ABSTRACT This article revisits a crucial and widely misunderstood period in the ecclesiastical career of Thomas Young, namely his time as chaplain to the Merchant Adventurers in Hamburg in the 1620s, which has significant implications for our understanding of Young’s religious position and, by extension, the interpretation of Milton’s “Elegia quarta.” Bringing fresh scrutiny of established sources together with the examination of previously neglected archival material, this study makes the case that Young was, contrary to a perspective prevalent in some recent scholarship, a Puritan exile, and that this is exactly how Milton portrays him in his Latin poem. In the process, this article complicates our understanding of what it meant to be a conformable Puritan in the early seventeenth century.
ABSTRACT Milton’s views on atonement have been debated between scholars who find him a traditional advocate of penal substitution and those who find him more sympathetic to moral exemplar models of atonement. This article argues that the debate draws its terms and structure implicitly from nineteenth-century dogmatic histories of atonement that prove inapt to understanding Milton in his seventeenth-century context, in which Socinianism was prompting new articulations of satisfaction atonement. In De Doctrina Christiana, Milton joins this anti-Socinian movement in espousing satisfaction, albeit without (as he would see it) going beyond Scripture by robustly articulating a mechanism. This case indicates the challenges that attend efforts to read seventeenth-century texts theologically in a context for which dogmatic histories are both inadequate and distorting.
ABSTRACT This article investigates the role of Harapha in Samson Agonistes. Harapha is not part of the biblical source, and Milton’s invention of a comic character appears deeply at odds both with his prefatory note and the poem’s tragic genre. The problem is illuminated by understanding Harapha in relation to two classical antecedents, one well known (the Roman comic miles gloriosus or “braggart soldier” archetype) and one advanced here for the first time (the hoplōn krisis or “judgment of arms” episode from the Trojan cycle). Milton’s intertextual procedure does more than fix Harapha within a field of classical reception. The specific connections help create a “contamination” between Harapha and Samson himself—in the sense of the Latin contaminatio (used of the mixing of comic plots) and in the sense of moral impurity. Contamination with negative classical archetypes, via Harapha, contributes to the ultimate and designed undecidability of Samson’s final action.
ABSTRACT This article argues that John Milton’s Paradise Lost investigates the limits of possible experience through the motif of worse and worst. When the poem’s fallen characters ask: “How bad can experience get?,” what they discover, to their horror, is that it can always get worse. Milton used the speculative liberty of poetry to represent his fallen characters—Satan preeminent among them—approaching, transgressing, and reflecting on experience’s ever lower limits. The article traces the unfolding of these investigations into the limits of experience and its conditions of possibility through Milton’s great epic as well as his other late poems before considering their place in intellectual history.
ABSTRACT This article explores the role of utopia, both as a form and as a mode of idealistic political modeling, in republican discourses between 1657–60. It focuses specifically on Marchamont Nedham’s underexplored letters from Utopia published as editorials in Mercurius Politicus in response to the kingship moment of March 1657, and John Milton’s The Readie and Easie Way, itself a response to the imminent restoration of the monarchy in February 1660. The article addresses how utopian form and ideas were incorporated by Nedham and Milton to propose republican change when a return to monarchical rule appeared likely. Both texts engage with utopianism in their mutual satire of James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana. The contrast between Nedham’s populism and Milton’s oligarchical modeling suggests that utopia was a common ground in republican discourses that frequently showed ideological disagreement.
