Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in Paradise Lost

by John N. King

• ISBN13: 9780521771986
• ISBN10: 0521771986
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-07-31
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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 sheds new light on Milton's epic and its literary and religious contexts.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	x
Preface	xiii
List of abbreviations	xvii
Note on texts	xx
Controversial merriment	1	(22)
Milton reads Spenser's May Eclogue	23	(21)
Satan and the demonic conclave	44	(25)
Milton's Den of Error	69	(20)
The Paradise of Fools	89	(20)
Laughter in heaven	109	(24)
Miltonic transubstantiation	133	(20)
Idolatry in Eden	153	(14)
The image of both churches	167	(29)
Conclusion	189	(7)
Appendix: transcriptions from satirical broadsheets	196	(10)
Select Bibliography	206	(16)
Index	222