Milton And The Rhetoric Of Religious Controversy

Religious satire and polemic constitute an elusive presence in Paradise Lost. John N. King shows how Milton's poem takes on new meaning when understood as part of a strategy of protest against ecclesiastical formalism and clericalism. The experience of Adam and Eve before the Fall recalls many Puritan devotional habits. After the Fall, they are prone to 'idolatrous' ritual and ceremony that anticipate the religious 'error' of Milton's own age. Vituperative sermons, broadsides and pamphlets, notably Milton's own tracts, afford a valuable context for recovering the poem's engagement with the violent history of the Civil Wars, Commonwealth and Restoration, while contemporary visual satires help to clarify Miltonic practice. Eighteenth-century critics who attacked breaches of decorum and sublimity in Paradise Lost alternately deplored and ignored a literary and polemical tradition deployed by Milton's contemporaries. This important study, first published in 2000, sheds light on Milton's epic and its literary and religious contexts.

Locating John Milton's works in national and international contexts, and applying a variety of approaches from literary to historical, philosophical, and postcolonial, Milton and Toleration offers a wide-ranging exploration of how Milton's visions of tolerance reveal deeper movements in the history of the imagination. Milton is often enlisted in stories about the rise of toleration: his advocacy of open debate in defending press freedoms, his condemnation of persecution, and his criticism of ecclesiastical and political hierarchies have long been read as milestones on the road to toleration. However, there is also an intolerant Milton, whose defence of religious liberty reached only as far as Protestants. This book of sixteen essays by leading scholars analyses tolerance in Milton's poetry and prose, examining the literary means by which tolerance was questioned, observed, and became an object of meditation. Organized in three parts, 'Revising Whig Accounts,' 'Philosophical Engagements,' 'Poetry and Rhetoric,' the contributors, including leading Milton scholars from the USA, Canada, and the UK, address central toleration issues including heresy, violence, imperialism, republicanism, Catholicism, Islam, church community, liberalism, libertinism, natural law, legal theory, and equity. A pan-European perspective is presented through analysis of Milton's engagement with key figures and radical groups. All of Milton's major works are given an airing, including prose and poetry, and the book suggests that Milton's writings are a significant medium through which to explore the making of modern ideas of tolerance.

"Describes a rhetoric of radical excess that developed among the Puritan wing of English Protestantism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and from which Milton's radically agressive style of prose emerged"--Provided by publisher.

First published in 1987, The Literature of Controversy is a collection of essays by scholars from Britain, the United States, and Australia on major works from a classic epoch of English controversial prose. Each essay engages a single text or series of texts, less to discuss the ideas and arguments per se than to consider the rhetorical techniques assumed for the political manipulation of the readers. Though emphasis varies from contribution to contribution, the purpose, broadly, is to explore how the constituents of those texts are organised to coax, cajole, persuade or inspire those to whom they address. As the editor argues in his introduction, this approach, the critique of polemical strategy, for the most part accepts the validity of paying regard to the author and his intentions; it engages questions about the responses of the readership at which the texts were targeted; and it proceeds intertextuality in its attempts to reconstruct the controversies in which the texts were embedded and the codes within which they operated. This book will be of interest to students of literature, rhetoric and history.

This study truly breaks new ground in Milton scholarship by demonstrating the extent to which Milton's work reflects the dominant discourse of his age - preaching. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the pulpit consistently commanded greater audiences than did the stage, and many of the era's great poets were also preachers. Milton himself argued that poetry can serve ""beside the office of a pulpit"" and prepared his life's work at the greatest English centre for formal homiletics of its time, Christ's College, Cambridge, but this connection has been virtually ignored by scholars and critics in examining Milton's poetry. Lares now challenges the longstanding assumption that Milton the poet paid no attention to the ministerial training of his past, and she demonstrates how Milton appropriated many structures from English preaching in his own work. That preaching was informed by five sermon types - doctrine, reproof, correction, instruction and consolation - first enunciated by the continental reformer Andreas Gerhard Hyperius (1511-1564). Milton, we find, favoured an odd combination of correction and consolation. Of all the preaching manuals published in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, only one so combines consolation and correction: Methodus concionandi by William Chappell, Milton's first tutor at Christ's College, Cambridge. Milton's use of homiletics, as explained by Lares, may be used in particular to resolve many critical issues related to the last two books of Paradise Lost, which are composed of Adam's dream vision and Michael's narration thereof. These diffuse books, which scholars have been unable to place into any critical paradigm, are actually sermonic in structure and content. And Paradise Regained, in which Milton seems to reject classical rhetoric, actually reflects then-contemporary pulpit concerns over the stylistic inadequacy of the Bible. Moreover, Milton's prose commentaries - often deplored as strident and uncharitable - follow the structure of a sermon of reproof. Of interest to both literary scholars and scholars of church history and homiletics, Milton and the Preaching Arts also surveys sermons and sermon manuals, Bible commentaries, and works of religious controversy on the issues of English church government and scriptural style.

John Milton's Paradise Lost has long been celebrated for its epic subject matter and the poet's rhetorical fireworks. In Between Worlds, William Pallister analyses the rhetorical methods that Milton uses throughout the poem and examines the effects of the three distinct rhetorical registers observed in each of the poem's major settings: Heaven, Hell, and Paradise. Providing insights into Milton's relationship with the history of rhetoric as well as rhetorical conventions and traditions, this rigorous study shows how rhetorical forms are used to highlight and enhance some of the poem's most important themes including free will, contingency and probability. Pallister also provides an authoritative discussion of how the omniscience of God in Paradise Lost affects Milton's verse, and considers how God's speech applies to the concept of the perfect rhetorician. An erudite and detailed study of both Paradise Lost and the history of rhetoric, Between Worlds is essential reading that will help to unravel many of the complexities of Milton's enduring masterpiece.

The issue of the Jews deeply engaged Milton throughout his career, and not necessarily in ways that make for comfortable or reassuring reading today. While Shakespeare and Marlowe, for example, critiqued rather than endorsed racial and religious prejudice in their writings about Jews, the same cannot be said for Milton. The scholars in this collection confront a writer who participated in the sad history of anti-Semitism, even as he appropriated Jewish models throughout his writings. Well grounded in solid historical and theological research, the essays both collectively and individually offer an important contribution to the debate on Milton and Judaism. This book will be of interest not only to scholars of Milton and of seventeenth-century literature, but also to historians of the religion and culture of the period.

This book argues that Milton used innovative and cunning means to persuade readers in an age distrustful of traditional rhetoric.