Milton Toleration And Nationhood

This study examines how Milton's polemical and imaginative prose intersects with representations of English Protestant nationhood.

Fifteen leading Milton scholars examine the idea of toleration in Milton's poetry and prose. Looking at how Milton himself imagined tolerance and locating his works in their literary, historical, and philosophical context, the essays address central issues including violence, heresy, church polity, liberalism, libertinism, natural law, equity, imperialism, republicanism, and Milton and his Muslim readers.

This study examines how Milton's polemical and imaginative literature intersects with representations of English Protestant nationhood. Through detailed case studies of Milton's works, Elizabeth Sauer shows the extent to which seventeenth-century English notions of nationhood and toleration can be subjected to literary and historicist inquiry.

15 leading scholars examine the idea of toleration in Milton's poetry & prose. Looking at how Milton himself imagined tolerance & locating his works in their literary, historical, & philosophical context, the essays address central issues including violence, heresy, church polity, liberalism, natural law & more.

Table of contents

Formerly a site of study reserved for intellectual historians and political philosophers, scholarship on religious toleration, from the perspective of literary scholars, is fairly limited. Largely ignored and understudied techniques employed by writers to influence cultural understandings of tolerance are rich for exploration. In investigating texts ranging from early modern to Romantic, Alison Conway, David Alvarez, and their contributors shed light on what literature can say about toleration, and how it can produce and manage feelings of tolerance and intolerance. Beginning with an overview of the historical debates surrounding the terms "toleration" and "tolerance," this book moves on to discuss the specific contributions that literature and literary modes have made to cultural history, studying the literary techniques that philosophers, theologians, and political theorists used to frame the questions central to the idea and practice of religious toleration. Tracing the rhetoric employed by a wide range of authors, the contributors delve into topics such as conversion as an instrument of power in Shakespeare; the relationship between religious toleration and the rise of Enlightenment satire; and the ways in which writing can act as a call for tolerance.

A collection of essays exploring John Milton's rise to popularity and his status as a canonical author. The volume considers Milton's 'authorial persona' in the context of his relationships with his contemporary writers, stationers, and readers.

The Masculinites of John Milton is the first published monograph on Milton's men. Examining how Milton's fantasies of manly authority are framed in his major works, this study exposes the gaps between Milton's pleas for liberty and his assumptions that White men like himself should rule his culture. From schoolboys teaching each other how to traffic in young women in the Ludlow Masque, to his treatises on divorce that make the wife-less husband the best possible citizen, and to the later epics, in which Milton wrestles with male small talk and the ladders of masculine social power, his verse and prose draw from and amplify his culture's claims about manliness in education, warfare, friendship, citizenship, and conversation. This revolutionary poet's most famous writings reveal how ambivalently manhood is constructed to serve itself in early modern England.