 have more feminine endings than the rest of the poem put together, with many of them in the bitterness of Adam’s soliloquy and recrimination at 10.720 ff. Most of all, the verse’s fusion of opposite and discordant qualities is epitomized by what the poet himself identified as “the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another.” His sentences are unparalleled in their length and syntactic energy— Paradise Lost is the most dynamic poem in the language in its interplay of meter and syntax—so that the verse is unprecedented in the freedom of its enjambment. Although the integrity of the individual line is marked, very nearly six lines in every ten run on, and there are far more midline pauses than endstops. With this comes a great variety of effect; for example, the enjambment often expresses violence and energy (as at 1.44 – 49), but when the forty-four lines of the two paragraphs opening book 11 run on with scarcely a pause, the verse flows on with ease. The fluidity of the verse prepares us for the spontaneous outpouring of grace at this great moment of transition from human penitence to divine compassion, the ease of movement emptying it of dramatic tension. Paradise Lost is a reappraisal of great and traditional paradoxes: that paradise lost is paradise gained, that the Fall is fortunate, that free will and divine foreknowledge can be reconciled, that the service of God is perfect freedom, and even the Proustian sense that les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus. In reconciling minute attention to strict prosodic norms with countless local nuances

and with syntax of unique energy and expansiveness, Milton gives a living demonstration that perfect freedom can be found within service. The verse’s paradoxical fusion of austerity and liberty is not mere form but an embodiment of meaning. This meaning is, however, more felt by readers than thrust at them. Milton is a self-aware and virtuoso prosodist, but throughout his oeuvre his prosodic virtuosity tends to shade from the manifest to the latent. In the early work, there is a high degree of formal self-consciousness, stanza by stanza and line by line. Versification alters from poem to poem, and often, as in the Nativity Ode or “Lycidas,” the form draws attention to itself through being either invented or rare. Even the tetrameter couplets of the companion poems are made unique by the stanzaic introductions (e.g., “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso”). As with George Herbert, conscious appreciation of prosodic skill and innovation is part of the reader’s primary response. Even the sonnets require awareness of their idiosyncrasies of form, while manifest and conscious virtuosity is found throughout the formal variety of the 1653 translations of “Psalms i–viii.” Prosodic innovation continues into the late blank verse—hence the need for Milton’s note to justify what he was doing—but even early readers need not long have felt disoriented by a form so simple in essentials as blank verse. The prolonged consistency of the meter invites absorption in the narrative content and an intuitive primary response to the local nuances, rather than the relish of conscious appreciation. This simple pattern of development as Milton’s subjects become graver is, however, complicated by an astonishing prosodic invention, the choric verse of Samson Agonistes, the earliest sustained passages of free verse in the language (though with some anticipation in, for example, asymmetrical madrigals or Abraham Cowley’s irregular Pindarics). These choruses are not yet modern free verse, and are still written largely in iambics (so that the standard deviations are felt), whereas free verse such as T. S. Eliot’s no more than alludes to earlier meters, and William Carlos Williams has left such meters behind. They are more vers libéré than vers libre, free in the irregular lengths of the line, while only twenty-one of the 320 lines are aberrant in rhythm. Nevertheless, a metrical Rubicon has been crossed. Free verse differs from metric in that it is “lineation-positive” rather than “lineation-neutral.” The rhythm of an individual line of metrical verse is noticeable only when it becomes expressive; there is no flaw in a line simply because it goes through the motions, without expressive force. The prosody of

Proverbs

free verse, however, is based simply on the division into lines. Each line is registered as a unique unit; each line is prosodically significant and there can be no going through the motions. The thrill of reading metrical form comes from a virtuoso’s remaking of the predictable, while the thrill of reading free verse comes from the continuous discovery of form, and the intimate integration of form and content. The most magnificent passage in Milton’s often strange choruses, lines 115 – 69, shows that he had intuitively grasped, decades and even centuries before others, the essentials of this prosody. Each line is a distinct unit, appropriate in rhythm, such as the emphatic negation of “LET us NOT BREAK in upon him” (116) or the sprawling line “See how he lies at random, carelessly diffused” (118). At their finest, these choruses are un-Miltonic in their relative lack of enjambment. Modern free verse is often markedly enjambed, but Milton intuitively realized—as Walt Whitman did two centuries later—that the prosody of free verse could not become established without first establishing its essential nature by isolating the individual line. These choruses epitomize how Milton remained an inventive prosodist throughout his career, and it is no coincidence that he has for three hundred years been central to the study of English prosody. See Attridge (1974, 1982, 1995), Beum (1967), Bradford (1983), Bridges (1921), Burnett (2003), Creaser ( 2001, 2002, 2007), Diekhoff (1934, 1939), Evans (1966), Kelley and Atkins (1961), Koehler (1958), McCauley (1994), Mueller (1996), Oberhelman and Mulryan (1983), Oras (1966), Prince (1954), Purcell (1944), Smith (1936), Snell (1918), Sprott (1953), Verbart (1999), Weismiller (1965, 1975, 1978 –1980), Whiteley (1958), Wright (1988).

John Creaser

Protectorate. The period in English history from 1653 to 1659 when first Oliver Cromwell and then, briefly, his son Richard Cromwell functioned as Lord Protectors of the Commonwealth of England. Upon the execution of Charles I and the abolition of monarchy in 1649, Britain became a Commonwealth and a search for a new political settlement began. The Purged Parliament (later known as the Rump) (dissolved April 1653) and then the Nominated Assembly or the Barebone’s Parliament ( July to December 1653) failed to agree on a constitution or mode of popular elections. After the swift self-dissolution of the assembly, the Army Council introduced, with effect from 16 December 1653, a written constitution called the Instrument of Government, drafted by John Lambert and

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other army officers. Under this constitution Cromwell was given the title Lord Protector. Cromwell had allegedly declined the offer of the crown earlier in 1653 but agreed instead to a constitution based on a separation between legislative and executive authority, constituted by a triennial Parliament (legislative), a Council of State (executive), and a Lord Protector (both). On paper the forty-two clauses of the instrument, which were published in print and widely debated, offered something like a practical republican blueprint, but from the first it was apparent that there was a disparity between the authority allocated to Cromwell on paper and the power that he would choose to wield. The first Protectorate Parliament failed to ratify the instrument before Cromwell dissolved it in January 1655. In October 1655 Cromwell experimented with government by a series of local major generals. This proved unpopular, and Cromwell abandoned it abruptly in May 1657, when the second Protectorate Parliament agreed to the Humble Petition and Advice, a new, more ceremonial (and less republican) constitution that gave more authority to the protector while also reintroducing a second House, replacing the House of Lords, which had been abolished in 1649. Cromwell had reportedly declined the offer of the crown once again. The Humble Petition and Advice made the office of Lord Protector hereditary (it had been an elected position under the Instrument of Government, with the Council of State having powers of election), and upon Cromwell’s death in September 1658 his son Richard, whom Cromwell had in any case chosen as his successor, succeeded him as Lord Protector, thus establishing what is sometimes termed the Second Protectorate. In May 1659, with no support from the army, Parliament, or populace, Richard resigned and the army restored the Rump Parliament, bringing an end to the Protectorate. Though it was the longest-lived of the political experiments of the 1650s, the Protectorate never fully succeeded in satisfying either republicans or the general populace, and financial troubles and popular unrest did not allow it time to establish its legitimacy. Joad Raymond

Proverbs. Book of the Old Testament. It consists mainly of brief aphorisms affirming order, consensus, and tradition. Individual proverbs take the form of plain precepts, metaphors, and antithetical statements contrasting wisdom with folly. The traditional attribution of Proverbs to King Solomon evokes his role as a wise monarch. In Salomon’s

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Proverbs

Divine Arts (1609), Joseph Hall presents Proverbs as Solomon’s compendium of ethical, political, and economic wisdom. Milton is perceptive of how certain proverbs generate opposed interpretations. Proverbs 18:13, cited on the title page of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (second edition, 1644), encourages dynamic social debate: “He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him.” In The Readie and Easie Way, Milton opposes monarchy by citing Proverbs 6:6 – 8, which “shews us, that they who think the nation undon without a king, though they look grave or haughtie, have not so much true spirit and understanding in them as a pismire.” His Brief Notes upon a Late Sermon (1660) attacks Matthew Griffith’s royalist exposition of Proverbs 24:21: “My son, fear God and the King, and meddle not with them that be seditious, or desirous of change.” Proverbs influences Milton’s treatment of gender. In The Reason of Church-Government, he imagines the female voice of wisdom calling to the nation (Prov. 1:20 –21). Proverbs 8:22 –31 personifies divine wisdom as a daughter of God present at the creation: “I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.” Divine wisdom is part of the amalgam of the muse Urania and the Spirit of God in the invocation to book 1 of Paradise Lost: “thou from the first / Wast present” (1.19 –20). The portrait of the good wife (Prov. 31) resonates with Adam’s advice to Eve (9.232 –33). See Gay (2002).

David Gay

providence. A Christian doctrine whereby God preserves his creation and directs it to its appointed goal. It is prominent throughout Milton’s prose and poetry, especially as it relates to the problem of evil. The early Greek fathers tended to reduce providence to divine foreknowledge, but Augustine argued that providence is necessary at each moment to prevent creation from collapsing back into nonbeing. According to Augustine, God permits evil to bring about a higher good. In De Civitate Dei [City of God] Augustine developed a linear and teleological view of history, according to which God providentially directs the heavenly and earthly cities toward their respective goals. The most sophisticated account of the doctrine of providence was that of Thomas Aquinas. Affirming the ontological dependence of all creatures on God, he argued that the power of God prevents

contingent beings from falling into nothingness and causally directs them to their appointed ends. Aquinas effected a synthesis between the divine movement of the human will and the freedom of the will, arguing that providence establishes creaturely freedom by causing the will to act in a way that is proper to its nature as a free agent. In the sixteenth century Martin Luther viewed providence not in cosmological or philosophical terms, but as a personal belief in God’s paternal care for his people. Jean Calvin affirmed that without providence the creation would be reduced to chaos. Denying that providence is permissive, Calvin claimed that God wills the evil actions of the wicked but insisted nonetheless that God is righteous and that free agents are morally responsible. PostReformation theologians increasingly regarded providence as comprising three aspects: preservation, in which God sustains the existence of created things; concurrence, in which God cooperates with second causes, allowing free agents to act freely; and government, in which God rules and directs all things. Sensitive to the problem of relating evil to divine sovereignty, they argued that God permits evil actions only in order to achieve good ends. Throughout his poetry and prose, Milton repeatedly affirms divine providence. In Areopagitica he extols Adam’s freedom and the potential benefits of temptation in reply to those “foolish tongues” who “complain of divin Providence for suffering Adam to transgresse.” His arguments in favor of regicide, divorce (see divorce tracts), republican government (see republicanism), and the abolition of tithes draw on the idea of providence, and his History of Britain sees providence at work in the specific events of British history. In each of Milton’s four major poems—A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes— God permits a righteous protagonist to be tempted by evil in order to bring about a greater good. In De Doctrina Christiana, Milton employs providence as a major organizing principle that subsumes treatments of prelapsarian humanity, the Fall, sin and death, and humanity’s redemption and renovation through Christ. Milton’s interest in divine providence is preeminent in Paradise Lost, the stated purpose of which is to “assert eternal providence, / And justify the ways of God to men” (1.25 –26). Benjamin Myers

Prudentius Clemens, Aurelius (348 –after 405). Poet, usually known as Prudentius. Born in Spain,

“Psalm 114”

he was a Christian and a Latin poet. In his Commonplace Book, Milton took an anecdote, about the nature of nobility, from Prudentius’s Liber Peristephanon, a collection of hymns celebrating the sufferings of sainted early martyrs. He seems to have drawn on his Opera published in Antwerp in 1564. Although Prudentius appears an improbable influence on Milton, given Milton’s skepticism about early martyrs manifest in the antiprelatical tracts, parallels between stanza xix of “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” and Prudentius’s Apotheosis have cogently been suggested. See OCCL.

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of Truth,” he mocked Prynne’s habit of excessive marginal citation, his texts “litter’d and overlaid with crude and huddl’d quotations.” An altogether sharper reference occurs a year later in the canceled version of line 17 of Milton’s anti-Presbyterian poem “On the New Forcers of Conscience”: “Crop ye as close as marginal P—’s ears,” a line that identifies the Long Parliament’s prejudice with the tyrannical intolerance of William Laud. It was from Prynne that Milton drew the Presbyterian arguments for a stipendiary ministry supported by tithes that he opposed in The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings.. See BDBR, Lamont (1991), ODNB.

N. H. Keeble

Prynne, William (1600 –1669). Presbyterian pamphleteer. He was educated at Oriel College, Oxford University, taking his B.A. in 1621. He qualified as a lawyer in 1628 but had already begun to engage in religious controversy, writing against Arminianism and the bishops. In his massive Histriomastix (1633) he attacked theatrical performance as a source of social and moral corruption. His outrage at women’s participation was taken to reflect on Charles I’s queen consort Henrietta Maria, who was a great masquer (see masque), and in consequence he was in 1634 sentenced by the Court of Star Chamber to lose both his ears, to be fined £5,000, and to be imprisoned for life. From the Tower of London he continued to publish. In 1637 he was again brought to trial (together with Henry Burton and John Bastwick). As reported in subsequent tracts, the men’s bearing during their trial constituted a defiant defense of the liberties of the subject against tyranny and oppression. Prynne was once more fined £5,000, lost what remained of his ears, and was branded on both cheeks (with “S.L.,” for “seditious libeler”). At the scaffold in Westminster yard, however, the men’s heroic composure turned their mutilation into a spectacle of triumph and one of the defining moments in the developing crises that led to the English civil wars. In November 1640, all three were released by the Long Parliament. Prynne exemplifies a strain of exclusive and legalistic Presbyterian Puritanism that was as uncongenial to Milton as it was hostile to him. In Twelve Considerable Serious Questions (1644) Prynne was among the first to point to Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce as evidence of Independency’s licentiousness for its promotion of “divorce at pleasure.” Milton replied in Colasterion. Though he recognized in Prynne “one above others who hath suffer’d much and long in the defence

“Psalm 114” (Greek). Translation by Milton. Thought to have been originally sent to Alexander Gil the younger on 4 December 1634, it constitutes the only extant example of the poet’s use of Greek to translate biblical poetry. This twenty-twoline rendition appeared in the 1645 and 1673 editions of Milton’s poems (see Poems of Mr. John Milton [1645] and Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions), with notable misplacements and omissions of proper accents and breathings occurring in the printed text of both collections. The morphology, syntax, and prosodic style of Milton’s translation clearly evidence his imitation of Homeric verse conventions, and his diction correspondingly conforms to the Ionic/Aeolic dialect of Greek epic. In contrast to the elliptical simplicity and parallelism of the Hebrew original, Milton’s psalmic rendition employs contracted prepositions, conjunctive enclitics, and unconventional verb forms to effect the dactylic hexameter characteristic of Homeric prosody, with very few exceptions, as John Hale observes. Similar to his 1624 paraphrase of this psalm (see “A Paraphrase on Psalm cxiv”), Milton’s 1634 rendition interpolates similes and conceits not found in the scriptural poem, frequently adopting images that are culturally, if not ontologically, foreign to the biblical original. Milton’s employment of pagan pastoral images (for example his allusion to the συριγγι, or “pan flute,” in lines 11 and 18) exhibits the extent to which his Psalm 114 translation conjoins Hebraic content and Hellenic form, paradoxically amalgamating the divergent theological tenets and aesthetic standards of these two distinct traditions. Jeffrey Einboden

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“Psalm cxxxvi”

“Psalm cxxxvi.” See “A Paraphrase on Psalm cxiv” and “Psalm cxxxvi.”

“Psalm 114” (Greek), “Psalms lxxx–lxxxviii,” and “Psalms i–viii”). See Hamlin (2004), Radzinowicz (1989).

Psalms. Book of the Old Testament. Historically it was one of the most significant books of the Bible for Christians, and the Reformation only increased its importance. Protestant commentaries emphasized a twofold use of the psalms first outlined by the Greek fathers. First, the Book of Psalms was understood to contain a brief and easily digested summary of all the necessary teachings in the Bible at large. Second, the psalms were seen as extraordinarily effective model prayers through which individuals could both approach God during affliction and at the same time see their own sins and failings reflected. Psalm-singing quickly became a trademark of early Protestants, and one of the most familiar forms of the Psalms for anyone growing up in early modern England was the metrical Psalter composed by Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins et al. Begun in the court of Edward VI and completed by the Marian exiles in Geneva, The Whole Book of Psalms was used in both congregational and private settings; its popularity appears by the more than seven hundred editions published between 1562 and 1696. (To one of these, compiled by Thomas Ravenscroft in 1621, John Milton, Sr., contributed three musical arrangements.) Other versions of the metrical Psalms likely to have influenced Milton include Henry Ainsworth’s 1612 Psalter and the 1640 Bay Psalm Book. Milton’s work displays the significance of the psalms both as doctrinal authority and as artistic models. In Of Education Milton assigns the Psalms among the scriptures to be read during the period of moral instruction, and he frequently cites psalms (following the numbering of the Septuagint) as proof texts in De Doctrina Christiana. Milton testifies to the poetic quality of the Psalms in The Reason of Church-Government, where he praises “those frequent songs throughout the law and prophets” as better lyric than their secular counterparts, and in Paradise Regained when Christ explains that Greek poetry merely imitates Hebrew hymns and psalms but is ultimately “unworthy to compare / With Sion’s songs.” Over a period of nearly thirty years Milton versified nineteen psalms: Psalm 114 into both English and Greek, Psalm 136, Psalms 80 – 88, and Psalms 1– 8 (see “A Paraphrase on Psalm cxiv” and “Psalm cxxxvi,”

Beth Quitslund

“Psalms i–viii.” Poetic translations of Psalms 1– 8 by Milton. Like the earlier “Psalms lxxx– lxxxviii,” Milton’s metaphrases of these psalms were first printed in Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions (1673). Milton dates the composition of these poems rather precisely: “Psalm i” is headed “Done into verse, 1653,” and the others bear dates from 8 to 14 August 1653 (there is no psalm for 11 August but two for 14 August). Each of the eight psalms employs a different stanzaic form: (1) iambic pentameter rhymed couplets; (2) terza rima (helpfully labeled “terzetti” by Milton); (3) stanzas rhyming a-a-b-c-c-b, in various iambic line lengths; (4) stanzas rhyming a-b-b-a-c-c, in lines of iambic trimeter and pentameter; (5) a-b-a-b quatrains, in common meter except for the unexpected pentameter in the fourth line; (6) a-b-b-a iambic pentameter (more or less) quatrains; (7) stanzas of six iambic pentameter lines rhymed a-b-a-b-b-a, with an irregular final aa-b-b quatrain; and (8) a-b-a-b iambic pentameter quatrains. With the exception of the pentameter couplets of “Psalm i,” these metrical forms are unique in Milton’s lyric oeuvre. Such variety in verse form places Milton’s 1653 psalms in a small minority of the metrical English versions produced during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most versions, notably the quasi-official Psalter by Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins et al. (see Psalms) as well as Milton’s 1648 metaphrases, use fewer, simpler stanzaic patterns, usually common meter. Milton’s renditions of Psalms 1– 8, by contrast, are more nearly related to the English Psalters by Sir Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, by George Sandys, and (in theory if not in practice) by George Wither, and the Latin metaphrases by George Buchanan. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Milton’s phrasing sometimes resembles each of those, saving Wither, and that he chooses the same form as Philip Sidney did for Psalm 1, while employing the stanza of Sidney’s Psalm 7 for his own “Psalm ii.” Other influences for Milton’s 1653 metaphrases include the Authorized Version of the Bible and the Henrician Great Bible translation contained in the Book of Common Prayer. Milton’s biographers emphasize the

Puckering [Newton], Sir Henry, Third Baronet

resonance of the themes of these psalms with contemporary events. Beth Quitslund

“Psalms lxxx–lxxxviii.” Poetic translations of Psalms 80 – 88 by Milton. They first appear in Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions (1673), where they are dated April 1648; their headnote announces that “all but what is in a different Character, are the very words of the Text, translated from the Original.” Verse paraphrases of the Old Testament psalms were an important part of early modern English culture. The austere psalms associated with Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins established the primacy of common meter (a four-line stanza of alternating fourstress and three-stress lines) in subsequent hymnals and served as a focus of reformed church identity. The translations of Sir Philip Sidney and especially of his sister, Lady Mary Sidney Herbert, attempt to recover the principles of ancient Hebraic poetry and to demonstrate the range of metrical effects possible in English verse. Amid the turmoil of the late 1630s and the 1640s, there were several competing versions of the psalms. In this context, it is significant that Milton decided to keep strictly to common meter in 1648, the year that his past collaborator Henry Lawes published Choice Psalmes, with settings of metrically varied paraphrases by George Sandys. Milton aligns himself with reformed sentiment, recalling the New England Puritans and the parliamentary forces that used psalms as battle songs. At the same time, Milton presents his versions as accurate translations from the Hebrew, using italics to allow the reader to see what has been added to maintain the verse’s regularity. The additions generally expand upon ideas and images already present in each psalm; a few also suggest topical references. His “Psalm lxxxiii,” for example, may glance at foreign support for the Stuart regime in describing certain enemies as those “Whose bounds the sea doth check” (28). As a group, the original psalms express both dire need and firm faith; commentators such as Margaret Boddy and John Shawcross have seen the selection of these psalms as indicative of Milton’s worries over a renewed English nation. He would later employ a variety of formal schemes in translating “Psalms i–viii” in August 1653. Stephen M. Buhler

[Pseudo-]Dionysius the Areopagite. Sixthcentury theologian, thought throughout the Middle Ages to be the Pauline convert mentioned in the

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Acts of the Apostles (17:34). He has seminal influence in the eastern and western churches on the subjects of mysticism, celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchy, sacraments, and negative theology. Serious interrogation of first-century dating begins when Desiderius Erasmus endorses the doubts of Lorenzo Valla and William Grocyn. Though his identity remains unknown, Pseudo-Dionysius is now thought to be a sixth-century Christian student of the Neoplatonist Proclus. He strongly influences Renaissance Platonism but is generally dismissed as a fraud by reformers, including Martin Luther and Jean Calvin. Milton mentions Dionysius in Of Prelatical Episcopacy without such dismissal, but this cannot be taken as an endorsement; it is instead part of his overriding argument for patristic heterodoxy. See angels. Feisal G. Mohamed

Publick Intelligencer. The Monday counterpart to the weekly newsbook Mercurius Politicus, which appeared on Thursdays. Both were edited by Marchamont Nedham. It first appeared in October 1655, following new printing regulations introduced by Oliver Cromwell’s Council of State that gave Nedham a near-monopoly of printed news. The Publick Intelligencer and Politicus contained much of the same content, in the same blocks of type. For the period May to August 1659, following a conflict within and between Parliament and the Council of State, Nedham was suspended and the newsbooks were edited by John Canne. The Publick Intelligencer and Politicus were silenced with the restoration of monarchy in 1660, though Charles II’s own journalists and controllers of the press learned much from Nedham and his newsbooks. Joad Raymond

Puckering [Newton], Sir Henry, Third Baronet (bap. 1618, d. 1701). Royalist army officer and local politician. He was educated briefly at Eton College and thereafter admitted to the Inner Temple. From the inception of the First Civil War he was in arms for Charles I, continuing to fight in the king’s interest until 1646, when he went for a while into exile. He returned and compounded, agreeing to pay the fine imposed upon defeated royalists (see compounding). He had been born “Newton” but took the name “Puckering” on acceding to the estate of a childless relative. He was a member of the Cavalier Parliament throughout its duration.

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Puckering [Newton], Sir Henry, Third Baronet

On his wife’s death in 1689 he apparently retired from public life. In 1691 he gave the bulk of his personal library to Trinity College, Cambridge, among which was the bundle of drafts and plans by Milton now known as the Trinity Manuscript. It remains a matter of speculation how the papers came into his possession. See TMS.

Thomas N. Corns

Pullman, Philip (Nicholas Outram) (1946 –). Teacher, fiction writer, and playwright. His principal publication is His Dark Materials, a trilogy that includes The Golden Compass (Northern Lights, U.K. title) (1995), The Subtle Knife (1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2000). This trilogy has been described as “a modern retelling of the Garden of Eden story [in] Miltonian fashion” (Daniel P. Moloney, in First Things 113, 2001), and indeed the title of the trilogy comes from the quotation from Paradise Lost that serves as the epigraph to The Golden Compass (2.910 –19; specifically, “Unless the almighty maker them ordain / His dark materials to create more worlds” [lines 915 –16]). Pullman, however, reverses Milton’s grand Christian myth in the spirit of William Blake’s familiar assertion that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Yet Daniel P. Moloney’s reading of the trilogy as satanic, even atheistic, paradoxically concludes that Pullman “has unintentionally created a marvelous depiction of . . . human ideals [that] Christians hold dear.” Pullman has won many awards, including the 2001 Whitbread Book of the Year for The Amber Spyglass. James H. Sims

Purchas, Samuel (c. 1577–1626). Geographer and churchman. He was educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge (B.A. 1594, M.A. 1600), and later received a Lambeth B.D., which was incorporated as an Oxford B.D. in 1615. His principal career was that of a moderately successful clergyman in Essex and then London. His final living, coincidentally, was All Hallows, Bread Street, the parish church of the Milton family, to which he was appointed in 1626 in succession to Richard Stock, who was the incumbent during Milton’s childhood. Milton, however, had already left to attend Cambridge, and Purchas died before the year was out; so possibly they did not meet. Milton owed something, however, to Purchas’s second vocation, as a dissemi-

nator of geographical information gleaned from printed and oral reports of English travelers. In his Commonplace Book Milton three times draws on Purchas’s Hakluytus Posthumus, or, Purchas His Pilgrimes (1624 –1625). In his History of Moscovia Purchas provides, along with Richard Hakluyt’s writing, much of the information that Milton assembles for his own Brief History of Moscovia. Thomas N. Corns

Purged Parliament. Formed in December 1648 by the removal of those members of the Long Parliament resistant to bringing Charles I to trial (see Pride’s Purge); it was later derisively known as the Rump Parliament. Its legislation transformed the English constitution through the abolition of the House of Lords and the declaration of the English republic. It established the Council of State, which was responsible for the initial engagement of Milton as a public servant. In foreign policy, it proved highly active, financing the campaigns of Oliver Cromwell in Ireland and against the Scots, as well as the first of the Anglo-Dutch Wars. However, its broader legislative program soon stalled and it drifted into the practice of its predecessor, the Long Parliament, of considering a downscaling of the armed forces. Moreover, it made little progress in drafting a new constitution for a future Parliament. Though his reasons and his timing remain subject to speculation, on 20 April 1653 Cromwell, aided by troops of the New Model Army, dismissed it, making way for the Barebone’s Parliament. The Purged Parliament was reinstated by senior army officers on the fall of Richard Cromwell’s Protectorate in 1659, and though it was dismissed a second time, it returned to government by the time of George Monck’s arrival in London. Thus it had a role, albeit ineffectual, in attempts to resist the Restoration. Those later events provided part of the context for Milton’s Readie and Easie Way. See Woolrych (2000), Worden (1974).

Thomas N. Corns

Puritanism. Religious reform movement. The term “Puritan” became current during the 1560s as a pejorative nickname for Protestants who, dissatisfied with the Elizabethan settlement of the church by the Act of Uniformity (1559), would have subscribed to the contention of the Admonition to Parliament of 1572 that “we in England are so fare off, from having a church rightly reformed, accordying

Pym, John

to the prescript of Gods worde, that as yet we are not come to the outwarde face of the same.” Puritans were distinguishable by their dissatisfaction with the rites and ceremonies of the Elizabethan church and by their desire to continue the process of Protestant Reformation, halted in mid-career in England, they believed, in the compromise of an established church that retained government by bishops and a liturgy still modeled on that of Catholicism. They never, however, belonged to a single sect or constituted a clearly defined group within or without the episcopal Church of England. Puritanism had no one founder, no single recognized leader, and no agreed policy. Puritanism’s defining characteristic was a dissatisfaction with the present realization of Christian ideals and a consequent determination to reform practice and institutions. Its various strategies and platforms shared a desire to recover for individuals and for congregations the purity of doctrine, the simplicity of worship, the commitment of ministry, and the integrity of faith that (it was believed) had characterized the early, or “primitive,” church of the first three centuries after Christ before the growth of the ascendancy of Rome over western Christendom had led (so it was held) to the corruption of the Christian gospel and church. For all the revolutionary impetus of its politics, leading ultimately to regicide, Puritanism is hence marked by the backward glance, by a constant longing to return not only to the days of the early (or “primitive” in the sense of “pristine”) church, but to the original purity of Eden: the prospect of paradise regained haunts its imagination. Milton always speaks admiringly of the Puritans: as Christ’s “best Disciples” were formerly styled Lollards and Hussites (see John Huss), so

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“now . . . term’d Puritans, and Brownists” (Reason of Church-Government); what “wee in mockery call precise Puritanisme” is but exemplary witness to the reformed religion (Of Reformation). Milton’s own religious, political, and intellectual development was toward increasingly radical Puritan positions, from opposition to episcopacy through Presbyterianism to Independency and, ultimately, to an individualistic heterodoxy. N. H. Keeble

Pym, John (1584 –1643). Politician. He matriculated at Broadgates Hall, Oxford, and then was admitted to the Middle Temple. He served in late Jacobean and early Caroline parliaments, though was not prominent. In the Short Parliament of 1640, however, he emerged as a leading figure in the attacks on Charles I’s government over the eleven years that had passed since the previous Parliament and was an ally of the king’s Scottish opponents. He retained that prominence in the Long Parliament, proving implacable in the prosecution of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, and alert to exploiting the weakness of the king’s position as a result of his Scottish campaigns. He was, with John Hampden, Denzil Holles, William Strode, and Sir Arthur Hesilrige, one of the “five members” whom Charles I tried to arrest in the House of Commons on 4 January 1643. Milton discusses the episode in Eikonoklastes. Pym died during the first year of the First Civil War. Stephen Marshall, one of the Smectymnuus consortium, preached his funeral sermon. See ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

Q Quakers. Members of the Society of Friends, a radical, separatist denomination arising during the seventeenth century in England. The distinctive doctrine of the Quakers is the privileging of the working of God’s Spirit, or the inner light, within the individual over any other religious authority, including church, preacher, and scripture. Quakers believe that the light inspires or “leads” them to certain actions, including speaking at meetings, preaching, missionary work, and even “going naked for a sign.” Quaker worship is silent until a member is led by the inner light to speak; the working of the light is frequently so powerful that it leads to the trembling and seizures for which the group is commonly known. Milton’s attitude toward the Quakers is unknown. Late in his life, he was closely acquainted with the Quaker Thomas Ellwood, who takes credit for suggesting the idea for Paradise Regained. Alden Samson suggests that Milton’s belief in internal revelation by the Holy Spirit is similar to the Quakers’ conception of the inner light. Steven Marx argues that Milton’s attitude toward war is both parallel to and contemporaneous with the origin of the Quakers’ peace testimony, and Peggy Samuels argues that Paradise Regained employs a definition of politicized quiet found also in Quaker discourse. See Marx (1992).

Linda B. Tredennick

Quarles, Francis (1592 –1644). Poet. He was educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, but left before graduation to be admitted to Lincoln’s Inn. In the late 1620s and early 1630s he served James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh, as secretary. Though he is now best known as the author of Emblemes (London, 1635), probably the most success-

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ful emblem book in the English tradition, he wrote a series of fairly short narrative poems, starting in 1620 with “A Feast for Wormes,” about Jonah, and continuing with further poems on Esther, Job, and Samson. Milton’s own narrative accounts of Bible stories should as surely be contextualized in this homespun domestic tradition as in the epics of classical antiquity. Quarles made a point dear to Milton, that godly heroism was superior to pagan heroism. See Lewalski (1966).

Thomas N. Corns

Quintilian [Marcus Fabius Quintilianus] (35 – before 100). Roman rhetorician and educational theorist. He was born in Calagurris (modern Calahorra, Spain) and educated in Rome, where he was the first rhetorician to set up a state school. He taught for twenty years, with pupils including Pliny the Younger and two nephews of Domitian, and he also pleaded successfully in the courts. He died wealthy and honored. His greatest and only surviving work, Institutio Oratoria [Education of the Orator] (a.d. 95), frames a comprehensive description of technical rhetoric (the parts of the oration, proofs, arrangement, style, etc.) with a wider discussion of education, stressing social and ethical imperatives. For example, the teacher stands in loco parentis to the student (2.2.5 – 8), and the ideal orator is “vir bonus dicendi peritus” (“the good man, skilled in speaking,” 12.1.1). After the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini discovered a complete manuscript in 1416, the Institutio became a central text for Renaissance humanists, who prized its practical civic orientation. In Of Education, Milton praises the beginning of the Institutio as an “easie and delightfull book of Education.” His claim in “Sonnet XI” that the discordant names

Quintilian [Marcus Fabius Quintilianus]

of Scots Presbyterians “would have made Quintilian stare and gasp” (11) refers to Quintilian’s rejection of barbarisms (Institutio 1.5.4), and he demonstrates, in the Lady’s superior oratory (A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle 780 – 805), Quintilian’s insistence that eloquence depends on

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morality, and even states this principle explicitly in Apology Against a Pamphlet (“how he should be truly eloquent who is not withall a good man, I see not”). Jameela Lares

R rabbinical influences on Milton. We know from Of Education how important Milton considered knowledge of Hebrew, Aramaic, and cognate tongues. Though it is now impossible to know exactly which rabbinical texts he knew directly, Hebrew grammars, lexicons, rabbinical Bibles, Chaldee paraphrases, Talmudic selections, and Jewish historical works were readily available to scholars of his time. Milton would have been exposed to the thought of eminent rabbis from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. However, his only reference to a specific rabbinical gloss occurs in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. He cites David Kimchi and Levi Ben Gershon, who in examining Judges 19:2 concluded, as did Milton, that “fornication” in scripture may refer to a wife’s contempt for her husband, itself grounds for divorce. In Paradise Lost, the vision of prelapsarian Eden finds several parallels in rabbinical sources. See Shoulson (2001), Werman (1995).

Allene Phy-Olsen

Racovian Catechism. A nontrinitarian catechism first promulgated in Polish in 1604 that embodied the principles of Socinianism espoused by the Polish Unitarians. It was translated into German in 1605; in 1614 a Latin translation, dedicated without authorization to James I, was publicly burned in London. The English Unitarian John Biddle translated it into English, publishing it, cautiously, in Amsterdam in 1652. Milton licensed it for circulation in England, although the Purged Parliament censured it and ordered it to be burned. It shares some common ground with Milton’s view of the nature of the Son in De Doctrina Christiana. Thomas N. Corns

Rainolds [Reynolds], John (1549 –1607). Theologian, Greek scholar, and college head. A convert 310

from Catholicism, he emerged in the closing years of the sixteenth century as one of the most prominent academics of Puritan orientation at Oxford University, where he held the mastership of Corpus Christi College. He attracted the hostile attention of both Elizabeth I and James I; however, his scholarship ensured his inclusion in the team that prepared the 1611 Authorized Version of the Bible. He was a controversialist and engaged Richard Bancroft on the status of bishops in the primitive church. Bancroft, supporting the elevated status of bishops in the Church of England, attempted to justify his position by claiming that episcopacy was divinely ordered. Rainolds countered by analyzing the role of bishops in the primitive church, depicting them as fulfilling a vital irenic function without prelatical superiority. Such an argument would not have found favor with William Laud. However, by 1641, some defenders of prelacy were prepared to consider a compromise that would have seen bishops reduced in status and stripped of secular power along the lines indicated by Rainolds’s view of the primitive church. To this end, his pamphlet The Judgement of Doctor Reignolds Concerning Episcopacy, Whether It Be Gods Ordinance . . . was reissued in 1641, followed shortly afterwards by James Ussher’s The Judgement of Doctor Rainolds Touching the Originall of Episcopacy. More Largely Confirmed out of Antiquity (London, 1641). Ussher takes a few pages from Rainolds as the starting point for his own terse review of the evidence of the early Christian church. Milton attacked Ussher’s publication, among others, in Of Prelatical Episcopacy. Thomas N. Corns

Ralegh [Raleigh], Sir Walter (c. 1552 –1618). Explorer, author, and politician. After captaining privateers and leading troops to suppress the Irish, in 1584 he embarked on the first of several unsuccessful colonization voyages to Virginia, though he

Ray, John

thereby introduced tobacco to England. After 1588 his prominent court position was overshadowed by the emergence of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, but he retained enough influence to secure royal patronage on behalf of Edmund Spenser for the publication of The Faerie Queene’s first three books. In 1595 a voyage to South America led to his account The Discovery of the Empire of Guiana (1596). Ralegh, having lost some of his court influence after his involvement in Essex’s prosecution, also began to fall in the estimation of James I, who had received advice critical of Ralegh’s atheism and temperament. Upon the king’s entry into England, he received Ralegh coolly and had him placed under house arrest and then transported to the Tower of London in July 1603 under suspicion of plotting to overthrow the crown and encouraging a Spanish invasion. On the basis of a statement by Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham, attesting to Ralegh’s collusion with the Spanish, the court (despite Cobham’s later retraction) found Ralegh guilty of treason. During fourteen years in the Tower, he composed one volume of History of the World (1614) together with many poems. Released in 1617, he voyaged up the Orinoco River in a futile search for gold; upon his return he was executed at James’s order in 1618. Milton copied passages from Ralegh’s History in his Commonplace Book and in 1658 published as Ralegh’s The Cabinet-Council, an aphoristic essay on politics, though Ralegh was not its author (see Preface to Ralegh’s Cabinet-Council). See ODNB.

Christopher Baker

Ramism. A body of thought, particularly of logic and rhetoric, developed by Petrus Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée, 1515 –1572) and his followers. Ramus’s works were published widely, and later treatises in the Ramist tradition abound; such works develop and expand Ramus’s writings or use Ramist “method” to organize arts or sciences that Ramus himself did not deal with. Milton’s Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio [Art of Logic] (published in 1672 but likely written much earlier) is a Ramist work. Ramus was a Parisian professor who converted to Protestantism in the 1560s and was murdered in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, despite his close ties with the royal family. His writing focused primarily on logic and rhetoric; works by his followers extended his “method” to the study of history, the natural sciences, theology, mathematics, and other fields. His influence was most widespread in Protestant Europe, not only because he died a martyr, but

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because his approach to philosophy radically simplified scholasticism and made room for the inner light of individual spiritual experience. What made Ramus most useful for practitioners of other arts and sciences was his account of “method.” He argued that method was the proper organization of any art, from underlying universal principles to specific applications and instances. In practice, Ramist method proceeded by dissecting categories into types, usually into binary types. The Ramist outline of an art could thus be presented as a chart of principles subdivided and further subdivided into minute specific terms. Ramist logic was most popular in England from the 1580s through the 1660s. George Downame, professor of logic at Cambridge University and later a bishop, wrote Commentarii in P. Rami Dialectica [Commentaries on the Dialectic of P. Ramus] (1601 and many later editions), and Milton’s Art of Logic was in its turn a revision of Downame’s. Aside from Art of Logic, many Ramist influences on Milton’s work have been observed. Occasionally Milton proceeds by dividing broader concepts into dichotomies, as when he organizes De Doctrina Christiana using Ramist method, proceeding from core concepts like God and the Trinity to the duties of the individual Christian. See CPW 8, Ong (1958).

Henry S. Limouze

Ranelagh, Lady Katherine. See Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh. Raphael. Archangel in the Judeo-Christian tradition. In the Book of Tobit in the Apocrypha, his name, translated from the Hebrew, means “God healed” or “the medicine of God.” Milton’s opening allusion to Raphael in book 5 of Paradise Lost as “the sociable spirit, that deigned / To travel with Tobias, and secured / His marriage” (5.221–23) marks the angel as the perfect matrimonial companion and spiritual confidant to Adam and Eve. Divine intimacy and matrimonial blessings are the hallmarks of his character, as in the Book of Tobit, and throughout Paradise Lost his angelic humanity reminds the reader of the affinity between heaven and earth, God and human. Marc Ricciardi

Ray, John (1627–1705). Naturalist. He was born at Black Notley, Essex, the son of a blacksmith, and

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was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge University, where he was influenced by the Cambridge Platonists. He forfeited his fellowship under the Act of Uniformity (1662) and devoted himself thereafter to natural history. He became a member of the Royal Society in 1667. His systematic classification of flora (which made the distinction between monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous plants) and fauna (which made use of comparative anatomy) laid the groundwork for Carl Linnaeus. Ray recorded English proverbs and dialect words during his botanical tours and wrote one of the era’s most influential works on natural theology, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (London, 1691). His work offers a fascinating context for Milton’s depiction of the natural world in Paradise Lost. Karen L. Edwards

Readie and Easie Way. Prose work by Milton; full title, The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, and The Excellence Thereof Compar’d with the Inconveniences and Dangers of Readmitting Kingship in This Nation (London, 1660). This late tract strove to hold off monarchy in the face of overwhelming public sentiment for the return of the king. Internal evidence indicates that the tract was largely written between 18 and 21 February 1660 before George Monck’s readmission of the secluded members of the Purged Parliament on 21 February. Under these changed circumstances, Milton added a brief prefatory paragraph and put the work into print. The tract was printed by “T.N.” and sold by Livewell Chapman. George Thomason dates his copy March 3. Scholars have debated whether The Readie and Easie Way—in one or both versions—is practical or utopian, carefully crafted to respond to shifting times or continually failing to keep up with events; aimed at persuasion, shifting into a mode of prophecy, or some combination of the two. The tract has been linked with other republican discourse and with jeremiads during 1659 –1660 over the decline of the Good Old Cause (see jeremiad). Much of the tract extols the virtues of a free Commonwealth and denounces the inconveniences and dangers of kingship, leading up to Milton’s proposed “readie and easie way” of a perpetual senate as a bulwark against the return of kingship, a single person, or a House of Lords. Rather, Milton argues, now is the time to establish a free Commonwealth, and he puts forward a central proposal of a Grand Council, which would sit perpetually and have control of the

armed forces, public revenue, legislative power, and foreign policy. Milton concludes the first edition of The Readie and Easie Way with the prophetic voice, crying out with the prophet Jeremiah, “O earth, earth, earth” to denounce the English, who—like the Judahites before them—are bent on returning to the falsely imagined security and plenty of Egypt. Despite increasingly desperate circumstances, however, Milton continued to work to preserve the republic. Having composed a letter to Monck, the “Present Means, and Brief Delineation,” outlining how the elections might be managed to ensure a republican outcome, Milton then revised, expanded, and corrected his treatise. The second edition of The Readie and Easie Way (published without printer’s or publisher’s name sometime during the first ten days of April) expands both the persuasive and the prophetic modes of the first. In response to criticism, most substantively from The Censure of the Rota, a royalist tract pretending to be a critique from the republican circles around James Harrington, Milton develops more safeguards on the Grand Council, including more regular rotation and the devolution of responsibilities to local councils. But he also enhances his core message for the Presbyterians likely to be making up the new Parliament in his enhancement of antiCatholicism, expansion of the dangers and luxuries of the court, and retribution intimated by the “diabolical forerunning libells” appearing in print. See Corns (1992, 1998), Holstun (1987), Knoppers (1990, 2001).

Laura L. Knoppers

Reason of Church-Government. Prose work by Milton; full title, The Reason of Church-Government Urg’d Against Prelaty. It was the fourth and longest of Milton’s five antiprelatical tracts (see also Of Reformation, Of Prelatical Episcopacy, Animadversions, and Apology Against a Pamphlet), and the only one that appeared with his name on the title page. It was printed by Edward Griffin for John Rothwell. Evidence indicates that Milton wrote it in November and December 1641, and it may have appeared in January 1642. The work is divided into two books, each subdivided: the first book contains a short preface and seven chapters; the second book a long preface, three chapters, and a conclusion. The Reason of Church-Government was in part a response to the collection of tracts and statements in support of episcopacy titled Certain Briefe Treatises (1641), in which essays by Richard Hooker,

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Lancelot Andrewes, and James Ussher are the most prominent. Milton replies directly to this collection in only two chapters, but he refers indirectly to it elsewhere as well as to the arguments of other advocates of episcopacy such as Joseph Hall. Milton begins by grounding his argument against episcopacy in the claim that New Testament texts use the terms “Bishop” and “Presbyter” interchangeably, and that the elevation of bishops above other priests arose from a later corruption of the church. Milton further claims that the scanty references to church government in the New Testament are nevertheless sufficient to provide a model for church government, and he argues strenuously against Andrewes and Ussher who try to derive episcopacy from Hebrew scripture. He repeats an argument from earlier tracts that a hierarchical church does not solve the problem of heresy and schism, claiming rather that episcopacy is a schism in itself, but he takes this point much further here, characterizing the sectarians as seekers after truth and comparing schism to labor pains, a point where he parts company with Presbyterian colleagues such as Smectymnuus and anticipates Areopagitica. Milton begins the second book with a lengthy and important autobiographical digression, revealing himself as one called by God to “leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die.” He confesses that the “cool element of prose” is not his element, and that he must use his “left hand” to write it. He writes prose, however, in the service of God and of the church. His persona as a reluctant combatant in the wars of truth, adumbrated in the earlier prose tracts, is here fully sketched and will be further developed in his last antiprelatical work, Apology Against a Pamphlet. The rest of the second book refutes the bishops’ claim of status above regular ministers, attacks church ceremonies and vestments, and defends the role of the lay elder. Milton concludes by arguing that bishops destroy royal sovereignty and state power. The work appears not to have received any reply. By the time it appeared, Charles I had left London, and events were moving toward civil war. See Corns (1992, 1998), Fish (1972).

Henry S. Limouze

Reformation. In 1534 Henry VIII severed England from the Church of Rome and became the head of the Church of England, marking the beginning of the English “Reformation.” Revisionist historians have recently challenged received accounts of the Reformation, but Milton in his first antiprelatical

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tract Of Reformation (1641), written in two books, had already done so. Rejecting the preeminence of Martin Luther, who had nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral in 1517, as the chosen instrument of reformation, Milton affirmed England’s own John Wycliffe as the inspiration for all subsequent European reformers. Milton argued that because of Catholicism, God’s light was soon extinguished in England and its people consigned to darkness until Henry VIII’s accession. Unfortunately, Henry was more interested in supremacy than in the church, and therefore little progress was made. Although the boy king Edward VI was a more promising promoter of reformation, he was frustrated by wars and rebellions and governed by the unfortunate protector Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, and subsequently the apostate John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, whose interest in self-advancement was foremost. Elizabeth I, beset with rebellion and misguided by papists and moderates, was so eager for a middle way in the church that she lost the way to true reformation and in the process alienated true reformers. In 1641, as he wrote Of Reformation, in which even the great Protestant English martyrs Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer, and Nicholas Ridley were not spared, Milton was still waiting for an English Reformation. On his account, casting off Rome and restoring the scriptures constituted a joyful beginning, but antiquaries, who falsely endorsed episcopacy; libertines, who repelled the discipline of Presbyterianism; and politicians were a serious hindrance to church reform. Vivienne Westbrook

regicide. A person who kills a king, and the killing of a king, as when King Charles I was beheaded on 30 January 1649. On 6 December 1648 the army, at the command of Colonel Thomas Pride, “purged” Parliament of two-thirds of its House of Commons (see Pride’s Purge). That remnant, the Purged Parliament, later derisively called “the Rump,” constituted itself as a governing body and when Charles I refused to accept terms put him on trial, saying, “by the fundamental Laws of this Kingdom, it is High Treason in the King of England, for the Time being, to levy War against the Parliament or Kingdom of England.” Though the House of Lords rejected this ordinance, nevertheless on 8 January the High Court of Justice met for the first time, with Oliver Cromwell, Richard Ireton, Thomas Fairfax, and numerous colonels of the New Model Army among the commissioners. Many who had sided

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with Parliament against the king during the civil wars nonetheless opposed the erection of this court and this trial, among them Levellers and Independents, on the constitutional ground that the court was illegal. On 20 January 1649, in the Great Hall at Westminster, John Bradshaw presided over that court. Attended by sixty to seventy appointed commissioners, the court charged Charles with “High Treason and other High Crimes,” claiming that he had attempted, “out of a wicked design to erect and uphold in himself an unlimited and tyrannical power to rule according to his will, and to overthrow the rights and liberties of the people; yea, to take away and make void the foundations thereof.” The trial was packed with onlookers, both men and women. The king refused to answer the charges but instead queried the authority by which the court sat. Some thought the trial would lead to Charles’s deposition; instead, the king was sentenced to death on 27 January and executed on 30 January. The fifty-nine commissioners who signed the death warrant, including Cromwell, Ireton, John Hutchinson, Thomas Harrison, Edmund Ludlow, Henry Marten, and Thomas Challoner, have been called the “regicides.” Kings had been deposed or assassinated before, but the public trial and execution of a ruler was altogether without precedent in England. The execution took place in the afternoon on a scaffold erected in front of the Banqueting House at Whitehall and was watched by a throng. Consoled by William Juxon, bishop of London, who appeared with him on the scaffold, Charles laid himself down on the block and made a signal when he was ready for the executioner’s blow. Reports have it that the crowd murmured a loud groan when the head was severed. The king’s body was then placed in a coffin in Whitehall and was buried in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor (where Henry VIII lay) after a funeral on 8 February. The sympathetic account of his conduct over the 1640s, Eikon Basilike, was issued on 9 February, purported to be written by him. Milton’s defenses of the regicide never used the term. He took pains to represent Charles as a tyrant and then to defend the tyrant’s deposition or killing. Milton had attacked tyranny from his earliest pamphlets. Using classical and biblical precedents as well as the ideas of Protestant reformers, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates gave a history and justification of tyrannicide in general, and Eikonoklastes transformed Charles into a tyrant. Sharon Achinstein

Rehearsal Transpros’d, The. Political satire by Andrew Marvell; full title, The Rehearsal Transpros’d; or Animadversions upon a Late Book, Intituled, A Preface Shewing What Grounds There Are of Fears and Jealousies of Popery. It was published in two parts, the first in 1672 and the second in 1673. Marvell directed his polemic at several tracts written by Archbishop Samuel Parker, primarily Parker’s Preface to Bishop John Bramhall’s Vindication of Himself (1672) and A Discourse of the Ecclesiastical Politie (1669). For the most part, Marvell championed such freedoms as privacy of conscience and the constitutional political rights of subjects under a monarchy. Yet his incorporation of George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham’s title for his play The Rehearsal (1672) into his own title suggests a broader, more aesthetic interest and audience as well. Marvell relentlessly caricatured Parker as a grasping zealot, with intricate satiric fictions insinuating that Parker was a fanatical enthusiast afflicted with an incurable mental disease. The Rehearsal Transpros’d provides frequent evidence of the association between Marvell and Milton that probably began in the 1650s. Marvell’s comments on the medium of satire and on the Christian satirist’s need to strike a delicate balance “betwixt Jest and Earnest” recall Milton’s position in Animadversions (1641). Both writers, moreover, associated themselves with the native Marprelate tradition of nonconformist polemic (see Martin Marprelate). Marvell’s defense in the second part of Milton the man, Milton the political and religious nonconformist, and Milton the iconoclastic artist suggests that his own process of “transprosing” may be meant as a tribute to Milton’s literary imagination and creative risktaking. James Egan

Reni, Guido (1575 –1642). Italian painter. He was born in Calvenzano and died in Bologna. An artist of considerable range and energy, he studied initially under Denis Calvaert and later apprenticed in Rome with Ludovico and Annibale Carracci and Gabrielle Ferrantini. Following the decoration of several palaces in Rome and a Borghese commission, Reni undertook his masterpiece, the Phoebus and the Hours Preceded by Aurora (1614), a dazzling tromp l’oeil sky that decorates the garden house ceiling at the Palazzo Rospigliosi. Further works by Reni that bear comparison with scenes from Paradise Lost include Christ in Glory with Angels (1614 –1616, in the cupola of the Church of

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Sacraments at the Ravenna cathedral), the Glorification of Saint Dominic (1613 –1615, San Domenico, Bologna), and Michael and Satan (1626, Santa Maria della Concezione, Rome). Reni’s career has prompted scholarly studies focusing alternately on his deep religiosity, his rabid misogyny, his neurotic fear of witches, and his gambling addiction. More in demand by English collectors of the eighteenth century than any other Italian artist, Reni has since declined in popularity, owing primarily to the perceived melodrama of his subjects. Kimo Carew, Jonathan F. S. Post

repentance. English equivalent for the Greek word metanoia in the New Testament meaning “a change of mind.” In De Doctrina Christiana, Milton considers “repentance,” along with “faith,” as two effects of “regeneration.” He defines “repentance” as “the gift of God by virtue of which the regenerate man, seeing with sorrow that he has offended God by his sins, detests and avoids them and, through a sense of the divine mercy, turns to God with all humility, and is eager in his heart to follow what is right.” Based on his reading of the Bible, Milton distinguishes “certain degrees of repentance”: “recognition of sin, contrition, confession [to God or men], abandonment of evil and conversion to good.” Milton dramatizes the idea of repentance in Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes. He depicts the three sinners, Adam, Eve, and Samson, making uneven progress toward the highest degree of repentance. Hui-Hua Wang

republicanism. A pan-European early modern political phenomenon, in Milton’s time it was both a political program (rule without a monarch or mixed monarchy laying emphasis on the freedom of the people) and an ethos (a virtuous, and in Milton’s thinking, a godly citizenry). The political culture of English republicanism emerged out of Independency and was largely gentry in background; but it was a set of literary habits and preoccupations as well as a political program. Actual republics such as Venice, Genoa, and the United Provinces offered contemporary or recent models, and the political thinker Niccolò Machiavelli revived a notion of civic humanism, a classical republicanism that included ideas about mixed constitution, a citizen militia, civic responsibility, and, especially important, individual virtue. In England, republi-

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canism was explored in many imaginative Renaissance works, including Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, plays by William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, and translations such as Lucan’s Pharsalia. Boys at school learned republican thought by reading Aristotle, Cicero, Sallust, Tacitus, and Livy. Milton’s republicanism was practical; he dismissed the fictional utopias of Plato, Francis Bacon, and Thomas More: England cannot “sequester out of the world into Atlantick and Eutopian polities,” he wrote in Areopagitica, but must strive to reform today. Between 1649 and 1653, England was a republic. Established after the abolition of the House of Lords and the execution of Charles I, the republican government was defended by Milton in 1651 in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio. The memory and ideology of the republic lasted far longer than its actual short-lived existence. Milton as late as the spring of 1660 was calling for a renewed commitment to a republic in The Readie and Easie Way; and from 1667 Paradise Lost—with its antiAugustanism, its modeling on the republican epic Pharsalia, and its considerations of the intersection of the personal and political spheres—was taken as a renewed exploration of republican themes. Milton’s rhetorically skillful Satan in Paradise Lost would “seem / Patron of Liberty” (4.957–58), and he spouts republican language (5.792 – 800). Republicanism was a major ideological dimension during the English civil wars and regicide. Milton, Henry Marten, Edmund Ludlow, Lucy Hutchinson, Algernon Sidney, George Wither, Henry Neville, and Robert Overton, among others, all promulgated republican political principles. Marchamont Nedham presented a republican defense in The Case of the Commonwealth of England Stated (1650), in his newsbook Mercurius Politicus (1651–1652), and in The Excellency of a Free State (1656); James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) was a republican political utopia. Milton’s writings have been significant in defining the nature of republicanism in England. His Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, and The Readie and Easie Way are all key texts in the English republican imagination. His Eikonoklastes, particularly the second edition, may also be seen as a republican text, and the Digression in The History of Britain offers a republican obsession with the decline of liberty. See Armitage et al. (1995), Norbrook (1999a).

Sharon Achinstein

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Restoration

Restoration. Strictly, the restoration in England of monarchical government in 1660, but the term is often used both of the return of Charles II as king and more generally of the decade following his return; sometimes, its scope takes in the remainder of his reign. The Restoration was effected less by royalist commitment than by the failure of the republican experiment and the collapse of the country’s political institutions into a kind of anarchy. There was a good deal of apprehension at what would ensue on the death of Oliver Cromwell on 3 September 1658 as competing political, religious, and military interests took stock: royalists looked for the return of Charles II and the restoration of unfettered monarchy; Presbyterians favored a restoration of monarchy but upon terms that limited the royal prerogative; Independents, however, were more likely to support the return to the Commonwealth favored by republicans; while supporters of the Protectorate (styled by contemporaries “Oliverians” or “Protectoreans”) hoped that nonmonarchical rule by a single person would survive. Effective authority was wielded not by any institution, but by the New Model Army; its decisions and actions would be decisive. At first it appeared that rule by Richard Cromwell would succeed that of his father. However, Richard did not enjoy his father’s standing with the army, and resistance to his moderate (or Presbyterian) religious inclinations grew over the ensuing months until, on 23 April 1659, the army locked out Richard Cromwell’s Parliament and the Protectorate collapsed. This was to be the first of four army interventions in public affairs. In each case, again in October 1659 through John Lambert, in December 1659 through Charles Fleetwood, and in February 1660 through George Monck, the result would be constitutional uncertainty and administrative disorder while political thinking struggled to catch up with events. On this occasion, the decision was taken to restore the Purged Parliament (the Rump) as the body most likely to represent the religiously and politically radical convictions of the army. This was a resolution not without its irony since it had been the Rump’s very failure to enact those convictions that had led the army forcibly to turn it out in 1653. Predictably, the Rump once again failed to legislate on the three key issues dear to the army: legal reform, the abolition of tithes, and full religious toleration. While the army grew increasingly frustrated with its tardiness, discontent grew in the rest of the country, where the Rump, perceived as the unrepresentative tool of the army, enjoyed far less support than its predecessor. In the

summer of 1659 this discontent became focused in Booth’s Rebellion, which was quickly suppressed by Lambert at the Battle of Winnington Bridge and much to royalists’ dismay failed to prompt any general insurgency. The Rump might not enjoy popular support in the country, but no more, it seemed, did the cause of Charles II. Lambert was now the most acclaimed of the army leaders, and it was primarily discontent at the Rump’s performance among his victorious troops that led him, on 13 October 1659, once more to lock out its members. For a brief interlude the army ruled through its Council of Officers, acting under Fleetwood, and then through a Committee of Safety. However, throughout 1659 the Presbyterian commander in Scotland, George Monck, had grown increasingly disquieted by the army’s management of the political process. When in October he declared his opposition to its coup d’état, Lambert marched north to confront him. This marked the end of Lambert’s influence upon affairs, for growing popular support for Monck’s stand against the army, coupled with bad weather as Lambert took his forces north, led to desertions by his troops and he returned ignominiously to London without having engaged Monck. In this extremity, the inability of the Committee of Safety and the Council of Officers to agree on a constitutional settlement was fatal. With growing disorder in London, on 24 December, Fleetwood surrendered to the speaker the keys to Parliament. The Rump was back once again. Impatience in the country had, however, reached a breaking point. Pressure for the return of the members excluded by Pride’s Purge, and so for the restoration of the full Long Parliament, grew irresistible. This was the Parliament that in the 1640s had wanted to negotiate with Charles I; to support its return was hence implicitly to support reaching an agreement with Charles II. Monck, who arrived in London with his troops in early February 1660, finally declared publicly for the return of the secluded members. They took their seats on 21 February, but their return was conditional: Monck required them to vote for the dissolution of the Long Parliament and to issue writs for a new Parliament. His, and the country’s, clear understanding was that such a Parliament, freely elected, would vote for the return of the king. And so it did: the Convention Parliament met on 25 April and promptly agreed that the country’s proper constitution was monarchical. Charles entered London on 29 May, his thirtieth birthday, to wild jubilation. That jubilation was, however, as

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much an expression of relief at what appeared to promise political stability as it was a positive delight at the return of the king. The country had grown more Puritan than it realized and was quickly disillusioned with the sexual promiscuity, profligacy, and political corruption of the restored regime. In 1688 Charles’s brother and successor James II lost his throne in a political coup that embodied many of the parliamentarian values articulated during the Interregnum. Throughout the months leading up to the Restoration Milton issued a series of tracts in support of liberty of conscience, the abolition of tithes, and republican government, seeking to stall the increasingly headlong rush toward the restoration of monarchy, toward choosing “a captain back for Egypt” (see Treatise of Civil Power, The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings, The Readie and Easie Way, and Brief Notes upon a Late Sermon). To do so as that outcome appeared ever more probable showed very considerable courage, for there was every reason to suppose that a restored regime would take revenge on supporters of the republic (see Act of Oblivion). See CPW 8, Hutton (1985), Keeble (2002).

N. H. Keeble

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Revelation is integral to Milton’s biblical revaluation of classical poetic genres. The infant Christ prevails over the dragon in “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” “Lycidas” evokes the angel Michael (Rev. 12:7) in the “great vision of the guarded mount” (161) and envisions the heavenly marriage of Christ and the redeemed church (Rev. 21:2) in its “unexpressive nuptial song” (176). Revelation 12:7 is a source for the War in Heaven in Paradise Lost books 5 – 6. Milton’s allusions to Revelation are often proleptic, projecting the course of earthly history out of cosmic prehistory (see prolepsis). Thus, the silence in Heaven (PL 3.218) alludes to Revelation 8:1, while Death personified (10.288 –90) is not yet on its pale horse (Rev. 6:8). Revelation is the generic basis for books 11–12, as an angel (Michael) mediates visions to a human witness (Adam). Books 11–12 reflect a mature conception of apocalypse. For Adam, the Apocalypse is not primarily an objective spectacle terminating fallen history, though it foresees the end of time; instead, it is a guided reading of scripture inculcating the virtues that will sustain him in a fallen world. Paradise Regained evokes Revelation, as “angelic choirs” (4.593) celebrate Jesus’s victory over Satan and his recovery of the tree and water of life (4.589 –90; Rev. 22:1–2). See Fixler (1964), Mueller (1990), Ryken (1970).

Revelation [Revelation of St. John the Divine]. Last book of the New Testament. Written during a time of persecution in the late first century, it takes its title from the Greek “apocalypse,” meaning to uncover or reveal. Revelation presents a sequence of visions mediated by an angelic figure to a human witness. Its symbolism presents polarized oppositions in the conflict between Christ and Antichrist, and between a New Jerusalem and Babylon as heavenly and earthly kingdoms. Polarized symbols create a sense of imminent crisis and potential resolution in history. The relationship of prophecy to history is thus a central theme in Revelation. The Reformation provides a context for reading Revelation. “Babylon,” a code word for imperial Rome in the late first century, readily became the papacy from a Protestant perspective, with the Pope cast as Antichrist. The polarization of Europe into Protestant and Catholic spheres was conducive to reading history as prophecy. Book 1 of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene recreates Revelation as an allegory of an elect Protestant nation. Milton pressed England to discover its elect character more fully. Hence, Revelation promotes an apocalyptic tone in Milton’s antiprelatical tracts, especially Of Reformation.

David Gay

rhetoric. The art of verbal persuasion, a discipline of the classical trivium that also included grammar and logic, and thus a central feature of Renaissance education. It was based on a revival or rediscovery of certain key Greco-Roman texts— especially Cicero’s orations and rhetorical treatises (De Inventione, De Oratore, etc.), the anonymous Ad Herennium, Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, and Aristotle’s Rhetoric. It was studied under predictable categories that typically retained Greek or Latin names. It had five parts (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery), three “offices” or duties (to teach, to delight, to move to action), and three types (deliberative, judicial, and epideictic). Stasis theory determined whether an argument concerned conjecture, definition, quality, or procedure. Orations typically moved through an exordium (introduction), narration, proposition, partition, confirmation, confutation, and conclusion; the optional digression was much employed by Milton. Argumentative proofs could appeal to the audience’s intellect (logos) or emotional response (pathos) or

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refer to the speaker’s character (ethos); a proof constructed from probability (enthymeme) was more persuasive than a mere example. Appropriate decorum aligned communication with time, place, and persons. Although classical rhetoric presumed oral performance, the art had long been adapted to writing and deemphasized the legislative and judicial rhetoric appropriate to democracy in favor of epideixis (praise and blame), which nevertheless could be manipulated to give advice or assess guilt. An oratory representing all three types survived in the best preaching; “sacred rhetoric” was stylistically more Hellenistic than Ciceronian. Petrus Ramus redefined rhetoric as only style and delivery, giving the other three parts (invention, arrangement, and memory) to dialectic, a pedagogical scheme widely accepted in England (see Ramism), but in practice the same material was still taught; the resulting equation of rhetoric with style highlighted the Renaissance love of eloquence. Milton often seems to dismiss rhetoric. He never wrote a rhetorical manual, as he did for grammar and logic. In Paradise Lost he lets Satan resemble “some orator renowned / In Athens or free Rome, where eloquence / Flourished” (9.670 –72), and in Paradise Regained he even famously has the Son deride epideixis as “varnish on a harlot’s cheek” (4.343 – 44). Yet he never uses the bare term pejoratively, despite the “gay rhetoric” of A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (789) and “the unmaskuline Rhetorick” of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. In An Apology Against a Pamphlet he even admits to considerable rhetorical expertise and models a superior argument for his opponent. Perhaps most characteristically, he declares that although he is “not utterly untrain’d” in the rules of the best rhetoricians, he believes that true eloquence derives from the “serious and hearty love of truth,” which somehow causes words to “fall aptly into their own places,” a stance reminiscent of Quintilian yet also a persuasive modesty topos that reflects an Augustinian discomfort with pagan methodology. The centrality of classical rhetoric in Milton’s time makes it a helpful tool for analyzing his work. Jameela Lares

Richardson, Jonathan, the elder (1667–1745). Portrait painter and biographer of Milton. Among the most successful portrait painters of his day, he extended his energies to writing about the visual arts and to critical engagement with the poetry of Milton, for which he had a particular enthusiasm.

He counted several leading writers, among them Alexander Pope and Sir Richard Steele, as friends. In his writing projects, he often collaborated with his son, Jonathan Richardson the younger (1694 – 1771). Together they published a substantial volume on Paradise Lost, Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is prefaced by a life of the author “By J. R. Sen.,” as the title page reads. Richardson was the last biographer of Milton to have spoken with those who actually knew him. He incorporates some anecdotes, particularly about Milton’s life after 1660, not to be found in other accounts, although they are often uncorroborated. See Darbishire (1932), ODNB.

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Richelieu, Cardinal Armand [du Plessis, Armand Jean] (1585 –1642). French prelate and statesman. He was born in Paris, the son of a prevost of the Touraine nobility. He began training for a military career but changed course when his brother gave up the see of Luçon in Vendée. During 1606 – 1607 he was appointed a bishop by Henri IV and consecrated by Pope Paul V. Elected a deputy to the clergy for the States-General in 1614, he proved a brilliant orator and, through the favor of the Queen Mother, Marie de’ Medici, became France’s secretary of state for foreign affairs in 1616. In 1622 he was made a cardinal by Pope Gregory and went on to head the royal council as prime minister of France from 1624. Richelieu is regarded as the founder of the modern French state, for he restored the authority of the king, especially by crushing political resistance (see Huguenots), and strengthened the position of France in Europe. Endeavoring to gain the support of England against the House of Habsburg, Richelieu arranged the marriage of Charles, Prince of Wales (later Charles I), to Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henri IV. Such a union of Protestant and Catholic was dangerous, but their children were to be educated in the Catholic faith. Milton refers to this in his Commonplace Book. In Of Reformation Milton denounced prelatical ambition by alluding to the reported intention of Richelieu to establish himself as patriarch of the Gallican church. Christophe J.-B. Tournu

Ridley, Nicholas (c. 1502 –1555). Churchman and Protestant martyr. After a glittering career at Cambridge University, he, with Hugh Latimer and Thomas Cranmer, emerged as a powerful influence

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in the reformation of the church under Henry VIII. He gradually established clear distance between his own views and the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church on issues such as transubstantiation and the role of auricular confession. On the succession of Edward VI, whose regime was more militantly Protestant, Ridley was appointed bishop of Rochester and then elevated to the see of London. On the death of Edward in 1553, Latimer promoted the succession of his Protestant cousin Lady Jane Grey; however, a coup by Mary I dashed the plan. Ridley was arrested for treason and dismissed from his bishopric. With Latimer he was taken to Oxford, tried, and burned at the stake. Their martyrdom was described in detail in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, ensuring their status within the English Protestant tradition. Milton in his antiprelatical tracts faced a polemical problem: how to condemn the prelacy the martyrs defended in the face of their reputation. Milton’s treatment of Ridley in Of Reformation is twofold. In a minor way, he picks at his conduct during the days of his prosperity, suggesting that, in his complicity in the attempt to exclude Mary I from the succession, he teetered on the edge of a treasonable act “which had it tooke effect, this present King had in all likelihood never sat on this Throne.” At the same time, he stresses that a martyr’s death should not obscure “corrupt doctrine, or discipline.” Thomas N. Corns

River Cam. River that winds through Cambridge before flowing into the River Ouse about ten miles to the north. In several poems Milton uses the Cam (Latin Camus) as a metonymy for the academic community of Cambridge. Curtis L. Whitaker

River Dee. River that was historically an important embarkation point for Ireland and that forms much of the northern border between England and Wales. The “ancient hallowed Dee” (“At a Vacation Exercise in the College” 98) had a number of historical, mythic, and personal associations for Milton. Eight kings of Britain paid homage to Edgar of Wessex as their superior by rowing him up the River Dee from Chester (History of Britain, book 5), and its “wizard stream” (“Lycidas” 55) was thought the home of nymphs and druids. Milton’s acknowledgment of the hallowed nature of the river follows from Edmund Spenser (“Dee, which Britons long ygone / Did call diuine”; Faerie

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Queene 4.11.39), Michael Drayton (Poly-Olbion 10.215), and William Camden (Britannia). In “Elegia Prima” Milton writes to Charles Diodati at Chester that the “down-rushing waters” (4) of the nearby Dee evoke a pleasant contrast with the reedy River Cam. Curtis L. Whitaker

River Severn. The longest river in Britain and, in part, an ancient natural boundary between Wales and England. The Severn (Welsh Hafren; Latin Sabrina) has its source in the mountains of midWales and empties into the Bristol Channel (Welsh Môr Hafren, “Severn Sea”). Ludlow Castle, site of Milton’s A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, lies just a few miles west from the Severn on the River Teme, a major tributary, thus inviting the appearance of the “goddess of the river” (841), Sabrina, near the masque’s end. Many of Milton’s details concerning Sabrina and the Severn derive from Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion. Curtis L. Whitaker

Rivetus, Andreas [Rivet, André] (1572 –1651). Theologian. A professor at the University of Leiden with a reputation as a fine Old Testament exegete, he led the so-called orthodox party at the Synod of Dort. The synod was called in 1618 to resolve the discord occasioned within the Dutch Reformed Church by the emergence of Arminianism. Rivetus was a strict Calvinist in his soteriology. His party achieved a significant victory at the synod, ensuring the passage of articles of faith congruent with the Calvinist position. His status among English Puritans of a Presbyterian inclination was high in the mid-seventeenth century. As Milton revised his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce to meet the strictures of his Presbyterian opponents, he added some material drawn from the man he calls “Rivetus, a diligent and learned Writer,” to support his arguments, drawing on Rivetus’s Theologicae et Scholasticae Exercitationes CXC in Genesin (Leiden, 1633). Thus, Milton underpins his developing argument that the heterodox opinions of his divorce tract are not far removed from the mainstream of the godly Reformation. In Tetrachordon he draws on Rivetus’s Tractatus Tertius. Thomas N. Corns

Robinson, Henry (?1605 –?1664). Merchant and law reformer. Unlike most of Milton’s pamphle-

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teering contemporaries, he was not a divine or a social reformer, but rather a business leader who had been involved in trade in the Mediterranean and who envisioned England as a mercantile empire. Many of Robinson’s most familiar tracts suggest his priorities, for example, Englands Safetie in Trades Encrease (1641) and Briefe Considerations Concerning the Advancement of Trade and Navigation (1650). Milton alludes to two anonymous pamphlets by Robinson, Liberty of Conscience (1644) and John the Baptist, Forerunner of Christ Jesus (1644), in Areopagitica (1644). Like Milton, Robinson calls for a free press, but his primary operating assumptions (that religious differences must be resolved before England’s economy could prosper) are more pragmatic and materialistic than Milton’s. James Egan

Romans. Book of the New Testament. In this particularly complex epistle, Paul addresses Christian converts in Rome in advance of his missionary journey there. Much of the complexity arises in the urgency with which he attempts to reconcile Jews and Gentiles among believers in the new faith, and he has much to say about the relationship of Christianity to Judaism and of the status of the Hebrew scriptures and Jewish rites. However, its significance within the soteriological development of the Protestant Reformation is also considerable. It offers an apparently clear enunciation of justification (that is, the action whereby man is justified, or freed from the penalty of sin, and accounted or made righteous by God) by faith alone (4:23 –5; 5:1–2). Interpretation of this text proved a major point of departure from Roman Catholicism for Martin Luther. Again, the epistle raises a range of interrelated issues about predestinate salvation and whether God’s foreknowledge of salvation constituted predestination (chapter 8). The issues proved central in the development of Calvinism, with its doctrine of salvation based on a strict and exclusive interpretation of the notion of predestination, and they stimulated the debates between Calvinists and Arminianism. These are issues central to Milton’s own systematic theology, and it is wholly unsurprising that in De Doctrina Christiana he cites this epistle more than any other book of the New Testament, with the exceptions of the gospels of Matthew and John. It also shapes significantly crucial sections of Paradise Lost, resonating through the discussion between the Father and the Son about individual salvation

(3.144 –266), although other Pauline epistles are equally important to that exchange. See Bauman (1989), ODCC.

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Rome. The capital city of the Roman empire and, after the establishment of Christianity, the seat of the papacy. During medieval times it declined sharply from its prominence as the imperial capital and was reduced to little more than a minor city within the Papal States. In 1447 it became once more the papal seat, and rebuilding and refurbishment began in earnest. But it sustained considerable destruction during its occupation by troops of the Holy Roman Empire in 1527 and in its subsequent liberation. However, under Popes Paul III and Sixtus V a massive building program was carried out, including the most important buildings of the Vatican. The glittering new Rome that Milton visited in 1638 –1639 was the finest example of a city built in accordance with the principles and aesthetic of baroque architecture. See ODR.

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Root and Branch Petition. A twenty-eight-point indictment presented to the Long Parliament by “many of His Majesty’s subjects in and about the City of London, and several Counties of the Kingdom” on 11 December 1640. The name originated in Malachi 4:1, which prophesied that “the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.” The focus of the petition was the eradication of the prelacy, that is, of “the government of archbishops and lord bishops, deans and archdeacons &c.,” who “have claimed their calling immediately from the Lord Jesus Christ . . . against the laws of this kingdom and derogatory to His Majesty and his state royal.” Milton addresses these issues in his antiprelatical tracts (see Of Reformation, Of Prelatical Episcopacy, Animadversions, Reason of Church-Government, and Apology Against a Pamphlet). Carol Barton

Rota Club. A political think-tank or minor academy formed in 1659 by James Harrington of

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like-minded republicans who were seeking a constitutional solution to the crises surrounding the English state at that time. It met from October 1659 in Miles’s Coffee House at the Turke’s Head, New Palace Yard, on the Thames Embankment. In an attempt to secure both stability and representativeness, the club advocated the formation of political institutions in which a proportion of places would be vacated and filled at regular intervals by ballot. The notion was expounded in such works as Harrington’s The Wayes and Meanes (London, 1660) and the anonymous Rota: Or, a Model of a Free-State (London, 1660). Milton, whose own model for a standing senate admitted of no such procedure, denounced in The Readie and Easie Way what he calls “this annual rotation of a Senat to consist of three hunderd, as is lately propounded.” A satirical attack on that pamphlet, called The Censure of the Rota (London, 1660), is a very thinly disguised attack on both the Miltonic and Harringtonian models of republicanism. Its spoof colophon, although appearing over Harrington’s initials, rather gives away its game: “Printed by Paul Giddy . . . at the sign of the Windmill in Turne-again Lane.” See ODNB (under Harrington, James), OED.

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Rouse, John (1574 –1652). Librarian. After holding college offices at Oriel College, Oxford, where he had studied and held a fellowship, he was in 1620 appointed librarian of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. He oversaw the accession of several major collections of manuscripts, and his policy on the acquisition of printed books was wider than his predecessor’s, allowing for the inclusion of plays and poetry. Milton’s acquaintance with him perhaps dated from 1635 and the incorporation at Oxford University of Milton’s Cambridge master’s degree. One possible reason for Milton to have made this decision is that he thus would have gained access to the library. Milton presented Rouse with a collection of his early tracts, dedicated to Rouse and endorsed “Doctissimo viro” (“to a most learned man”). He also presented a copy of Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645), which evidently went astray. The replacement he sent has pasted to the verso of the title page of the Latin section the poem “Ad Joannem Rousium.” Rouse’s political inclinations remain uncertain. Though he subscribed £50 to support the royalist garrison in Oxford, he achieved some minor fame in refusing to allow Charles I to borrow a book from

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the library. (Then, as now, the Bodleian Library was not a lending library.) He was briefly suspended from his fellowship by the parliamentary visitation of 1648, but he evidently soon resumed his office. Thomas N. Corns

Rowland, John (c. 1606 –1680). Church of England clergyman and controversialist. He was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (B.A. 1622, M.A. 1626). At the start of the First Civil War he was rector of Foots Cray, Kent. In 1643 he was sequestered from that living for complicity in the royalist Kentish rising. Thereafter, he moved to the Netherlands. He was much later reconciled to the Protectorate, although that did not prevent his regaining his living at the Restoration. In response to Milton’s Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Rowland published anonymously Pro Rege et Populo Anglicano Apologia Contra Johannis Polypragmatici (alias Miltoni Angli) Defensionem Destructivam Regis et Populi Anglicani [Apology on Behalf of the King and the English People Against the Defense, Destructive of the King and English People, of John the Glibly Multitalented, Alias Milton the Englishman], which went to two editions in 1651, a third in 1652, and was translated into Dutch. Milton and his advisors evidently attributed the work to a rather more distinguished Laudian exile, John Bramhall, former bishop of Derry. Milton handed the case to his nephew, the twenty-year-old John Phillips, still resident in his uncle’s household. His brother Edward Phillips, who by then had quit Milton’s home for Oxford and had perhaps already moved on to the estate he inherited in Shrewsbury about that time, recalled that his brother had submitted sections of his own tract to Milton “for his examination and polishment.” His Joannis Phillipi Angli Responsio Ad Apologiam Anonymi Cujusdam Tenebrionis pro Rege & Populo Anglicano Infantissimam [The Response of John Phillips, Englishman, to the Most Puerile Apology of Some Anonymous Fellow Who Shuns the Light] appeared around December 1651, though it carried a 1652 imprint (a familiar publishers’ trick for publications coming out near the turn of the year). Phillips speaks for himself— or, rather, for his uncle. Not for the last time in the Latin controversies of the 1650s, Milton’s defective information certainly produced a misfire, for the opening pages dwell extensively on the failings of Bramhall, “a dissolute drunkard from his youth.” Rowland eventually responded to Phillips with Polemica Sive Supplementum ad Apologiam

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Anonymam Pro Rege etc. per Jo. Rolandum Pastorem Anglicanum [Polemica: Or a Supplement to the Anonymous Apology for the King etc., by John Rowland, an English Minister] (Antwerp, 1653), thus acknowledging on his title page his authorship of the earlier tract. Thomas N. Corns

royalists. Supporters of the kings of England in their struggles against their opponents. The term had and retains a particular currency as the convenient label for those who actively supported Charles I in his armed struggle against the forces of the Long Parliament, and who subsequently recognized and supported his son, Charles II. Milton’s republican writings explicitly engage royalist apologists of Charles I. He is particularly scathing in The Readie and Easie Way about former supporters of Puritan church reform and parliamentary action who later became what he terms “presbyterian royalists.” Thomas N. Corns

Royal Society. Society founded in 1660 “for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning.” It received its charter of incorporation from Charles II in 1662; the revised charter of 1663 stated the society’s name as the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. It had its origin in meetings of the “Invisible College” at Gresham College, London, and in gatherings of allied experimentalists at Oxford during the 1640s and 1650s, at which religious and political debate was explicitly avoided. The Society’s Horatian motto, “Nullius in verba” (“On no man’s word”), signaled its skeptical attitude toward ancient scientific authorities. Avowedly Baconian in its aim to reform natural philosophy through experiment and observation, it emphasized collaborative activity (which increasingly came to mean the fruitful relationship between individual and institution), “matters of fact” over (premature) theorizing, utilitarianism (in accord with Francis Bacon’s call for dominion over nature for humanity’s good), and the experimental method, gradually refined. Both legal and social, that is, “gentlemanly,” codes governing notions of evidence, testimony, and assent have been proposed for the society’s development of a distinctively English science. To advocate its aims and to counter criticism (including charges of atheism and triviality), the society engaged Thomas Sprat to write its history, which was published in

1667. Its early membership included Robert Boyle, John Dryden, Kenelm Digby, John Evelyn, Theodore Haak, Robert Hooke, Richard Jones, William Petty, Christopher Wren, John Wallis, and (as joint secretary) John Wilkins and Henry Oldenburg. Oldenburg instituted the society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1665, and his extensive correspondence did much to promote its reputation. The Royal Society today remains a prestigious academy for the sciences in the United Kingdom. Karen L. Edwards

Rubens, Peter Paul (1577–1640). Flemish painter. He was the dominant exponent of the baroque in northern Europe. After training in Flanders, he spent eight years in Italy (1600 –1608) under the patronage of Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua. Traveling extensively, he came under the varied influences of Guido Reni, the Carracci, and Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. He returned to Antwerp equally proficient in religious as in mythological painting, in portraiture as in landscape. His compositions, surging with heroic energy or suffused with devotional ardor, were everywhere in demand. One of his most important commissions came in the 1620s from Marie de’ Medici, widow of Henri IV, for a sequence of paintings celebrating her eventful life. English patrons made contact with Rubens in the early 1620s, resulting in a number of works for George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, and Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel. Buckingham also bought Rubens’s splendid collection of paintings and sculpture in 1627. With his many royal and aristocratic connections, Rubens was well placed to act as a diplomat, and during 1629 –1630 he came to London as the representative of Spain and the Spanish Netherlands to negotiate a peace treaty with England. During his stay, Charles I commissioned a series of paintings for the ceiling of Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House, depicting the glories of the reign of James I and offering the most developed celebration of the king and royalist devotionalism that Milton so vigorously attacked in Eikonoklastes. When installed in 1637, they were the most prominent examples of baroque art in the country, proof that England was now touched by the most modern developments in European art. Rubens painted a number of allegorical works for Charles I, who knighted him in 1630. He died in Antwerp. Graham Parry

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Rugge [Rugg], Thomas (d. 1670). Diarist. He may have been of a Norfolk family, though he was probably born in London, where he lived in Covent Garden from about 1656 until his death. He earned his living as a barber. Since Covent Garden was then a fashionable and desirable residential area, Rugge may have numbered the socially privileged among his clients. Originally prompted by the collapse of the Protectorate in April 1659, between May 1659 and January 1670 Rugge kept a chronicle of contemporary London affairs “that after ages may learne constancie from these our inconstant revoluctions that have so long had the prodominancy in the[se] our nations.” About half the text is devoted to the years 1660 –1661, offering a unique firsthand account of the Restoration as perceived and experienced by one far from the centers of power. Rugge mentions (under July) the August 1660 parliamentary proclamation to burn as treasonable Milton’s Eikonoklastes and Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio. N. H. Keeble

Rump Parliament. See Purged Parliament. Rupert, Prince and Count Palatine of the Rhine and Duke of Cumberland (1619 –1682). Army and naval officer. His parents were Frederick V, Elector Palatine, and Princess Elizabeth, daughter of James I. Charles I was his uncle. His earliest military experience, during the Thirty Years War, ended in capture and imprisonment. He joined Charles early in the First Civil War and commanded cavalry at the Battle of Edgehill, Battle of Marston Moor, and Battle of Naseby. He was targeted as a hate figure in parliamentarian newsbooks and acquired a notoriety on which Milton still played in 1660. Thus, in The Readie and Easie Way, Milton warned that the Restoration would usher in “a standing army . . . of the fiercest Cavaliers . . . perhaps again under Rupert.” Once the land war had been lost, Rupert commanded a small royalist fleet to harry enemy shipping. Hence Milton inveighed in Eikonoklastes against “the Piracy of Rupert.” After the Restoration he served as a naval commander in the second and third Anglo-Dutch Wars. Thomas N. Corns

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Ruth. Book of the Old Testament. A Moabite, Ruth movingly professes her loyalty to her Israelite mother-in-law Naomi by choosing to remain with her during a time of crisis and destitution after the death of Ruth’s husband. They journey to Bethlehem, Naomi’s former home, where Ruth gleans in the fields of the wealthy Boaz and eventually marries him. She becomes the direct ancestor of David (Ruth 4:22) and of Jesus (Matt. 1:5). Milton lists “a Pastoral out of Ruth” in Outlines for Tragedies. “Sonnet IX” praises a lady for choosing the “better part with Mary and with Ruth” (5). In Paradise Lost Eve’s profession of devotion to Adam as they leave Eden (12.616 –20) echoes Ruth 1:16. David Gay

Rutherford, Samuel (c. 1600 –1661). Church of Scotland minister and controversialist. An active opponent of episcopalianism in Scotland through the 1630s, he was a leading advocate of the Scottish National Covenant and a member of the national assembly. In 1643, with Robert Baillie, Alexander Henderson, and George Gillespie, he was appointed a Scottish commissioner to the Westminster Assembly of Divines. He participated energetically in its debates from November 1643 to November 1647, when he returned home. He was a strict Calvinist, an influential proponent of settling the Church of England on the model of Scottish Presbyterianism, and a fierce opponent of sects and of the Independents, who, in his view, allowed their proliferation. As such, he opposed the supposed heresy expressed in such heterodox works as Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, though he did not attack Milton in print (unlike Baillie). Milton lists Rutherford among the forcers of conscience in “On the New Forcers of Conscience” (line 8). He remained active in the politics of the church and state once back in Scotland, and at the Restoration he was placed under house arrest. He died while awaiting trial for treason. See ODNB, including the article “Members of the Westminster Assembly and Scottish Commissioners (1643 – 1652).”

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S Sabbatarianism. The strict observance of the Sabbath and the set of arguments which support that practice. Although Christian interpretations of the fourth commandment—“Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Exod. 20:8)—have always been controversial, the Sabbatarian debate had a serious effect on English politics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Constantine’s establishment in a.d. 321 of Sunday as a day of worship constituted an ecclesiastical convention and assumed Christ’s abrogation of Old Testament laws. According to the injunction, canon law, not God’s law, dictated that one should observe the Sabbath. Elizabethan precisionists, on the other hand, argued that the commandment constituted perpetual law and explained the change from Saturday to Sunday as a divinely sanctioned celebration of Christ’s Resurrection. The debate over the lawfulness of Sunday activities culminated in the Book of Sports controversy of 1617–1618. Although evidence of Milton’s Sabbatarianism is apparent in several of his works (“the Sabbath is a higher institution, a command of the first Table,” Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce), his views are relatively moderate. Gregory M. Colón Semenza

Sabrina. The goddess or nymph of the River Severn (so pictured crowned in Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion), who comes to the aid of the Lady in Milton’s A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus), releasing her from the enchanter’s chair. Traditionally, she was the bastard daughter of Locrine, son of Brute, and was pursued by her father’s wife, Guendolen, who was enraged at his infidelity. Sabrina drowned in the river that subsequently took her name and marked the reputed ancient border between England and Wales. Milton’s figure derives ultimately from Geoffrey of Monmouth, as mediated by various redactors, but he himself points to Edmund Spenser’s Faerie 324

Queene, where Sabrina appears in the chronicle of British history read by Arthur in the Castle of Alma (2.10.19). Milton departs from Spenser in implying she drowned herself; nor, in the latter, does she become a nymph, but Milton may have had in mind a parallel story (Faerie Queene 2.2.6 –9) where a nymph was transformed into a stream to escape rape, a fate that did not threaten Sabrina. Details more similar to Milton’s version appear in other contemporary accounts by Drayton, Giles Fletcher, Sr., and William Slatyer. Sabrina’s relation to Wales is unclear. Tom Bishop

St. Giles Without Cripplegate. Eleventh-century church in Fore Street, London. It has been host to many illustrious vicars, parishioners, and visitors, including Sir Thomas More, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, John Foxe, Lancelot Andrewes, John Bunyan, Sir John Speed, Oliver Cromwell, Martin Frobisher, and its “most famous parishioner,” John Milton, who lies beneath what are now the altar steps in the center aisle on the northeast side of the church. Milton buried both his father, John Milton, Sr., and his father-in-law, Richard Powell, Sr., here. Carol Barton

St. Paul’s Cathedral. The cathedral of the City of London. Until 1666, this was a vast Norman and Gothic structure that dominated the London skyline. Milton grew up almost in its shadow. A major refurbishment program had begun in 1633 as part of the campaign by William Laud and Charles I to improve the physical appearance of the buildings of the Church of England. Inigo Jones designed a neoclassical portico, which was built at the west end. Considerable coercion was necessary to raise the subscription required, and the project divided

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opinion across the country, with those of a Puritan inclination particularly opposed to it. The work was interrupted by the outbreak of the First Civil War in 1642, though the portico was finished. The building was the target for desecration over the 1640s and 1650s. Shops and workrooms were built into the portico, which was divided by a mezzanine floor, and horses were stabled in the chancel. At the Restoration, refurbishment and restitution began, but the building was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. The present structure, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, was begun after the death of Milton and completed in 1710. See Sharpe (1992).

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St. Paul’s School. A one-room school that stood on the north side of the old St. Paul’s Cathedral, a short walk from Milton’s childhood home. The school and all its records were destroyed in the 1666 Great Fire of London. The earliest record of Milton’s attendance there is the admissions book of Christ’s College, Cambridge. No extant record includes the dates of his attendance at St. Paul’s; he must have left near the end of 1624, but he may have entered the school any time between 1615 and 1621. The earliest date at which St. Paul’s School was constituted formally is 1103. John Colet, prompted and guided by Desiderius Erasmus, took advantage of his position (dean of the cathedral) and his wealth (a large inheritance from his father in 1505) to rebuild it. A new schoolhouse was opened in 1509. Colet delegated the governance and financial management of the school to the Mercers’ Company (which still substantially retains these roles), and within Colet’s lifetime St. Paul’s became one of the most important schools in England. Boys had to be able to read and write both English and Latin before they entered the school. The principal medium of instruction was Latin. Teaching in the school’s large room was conducted by the high master and the surmaster (also known as the “usher”); the latter was assisted by an under-usher in charge of the first form. The first four forms were the responsibility of the surmaster, and the last four of the high master. In Milton’s time the high master was Alexander Gil the elder. The schoolroom of St. Paul’s was divided by a curtain, and in each half the four forms were ranged along the three walls and the curtain; the head boy of each form sat at a special desk. Gil taught the four upper forms in turn. Among those who were at St. Paul’s during Milton’s time, Charles Diodati, a fellow pupil,

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and Alexander Gil the younger, an under-usher, became his friends. See Campbell and Corns (2008).

Thomas N. Corns

Salmasius, Claudius [De Saumaise, Claude] (1588 –1653). French humanist and philologist. A prodigious scholar, he was born into a noble family in Semur en Auxois. After studying Latin and Greek with his father, he was sent to Paris to study law and met Isaac Casaubon. Called to the University of Heidelberg, he adjured his Catholic faith and embraced Protestantism. Lawyer to the Parliament of Dijon (1610), he then turned to the study of Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian. Salmasius edited Historiae Augustae Scriptores 6 [Six Writers of Imperial History] (Paris, 1620) and wrote Plinianae Exercitationes in C. J. Solini Polyhistora [Plinian Exercises on the Polyhistora of C. J. Solinus] (Paris, 1629). In 1631 he was called to the University of Leiden to succeed Joseph Scaliger. There he produced eighty books, two of which Milton refers to in his works: De Episcopis et Presbyteris Contra D. Petavium Loiolitam Dissertatio Prima [First Dissertation About Bishops and Presbyters in Opposition to D. Petavius Loiolita] (1641) and De Primatu Papae Pars Prima, cum Apparatu [First Part About the Preeminence of the Pope, with an Apparatus] (Lugd. Batavor, 1645). In 1649 Charles II commissioned him to write an apology of his father: Defensio Regia, pro Carolo I. Ad Serenisimum Magnae Britanniae Regem Carolum II. Filium Natu Majorem, Heredem & Successorem Legitimum [Royal Defense on Behalf of Charles I, Dedicated to the Most Serene King of Great Britain, Charles II, his Elder Son, Heir, and Legitimate Successor] (Leiden, 1649). The book was translated into French the following year and appeared as Apologie royale pour Charles I (Paris, 1650). Milton replied with Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (1651). After spending a year at the Swedish court of Queen Christina, Salmasius died in Spa, but his posthumous response, Ad Johannem Miltonum Responsio, Opus Posthumum [A Posthumous Work, the Response to John Milton], was published in London in 1660. See CPW 4.

Christophe J.-B. Tournu

salting. The rite in which a year’s intake of freshmen was initiated by fellow students into full membership at Cambridge University and Oxford University. Some test, performance, or ordeal was

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required of the new student at a full muster of the student fraternity. If he acquitted himself well, he was rewarded with beer; but if badly, with the beer salted. Behind the insistence on salt, both name and thing, lies the ancient metaphor of salt as wit (Latin sales = wit): dullards, like tasteless foods, needed salting. Anthony Wood vividly describes his own initiation at Merton College, Oxford, in 1648. In Milton’s time, Cambridge saltings had become scripted and rehearsed bilingual shows, entrusted to the wittiest older student to cast and present. The entertainment had become organized and corporate. As such shows were lubricated by alcohol and gravitated toward obscene wit and offensive parody, they were regularly banned, but then—because they answered some permanent necessity for rites of passage—they were revived. The funniest extant script is one by Thomas Randolph, for Trinity College in 1627. Milton did one for Christ’s College shortly afterward (“At a Vacation Exercise in the College”). John K. Hale

Saltmarsh, John (d. 1647). Seeker, army chaplain. A Yorkshireman, he graduated with an M.A. from Cambridge University and gradually developed radical views of church reformation, resigning livings rather than take tithes or even voluntary donations. In the 1640s Saltmarsh urged freedom of speech and of the press and opposed using civil power in religion. He became an articulate leader among those, like William Dell and William Erbery, who were open to views of Seekers, emphasizing in his preaching and writing the idea of free grace and the spiritual progress of individuals guided not by a church and its inauthentic clergy, but by the private workings of the Holy Spirit. Ideas like these brought him into open conflict with the Presbyterian majority in the Westminster Assembly of Divines that had formulated a new established church precisely to direct the beliefs and modes of worship of all and thus exposed him to the kind of response that was directed against Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. The assembly’s Samuel Rutherford denounced Saltmarsh, Dell, and others as Antinomians and Familists in A Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist (1648). Saltmarsh’s masterpiece, published the year he died, was Sparkles of Glory (1647), wherein it appears that the highest attainment for a spiritual Christian is not to find a true church or fellowship, but to unite with God, seeing by his light. As an army chaplain, Saltmarsh’s views made him a popular preacher, and he

became a hero of the suppressed Levellers when, in his final illness, he traveled to the headquarters of Thomas Fairfax and his officers and scolded them, saying they had angered God by not fulfilling their promises to the people. See BDBR, ODNB.

Norman T. Burns

Salzilli, Giovanni (fl. 1638). Poet. Milton met him during his visits to Rome in 1638 –1639. He contributed fifteen Italian poems (mostly sonnets) to a collection published in 1637 and wrote a fourline Latin section of Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645). It is titled “An Epigram by Giovanni Salsilli of Rome to John Milton, Englishman, who deserves to be crowned with the triple laurel of poetry, certainly Greek, Latin and Etruscan,” and compares Milton, the poet of the Thames, to three poets whom he names by metonymy through their rivers: Meles (Homer), Mincius (Virgil), and Sebetus (Torquato Tasso). Milton’s poem “Ad Salsillum” wishes Salzilli a good recovery from a period of ill health. Little else is known of him. Thomas N. Corns

Samson. One of the judges of ancient Israel, distinguished for his miraculous physical strength and prowess in battle. The meaning of his name is not explained in the biblical narrative, but according to Tammi Schneider’s edition of Judges in the Berit Olam series (2000) it “is related to the Semitic word for sun.” Milton refers to Samson at various points in his writing but most fully in his tragic drama Samson Agonistes. The biblical account ( Judg. 13 –16) begins with Samson’s auspicious birth and the establishment of his lifelong status as a Nazarite, the requirements for which entail that he abstain from fermented drink (and any part of the grapevine) and that his hair never be cut ( Judg. 13:5 –7; cf. Num. 6:1–21). The narrative describes the escalating violence that ensues from Samson’s failed attempt to marry a Philistine woman from Timnah. What begins as a riddle contest at the wedding feast results in the death of thirty and then a thousand Philistines, the widespread burning of crops (by means of three hundred foxes with torches tied to their tails), and the burning of the bride and her father (by their neighbors). The narrator indicates that the divine purpose of these events was to deliver the Israelites from Philistine dominion ( Judg. 14:4). By contrast, Samson seems to lack such divine warrant for his liaison with an apparently non-Israelite woman in

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Sorek named Delilah (in Samson Agonistes Milton spells the name “Dalila”). The Philistine rulers offer Delilah eleven thousand shekels of silver to find out the source of Samson’s strength. After three attempts to mislead her, Samson tells Delilah that cutting his hair, a sign of his Nazarite vow, would result in the loss of his supernatural strength. His answer proves correct, resulting in Samson’s eyes being gouged out, after which he is imprisoned to work a millstone. Ultimately, Samson takes revenge by collapsing the temple of Dagon upon himself and three thousand Philistines, even as they celebrate his capture. The narrative in Judges seems not to offer Samson as a model for leadership, as he is “the only judge to die in battle with the enemy,” notes Schneider. Outside the Book of Judges, the only further explicit biblical mention of Samson is Hebrews 11:32, which names him among those ancient Israelites identified as exemplary for Christians because of a faith that enabled great deeds. Renaissance biblical commentators also seemed to note that Samson was a Danite and that the tribe of Dan is missing from the list of the tribes of Israel in Revelation chapter 7. In The Reason of Church-Government Milton interprets Samson’s betrayal by Delilah as a political allegory for the relationship between the king and the “strumpet flatteries of Prelats.” He predicts that, ultimately, “knowing his prelatical rasor to have bereft him of his wonted might,” the king will “thunder with ruin upon the heads of those his evil counsellers, but not without great affliction to himselfe.” In Areopagitica, Milton alludes to Samson when he compares the nation of England to a “strong man” “rousing” from sleep and “shaking her [England’s] invincible locks [of hair].” Eikonoklastes likens the “autority and strength of Law” to “the strength of that Nazarites lock.” In Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Milton compares the English overthrow of the monarchy to the ancient Israelite struggle against the Philistines. Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, when they awake from slumber after eating the forbidden fruit, are compared to “Herculean Samson” at that moment when he “waked / Shorn of his strength” from “the harlot-lap / Of Philistean Dalilah” (9.1059 – 63). Phillip J. Donnelly

Samson Agonistes. Poem by Milton; full title, Samson Agonistes, A Dramatic Poem. It was printed by John Macock for John Starkey in 1671, after being licensed for publication 2 July 1670 by Thomas Tomkins and registered 10 September. The trag-

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edy forms the second part of a two-part volume, for which the main title page reads Paradise Regain’d. A Poem. In IV Books. To Which Is Added Samson Agonistes. In a manner unique among Milton’s publications, as Joseph Wittreich notes, the facing page indicates emphatically that the text has indeed been “Licensed” by state censors. A secondary title page, following Paradise Regained and immediately preceding the text of the tragedy, adds the subtitle, A Dramatic Poem. The author is identified on both title pages as “John Milton.” The first printing included numerous typographical errors; however, the appended “Omissa,” which appears in modern editions as lines 1527–35 and 1537, may have been intended to suggest an “alternative reality,” according to Stephen Dobranski, whose very imagining requires textual-restorative action on the part of the reader. That Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes were published together is clearly suggestive and raises the question of whether Milton intended the pairing to emphasize a stark contrast between the antimartial hero of Paradise Regained and the violent protagonist of Samson Agonistes, or to suggest instead that Samson is an incomplete prefiguration of the Son of God as he appears not only in Paradise Regained but in final judgment. Although Samson Agonistes was printed in 1671, the date of its composition has been a topic of debate. The traditional date, between 1667 and 1670, has been defended and contested, the revisionists favoring the late 1640s and early 1650s. Although the consensus for the traditional date remains stable, the question is not likely to be resolved with final certainty, according to Barbara Lewalski. The interpretive uncertainty attributed to much of the text has also been taken to imply a double context of 1648 –1649 and 1667–1670. The date of composition can have crucial interpretive consequences, as readings of the poem tend to be shaped by whether we imagine its primary political context as the end of civil war, the Interregnum, the Restoration, or some combination of those moments. In adapting the biblical story of the ancient Israelite judge Samson to the genre of classical tragedy, Milton opens new interpretive possibilities for both the genre and the biblical narrative. The polyvocal character of Samson Agonistes is evident even in its sense of genre. The prefatory matter (including the title page) invokes Aristotle’s definition of tragedy no fewer than three times, once each in Greek, Latin, and English, and alludes at various points to Aristotle’s further discussion of the genre (cf. Poetics 1449b21–1456a31). But Milton’s substitution of “passions” for “actions” as the

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object of dramatic imitation should alert us to the limits of his commitment to Aristotle. Apparently disowning the more proximate English traditions of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy, the polemical headnote explicitly situates the work among the ancient Greek tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Milton cites these ancient dramatists, however, not as models to be slavishly followed, but as those whose works offer the experiential basis for cultivating judgment appropriate to understanding Samson Agonistes. The headnote also cites the commentary of David Pareus (1644) to the effect that the book of Revelation is structured like a tragedy. Milton thus presumes: (a) that the literary genre of tragedy has already been long detached from its pagan ethos, and (b) that the same events narrated as a tragedy for some will be a redemptive comedy for others (for example, the fall of the Antichrist in Revelation). Such duality, however, also raises the question of whether the fall of Philistia or the self-destruction of Samson the Danite bears most resemblance to the tragic fall of the Antichrist. Samson Agonistes is arguably closest in genre to a small tradition of humanist drama, represented by George Buchanan’s Jeptha and Jean Racine’s Athalie. In effect, such writers accommodated biblical narrative to the tragic genre by locating the “comic” resolution of Christian salvation beyond the vanishing point, as it were, of the play’s moral and historical horizons. The commitment to both the spare Greek verse style and the historicity of the biblical account also helps to explain why Samson Agonistes generally eschews the kind of illuminating typological anachronism (whether classical or biblical) that operates so frequently in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Within the play, the Chorus invokes the idea of a tragic fall (164 – 69, 674 –96), but their appeals to “fortune” contrast sharply with Samson’s repeated insistence on his own responsibility for his fall (for example, 45, 235, 489 –501). The structural similarities between Samson Agonistes and Oedipus at Colonus thus serve to underline the difference between Samson’s admission of culpability and Oedipus’s insistence on his innocence. The “disturbing, questioning generic instability” of Samson Agonistes, in David Norbrook’s view, arguably owes most to the plays of Euripides. Many events recounted in the biblical story of Samson are noted at some point in Milton’s play, but in Samson Agonistes those events are addressed by characters through their exchanges with Samson just before his decision to go to the Philistine temple of Dagon. Samson encounters five differ-

ent interlocutors in sequence: the Chorus, his father Manoa, Dalila, a giant named Harapha, and finally a “publick officer” from the Philistine rulers who summons Samson to the temple. For most present criticism of Samson Agonistes, the root interpretive question is the extent to which these encounters suggest, directly or indirectly, how readers should evaluate Samson’s final action in which he destroys the temple of Dagon, killing himself and many Philistines (three thousand, according to Judg. 16:27–30). In adapting the biblical story to the tragic genre, Milton necessarily dilates the narrative in various ways. In terms of characterization, Milton’s Samson has an interior life that is not evident in the biblical Samson. Samson Agonistes adds the character of Harapha and makes Dalila into Samson’s estranged wife, rather than merely his lover. The narrator in Judges seems most concerned with the Philistine body count as a measure of Samson’s success ( Judg. 16:30), whereas Samson Agonistes suggests that only members of the Philistine aristocracy were slain and emphasizes the unavoidability of Samson’s self-destruction, carefully distinguishing it from suicide (1651–59, 1664-66). In Samson Agonistes the narration of Samson’s final moments before destroying the temple describes him as simply bowing his head “as one who prayed, / Or some great matter in his mind revolved” (1637–38). Absent is the clear assertion of the Judges narrator regarding both the fact and content of Samson’s prayer for vengeance ( Judg. 16:28 –30). Early twentieth-century scholarship on Samson Agonistes gave attention primarily to classical antecedents and to whether the “spirit” of the play is primarily Hellenic or Hebraic. Despite the shift toward more theologically oriented typological readings of the play during the third quarter of the twentieth century, criticism continued to be motivated by the concern to address Samuel Johnson’s charge (Rambler No. 139) that the play lacks a “middle”: that is, its central action seems neither to follow necessarily from those actions that begin the play nor to constitute a plausible cause for the final events that ensue. Critical assessment, whether positive or negative, of the final violence in Samson Agonistes requires presuppositions regarding (a) whether Milton aims either to harmonize all disparate elements of biblical revelation, including Hebrews 11:32, which identifies Samson as a man of faith, or to practice a quasiQuaker subjective hermeneutic that allows him to disregard selected biblical texts; and (b) whether it is anachronistic to attribute to Milton any doubts or reservations about the legitimacy of claiming divine sanction for violent political action.

Sarpi, Paolo [Pietro]

In reading Samson Agonistes for its treatment of political themes, the range of available interpretations will depend on whether one identifies the character of Samson primarily with Milton, Charles I, or Oliver Cromwell, or other regicides, or even the 1666 fire of London. Such political readings will also be shaped by whether one views Milton as persisting in his desire for revolution after the Restoration or entertaining doubts about the use of violence to oppose tyranny. See Achinstein (2003), Dobranski (1999), Knoppers (1994), Lewalski (2000), Loewenstein (2001), Low (1974), Norbrook (1999a), Wittrelch (2002).

Phillip J. Donnelly

1 Samuel. Book of the Old Testament. It narrates the transition in leadership of the Israelites from judges to kings (see Paradise Lost 12.320 –24). Samuel is a prophet and the last judge of Israel. When the Israelites ask for a monarch after the manner of other nations, he cautions them (1 Sam. 8:11–18) but accedes, anointing Saul as Israel’s first king. God later rejects Saul (1 Sam. 15 –16), and Samuel anoints David (1 Sam. 16:13). God’s displeasure with Saul and favor for David continue until Saul’s death. Saul is a negative example in Milton’s prose. In Eikonoklastes Milton finds Charles I “more unexcusable then Saul” in his duplicity (see 1 Sam. 15). Opposing the institution of monarchy, Milton emphasizes God’s displeasure at Israel’s request for a king in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio and again in The Readie and Easie Way. For Milton, 1 Samuel chapter 8 portrays political conformity rather than maturity in Israel’s desire for a king and, by comparison, in England’s restoration of monarchy in 1660. Satan alludes to Saul while tempting Jesus with earthly kingdoms (Paradise Regained 3.242). The fictional Harapha is the ancestor of the Philistine Goliath (1 Sam. 17) in Samson Agonistes (1249). See Gay (2002).

David Gay

2 Samuel. Book of the Old Testament. It and 1 Samuel were originally one document but were divided, with 2 Samuel carrying the history of the Israelites over the latter part of the reign of King David. The reign of David presented royalist apologists for monarchy with valuable material, in that it provided a potent example of how a divinely sanctioned monarch could err and yet retain God’s support as, through contrition, he sought and found

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redemption for his error. The analogue works particularly effectively in Eikon Basilike, which in the prayers attributed to Charles I draws heavily on David’s penitential psalms. Thus a complex web of allusion ties Charles’s experience to a biblical model. In Eikonoklastes Milton observes, “Had he borrow’d Davids heart, it had bin much holier theft.” See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

Sandys, George (1578 –1644). Translator, mythographer, and adventurer. His father, Edwin Sandys, was archbishop of York, and his family was involved with the Virginia Company. He traveled extensively, and Milton’s poetry may have been informed by his work A Relation of a Journey Begun An: Dom: 1610. Foure Bookes. Containing a Description of the Turkish Empire, of Aegypt, of the Holy Land, of the Remote Parts of Italy, and Ilands Adjoyning (1615). Sandys also served as treasurer for the Jamestown Colony, but he remains best known for his translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, part of which was completed during his time in America and which he dedicated to Charles I. The heroic couplet verses, in the 1632 edition, are accompanied by Sandys’s copious allegorical readings and critical commentary. He is buried in Boxley Church, Kent. Eric C. Brown

Sarpi, Paolo [Pietro] (1552 –1623). Friar and political writer. The orphaned son of a Venetian tradesman, he entered the Servite order at age thirteen. He became internationally famous in 1606 – 1607 for his defense of the Venetian republic’s right to control church affairs within its territory against the authority of the Pope. He wrote a number of works concerned with abuses in church power and welcomed dialogue with Protestants, hoping that they might be tolerated in a Venice separated ecclesiastically from Rome. His most influential work was a devastating critique of the abuses of ecclesiastical power, Istoria del Concilio Tridentino [History of the Council of Trent], printed for the first time in England in 1619 (sent there with the help of Milton’s future patron Sir Henry Wotton). It rapidly became a cornerstone of the anticlerical literature that would eventually power the Enlightenment. Sarpi provided Milton with a way of understanding a structural feature of the English state: a weak king would lead to exploitation by bishops, who would intrude papal power and steal the kingdom away.

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Milton refers to Sarpi’s Istoria thirteen times in his Commonplace Book, where it provides evidence of church corruption in marriage arrangements. Most important to Milton was the extended section in book VI of the Istoria that deals with censorship, especially the Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum [Index of Prohibited Books]. There are four important places of reference in Areopagitica (1644), and three passages in Sarpi’s History of the Inquisition (1626) that were also highly suggestive for Milton’s argument. Nigel Smith

Satan. A multifaceted figure in both Judaism and Christianity, but traditionally in Christianity an angel who rebelled against God, among other evil deeds, including persuading Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. Milton gives us several Satans rather than one Satan, not only in separate poems (“In Quintum Novembris,” Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained), but also within Paradise Lost. As the archfiend attempts to fly from himself, thus betraying his essential restlessness, Satans multiply. In every incarnation Satan is the leader of the devils and “the author of all wickedness,” as he is described in De Doctrina Christiana, which lists the scattered scriptural passages that warrant this identification. Milton gives the name from the first of this list of passages, “Beelzebub the prince of the devils” (Matt. 12:24), to Satan’s main subordinate in the epic. Lucifer, another potential name for the leader of the devils, is drawn from Isaiah 14:12. Milton employs the name Lucifer in Paradise Lost (7.131). Satan, Milton’s preferred name, means “adversary”; it replaces the name that he, like all the devils, lost at his fall (PL 1.361– 65). Milton expands upon brief and sometimes enigmatic passages in scripture to compose his Satan(s). The fact of Satan’s leading one-third of the angels in rebellion against God is drawn from the verse from Isaiah quoted above and from Revelation 12:3 – 4. In expanding upon these hints, Milton draws liberally on literary traditions, classical as well as Christian. The Satan of “In Quintum Novembris” is identified as the tyrant who rules Acheron, father of the Eumenides and exile from Olympus. Later in the poem, when Satan deceives the Pope, Milton borrows from Edmund Spenser’s Archimago, as he does again in Paradise Regained. In both poems Satan disguises himself as an old man. Setting the pattern for the later poems, the Satan of “In Quintum Novembris” relies more on fraud than on force.

It is not surprising that the Satan of Paradise Lost is more complex than the antagonist of the youthful Latin mini-epic. What may be surprising is that many readers have regarded Satan as the hero of the epic. It is undeniable that he is laden with the trappings of tragic and epic heroism. It is a critical commonplace that Satan is the protagonist of an epic within the epic. Links to classical heroes proliferate. The energy and magnificence of the epic’s Satan caught the attention of Romantic readers. In an influential statement in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell William Blake wrote that Milton “was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it,” and Percy Bysshe Shelley argued that “Milton’s Devil as a moral being is . . . far superior to his God.” Having created an attractive Satan, Milton in a dozen ways undoes his creation. The dismantling of Satan as epic hero proceeds on two fronts: (1) Milton suggests that the virtues of epic heroism pale next to the virtues of Christian heroism, “patience and heroic martyrdom” (PL 9.25 – 41), and (2) he shows Satan failing to meet even this lesser standard. No one claims that Satan is the hero of Paradise Regained, which expands Luke’s gospel account of Satan’s temptation of the Son of God in the desert. In the brief epic, Satan once more presides over an infernal council, before approaching the Son, in Spenserian fashion, as an “aged man in rural weeds” (1.314). Unlike Red Crosse, the sometimes gullible hero of book I of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, who is deceived by a similar figure, the Son is not fooled for a moment, and Satan delivers his second speech as “th’ Arch-fiend now undisguised” (1.357). Stephen M. Fallon

Saumur. Town located in the Anjou region of France on the Loire River. When Philippe Duplessis-Mornay was governor from 1589 to 1621, a famous Protestant academy was founded (1599), and Saumur became a stronghold of the Huguenots, attracting students from all over Europe. However, with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, l’Académie Royale (1610) was closed and people migrated. Francis Gomar (1615 –1618), John Cameron (1618 –1622), and Moïse Amyraut (1626 –1664) were renowned professors at Saumur. Richard Jones, one of Milton’s former pupils, was for a little while a student there. Apparently, Milton did not visit the place when on his grand tour in 1638 –1639. His De Doctrina Christiana may

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have been influenced by Amyraut’s Brief traitté de la prédestination et de ses principales dépendances (Saumur, 1634). Christophe J.-B. Tournu

Savile, Sir Henry (1549 –1622). Classical scholar, astronomer, mathematician, and antiquarian. He was in turn warden of Merton College, Oxford, and the provost of Eton. Though best known for his work on astronomy, on the editing of classical texts, and on the history of science, he also published Rerum Anglicarum Scriptores Post Bedam Praecipui [Principal Writers on English Affairs Since Bede] (1596), which contained the writings of William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon, from which Milton drew in his Commonplace Book and for The History of Britain. Thomas N. Corns

Savonarola, Girolamo (1452 –1498). Dominican friar. From 1491 he was prior of the monastery of San Marco, Florence. Although originally a protégé of the Medici family, on the exile of Piero II de’ Medici he became the principal political figure of the Florentine republic and increasingly independent and oppositional in his dealings with papal authority. His theocratic domination ended with his arrest in 1498. Under torture he confessed to heresy and was burned at the stake. Milton included a reference to him in his Commonplace Book—an incident is taken from Savonarola’s Oraculo della Renovatione della Chiesa. Milton alludes to the same text in Animadversions, where he cites Savonarola’s view that the “Lukewarm ones” were the greatest enemies to the church reformation he attempted to carry through. Thomas N. Corns

Savoy. Historical region of present-day southeast France and northwest Italy. At the time that Milton traveled through it in 1638, the state of Savoy included what are now the French départements of Savoie and Haute-Savoie and the Italian regions of Valle d’Aosta and Piedmont (which includes Turin, then the duchy’s capital); the territory of Savoy extended south in a narrow corridor to the Mediterranean, where its port was Nice. The language of Savoy was Savoyard, a Romance language quite distinct from French and Occitan and Italian; the French language had made inroads into southern France, but not into Savoy.

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In entering the duchy Milton was encountering a distinctive culture that, like England, was fragmenting under the pressure of religious divisions: Geneva had finally seceded in 1603, and there were attempts to convert the Waldensians by force. Much later he took up their cause after the forces of the duke of Savoy embarked on massacres of the Waldensians in Piedmont, which was part of his duchy. Those events are the context for Milton’s “Sonnet XV” (“On the Late Massacre in Piedmont”). Thomas N. Corns

Scotland. In Milton’s time, an independent sovereign state in the northern part of Britain. Since the accession to the throne in England of James I, who already reigned in Scotland as James VI, the two countries had the same monarch, who was also king of Ireland. Scotland, however, had its own Parliament, its own church, and its own legal system. Scottish constituencies were not represented in the English House of Commons. James sought to promote the merger of the countries into a political entity, Great Britain. He met with considerable resistance from both kingdoms, and the project did not proceed far. The attempts of King Charles I to bring the Church of Scotland into uniformity in matters of government, doctrine, and liturgy with the Church of England occasioned two abortive attempts to impose his will by military incursion, which in turn precipitated the calling of the Short Parliament and the Long Parliament. The Westminster Assembly of Divines came under the influence of senior Scottish clergy, whose mission was to urge a settlement that accorded with the Presbyterianism of their own church, a tendency that accelerated Milton’s alienation from those Puritan ministers whose efforts he had previously endorsed. Thomas N. Corns

scrivener. Originally a scribe who prepared or copied documents. The role of scriveners was changing rapidly during Milton’s time, as they also worked as notaries, as money lenders, and increasingly as managers of other people’s money, arranging loans and gathering interest. John Milton, Sr., was admitted on 27 February 1600 to the Company of Scriveners, which regulated the profession. He was evidently good at his calling and acquired enough wealth to educate his sons well, to provide a considerable dowry for his daughter, to support John Jr.

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in leisure, and to pay for his prolonged continental journey in 1638 –1639. Thomas N. Corns

Scudamore, John, First Viscount Scudamore (1601–1671). Diplomat and politician. The scion of a powerful upper gentry family in the southern Marches, he was a prominent lay supporter of William Laud and a protégé of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham. At the time of Milton’s visit to continental Europe in 1638 –1639, he was one of the two ambassadors in Paris. Scudamore’s circle of friends in Paris included the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, who was then the ambassador of Queen Christina of Sweden. Scudamore provided Milton with letters of introduction and the loan of several retainers to accompany him on his visit. In 1643 Scudamore was briefly in arms for Charles I but quickly surrendered and compounded. Through the rest of the decade and in the 1650s he lived in part in Petty France, where from 1651 to the Restoration Milton was his neighbor. Thomas N. Corns

Second Civil War (1648 –1649). The second of three armed clashes between English royalists and Parliamentarians. In many respects, the First Civil War achieved no resolution but rather perpetuated hostilities and ultimately set the stage for the Second Civil War. Charles I forged an uneasy alliance with his former Scottish adversaries. Parliament had neglected its promise of Scottish church reform, allowing the outcast king the opportunity to make similar, albeit vague, promises. The Scottish attacks on England were disorganized and ineffective against the New Model Army, as was evident in the decisive Battle of Preston (1648). The Second Civil War saw further outbreaks of fighting as newly reanimated royalists raised major insurrections in south Wales and southeast England. Though the former was relatively easily suppressed, the latter ended only with the prolonged siege of Colchester by Thomas Fairfax, which provided the immediate context for Milton’s sonnet “On the Lord General Fairfax at the Siege of Colchester.” Sandy Bugeja

Secretary for Foreign Tongues. Government position to which Milton was appointed on 15 March 1649. The role involved the translation to and from English of state papers and the occasional provision

of simultaneous translations for visiting ambassadors and envoys if they spoke Latin. He continued in these duties until c. October 1659, thereby serving the Commonwealth (in particular the Council of State, 1649 –1653), the Protectorate (of Oliver Cromwell, 1653 –1658, and then of Richard Cromwell, 1658 –1659), and then the restored Purged Parliament (in 1659). See also Letters of State. Thomas N. Corns

Seekers. Name for an attitude rather than a religious sect, which developed during the 1620s. Contentions about church polity and doctrine during Milton’s lifetime led many pious people, not convinced that existing churches and sects had divine approval, to denounce their pretensions and judge them apostate. Broadly, there were two sorts of Seekers. Some submitted to the authority of a charismatic leader, such as Lodowick Muggleton; the others, such as George Fox and William Erbery, urged following the inner light of the Holy Spirit that dwelled within every man and woman. Those who avoided the Ranter impulse often came to rest in the Society of Friends, or Quakers, which was quite unlike the apostate churches, being without clergy, creed, liturgy, sacraments, or formal sermons and where all had liberty to speak as the Holy Spirit moved them. John Saltmarsh’s The Smoke in the Temple (1646) is considered a statement of Seeker beliefs. Norman T. Burns

Selden, John (1584 –1654). Lawyer, antiquary, Hebraist, legal historian, and politician. He matriculated at Hart Hall, Oxford, but like many who intended to follow a legal career, he left without graduating, entering Clifford’s Inn in 1602 and the Inner Temple in 1603. In London he developed the formidable linguistic skills on which his subsequent research depended. As well as classical languages, he knew French, German, Spanish, Italian, Old English, Chaldean, Samaritan, Aramaic, Arabic, Persian, and Ethiopic, at least well enough to cite them in his published works. He was among the foremost Hebraists of his time. His circles of friends, acquaintances, and correspondents included poets ( John Donne, Ben Jonson, and Michael Drayton among them), antiquaries such as Sir Robert Cotton, and theologians (including James Ussher), and for a while he assisted Francis Bacon in some of his later researches. His early publications ranged from accounts of the heathen gods of the Middle

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East to the origins of tithes. As a constitutional theorist, Selden argued that, in the longer historical view, England was a mixed monarchy, governed by the monarch in Parliament. He was a member of Parliament in the short-lived parliaments of the 1620s, where his constitutional principles drew him to support Sir John Eliot in his opposition to the practices of James I and Charles I. During the Personal Rule of Charles I he was imprisoned intermittently between 1629 and 1634, after which he was in some measure reconciled to the regime. He was elected to the Long Parliament and served until his exclusion at Pride’s Purge. As a lay member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, he was perceived as the leader of the Erastian party (see Erastianism). Milton plainly revered Selden; his explicit allusions to him are relatively few but always profoundly respectful. There are a few notes in the Commonplace Book. In The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, in material added in the second edition, Milton alludes respectfully to Selden’s Of the Law of Nature & of Nations. In Areopagitica, he calls Selden “the chief of learned men reputed in this Land.” Selden’s own account of the basis for marriage in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Uxor Hebraica (London, 1646), postdated Milton’s divorce tracts. Although Milton rarely cites other authorities in De Doctrina Christiana, it is with evident satisfaction that, at one point when discussing marriage, he observes that Selden “demonstrates particularly well” in that study the point that Milton is maintaining. He cites him, too, in The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings. Recent scholarship has identified a pervasive debt to Selden in key sections of Milton’s poetry. When Milton depicts heathen gods and fallen angels in “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” and Paradise Lost, he draws silently on Selden’s De Diis Syris (London, 1617, 1629). Milton’s depiction of the Israelite milieu in Samson Agonistes also evidently owes much to Selden’s broader writings as Hebraist. See ODNB, Rosenblatt (2006).

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Seneca [Lucius Annaeus Seneca, or Seneca the Younger] (c. 4 B.C.– A.D. 65). Imperial politician, philosopher, and dramatist. He held high imperial office under the emperors Claudius and Nero and was at least at times complicit in the repressive excesses of those regimes. His works of morality and popular philosophy had some currency in the

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Christian era, and his dramatic output appropriated the major features of Greek drama for the Latin literary culture. He was implicated in the Piso conspiracy against Nero and forced by the emperor to commit suicide. Milton cites him in Colasterion in justification of his own method of biblical interpretation, and he draws on Seneca’s Hercules Furens in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates in support of his argument that the Greeks and Romans held it “a glorious and Heroic deed” to kill tyrants. However, in his headnote to Samson Agonistes, Milton admits to some uncertainty about the authorship of the plays attributed to this Seneca. The doubt is due to a mistake of Sidonius Apollinaris, who distinguishes erroneously between Seneca the philosopher and Seneca the tragedian. Thomas N. Corns

Separatists. Congregations that met in separation from the Church of England to worship according to their own understanding of reformed religion. Following the establishment of the Church of England by the Act of Uniformity (1559), the desire of many English Protestants further to reform its government and liturgy (see Puritanism) took three forms: first, to reform the practices of the church from within (see nonconformity); second, to escape from episcopal jurisdiction through immigration to the Netherlands or (in the 1630s) to New England; and third, to function as Separatists (see Henry Barrow and Brownists). The numbers of these separating ministers and congregations were very small throughout the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, but their existence caused consternation to a political establishment which supposed that religious diversity was inimical to good order in the state. The significantly titled Act for Retaining the Queen’s Subjects in Their Due Obedience (1581) prescribed imprisonment, banishment, and death as penalties for those who refused to attend their parish churches, who challenged the authority of the crown in religious matters, or who organized or attended any religious gathering held contrary to the provisions of the Book of Common Prayer. As the movement toward open conflict between Charles I and his opponents developed in the 1630s, the spread of separatist ideas—now combined with a variety of radical theological positions, often conflated in various ways with notions of congregationalism (the distinction between separatism and congregationalism or Independency is not easy to maintain)—led to Presbyterian outrage, as manifested in the Gangraena of Thomas Edwards. This

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outrage was exacerbated by the perceived lack of education and socially underprivileged status of separatist preachers. Milton’s divorce tracts led to his being set upon by opponents in this company, not without some justification since in Areopagitica he had shown himself wholly sympathetic to the individualism that informed separatism.

the Inquisition, he fled to Geneva, where he was tried and executed. Though supported by Calvin and approved by other reformers, the execution led to controversy over the punishment of heretics. He anticipated some aspects of the heterodoxies apparent in Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana. Benjamin Myers

N. H. Keeble

sequestration. The confiscation of property or income; specifically, the practice of raising revenue from defeated supporters of the opposing group, a procedure adopted by both royalists and Parliamentarians during the First Civil War. It remained in force as a penalty against royalists thereafter until the Restoration. Christopher Milton, the poet’s younger brother, spent some time implementing such measures against parliamentary supporters in territory controlled by the armies of Charles I. In turn, he himself was exposed to the procedure after the collapse of the royalist cause. On the parliamentary side, the principal instrument establishing sequestration was An Ordinance for Sequestering Notorious Delinquents Estates (27 March 1643), which was amended, augmented, and repeated by subsequent regimes. Milton, who had aided his brother and his fatherin-law, Richard Powell, Sr., in their dealings with the sequestrators, came to regard the business as corrupted by the malpractices of the more corrupt members of the Long Parliament. In his Character of the Long Parliament, Milton indicts “greedy Sequestrations” exacted to satisfy the cupidity of “Men for the most part of insatiable hands, and noted Disloyalty.” Thomas N. Corns

Servetus, Michael (c. 1511–1553). Protestant antitrinitarian theologian born in Spain. His early work, De Trinitatis Erroribus Libri VII [Seven Books About the Errors of the Trinity] (1531), aroused the opposition of leading reformers. He corresponded with Jean Calvin, sending him a manuscript of Christianismi Restitutio [The Restoration of Christianity] (published 1553), a work that repudiated orthodox views of the Trinity, Incarnation, and infant baptism, arguing that the Catholic and Protestant churches alike were corrupt. Servetus’s unique and highly abstract antitrinitarianism is best described as a pantheistic modalism, in which an unknowable divine essence is manifest in different historic emanations. Condemned for heresy under

Sesellius, Claudius [de Seissel, Claude] (c. 1450 –1520). Professor of law, ambassador, translator, and historian. He served as a counselor to King Louis XII of France. He wrote La Grande Monarchie de France (1519), which was translated into Latin in 1545 by Johannes Sleidan as De Monarchia Franciae Sive De Republica Galliae et Regum Officiis. Milton drew upon this version three times in his Commonplace Book. He notes that Sesellius regarded the general parliament of France as a “bridle” on the king. Thomas N. Corns

Shakespeare, William (1564 –1616). Playwright and poet. Milton’s relationship with him is complex and remains elusive. In 1620 Milton’s father became a trustee of the Blackfriars Playhouse, the covered theater and principal home since 1609 of Shakespeare’s acting company, the King’s Men. The benefits of trusteeship may have included “the right to attend plays gratis” and may explain why young Milton, while still at Christ’s College, Cambridge, came to publish his first work in the King’s Men’s 1632 Second Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. Milton’s poem “An Epitaph on the Admirable Dramaticke Poet, W. Shakespeare” (see “On Shakespeare”) dwells on the extraordinary facility and power of the elder poet’s imagination. Milton repeats the emphasis on Shakespeare’s fertile imagination in “L’Allegro,” where the plays of Ben Jonson and Shakespeare are represented as the chief attractions of the English theater (131–34). The early association of Shakespeare with imagination persists into Paradise Lost. In book 6, for instance, as Raphael strives to raise “Human imagination to such height / Of godlike power” (6.300 –1) in order to describe the War in Heaven, he remembers Shakespeare’s Henry V, where the Chorus strives to inspire his audience’s “imaginary forces” (I.Cho.18) in order to visualize the war in France: in the tense moments before Milton’s war begins, Shakespeare’s personification “Expectation [sits] in the air” (II.Cho.8) is remembered in Raphael’s “expectation stood / In horror” (6.306 –7).

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In recent criticism, the modernist idealization of Shakespeare at the expense of Milton has led in two discrete directions. First, the reaction against the excesses of F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot that largely determined the immediate shape of postwar Milton criticism encouraged critics to reemphasize Milton’s debt to the Elizabethan theater, most strikingly his debt to soliloquizing villains like Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Iago in the creation of Satan. As criticism gradually shifted focus from the advocacy of modernism to the analysis of modernity, this reemphasis on theatricality led to the crucial perception that Milton and Shakespeare probably had more in common than class-driven, impressionistic descriptions of their style would allow. It became clear that so many of their dramatic representations from Hamlet to Satan and the author “Milton” himself were in fact manifestations of a newly emerging, highly interiorized, “autonomous” subjectivity, a subjectivity intimately related to the needs and ways of being made possible by the incipient, modern nation-state. The second direction returned to Milton’s unease with Shakespearean fancy but read it less through the social fears of mass culture than through the personal anxieties of ambitious poets. See critical tradition in Milton studies. Paul Stevens

Sheldon, Gilbert (1598 –1677). English clergyman; archbishop of Canterbury from 1663 to 1677. He enjoyed a glittering career as academic and churchman. By the time the First Civil War broke out in 1642, he was a royal chaplain, held several livings, and was the warden of All Souls College, Oxford. Those posts were variously lost, though he did minister to Charles I during his captivity. He remained hostile to Puritanism. During the Restoration, he rose to be archbishop of Canterbury and for a time chancellor of Oxford University. Milton never mentions him; however, The Dignity of Kingship Asserted (1660), a sustained critique of Milton’s Readie and Easie Way, has sometimes been claimed as Sheldon’s, though it is more usually attributed to George Starkey. Thomas N. Corns

Shelley [née Godwin], Mary Wollstonecraft (1797–1851). English Romantic novelist. She quotes from Paradise Lost in the frontispiece to her 1818 novel Frankenstein. The companionless Adam’s recriminations to his maker, taken out of context, set the tone for the monster’s bitterness

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toward his creator. During the novel, however, the monster realizes that there are important differences between him and Adam. Milton’s text is alluded to in order to point out the lack of guidance the monster has when he is created and his lack of a companion, and to suggest that his physical deformity is a mirror of his maker’s in the same way as is Adam’s beauty. The monster himself uses Milton to criticize his creator: “I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.” As this shows, the monster is one of those who believe, as William Blake did, that Milton is “of the devil’s party.” Paradise Lost is one of the three books the monster finds, and, with Plutarch and Goethe, reading it teaches him to be a political radical. In Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar see Mary Shelley as one of Milton’s “submissive daughters,” an image found in her novel Valperga in the character of Euthanasia, who learns classical languages so that she can read to her blind scholar father. Shelley’s appropriation of Milton in Frankenstein, however, is less submissive than creative and challenging. Sharon Ruston

Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792 –1822). English Romantic poet. His body of work testifies to his belief that the poet “comprises and unites” the characters of legislator and prophet. Born at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, Shelley attended Eton from 1804 to 1810 and University College, Oxford, until March 1811, when he was expelled for publishing his pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism. Shelley’s passionate opposition to tyranny in all its forms, especially as institutional authoritarianism, is a mainstay of his ever-evolving religious outlook and forms a common thread between the early poem Queen Mab (1813) and mature works such as Laon and Cythna (1817, retitled The Revolt of Islam in 1818) and Prometheus Unbound (1818 –1819). The latter poem in particular concerns the liberation of humankind from the tyrant Jupiter and the consequent dawn of a new order of universal love and freedom. In the Preface, Shelley invokes “the sacred Milton” as the inheritor of a republican tradition in poetry that awakens the “public mind” to question existing political and religious institutions, a task that Shelley believes his own generation of poets is to continue. Shelley here deems Satan “the Hero of Paradise Lost,” a notion that he further develops in A Defence of Poetry (1821) through an appeal to Satan’s unrivaled “energy and magnificence.” For Shelley,

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God’s lack of moral supremacy over Satan is “the most decisive proof of the supremacy of Milton’s genius.” Shelley shares this Romantic Satanism with Byron and, to a lesser degree, with William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. On 8 July 1822 Shelley drowned off the coast of Italy. Julian Knox, Jonathan F. S. Post

Short Parliament. Parliament that sat from 13 April to 5 May 1640. Since 1629 Charles I had ruled without recourse to parliaments, a period now known as the Personal Rule. Such a measure was feasible only by the exaction of some taxation of a dubious legality and by the careful avoidance of major expenditure, particularly warfaring. However, in 1639 he launched a campaign against the Scots to enforce the reformation of the Church of Scotland along the ceremonialist lines that had been imposed on England under the leadership of Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud. This expedition and the resulting confrontation, the first of the Bishops’ Wars, ended in failure and an expensive interim peace treaty. This was the state of affairs as Milton returned to London from his continental travels of 1638 –1639. Charles worked to retrieve his position while his emboldened Scottish antagonists, the Covenanters, suppressed episcopacy and prepared to resist another invasion. For this second campaign, Charles needed a subsidy, which required a parliamentary vote of supply. In April 1640, after eleven years of government without parliaments, what would come to be known at the Short Parliament assembled. Yet the vote of supply was deferred until the grievances of the 1630s had been addressed, even though another expeditionary force was in preparation. In early May, Charles dissolved Parliament, a move precipitated perhaps by the government’s anticipation of an imminent plan to bring a Scots declaration of their grievances before the House of Commons in a maneuver to align the oppositional forces in both kingdoms. See Russell (1995).

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Sidney, Algernon (1623 –1683). Soldier, republican activist, and political writer. He was the second surviving son of Robert Sidney, Second Earl of Leicester. In arms for the parliamentary side, he fought with distinction at the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644. He opposed Pride’s Purge and the trial of Charles I but was active in the Purged Parliament, where he collaborated with Sir Henry

Vane the younger. In 1652 he joined the Council of State. Like Vane, he was generally opposed to the Cromwellian Protectorate. He returned to the higher circles of political power with the restoration of the Purged Parliament in 1659, serving on a diplomatic mission to the Baltic. He spent much of the Restoration in exile, coming back to England in 1677 and staying to settle his financial affairs on the death of his father. In 1683, in the aftermath of the Exclusion Crisis, he was arrested and tried for treason, a charge that was substantiated in court on the evidence of the manuscript of his Discourses Concerning Government. Milton possibly met him in 1638 during his visit to Paris; Sidney had accompanied his father on a diplomatic mission there. He was a member of the Council of State that Milton served, and he worked with Vane, whom Milton admired. It is improbable, however, that Algernon was the Sidney that Milton praised in Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda; almost certainly the allusion is to his older brother, Philip Sidney, Viscount Lisle, a member of the Protectoral Council of State. However, Sidney’s Discourses, first published in 1698, invite comparison with Milton’s writings, especially The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, as justification for republican government. Thomas N. Corns

Sidney, Sir Philip (1554 –1586). Elizabethan courtier. He was born at the family estate of Penshurst, the nephew of two powerful uncles: the Earls of Leicester and Warwick. He was educated at Shrewsbury and Christ Church, Oxford University. After leaving Oxford without taking a degree, he traveled extensively on the Continent between 1572 and 1575 and witnessed the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris on 14 August 1572. Knighted in 1582, he married Sir Francis Walsingham’s daughter soon after. Appointed governor of Flushing in 1585, Sidney was mortally wounded at the Battle of Zutphen on 17 October 1585 and died in Arnhem. He was a key author and patron of the Elizabethan avant-garde. Sidney’s works, all published posthumously, were very influential: Astrophel and Stella (c. 1582, published 1591), A Defense of Poesy (c.1580, published 1595), and Arcadia (written 1570s, possibly completed 1580, published 1590). In Eikonoklastes, Milton identified one of Charles I’s prayers as Pamela’s Prayer in book 3 of “the vain amatorious Poem of Sr Philip Sidneys

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Arcadia,” and in the 1650 edition Milton greatly expanded on the indecorous implications of the inclusion of a prayer “offer’d to a Heathen God,” including the page reference to Arcadia, and suggested that the incident was another example of Charles I’s arbitrary and tyrannical trampling of his subjects’ rights.

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on “July 3. 1652.” Whether Sikes simply found the sonnet among Vane’s papers or Milton sent it to him for inclusion in the biography is unknown. Sikes is also author of The Book of Nature (1667), which is reminiscent of Paradise Lost in aspects of its discussion of Adam’s knowledge and human will. Feisal G. Mohamed

Jim Daems

Siena. City in Tuscany located south of Florence. Founded by the Etruscans, it later passed to the Romans and the Lombards; in the twelfth century it became a self-governing commune. Rivalry with Florence made Siena the center of proimperial Ghibellinism in Tuscany in the early thirteenth century. Siena was an early and important banking center until surpassed by Florence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Conquered by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1555, it was ultimately ceded to Florence in 1557. Galileo spent part of his decade of house arrest with the bishop of Siena. Milton visited the city during his travels through Italy in 1638 –1639. Julia M. Walker

Simmons, Samuel (1640 –1687). London printer. In 1662 he was made a member of the Stationers’ Company by his father, Matthew Simmons (see stationers), and he later took over his parents’ shop in Aldersgate Street until his death. Simmons printed, among other books, Milton’s Accedence Commenc’t Grammar (1669) and the first three editions of Paradise Lost (1667, 1674, 1678). Milton’s epic was the first copy that Simmons had entered as his in the Stationers’ Register, and his contract with Milton on 27 April 1667 for publishing Paradise Lost remains the earliest surviving formal agreement of its kind in England. The contract stipulates that Simmons pay Milton £5 for each edition and suggests that Milton may have also received two hundred complimentary or wholesalepriced copies. See Dobranski (1999), ODNB.

Sigonius, Carolus [Sigonio, Carlo] (1524 – 1584). Humanist and historian. Educated at Venice, Padua, and Bologna, he was a significant figure in classical historiography, applying humanist methods to the study of Roman and Greek antiquity. Milton had read his De Occidentali Imperio (Frankfurt, 1618; first published in 1577) and his De Regno Italiae (Frankfurt, 1591; first published in 1575) and included notes from them in his Commonplace Book. In Of Reformation, he cites Sigonius as a Catholic writer who nevertheless sets the record straight on the early finances of the papacy and he draws on him infrequently in The History of Britain. Thomas N. Corns

Sikes, George (fl. 1662 –1667). Author. Little is known of him or of his relationship with Milton. Upon the execution of Sir Henry Vane the younger, Sikes composed the hagiography The Life and Death of Sir Henry Vane Kt. (1662), a surreptitious work anonymously written and printed. The inclusion of Milton’s sonnet “To Sir Henry Vane the Younger,” the first time the poem appeared in print, is also anonymous: the poet is described as a “learned Gentleman” who sent the sonnet to Vane

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Simon Magus. The magician of Acts of the Apostles chapter 8 and, according to the patristic heresiographers, the “fount of all heresies.” The conjurer of Samaria, he was called “the great power of God” (Acts 8:10) by the Samarians. Impressed, however, by the apostles’ powers, Simon tried unsuccessfully to buy the ability to confer the Holy Ghost from Peter and John. He is discussed by Irenaeus and Epiphanius and appears in various apocrypha, notably the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions. Simon was thus the type of the false messiah, and from him derives the term “simony,” or the buying and selling of sacred objects and ecclesiastical preferments. Simon was thus a convenient symbol to be used by antiprelatical controversialists, including Milton. William Poole

sin. The New Testament locates the notion of sin as disobedience and rebellion against divine authority (Hebrew, pesha) in a context of repentance and forgiveness. The combination of biblical concepts of sin with classical ethics by classical moralists

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(Aristotle) and Christian moralists (Augustine) informed Milton’s definition of sin. The moral rigidity evidenced in his treatises is attributable to his Puritanical concept of sin. Milton distinguishes among original sin (identified more with transgression than concupiscence); civil and political sin; national sin; and personal sin committed “quite apart from that sin which is common to all” (De Doctrina Christiana), a sin that repentance, grace, good works, and obedience to the Word can repair. Temptation, disobedience, and redemption are the key themes in Milton’s major poetry. Satan’s first disobedience in Paradise Lost generates Sin, a “sign / Portentous” (2.760 – 61), whose allegorized encounter with her father and lover produces Death, recalling James in the New Testament: “when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death” (1:15; De Doctrina Christiana). The “double-formed” Sin (PL 2.741) is modeled on Scylla in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Echidna in Hesiod’s Theogony, and the dragon Errour in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. The disobedience of Adam and Eve unleashes sin into the world (PL 10.585 – 89) and infects “all mankind” (10.822), as evidenced in the panorama of sins in Paradise Lost, books 11 and 12. The Son’s redemption of humanity results in a felix culpa (12.469 –78), a concept that the angel Michael qualifies. In Paradise Regained the Son’s obedience and resistance to temptation represent the victory over sin. Elizabeth Sauer

Skinner, Cyriack (1627–1700). Pupil, friend, and biographer of Milton. He was the grandson of the famous jurist Sir Edward Coke. He probably joined Milton’s nephews, Edward Phillips and John Phillips, as pupils of the poet about 1643, perhaps as a boarder. He was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in 1647. He was possibly responsible for introducing Andrew Marvell to Milton early in the 1650s, during which time Skinner and Milton lived close to one another in Petty France. They remained friends and Skinner may occasionally have acted as one of Milton’s amanuenses. His manuscript life of Milton, formerly misattributed to John Phillips, is second only to that of Edward Phillips in its usefulness and is particularly valuable for those years when Edward was living out of London, from 1648 to 1655 and again from 1665 to some time between 1669 and 1672. It survives in the papers of Anthony

Wood and supplied Wood with much information for his own life. In the final months before the Restoration Skinner participated in meetings of the Rota Club. On 5 May 1660 Milton transferred to him some of his government bonds, presumably in an attempt to protect them from confiscation. The measure proved abortive since the restored monarchy refused to honor the debts of previous regimes. Milton wrote two social sonnets to him, “Sonnet XVIII” (“Cyriack, whose grandsire on the royal bench”) and “To Mr. Cyriack Skinner upon His Blindness.” Thomas N. Corns

Skinner, Daniel (?1651– after 1682). Editor of Milton’s unpublished writings. He was the son of a London merchant, also called Daniel, and the brother of Mary, the resident mistress of Samuel Pepys. Although he represented himself in correspondence with Pepys as Milton’s unofficial literary executor, no life record, beyond his own assertion, connects him with the poet, and probably he acquired from Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips the Milton manuscripts with which he was associated. These possibly include the papers now known as the Commonplace Book and the Trinity Manuscript. He certainly acquired the manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana and at least had access to Milton’s Letters of State. In the case of the former, he produced a fair copy of the first part, and in the case of the latter, a new transcription. Absenting himself from Trinity College, Cambridge, where he held a fellowship, he attempted to publish both in the United Provinces. Under pressure from Sir Joseph Williamson, he acceded to the instruction to hand the manuscripts over to the government, using his father as an intermediary. See Campbell et al. (2007).

Thomas N. Corns

Sleidan [Sleidanus], Johannes [Philippson, Johann] (1506 –1556). Historian. His great work was a history of the Reformation, commissioned by Philip of Hesse on the recommendation of Martin Bucer and his disciple Johannes Sturm. Sleidan visited England on a diplomatic mission in 1545. His history was published in Latin in Strasbourg in 1555 as De Statu Religionis et Reipublicae Carolo V Caesare Commentarii. An English translation appeared in 1560. Milton cites the Latin version

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frequently in his Commonplace Book. The copy of the Commentarii held by the New York Public Library has been identified as Milton’s and contains marginal annotations in what appears to be his hand. See ODR.

Thomas N. Corns

Smectymnuus. Pseudonym used by five Presbyterian divines who wrote a scholarly attack on a defense of episcopacy by Joseph Hall and began a pamphlet war that eventually prompted two contributions by Milton. The name was created from their initials: Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew Newcomen, and William Spurstowe. Marshall and Calamy were famous preachers. Young had been Milton’s tutor before the boy attended St. Paul’s School and apparently kept in close touch with Milton, who addressed “Elegia Quarta” to him. Young is thought to have been the primary author of the first work the five produced. Milton’s involvement in the controversy is almost certainly owing to his relationship with Young. Joseph Hall’s An Humble Remonstrance to the High Court of Parliament was published anonymously in January 1641. Smectymnuus replied to Hall in March with their first tract, An Answer to a Booke Entituled, An Humble Remonstrance. This ninety-three-page work divided Hall’s argument into individual points and answered it in eighteen sections. Most of the tract dealt with church government, although early sections brought up the issue of liturgy and prescribed prayer, a sore point for Puritan clergy. Following the work was a short Postscript, often attributed to Milton, reviewing English history to show that bishops had consistently challenged and eroded royal sovereignty. Hall responded in April with A Defence of the Humble Remonstrance, a section-by-section refutation of Smectymnuus’s arguments. Smectymnuus replied in June with the 219-page Vindication of the Answer to the Humble Remonstrance, the longest work in the series. Hall concluded the discussion with his Short Answer to the Tedious Vindication, which appeared in September. Meanwhile, Milton published Animadversions, his attack on Hall’s Defence, in July. The pen name of the five ministers drew attention, and references to “Smectymnuus” or “Smec” can be found in many anti-Puritan satires, notably poems of John Cleveland and Samuel Butler’s

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Hudibras. Later in the 1640s Milton broke openly with his Presbyterian allies, first over divorce and the liberty of publication, and then over the trial and execution of King Charles I. Henry S. Limouze

Smith, Sir Thomas (1513 –1577). Scholar, diplomat, and political theorist. He was regius professor of civil law at Cambridge University and a friend of Sir John Cheke, whose endeavors at the humanist transformation of higher education he largely endorsed. He served as a diplomat and secretary of state during the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth I. In 1549, during the stormy years of the protectorate of Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, he wrote The Discourse of the Commonweal, although it was not printed until the 1580s. It was reprinted several times in the seventeenth century. His recent biographer has claimed for it the status of the most impressive piece of economic analysis produced in the sixteenth century. Milton cites it five times in his Commonplace Book. Thomas N. Corns

Socinianism. A theological movement, considered heresy by the Catholic Church and by most Protestant faith communities, in which the divinity of Christ is denied. It shares common ground with the much older Arian heresy, although it differs in that it denies Christ’s existence before the Nativity. Both accept his continued existence after his ascension. Socinianism was explicitly stated and endorsed in the Racovian Catechism, which Milton licensed. Its immediate origins were in the writings of the Italian Protestant reformers Faustus and Laelius Socinus (1539 –1604; 1525 –1562). Socinian antitrinitarianism has strong analogies with the arguments about the nature of Christ in Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana. Thomas N. Corns

Socrates Scholasticus (c. 388 – 450). Church historian. “Scholasticus” alludes to his profession as a lawyer. He was born and lived in Constantinople and wrote a history of the Byzantine church in the fourth and early fifth centuries, continuing the account of Eusebius and drawing extensively on the records of church councils of seminal importance in the development of doctrine and discipline. Milton draws on his account quite frequently in his

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Commonplace Book, usually in association with other historians of the eastern church. Thomas N. Corns

Solemn League and Covenant. A 1643 agreement between the Long Parliament and the Scottish Covenanters designed to unite the opponents of Charles I in an alliance that would protect Presbyterian church government in Scotland and ensure the eradication of episcopalianism in England. It provided the basis for the entry of Scottish forces into the First Civil War. Signing was expected of adult males as a test of loyalty to the regime. Milton’s brother Christopher Milton signed in 1646 as part of his submission to Parliament. Milton had presumably signed some time earlier, though there is no record of it. Eventually, the covenant proved an ideological stumbling block to republicans and the leaders of the New Model Army, in that it included an undertaking “to preserve and defend the King’s Majesty’s person and authority.” For Milton, as he engages the issue in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, the clause appears supererogatory in a document really drawn up to bind English and Scottish Puritans to the promotion of church reform. Thomas N. Corns

Solon (c. 640 – c. 558 B.C.). Athenian lawgiver traditionally credited with laying the foundations of Athenian democracy by creating the Areopagus and Boule (upper and lower councils of government). Milton praises Solon (alongside the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus) in The Reason of ChurchGovernment and Of Education. In An Apology Against a Pamphlet he invokes Solon against those who are “cold neuter in the cause of the Church.” The allusion is to Plutarch, who relates that Solon disenfranchised anyone who remained neutral in times of political strife. In Tetrachordon Milton praises Solon for respecting the spirit before the letter of the law. In Eikonoklastes he praises Solon and Lycurgus for holding tyrants and kings accountable to law. John Leonard

“Song. On May Morning.” Poem by Milton. First published in Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645), it reflects the style of Ben Jonson. The brief lyric invokes without judgment controversial practices

and ceremonies to “bring in May,” as Robert Herrick describes such customs in “Corrina’s Going A-Maying.” The poem has been associated with the thematically similar “Elegia Quinta”; it also offers a mundane counterpart to the versions of pastoral found in “Lycidas.” The brief song, written about 1629, and the great monody composed in 1637 complement each other in terms of their imagery. One testament to the work’s musicality is its incorporation into the text of Benjamin Britten’s Spring Symphony, a choral and orchestral piece composed in 1949. Stephen M. Buhler

Song of Solomon. Book of the Old Testament, also known as the Song of Songs and as Canticles. Modern biblical scholars regard it as most probably a short anthology of love poems. The ascription of the poems to King Solomon and his circle is suggested by internal evidence and tradition, although it would seem to be of a later date of composition. However, since patristic times, the text has been interpreted allegorically and was “generally beleev’d” to be a celebration of Christ’s reciprocated love for the church, as Milton with a hint of skepticism notes in Tetrachordon. The language of the Song of Solomon permeated the love poetry of western Europe, though it is not a conspicuous element in Milton’s own verse. See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

“Sonnet I” (“O nightingale, that on you bloomy spray”). Poem by Milton. Probably written c. 1628 –1630 and published in Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645), Milton’s first sonnet mixes Italian and English influences in ways that anticipate the complexity of his more mature sonnets. The rhyme scheme and structure follow Italian models (esp. Petrarch and Giovanni Della Casa), but the poem’s primary conceit has native English roots. Sir Thomas Clanvowe’s “The Cuckoo and Nightingale” (then attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer) associates the birds with erotic love and poetic singing (Milton’s “amorous power” and “soft lay”), and Edmund Spenser’s “Amoretti XIX” presents the cuckoo (Milton’s “rude bird of hate”) as a symbol of cuckoldry (cf. Ovid’s tragic story of Philomela in Metamorphoses 6). Gregory Kneidel

“Sonnet VIII”

“Sonnet II” (“Dona leggiandra” [Charming lady]). Poem by Milton. The first two lines announce, via a reference to the River Reno, which runs through the Emilia region in Italy, the name of Milton’s avowed beloved and the putative inspiration for his short sequence of sonnets in Italian. Her identity has provoked much speculation. Since the Italian sonnets are usually dated c. 1628 –1630, before Milton’s tour of Italy, she may have been a friend of Milton’s friend Charles Diodati; perhaps one Emilia Varco (from varco, the last word in line 2); or simply a necessary fiction for Milton to experiment with and, in retrospect, mature out of Petrarchan love poetry. The poem’s conceits are usually deemed conventional (for example, the bow and arrows of love), but, as with his choice to write in Italian, Milton eschews much of the pathos associated with outmoded English Petrarchanism. Gregory Kneidel

“Sonnet III” (“Qual in colle aspro” [As on some rugged mountain]). Poem by Milton. It offers a poetic account of his decision to write and publish a short sequence of sonnets in Italian written in the somewhat antiquated style of the seicento sonneteers Torquato Tasso, Pietro Bembo, Benedetto Varchi, and Giovanni Della Casa (Milton’s edition of poems by the last two is now in the New York Public Library). The speaker claims that amor has aroused “the strange flower of a foreign language,” thus inciting him to exchange English for Italian or, in the river metonymy also used in “Sonnet III,” “the fair Thames for the fair Arno.” The concluding exclamation, which longs for heaven’s gardener (that is, God) to cultivate of his “dull heart and hard breast,” mixes a suggestion of Platonic assent with language that insists on the speaker’s fundamental humanity. This horticultural image originates in Dante (Purgatorio 30.115 –20) and, paired with the initial analogy to the young shepherdess (pastorella) watering a “lovely foreign plant,” frames the poem with images of loving human and divine cultivation. On publication and dating, see “Sonnet II.” Gregory Kneidel

“Sonnet IV” (“Diodati, e te ’l dirò [Diodati, I’ll tell you something]). Poem by Milton. Its central contrast is between the stock features of English beauty (the golden tresses and rosy cheeks of line 5; cf. Milton’s “Elegia Prima” 51–72) and the new or rare pattern (nova idea [line 6]) of loveliness em-

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bodied by the foreign beauty (Pellegrina bellezza [line 7]) for whom the speaker, like so many poetic lovers before him, has unwittingly fallen (caddi [line 4]). Her black eyes and lashes identify her as Italian, and her idealized proud bearing and calm radiance have suggested to some commentators the high-mindedness of Plato and Dante. Milton’s most immediate source seems to be Petrarch’s canzone “Ben mi credea,” 7.3 –5. On publication and dating, see “Sonnet II.” Gregory Kneidel

“Sonnet V” (“Per certo i bei vostr’ occhi” [Believe me, lady, your beautiful eyes]). Poem by Milton. It is usually considered Milton’s least original sonnet. The initial conceit (the lady’s eyes as scorching suns) is entirely conventional in both the Italian and English Petrarchan traditions, as is its rigidly antithetical development. On publication and dating, see “Sonnet II.” Gregory Kneidel

“Sonnet VI” (“Giovane piano, e semplicetto amante” [Young, unassuming, and artless lover]). Poem by Milton. This final sonnet in Italian answers the previous one—in which Milton emits and then internalizes a lover’s distressed sigh— with an offer of his heart as a “humble gift” [umil dono] (3) to his beloved Emilia. But “Sonnet VI” betrays little distress and less humility. On publication and dating, see “Sonnet II.” Gregory Kneidel

“Sonnet VII” (“How soon hath time”). Poem by Milton. It first appears in the fair copy of Letter to a Friend (1633) in the Trinity Manuscript. Milton begins it with a reference to his twentythird year, thus setting the sonnet around December 1632. Taking the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matt. 8:20), who balk at the lesson that all should be paid the same regardless of hours worked, Milton applies that paradigm to the work of a good man. Julia M. Walker

“Sonnet VIII” (“When the Assault Was Intended to the City”). Poem by Milton. A fair copy in the Trinity Manuscript bears the title, with the (deleted) date “1642”; the sonnet is untitled in Poems

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“Sonnet VIII”

of Mr. John Milton (1645) and Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions (1673). The title points to an occasion during the First Civil War. After the Battle of Edgehill (October 1642), the Parliamentarians retreated, leaving London undefended. The royalists advanced, causing panic in the city. Milton’s house lay outside the city walls (hence “defenceless doors,” 2). Battle was averted at the confrontation at Turnham Green, after which King Charles I withdrew (13 November). The poem probably dates from November 1642. Robert Graves reads the octave (addressed to a royalist officer) as a serious attempt to barter fame for clemency. This reading ignores the tone of wry irony that is audible from the first line. But critics differ as to how far the irony goes. The sestet moves from London to ancient Greece, but critics differ as to the suggested relationship between the two worlds. John Leonard

“Sonnet IX” (“Lady, that in the prime of earliest youth”). Poem by Milton. It first appeared in Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645) and dates from 1642 –1645. It is addressed to an unnamed woman or girl of exceptional virtue, and critical discussion has concentrated on identifying this addressee. Prominent suggestions include Milton’s first wife, Mary Powell; Lady Alice Egerton; the mysterious Miss Davis, whom Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips claimed Milton considered marrying after Mary Powell’s desertion (cautiously postulated by David Masson; see Dr. and Miss Davis); and the ten-year-old Miss Thomson, daughter of the subject of “Sonnet XIV.” David Urban argues that Milton is addressing both Powell and himself as their wedding approaches. “Sonnet IX” contains plentiful biblical allusion, including references to Matthew 7:13 –14 (“the broad way,” line 2); Luke 10:42 and Ruth 1:14 (“The better part with Mary and with Ruth / Chosen thou hast,” 5 – 6); and the parable of the virgins in Matthew 25:1–13 (“virgin wise and pure,” 14, cf. 9 –14). David V. Urban

“Sonnet X” (“To the Lady Margaret Ley”). Poem by Milton. The fair copy in the Trinity Manuscript uses the title. Edward Phillips, Milton’s nephew and biographer, reports that Lady Margaret Ley and her husband were Milton’s neighbors and close friends in the early 1640s, after his first wife, Mary Powell, had left him. The sonnet is usually dated 1642 –1645. The poem begins in Hor-

atian fashion by praising the addressee’s descent. James Ley had died thirteen years before the English civil wars broke out, but Milton claims him for the parliamentarian cause by attaching political significance to the fact that he had died four days after Charles I’s dissolution of Parliament on 10 March 1629. As in “Sonnet VIII,” Milton draws a parallel between his own time and ancient Greece, and Milton’s account accords with the best scholarship of his own time. His likely source is Lucian, who reports that Isocrates, on hearing of the defeat of Athens, groaned, quoted a line from Euripides, sighed “Greece will lose her liberty,” and then dropped dead (Longaevi 23). John Leonard

“Sonnet XI” (“A book was writ of late”). Poem by Milton. Probably written in 1647, it conveys his frustration about the vehement opposition from some Presbyterians to his pro-divorce tracts, particularly Tetrachordon (1645), which is named in the poem’s first line. The speaker, who seems to represent Milton himself, expresses bewilderment that the word Tetrachordon should prove to be more difficult than the Scottish Presbyterian names that dominate the everyday discourse about ongoing intellectual and military conflicts. The “turn” occurs after the sestet’s first three lines, after which the speaker addresses the spirit of the Tudor scholar of Greek Sir John Cheke. Kevin De Ornellas

“Sonnet XII” (“I did but prompt the age”). Poem by Milton. In the Trinity Manuscript it has the headnote, “On the detraction wch follow’d upon my writing certain treatises.” Probably written in 1646, it rehearses similar frustrations to those expressed in “Sonnet XI”—but “Sonnet XII” is more acerbic. The tone appropriates comic modes of derogation, depicting those who criticized Milton’s divorce tracts as bestial and unthinking, but the subject matter is serious because the critics’ alleged ignorance is linked ultimately to the general chaos and fissures that characterize the 1640s. It has been suggested that the vituperative bite in the poem’s invective is delivered not at the Presbyterians who attacked Milton’s support of divorce, but at some extremist sects that embraced the tracts’ call for liberty in an unrestrained, excessively enthusiastic manner. But the clear attack on the supposed tyranny of Milton’s critics suggests, surely, that those he criticizes are in a powerful position— one

“Sonnet XVII”

not held by most of the marginal sects that embarrassed Milton. Kevin De Ornellas

“Sonnet XIII” (“To Mr. H. Lawes, on his Airs”). Poem by Milton. It is a tribute to Milton’s sometime collaborator Henry Lawes, and Milton seems to have devoted considerable thought to it. Three versions exist in the Trinity Manuscript, two in Milton’s own hand; the titles alone refer, in turn, to friendship, to public support for publication (in a draft dated 1645), and to Lawes’s skill as a composer of “Aires,” or melodies. The poem first appeared in print along with other commendatory verses in Henry Lawes’s Choice Psalmes (1648), an avowedly political collection that commemorates his brother William Lawes as a martyr for the royalist cause. The inclusion of Milton’s sonnet has understandably attracted comment. Friendship is a constant theme in the poem, which begins with the familiar “Harry” and concludes with a reference to how Dante honors his friend, the musician Casella, in Purgatorio 2.76 –114. Stephen M. Buhler

“Sonnet XIV” (“When faith and love”). Poem by Milton. The Trinity Manuscript contains three drafts of it, one of which bears the header “On the religious memory of Mrs Catharine Thomason my Christian friend deceased 16 Decem. 1646.” The best-known version derives from the 1673 collection Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions. Dating the poem is uncomplicated. Thomason’s husband, the bookseller George Thomason, is a seminal figure for scholars of Milton’s period because his huge collection of pamphlets and tracts makes up the British Library’s crucial “Thomason Tracts” resource. Little is known about Catharine, however. She gave birth to at least nine children, six of whom were still alive in 1664; her library was left in her husband’s will; and she inspired “Sonnet XIV,” a sonnet-epitaph that valorizes her as an exemplary, God-worshipping friend of Milton’s. Kevin De Ornellas

“Sonnet XV” (“On the Late Massacre in Piedmont”). Poem by Milton. In April 1655, at the command of Charles Emmanuel II (duke of Savoy), an army of Italian, French, and Irish soldiers led by the Marquis of Pianezza attacked an ur-Protestant sect, the Waldensians, who lived in two Piedmontese

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valleys of the Alps west of Turin. Milton composed this sonnet in response to Protestant England’s indignation over the Piedmontese Easter massacre. As well as producing the sonnet, Milton wrote letters of protest to European rulers in Oliver Cromwell’s name and is said to have drafted an address delivered by Sir Samuel Morland to the court in Turin. No manuscript version of “Sonnet XV” exists; the only text is that of 1673 (see Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions). The received tradition most often locates the poem in terms of the JudeoChristian tradition. “Sonnet XV” recuperates the Hebrew lament in its diction, tone, and style and compares the Waldensians’ suffering to that of the ancient Israelites during the Babylonian exile. The sonnet’s dialogue with mid-seventeenth-century political and religious contexts is also the subject of several critical studies. Elizabeth Sauer

“Sonnet XVI” (“When I consider how my light is spent”). Poem by Milton. With “To Mr. Cyriack Skinner upon His Blindness” and “Sonnet XIX” (“Methought I saw my late espoused saint”), it is one of the three English sonnets in which Milton specifically mentions his blindness, and the only one in which he confronts it directly. Traditionally interpreted to be a sigh of resignation, the poem’s final line is also apparently so interpreted by the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, who cite it to illustrate popular usage in the seventeenth century of the verbs “serve,” “stand,” and “wait.” Others, however, have seen it as a determined refusal to succumb to despair. Carol Barton

“Sonnet XVII” (“Lawrence of virtuous father”). Poem by Milton. It could have been written during any winter between 1651 and 1657, when Milton, in his dwelling near St. James’s Park, London, was visited with apparent regularity by Edward Lawrence—although scholars generally date the poem to the winter of 1653 –1654. The sonnet celebrates friendship as revivifying relaxation. Lawrence’s father, Henry Lawrence, was the chairman of the Cromwellian Council of State. The opening line remarks, factually, on the merits of the Lawrence family: “virtuous father virtuous son.” The first quatrain goes on to contextualize the paean to friendship within the harshness of a cold, gloomy winter. In the second quatrain it is argued that time will move faster in the dank winter if company is

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“Sonnet XVII”

enjoyed. The sestet works as a sort of inventory of pleasures enjoyed jointly by the speaker and the addressee: music, singing, and wine shall be encouraged. Such delights are “Attic” because they are straightforward, are appreciated in moderation, and are valued respectfully. It was first printed in Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions (1673). Kevin De Ornellas

“Sonnet XVIII” (“Cyriack, whose grandsire on the royal bench”). Poem by Milton. Written in or around 1655, it is addressed to Cyriack Skinner, whom Milton tutored in the early 1640s. It is the first of two poems addressed directly to Skinner. The other, more famous poem, “To Mr. Cyriack Skinner upon His Blindness,” is a response to Milton’s blindness that celebrates Milton’s work in a retrospective manner; but “Sonnet XVIII” is written very much in the present tense—it is, like “Sonnet XVII,” an assertion of the positive benefits that are gained through necessary leisure and rest. Skinner’s grandfather was Sir Edward Coke, a chief justice of the King’s Bench during the Jacobean era. Coke was admired by Parliamentarians for his record of opposing both James I’s and Charles I’s exploitation of the royal prerogative. The first quatrain celebrates the learning and pedagogy of the great lawyer. The second quatrain expresses the speaker’s desire to leave study behind— for the time being. The sestet is directed, rather didactically, to the young Skinner. It is imperative to relax and to forget about urgent, complicated issues for certain periods. It is Christian and moral to accept and relax during any God-given “cheerful hour.” Well-motivated industry is certainly beneficial and requisite, but productivity is compromised by the carrying of “superfluous burden.” Kevin De Ornellas

“Sonnet XIX” (“Methought I saw my late espoused saint”). Poem by Milton. It was probably written in 1658. As in a number of Milton’s late sonnets, it is difficult not to align the speaker closely with Milton himself. The “late espoused saint” whose resurrection is dreamed about may be Milton’s first wife, Mary Powell, who died in 1652, or it may be his second wife, Katherine Woodcock, who died in early 1658 (the most likely subject)— or the unnamed figure may represent an idealized conflation of the two wives. A classical allusion, to Euripides’s drama Alcestis, in which the dedicated wife Alcestis is resurrected, adds to the awareness that

the speaker’s vision was forlorn and impossible, one constructed through the unconscious channel of a dream. The speaker wakes up bereft of the perfect, saintly woman—and, because of blindness, bereft of all sight. Day, which brings light to most people, paradoxically brings darkness and awareness to this speaker. Kevin De Ornellas

sonnets. Milton wrote twenty-three sonnets between the late 1620s and the end of the 1650s. Ten appeared in Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645) (with five written in Italian) and nine in Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions (1673). Four sonnets—to Thomas Fairfax, Oliver Cromwell, Henry Vane, and Cyriack Skinner—were not published in Milton’s lifetime, probably because their praise of Parliamentarians made them too politically volatile after the Restoration. As a result of their publishing history, the numbering of these sonnets differs in modern editions: for example, “Methought I saw my late espoused Saint” (see “Sonnet XIX”) is numbered XXIII by Merritt Y. Hughes and E. A. Honigmann and XIX by John Carey and John Leonard. Considerations of Milton’s use of the sonnet form might also include three other works: “On the New Forcers of Conscience,” a sonnet with a “tail”; the “Canzone” in Italian; and the Chorus’s final lines in Samson Agonistes. How one reads these poems will depend in part on one’s view of the history of the sonnet. The form emerged in thirteenth-century Sicily and became culturally dominant through Petrarch’s Canzoniere, the paradigmatic articulation of the unrequited desire of a lover for an absent mistress. Over the next two centuries, poets in nearly every vernacular produced works based more or less on Petrarch that, while extremely varied, were especially implicated in nationalist and imperial projects. The domestication of the sonnet in English can be divided into three important moments: the first sonnets by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, which circulated mostly in courtly coteries in the 1530s and 1540s; the publication of Richard Tottel’s Miscellany in 1557, which tied the sonnet to a largely nonaristocratic, urban readership; and the publication of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella in 1591, which initiated a vogue for sonnet sequences that lasted about twenty years and included works by Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, William Shakespeare, Michael Drayton, Lady Mary Wroth, and others. Sonnet sequences became less popular in the seventeenth century, but their after-

Spain

life is readily apparent in devotional poetry (for example, John Donne and George Herbert), which adapts the desire for a mistress to the desire for God; and in the popularity of epigram books (for example, Ben Jonson and Robert Herrick), a new sort of rime sparse with multiple and often contradictory political stances. Milton’s debt to these traditions is typically complex. Formally, he employs Italian rhyme schemes, and he never uses the final couplet introduced by Surrey. Thematically, his sonnets often redeploy the energy of intense, private emotion for a variety of public declarations: about the importance of poetry, about friendship and coalitions of varying types, about Protestant political causes. Milton’s sonnets vitally participate in the dramatic reconfiguration of the relations between public and private characteristic of seventeenth-century poetry generally. Christopher Warley

Son of God. See God. Sophocles (c. 496 – 406 B.C.). Tragedian. The second of the great Greek tragedians, successor to Aeschylus, whom he beat for the first time in the Great Dionysia of 468 b.c., and precursor of Euripides, he is the author of seven extant tragedies. His plays are deeply pious and show a strong sense of moral justice. In Of Education, Milton recommends that pupils, once they have achieved the necessary linguistic competence, should be encouraged to read aloud and in part memorize orations and tragedies “to endue them even with the spirit, and vigor of Demosthenes or Cicero, Euripides, or Sophocles.” Milton cites Sophocles occasionally in his prose. In Of Reformation he cites an example of the burden of truth telling from “the wise Poet Sophocles” and translates a couple of apposite lines from his Electra to clinch a point in An Apology Against a Pamphlet. In the headnote to Samson Agonistes, Sophocles appears alongside Aeschylus and Euripides, “the three tragic poets unequalled yet by any, and the best rule to all who endeavour to write tragedy.” See OCCL.

Thomas N. Corns

Southey, Robert (1774 –1843). English poet. He was born in Bristol and educated at Westminster and Balliol College, Oxford. In the 1790s he shared with Samuel Taylor Coleridge radical support for

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the French Revolution; the two collaborated on The Fall of Robespierre (1794), a drama influenced by Milton’s depiction of Satan. Joan of Arc (1796) is his most Miltonic attempt at an epic: its success prompted Charles Lamb to expect “Southey one day to rival Milton.” Increasingly conservative, Southey joined the Quarterly Review in 1809 and was appointed poet laureate in 1813. His preface to A Vision of Judgment (1821) impugns younger contemporaries such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and ( James Henry) Leigh Hunt as belonging to the “Satanic school,” comparing their morality and politics to Milton’s Belial, Moloch, and Satan. The poem, a tribute to George III, finds Milton in Southey’s heaven implausibly reconciled with monarchy. Daniel Robinson

Sozomen [Hermias Sozomenus] (c. 400 – 443). Church historian. Born in Bethelea in Palestine, he lived and died in Constantinople. He sought to write a history of the Greek church from 324 to 439, though his extant work ends at 425. He provided the western tradition with much of what it knew about the early history of Christianity, especially in the eastern empire, although his writing depends heavily on that of Socrates Scholasticus. Milton evidently knew Sozomen’s work through his Historiae Ecclesiasticae Libri VII (Basel, 1611) and from Ecclesiasticae Historiae Autores (Paris, 1544). He cites him several times in his Commonplace Book and draws silently on him from time to time in Of Reformation. He is cited occasionally in Eikonoklastes and in The History of Britain. Thomas N. Corns

Spain. By the end of the Thirty Years War and the completion of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Spain’s control in Europe no longer extended beyond Sicily and Flanders. Spain did, however, set its sights on New World territories. Despite the 1588 defeat of the Spanish Armada, Spain maintained a stronghold in the English cultural imagination as a papist nation and political threat, as evidenced in Oliver Cromwell’s anti-Spanish writings and military campaigns. The last of England’s wars to take place during Milton’s position in the Cromwellian government was that with Spain, which began in late 1655 and lasted until the Peace of the Pyrenees (1659) when Spain surrendered parts of the Spanish Netherlands to France. In A Declaration of His Highness (1655),

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attributed by some to Milton, Cromwell observes that English-Spanish relations were soured “since the Reformation of Religion, and the Discovery of the West Indies.” At the opening of Parliament on 17 September 1656, Cromwell’s justifications for his war against Spain included the internal threat posed by the enemy: “Papists in England they have been accounted, ever since I was born, Spaniolised”; and, moreover, they “shake hands” with the English Cavaliers. Struggling to reconcile his loss to Spain in the West Indies with his providential role to establish the republic and expand the empire, Cromwell uses Spain as a crucible of imperial difference, contrasting his policies with those of the Spanish papists, whose history was scarred by the expulsion of the Jews, the recent brutality against the New World Indians, and the denial of liberty of conscience to English Protestants. Probably in anticipation of Cromwell’s success in the Hispaniola expedition, William Davenant produced The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (1658), which may have been inspired by The Tears of the Indians (1656) by Milton’s nephew John Phillips. Phillips’s tract is an English translation of Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevíssima relación de la destrucción de las Indias. Milton views Spain through a Protestant, antiroyalist vision. In Areopagitica, for example, he aligns censorship with the interrelated papal and Spanish measures of repression, including the Inquisition. In Eikonoklastes he adds kingship to the mix by likening Charles I to the Pope and Spanish monarch; by maligning the king for his indebtedness to Spanish romances, including Jorge Montemayor’s 1559 Diana; and by accusing him of conspiring with Spaniards. Little evidence exists about Milton’s knowledge of England’s war with Spain, though in his capacity as Secretary for Foreign Tongues, Milton translated letters and documents, including those in Spanish. Letters to France that he prepared in May–July 1658 included reference to Dunkirk and its surrender and reassignment to England (Fallon [1993]). Milton again branded the English monarchy as Spanish by attacking the imminent successor to the throne for being “traind up and governd by Popish and Spanish counsels” (Brief Notes upon a Late Sermon). Charles II raised regiments which fought on the part of the Spaniards in Flanders when Cromwellian forces helped defeat them at the 1658 Battle of the Dunes. Elizabeth Sauer

Spanish Match. The attempt in 1623 to marry the future Charles I to a Spanish princess. England’s James I used dynastic marriages for diplomacy. From 1604, a match between his older son, Henry, and a Spanish princess had been considered. Following the 1613 marriage of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick, Elector Palatine, and Henry’s untimely death, James sought a Spanish bride for Charles. Because marrying into the most powerful Catholic power might restore peace (and return Elizabeth and Frederick to lands lost during the Thirty Years War), James intensified the unpopular negotiations. In 1623, Charles and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, traveled incognito to Madrid to force a climax in the negotiations for the Infanta Maria’s hand, returning to England without a bride. Most English people, who loathed a marriage uniting their nation to Catholic Spain, celebrated. Charles married the French princess Henrietta Maria in 1625. Andrew Fleck

Sparta. Ancient Greek city-state. It is both celebrated and reviled for its orderly government and stern military way of life. Milton in The Reason of Church-Government uses the phrase “prelatical Sparta” to describe the philistine education of the professional clergy of the Episcopal Church. In Areopagitica he describes the Spartans as “muselesse and unbookish.” On the other hand, he praises Sparta’s balanced constitution in Of Reformation, Eikonoklastes, and Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda. In The Readie and Easie Way he cites a Spartan precedent for the perpetual Grand Council he recommends for England. In Of Education he advocates a middle course between the extremes of Sparta and Athens, which trained their youth, respectively, “for warre” and “for the gown.” The fallen angels in Paradise Lost are most alluring when they march “In perfect phalanx to the Dorian mood / Of flutes and soft recorders” (1.550 –51)— a picture that recalls Plutarch’s description of marching Spartans (Parallel Lives, Lycurgus 22). Milton never mentions that aspect of Sparta that most offends modern sensibility: its cruel oppression of the helots. John Leonard

Speed, John (1552 –1629). Historian and cartographer. Perhaps best known now for his innovative maps of Britain, he also assembled a History of Great

Spurstowe, William

Britaine, first published in 1616. Milton evidently found it useful and cited it frequently in his Commonplace Book and in the Postscript he supplied for Smectymnuus. Thomas N. Corns

Spencer, Alice, Countess of Derby (1559 –1637). Aristocrat. She was born into a noble family and twice married well. Her first husband was Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange (later Earl of Derby). In 1600 the countess married again (this time secretly), becoming the third wife of Sir Thomas Egerton; as part of the same alliance, Alice’s daughter Frances married John Egerton, Sir Thomas’s son and heir (and the future First Earl of Bridgewater). The marriage ended with the death of Sir Thomas in 1617, whereupon Lady Alice withdrew to Harefield and lived the life, in Milton’s phrase, of a “rural queen.” The dowager countess was a notable patron of poets and dramatists. She had performed in court masques, such as Samuel Daniel’s Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (1604) and Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness (1605) and Masque of Beauty (1608), and she played a part in Milton’s Arcades (see masque). Her patronage continued at Harefield, where she mounted masques in which her grandchildren could act. However, in 1631 the family was engulfed in a national scandal, the trial and execution of Mervin Touchet, Second Earl of Castlehaven (see Castlehaven scandal). Thomas N. Corns

Spenser, Edmund (c. 1552 –1599). Poet, and administrator in Ireland. Probably born in London and educated at Merchant Taylors under the humanist Richard Mulcaster, he proceeded, as a sizar, to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge (B.A. 1573, M.A. 1576), where he became friends with Gabriel Harvey. Spenser served as secretary to John Young, bishop of Rochester, and moved in the literary circle of Sir Philip Sidney. In 1580 Spenser left for Ireland as secretary to Lord Grey, then Elizabeth I’s Lord Deputy of Ireland. During Grey’s tenure, and after his recall, Spenser continued to serve the English administration in a variety of posts while compiling estates from confiscated rebel lands—most notably Kilcolman in Munster. Following the outbreak of the Tyrone Rebellion in 1598, Kilcolman fell to the rebels and Spenser left for England, carrying letters for the Privy Council. He died in London and was buried at the expense of Robert Devereaux, Second Earl of Essex.

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In 1589 Spenser traveled to London to have books 1–3 of The Faerie Queene published. He apparently read parts of the work to the queen, who granted Spenser a pension of £50 per annum. The six-book Faerie Queene was published in 1596, and the work as we have it today, with the Mutability cantos, was first published in the first folio edition in 1609. The influence of Spenser’s romance epic, and his shorter poetic works, can clearly be seen in Milton’s poetry, particularly Paradise Lost. For Milton, the poet was the “sage and serious . . . Spencer,” and The Faerie Queene also provides interesting allusions in Milton’s prose works. Like Spenser’s, Milton’s government posts implicated him in Irish affairs. In March 1649 Milton was commissioned by the Council of State to compose a response to the Articles of Peace proclaimed in Ireland by James Butler, Twelfth Earl and First Duke of Ormonde, on 17 January. Milton’s perspective on Ireland in Observations upon the Articles of Peace may well have been significantly influenced by his reading of Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland. Written about 1596, Spenser’s Irish tract was not published until 1633 in a bowdlerized version by James Ware, dedicated to Thomas Wentworth. We know that Milton read Spenser’s View, as two entries in his Commonplace Book specifically cite the tract. Jim Daems

Spurstowe, William (?1605 –1666). Clergyman. The son of a London merchant, he was educated at Emmanuel and St. Catharine’s Colleges, Cambridge (B.A. 1623, M.A. 1630), and elected to a fellowship at the latter institution. He was in 1637 presented by John Hampden with a living in Buckinghamshire. As opposition to the church policies of William Laud grew bolder, he played a prominent part in the group of godly ministers that was centered on Edmund Calamy. He was a member of the writing team Smectymnuus, which produced two antiprelatical tracts, and received the support of Milton. He was a member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines and became an advocate of settling the Church of England along Presbyterian lines on the Scottish model (see Presbyterianism). He migrated to a living in Hackney and remained actively engaged in the church politics of the metropolis through the 1640s and 1650s. He opposed the execution of Charles I and supported the Restoration. Nevertheless, like many moderate Puritan ministers, he was ejected from his post

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by the Act of Uniformity (1662). Thereafter, he lived in retirement. Thomas N. Corns

Star Chamber. See Court of Star Chamber. Starkey, John (c. 1630 –1690). Bookseller. From the months before the Restoration onward, he showed a predilection for publishing books on constitutional theory and political history and emerged in the late 1670s as a fiercely anti-Catholic activist with connections to those proto-Whigs most engaged in the Exclusion Crisis. Allegedly implicated in the Rye House Plot to assassinate Charles II, he fled to Amsterdam and took up permanent residence, aiding in 1688 the production of Williamite propaganda. In 1671, somewhat outside his usual range of activity, he published Milton’s Paradise Regain’d. A Poem. In IV Books. To Which Is Added Samson Agonistes. Thomas N. Corns

stationers. In a general sense, members of the book trade; in a specific sense, members of London’s Stationers’ Company. (The restriction of its application to people who deal in paper and writing products is a later development.) It is important to distinguish the different roles undertaken by members of the early modern book trade in the production of printed books. A printer was responsible only for the physical production of a printed text, a text that usually ended up for sale in the shop of a retail bookseller. In between stood a wholesale bookseller, who sold copies directly to retailers, and a publisher, who was responsible for financing the cost of the printing. (The term “publisher” developed its own specific trade meaning in the seventeenth century.) Distinguishing among these roles for any one printed text is, however, difficult: not only did early modern practice apply the same term, “bookseller,” to the different roles of publisher, wholesaler, and retailer, but it was very common for a single individual to occupy two or more roles. It was possible, for example, for a bookseller to act as a publisher, wholesaler, and retailer, or for a printer to act as a publisher. As a result, perfectly honest book imprints from the early modern period can be misleading; “printed by” can, on occasion, refer to the person who made the printing happen (that is, the publisher) while “to be sold by” refers to the wholesaler of a particular edition, not the re-

tailer. Moreover, given the prevalence of “shared printing” (that is, sharing the job of printing a text among more than one printing house), identifying the single printer of a particular text with absolute certainty is difficult. Unlike many of its continental counterparts, England’s book trade was almost entirely confined to a single city, London. London’s dominance over the book trade was partly a function of its political, economic, social, religious, and cultural preeminence within the kingdom; however, it was further enhanced by the national powers granted to the Stationers’ Company under the terms of its 1557 incorporation that effectively restricted the technology of printing to members of the company. This is not to dismiss the significance or influence of the university presses established by royal charter at Oxford University and Cambridge University in the sixteenth century, but in terms of output and market, London was by far the superior to both. Milton, for example, himself a Cambridge graduate, had only one significant work published at a university press: “Lycidas” in Justa Edovardo King Naufrago (1638), printed at Cambridge by Thomas Buck (d. 1670) and Roger Daniel (fl. ?1620 –1666). Under the terms of the 1637 Star Chamber Decree, the number of printing houses operating in London was restricted to twenty-four. However, the decree lapsed with the abolition of the Court of Star Chamber in 1641, and by the early 1660s Michael Treadwell estimates that there were almost sixty printing houses active in the city. An ill-fated attempt was made to restrict numbers once again in the 1670s, but by the end of the century the number had once again reached about sixty. MILTON AND THE BOOK TRADE

Stephen Dobranski argues that scholars have generally undervalued or misunderstood the nature of Milton’s relationship with London’s book trade: either they assume that “Milton transcended the typical business relationships among authors, printers, and booksellers,” or they “have posited an antagonistic relationship between Milton and his publishers.” Dobranski instead argues that there was a collaborative relationship between Milton and the book trade that allowed the poet to shape an independent authorial persona that, ironically, has “obscured” the nature of that relationship for subsequent scholars. D. F. McKenzie and Joad Raymond also both emphasize Milton’s sophisticated use of print. McKenzie identifies the “amphibolous state” of Milton’s polemical writing, inhabiting the “interstitial space” between print, manuscript, and

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speech: “Milton moves easily and positively into the double role of a speaker and writer.” Raymond describes Milton as “a canny author, attuned to the making and selling of books and pamphlets”; he was “neither a coterie author . . . nor . . . a prototype of the professional author . . . rather, he occupied the intermediary sphere of a remunerated writer who chose the marketplace as the most effective means of addressing a broad public.” PUBLICATIONS TO 1645

Milton was evidently in contact with members of the book trade—albeit as a purchaser of books—as early as 1634 when he wrote to Alexander Gil the younger, announcing that he would shortly be “in London among the booksellers” (Dobranski). However, Milton did not enter the marketplace in earnest as an author until the early 1640s; before that date, his works had mostly circulated in manuscript form. A notable exception to this is A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, printed in 1637 by the London printer Augustine Mathewes (fl. 1619 –at least 1653) for Humphrey Robinson (d. 1670), the latter already on his way to becoming one of London’s most successful booksellers. Mathewes was deprived of his printing press in that same year, but he appears to have continued printing as a journeyman; he perhaps printed Milton’s “Epitaphium Damonis” (1640?) for private circulation. Nonetheless, it was with his decision to enter the public debates on the nature of the church in 1641–1642 that Milton began to establish a series of professional relationships with London printers and booksellers. His first three publications, Of Reformation, Of Prelatical Episcopacy, and Animadversions (all 1641), seem to have been printed by Richard Oulton (fl. 1633 –1643) and Gregory Dexter (fl. 1637–1644) (although Oulton alone perhaps printed Of Reformation), all for the bookseller Thomas Underhill (d. 1670). Oulton and Dexter had both been apprentices in the printing house of Edward Allde, and later his wife Elizabeth, and it appears that Dexter’s wife, Abigail, was Oulton’s sister. Both men were significant printers of radical material during the early 1640s, but of the two, Dexter was evidently the more notorious. In trouble with the Court of High Commission as early as 1637, he was also imprisoned twice by the House of Commons in the summer of 1641, and in March 1642 he was summoned to the Commons in connection with some unlicensed printing. Oulton seems to have ceased printing in 1643, while Dexter, after a raid on his printing house by officers of the Stationers’ Company in February 1644, sold his

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equipment and his “copies” (his rights to print certain books) later that year and moved over to New England where he died, probably in 1700. Underhill, on the other hand, remained active in London throughout the 1640s and 1650s. The most junior of the three men, he was identified as the printer of a handbill against the 1643 peace proposals and was also a leading figure in the internal quarrels of the Stationers’ Company in the mid-1640s. A stalwart Presbyterian by 1645, he also published Richard Baxter. Milton’s tracts The Reason of ChurchGovernment (1641) and An Apology Against a Pamphlet (1642) were printed by Edward Griffin the younger (d. 1652) for John Rothwell (fl. 1632 – 1660). Griffin, the son of printers Edward and Anne Griffin, had taken over the family printing business in 1637 and remained active until his death when he was succeeded by his wife Sarah. However, for The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), Milton turned instead to the printers Thomas Paine (or Payne) (fl. 1630 –1657) and Matthew Simmons (c. 1608 –1654). Paine and Simmons had been apprentices together under the printer John Dawson, a working relationship they continued once both were freed, formally becoming partners in 1640. Paine made a name for himself in the 1640s as a notable radical printer, publishing William Walwyn and becoming closely associated with the Levellers. Similarly, Simmons was a printer much favored by Independents and radicals, but unlike Paine, he and his family forged a closer professional relationship with Milton— one that continued into the 1670s (see below). Simmons printed The Judgement of Martin Bucer (1644) and probably both of Milton’s 1645 divorce tracts Colasterion and Tetrachordon. He may also have been involved in printing Areopagitica (1644) and Of Education (1644), a work entered by Underhill in the Stationers’ Register in June 1644. Areopagitica was issued with a bare imprint: “Printed in the yeare, 1644.” This was not a particularly unusual form, but given the work’s direct attack on the established system of licensing and licensers (see licenser), a system of which the Stationers’ Company was a tacit supporter, it would have been presumably politic for the relevant printer and bookseller to remain anonymous. For his first poetry collection, Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645), Milton turned to an established London bookseller, Humphrey Moseley. The collection was printed by Ruth Raworth (fl. 1645 –1648), the widow of John Raworth (d. 1645), who had been a former apprentice, like Oulton and Dexter, of the Allde printing house.

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Ruth remarried in 1648; her new husband, Thomas Newcombe, was a former apprentice of Dexter’s and published a number of Milton’s polemical works during the 1650s. PUBLICATIONS 1649 –1660

Milton’s return to print in 1649 marked a new phase for him as an author. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), a defense of regicide, was published only two weeks after Charles I’s execution and seems to have been instrumental in Milton’s appointment by the Council of State as Secretary for Foreign Tongues. Later that year, as part of his official duties, Milton produced Observations upon the Articles of Peace and, more famously, Eikonoklastes, a counterblast to the immensely popular hagiography of Charles I, Eikon Basilike. All three works were printed by Simmons (despite the rather curious fact that the printer had entered Eikon Basilike into the Stationers’ Register in March), who became a printer to the Council of State that same year. The revised edition of Eikonoklastes (1650) was printed by Newcombe (who would follow Simmons as a printer to the council in 1651), with the wholesalers for this edition named as the London booksellers Thomas Brewster (d. 1664) and Gregory Moule (fl. 1649 –1651). Little is known of Moule beyond his brief partnership with Brewster, who had a more notable career, publishing radical works from at least 1645. Brewster was a printer to the Council of State until the end of 1653. He maintained his radical sympathies into the Restoration and was one of a number of members of the trade charged with sedition in 1664. Found guilty, he was fined, pilloried, and imprisoned; he died shortly afterwards. His widow, Anne, carried on his business. In 1649 the Frenchman Claudius Salmasius issued an attack on the regicide; Milton was commissioned to write a response, a work that would make his name across Europe. Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio appeared in 1651, printed by another printer to the council, William Dugard; it was promptly pirated by a number of continental printers. Dugard also printed a French translation of Eikonoklastes to be sold by the bookseller Nicholas Bourne (c. 1584 –1660). Bourne, apprenticed to the printer Cuthburt Burby, whose equipment and shop he inherited, is best known for his activities as a publisher (with Nathaniel Butter) of newsbooks up to 1640. A senior and prosperous member of the Stationers’ Company (serving twice as its master), he continued to be interested in publishing foreign

news. His health and career began to decline in the late 1650s, and he died in 1660. Most of Milton’s remaining publications up to the Restoration (Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda [1654], Pro Se Defensio [1655], Preface to Ralegh’s Cabinet-Council [1658], A Treatise of Civil Power [1659], The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings [1659], and The Readie and Easie Way [1660]) were printed by Newcombe. The Preface to Ralegh’s Cabinet-Council was printed for Johnston, who republished it as Aphorisms of State in 1661; Johnston was better known as a printer and was imprisoned in 1666 for offensive printing. The Likeliest Means and The Readie and Easie Way were both to be sold by the bookseller Livewell Chapman. The 1650s also saw a reissuing by Rothwell of two of Milton’s 1642 pamphlets as An Apology for Smectymnuus (1654). “PARADISE LOST”

The Restoration brought Milton’s career as a polemical writer to an abrupt halt; in August 1660 some of his published works were ordered to be burned. He returned instead to poetry and, more specifically, to Paradise Lost. Its publication in 1667 marked a return for Milton to the printing business of the Simmons family. Matthew Simmons had died in 1654 and had been succeeded by his wife, Mary Simmons (d. 1687), who continued to register works in the Stationers’ Register and bind apprentices. Their son, Samuel Simmons (1640 – 1687), formally joined the business in 1662 and apparently formed a partnership (of which Mary was initially in charge) that lasted until at least 1673. Their premises were large (the largest printing house to be recorded on London’s 1666 hearth tax roll), and in 1668, they were recorded as working two presses with five workers and one apprentice. Although Samuel’s name appears on imprints from 1662, Paradise Lost was the first work he entered in his own name in the Stationers’ Register. A detailed contract between Simmons and Milton— one of the earliest such agreements to survive—was drawn up; Milton received £5 in advance with a further £5 (and two hundred copies) payable at the end of the first three impressions. Samuel also printed Milton’s Accedence Commenc’t Grammar (1669) and the later 1674 and 1678 editions of Paradise Lost. The publisher Jacob Tonson, writing later in the century, described Simmons as someone who “was lookt upon an able & substantial printer” (Dobranski). Mother and son died within weeks of each other in 1687.

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As the imprint to the first edition of Paradise Lost attests, the work was sold by a number of London booksellers. Peter Parker (d. 1712), Robert Boulter (fl. 1665 –1683), and Matthias Walker were named as the booksellers of the 1667 and 1668 issues, each man based in a different part of the city. Parker was later involved in the printing of Bibles on behalf of Oxford University in direct competition with the King’s Printing House. Less is known of Boulter, but in 1674 –1675, the widow of Thomas Underhill transferred all her husband’s “copies” to Boulter (Boulter was also named as the bookseller for the 1673 reissue of Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio [1672]). The names of Samuel Thomson (or Thompson) (d. 1668) and Henry Mortlock (d. 1714) were added to the second Paradise Lost issue of 1668. Thomson was described at his death as “a good husband and industrious man in his profession,” while Mortlock thrived as “one of the most prolific publishers of the time” (Henry Plomer), serving three times as master of the Stationers’ Company. The 1669 reissue lists only Thomas Helder (fl. 1666 –1703) as its bookseller; Helder was also the bookseller for the 1675 reissue of the 1674 edition. Simmons sold his rights to Paradise Lost to the bookseller Brabazon Aylmer (fl. 1671–1707) in 1680, who in turn sold half to Jacob Tonson; the imprint of the resulting famous fourth edition of 1688, however, lists only Tonson and Richard Bentley (d. 1697) as the booksellers. Bentley is not to be confused with Bentley the leading classical scholar and later editor of Milton, but was known as a publisher of novels and plays to the extent he was described as “novel Bentley” by contemporaries. The 1688 edition was printed by the rather overlooked figure of Miles Flesher (1657–1688), who— despite being the grandson of his namesake, the most successful and enduring printer of the first half of the century, and despite printing a number of items during the 1680s—is not even listed in the standard book trade dictionaries for this period. Tonson received the rest of the rights for Paradise Lost from Aylmer in 1690 and republished both Paradise Lost and Milton’s Poetical Works in 1695. (Thomas Hodgkin [or Hodgkins] [d. 1724] was named as the printer of the 1695 Paradise Lost edition.) LATER POETRY AND PROSE

Milton’s Accedence Commenc’t Grammar (1669), printed by Simmons, was sold by John Starkey, who was later a partner of Richard Chiswell (1640 – 1711). Chiswell, involved in the third edition of Milton’s History of Britain (1695), was primar-

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ily a wholesaler and had an extremely successful career. Starkey was also the bookseller for both the 1671 and 1680 editions of Paradise Regained. The printer of the 1671 edition, John Macock (d. 1692), also printed editions of The History of Britain in 1670 –1671 and 1677–1678. Macock, active as a printer since the 1640s, had been appointed printer to Parliament with John Streater in 1660, and by 1668 he was operating one of the largest printing houses in the city. He served as master of the Stationers’ Company in 1680. The booksellers named on the successive imprints of The History of Britain were James Allestry (d. 1670), Spencer Hickman (fl. 1670 –1677), John Martyn (1617/18 –1680), and Mark Pardoe (fl. 1677–1686). Interestingly, all but Pardoe were official “printers” (that is, publishers) to the Royal Society. Allestry, a relation of Richard Allestree the clergyman and a former apprentice of George Thomason, was “one of the largest capitalists in the trade” (Plomer); he and Martyn (already an established literary publisher) were formally appointed as Royal Society “printers” in 1663, publishing the Philosophical Transactions. The Great Fire of 1666 almost destroyed Allestry’s business; he resumed trading in 1669 but died the following year. Martyn continued until his own death in 1680, with Hickman (a former apprentice of Allestry) joining him as a publisher for the Royal Society. Little is known of Pardoe, although he published an edition of Leviathan in 1686. In 1673 Milton’s Of True Religion appeared without any printer or bookseller named on the imprint, but a contemporary catalogue listed Thomas Sawbridge (d. 1692) as the publisher. Sawbridge was prolific as a publisher, and he was succeeded in 1692 by his son George Sawbridge the younger (fl. 1692 –1716) (see below). In the same year, a second collection of Milton’s poetry appeared, Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions (1673), published by Thomas Dring the younger (d. 1695). The following year, 1674, Aylmer brought out a collection of Milton’s correspondence, Epistolarum Familiarum Liber Unus, following negotiations with the poet. In the same year Aylmer also published the last work of Milton’s to appear before his death, a translation, the Declaration, or Letters Patents. He was also behind the posthumous publication of A Brief History of Moscovia in 1682; Flesher was the printer on this occasion. POSTHUMOUS PUBLICATIONS

Works by Milton continued to be published after his death, including ones previously unprinted.

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Character of the Long Parliament (1681) was printed for Henry Brome (d. 1681), a bookseller with a long-standing and close association with the Tory Roger L’Estrange, publishing the latter’s journal the Observator from April that year. The 1688 edition of Paradise Regained was printed by Robert Everingham (fl. 1680 –1700) for the bookseller Randal Taylor (fl. 1664 –1700). Other publishers of Milton at this time included Joseph Watts (fl. 1685 – 1692), who published The Arts of Empire (1692); and John Whitlock (fl. 1683 –1696), who wholesaled Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in 1695 as part of Tonson’s collected works. The third edition of The History of Britain (1695) brought together Chiswell, Bentley, Robert Scott (c. 1632 –1709/10), and George Sawbridge the younger as publishers and Abel Swall and Timothy Child (d. 1721) as booksellers. Scott was a major retailer (Samuel Pepys was a customer), who both imported books and acted as a London agent for Oxford University Press; he sold off much of his stock (twenty-five hundred items) in 1688 but continued to run a bookshop. He was master of the Stationers’ Company in 1691. Sawbridge, himself a scientific publisher who succeeded to the business of his father Thomas in 1692, is not to be confused with his namesake and relative, the important medical publisher who died in 1681. Swall and Child were partners between 1691 and 1697. Another issue of The History of Britain of 1695 simply noted the work as printed by Chiswell and sold by his former apprentice, Nathaniel Rolls (fl. 1692 –1697), who was primarily a publisher of schoolbooks. See Dobranski (1999), McKenzie (1980), ODNB, Plomer (1907), Plomer et al. (1922), Raymond (2002).

Ian Gadd

Stationers’ Company. London trade and craft body with particular responsibilities for the book trade and its related crafts (principally bookselling, bookbinding, and, from 1557, printing). Formally recognized by the city authorities in 1403, its structure and activities (for example, binding and freeing apprentices) were typical of a city company, but unlike most other London companies it wielded a national jurisdiction: under the terms of its 1557 incorporation, only members of the company (or those granted patents by the crown) were allowed to “practise or exercise . . . the art or mistery of printing” (Edward Arber). Not all members of the London book trade were company members, and not all company members were members of the book trade; nonetheless, the company dominated the English book trade in the sixteenth and seven-

teenth centuries, with its powers being confirmed and extended during this period by decrees of the Court of Star Chamber, ordinances from Parliament, and, from 1662, statute. The lapsing of the terms of the 1662 statute in 1695 effectively brought the company’s printing monopoly to an end but did not otherwise signal an immediate decline in terms of its wealth and power. The company records survive from 1554 (in the company’s hall); these include the Stationers’ Register, apprenticeship and freedom records (indexed to 1800 [D. F. McKenzie]), and records relating to the company’s lucrative joint-stock venture, the English Stock, established in the early seventeenth century. The vast majority of the records have been microfilmed and a catalogue compiled (Myers). See also stationers. See Blagden (1960), Myers (1987, 1990).

Ian Gadd

Stationers’ Register. A register kept by the Stationers’ Company from at least the 1550s that recorded the titles of items published by members (and occasionally nonmembers) of the company. The register is the most consulted and misinterpreted record belonging to the company. That nearly half of new titles published before 1640 were not entered has been cited as evidence of a large amount of illicit publication, but, as Peter Blayney argues, this is to misunderstand fundamentally how the register operated. A member wanting to publish a work had to seek the authorization (“license”) of senior company officers; this license protected the work from being reprinted or commercially threatened by other members without the permission of its owner. Obtaining this license was compulsory, but recording this license in the register (which required an extra fee) as “an insurance policy” was not: “certainly before 1622, and probably until 1637, a stationer was not required to spend money on an entry in the register” (Blayney). The register was transcribed by Edward Arber to 1640 and by G. E. Briscoe Eyre to 1700. See Arber (1875 –1894), Blayney (1973).

Ian Gadd

Sterry, Peter (1613 –1672). Independent divine, chaplain to Oliver Cromwell at Whitehall. Born in Southwark, he was elected fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, when Cambridge Platonists such as Benjamin Whichcote and John Smith set the intellectual tone. He was a determined

Stow, John

opponent of Presbyterianism and preached, often lyrically, a personal and spiritual Christianity that kept aloof from concerns about the forms of worship and ecclesiastical polity. A member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, he preached before Parliament and in 1649 was appointed chaplain to the same Council of State that employed Milton. He later became chaplain to the Lord Protector, who frequently assigned him to committees dealing with politico-religious questions, sometimes with Milton. After 1660 he tutored some boys and preached in conventicles until he died. See BDBR, ODNB.

Norman T. Burns

Stillingfleet, Edward (1635 –1699). Bishop and theologian. He was educated at Cambridge University and achieved rapid success as rector, preacher, and author. In 1678 he became dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral; his influence was such that all four thousand copies of his sermon that November against the Popish Plot sold in one day. In Irenicum (1661) he tolerantly advocated a cooperative church polity for Anglicans and Presbyterians, for which he was accused by some of favoring Thomas Hobbes. His Origines Sacrae (1663) defended the divinity of the Bible and advanced the orthodox doctrine, which Milton shared, that creation was a freely voluntary act of God (cf. PL 4.412 –15, 7.170 –73). Origines Britannicae (1685) studied the historical roots of the British church, and his Rational Account of the Grounds of the Protestant Religion (1664) was a notable anti-Catholic apologetic. It has been confidently claimed that the opening of Milton’s final polemic, Of True Religion (1673), refers to Stillingfleet’s 1671 Discourse Concerning the Idolatry Practiced in the Church of Rome. In 1678 Stillingfleet became bishop of Worcester, a post he held for the last ten years of his life, during which time he attacked in several tracts John Locke’s opposition to the Trinity as promulgated in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Christopher Baker

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the living. His circle of associates included Thomas Gataker, who was to preach his funeral sermon. Thomas Young was Gataker’s protégé, and it was probably through Stock that Young secured employment from John Milton, Sr., as tutor to his son. Young Milton would often have heard Stock preach. His sermons and his few publications were fiercely anti-Catholic. Thomas N. Corns

Stoicism. A philosophy that emphasized reason’s ability to bridle the passions. It originated in ancient Greece before migrating to Rome. Stoicism valorized the temperate person’s equanimity when confronting Fortune’s mutability. Although its materialism made this philosophy fundamentally incompatible with Christianity, some attempted to syncretize the two systems. The similarity of Stoic constancy and Christian prudence in response to Fortune’s fickle wheel offered one tantalizing point of contact. In the sixteenth century, Justus Lipsius revitalized Stoicism as a response to the rapid changes of post-Reformation Europe. During England’s civil wars, this neo-Stoicism offered psychic refuge from the conflict. As a controversialist, Milton had little patience for those who espoused the Stoics’ calm restraint in the midst of momentous changes. When Joseph Hall responded to the vigor of Smectymnuus with dispassionate indifference, Milton’s Apology Against a Pamphlet recast the bishop’s equanimity as sloth, claiming that even wise Solomon reacted with zeal, rather than “affections so equally temper’d,” when he learned of his own faults. In his prose, Milton’s zeal left no room for Stoic apathy. Milton turned to Stoicism after his own change of fortunes during the Restoration. The heroes of Milton’s later poetry, especially Samson and Jesus, embrace a modified Stoicism: both the “calm of mind all passion spent” that concludes Samson Agonistes and Jesus’s calm rejection of Satan’s temptations in Paradise Regained, including the pride of the pagan Stoics, suggest the importance of mastering the passions. Andrew Fleck

Stock, Richard (c. 1568 –1626). Clergyman. He was educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge, which was something of a seminary for churchmen of a puritanical inclination. In his early clerical career he secured a series of valuable puritanical patrons. He became an assistant to the rector of All Hallows, Bread Street, and on 20 December 1608 he baptized Milton. In 1611 he succeeded to

Stow, John (?1525 –1605). Historian. Although not university educated, he was an energetic collector and editor of old manuscripts and an assiduous and generally accurate chronicler. He is best known for his Survey of London (1598, expanded edition 1603), which provides scholars today with easy access to detailed descriptions of the streets

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Stow, John

and churches of early modern London. For Milton, Stow’s most valuable work was his Annales, or Generall Chronicle of England, first published in 1580 and frequently reprinted. He cites it often in the Commonplace Book, whose editors have called it “one of the chief sources of his [Milton’s] knowledge of English history, as shown in Of Reformation (1641) and later.” Thomas N. Corns

Strickland, Walter (?1598 –1671). Politician and diplomat; appointed Lord Strickland under the Protectorate. Perhaps because of family connections, through his wife, with Dutch political affairs, he emerged in 1642 as a significant figure in the diplomatic initiatives of the Long Parliament toward the United Provinces, when he was appointed ambassador there. In 1645 he was recruited as a member of Parliament. After the execution of Charles I, diplomatic activity toward the Dutch intensified. Isaac Dorislaus was dispatched to assist Strickland, though his assassination proved alarming and disruptive. In a new embassy of 1651, he was joined by Oliver St. John. Attempts to persuade Dutch republicans to join with the new English regime in a close alliance were frustrated, in part through the endeavors of supporters of the House of Orange, who upheld the interests of the English monarchy. The first of the Anglo-Dutch Wars (1652 –1654) was concluded by negotiations in which Strickland played a major part. He remained active in English political life throughout the Protectorate, serving on successive Councils of State. In the confusions following the death of Oliver Cromwell, he tended to side with the senior army officers who had been closest to the Lord Protector. At the Restoration, he retired to his native Yorkshire. Milton was actively engaged as a public servant in supporting the diplomatic activities in which Strickland was principally involved, and his Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio seconds the diplomatic mission of Strickland and St. John in its measured appeal to Dutch republicanism. (Strickland had attempted to persuade the States-General to prohibit the production and circulation of Claudius Salmasius’s Defensio Regia pro Carolo I.) Strickland appears in the roll-call of Cromwellian statesmen celebrated in Milton’s Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda. Thomas N. Corns

Stubbe, Henry (1632 –1676). Author and physician. A pamphleteering contemporary of Milton’s in the Interregnum, he was also a librarian at the Bodleian Library in addition to being a physician. One of his anonymous tracts, Rosemary and Bayes (1672), figured in the 1672 –1673 pamphlet war between Samuel Parker and Andrew Marvell. There is abundant evidence that Stubbe admired Milton’s controversial prose and shared Milton’s views on freedom of conscience and the limited spiritual authority of the civil magistrate. Significant ideological parallels can be found between Stubbe’s 1659 pamphlets An Essay in Defence of the Good Old Cause, A Light Shining Out of Darknes, and a Letter . . . Concerning a Select Senate, and Milton’s Treatise of Civil Power (1659), The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings (1659), and The Readie and Easie Way (1660). James Egan

Suckling, Sir John (1609 –1642). Poet and dramatist. Born in Whitton, Middlesex, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge University, in 1623 and Gray’s Inn, London, in February 1627. He inherited his father’s estates a month later and possibly joined the Île de Ré campaign of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, that year too. Traveling on the Continent in 1629, and knighted in 1630, he served in Charles I’s embassy to Gustavus Adolphus in 1631, returning the following year to become professionally prodigal at court. He associated with other poets, scholars, and wits, including Thomas Carew, Richard Lovelace, and William Davenant, and by 1637 he had penned Aglaura (staged and published in 1638) as well as his acclaimed “The Wits” (or “A Sessions of the Poets”). He raised forces to join the king in the first of the Bishops’ Wars (1639), commissioning another troop in the second (1640), when he also wrote The Discontented Colonel (later redrafted as Brennoralt), though his military reputation was soon subjected to mockery and even allegations of cowardice. In a letter to Sir Henry Jermyn (written December 1640; printed 1641), Suckling urged Charles to take decisive military action. By March 1641 he was involved in the First Army Plot, conspiring to liberate Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, from the Tower of London by force (discussed by Milton in Eikonoklastes, chapter 9). When the plot was discovered, in May, Suckling escaped to Paris. He died within a year, possibly by suicide. His collected works appeared in Fragmenta Aurea (1646),

Sylvester, Josuah

enlarged in later editions (1648, 1658), and in The Last Remains of Sir John Suckling (1659). Suckling may have known Milton at Cambridge, but there is no evidence they met. Michael Davies

Suetonius [Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus] (c. 70 – c. 130). Roman biographer. Though writing at some remove from the events, his De Vita Caesarum [Lives of the Caesars] afforded Milton information about the Roman conquest of Britain, and he frequently draws on Suetonius in The History of Britain. He is to be distinguished from Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, who also figures in Milton’s history; the latter was sent by Nero to be commander in chief of the Roman forces in Britain. See OCCL.

Thomas N. Corns

Sulpicius Severus (c. 360 – c. 430). Historian and hagiographer. He lived in Aquitaine, a convert to an ascetic lifestyle. His Life of Martin [of Tours] established the pattern for saints’ lives in the medieval period. Milton occasionally cites it. Milton’s principal interest in him was as an apparently reliable source of information on the early church in his Sacrae Historiae Libri Duo [Two Books of Sacred History], widely available since the mid-sixteenth century. He takes notes from it in his Commonplace Book and cites it in his antiprelatical tracts as evidence that early bishops were marked by their elective poverty, an anecdote to which he returns much later in The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings, where he endorses Sulpicius Severus as “a good author.” Thomas N. Corns

Svogliati [Accademia degli Svogliati; academy of men without will]. Florentine academy. The laconic name is typical of Italian academies of the time. At the time of Milton’s two periods in Florence during his extended visit to Italy in 1638 –1639, it probably met in the family palazzo of Jacobo Gaddi in Via del Giglio (the Hotel Astoria in the early twenty-first century). Members later mentioned by Milton include Gaddi, Antonio Malatesti, and Benedetto Buonmattei. Minutes taken by Gaddi show that on 28 June/8 July 1638 an unnamed English man of letters attended a meeting of the Svogliati and expressed a desire to become a

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member. The following Thursday (5/15 July), an unnamed person, probably Milton, was elected to membership. He may have attended any or all of the meetings during the weeks that followed (there is not always a list of those present), but he certainly attended on 6/16 September, when he read one of his poems at the weekly meeting; the poem was written in Latin hexameters and is likely to have been either “Ad Patrem” or “Naturam Non Pati Senium.” Whichever poem it was, the view of the academicians was recorded in the Minute Book: they thought it molto erudita. See Campbell and Corns (2008), Haan (1998).

Thomas N. Corns

Sydenham, William (?1615 –1661). Parliamentarian army officer and politician, appointed Lord Sydenham under the Protectorate. In arms throughout the First Civil War, by 1645 he had risen to the rank of colonel. He entered the Long Parliament in a recruiter election. Although he opposed Pride’s Purge, he was active in the Purged Parliament and Barebone’s Parliament. An architect of the dismissal of the latter, he played an active part in Protectoral Councils of State, where he worked closely with Oliver Cromwell. Though not a regicide, he evidently seemed a potential danger to the state at the Restoration. The Act of Oblivion included him among those perpetually incapacitated from holding any office. Sydenham appears in the roll-call of Cromwellian statesmen celebrated in Milton’s Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda. Thomas N. Corns

Sylvester, Josuah (1563 –1618). Clothier, poet, and translator. Born in Kent and brought up by his uncle, William Plumbe, he attended the Southampton grammar school of Hadrianus Saravia, a Belgian Protestant divine. The school specialized in French, and boys who lapsed into English were punished. This early grounding in French served him well in his literary endeavors. Although Sylvester left school at age twelve to embark on his mercantile career, he continued to educate himself. A cloth merchant, he divided his time between England and the Low Countries. He gained a place in the Society of Merchant Adventurers, probably through apprenticeship. Throughout his life Sylvester avidly dedicated himself to his poetic avocation. Although he

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produced some original poetry, his most extensive work was in translation. He translated works by Odet de La Noue, Jean Du Nesme, Guy Du Baur de Pibrac, Pierre Matthieu, and Girolomo Fracastoro, but he is best known as the English conduit for the works of the French Huguenot poet Guillaume de Salluste, Seigneur Du Bartas. His most significant endeavor was the translation of Du Bartas’s La Semaine and its sequel La Seconde Semaine. Although generally noted for the accuracy of his translation, Sylvester did give these works a decidedly English imprint by substituting English place names and history for the French. Moreover, Sylvester is more staunchly Protestant and his translation marked with anti-Catholic fervor. In addition to Du Bartas’s epic and hexameral Divine Weeks, Sylvester also translated the French Huguenot’s minor poetry, including L’Uranie, which delineates the responsibilities of the Christian artist. The poem dramatizes the conversion and education of its poet-protagonist through the intercession of the muse Urania. Identifying herself as the same muse who inspired David, Urania is clearly associated with the Holy Spirit in the poem. The Du Bartasian/Sylvestrian aesthetic of Christian poetry, the adoption of Urania as the muse of divine poetry, the merging of scriptural subject matter and epic form, and the hexameral nature and the prosody of the Weeks have all been identified as models for Milton. Sylvester died in Middleburg, Zeeland. Frances M. Malpezzi

Symmons, Charles (1749 –1826). Biographer. He was the younger son of John Symmons, member of Parliament for Cardigan. He attended Westminster School and the University of Glasgow before studying at Cambridge University. Possibly the most effusive of Milton’s earlier biographers, a prolific man of letters, and sympathizer of the Whigs, Symmons is important to Miltonists chiefly for his “Life of Milton,” published with a seven-volume edition of Milton’s prose works in 1806. A second

edition appeared in 1810, and a third was released in 1822. Carol Barton

Synod of Dort. A Dutch national synod of reformed churches that met in 1618 –1619 in Dordrecht, or Dort. One hundred delegates, including twenty-five from foreign churches, gathered to settle the controversy over Arminianism. The Remonstrants, so called because of the Arminian Remonstrance of 1610, were led by Simon Episcopius (Jacobus Arminius had died in 1609). They sought a free interchange of ideas but were treated as defendants. The synod closed with an unequivocal condemnation of the Remonstrants. The “Canons of Dort” defended double predestination (God decreed the Fall of Adam and Eve as well as the fate of individuals born since the Fall) and rejected the Arminian view that predestination is conditional and based on God’s foreknowledge of freely chosen belief. See Tyacke (1987).

Stephen M. Fallon

Syriac. An eastern dialect of Aramaic. As the language of the eastern church, it served as the idiom for several early and consequential Bible translations, such as the Peshitta (see Bible, translations of). It is not known when and how Milton acquired his knowledge of the language, but he is reported to have tutored his nephews in Syriac during the early 1640s, and his Of Education (1644) recommends the teaching of this dialect. Although Milton cites the Peshitta New Testament to substantiate his own exegesis (see Areopagitica, Tetrachordon, and De Doctrina Christiana), it is questionable whether the poet relied on the original Syriac of the Peshitta as his primary source or merely consulted the accompanying Latin translation included in Immanuel Tremellius’s 1569 edition. Jeffrey Einboden

T Tacitus, Publius Cornelius (56 or 57–after 117). Historian. His place of birth is uncertain. He was a moderately successful politician and imperial administrator during the early Roman empire, living through the tyranny of Domitian’s reign and reaching the rank of governor of the province of Asia. He was a master of prose style and among the most influential exponents of terse syntax, with a gift for epigrammatic expression. As a historian, he paid careful attention to the importance of understanding the characters of the major figures in order to interpret their decisions and actions. His major works were Histories and Annals. His Germania is an important source of information about the characteristics and customs of the Germanic tribes, some of which later occupied England. He was the son-in-law of Gnaeus Julius Agricola, the Roman general responsible for the pacification of Britain as a Roman colony. Tacitus justified and celebrated his achievements in Agricola, which also describes the tribes of Britain, their customs, and the terrain and climate of the island. In The History of Britain Milton draws considerably in his account of the Roman occupation on “Tacitus who liv’d next those times of any to us extant.” Thomas N. Corns

Tallis, Thomas (c. 1505 –1585). English composer. He was organist at Waltham Abbey until the monasteries were dissolved. He was soon appointed to the Chapel Royal and kept the post for the rest of his life. William Byrd, another great figure in sixteenth-century English music, was his student and friend. Tallis maintained his Catholicism despite England’s shifting religious identity. His musical styles vary in response to changing practice, ranging from homophonic anthems to a contrapuntal masterwork, Spem in Alium, that uses forty voices. He died in Greenwich. Tallis’s music was included

in efforts by William Laud to reshape the Church of England; it also influenced the work of John Milton, Sr., who reportedly composed works for forty and eighty voices. See New Grove.

Stephen M. Buhler

Tasso, Torquato (1544 –1595). Italian poet and man of letters during the late Renaissance. He composed a pure example of pastoral drama, Aminta (1573), and the influential narrative poem Gerusalemme liberata (1581). He was also a prolific literary theorist; his Discorsi del poema eroica (1591) constitutes a fundamental contribution to the emergence of neoclassical poetics, which dominated European letters for two centuries after Tasso’s death. Milton was intensely aware of Tasso as an influential precursor in all of these areas. A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus) completes, in many ways, the dramatic tradition begun by Tasso’s Aminta. Only Paradise Lost supersedes Gerusalemme liberata as an example of Christian epic fully informed by classical precedents, and Tasso’s poem sets the standard by which Milton’s measure must be taken in this regard. The “patience and heroic martyrdom” (PL 9.32) that distinguishes Milton’s ideal of true Christian heroism stands in pointed contrast to the pietas of Goffredo, a military leader and the protagonist of Tasso’s epic. In Of Education Milton recommends Tasso’s literary theory to students, who can thereby come to understand the “true laws” of epic poetry; and during his Italian journey in 1638 –1639, Milton sought out Tasso’s first biographer, Giovanni Battista Manso, to whom he subsequently addressed a poem in Latin (see “Mansus”). Lawrence F. Rhu

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Temple, Sir John (1600 –1677). Irish knight. Born in Ireland and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, he was knighted by Charles I in 1628 and served in a variety of offices in the Irish administration, including master of the rolls. Temple’s opposition to the 1643 cessation of arms resulted in his suspension from office and imprisonment. Upon his release, he spent some time in England, where Parliament recognized his services in Ireland. His lurid Irish Rebellion was published in 1646, a tract that draws upon the 1641 depositions for its veracity, while exaggerating tales of atrocities. Such representations of the Irish Rebellion may well have influenced Milton’s views on Ireland. Jim Daems

Temple, Sir William (1628 –1699). Diplomat and writer. Born in London, he was educated at Cambridge University but left without taking a degree. His love affair with Dorothy Osborne, whom he eventually married despite her father’s opposition, is well known. He was involved with several key political negotiations on the Continent, particularly at The Hague. Offered higher offices by both Charles II and William III, Temple consistently declined and gradually retired to his estate. There he wrote on a wide variety of topics, including An Introduction to the History of Britain (1695). Temple was probably familiar with Milton’s History of Britain, though no explicit mention of Milton’s work occurs. Significantly, Milton is not considered in Temple’s writings on literature. His library, however, did contain John Toland’s Life of Milton. Biographers suspect that this acquisition was made by Temple’s secretary, Jonathan Swift. Jim Daems

Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, The. Milton, work of prose. He wrote it in the second half of January 1649 during the trial of King Charles I for treason against his subjects. It was published by Samuel Simmons on 13 February, two weeks after the king’s execution on 30 January. Though it did not mention the trial or execution, it nonetheless offered a defense of the legitimacy of that trial and execution. A few weeks later, in March 1649, Milton was offered, and accepted, the post of Secretary for Foreign Tongues, working for the Council of State in the new, postmonarchical regime. The job offer was probably secured by the republican rhetoric of Tenure.

The sixty-page, eight-sheet quarto tract was distinguished in two respects: first, in its radical contractual argument about the grounds and nature of monarchy, and second, in its disciplined yet energetic rhetoric. Milton argued that kings are elected by the people for the good of the people. Monarchy is contractual in basis. When the king no longer follows the salus populi as his main end, he ceases to be a good king and can be rightfully deposed. Milton argues that not only are lesser magistrates authorized to determine when a monarch can legally and morally be deposed, but this same authority rests in all people in the state of nature, before kings were elected, and cannot be alienated. Hence the power to judge a king, and therefore to resist a king, extends to all subjects. The Scots had, after supporting the English Parliament in its war against the king, opposed the trial and execution. The mutual resentment generated by this conflict is a major thread in Tenure. Milton argues that in fighting against their king the Scots had already rendered him less than a king in everything but name: hence they could be said to have deposed him through armed conflict, though they were too timorous, too dependent on the hollow reverential language of monarchy, to acknowledge that they had done so. The anti-Scottish sentiment of Tenure colors its language, as it influenced much of Milton’s writing in 1649. His deep-seated antipathy to Presbyterianism and its alleged antipathy to religious toleration shaped Milton’s understanding of politics within the archipelago. Tenure retains a tone of intellectual rigor and careful argument. It champions reason against the customs and blind affections that imprison men and women. Milton draws on rich biblical and (especially English) historical exempla to make his case concerning the legitimacy of resistance. A second, revised and extended edition of Tenure appeared probably in the autumn of 1649, also published by Simmons. The title page of this edition exists in three states, giving 1649 and 1650 as the date of publication (George Thomason dated his copy 15 February 1650). The revised edition may indicate satisfactory sales, or patronage by the Council of State (though there is no hard evidence of this, other than a request that Milton’s books be dispersed). Milton introduced some changes and amplifications to the text and added a series of quotations from Protestant authorities and another peroration, thereby disfiguring its oratorical structure. Joad Raymond

Theocritus

Tertullian (c. 160 – c. 225). Latin church father. He was an energetic religious polemicist, whose concerns sometimes anticipate Milton’s. As Milton noted in Of Reformation, Eikonoklastes, and Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, he argued at various times for (1) the toleration of Christianity by secular authorities, (2) the suppression of heresies within the Latin church, and (3) the separation of Christians from the immoral secular world. Milton cites from his Opera (Basel, 1634). Tertullian was a rigid moralist, and English Puritans often cited his Of Public Shows in their antitheatrical polemics. Milton draws on it in his Commonplace Book to posit the cunning mixture of good and evil in the world. Gregory Kneidel

Test Act (1673). Popular name for the Act for Preventing Dangers Which May Happen from Popish Recusants. In March 1673 the Cavalier Parliament compelled Charles II to withdraw his Declaration of Indulgence. It went on to reinforce its opposition to what it took to be Charles’s pro-Catholic policy by passing the Test Act. This required all people holding public office, civil or military, and all members of the royal households living in London or Westminster to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy (to the king as supreme head of the Church of England), to disavow the doctrine of transubstantiation (which affirms the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine), and annually to receive the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper according to the rite in the Book of Common Prayer. (A second Test Act in 1678 extended these provisions to members of Parliament.) Though Milton does not mention it in his text, the episode of the Declaration of Indulgence and the Test Act provides the context for Of True Religion. N. H. Keeble

Tetrachordon. Milton, work of prose, third of his divorce tracts. It was published on 4 March 1645. Milton’s initials appear on the title page, and his name appears in full at the end of the prefatory address to Parliament. The title means “fourstringed,” referring to the four places in scripture where marriage is discussed; Milton’s intention was to show that scripture supported divorce by showing that the “four strings” were in harmony. The argument of the tract strengthened Milton’s contention in The Doctrine and Discipline

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of Divorce that Christ’s denial of divorce was consistent with Moses’s permission for divorce. Milton now argued that by natural law instituted after the Fall (as opposed to “Scripture and Reason”), divorce was permitted for the sake of the very imperfections in postlapsarian humankind. As before, Milton’s intention was to show that extant marriage laws constituted a tyranny that alienated “human and . . . Christian liberty,” the “true dignity of man,” and his “native pre-eminence.” He also maintained the translation of Genesis 1:27 as “male and female created he him,” which allowed him to argue for the subordination of women and against the view in kabbalistic learning and in Plato that man was originally a hermaphrodite. Milton’s commentary is not driven by engagement with word definitions in original languages, nor with any other formal aspect of scriptural analysis; there is no hint of fourfold allegorical schema. This allows Milton to focus more exclusively on his line of interpretation; the tract is instead a detailed account of his reading, in which a host of authorities is marshaled to support the argument for divorce without regard for the broader set of statements that may be found in those writings, and in which paraphrase is matched by the use of italic type roughly to indicate quotation. Nonetheless, Milton claimed that he came upon his predecessor commentators only after he had completed his thinking on divorce. Even as he produced detailed scriptural commentary, Milton argued (in a way contrary to The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce) that the touchstone of judgment was natural law, as ascertained through reason. Any interpretation of any part of the Bible was wrong if it went against these principles. Nigel Smith

Theocritus (fl. first half of the third century B.C.). Poet. He was probably born at Syracuse in Sicily, at that time a Greek colony, and traveled in the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean. He is generally regarded as the initiator of pastoral poetry. His idylls include a range of minor genres. They establish many of the topoi familiar in later pastoral poets, including the lamentations of unhappy lovers. His first idyll, which contains the lament for Daphnis, was imitated by Bion and established a tradition of pastoral elegy to which Milton’s “Lycidas” belongs. The name “Lycidas” occurs in Theocritus’s seventh idyll. In Of Education Milton includes Theocritus among “those Poets which are now counted most hard,” the understanding of

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whom his proposed scheme of study would well prepare his pupils. See OCCL.

Thomas N. Corns

Theodoret (c. 393 – c. 460). Churchman and church historian. He was a prominent figure within the Antioch School of theologians. From 423 he was bishop of Cyrrhus in ancient Syria. He was actively engaged in the controversies of the early Christian church, and his teaching on the Trinity was significant in establishing the orthodoxy of Trinitarianism. In Of Prelatical Episcopacy Milton dismissed the usefulness of Theodoret’s writings about the apostolic church, as evidence for the character of episcopacy in that age, on the grounds that he was living too long after the events to be a reliable source. Milton found his church history of the years 323 – 428, variously termed Historia Religiosa or Ecclesiastical History, more useful. He cited Theodoret alongside Eusebius and Sozomen to support an argument that, in the early church, funding came not from tithes but directly from imperial reserves. See ER.

Thomas N. Corns

These Tradesmen Are Preachers in and About the City of LONDON. Anonymous broadside of 1647. It was published as part of the Presbyterian campaign against Independents, sects, and heterodoxy. It lists alleged heresies supposedly circulating contemporaneously in London, with a strong suggestion that uneducated preachers in manual trades were largely responsible for their dissemination. Milton’s alleged views on divorce, “That a man may lawfully put away his wife if she be not a meet helper,” appears as heresy 27, between extreme tolerationism and the view “That God is the Author of the sinfulnesse of his people.” A curious publication, it lists the gamut of heresies beneath cartoons of confectioners, smiths, soap-boilers, “chickenmen” (that is, poulterers), and the like, going about their daily work. See Campbell and Corns (2008), Hughes (2004).

Thomas N. Corns

ety about church members who died (literally, “who have fallen asleep”) before the eagerly anticipated Second Coming (cf. 4:13 ff.). Paul’s subsequent description of the sleep of the soul figured centrally, along with 1 Corinthians chapter 15, in Milton’s mortalist thinking (De Doctrina Christiana). See Burns (1972).

Gregory Kneidel

2 Thessalonians. Book of the New Testament. Like 1 Thessalonians, it addresses problems caused by the overeager anticipation of the Second Coming. Here the problem is not sorrow and confusion, but immorality and idleness. In exhorting the Thessalonians to avoid both, Paul explains that the day of Christ will not come until after a period of apostasy, persecution, and false miracles originating from within the established church and ruled over by “the son of perdition” (2:3). This figure was identified by English Protestants as the Pope and by Milton, more indiscriminately, as any personal opponent (see Of Reformation, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, and Of True Religion). This epistle’s central concern with the perceived delay in divine action also informs Adam’s postlapsarian anxieties in Paradise Lost books 9 –10. Gregory Kneidel

Third Civil War (1649 –1651). The last of three armed clashes between English royalists and Parliamentarians. The Second Civil War had ended with the siege of Colchester, though pockets of resistance remained for a while elsewhere. Hostilities arose again over the tensions between the republican government of England and the Scots about the execution of Charles I. Oliver Cromwell took an expeditionary force of the New Model Army north to meet them, routing a Scottish army at the Battle of Dunbar. The Scots, checked from uniting with reinforcements from the Highlands, marched south with Charles II at their head, hoping to attract recruits from English royalists. However, few joined them, and they were utterly defeated by a much larger English force, under Cromwell, at the Battle of Worcester. Thomas N. Corns

1 Thessalonians. Book of the New Testament. Probably Paul’s earliest extant epistle, it argues for the probity of his ministry and his affection for the Thessalonians themselves. Paul’s self-defense seems to have been occasioned by the Thessalonians’ anxi-

Thirty-Nine Articles. The articles of religion that define the beliefs and government of the Church of England. They derive from the Forty-Two Articles agreed upon during the reign of Edward VI,

Thomason, George

though with some variations. They were accepted as part of the Elizabethan church settlement and were printed in all copies of the Book of Common Prayer. The articles are moderately Calvinist on issues of salvation (though less so than their Edwardine precursors). Protestant doctrine on issues that separate that faith community from Catholicism are plainly stated. Church government is invested in a hierarchy of bishops and archbishops, with the monarch as head of the national church. In later life, Milton would have identified several articles with which he did not agree. However, as Milton supplicated in 1629 for his B.A., he signed articles that acknowledged his acceptance of the Thirty-Nine Articles. Thomas N. Corns

Thirty Years War (1618 –1648). The major continental conflict of the seventeenth century. Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic and then a part of the Holy Roman Empire, was the site of its flashpoint. It was a state marked by its commitment to the toleration of Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and members of other Protestant groups. However, the Holy Roman Empire, animated by the spirit of the Counter-Reformation, imposed Catholic deputies appointed to govern in the name of the emperor. In a stormy meeting in Prague, they were thrown from a first-floor window, an event known as the Defenestration of Prague. The Bohemian Protestants then chose Frederick V, the Elector Palatine, and son-in-law of James I, as their leader. Militant English Protestants advocated support for Frederick, against whom the tide of war soon flowed strongly. The king, committed to an irenic foreign policy, resisted, courting considerable unpopularity. In time, most of continental Europe took sides in the conflict, but England remained neutral. The events lend some depth of interpretation to Milton’s early Latin panegyric of the king as a blessed peacemaker (“In Quintum Novembris,” line 5), and they provide the backdrop to which he alludes in “Elegia Quarta” to Thomas Young. The continuing conflict perhaps influenced his choice of route during his continental travels of 1638 –1639. Thomas N. Corns

Thomason [née Hutton], Catharine (d. 1646). Wife of London bookseller George Thomason and subject of Milton’s “Sonnet XIV.” Niece and ward of the London bookseller Henry Fetherstone, she married Thomason, a former apprentice of Fether-

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stone who had succeeded to his master’s business, about 1631. Together they had at least nine children. See ODNB (under Thomason, George).

Ian Gadd

Thomason, George (d. 1666). London bookseller, apprenticed to the London bookseller Henry Fetherstone from 1617 to 1626, to whose business he succeeded shortly afterwards. He married Fetherstone’s niece Catharine Hutton (see Catharine Thomason) about 1631, with whom he had at least nine children. The couple’s friends included William Prynne, Henry Parker, John Rushworth (Thomason published his Historical Collections in 1659), and Milton. Thomason did not remarry after Catharine died in 1646. A partner of the London bookseller Octavian Pulleyn until 1643, Thomason set up new premises in St. Paul’s Churchyard in that year. Although he published nothing between 1646 and 1659, he was a major book importer, supplying books to both Oxford and Cambridge universities. His strong Presbyterian sympathies led to an involvement in the Love conspiracy after Charles I’s execution. (Christopher Love, a Presbyterian minister, involved fellow Presbyterians in an abortive plot to restore Charles II to the throne.) Thomason was arrested in 1651 and briefly imprisoned. Prosecution, however, never followed—thanks perhaps to Milton. Thomason never seems to have published any works by Milton although his apprentice James Allestry did (see stationers). From 1640 Thomason exhaustively collected all manner of printed and published material, annotating them with the date of publication or acquisition and often the name of the author; he received some of Milton’s copies directly from the poet. He had amassed more than twenty-two thousand items by the time he stopped collecting in 1661. After Thomason’s death, the collection remained with his descendants; however, its rebinding in the late 1670s by the bookbinder Samuel Mearne was never paid for, and so the collection passed into Mearne’s family. Despite that family’s best efforts, the collection was not sold until George III purchased it in 1761; he presented it to the British Museum the following year. Catalogued in 1908, the Thomason Tracts, as the collection is known, is an unparalleled resource for scholars of the period. See Fortescue (1908), ODNB.

Ian Gadd

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Thomson, James

Thomson, James (1700 –1748). Scottish poet and playwright. He left divinity school in Edinburgh for a literary life in London. An early review of his poem Winter (1726) praised its “genuine spirit of sublime poetry”; Thomson “bids fair to reach at length the heighth of Milton’s character” (The Seasons). Summer (1727) and Spring (1728) followed; he completed his blank verse cycle with Autumn and published The Seasons (1730). Milton reigns “A genius universal as his theme / Astonishing as chaos” (Summer 1569 –70) in Thomson’s aesthetic mix of nature, Newtonian science, and the patriot Whig politics of his patron Frederick, Prince of Wales (1707–1751). Mel Kersey

Thuanus, Jacobus Augustus [de Thou, JacquesAuguste] (1553 –1617). French historian and magistrate. Born in Paris, after studying law at Orléans, Bourges, and Valence, he entered the minor orders at the cloister Notre Dame and subsequently traveled across Europe. In 1588 he was made a counselor of state and participated in the States-General at Blois. In 1595 he negotiated the Edict of Nantes and opposed the recognition of the Council of Trent in the name of the principals of the Gallican church. After Henri IV’s death, he fell into disgrace, being merely a member of the finance council. Thuanus is remembered for Historia Sui Temporis (Paris, 1604 –1608), a would-be impartial history of France from 1545 to 1584, which Milton often quotes in his Commonplace Book. In Historia Sui Temporis Milton found the French Monarchomachs and sources for divorce. Christophe J.-B. Tournu

he retained a low profile, he was among the most powerful political figures of the decade. His career ended with the second Protectorate. He was imprisoned briefly at the Restoration but collaborated with the new regime. Thereafter, he retired from public life. He concealed his papers behind a false ceiling in his Lincoln’s Inn chambers, where they were rediscovered during the reign of William III. They constitute a major research resource for the politics of the 1650s. See ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

1 Timothy. Book of the New Testament. Modern scholars have questioned Paul’s authorship of it (and the other pastoral epistles—2 Timothy and Titus) in part because the church organization it describes (esp. 2:1–3:13 and 5:1– 6:2) is more developed than in Paul’s acknowledged letters. But it was precisely this description of the qualifications and roles of bishops, deacons, presbyters, and others that was hotly contested during Milton’s time and prominent in his antiprelatical tracts. Milton was especially preoccupied in Of Prelatical Episcopacy with the significance of Timothy’s title of “bishop,” an important piece of evidence for the scriptural grounding of episcopal church government. He determines that Timothy was not an exemplary bishop in the seventeenth-century sense, but an apostle or “Apostles extraordinary Vice-gerent” (Animadversions). The epistle also contains one of Paul’s most controversially misogynistic passages (2:11–15), which enjoins women to submissive silence and (contra Rom. 5:12) explicitly blames Eve for the Fall. See Gallagher (1990), Hill (1964).

Thurloe, John (1616 –1668). Public servant. He was a protégé and aide of Oliver St. John and was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in 1646. In 1650 he appeared in minor legal cases on behalf of Oliver Cromwell and accompanied Walter Strickland and St. John as secretary on a crucial embassy to the United Provinces. Sent back to report to the Council of State, he plainly impressed his auditors and was appointed clerk to the committee for foreign affairs. After the dismissal of the Purged Parliament in 1648 he assumed responsibility for intelligence. Thurloe was the principal secretary of successive Protectoral Councils of State and from 1657 a full member of the council in his own right. Throughout this period he was, in effect, Milton’s immediate superior in public service, and though

Gregory Kneidel

2 Timothy. Book of the New Testament. More personal in tone than 1 Timothy, it likewise figured prominently in Reformation controversies about the duties and qualifications of the clergy. It also shaped the conduct of these controversies: Roman and conformist commentators emphasized its defense of tradition (“continue thou in the things which thou hast learned” [3:14]); nonconformists and radicals its advocacy of scripturalism (“All scripture is given by inspiration of God” [3:16; a theme rehearsed by Milton, for example, in The Reason of Church-Government]); and moderates its plea to “strive not about words” (2:14). It vividly describes the wicked inhabitants of “peril-

Toland, John

ous times” of the “last days” (3:1– 6) in terms of opprobrium readily attributable to one’s opponents, which broadly accords with the spirit of Of Reformation. See Mueller (1990).

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material that he could relate to the doctrine of redemption, in his antiprelatical tracts the experiences of Titus and Timothy are central to the question of whether the status of the apostles and their immediate associates provided justification for a strong and hierarchical structure in later church government. See ODCC.

tithes. A tax levied on all fruits and products, at a rate of 10 percent, for the maintenance of the Church of England. The institution of tithes is described and justified in the Old Testament (Lev. 27:30 –32; Deut. 14:22 –24), though the New Testament is less specific, a fact that invites the abolitionist argument that they were a feature of the Jewish religion, with its priestly caste, not of Christianity. However, in England they were enforced by law from the tenth century. Radical Independents and sectaries, seeing neither biblical justification nor denominational advantage, tended to oppose them, though more moderate Puritans recognized the difficulty in supporting a professional clergy without some form of church tax. But the case for reform was more widely acknowledged, since evidently it proved difficult, especially in London, to generate income to support all the parishes. The campaign to abolish tithes went through three principal phases: in the late 1640s; in the early 1650s, especially while the Barebone’s Parliament was sitting; and again in 1658 –1659. Only in the final phase did Milton actively engage in the campaign. His tracts of 1659, Treatise of Civil Power and Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings, oppose tithes as part of a larger campaign to separate church and state and to replace the salaried clergy. Tithes remained a part of English life until the Tithe Act of 1936, though they were significantly reformed in the nineteenth century. See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

Titus. Book of the New Testament. It is one of the three so-called pastoral epistles (see also 1 Timothy and 2 Timothy). Although the authorship of Paul has, since the nineteenth century, been subject to increasingly convincing challenge, in Milton’s age their straightforward Pauline authenticity was not in dispute. Titus was identified by earlier patristic commentators as the first bishop of Crete, and indeed the epistle to him is largely concerned with church leadership and organization to combat theological error. Though in De Doctrina Christiana Milton is more concerned with gathering from it

Thomas N. Corns

Titus (fl. early first century A.D.). Apostle. The commission of Timothy and Titus in the apostolic age was of crucial significance in the seventeenthcentury debate about episcopal church government. Its apologists argued that they, in receiving their instructions from the apostle Paul, constituted the first examples of bishops and that their powers justified the extent of episcopal powers in the Church of England. As Joseph Hall in his response to Smectymnuus argued, in a passage Milton quotes to refute in Animadversions, “if our Bishops challenge any other power then was delegated to, and required of Timothy, and Titus, wee shall yeeld them usurpers.” Milton views the Pauline commission, which he cites from 2 Timothy chapter 4, as specifically intended for the particular circumstances of the times and the special qualities of the agents. He returns to the issue in Eikonoklastes. Thomas N. Corns

Toland, John (1670 –1722). Freethinker and political writer. He was born in Donegal and educated at the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh (M.A. from the latter, 1690). He rejected early the Roman Catholic faith into which he had been born, and under the sponsorship of wealthy Presbyterians, he completed his studies at the universities of Leiden and Utrecht, working there on advanced biblical exegesis. He met John Locke, with whom he later debated in print. His first major publication, Christianity Not Mysterious (1695), challenged Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), asserting that no aspects of true Christianity are above human reason, and in the process attracting the charge of Socinianism. He also attracted the attention of a group of powerful Whig politicians, among them Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, who employed him on a series of editions and associated biographies designed to effect the rehabilitation in the English tradition of the political philosophy of Algernon Sidney, Denzil Holles (the Presbyterian politician prominent in

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the 1640s), Edmund Ludlow (a regicide), James Harrington, and Milton. Under an Amsterdam imprint, there appeared in 1698 A Complete Collection of the Historical, Political and Miscellaneous Works of John Milton . . . To Which Is Prefix’d a Life of the Author. Less useful than the early biographies of Cyriack Skinner and Edward Phillips, both of whom knew Milton personally and over a long period, it nevertheless contains some material not found elsewhere, particularly in its account of Milton’s difficulty in getting Paradise Lost through the licensing process required by law (see Licensing Act [1662]). See Darbishire (1932), ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

toleration. The idea that coercion has no legitimate role in promoting authentic religious practice. Milton’s Treatise of Civil Power (1659) and Of True Religion (1673) are the only tracts in which he explicitly addresses the topic, but the logical core of his position informs his earliest polemical writing of the 1640s and runs through much of his prose and poetry. Whether writing against Anglican bishops or Westminster divines, or whether addressing a republican or a Cavalier Parliament, Milton contends that true Protestant belief precludes religious coercion. The Protestant account of faith and works (or “justification” and “sanctification,” respectively) entails that virtuous actions cannot earn salvation but must result from saving faith. Such a distinction had been used, however, to defend religious coercion on the grounds that civil law included external religious practices because they were matters “indifferent” to eternal salvation. Milton consistently argues that not only saving faith, but also the consequent good works—which includes everything from the virtue of patience to ecclesiastical polity— cannot be coerced. Paradise Lost engages the theme of toleration at the end of Michael’s prophetic summary of human history, implying that religious coercion is the distinguishing characteristic of the corrupt postapostolic church (12.504 – 40). In Paradise Regained Christ disavows the use of force to establish his kingdom, choosing instead to “guide nations in the way of truth” through “saving doctrine” ( justification) and “worship” (sanctification) (2.473 –76). Milton’s political sonnets addressed to Thomas Fairfax (1648) (“On the Lord General Fairfax at the Siege of Colchester”), Oliver Cromwell (1652) (“To the Lord General Cromwell”), and

Henry Vane the younger (?1652) (“To Sir Henry Vane the Younger”) all raise the topic of religious toleration. Milton’s failure to extend religious toleration to Catholics (see Areopagitica and Treatise of Civil Power), though not excusable, is intelligible, as he shared the seventeenth-century English public consensus that Catholicism was a genuine political threat. Phillip J. Donnelly

tolerationism. The promotion or advocacy of toleration of religious diversity or dissent. A controversial project in the early modern era, it is not to be confused with contemporary notions of liberalism. Tolerationism assumed civil, ecclesiastical, political, and cultural forms and was most often associated with a climate that condoned the “liberty of conscience” and that advanced “union and right understanding between the godly people” (in the words of Oliver Cromwell). Elizabeth Sauer

Tomasini, Jacob Philipp (1597–1654). Literary scholar. He was the author of Petrarcha Redivivus (Padua, 1635), presumably acquired or at least read by Milton during his Italian travels of 1638 –1639. Milton cites him in his Commonplace Book as the source of an anecdote that Petrarch as a young man “scorn[ed] the study of law.” Thomas N. Corns

Tomkins, Thomas (1572 –1656). Composer. He studied with William Byrd and was a prolific and innovative composer of church music, ceremonial music, instrumental music, metrical psalm settings, and madrigals. He was appointed organist and choirmaster at Worcester Cathedral (1596) and Gentleman Extraordinary (1603), then Gentleman (c. 1620), then organist (1621) of the Chapel Royal. His sacred madrigal “When David Heard” is included, like John Milton, Sr.’s, in Myriell’s Tristitiae Remedium. Both also contributed to The Triumphes of Oriana (1601) and Thomas Ravenscroft’s Whole Book of Psalmes (1621). William Lawes’s “Elegie on Mr. Tomkins” is included in Choice Psalmes (1648), as is Milton’s “Sonnet XIII” to Henry Lawes. Tomkins’s “Behold I Bring You Glad Tidings” keeps the pattern of solo tidings and choral response from Luke, as does Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” In 1649,

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mourning the death of Charles I and deprived of his vocation as a church musician, Tomkins wrote a wordless Sad Pavan for These Distracted Times. A large collection of his works, Musica Deo Sacra, was published in 1668. His nephew, Thomas Tomkins (c. 1637–1675), licensed both the first edition of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain’d. A Poem. In IV Books. To Which Is Added Samson Agonistes. See ODNB.

Diane Kelsey McColley

“To Mr. Cyriack Skinner upon His Blindness.” Poem by Milton. Addressed by Milton to his friend and former pupil Cyriack Skinner, its dating remains conjectural. Milton says he writes three years after his own blindness. If by that he means the point at which he lost his sight completely in 1652, the date would be 1655, though it is possible that he alluded to the decline in his vision over the immediately preceding years. The social sonnet takes the form of a contribution to a continuing conversation, in which Milton appears to answer the younger man’s inquiry about what comfort and support he draws on in his affliction. Milton answers that it is the “conscience” that his sight had been finally lost in defense of “liberty.” Thomas N. Corns

Tonson, Jacob (c. 1656 –1736). Bookseller. Born in London, he established his own publishing house in 1676. He was an early admirer of Paradise Lost and purchased half the rights in 1683 and the remainder in 1690; he also purchased the first edition’s corrected manuscript, so that his first printing of the poem, in 1688, was carefully edited and emended. (The manuscript to book 1 is now in the Morgan Museum and Library, New York.) The 1688 edition, published by subscription, was a sumptuously produced folio with illustrations by John Baptist Medina. Tonson published many succeeding editions of the poem, establishing and nurturing an ever-widening audience for Milton; as publisher of the Spectator, he encouraged Joseph Addison’s series of essays on the poem and did what he could to keep Milton at the center of the literary discussions of the day. His 1695 edition of Paradise Lost was the first to include scholarly annotations (by Patrick Hume), further confirming Milton’s place in the pantheon of great English authors. Sir Godfrey Kneller’s portrait of Tonson shows him

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holding the folio edition of Paradise Lost, indicating how closely he wished to be associated with the poem. See stationers. See Bennet (1988), ODNB.

Raymond N. MacKenzie

Topsell, Edward (1572 –1625). English divine. Educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, he was curate of St. Bartolph’s, Aldersgate, from 1604 until his death. In 1607 he published The Historie of Foure-Footed Beasts in illustrated folio, followed in 1608 by volume 2, The Historie of Serpents. (His unfinished “The Fowles of Heauen or History of Birdes” exists in manuscript.) Ostensibly a translation of Conrad Gesner’s Historia Animalium (1551– 1558), Topsell’s Historie freely adapts Gesner’s work and supplements it with material from other sources. Topsell was not a naturalist, apparently compiling his Historie to demonstrate that creation provides matter for devotional instruction. In 1658 the work was reissued by John Rowland, with Thomas Mouffet’s Theater of Insects as volume 3. Topsell’s writings furnish much evidence for contextualizing Milton’s depiction of the animal world in Paradise Lost, and they figure prominently in the annotation to most modern scholarly editions of Milton. Karen L. Edwards

Tories. Political grouping in England. At the Restoration, those who had remained committed to monarchy and to the episcopal Church of England were usually termed Cavaliers. (The term “new Cavaliers” was sometimes used to distinguish those Presbyterians who had come to support the Restoration.) In the main, Cavaliers held an elevated notion of the royal prerogative, supposing that the monarch’s will takes precedence over the will of Parliament. This usage continued for some years—in 1675 Andrew Marvell wrote in a letter of the “Episcopal Cavalier Party”—but increasingly, “Cavalier” became confined to a brand of hedonistic and amoral royalism characteristic of some members of the king’s circle. In 1660 “Presbyterian” was the usual term used to denote those who had sought to limit the exercise of the royal prerogative by Charles I and who continued to work for a balanced (or, in contemporary terms, mixed) constitution in which power is shared among the monarch and the House of Lords and House of Commons. A person who had formerly adopted more radical

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political positions was variously styled a Commonwealthsman, Oliverian, Swordsman, or Fanatic. From the mid-1660s contemporaries began to speak instead of rival “Court” and “Country” groupings of members of Parliament. In this usage, Court and Country refer respectively to supporters of the royal executive (as the choice of ministers of state lay with the king, they tended to be his close confidants, that is, members of the court) and of the parliamentary legislature (“Country” presumably because of the alliterative neatness of this distinction between them and the predominantly Londonbased Court party). In 1666 Samuel Pepys wrote of “all the country gentlemen” being “publicly jealous of the Courtiers in the Parliament.” By 1671 Gilbert Burnet could write of “the names of the Court and Country party.” In the 1670s this political division became more marked. Under the pressure of the anti-Court feeling aroused by Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence, a sense of identity among opposition members of Parliament developed through their habit of meeting in London taverns to plan tactics, leading to the founding in 1674 of the Green Ribbon Club. During the Exclusion Crisis—the parliamentarian attempts during 1679 –1681 to exclude from the succession the Roman Catholic James, Duke of York (see James II)—something akin to modern political parties, with lobbying organizations and recognized members, began to develop. These two political groups were now known almost exclusively by the terms Tories and Whigs, though both terms antedate the Restoration and both are religious in origin: “Tories” referred originally to Irish Catholic outlaws, while “Whigs” (or whiggamores) was used of Scottish Covenanters. Contemporaries were soon interpreting their own history in terms of this opposition. In 1675 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury—a former Presbyterian and Parliamentarian, at this date a man of the Country party, and soon to become the leader of the Whigs—wrote of “a Project of several Years standing . . . To make a distinct Party from the rest of the Nation of the High Episcopal Men, and the Old Cavalier” for whom “Monarchy as well as Episcopacy [is] Jure Divino, and not to be bounded, or limited by humane Laws.” In his Account of the Growth of Popery (1677) Andrew Marvell traced back to the mid-1660s a pro-Catholic Court party desiring to rule through a standing army rather than Parliament. In A New Test of the Church of England’s Loyalty (1702), Daniel Defoe discerned “two contending Parties” throughout the seventeenth century, “distinguish’d, as in like Cases, by Names of

Contempt; and tho they have often changed them on either side, as Cavalier and Roundhead, Royalists and Rebels, Malignants and Phanaticks, Tories and Whigs, yet the Division has always been barely the Church and the Dissenter.” The political distinctions between the groups set a context for Milton’s late prose work Of True Religion (1673) and for the posthumous responses to his life and work. See John Toland. N. H. Keeble

“To Sir Henry Vane the Younger.” Poem by Milton (dated 3 July 1652). It was occasioned by the diplomatic breakdown leading to the first of the Anglo-Dutch Wars. It praises Sir Henry Vane the younger, a statesman of the English Commonwealth. The epideictic sonnet exists in three states—the Trinity Manuscript, the biography of Sir Henry by George Sikes, and Edward Phillips’s biography of Milton—with several important variations in its final lines. Line 11, for instance, varies in whether Vane “learns” or “teaches” the proper uses of “spiritual power and civil.” In another variation, matronly “religion” leans on either Vane’s “firm” or his “right” hand, with different connotative implications. The poem appeared first in the anonymous Life and Death of Sir Henry Vane (1662), a hagiographical account that does not attribute the work to Milton but states that it was composed by “a learned Gentleman, and sent to him [Vane], July 3. 1652.” The Life was a clandestine publication, carrying the name of neither printer nor bookseller. It is usually attributed to George Sikes. The poem was not printed again until 1694, when it appeared in the short biography with which Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips prefixed his edition of his uncle’s Letters of State. Andrew Fleck

“To the Lord General Cromwell.” Poem by Milton. Its original title in the Trinity Manuscript was “To the Lord Generall Cromwell May 1652 / On the proposalls of certaine ministers at ye Comm[it]tee for Propagation of the Gospell”; it was first printed by Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips in Milton’s Letters of State (1694). Milton praises Oliver Cromwell, “our chief of men,” who succeeded Sir Thomas Fairfax as commander in chief of the parliamentary forces. Cromwell’s decisive victories over the Scots at Preston, Dunbar, and Worcester had brought stability to the new republic,

translations of Milton

yet the sestet warns against the intolerance exemplified not only by the Scottish Presbyterians, but by some Independent divines. John Owen, chaplain to Cromwell in 1649 –1650, and others had introduced to Parliament proposals for the propagation of the gospel, including a plan for the screening of ministerial candidates and the ejection of unfit ministers. Owen also advocated identifying and proscribing views incompatible with salvation and included a petition targeting Socinianism, or antitrinitarianism, as evinced in a recent publication, the Racovian Catechism, that Milton himself, as licenser for the state, had approved. Laura L. Knoppers

Touchet, Mervin, Second Earl of Castlehaven (c. 1592 –1631). See Castlehaven scandal. Tovey, Nathaniel (?1597–1658). Academic and clergyman. He was educated at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (B.A. 1616, M.A. 1619), and in 1621 migrated to a fellowship and lectureship in logic at Christ’s College, Cambridge. He held several college offices. Probably in 1627 he became Milton’s tutor, on Milton’s return to the college after his falling out with his original tutor, William Chappell. When Milton’s brother Christopher Milton entered the college in 1631, he too became Tovey’s pupil. In 1634 Tovey left Cambridge to take up the rectorship of Lutterworth, Leicestershire. During the First Civil War, his sympathies were apparently with Charles I, and in 1646 he was ejected for continuing to use the Book of Common Prayer, among other Laudian practices. However, by 1654 he was sufficiently reconciled to the government of the day to accept a rectorship elsewhere in Leicester. See Campbell and Corns (2008), ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

Tower of London. Royal fortress in London. Situated on the Thames immediately next to the city walls, the complex of buildings served several functions in the early modern period. It housed a considerable menagerie. Its cannons both commanded the Thames and could be maneuvered to intimidate the city. Successive regimes throughout the middle decades of the seventeenth century strove to ensure that the post of the tower’s resident governor was held by a supporter whose loyalty could be relied on. It functioned also as a prison and a secure location for state executions. William Laud and

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Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, were both imprisoned and beheaded there. Milton was briefly incarcerated there toward the end of 1660. On his release, he was obliged to pay fees of £150. The sum was exorbitant and the subject of a complaint in Parliament. The outcome of the protest, launched by Andrew Marvell in the House of Commons, is unknown. Thomas N. Corns

Townshend, Aurelian (c. 1583 – c. 1649). English courtier and minor poet. Born in Norfolk, he was assisted early by Sir Robert Cecil, whom he may have served. He was living in the Barbican upon his marriage in 1622, and also ten years later when Thomas Carew addressed a poem to him. He wrote verses for the king’s masque Albion’s Triumph (1632) and again for the queen’s masque Tempe Restored (1633), in which Alice Egerton and her sister danced. Alice later played the Lady in Milton’s Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle. Townshend’s poems are mostly love songs, many set by Milton’s friend and collaborator Henry Lawes, plus occasional and commendatory verses. His daughter was a noted court beauty in the 1640s, but his own later activities are obscure. In 1642 Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, described him as “poor and pocky.” His death is unrecorded, but fragmentary verses on Charles I’s execution survive. Tom Bishop

translations of Milton FROM ENGLISH INTO FRENCH

Prose Eikonoklastes was translated in Milton’s lifetime, and under his supervision (London, 1652). Of Education was translated by Abbot Jean-Bernard Le Blanc and published in Nonney de Fontenai’s Lettres sur l’éducation des princes (Edinburgh, 1746). Areopagitica was adapted by the Comte de Mirabeau as Sur la liberté de la presse, imité de l’anglois de Milton (London, 1788) and was reissued twice in Paris in 1789 and 1792. Aréopagitique (1823), a translation by Etienne Aignan, was republished in 1826 as De la liberté de la presse, et de la censure. The standard translation is Olivier Lutaud’s Milton. “Areopagitica,” pour la liberté d’imprimer sans autorisation ni censure (1956). Milton’s English version of Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio was rendered into French by Mirabeau as Théorie de la royauté, d’après la doctrine de Milton, or Doctrine de Milton

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sur la royauté (1789). It was published again in 1792 as Théorie de la royauté, d’après les principes de Milton and in Valence as Défense du peuple anglais sur le jugement et la condamnation de Charles Premier, roi d’Angleterre. Laïla Ghermani translated Of True Religion in John Rogers, Franck Lessay, and YvesCharles Zarka (eds.), Les fondements philosophiques de la tolérance (2002). Christophe Tournu’s translation of the second edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce was published by Belin Editions in 2005. Poetry Besides François Auguste René Chateaubriand’s masterpiece (1836, 1855), there have been sixteen other original and complete French translations of Paradise Lost. The earliest is Dupré de SaintMaur’s (1743), which reappeared illustrated with twelve drawings in 1792. Jean Racine made a verse translation (1755). The other translators are Abbot H.-C.-M. Le Roy (Rouen, 1775), M. Beaulaton (Montargis, 1778), J.-B. Mosneron de Launay (1786), Jacques Delille (1805), J.-B. Salgues (1807), C. de Loynes d’Autroche (Orléans, 1808), J.-V.-A. Delatour de Pernes (1813), Eugène Aroux (1842), Paul Guérin (1857), J.-B. de Pongerville (1838), Jean de Dieu (1864), André Tasset (Chartres, 1867), Pierre Messiaen (1951–1955), and Armand Himy (2001). Pierre de Mareuil’s Le Paradis reconquis (La Haye, 1730) also includes “Lycidas,” “L’Allegro,” “Il Penseroso,” and “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” which were bound up with Dupré de Saint-Maur’s translation of Paradise Lost (La Haye, 1740, 1777; Amsterdam and Leipzig, 1753; Paris, 1765, 1779, 1782). Other translators of Paradise Regained are Lancelin de Laval (1755), Louis Vaucher (1859), and Jacques Blondel (1955). Joseph-Bruno M.-C. Kervyn de Lettenhove’s Oeuvres choisies de Milton (1839) includes A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus), Samson Agonistes, “L’Allegro,” “Il Penseroso,” “Lycidas,” sonnets, and some Latin verse. Fernard Henry, Les Petits poèmes de John Milton (1909), includes sonnets, “L’Allegro,” “Il Penseroso,” and “Lycidas.” Also of significance are “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” translated by Paul Chauvel (Paris, 1924); Samson Agonistes, translated by Floris Delattre (1937); Charles Cestre’s Milton. Oeuvres choisies (1926); Samson Agonistes, translated by Joseph d’Avenel (1860); “Lycidas” translated by Émile Le Brun (1917); and Milton’s sonnets, translated by Émile Saillens (1971). A translation of Comus by M. de La Bientinaye appeared in 1812; three others followed: Etienne Aignan’s in 1823, Marc Fautrie’s in 1910,

and Jacques Blondel’s in 1964. The most famous are Chateaubriand’s and Mirabeau’s translations. Christophe J.-B. Tournu

FROM ENGLISH INTO GERMAN

German was the first language into which Paradise Lost was translated, by Theodore Haak (date uncertain; probably 1667–1680) and shortly thereafter by Ernest Gottlieb von Berge (1682). Haak’s partial translation (he completed only the first four books) is more successful than Berge’s in replicating Milton’s pentameter line, but he never published his work, which exists in manuscript at Kassel and in a modern edition by Pamela Barnett. The next translation appeared some forty years later at the hand of Swiss scholar J. J. Bodmer, who seems not to have known the Haak and Berge versions until his own work was completed. Reacting against the neoclassical critical school led by Johannn Christoph Gottsched in Leipzig, Bodmer was in large part responsible for creating a new taste for the romantic and imaginative in Germany. After single-handedly introducing the German-speaking world to both Dante and the medieval German tradition of Minnesänger, he championed Milton for similar reasons: archaic vocabulary, loose syntax, and power of imagination. Bodmer completed his translation of Milton’s epic in 1723, but because of ecclesiastical resistance to what seemed a radical treatment of sacred truth, he succeeded in publishing it only in 1732. Over the next five decades he would rework this translation, publishing subsequent editions in 1742, 1754, 1759, 1769, and 1780. Bodmer’s translation played a fundamental role in introducing Milton to Germany, inspiring the poet’s greatest imitator in German-speaking lands, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. Following the example of Klopstock, Friedrich Wilhelm Zachariä translated Paradise Lost into hexameters (1760 –1763). Although his knowledge of English was deficient, his translation had some influence and was the text of the poem read by Goethe. Samuel Bürde published a new version in 1792, the first full translation in pentameter to meet with artistic and popular success. Neoclassical in style, he frequently shortens Milton’s periods to read smoothly, but with greater loss of meaning than occurs in some other translations. The nineteenth-century translators of Paradise Lost followed the models established by Bodmer, Zachariä, and Bürde. Friedrich Bruckbräu published a translation in prose (1828); Carl Friedrich von Rosenzweig, one in hexameters (1832); Adolph

translations of Milton

Böttger (1843) and Bernhard Schuhmann (1855), ones in pentameter. The next notable translation was that of Karl Eitner (1865), also in pentameter but more faithful than earlier translations to Milton’s vocabulary and periodic syntax. Milton was a popular choice among nineteenth-century German translators; other editions of Paradise Lost include those of J. F. Pries (1813), Johann Voss (1835), F. Kottenkamp (1841), and Heubner (1856). In the twentieth century only one notable translation of Paradise Lost appeared, that of Hans Meier (1969), in pentameter and still in print in the early twentyfirst century. Other poems by Milton first appeared in German translation in Simon Grynaeus’s prose edition of 1752, which includes Das Wieder-eroberte Paradies (Paradise Regained), Der Sterbende Samson, “Lycidas,” “L’Allegro,” “Il Penseroso,” and “WeihnachtGesang” (“On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”). Another prose edition of these same works along with Komus (Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle), “An die Zeit” (“On Time”), and “Bei einer feierlichen Musik” (“At a Solemn Music”) appeared anonymously at Mannheim in 1781. Later translations of these various works include those of Johann Voss (1789 –1792), Johann Rupprecht (1812), I. F. Mosel (1814), Bruckbräu (1828, 1840), Schuhmann (1855), H. W. Werner (1859), Immanuel Schmidt (1860), Alexander Schmidt (1864, 1869), E. C. Eddebüttel (1869), and H. Ulrich (1947). A collected edition of Milton’s prose in German was first published by Wilhelm Bernhardi (1874 –1879). Curtis L. Whitaker

FROM ENGLISH INTO SLAVONIC LANGUAGES

The earliest translations of Milton’s epics into Slavonic languages were undertaken in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and were often involved with larger concerns about a national language. In Russia the problem centered on the use of the literary language, Church Slavonic, as opposed to the vernacular. The first 1745 unpublished prose translation of Paradise Lost by Baron Aleksandr Grigor’evich Stroganov, rendered from the French, blends Church Slavonic with the vernacular to match Milton’s sublimity. The two unfinished prose translations by the poets Vasilii Petrov and Mariya Vasil’evna Khrapovitskaya are less archaic. The first complete “modern” translation, published in Moscow in 1780, was made from the French by Amvrosii Serebrennikov, who disapproved of Milton’s heresies (including Arianism) but as prefect

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of the Moscow Theological Academy did not face difficulty in getting the work into print. Serebrennikov’s third edition (1803) included Ivan Greshishchev’s translation of Paradise Regained from the French, first appearing in 1778. Milton’s Satan inspired Russian Romantic poets; Paradise Lost was translated by the teachers of Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov—Efim Liutsenko (1824) and Aleksei Zinov’evich Zinoviev (1861), the author of its first full rendering from the original into Russian. Sergei Pisarev translated Paradise Lost in verse in 1871. Since then, Milton’s epics have many times been published in both prose and verse translation. “Il Penseroso,” translated by Platon Beketov, appeared as early as 1780; the years 1875 and 1881 saw the publications of A Brief History of Moscovia and “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”; Areopagitica and Samson Agonistes came out in 1905 and 1911, respectively. Among modern Milton translators are A. A. Shteinberg (Paradise Lost) and S. A. Aleksandrovsky (Paradise Regained). There is a 1913 Ukrainian translation of Samson Agonistes by I. Frank. Among the western Slavonic languages, the first translation was the 1791 Polish version of Paradise Lost, rendered from the original by Jacek Przybylski in rhyme, followed by his Paradise Regained in 1792. Though widely used, Przybylski’s achievement was severely censured for linguistic license. The partial translation of Paradise Lost in Alexandrine rhymes is the work of the poet Franciszek Ksawery Dmochowski (1803). Leon Borowski’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” and Constantine Piotrowski’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” are among the most successful attempts at reproducing Milton’s minor poems. Having produced a slightly “corrected” Catholic version of Paradise Lost in blank verse (1902), Władysław Bartkiewicz prepared his blank verse Samson Agonistes for the Milton tercentenary. Stanislas Helsztyn´ski rendered some minor poems for his edition of the best translations of Milton (1929). Maciej Słomczyn´ski is Poland’s late-twentieth-century translator of Paradise Lost. The 1811 translation of Paradise Lost into Czech deserves special attention as the first notable achievement of modern Czech literature. The linguist Josef Jungmann translated it at the start of the Czech national renaissance when translations served as substitute for literature in the vernacular. Though Satan’s rebellion appealed to Jungmann’s pre-Romantic imagination and his national cause under the Habsburg rule, his choice was dictated by poetic and personal motives—the latter concerns his admiration for Milton’s treatment of paradisal

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sexuality. Like Milton’s, his is a linguistic experiment and concern. He revived old words, introduced loanwords, and created new, now common, expressions. Jungmann’s translation in unrhymed hendecasyllabic lines of falling rhythm, combining trochee with dactylic endings, has been surpassed neither by Josef Julius David’s heavy style (1911)— likewise the translator of Paradise Regained (1880, 1893)—nor by partial translations ( Josef Dvorˇák’s book 4 [1848] and František Pracharˇ’s book 7 [1910]). Jarmila Urbánková’s recent rendition of Samson Agonistes (1996) is not wholly satisfactory. In the south the 1898 translation of Paradise Lost into Bulgarian by Teodosii Skopski, followed by Paradise Regained in 1910, was a result of the consolidation of modern Bulgarian culture in the late nineteenth century. The other Balkan nations seem to have used French and German eighteenthcentury translations of Milton’s epic. Milovan Ðilas produced a Serbian translation of Paradise Lost in 1969; there are recent translations of both epics into Serbo-Croatian by Darko Bolfan and Dušan Kosanovic´. The Slovenian poet and former BBC journalist Marjan Strojan has introduced Paradise Lost into Slovene. Šárka Ku˝hnová

FROM LATIN INTO ENGLISH

Milton’s most important single Latin work is Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (1651), and it has a rich tradition of translation into English. The Leveller John Lilburne used its peroration for his own As You Were (1652). One seventeenth-century translation survives only in manuscript, in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. The first printed translation was by Joseph Washington (1692). This had a long run, extended further when Columbia University Press chose it for its edition (WJM 7) but adapted it, giving the effect of curious pastiche. Yale University Press (CPW 4) did it afresh (Donald Mackenzie). Clare Gruzelier (1991) combines accuracy with a more flexible, matching tone. For Milton’s largest work of all, De Doctrina Christiana, Columbia University Press (WJM 14 –17) reprints Bishop Sumner’s translation of 1825, while John Carey’s for Yale University Press (CPW 6) is exceptionally lucid, more so than the original. For Milton’s other Latin prose there are serviceable translations in CPW, though Columbia’s WJM is more useful to the serious scholar because Yale omits the original Latin.

For the Latin verse, serviceable renderings into prose are legion, but if “poetry is what gets lost in translation,” it sinks without trace in English prose. For verse renderings, the choice of verse medium is vital. The poet William Cowper turned Milton’s rhymeless elegiac couplets into English heroic couplets, rhyming with all his usual skill and fluency in this medium. Their closure well suits that of Latin’s elegiac couplets, but the onward-flowing hexameters (verse paragraphs) much less well. Accordingly, David Masson chose a medium resembling that of the source—not target language: his Clough-like hexameters transplant the exact Latin quantitative rhythm of each line into its English accentual equivalent. Yet equivalence there cannot be when a rhythm of vowel length, as in music, becomes a rhythm of accentuation. Helen Waddell’s more relaxed dactylics, with well-placed half lines, do better for “Epitaphium Damonis.” Subsequent verse renderings like those of Robert Hodge or Peter Levi have been into free verse, virtually forfeiting rhythm altogether. The present writer has experimented with strongly rhyming versions, on the grounds that rhyme and rhythm help each other and that Milton—besides always rendering verse into verse— often used rhyme conjoined with simple rhythm. Thus irregular Pindarics are used to render the prosodically corybantic Latin of the ode “Ad Joannem Rousium.” John K. Hale

Transproser Rehears’d. Anonymous work of prose (1673). Andrew Marvell suspected that it was written by Samuel Parker, but modern scholarship has attributed the pamphlet first to Richard Leigh and most recently to Samuel Butler. The Transproser discredits Marvell’s The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672) by registering a broad range of objections to it, most of them ad hominem accusations against Marvell’s character and his nonconformist preferences. Of the six replies to The Rehearsal Transpros’d, The Transproser Rehears’d provides the most detailed critique of Marvell’s habit of animadverting, condemning the intricacy of his rhetoric, attacking the process of transprosing itself as a violation of decorum, and questioning the mimetic assumptions governing Marvell’s use of the Duke of Buckingham’s play, The Rehearsal (1672). The Transproser indicts Marvell by associating him with Milton. When he compares Marvell’s practices to those of the “Blank Verse Poet” of Paradise Lost, he disparages the epic as obscure

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and confusing, and thereby contests Milton’s claim to prophetic authority and illumination. James Egan

transubstantiation. Catholic doctrine, ratified by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which advocates that, through their consecration by the priest during Mass, the eucharistic bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, with only their outward appearances (accidents, or species) remaining the same. Reformation theologians refuted this doctrine systematically. Whereas Martin Luther advocated consubstantiation (wherein the bread and wine are seen as coexisting with, rather than transformed into, Christ’s body and blood), Ulrich Zwingli took a “sacramentarian” or “memorialist” stance, denying Real Presence altogether: the Eucharist was merely commemorative in function, and the words said by Christ at the Last Supper (“this is my body”: Matt. 26:26; Mark 14:22; Luke 22:19, 20) were not to be understood literally, but figuratively. Jean Calvin likewise denied transubstantiation but nevertheless regarded the sacrament as an effective means of grace (also known as “virtualism”). In De Doctrina Christiana (book 1, chapter 28), Milton adopts a strict memorialist stance—the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper serving merely to commemorate the death of Christ. In Of True Religion, he again denigrates transubstantiation as idolatrous, but he adjusts his position on Lutheran consubstantiation, identifying it still as “an error indeed, but not mortal.” Michael Davies

Treatise of Civil Power. Milton, work of prose; full title, A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes: Shewing That It Is Not Lawfull for Any Power on Earth to Compell in Matters of Religion. It was printed by Thomas Newcombe and registered with the Stationers’ Company on 16 February 1659. The author is identified on the title page as “J.M.” The prefatory epistle is signed with Milton’s name and is addressed to the “Parlament of the Commonwealth of England,” which had convened 27 January 1659 under Richard Cromwell. Self-described as a companion work for a later tract on the topic of tithing (Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings [1659]) (see tithes), Civil Power claims to argue from “scripture only.” The result is a deeply biblicist rhetoric in the plain style. William B. Hunter notes that, although specific oppo-

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nents remain unnamed, Milton engages the same biblical proof texts that are cited by the Westminster Confession (Humble Advice 1647, chapters 20, 23, 31) and upon which Erastian Presbyterians sitting in Parliament would continue to base their arguments in 1659. The treatise advances four closely related arguments for religious toleration. The first follows from Milton’s definition of “protestant religion” as rooted in two authorities alone: the external and noncoercive authority of scripture, and the internal authority of the Holy Spirit at work in the conscience. The second main argument is that the magistrate “hath no right” to use coercion in religious causes. The final two arguments claim that religious coercion violates Christian liberty and that such force cannot achieve its own purported aims. In effect, Milton repeatedly points out that genuine Protestant sanctification (good works consequent upon saving faith) must result from inner transformation and therefore cannot be coerced. The tract notes two qualifications. By defining “blasphemy” as a species of libel, Milton contends that speaking malicious falsehood about God is subject to civil law, in the same way that libel against any human would be subject to legal action. The tract also does not extend toleration to the public practice of Roman Catholic worship. See Corns (1998), Lewalski (2000).

Phillip J. Donnelly

Tremellius, ( Joannes) Immanuel (1510 –1580). Hebraist and Bible translator. He was born to Jewish parents in Ferrara, Italy, and was educated at the University of Padua. In 1540 he converted to Roman Catholicism, though as a protégé of Peter Martyr, he followed his master toward Protestantism. After he fled Italy and the Inquisition, he joined Peter Martyr in Strasbourg, where both were encouraged and supported by Martin Bucer. During the reign of Edward VI Tremellius migrated to England and entered the glittering circle of Protestant humanists that had gathered there, among them Bucer and Paul Fagius. On the accession of Mary I he returned to continental Europe, where he held academic posts in several Calvinist universities, most significantly at Heidelberg, where he was professor of Hebrew from 1561 to 1577. In collaboration with Franciscus Junius he worked on the project of translating the Old Testament into Latin (published in five volumes, 1575 –1579) and the New Testament from Syriac into Latin (1569). The Junius-Tremellius Bible, as it is usually called,

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became the standard Protestant Latin translation throughout the early modern period. It is this translation on which Milton depends in De Doctrina Christiana, together with Theodore Beza’s translation of the Greek New Testament into Latin. Campbell et al. (2007), ODNB, ODR.

Thomas N. Corns

Trinity Manuscript. A collection of Milton’s papers that have been bound into a single volume (hence often characterized as a notebook). It came into the possession of Trinity College, Cambridge, together with numerous papers and printed books owned by Sir Henry Puckering. It contains drafts, in whole or part, of Arcades, “At a Solemn Music,” “On Time,” “Upon the Circumcision,” “A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle,” “Lycidas,” and most of the sonnets, as well as Letter to a Friend (1633) and Outlines for Tragedies. Thomas N. Corns

True Religion. See Of True Religion. Turnham Green. A village and the site of a military confrontation, commanding the main road into London from the northwest. After the Battle of Edgehill in October 1642, royalist forces commanded by Charles I and Prince Rupert advanced on the metropolis, capturing Brentford on 12 November. The army of Robert Devereux, Third Earl of Essex, which had withdrawn southward after the earlier battle, combined with trained bands and other London citizens to form a force of about twenty-four thousand troops, albeit many of them untried and untrained. However, they outnumbered the royalist forces by about two to one. The two armies met at Turnham Green on 13 November, and after some minor skirmishing, the royalist commanders declined to force a pitched battle and withdrew. There is nothing to suggest Milton took part in the action; however, the panic occasioned in London by the approach of Charles and Rupert provided the subject and the background to Milton’s “Sonnet VIII” (“When the Assault Was Intended to the City”). Thomas N. Corns

Tuscany. The region of Italy in which Florence, Siena, Pisa, and Fiesole are located. It derives from the ancient civilization of Etruria. Rome controlled

the region from the fourth century b.c., with the Lombards taking over after the fall of the Roman empire in the sixth century. The Franks had control of the region from the eighth to the twelfth centuries, when Matilda willed it to the papacy. It was the home of the Guelf-Ghibelline disputes of Dante’s time, as several of the cities (communes) allied themselves with the papacy or with the Holy Roman Empire. Florence emerged as the dominant city in the fourteenth century. In 1569 Tuscany became a grand duchy under the Medici family of Florence, passing in the eighteenth century under the control of the Holy Roman Empire. Milton visited Tuscany on his trip to Italy of 1638 –1639. Julia M. Walker

typology. Broadly speaking, an approach to history that finds a “recurrence of common patterns in events” and “has both Jewish and Hellenistic origins, which account for its use for both biblical and secular history” (Kelly 1980). Milton employs typology extensively throughout his poetry. The term is derived from the Greek typos, meaning “figure” in the sense of “image.” Typos has many applications, one of them being that a type prefigures or foreshadows a later event or person in an earlier one. From a Christian point of view, classical typologies were pagan but during the Renaissance became absorbed through the medieval tradition of the Ovide Moralisé into syncretistic interpretations of the Bible under the influence of humanism. Biblical typology developed from the idea of types as foreshadowings or prefigurations in the Old Testament of people and events in the New Testament. The fulfilling person or event is known, somewhat confusingly, as the “antitype”: a common error is to identify the antitype as the opposite of the type rather than as its fulfillment. The Bible itself affords a number of typological interpretations. For example, in Matthew’s gospel, Christ identifies in Jonah a prefiguration of his own resurrection: “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (12:40). The prefiguration of the Old Testament is usually understood as a partial insight into the complete fulfillment in the New Testament. The fulfilling antitypes are not to be compared with their types for absolute likeness: indeed, significant differences are sometimes emphasized to show that the antitype transcends the type. Biblical typology generally places Christ at the center of typological fulfillment in the antitype, but not invariably so.

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Typology in relation to the Bible grew from a limited beginning into a large and complex system. The early Alexandrian fathers greatly extended the basis of typological reading of scripture to the point where almost every detail in the Old Testament could be found to prefigure the New Testament. During the Middle Ages the scope of typology was extended even further to include the minutiae of numerology: for instance, the measurements of Noah’s ark in length, breadth, and depth were understood to reflect the proportional dimensions of the human body in general and that of Christ in particular. In the later Middle Ages it became common to find a third term to add to the prefigurative type and the fulfilling antitype: this was a postfigurative recurrence of type and/or antitype in the contemporary world. In Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” there are classical types for Christ in Pan and the infant Hercules, though the pagan gods generally become devils; “Lycidas” is thoroughly typological according to David Berkeley; and the last long works—Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes—are all replete with typological reference. The progress in books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost “from shadowy types to truth” (12.303) in the context of successive covenants between God and humans indicates that the entire vision of Michael is typological in construction and theme. Christopher Wortham

tyrannicide. The killing of a tyrant. Concerns about the propriety of tyrannicide pervade the political literature of the 1640s and 1650s, with Niccolò Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy and George Buchanan’s De Jure Regni Apud Scotos supplying Milton and others with the period’s greatest theoretical support for tyrannicide. An amanuensis for Milton recorded in his Commonplace Book Machiavelli’s statement, “To cure the ills of the people, words suffice, and against those of the prince the sword is necessary.” In The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates Milton transcribes Seneca’s dictum that “There can be slaine / No sacrifice to God more acceptable / Then an unjust and wicked King,” as though wishing to validate Thomas Hobbes’s incensed claim that the “false and pernicious” belief that tyrannicide is lawful is attributable to “the writings of those moral phi-

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losophers Seneca and others, so greatly esteemed among us.” Christopher N. Warren

tyranny. “Pure tyranny,” according to Aristotle’s Politics, in a definition on which Milton drew, is “just that arbitrary power of an individual which is responsible to no one and governs all alike, whether equals or better, with a view to its own advantage, not to that of its subjects and therefore against their will.” Tyrannos first appears in ancient Greek literature as a neutral term describing a ruler’s extraconstitutional route to power, without inherent judgment on the quality of the rule; but by the fourth century b.c. the terms tyrannis and tyrannos had accreted emphatically pejorative meanings. Although a few Greek tyrants, such as Pisistratus, were somewhat popular despite usurping rule, tyranny was deemed the least desirable form of rule because of its toll on institutions of self-government, even if sometimes employed with good intentions. In Stuart England, the questions of “what a Tyrant is, and what the people may doe against him,” to use Milton’s phrase from The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, structured much mid-century political discourse; indeed, political opponents leveled the charge at various times against Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, Parliament, and members of the clergy. In many respects, James I’s absolutism, as declared to Parliament in 1610, set the terms of a debate that would rage for much of the century: “You cannot clip the wings of greatness. If a king be resolute to be a tyrant, all you can do will not hinder him.” Against such absolutist claims, opponents regularly cited classical history and pamphlets such as the anonymous French monarchomach tract Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos (1579), which permitted magistrates’ resistance against tyranny, even if it stopped short of granting the same to a wider populace. Milton made nineteen entries under headings of “The Tyrant” in his Commonplace Book, citing Niccolò Machiavelli, Sir Thomas Smith, Angelo di Costanzo, Peter Martyr, Raphael Holinshed, Johannes Sleidan, and Jacobus Augustus Thuanus. Like Tenure and Eikonoklastes, Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio and Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda take tyranny as their chief concern. Christopher N. Warren

U Ulster Presbyterians. Scots settlers in Ireland, noteworthy in respect to Milton for the Necessary Representation of 1649 signed “by the Presbytery at Belfast,” which is treated in his Observations upon the Articles of Peace. The “Belfast” Presbytery represented more than Belfast, comprising the counties of Antrim and Down. It was established at Carrickfergus in 1642. Like their Presbyterian brethren in England, the Ulster Presbyterians sided with the Scots who abominated the execution of Charles I, seeing it as a breach of the Solemn League and Covenant. They also abhorred the religious toleration of the Independents (see Independency); hence, their Representation attacks “the insolent, and presumptuous practices of the Sectaries in England.” In Observations upon the Articles of Peace Milton berates them for their presumption and religious intolerance, and for meddling in civil affairs from some “small Town in Ulster.” Jim Daems

Ulysses. The Latin name for Odysseus, hero of Homer’s Odyssey, king of Ithaca, legendary for valor, strength, and intelligence. Milton’s early epic aspirations refer to Homer’s account of “sad Ulysses’ soul” spellbound by the story of Troy (“At a Vacation Exercise in the College” 50) and the heroic deeds of “Dulichium” (“chief of Ithaca,” “Elegia Sexta” 72). In A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, the plant haemony is likened to the herb moly used by “wise Ulysses” (636), and Of Education concludes with an allusion to Ulysses’s strength. In Paradise Lost, Satan is lent heroic stature by comparison with Ulysses (2.1014 –20), but in the invocation to book 9, Milton declares his subject to be “more heroic” than the wrath that prevails in pagan epic, including that inflicted upon “the Greek” (Ulysses) (9.13 –19). Beverley Sherry

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Unitarianism. Most broadly and originally, any antitrinitarian position (see antitrinitarianism). At the end of the seventeenth century in England, it was adopted as a less provocative name for Socinianism, a continental belief that affirmed Christ’s fundamental humanity. The first use of the term “Unitarian” recorded by the OED is 1687. Although explicitly excluded from the Act of Toleration of 1689, Unitarianism as a belief was the subject of an important dispute within the Church of England during the last decade of the seventeenth century. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, the term became a proper noun referring to a distinct, dissenting denomination that looms large in American intellectual history. In addition to its antitrinitarian belief that the doctrine of the Trinity is unscriptural and tritheistic, this deistic denomination affirms the fundamental goodness of humanity and an antiCalvinist, humanist description of God. Milton predates the Unitarian controversy within the Church of England and, of course, never uses the words “Unitarian” or “Unitarianism,” but he, along with Desiderius Erasmus and Philipp Melanchthon, is claimed as a sympathetic precursor to the Unitarian movement. In addition, it is clear that he expresses several opinions, particularly in De Doctrina Christiana, that he shares with Unitarians: a belief that Christ is created by and subordinate to God; that the doctrine of the Trinity is grounded in church authority and not scripture; and that the doctrine of the Trinity is neither reasonable nor identified within scripture as a mystery. Linda B. Tredennick

United Provinces. The United Provinces of the Netherlands combined seven separate provinces (Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelderland, Overijssel, Friesland, and Groningen) into one federated republic. Spain’s introduction of the Inquisition

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into its seventeen provinces in the Low Countries to suppress Protestantism there ignited a revolt in 1568. The seven northernmost provinces—with overt English assistance in 1585 (following years of informal aid)—succeeded in rescinding Spain’s dominion. Artisans and merchants fled the turmoil of the Spanish Netherlands for the Protestant Dutch Republic. The United Provinces fought Spain to an advantageous truce in 1609, but after a twelveyear respite (which, together with the wealth and skills of the refugees, paved the way for the cultural “Golden Age” that Milton would later praise in Pro Se Defensio), their war reignited within the larger European conflict of the Thirty Years War. In the Peace of Westphalia (1648), Spain formally acknowledged the independence of the United Provinces and the lands they had conquered on their eastern and southern borders. The United Provinces officially vested political authority in a republican form of government. At the top of their federal hierarchy was the “high and mighty” (or “Hogen Mogen”) States-General, to which each individual province sent representatives. Below the national States-General, each province had its own government, also called the “States.” On the most important issues, delegations to the States-General consulted with their provincial States before voting. Civic governments within each province also wielded significant power. The first leader of the United Provinces, William the Silent, of the House of Orange-Nassau, was assassinated in 1584. His descendants exercised significant political influence. Each province elected a military leader, or stadholder, and in most cases, several provinces would elect the same member of the House of Orange as their stadholder. Thus Maurits of Nassau, one of William’s sons, exerted great sway over the nation as stadholder of most of its provinces. Frederick Henry, Maurits’s brother, succeeded him as stadholder and was followed by his son, William II, who married a daughter of England’s Charles I. In 1650, William died while besieging his mercantile and republican enemies in Amsterdam, who sought to limit his power after Westphalia. The States-General, reacting to the growth of the stadholders’ power, prevented William III—born shortly after his father’s sudden death — from occupying that office. In the midst of a crisis in 1672, they repealed the ban and young William rose to power. William married into the Stuart family and in 1689 took the English throne with his wife, Mary, the daughter of James II.

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The United Provinces served as an early model of religious toleration. Although the nation was officially Calvinist, numerous sects found a home there. While such toleration incensed the republic’s critics, Milton praised Dutch attitudes in both Of Reformation and The Readie and Easie Way. Generations of English exiles found a haven among the Dutch, such as the Separatists who eventually founded the Plymouth colony in America and royalists during the Interregnum, including Charles II, who returned to England in 1660 from the United Provinces. Andrew Fleck

“Upon the Circumcision.” Poem by Milton. It is one of his three on events of the liturgical year (see also “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” and “The Passion”). Poems in this genre were commonplace in Caroline England and broadly accorded with the devotional emphases of the Laudian church (see Laudianism). Commemoration of the Feast of the Circumcision (see circumcision) was a much less popular topic than the Crucifixion or the Nativity, but poems by Robert Herrick and Francis Quarles share some concerns of Milton’s poem. The notions that the first effusion of Christ’s blood indicates his humanity and foreshadows the atonement are commonplace in the analogues, though the latter at least perhaps strikes modern readers as grotesque (see also kenosis). It is not known when Milton wrote his poem, though it has been tentatively ascribed to 1633. There is a late draft in the Trinity Manuscript, and it was printed in Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645) and in Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions (1673). Thomas N. Corns

Urania. One of the nine muses, who, in classical mythology, were the daughters of Mnemosyne. She had dominion over astronomy. Associated with the harmony of the spheres and transcendence to divine mysteries, she was said to elevate human intellectual endeavor beyond the sublunary to the celestial. In the sixteenth century, primarily through French Huguenot Guillaume de Salluste, Seigneur Du Bartas, Urania became the muse of Christian poetry. Du Bartas’s L’Uranie depicts the conversion of its poet-protagonist, whose verses had flattered the unworthy and glorified profane love. Milton, whose narrator invokes Urania in book 7 of Paradise Lost, undoubtedly was aware of Du Bartas’s work in both the original and translation. Milton’s muse was

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shaped by other sources as well, including Marsilio Ficino’s Venus Urania, the Urania of Edmund Spenser’s Teares of the Muses, Spenser’s Sapience in the Fowre Hymnes, and wisdom literature. Frances M. Malpezzi

Urban VIII [Barberini, Maffeo] (1568 –1644). Pope. He was Pope from 1623 and thus the incumbent when Milton visited Rome in 1638 –1639. His nephew, Francesco Barberini, received Milton and invited him to an operatic performance. Urban was constrained to pursue an active foreign policy and considerably improved the fortification of Rome. During Milton’s time there, considerable improvements to the defensive capacity of the Castel Sant’ Angelo were drawing to a conclusion. Milton alluded to the mighty fortress of the papacy in Areopagitica, likening it, in its formidable presence, to the role of an imprimatur. Thomas N. Corns

Uriel. In Judeo-Christian tradition, one of the four cardinal archangels, with Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. He is a lordly instructing angel in the Apocrypha (2 Esdras) and ruler over the heavenly luminaries in the pseudepigraphal 1 Enoch. His name means “light of God,” and in Paradise Lost he is “regent of the sun” (3.690, 9.60). Beverley Sherry

Trinity College (which later acquired his library) and was ordained into the Protestant priesthood in 1601, the year after taking his M.A. He served twice as the vice chancellor of Trinity College (1614, 1617) and was a professor there from 1607 until 1621, when he became bishop of Meath, later rising to archbishop of Armagh in 1634. A Calvinist royalist, Ussher maintained deep doctrinal differences with Archbishop William Laud and urged the adoption of reformed articles for the Irish church but was later compelled by Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford (whose execution he urged the king to oppose), to accept the English articles. His prodigious scholarship in patristics, Semitic languages, and biblical antiquity earned him wide respect. It was from Ussher that Franciscus Junius obtained the CAedmon manuscript. Ussher’s rigorous study of ancient chronology led to his assertion in Annals of the World (1658) that creation took place in 4004 b.c., a date included in the marginalia of the Authorized Version beginning in 1701. Milton disputed Ussher’s attempts to defend episcopacy on historical grounds. Ussher’s The Judgment of Dr. Rainoldes Touching the Originall of Episcopacy, prompted by either Smectymnuus’s writings or Milton’s Of Reformation, or both, was answered by Milton’s Of Prelatical Episcopacy (all in 1641). Milton’s Reason of ChurchGovernment (1642) responds to Certain Briefe Treatises, published by Ussher and Lancelot Andrewes in 1641. See ODNB.

Ussher, James (1581–1656). Archbishop and biblical scholar. A native Dubliner, he was educated at

Christopher Baker

V Vallombrosa. A village in the Firenze province, Tuscany region, in a valley on the northern slope of the Monti Pratomagno, twenty-one miles (thirtythree kilometers) southeast of Florence. Surrounded by a magnificent forest of chestnuts and white firs, the village is the site of the Abbey of Vallombrosa, a Benedictine monastery founded in the eleventh century by Giovanni Gualberto. Biographers speculate that Milton visited the monastery in late summer 1638 — a trip that was the source of an epic simile in book 1 of Paradise Lost (301-4). Vallombrosa literally means “shady valley,” and editors often suggest the lines allude to Psalm 23:4. David Boocker

Van Dyck [Vandyke], Sir Anthony (1599 –1641). Flemish painter. He dominated the English art scene in the 1630s. Born in Antwerp, he received his training there and later became an assistant to Peter Paul Rubens. After a brief visit to London in 1621–1622, and after a formative period in Italy, he returned at the height of his powers in 1632, when he became principal painter to Charles I and was knighted. His portraits of the royal family, courtiers, and members of the Stuart establishment endowed his subjects with grace, sensitivity, and intelligence, and more than any other artist Van Dyck was responsible for mythologizing the Caroline court as a place of elegance and refinement. His “Cupid and Psyche” (1639), now in the royal collection, offers a sensuous and perhaps profane analogue to the “Celestial Cupid” of Milton’s Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (1002 –10). He was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral.

cated at Westminster School and Magdalen Hall, Oxford University, he was introduced to public life in 1631 in the office of the English ambassador to Vienna. During his brief stay in New England (1635 –1637), he quickly obtained the office of governor. He was a prominent parliamentarian. Milton praises him in the sonnet “To Sir Henry Vane the Younger.” Vane released to John Pym sensitive papers copied from his father’s bureau that were the chief evidence in the trial of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford. His Speech in the House of Commons (1641) endorses the extirpation of episcopacy as demanded in the Root and Branch Petition. Vane argued in Healing Question (1656) that the army should relinquish political authority. This statement led to a brief imprisonment. Under the restored Purged Parliament and the Committee of Safety of 1659 –1660, he assumed the direction of the navy, although he refused to sit in the latter. At this critical juncture he issued Needful Corrective, which objects to James Harrington’s proposed institution of democratic process and advocates instead the institution of an oligarchy of two appointed houses that would assure liberty of conscience. These views strongly resemble those evident in Milton’s prose of the same period. Though Vane had absented himself from proceedings against Charles I, and though his more culpable codefendant John Lambert was spared, Vane was executed for high treason in 1662. His defiant assertion at trial that Parliament is the supreme power made him, as Charles II put it in a letter to Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, “too dangerous a man to let live.” See ODNB.

Feisal G. Mohamed

Graham Parry

Vane, Sir Henry, the younger (1613 –1662). Politician and author. Baptized in Debden and edu-

Varro, Marcus Terentius (116 –27 B.C.). Roman writer. Under the first triumvirate he had supported Pompey against Julius Caesar but was reconciled to 377

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him. He was later proscribed by Mark Antony but survived to live into old age. His oeuvre was large and scholarly, but little has survived. It includes part of a treatise on the Latin language and numerous fragments of a satire. However, his De Re Rustica [On Farming], which dates from his eightieth year, is complete. In three books in the form of a dialogue, it deals with many aspects of the rural life. In Of Education Milton included it among works in which “the matter is most easie” even though “the language be difficult.” See OCCL.

Thomas N. Corns

Vatican. An area of the Roman metropolis and the buildings that occupy it. On the return of the papacy to Rome in 1377, a program of new building and refurbishment was initiated. By the time Milton visited Rome in 1638 –1639, most of the work was complete. The new basilica of St. Peter’s was finished (except for the Piazza di San Pietro), as was the Vatican Library. The latter holds several documents relating to Milton’s Italian travels. Thomas N. Corns

Vecchi, Orazio (c. 1550 –1605). Italian composer. He was born in Modena and, after taking holy orders, directed music at the cathedrals of Salé, Reggio Emilia, and Modena; he also instructed the children of the Este family and published several volumes of secular and sacred music. His best known work is L’Amfiparnaso (1594, published 1597), a madrigal comedy based on characters from commedia dell’arte; one of the predecessors of Italian opera, it was designed for vocal performance only, not staging. Vecchi is one of the composers whose works Milton collected during his Italian travels of 1638 –1639 and part of the shipment of “a chest or two of choice music-books of the best masters” that Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips mentions in Life of Milton. See Darbishire (1932), New Grove.

Stephen M. Buhler

Venice. Capital city of an independent republic. The Venice that Milton visited in 1639 was the most liberal city in Counter-Reformation Italy. This liberalism was essential to the prosperity of the greatest mercantile center of the Mediterranean: people of all nations operated freely here in the se-

curity of the Serene Republic. Venetian policy at this time was hostile to Spain and to Rome and the papacy; this policy had resulted in the expulsion of the Jesuits from the state. Relations with England were friendly and had been well cultivated by Sir Henry Wotton, three times ambassador, who had tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the government to permit the practice of the Protestant religion there. Wotton had advised Milton about how best to spend his time in the city. Venice was the only independent republic in Italy, and Milton would have encountered here the model of an aristocratic republic such as he later wished to see introduced into England. An elected doge presided over a small Senate as the legislative body, with a Grand Council composed of all the adult males of the patrician families as a larger forum for debate. The stability of the Venetian state was legendary. Graham Parry

Venn, John (?1586 –1650). Parliamentarian and regicide. A silk merchant, he lived and had a shop in Bread Street at the time that John Milton, Sr., was in business in the same locality. He was a leading figure in metropolitan opposition to Charles I throughout the 1630s and a member of the Long Parliament. He supported Pride’s Purge and signed the death warrant for the king. He died shortly afterwards, it was said by his own hand. At the Restoration, he was sometimes linked with Milton as examples of traitors who had been punished by divine providence (in his case by a selfdestructive insanity; in Milton’s by his blindness). Thomas N. Corns

Venner, Thomas (d. 1661). Fifth Monarchist. A cooper, formerly resident in New England, who emerged in London in the 1650s as a Fifth Monarchist preacher and proponent of armed insurgency to bring about the millennium (see millenarianism). Between 5 and 9 January 1661 he led an uprising in London, which, though it was never more than a localized revolt, terrified the capital. There were some sixty insurgents (rather than the five hundred given out at the time). Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, and Quakers quickly dissociated themselves from the act. The uprising provoked many arrests and ferocious punishment. Venner himself was executed within days, as were fifteen of his followers. The uprising certainly contributed to the growing repression of dissent in the early years of

Virgil [Publius Vergilius Maro]

the 1660s and the heightened suspicion of former republicans such as Milton. N. H. Keeble

Vergil, Polydore [Virgili, Polidoro] (c. 1470 – 1555). Historian. He was born near Urbino and educated at the universities of Padua and perhaps Bologna. He was ordained as a priest and entered the service of the papacy. In that capacity, he first visited England as part of the group sent to collect Peter’s Pence, the national contribution to the Holy See. He spent some considerable time in England and wrote his greatest work of historical research, Anglica Historia (completed about 1513; first published, in Basel, 1534). He draws on many of the sources Milton used in his own History of Britain, including Bede, William of Malmesbury, Gildas, and Henry of Huntingdon. Milton, however, would seem to have made little use of Polydore Vergil. Thomas N. Corns

Vermigli, Pietro Martire. See Peter Martyr. Vida, Marco Girolamo (c. 1485 –1566). Bishop of Alba, leading poet and humanist. He was born in Cremona, Italy. His most important work is the Christiad, a six-book Latin epic on the Passion. Seconding his contemporaries’ high opinion of Vida, Milton praises the Christiad in his own abortive lyric on “The Passion” (26). The Christiad is the most successful neo-Latin epic on Christ’s life and influenced Milton’s Latin and English poetry intimately. Milton looked to Vida as a model for the Christianizing of Virgilian epic, drawing from it structural elements such as the Council of Devils. Stephen M. Fallon

Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos. The most infamous of the Monarchomach pamphlets produced during the French religious wars. It was published by Etienne Junius Brutus (Basel, 1579), and its author may have been Philippe Duplessis-Mornay (1549 –1623) or Hugues Languet (1518 –1581), or both, or improbably Theodore Beza. Translated into English in 1648, it puts forward the existence of a double contract between God and the king and between the king and the people. If the orders of the prince contradict God’s law, if he ruins the church or dev-

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astates the state, he may be resisted and deposed by the people, by its officers, or by a private person called by God. Surprisingly, Milton made very little of the book, which he knew only through Jacobus Augustus Thuanus’s Historia Sui Temporis. Christophe J.-B. Tournu

Virgil [Publius Vergilius Maro] (70 –19 B.C.). Poet. He was born in Mantua in Cisalpine Gaul and studied in Cremona, Milan, Rome, and Naples. His first significant publication was Eclogues, ten unconnected pastoral poems written in imitation of Theocritus, enriching the pastoral mode within the classical literary tradition in ways that profoundly influenced poets across early modern Europe, not least among the major writers of Elizabethan England, on whom Milton freely drew. Georgics followed, a two-thousand-line work transmuting the information of Marcus Terentius Varro’s De Re Rustica into verse in celebration of the agricultural life of the Roman countryside. His major achievement, the Aeneid, concluded his writing career. It was unfinished at his death but made fit for publication by his literary executors on the instructions of the Emperor Augustus. However, it seems unlikely that the poem would have been extended beyond its present twelve books. It takes the genre assumptions of Homeric epic and builds on them a complex celebration of the Roman nation and its imperial destiny. Milton’s debt to Virgil has several dimensions. His was a life story that fascinated Milton and offered a sort of template for the ideal progress of an ideal poet. His own poetic output in outline shares some similarity with the Virgilian oeuvre. He begins with shorter poems, sometimes in a pastoral idiom that palpably stretches through Edmund Spenser to the Eclogues. When Milton first collected his early verse for publication, in Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645), he selected lines from “Eclogue 7” as its epigraph. When, in the autobiographical digression in The Reason of Church-Government, he outlines his long-term poetic ambitions, it is epic that he aspires to, and Virgil, together with Homer, Torquato Tasso, and the Book of Job, who offers the finest example. When eventually Milton published Paradise Lost, although its relationship to the Aeneid was apparent, it appeared in ten books. The division of two books as he edited it for the second edition produced a structure identical with the Virgilian model. When he added a note on the verse to late issues of the first edition, he turned to

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Homer and Virgil to justify his rejection of rhyme as a component of narrative poetry. The Virgilian connections were widely acknowledged among early readers of Paradise Lost and were a crucial element in Milton’s emergence as in some sense the poet laureate of England. Curiously, perhaps, in Of Education he commends the study of only the Georgics and Eclogues. Thomas N. Corns

Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694 –1778). French writer and satirist. He embodied the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as he led a crusade against tyranny and bigotry. Born into a middleclass family in Paris, his impertinent character sent him into exile in England (1726 –1729), where he met Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Joseph Addison and completed his epic poem La Henriade. He admired Milton and contributed to making him popular in France with An Essay . . . upon the Epick Poetry of the European Nations from Homer down to Milton (London, 1727), rendered into French by Abbot François Granet (The Hague, 1729). “What Milton so boldly undertook [in Paradise Lost],” Voltaire wrote, “he performed with a superior strength of judgment, and with an imagination productive of beauties not dreamt of before him.” Christophe J.-B. Tournu

Vondel, Joost van den (1587–1679). Poet and dramatist. Sometimes termed the greatest Dutch poet,

he composed thirty-two plays and excelled in various poetic genres. Born in Cologne to an Anabaptist father, he for a time favored Arminianism, and in his play Palamedes (1625) he satirized the 1619 execution of Remonstrant statesman Johan van Oldenbarneveldt. A friend of Hugo Grotius, he was abandoned by many acquaintances after his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1641. His plays Lucifer (1654) and Adam in Ballingschap [Adam in Exile] (1664) have been considered possible influences on Paradise Lost. See Kirkconnell (1967).

Christopher Baker

Vossius, Isaac (1618 –1689). Dutch scholar and book collector, son of G. J. Vossius. He wrote on many subjects, including poetry, tides and winds, biblical chronology, and the origin of the Sibylline oracles. Vossius was intellectually pugnacious and notorious for championing skeptical positions, notably that the Septuagint chronology was to be preferred over the conventional Vulgate figures, thereby dating the creation at least an eon earlier than commonly supposed. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1664 and settled in England in 1670. We owe much of our information on the continental reception of Milton’s Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio to the correspondence of Vossius with his fellow Dutch scholar Daniel Heinsius. William Poole

W Waldensians [Waldenses, Vaudois]. Initially pejorative term for the religious movement the Poor of Lyons that emerged c. 1170 founded by Peter Waldo, or Pierre Vaudès. Waldo established a religious community based on strict observance of the gospel, preaching, and asceticism. Despite persecution, the Waldensians nevertheless managed to maintain links throughout the whole of Europe and were then integrated into the Reformation movement as they adopted Calvinist doctrines. By the mid-1550s the term “Waldensian” acquired a geographical significance (the Waldensian valleys) and an ethnic meaning (the Waldensian population), which included the religious identity. The church boasted around forty thousand members at this time, and the name Waldensian ceased to be pejorative. In 1655 Charles Emmanuel II, Duke of Savoy, sent an army led by the Marquis of Pianezza to expel the Waldensians who lived in two Piedmontese valleys of the Alps west of Turin and slaughtered them in what became known as the Piedmontese Easter massacre of April 1655. The publication of the assault sparked a national outcry for justice. As a public servant, Milton wrote letters of protest to European rulers, is said to have drafted an address delivered by Sir Samuel Morland to the court in Turin, and also composed the 1655 “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” (“Sonnet XV”). Elizabeth Sauer

Wales. Since the mid-sixteenth century Wales was governed by the same legal system as England and was divided into constituencies that were represented in the English Parliament. Like the north of England, however, it had an additional administrative level, a regional council with a president nominated by the English monarch, with viceregal powers analogous to those of the Lord Lieutenants of Ireland. This was the Council of Wales and the Marches. In part, the measure reflected a general

concern that, in areas remote from London and somewhat inaccessible, law and order could not be so easily maintained. That impression, in the case of Wales (though not of northern England), was perhaps reinforced by linguistic divisions: Welsh was (as it remains still in parts of Wales) the predominant language, although English was the language of civil administration. In the mid-1640s there was also a strong sense that Wales had missed the godly reformation by then spread, through force of arms, through England, and in 1650 the Purged Parliament passed the Act for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales, which, among other provisions, appointed a number of itinerant preachers. Two of Milton’s early occasional poems have powerful Welsh connections. In A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, he celebrated the installation of John Egerton, First Earl of Bridgewater, as Lord President of the Council of Wales and the Marches. In “Lycidas,” Milton engages with the tragic death of Edward King, shipwrecked on the coast of Anglesey. He alludes to “the steep / Where your old bards, the famous Druids, lie” and “the shaggy top of Mona high” (lines 52 –54). By the former, he means Bardsey Island, off the tip of the Lleyn peninsula, the reputed burial place of twenty thousand saints. The latter alludes to Anglesey, the northern coast of which is imposingly mountainous. Milton’s History of Britain included the early history of Wales. Thomas N. Corns

Walker, Clement (d. 1651). Political activist. A gentry-class Puritan, he was perhaps educated at Christ Church, Oxford, and was admitted to the Middle Temple. He held several government offices as sinecures. At the start of the First Civil War in 1642 he was actively engaged on Parliament’s behalf and was appointed to the Somerset assessment and sequestration committees for the confiscation 381

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of royalists’ property. He was in Bristol when it was captured by Prince Rupert and conceived a profound animosity toward Nathaniel Fiennes, its parliamentarian governor, whose defense of the city, in Walker’s view, was pusillanimous. Fiennes had a powerful father, Lord Saye and Sele, and Walker was fined by the House of Lords. Thus, seemingly, began a career of opposition to the political Independents, whose faction father and son were broadly aligned with. He was recruited to the Long Parliament in 1646 and was active in metropolitan Presbyterian circles. Under the pseudonym Theodorus Verax, he campaigned effectively against the Independents. His Anarchia Anglicana; or, The History of Independency appeared in two parts in 1648 and 1649. The second part contains an attack on Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, which he calls “a Booke of Iohn Miltons (a Libertine that thinketh his Wife a Manacle, and his very Garters to be Shackles and Fetters to him; one that (after the Independent fashion) will be tied by no obligation to God or Man).” On his appointment as an employee of the Council of State, on 24 October 1649, Milton was ordered (together with Edward Denby) to seize Walker’s papers and prepare a report for the council, duties that he probably discharged. Walker was arrested and committed to the Tower of London, where he died without trial. Thomas N. Corns

Wall, Moses (fl. 1650 –1661). Translator of Menasseh ben Israel’s Spes Israelis [The Hope of Israel] (1650), also a Hartlibean and correspondent of Milton (see Samuel Hartlib). Menasseh, in dedicating his book to the Parliament of England, hoped to forward the possibility of readmitting the Jews to England. Spes Israelis was prefaced by the account of Antonio de Montezinos, or Aaron Levi, who claimed to have discovered a tribe of Jewish Indians in the Andes. For Menasseh, and especially for John Dury, who aided and encouraged him, this discovery was related to the discovery of the Lost Tribes and hence of crucial messianic significance. A second edition of Wall’s translation appeared in 1651, this time with Wall’s name on the title page. William Poole

Waller, Edmund (1606 –1687). Poet and statesman. Born in Coleshill. His stature has dwindled significantly since the seventeenth century; politically, he remains best known for “Waller’s Plot,” the failed 1643 conspiracy he spearheaded to restore

London to Charles I. Poetically, “A Panegyric to My Lord Protector” persists as his most notorious work. In this contrast—royalist sympathizer, lionizer of Oliver Cromwell—appear some of Waller’s manifest contradictions. His career interestingly parallels Milton’s own; his early poetry belongs in part among the Caroline heirs of the Jacobean tradition, while his late poems share the age of John Dryden. Waller’s own life was fruitful. He earned a reputation as a premier lyricist, still observed in such works as “Go, Lovely Rose” and “On a Girdle”; his songs were set by Henry Lawes, Milton’s friend and collaborator. He kept a large estate and a burgeoning family, and his service in the House of Commons, which began as early as the age of eighteen, lasted some fifty-five years. But much of this productivity was coupled with travail—the deaths of his wives, a failed courtship, and political exile. Waller’s collected poems were first published the same year as Milton’s, 1645, though under quite different circumstances (though by the same bookseller, Humphrey Moseley). His role in Waller’s Plot had led to a period of imprisonment and ultimately banishment. He returned to England only after being pardoned by Parliament in 1651, likely at Cromwell’s instigation. Three years later, his “Panegyric” to the Lord Protector appeared, in which Waller compares the aftermath of Julius Caesar’s death at the hands of “Mistaken Brutus” to Cromwell’s Octavius-like quelling of strife. His later celebration of the Restoration, “To the King, upon His Majesty’s Happy Return” (1660), exhibits much penitence for such effusions. Though Charles II reportedly chided the verse for its inferiority to the “Panegyric,” Waller replied, “We poets succeed better in fiction than in truth.” A number of verses are inspired by “Sacharissa,” Waller’s appellation for Dorothy Sidney, with whom he became enamored after the death of his first wife, Anne Banks, in 1635. His elopement with the latter (Anne was a wealthy heiress and ward of the state) caused him to be brought before the Court of Star Chamber in 1631. His subsequent marriage to Mary Bresse, c. 1642, resulted in thirteen children. For much of his poetic career, Waller continued to write verse in praise of famous men and women, including Henrietta Maria, James II, and perhaps most notably the Duke of York, the future James II, in “Instructions to a Painter” (1666), which commemorates a naval triumph over the Dutch at Lowestoft. Its hyperbolic heroic style prompted immediate parodies by Andrew Marvell and others.

Weckerlin, Georg Rudolph

Late in life, Waller turned to sacred poetry, releasing Divine Poems in 1685. When Waller died, his tomb was marked with a Latin epitaph: “inter poetas sui temporis facile princeps” (“among the poets of his time easily the first”). Such lofty conceptions have largely dissipated, though the sense that Waller was “of his time” remains the prevailing critical sentiment. Eric C. Brown

Walton, Brian [Bryan] (c. 1600 –1661). Editor of the London Polyglot Bible (1653 –1657), a triumph of English scholarship and typography. Educated at Cambridge University, in the 1620s he was assistant to Richard Stock, rector of Milton’s family church of All Hallows. Holding from 1628 the living of St. Martin’s Orgar, Walton angered his parishioners by moving the communion table back; in 1641 they printed a petition against his “popish Innovations,” and he was ejected. Retreating to Oxford he successfully supervised the production of the polyglot, a vast undertaking and one of the earliest books to be produced by subscription. Its six volumes boasted scripture in nine languages; Walton’s own Prolegomena defended his doctrinally minimal methodology. Milton is known to have drawn it to the attention of the Council of State and persuaded the council to allow duty-free importation of the paper needed for the project. At the Restoration Walton was made, albeit briefly, bishop of Chester. See ODNB.

William Poole

Ward, Robert (fl. 1639). Soldier and writer on military theory and practice. A rather shadowy figure, he wrote Animadversions of Warre; or, A Militarie Magazine of the Truest Rules, and Ablest Instructions, for the Managing of Warre Composed, of the Most Refined Discipline, and Choice Experiments That These Late Netherlandish, and Swedish Warres Have Produced. On the title page he has the epithets “Gentleman and commander.” It is a handsome folio, exhaustive in its practical details, particularly of fortifications. Milton made a single reference to it in his Commonplace Book. Thomas N. Corns

Ware, Sir James (1594 –1666). Antiquary and historian. He was editor of The History of Ireland.

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Collected by Three Learned Authors, viz. Meredith Hanmer . . . Edmund Campion and Edmund Spenser (Dublin, 1633), which was dedicated to Thomas Wentworth, the future Earl of Strafford, then Lord Deputy General of Ireland. Milton cites the collection three times in his Commonplace Book, drawing once on Campion and twice on Edmund Spenser. Thomas N. Corns

Wase, Christopher (1627–1690). Schoolmaster, classical scholar, and translator. He was educated at King’s College, Cambridge, where he held a fellowship (B.A. 1649), though he was ejected in 1650 after he declined to take the oath of engagement. He traveled to the Low Countries, perhaps as a royalist agent, escaping from capture while in possession of royalist letters. He returned to England in 1652 and thereafter held various teaching posts. After the Restoration, he received various appointments through the patronage of the universities or members and supporters of the new regime. His political sympathies— or at least antipathies— were evident before his ejection. His translation of Sophocles’s Electra is suffused with royalist sentiment. As a jibe at heterodoxy as exemplified by Milton’s views on divorce, he coined the term “the froward Miltonist.” Thomas N. Corns

Weckerlin, Georg Rudolph (1584 –1653). Poet and public servant. He was born in Stuttgart and educated at the University of Tübingen. A skilled linguist, he entered the diplomatic service of Württemberg, participating in embassies and missions to France and England. In 1630 he was naturalized as an English citizen by letters patent. He had by then some reputation as a masque writer and had published two books of poetry in German. He worked for the Caroline government as a translator of both German and French and came informally into the personal service of Charles I. Despite personal and family loyalties — a son was in arms for the king —he accepted the role of servicing the Long Parliament as a translator and worked on deciphering papers captured at the Battle of Naseby for inclusion in the Kings Cabinet Opened. At the formation of the Council of State he could reasonably have expected the appointment that went to Milton, but Milton had no uncertainties over his loyalty to the republican regime. As Milton’s sight faded, however,

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Weckerlin was reengaged, though he died shortly afterwards. See Aylmer (1973), ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

Wentworth, Thomas, Earl of Strafford (1593 – 1641). Caroline statesman. He was born in London and educated at Cambridge University and the Inner Temple. He served as a member of Parliament for Yorkshire, and once for Pontefract, in parliaments during the reigns of James I and the early parliaments of Charles I. Knighted in 1611 Wentworth rose to higher titles and offices during Charles I’s reign: president of the Council of the North and Privy Councilor in 1629, and Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1632 (though he did not enter Dublin until 1633). He was created Earl of Strafford and a knight of the garter in 1640. Much of the ire directed at him as one of the “great incendiaries” and evil counselors of the king resulted from his Irish post. As Lord Deputy, Wentworth prompted resentment in both the Catholic and the Protestant communities as he attempted firmly to reassert the rights of the crown in Ireland. Called back to England in 1639 by Charles I, with the hope that Wentworth could manage an English Parliament as effectively as he had the Irish Parliament, he entered the center of a political storm. His absence from Ireland emboldened both Catholics and Protestants to act in order to reassert their rights, and open rebellion eventually broke out in October 1641 (see Irish Rebellion). Meanwhile, in England, Wentworth was soon impeached by Parliament and put on trial in the spring of 1641. His Bill of Attainder passed the House of Lords on 8 May and, after a day of indecision, Charles I signed his death warrant, though he later expressed remorse in Eikon Basilike. Milton discusses both the merit of the judgment and the perverseness of the king’s response in Eikonoklastes. Wentworth was beheaded on Tower Hill on 12 May 1641. See ODNB.

Jim Daems

Wesley, John (1703 –1791). Founder of Methodism, Anglican priest, and Oxford don turned traveling preacher. He preached in fields, barns, and village squares to the poorer classes. Encouraging his followers to read, Wesley abridged books and published them in cheap duodecimo form, among them George Herbert’s The Temple and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. He prized Paradise Lost

above all, and his hymns and those of his brother Charles have numerous Miltonic echoes. In 1763 he edited a pocket Paradise Lost, with concise notes, for “the unlearned.” Of Milton’s 10,565 lines, he excised 1,870 that he considered either too difficult or theologically or morally objectionable. Beverley Sherry

Westminster. The seat of all but economic power in London. The City and Liberties of Westminster lie two miles west of London along the Thames. The Courts of Common Law (King’s Bench and Common Pleas) met in Westminster Hall; Westminster Abbey was the site of coronation for monarchs; and the House of Commons met in St. Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster Palace, where the majority of administrative functions in government were also located. North of Westminster Palace along the Thames lay the twenty-three acres comprising the royal residence of Whitehall Palace, a rambling structure with buildings, courts, and gardens connected by galleries. Milton’s work as Secretary for Foreign Tongues required him to be much at Westminster. On 19 November 1649 he was given chambers in Scotland Yard, Whitehall; when he was deprived of these he took up a house in Petty France in Westminster on 17 December 1651. The funeral service for his second wife, Katherine Woodcock, was in St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster, on 10 February 1658. Ceri Sullivan

Westminster Assembly of Divines. A longstanding synod of the Church of England, it was instituted in 1643 by the Long Parliament, with a remit of completing the reformation of the doctrine and discipline of the Caroline church, which was thought necessary by Puritan critics of William Laud. It consisted of 121 divines and 30 laity. The divines included the members of the Smectymnuus writing consortium, whose efforts Milton had seconded in his antiprelatical tracts of 1641–1642. The laity included the members of Parliament Sir Henry Vane the younger and John Selden, whom Milton admired, and Bulstrode Whitelocke, who was probably a future patron and possibly already an acquaintance of Milton from the late 1630s. Moderate Puritans like Stephen Marshall and Edmund Calamy predominated. Controversies soon emerged, centering on the relationship between church and state (where moderates and Erastians disagreed) and on church government (where mod-

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erates and Independents disagreed). Once Scottish members joined the assembly, the moderate position hardened into an advocacy of a Presbyterian church government, to be enforced by the civil magistrate. Milton initially viewed the convocation of the assembly with an apparent optimism, probably shaping his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce to meet their remit, and addressing them explicitly in the epistle to the first edition. However, as the assembly polarized and Milton became increasingly under scrutiny and attack by Presbyterians, his expectations certainly shifted. Thomas N. Corns

Wexford. Port town on the southeastern tip of Ireland, County Wexford. Once a Norse settlement, it was captured and heavily fortified by the Normans in the twelfth century. During the English civil wars an extensive fleet of privateers operated out of Wexford; hence, the town posed a significant logistical danger, particularly for Oliver Cromwell’s invasion plans. Following the capture of Drogheda, Cromwell turned his attention to the town. On 11 October 1649 Cromwell’s artillery breached the castle walls at the south end of the town, and his soldiers massacred its inhabitants. As in Drogheda, the slaughter was iconoclastic; for example, a number of priests were beaten to death with crucifixes. Accounts of the event viewed the massacre as retribution for the supposed Catholic atrocities committed upon the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion in 1641. Cromwell saw the victory, as he had Drogheda, as a righteous victory over the town. History has judged him, for the most part, severely, and some of the opprobrium associated with his Irish campaign has been extended at times to Milton, whose Observations upon the Articles of Peace provided a justification for the expedition. Jim Daems

Whigs. A loose grouping of members of Parliament with republican and nonconformist connections whose opposition to the government in the later 1670s became focused on an attempt to exclude the Roman Catholic James, Duke of York (the future James II), from the succession. See republicanism, nonconformity, and Tories. N. H. Keeble

White [née Harmon], Ellen Gould (1827–1915). Cofounder of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church.

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She was born on a farm outside Gorham, Maine, and grew up in Portland, Maine, where at about nine years of age she was struck by a rock thrown by an angry classmate. As a result she became a lifelong invalid. In 1840 she accepted the premillennial teachings of William Miller that Christ would return “about the year 1843.” In December 1844 she experienced her first vision explaining the Millerite disappointment. In 1858 she received her most significant vision outlining a great controversy between Christ and Satan. She wrote more than forty books during her lifetime, the majority of which expanded on this theme. White was powerfully influenced by Milton and Puritan thought although there does not appear to be any direct link between her writings and those of Milton. There is a tradition that suggests that White was given a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost soon after her Great Controversy vision, yet in her history of Christianity Milton’s name is conspicuously absent from her list of Puritan luminaries. Such an omission in no way diminishes Milton’s effect. She used obvious parallels in her writings, particularly in her description of the fall of Lucifer along with other extrabiblical insights that become particularly apparent in her more mature writings. In addition, early Sabbatarian Adventists were familiar with Milton’s writings on the nonimmortality of the soul and circulated excerpts in tract form as a defense for their own position. Michael W. Campbell

Whitehall. A major complex of a royal palace and related buildings and facilities, sited to the west of London, adjacent to Westminster. In the seventeenth century this was the largest royal compound in England. It included royal apartments, offices, a Banqueting House, a tiltyard, and at various times a theater and a masquing hall. Charles I entertained ambitious plans for its redevelopment, inspired in part by his visit to Spain (see the Spanish Match) and his wonder at the palatial retreat, the “royal monastery” of the Escorial outside Madrid. Inigo Jones was commissioned to design a new palace of Whitehall in a unified Palladian style to match the Banqueting House that was completed under James I, but the plan was never implemented. During the later 1640s, the palace complex became a military base for the New Model Army in London, and issues of tactical security, rather than a brutal poignancy, prompted its selection as the site for the execution of Charles I. At the Restoration the complex was refurbished and new buildings added;

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however, most of the site was devastated in a fire of 1698 and not reconstructed. The Banqueting House, which survived the fire and remains one of the finest buildings in England of the period, was designed for James I by Inigo Jones and built during 1619 –1622 for the reception and entertainment of the king’s visitors. The ceiling paintings by Peter Paul Rubens were installed for Charles I in 1636 as a memorial to his father. The program promotes James’s reputation as “England’s Solomon” for peacekeeping, as is appropriate for ambassadorial visits; Rubens, himself an ambassador, had helped negotiate peace between England and Spain. Rubens represents ideal kingship in three large paintings, each flanked by two smaller allegorical panels. The union of England and Scotland, or the Union of the Crowns, represents the king’s reception of a child being crowned by Britannia as Minerva and held by two women, suggesting (with differences) a Judgment of Solomon. The Apotheosis of James I, analogous to an Ascension of Christ, is accompanied by processions of cherubs riding wild animals to represent the taming of divisive passions. The Benefits of the Government of James I depicts the king enthroned, as in paintings of The Last Judgment. Milton would have understood the allegories of rational virtue without applauding the elevation of the monarch by analogy with the Son of God, a presumption he deplores in his prose and ascribes to Satan in Paradise Lost. Diane Kelsey McColley, Thomas N. Corns

turned, Whitelocke was constrained to use bribery to escape punishment. He returned to legal practice, though with only modest success. Milton may first have encountered Whitelocke at Horton. The manor house was the seat of the Bulstrode family; long before the Miltons moved there, one daughter had married James Whitelocke. Bulstrode Whitelocke was their son, and familial duty could well have called him back to Horton during Milton’s time. Whitelocke, it is sometimes speculated, may have played a part in Milton’s first appointment as a public servant under the Purged Parliament. Their paths certainly crossed during the Protectorate, and Milton’s Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda, with its panegyric to Queen Christina of Sweden, can be seen to be supporting Whitelocke’s embassy to the Swedish court. Thomas N. Corns

Wilkins, John (1614 –1672). Experimental philosopher, a founder of the Royal Society, and bishop of Chester from 1668. He was the major publicist of the new science, and as warden of Wadham College during the Interregnum, he supported and sustained the circle of experimentalists at Oxford University. His early tracts in defense of the Copernican hypothesis were particularly influential and furnished material for the astronomical discussion between Adam and Raphael in Paradise Lost. William Poole

Whitelocke, Bulstrode (1605 –1675). Politician and lawyer. He was educated at St. John’s College, Oxford, leaving, without taking a degree, to enter the Middle Temple. He practiced as a lawyer through the 1630s and supported John Hampden on the issue of the ship money tax. He was elected to the Long Parliament at its inception and was active on its behalf, most notably in abortive negotiations with Charles I. Though he opposed the execution of the king, he served as commissioner of the great seal under the Purged Parliament and was a member of its Council of State. He opposed the dissolution of that Parliament but remained on sufficiently good terms with Oliver Cromwell to be sent by him as ambassador to Sweden. On his return he was once more appointed commissioner of the great seal, and he served in the first Protectoral Parliament. He retained the great seal under the second Protectorate. He was actively engaged in abortive attempts to reorganize the constitution to fend off the Restoration. After Charles II re-

William of Malmesbury (c. 1090 – c. 1142). Historian, man of letters, and Benedictine monk. He spent his whole life from boyhood at the Benedictine abbey at Malmesbury. His most influential work was Gesta Regum Anglorum, a full-scale history of England from the death of Bede in 735 until his own day, which was completed c. 1125 –1126, although he continued to revise it for many years. William wrote a companion piece of similar scale, Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, a church history of England. This, too, was finished c. 1125 and revised at intervals over the next decade. Milton knew William’s work in the compilation of Henry Savile (1596), and he drew heavily on it in The History of Britain, citing it about 130 times. Thomas N. Corns

Williams, Roger (?1603 –1683). Religious controversialist and founder of Providence, Rhode Island.

Wither [Withers], George

Born in London, he departed for America in 1631. His heterodox views on toleration and on the colonial charter (which expropriated indigenous peoples) placed him at odds with Boston authorities, and he was soon banished. Williams and his ideas about unfettered religious liberty and the strict separation of church and state found a haven in Providence. Milton and Williams perhaps became friends at Cambridge University (they were fellow students from 1625 to 1629) or during Williams’s 1643 –1644 trip to England, but the first evidence of their association is Williams’s letter to John Winthrop, Jr., during a 1651–1654 visit to England. The letter’s tortured syntax implies that Williams aided Milton with Dutch, while Milton assisted him with other languages. There is no known source in which Milton mentions Williams, and Williams rarely mentions Milton. They were indelibly linked in the minds of seventeenth-century critics, however, who expressed scorn for their “dangerous” writings. See ODNB.

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at Wadham College, Oxford University, on 18 January 1660 and received his M.A. in 1661. Rochester then left on a grand tour before entering the court. His favor with Charles II was due to both his amazing wit and his late father’s service to the monarchy. Henry Wilmot, Baron Wilmot of Adderbury in Oxfordshire, served as a general in Charles I’s forces and played a key role in Charles II’s escape to the Continent after the disastrous Battle of Worcester in 1651, for which he was rewarded with the title of Earl of Rochester. John Wilmot succeeded to the title on the death of his father in 1658. The quintessential libertine, his life reads like an example of much that Milton critiques in regards to court debauchery. But there are some curious literary connections between the two authors. Rochester’s cryptically titled fragment “SAB: LOST” has been assumed to allude to Sabrina in Milton’s Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, and the lyric “Have you not in a chimney seen,” debatably Rochester’s, was once attributed to Milton. Jim Daems

David L. Weeks

Williamson, Sir Joseph (1633 –1701). Public servant. He was educated at Queen’s College, Oxford (B.A. 1654, M.A. 1657), where he later held a fellowship. In 1660 he was invited to join the administration of the Restoration government, taking up the post of undersecretary of state for the south, a department of government that included intelligence gathering among its responsibilities. By the mid-1670s he was secretary of state and a member of Parliament charged by the government to organize and promote court interests in the House of Commons. He became aware of the attempt by Daniel Skinner to place for publication in the United Provinces the manuscripts of De Doctrina Christiana and Milton’s Latin Letters of State. Probably more exercised about the latter, he brought immense pressure to bear on Skinner, ensuring that he handed over the manuscripts, which were confiscated and placed in the Old State Papers Office, Whitehall, where they remained until their rediscovery in 1823 by Robert Lemon. See Campbell et al. (2007), ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

Wilmot, John, Second Earl of Rochester (1647– 1680). Poet and court wit. He was born at his mother’s estate, Ditchley, Oxfordshire. He matriculated

Wither [Withers], George (1588 –1667). Poet, satirist, emblematist, and political activist. He was born in Bentworth, Hampshire, and entered Oxford in 1604 but was withdrawn by his father after only three years. An early collection of satirical essays, Abuses Stript and Wipt (1613), landed him in prison at Marshalsea, but the book was widely read and reissued. While incarcerated he completed a series of eclogues, The Shepherd’s Hunting, and supported his release with Satyre to the King, a defense of his previous works. His early lyrical works include Fidelia (1617). Alexander Gil the elder, in his patriotic English grammar Logonomia Anglica (1619), celebrated Wither as “our Juvenal” and had students translating his satires into Latin. Ben Jonson notoriously satirized this gesture in his masque Time Vindicated (1623), in which Wither also comes under direct attack. Having dedicated Abuses “To Himselfe,” Wither is burlesqued by Jonson as “Chronomastix,” a whipper of the times, and dubbed a “Selfe-loving Braggart.” Wither’s reputation never quite recovered, and he complains five years later: “With words ironicall, they doe revile me: / The Valiant Poet, they in scorne doe stile me, / The Chronomastix” (Britain’s Remembrancer [London, 1628], 7.191–93). His reputation as a poet, indeed, seemed always under assault. In 1635 he published the popular work A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Modern, adding “Moral and Divine” verse to a

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gallimaufry of allegorical emblems assembled from various continental authors. Yet when Wither was captured by royalist troops in 1643, his cause was pleaded by fellow poet Sir John Denham, who “desired his majesty not to hang him, for that whilest G.W. lived, he [Denham] should not be the worst poet in England.” That Wither saw himself situated in a more lofty pantheon is suggested by The Great Assises Holden in Parnassus by Apollo and His Assessours (1645), in which a jury of English poets, with Wither as foreman, condemns personified newspapers and their editors ( Jonson is served a turn as their labored jailer). Wither’s Puritan poetic style typically avoids the closed couplet in his verse and tends toward plain language and syntax, unadorned by mythical allusion. Though he had raised troops against Charles I in 1642, he was notoriously ambivalent in his political sympathies and defends in Campo-Musae, or, The Field Musings of Captain George Wither (December 1643) his decision to side against the king after previously praising him in Britain’s Remembrancer (1628). Latterly his significance as a political thinker and seminal figure in the history of English republicanism has been reconsidered, primarily by David Norbrook, who sees him as “against replacing royal absolutism by parliamentary absolutism.” In the eyes of contemporaries, his profile in the 1640s as militant poet of the parliamentary cause stood considerably higher than Milton’s, with whom he obviously now invites comparison. Imprisoned yet again from 1661 to 1663, Wither occupied himself increasingly with prophetic writings, in which apocalypticism figures prominently, leading to the posthumous publication of Fragmenta Prophetica in 1669. He died in his home in the Savoy and is buried in the Savoy Chapel Royal, off the Strand, London. See Norbrook (1991, 1999a).

Eric C. Brown

Wolleb, Johan [Wollebius, Johannes] (1586 – 1629). Reformed divine. He was the author of a systematic theology, Compendium Theologicae Christianae, first published in Basel in 1626 and frequently reprinted there, in England, and in the United Provinces. An English translation appeared in 1650. He was a very influential figure, and his treatise did much to fix among reformed divines and scholars essentially Calvinist doctrine. Milton certainly knew the work well, though on several crucial areas of Christian belief he profoundly disagreed with Wolleb. It influenced both the structure and

the content of Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana. Where they concur, Milton often borrows heavily from Wolleb and sometimes, without acknowledgment, closely follows his text. See Campbell et al. (2007).

Thomas N. Corns

Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759 –1797). Author of the feminist credo A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, wife of the philosopher William Godwin, and mother of the author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Although she praised Milton’s ethical power and high seriousness, she expressed ambivalent feelings about his depiction of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost. Enthralled by the loving words on the lips of both Adam and Eve, she still could not forgive Milton for placing man as intermediary between God and woman, violating her own conviction that the sexes were identical in virtue and divine status. After examining the illustrations to Paradise Lost of her friend Henry Fuseli (see illustrations of Milton’s works), Wollstonecraft concluded that both the poet and the artist were more of the party of Satan than of God, thoroughly at home in the regions of hell. Allene Phy-Olsen

women, Milton’s representation of. Milton’s representations of women are limited to those characters mandated by his source texts (Eve in Paradise Lost and Dalila in Samson Agonistes), by specific circumstance (the Lady as a role for Alice Egerton in A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle), and by his personal concerns with divorce. Janet Halley suggests that Milton’s few women are objects of exchange in a homo-social universe, where all important relationships and exchanges are between and among men. Certainly Milton avoids writing about women wherever possible, even going so far as to re-gender a muse male in “Lycidas.” Feminist writers from Virginia Woolf to the present have variously noted, attacked, and taken for granted Milton’s misogyny, a point others have disputed. Although Eve and Dalila are necessary for retellings of the narratives of Genesis chapters 1–3 and Judges, Milton does not simply reproduce the women of the Bible. To say that he gives a more sympathetic version of Eve than any found in canonical sources is to beg the question: Milton’s Eve is clearly secondary to Adam in every important way, just as, in Paradise Lost, the rib story from

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Genesis chapter 2 is privileged over the account in Genesis chapter 1 of the creation of man and woman together. Milton’s first woman, however, is far more complex than the woman of Genesis chapters 2 and 3; this complexity allows the poet to represent aspects of woman not articulated in scripture. Very few scholars have suggested that Milton gives a sympathetic version of Dalila, a character who embodies all of Milton’s views on the dangers of sexuality. Although, in Samson Agonistes, Milton translates the Hebrew ‘ishshâh from Judges as “wife” (a more accurate rendering of Dalila’s status than the “woman” to be found in most biblical translations), the result is not a more fully developed Dalila, rather a more thoroughly betrayed Samson. The radical words of the Lady in A Masque have sparked a number of psychological readings of female complexity. But, while the most interesting of those lines, “Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind” (663), is found in the original text, the equally oft-quoted phrase “the sage / And serious doctrine of virginity” (785 – 86) comes from the 1645 printed revision, not from the Bridgewater manuscript of the 1634 performance text. Arguably, Milton is taking the Lady of the performance and making her, at least verbally, stronger in a particularly female context. But even in the 1645 text she is still ultimately in need of rescue by the Attendant Spirit’s summoning of Sabrina (not by Sabrina herself ). After Comus’s final temptation, the Lady has lost both the power of movement (putatively restored by rescue) and the power of speech, never recovered. The divorce tracts, frequently offered by scholars as the most objective of Milton’s writings on women, cannot be separated from his own problematic marriages, especially the one to Mary Powell. Although many scholars have found his definition of marriage as an equal union of equal minds misleadingly seductive, Joseph Wittreich makes the case that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers, particularly novelists, found Milton’s Eve to be an inspiration. In the context of canonically misogynist, Pauline representations of Eve, this phenomenon has considerable cultural force, although it depends entirely on a historically relativist evaluation of Milton’s Eve as an icon for all women. In addition to the medieval debates and Renaissance humanist dialogues on the nature of women, Milton had access to the writings of Aemilia Lanyer, Rachel Speght, and quite a number of Protestant reformers who challenged the canonical view—

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descended from both Paul and Aristotle— of women as lesser beings than men. No argument for intellectual or historical context adequately authorizes Milton’s mid-seventeenth-century representations of women as, at best, less than men and, at worst, the downfall of men. Only in theory and briefly—and without historical or fictive example— does Milton suggest that women can be men’s mental and moral equals. His statement in An Apology Against a Pamphlet stands undisputed: man is “the perfecter sex.” See Halley (1988), McColley (1983), Walker (1998), Wittreich (1988).

Julia M. Walker

Wood, Anthony [Anthony à] (1632 –1695). Antiquary. He was educated at Merton College, Oxford University (B.A. 1652, M.A. 1655). He remained at Oxford, following antiquarian interests in the Bodleian Library and living relatively frugally. He worked on collecting documents about Oxfordshire but soon turned his attention to chronicling the university. From 1667, he was aided by an association with John Aubrey. As a supplement to his history of the university, he embarked on a project to compile short biographies of authors and bishops who had attended the university. The result was his Athenae Oxoniensis . . . To Which Is Added the Fasti or Annals of the Said University, first published in 1691. Since Milton had incorporated his Cambridge M.A. at Oxford, he was eligible for inclusion. Wood’s account drew on two biographies still in manuscript, by Aubrey and by Cyriack Skinner. Wood offers little that is not in his sources, though he imparts to his narrative an explicit dislike of Milton’s politics. See Darbishire (1932), ODNB.

Thomas N. Corns

Woodcock, Katherine (1628 –1658). Milton’s second wife. Milton’s first wife, Mary Powell, had died in May 1652; four years later, he remarried. At that point, he was blind, and his three daughters— aged ten, eight, and four—lived with him. His new bride was the twenty-eight-year-old daughter of Elizabeth Woodcock, a widow since the death of her husband twelve years earlier. The mother was dependent on the generous support of relatives. Katherine is not known to have brought a dowry to the marriage. The wedding was on 12 November 1656. It was a civil ceremony, as required by the Marriage Act of 1653, and probably took place in the

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Guildhall. Shortly afterwards, Katherine became pregnant. Their daughter, also called Katherine, was born on 19 October 1657. On 3 February 1658, Milton’s wife died (it is usually surmised, of consumption). An elaborate funeral followed, an indication of Milton’s wealth and status in the final years of his career as public servant. Milton’s “Sonnet XIX” (“Methought I saw my late espoused saint”) almost certainly expresses his grief for Katherine, although his first wife has sometimes been conjectured as the subject. The baby daughter died on 17 March.

his poetry and prose. There are ubiquitous Miltonic elements in his works, ranging from words, phrases, and figures of speech to extensive reproduction of Milton’s organ tone and structural and thematic parallels. His finest tribute is the sonnet “London, 1802” (“Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour”). Insistent parallels with Paradise Lost are evident in The Prelude and the Prospectus to The Recluse. See Abrams (1971), Newlyn (1993), Wittreich (1970).

Beverley Sherry

See Campbell and Corns (2008).

Thomas N. Corns

Woodward, Hezekiah (?1591–1675). Clergyman and educational reformer. He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford (B.A. 1612). In the early 1640s he interested himself in educational reform and was in the circle of Samuel Hartlib. His educational writing in the early 1640s is thought by some to be a significant influence on Milton’s Of Education. In the developing crises among English Puritans, he inclined toward support of the Independents and toleration and engaged in controversy with William Prynne. He thus found himself in the company of Milton and in trouble. By the end of 1644 the Long Parliament had instructed the Stationers’ Company to seek out information relating to a recent “libel,” currently unidentified, that plainly had exercised them. The stationers’ officers evidently failed, claiming that the letterpress used was too common to allow the identification of the printer. But they covered their shortcoming by raising the issue of “frequent Printing of scandalous Books by divers,” naming as examples Woodward and Milton. Part of Woodward’s tolerationist tract Inquiries into the Causes of Our Miseries (London, 1644) was seized while in the press. Woodward and Milton were to be brought “before the Judges” under arrest and interrogated in the presence of the stationers’ representatives. However, Woodward was released on bail. There is no record of any further action against Milton, though Cyriack Skinner, who probably erroneously attributes the action to the prompting of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, suggests he was arraigned before the House of Lords and released. Thomas N. Corns

Wordsworth, William (1770 –1850). English poet laureate. As a child he learned passages from Milton by heart and later developed a wide knowledge of

Wotton, Sir Henry (1568 –1639). Diplomat and writer. He was educated at Oxford, migrating from New College to Hart Hall and on to Queen’s College (B.A. 1588). Thereafter, he traveled and studied in continental Europe for five years, acquiring a mastery of French, German, and Italian. On his return he became a secretary to Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex. For considerable periods of the reign of James I Wotton was resident ambassador to Venice and thereafter served on embassies to Savoy and The Hague as well as further missions in Italy. An immensely cultured man, he collected works of art on behalf of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, to whom he had transferred his loyalty. He himself wrote a book on Italian architecture. On his retirement from diplomacy, he acquired, through the patronage of Villiers, the post of provost of Eton College, which he held until his death. Milton visited Wotton at Eton, seeking advice and assistance as he planned his travels to Italy in 1638 as well as letters of introduction. After meeting Wotton Milton wrote a letter of thanks (6 April 1638; now lost) and enclosed a copy of A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle. Wotton was clearly impressed, and on 13 April 1638 he replied to Milton. Milton carefully preserved the letter and published it in Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645) by way of preface to the masque. See Campbell and Corns (2008).

Thomas N. Corns

Wycliffe, John (c. 1330 –1384). Oxford scholar and heresiarch. He developed from public academic to public heretic by questioning the church’s extrabiblical practices—such as transubstantiation—and its intrusion into England’s finances and politics. Although he died in relative peace, Wycliffe’s followers, the Lollards, and their books were being burned by 1401. Milton faults “our Prelats” for suppressing “the divine and admirable spirit of

Wycliffe, John

Wicklef ”; if the Catholics had not censored Wycliffe, Milton argues in Areopagitica, “the glory of reforming all our neighbours had bin compleatly ours.” Such is Milton’s typical deployment of Wycliffe: he serves both to aggrandize England and to castigate Catholicism. Wycliffe’s life supplied support for some of Milton’s favorite issues: antipopery, religious prohibition, and divorce. Given Milton’s allusions, it might seem surprising that he prob-

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ably never read Wycliffe. In Milton’s words, “the poverty of our Libraries” forced Englishmen to cite Wycliffe at second hand (Tetrachordon); one might read of Wycliffe from John Foxe or Raphael Holinshed, but none of Wycliffe’s ostensible English works was printed, and his Latin manuscripts were rare. Craig T. Fehrman

X Xenophon (c. 428 – c. 354 B.C.). Adventurer and historian. He was an aristocratic disciple of Socrates, and after Socrates’s execution he left Athens. He joined the Ten Thousand, the Greek mercenary army recruited by the Persian Cyrus the Younger to second his attempted coup d’état, and played a significant part in its retreat after that attempt had failed. He thereafter joined with the king of Sparta in expeditions against Persia and Athens. He retired to a country estate near Olympia provided for him by the Spartans, for whom he remained an officeholder. His writings, which date from this period, are largely based on recollections of his own experience. Thus, his Memorabilia contains accounts of

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the life and sayings of Socrates, whom he plainly continued to idolize. In Animadversions Milton draws on Xenophon for his reflection that Socrates never bargained over fees because “The heathen Philosophers thought that . . . the greatest gaine of a teacher [is] to make a soule vertuous.” Again, in The Reason of Church-Government Milton finds in Xenophon’s Anabasis and Cyropaedia, his accounts of his military adventures with Cyrus, support for his contention that “discipline” holds the key to success. Xenophon’s writings also figure in the syllabus defined in Of Education. Thomas N. Corns

Y Yeats, William Butler (1865 –1939). Irish poet, dramatist, and politician. Although he agreed at least in part with T. S. Eliot and other modernists on Milton—that he was too rhetorical, sterile, puritanical, and Latinate—Yeats was less truculent, remembering the inherent difficulties of the supernatural subjects Milton engaged. An avid reader of Milton’s prose, Yeats thought highly enough of Milton to quote from The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce during an Irish Free Senate debate. His library also indicates he found redeeming qualities in Milton’s poetry. Yeats owned H. C. Beeching’s 1935 edition of The Poetical Works of John Milton (now in the University of Tulsa’s Ellmann Collection), and in this copy he marked “Il Penseroso” lines 65 –148 (see “L’Allegro”) and Paradise Lost 4.211–94. These passages, along with “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” influenced Yeats’s “News for the Delphic Oracle”; Yeats even drafted the first lines of “News” in the back cover of his Poetical Works. Craig T. Fehrman

Young, Thomas (c. 1587–1655). Clergyman. He was born in Scotland and educated at St. Leonard’s College, St. Andrews. In holy orders, he moved to work as an assistant to the puritanically inclined Thomas Gataker in Rotherhithe. Perhaps through

Gataker’s friend Richard Stock, who was the rector of the parish in which the Milton family lived, he was introduced to John Milton, Sr., who hired him to tutor his son, probably in 1617–1618 and probably in preparation for his enrollment at St. Paul’s School. Milton had several tutors, though Young is the only one whose identity is known and with whom he is known to have kept in friendly contact. Young left England in 1620 to take up a good living as chaplain to the English Merchant Adventurers in Hamburg. While he was there, Milton addressed to him “Elegia Quarta,” which alludes with apparent anxiety to the threats to Young and his family posed by the Thirty Years War (though in fact Hamburg was never attacked). Two letters from Milton also survive. On his return to England in 1628 Young took up the living at Stowmarket, Suffolk, which he held until his death. As open criticism of William Laud’s church leadership became possible, Young played his part as a member of the Smectymnuus group, whose efforts Milton seconded in his antiprelatical tracts of 1641–1642. A prominent member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, Young advocated a Presbyterian church settlement. From 1644 to 1651, he was master of Jesus College, Cambridge. See ODNB.

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Z Zechariah. Book of the Old Testament. One of the “minor prophets,” it is regarded by modern Bible scholarship as being of composite authorship. Its principal themes, however, relate to the late sixth-century foundation of the second temple in Jerusalem, which its exhortations are designed to promote. A vividly if enigmatically symbolic book, it contains strongly messianic elements. Milton in De Doctrina Christiana remarks on some difficulties it poses in interpretation. A short section in chapter 6 affords an unusual account of Satan’s appearance on earth in dialogue with God and a good angel, which Milton incorporates into his chapter “Of the Special Government of Angels.” See ODCC.

Thomas N. Corns

ing, variously, the house or household of God and thence the Israelites and their religious system; the Christian church; heaven as the final home of believers; or a place of worship or a meetinghouse. In an exultant passage in Areopagitica Milton likens England to Zion. However, from 1647 to 1659 Sion College was the seat of the Presbyterian provincial assembly, from which in 1648 –1649, as the New Model Army purged the Long Parliament and brought Charles I to trial and execution, numerous attacks on the legality and appropriateness of the process were issued. Milton alludes to Sion College in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. In Eikonoklastes he pillories those who appropriated the term to express their own holiness. See OED.

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Zephaniah. Book of the Old Testament. One of the twelve “minor prophets,” it follows the usual pattern of the prophetic books, threatening imminent doom and future reconciliation. Its idiom, however, more insistently universalizes its message, and its expression is often vivid. In De Doctrina Christiana Milton typically treats it among other prophetic writing, but in his chapter on predestination he invests more effort in explicating a passage (2:1–3) in which the judgment Zephaniah foretells is couched in provisional and conditional terms and can be averted. For Milton, the text can be related to a larger argument crucial for his soteriology. See ODCC.

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Zion [Sion]. Originally the name of one of the hills of Jerusalem, on which the city of David was built and which became the center of Jewish life and worship. Thereafter, in both biblical and later usage, it acquired a much wider resonance, mean394

Zwingli, Ulrich [Huldrych] (1484 –1531). Leader of the Reformation in Switzerland. Educated at the universities of Vienna and Basel, he became a priest of the Roman Catholic Church. However, an enthusiasm for humanistic enquiry into the languages of the Bible led him toward a radical critique of many aspects of the papacy. In open disputations with papal representatives, he defended the key principles of the Reformation and persuaded Zürich to break with Rome. He was killed in the civil war that broke out, on devotional lines, amomg the Swiss cantons, thus ensuring a heroic status among Protestants across Europe. Milton cites him with enthusiasm in Eikonoklastes, where he translates about two hundred words justifying the deposition and execution of tyrants, though in Areopagitica he questions the inhibiting effect of Zwingli’s and Jean Calvin’s reputations. See ODCC, ODR.

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Contributors

Sharon Achinstein (St. Edmurd Hall, Oxford) Hazard Adams (University of Washington) Christopher Baker (Armstrong Atlantic State University) Carol Barton (independent scholar) Steven Berkowitz (independent scholar) Tom Bishop (University of Auckland) Marlin E. Blaine (California State University, Fullerton) David Boocker (University of Nebraska, Omaha) Eric C. Brown (University of Maine at Farmington) Sandy Bugeja (independent scholar) Stephen M. Buhler (University of Nebraska, Lincoln) Norman T. Burns (State University of New York, Binghamton) Todd Butler (Washington State University) Gordon Campbell (University of Leicester) Michael W. Campbell (Loma Lind University) Thomas N. Corns (Bangor University) John Creaser (Royal Holloway College) Juliet L. Cummins (University of Queensland) Jim Daems (University of the Fraser Valley) Dennis Danielson (University of British Columbia) H. Neville Davies (University of Birmingham) Michael Davies (University of Liverpool) Margaret J. Dean (Eastern Kentucky University) Kevin De Ornellas (University of Ulster) Stephen B. Dobranski (Georgia State University) Phillip J. Donnelly (Baylor University) Karen L. Edwards (University of Exeter) James Egan (University of Akron) Jeffrey Einboden (Northern Illinois University) Stephen M. Fallon (University of Notre Dame) Craig T. Fehrman (Yale University)

James Fitzmaurice (University of Sheffield/Northern Arizona University) Roy Flannagan (University of South Carolina, Beaufort) Andrew Fleck (San Jose State University) Wendy Furman-Adams (Whittier College) Ian Gadd (Bath Spa University) David Gay (University of Alberta) Marshall Grossman* (University of Maryland) Estelle Haan (Queen’s University, Belfast) John K. Hale (University of Otago) Richard F. Hardin (University of Kansas) Peter C. Herman (San Diego State University) Peter Hinds (Plymouth University) Larry R. Isitt (College of the Ozarks) Edward Jones (Oklahoma State University) N. H. Keeble (University of Stirling) Charles A. Keim (Briercrest College) Margaret Kelly (Macquarie University, Sydney) Mel Kersey (independent scholar) Kevin Killeen (University of York) Peter J. Kitson (University of Dundee) Gregory Kneidel (University of Connecticut) Laura L. Knoppers (Pennsylvania State University) Sˇárka Kú´hnová (Charles University, Prague) Albert C. Labriola* (Duquesne University) Jameela Lares (University of Southern Mississippi) T. Ross Leasure (Salisbury University) John Leonard (University of Western Ontario) Barbara K. Lewalski (Harvard University) Henry S. Limouze (Wright State University) David Loewenstein (University of Wisconsin, Madison) Jack Lynch (Rutgers University)

405

406

Contributors

Raymond N. MacKenzie (University of St. Thomas) Gerald Maclean (University of Exeter) Frances M. Malpezzi (Arkansas State University, Jonesboro) Catherine Gimelli Martin (University of Memphis) Ryan C. McCarty (independent scholar) Diane Kelsey McColley (Rutgers University) Feisal G. Mohamed (University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign) Benjamin Myers (Charles Sturt University, Sydney) Coleman C. Myron (American Public University) Graham Parry (University of York) Philip E. Phillips (Middle Tennessee State University) Allene Phy-Olsen (Austin Peay State University) William Poole (University of Oxford) Jonathan F. S. Post (University of California, Los Angeles) (with Loren Blinde, Kimo Carew, Richard Contreras, Valerie A. Cullen, Wayne Gochenour, Julian Knox, Susan E. Lewak, Carrie L. Meathrell, Sean R. Silver, and Patricia G. Waldron) Beth Quitslund (Ohio University) Joad Raymond (University of East Anglia) Lawrence F. Rhu (University of South Carolina) Marc Ricciardi (St. Joseph’s College) Daniel Robinson (Widener University) John P. Rumrich (University of Texas, Austin) Sharon Ruston (University of Salford) Elizabeth Sauer (Brock University)

*Deceased.

Michael Schoenfeldt (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) Gregory M. Colón Semenza (University of Connecticut) Leslie E. Sheldon (University of Ottawa) Beverley Sherry (University of Sydney) James H. Sims (University of Southern Mississippi) Nigel Smith (Princeton University) Paul Stevens (University of Toronto) Kay Gilliland Stevenson (University of Essex) Ceri Sullivan (Bangor University) Christophe J.-B. Tournu (University of Strasbourg) Linda B. Tredennick (Gonzaga University) Virginia James Tufte (Whittier College) David V. Urban (Calvin College, Grand Rapids) Nicholas von Maltzahn (University of Ottawa) Julia M. Walker (State University of New York, Geneseo) William W. Walker (University of New South Wales, Sydney) Hui-Hua Wang (National Taiwan Normal University) Christopher Warley (University of Toronto) Christopher N. Warren (Carnegie Mellon University) David L. Weeks (Azusa Pacific University) Vivienne Westbrook (National Taiwan University) Curtis L. Whitaker (Idaho State University) Susan Wiseman (Birkbeck College, University of London) Christopher Wortham (University of Western Australia)