John Milton Radical Politics And Biblical Republicanism

In analyzing how Milton reads and appropriates different biblical texts to give shape to his republican vision, this book also assesses his significance to the development of early modern English political thought, his conception of the English nation, and finally, his response to pressures exerted by a secular modernity grounded on international commercial activities."--Jacket.

Historians and literary critics offer a comprehensive thematic assessment of Milton's political and literary career.

Bringing together literary criticism, historical bibliography, and religious, political, and print history, this volume offers a definitive scholarly edition of John Milton's Paradise Regain'd and Samson Agonistes. The scrupulously-edited text is based on extensive collation of the 1671 and 1680 volumes. Drawing on new archival sources and up-to-date historiography, a detailed Introduction sets out the cultural, religious, and political contexts of 1670-71, including continuing opposition to the Restoration regime and the major contribution made to that opposition by publishers and print. While the meanings of the 1671 poems have been much discussed and debated, print and publishing history has been little addressed in teaching editions or scholarship. New archival materials on Milton's publisher, John Starkey, and his printer, John Macock, open up the radical print networks in which Milton's poems were produced, published, and circulated. The Textual Introduction and Headnote also provide a thorough discussion of the contributions of the printing house to the text. Reconstruction of the octavo sheets used in printing the text shows that multiple compositors worked on the text and thus helps to explain variant spelling and address longstanding issues of dating. A discussion of Milton's bold transformation of classical epic and tragedy provides literary historical context. This edition also breaks new ground by including materials on early owners and readers, who actively shaped the texts with corrections, annotations, and references to biblical and classical sources. As an aid for students and scholars alike, Textual Commentary provides precise OED word definitions, identifies biblical, classical, historical, and geographical references, and explains Latin, Greek, and Hebrew usages. This volume will be of interest to scholars of Milton, of Renaissance literature, of print and publishing history, of history of the book, and of early modern cultural, political, and religious history.

This book tells the story of how early modern poets used the theological concept of grace to reimagine their political communities. The Protestant belief that salvation was due to sola gratia, or grace alone, was originally meant to inspire religious reform. But, as Deni Kasa shows, poets of the period used grace to interrogate the most important political problems of their time, from empire and gender to civil war and poetic authority. Kasa examines how four writers—John Milton, Edmund Spenser, Aemilia Lanyer, and Abraham Cowley—used the promise of grace to develop idealized imagined communities, and not always egalitarian ones. Kasa analyzes the uses of grace to make new space for individual and collective agency in the period, but also to validate domination and inequality, with poets and the educated elite inserted as mediators between the gift of grace and the rest of the people. Offering a literary history of politics in a pre-secular age, Kasa shows that early modern poets mapped salvation onto the most important conflicts of their time in ways missed by literary critics and historians of political thought. Grace, Kasa demonstrates, was an important means of expression and a way to imagine impossible political ideals.

This edited collection brings together varying angles and approaches to tackle the multi-dimensional issue of anti-Catholicism since the Protestant Reformation in Britain and Ireland. It is of course difficult to infer from such geographically and historically diverse studies one single contention, but what the book as a whole suggests is that there can be no teleological narration of anti-Catholicism – its manifestations were episodic, more or less rooted in common worldviews, and its history does not end today.

An important and innovative edition of Milton's shorter verse & the first volume to present the poems with the original spelling and pronunciations intact, offering readers the opportunity to experience the vitality of the poems as they were experienced by Milton's contemporaries: Includes Milton's original Latin poems, with a new English translation on facing pages for cross-comparison Serves as a companion to Lewalski's Paradise Lost and Loewenstein's prose selections of Milton Features both collected and uncollected poetry in English, Latin, and Greek, the latter two with translations Retains original spelling and punctuation of Milton's 1645 Poems and his 1671 Paradise Regained and Sampson Agonistes Offers readers comprehensive footnotes, marginal glosses, chronology, bibliography, and longer discussions in introductions to sections

Disciplinary Measures from the Metrical Psalms to Milton studies the relationship between English poetry and church discipline in four carefully chosen bodies of poetry written between the Reformation and the death of John Milton. Its primary goal is to fill a gap in the field of Protestant poetics, which has never produced a study focused on the way in which poetry participates in and reflects on the post-Reformation English Church's attempts to govern conduct. Its secondary goal is to revise the understandings of discipline which social theorists and historians have offered, and which literary critics have largely accepted. It argues that knowledge of the early modern culture of discipline illuminates some important poetic traditions and some major English poets, and it shows that this poetry in turn throws light on verbal and affective aspects of the disciplinary process that prove difficult to access through other sources, challenging assumptions about the means of social control, the structures of authority, and the practical implications of doctrinal change. More specifically, Disciplinary Measures argues that while poetry can help us to understand the oppressive potential of church discipline, it can also help us to recover a more positive sense of discipline as a spiritual cure.

Tracing a series of political crises in Anglo-American history from the 16th-century Reformation to the civil rights movement Coffey excavates the history of deliverance politics testifying to the powerful political appeal of the Exodus, the Jubilee and the biblical language of liberty.