“Disabled” Milton

Abstract

The article tracks the language of “disability” in the writings of John Milton in an effort to broach the question of how the terminology came to refer almost exclusively in modern usage to physical or mental impairments inherent to individual subjects. It argues that Milton’s early usage points to various social incapacitations occasioned by the civil wars, and that these meanings later converge with connotations of physical and mental impairment, along with a moral strain of meaning also evident in seventeenth-century religious writings. His practice culminates with attributions of “disabled” in Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes that designate the poems’ flawed protagonists as potent sites of moral culpability and social danger.