John Milton S Philosophy Politics A Modernized Reader

John Milton (1608-1674) was not just an iconic English poet but also a profound thinker and political commentator. As a devout Reformed Christian and fervent libertarian, Milton’s works championed individual freedom, truth, and resistance against tyranny and religious oppression. This modernized reader brings together twenty-five of Milton’s seminal philosophical and political treatises, thoughtfully updated for contemporary readers. Key works include: · On England's Reformation: A critique of religious and political corruption, advocating for reform based on liberty and conscience. · On Prelatical Episcopacy: A challenge to ecclesiastical hierarchy and political ambition, promoting egalitarian church governance. · Areopagitica: A passionate defense of free speech and publication, opposing censorship in favor of open dialogue and diverse voices. · The Defense of 'Smectymnuus': An assertion of freedom of expression and individual conscience amid civil war. · On Education: An ahead-of-its-time vision for holistic education, emphasizing virtue, wisdom, and intellectual freedom. · Revisiting Divorce Doctrine and Discipline: A provocative challenge to societal norms and religious orthodoxy regarding marriage and personal autonomy. · Kings and Magistrates and Their Accountability: A defense of republican government and the right to depose tyrannical rulers, influencing later political thought. · Iconoclastes: A repudiation of monarchical myths, defending the Parliamentary cause against royalist propaganda. · The Second Defense of the English People: A robust justification of the regicide of Charles I, defending the Commonwealth’s legitimacy and principles. Milton’s eloquence and conviction resonate through these modernized texts, making them accessible to today’s readers while preserving their original fervor and insight. Ideal for scholars, students, and anyone interested in the intersections of literature, philosophy, and politics, this collection highlights Milton's enduring relevance in the ongoing discourse on liberty, governance, and human rights.

The phrase “early modern” challenges readers and scholars to explore ways in which that period expands and refines contemporary views of the modern. The original essays in Milton’s Modernities undertake such exploration in the context of the work of John Milton, a poet whose prodigious energies simultaneously point to the past and future. Bristling with insights on Milton’s major works, Milton’s Modernities offers fresh perspectives on the thinkers central to our theorizations of modernity: from Lucretius and Spinoza, Hegel and Kant, to Benjamin and Deleuze. At the volume's core is an embrace of the possibilities unleashed by current trends in philosophy, variously styled as the return to ethics, or metaphysics, or religion. These make all the more visible Milton’s dialogues with later modernity, dialogues that promise to generate much critical discussion in early modern studies and beyond. Such approaches necessarily challenge many prevailing assumptions that have guided recent Milton criticism—assumptions about context and periodization, for instance. In this way, Milton’s Modernities powerfully broadens the historical archive beyond the materiality of events and things, incorporating as well intellectual currents, hybrids, and insights.

This book is about the complex ways in which science and literature are mutually-informing and mutually-sustaining. It does not cast the literary and the scientific as distinct, but rather as productively in-distinct cultural practices: for the two dozen new essays collected here, the presiding concern is no longer to ask how literary writers react to scientific writers, but rather to study how literary and scientific practices are imbricated. These specially-commissioned essays from top scholars in the area range across vast territories and produce seemingly unlikely unions: between physics and rhetoric, math and Milton, Boyle and the Bible, plague and plays, among many others. In these essays so-called scientific writing turns out to traffic in metaphor, wit, imagination, and playfulness normally associated with literature provides material forms and rhetorical strategies for thinking physics, mathematics, archeology, and medicine.

Milton and the Post-Secular Present defines and critiques the term 'post-secular' as it appears in current thought, bringing its implications into sharp relief by comparison to the pre-secular works of John Milton.

This is a global anthology of great texts in the history of political dissent. Volume 1 spans the ancient and early-modern world, beginning with the Book of Isaiah, from the eighth century, BCE, and ending with John C. Calhoun’s “South Carolina Exposition,” from the early nineteenth century CE. Volume 2 begins with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the “Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments,” from the mid-nineteenth century, and ends with the 2008 online Chinese human rights manifesto “Charter 08”. The selected texts come from across the ideological spectrum, representing a wide range of political, cultural, philosophical, and religious perspectives. Each text has been framed with an introduction that describes its historical context and importance and provides readers with assistance in interpreting the text—including explanations of unfamiliar terms and concepts. These introductions have been written for a general audience. Each text is also accompanied by a list of “Suggestions for Further Reading,” which points interested readers toward reliable sources for further exploration of the text, its author, and/or the historical moment or issues involved. This anthology should be accessible and useful to anyone from advanced high school students to scholarly specialists.

How translatable is the language of the emotions across cultures and time? What connotations of particular emotions, strongly felt in the early modern period, have faded or shifted completely in our own? If Western culture has traditionally held emotion to be hostile to reason and the production of scientific knowledge, why and how have the passions been lauded as windows to higher truths? Assessing the changing discourses of feeling and their relevance to the cultural history of affect, Reading the Early Modern Passions offers fourteen interdisciplinary essays on the meanings and representations of the emotional universe of Renaissance Europe in literature, music, and art. Many in the early modern era were preoccupied by the relation of passion to action and believed the passions to be a natural force requiring stringent mental and physical disciplines. In speaking to the question of the historicity and variability of emotions within individuals, several of these essays investigate specific emotions, such as sadness, courage, and fear. Other essays turn to emotions spread throughout society by contemporary events, such as a ruler's death, the outbreak of war, or religious schism, and discuss how such emotions have widespread consequences in both social practice and theory. Addressing anxieties about the power of emotions; their relation to the public good; their centrality in promoting or disturbing an individual's relation to God, to monarch, and to fellow human beings, the authors also look at the ways emotion serves as a marker or determinant of gender, ethnicity, and humanity. Contributors to the volume include Zirka Filipczak, Victoria Kahn, Michael Schoenfeldt, Bruce Smith, Richard Strier, and Gary Tomlinson.

Explores the cultural functions played in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by accounts of the Bible's origins.

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.