"What If the Sun Be Centre to the World?": Milton's Epistemology, Cosmology, and Paradise of Fools Reconsidered

Abstract

Francis Bacon is widely credited as the prophet of the new science, while John Milton is still seen as the apostle of the no science: the backward-looking, Ptolemaic worldview that scholars from Arthur Lovejoy and Kester Svendsen to the most recent editor of Milton's complete poetry and major prose have assigned to his epic cosmos.1 Yet the fact that Milton, perhaps the most Baconian poet of the seventeenth century, should be regarded as conservatively clinging to Renaissance or even medieval scientific paradigms is a strictly twentieth-century phenomenon. In his own time and long afterward, his reputation as an associate not only of Samuel Hartlib but of prominent mathematicians and other foundational figures associated with