Schooling Milton: Materialism and Social Ontology in Milton’s Educational Prose

Abstract

ABSTRACT Scholars have explained Milton’s curriculum within the history of ideas but have given much less attention to the relationship between Milton’s experience as an educator and the development of his imagination, theology, and political commitments. This article argues that Milton’s monistic understanding of body and spirit, which played a prominent role two decades later in Paradise Lost and Christian Doctrine, emerged when he was a London schoolmaster in the 1640s. Drawing from writings on the social ontology of habit, the article demonstrates that the materialist orientation of these later masterpieces plays a prominent role in Milton’s earlier writings on social institutions, Of Education, The Reason of Church-Government, and Areopagitica. The social ontology of habit, as it appears in the works of both ancient and modern philosophers, challenges how we understand Milton’s conception of liberty and reveals his early monistic vision of collective life in the postmonarchical English republic.