Civil Death in Early Modern England

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article explores the political, theological, and literary significance of civil death (mors civilis) in early modern England and claims the relevance of this doctrine for our thinking about incarceration today. Civil death makes explicit the state’s capacity to render a criminal inanimate before the law, stripping him of not only rights and possessions but also the capacity to will. Civil death’s seventeenth-century theorists claim that civil death does not only come after a crime as punishment, however; it also precedes it as cause, the criminal’s will having been rendered dead by sin in order for the crime to have been committed in the first place. After exploring the genealogy of civil death, I analyze how this doctrine affected the literary representation of imprisonment and revolt in John Milton’s oeuvre, especially Samson Agonistes (1671). Milton’s play both diagrams the imprisoned Samson’s experience of civil death and illustrates how it can be transformed it into an instrument of revolutionary resistance. I conclude with a brief demonstration of how the dehumanizing effects and revolutionary possibilities of civil death persist today.