Milton's Angels The Early-Modern Imagination

by Raymond, Joad

• ISBN13: 9780199560509
• ISBN10: 0199560501
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-05-02
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Milton'sParadise Lost, the most eloquent, most intellectually daring, most learned, and most sublime poem in the English language, is a poem about angels. It is told by and of angels; it relies upon their conflicts, communications, and miscommunications. They are the creatures of Milton's narrative, through which he sets the Fall of humankind against a cosmic background. Milton's angels are real beings, and the stories he tells about them rely on his understanding of what they were and how they acted. While he was unique in the sublimity of his imaginative rendering of angels, he was not alone in writing about them. Several early-modern English poets wrote epics that explore the actions of and grounds of knowledge about angels. Angels were intimately linked to theories of representation, and theology could be a creative force. Natural philosophers and theologians too found it interesting or necessary to explore angel doctrine. Angels did not disappear in Reformation theology: though centuries of Catholic traditions were stripped away, Protestants used them in inventive ways, adapting tradition to new doctrines and to shifting perceptions of the world. Angels continued to inhabit all kinds of writing, and shape the experience and understanding of the world. Milton's Angels: The Early-Modern Imaginationexplores the fate of angels in Reformation Britain, and shows how and whyParadise Lostis a poem about angels that is both shockingly literal and sublimely imaginative.

Author Biography

Joad Raymond is the author of The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641-1649 (Oxford, 1996) and Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge 2003), and the editor of several books on the history of newspapers, print culture, and literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Having taught at Oxford and Aberdeen he is presently Professor of English Literature at the University of East Anglia.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Conventions

Abbreviations

Illustrations

Introduction: Protestant angels, poets, the imagination

Understanding angels

Angelographia: Writing about angels

Angelology: Knowledge of angels

Angels, Writing and Radical Speculation, 1640-1660

Conversations with Angels: The Pordages and their Angelical World

The Fleshy Imagination and the Word of God

Spiritual Gifts: Angels, Inspiration, and Prophecy

Milton's angels

Can Angels Feign?

Look Homeward Angel: Angelic guardianship and nationhood

Angels in I aradise Lost

The Natural Philosophy of Angels

'With the tongues of angels': Angelic Conversations

Literature and Representation

Dryden's Fall: Dreams, Angels, Freewill

Conclusion: Angels and Literary Representation

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