Divorce Tracts Research Articles

Milton, Lucretius, and the “Womb of Nature”

ABSTRACT Milton’s relation to Lucretius has been ignored, interpreted as hostile, or reduced to a few spectacular moments in the epic descriptions of Chaos and Creation. This article shows, contrarily, that Milton’s engagement with this Roman poet-materialist was intimate, systematic, and lifelong. To this end, it brings together the well-known Lucretian moments in Paradise Lost, a host of hitherto-unrecognized echoes in that epic, De Doctrina Christiana, the divorce tracts, Milton’s Latin poems, and some of his little-studied marginalia. Starting with Naturam non pati senium, it establishes Milton’s habit of extensive citation and strategic redeployment of Lucretius even when arguing against him. Milton rightly embraced Lucretius, not as a frigid atomist but as a pansexual vitalist. The ancient poet’s primordial particles are living seeds, wombs, and genitalia rather than mechanically colliding atoms, and Milton’s citations cluster around this theme. Subsequent sections explore the two authors’ shared imagery of procreation, nutrition, growth, elimination, emotion, cognition, and—in conclusion—poetic creativity.

Satanic Ingratitude and Psychological Determinism in Paradise Lost

ABSTRACT This article suggests that Milton’s representation of Satanic ingratitude in book 4 of Paradise Lost imports into his epic poem some of his previous thoughts on unchangeable affections in the divorce tracts. Satan’s inability to repent in the soliloquy on Mount Niphates is routed through an experience of emotional fixity; he fails to feel gratitude for divine beneficence even though he knows he ought to feel it. In the divorce tracts, Milton bases his argument for divorce on the claim that certain affections, even negative ones, could not be changed because they originate in a person’s innermost nature. Satan’s soliloquy, I propose, explores the possibility that a similar emotional immutability may preclude certain persons from participating in virtue.

Race, Sex, and God

Race, Sex, and God

Scholarly Milton ed. by Thomas Festa and Kevin J. Donovan

Reviewed by: Scholarly Milton ed. by Thomas Festa and Kevin J. Donovan Margaret Thickstun Scholarly Milton. Ed. by Thomas Festa and Kevin J. Donovan. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press. 2019. vii+295 pp. $130. ISBN 978–042054–81–1. A book entitled Scholarly Milton and asking what it means ‘to historicize and theorize Milton’s work as a scholar’ by trying to clarify ‘the specific pressures affecting early modern scholarly exchange—epistemological, political, and theological’ (p. 2) appears intimidating, and the fact that it puts first a complex argument by Sharon Achinstein charting the shift in Milton’s attitude towards different available understandings of ‘scholarship’ as he wrote his divorce tracts might lead one to think that only extremely serious Miltonists should be reading it. That could not be further from the truth. The Introduction is admirably clear and informative. It lays out the basics of Milton’s education and intellectual life and the evolution of his thinking in relation to the political concerns of his time in ways that should orient a person new to this material at the same time as it provides a focused refreshment for someone more expert. The articles themselves offer engaging and thoughtful explorations of Milton’s work by grounding their analysis in specific seventeenth-century intellectual concerns. Most address Paradise Lost, and the collection as a whole demonstrates that [End Page 115] topics which may appear as dry as dust—how Milton taught grammatical tenses, for example—can instead result in rich and fresh understandings of this much-studied work. In the section addressing the ethical ends of learning, Sam Hushagen argues that Milton uses typological patterning to locate the fulfilment of God’s plan within history, thus preserving individual agency and foregrounding the exercise of reason. James Ross Macdonald puts the poem in conversation both with a sixth-century narrative of the Fall and Milton’s Art of Logic to suggest a more pessimistic attitude towards the ability to choose rightly through reason. J. Antonio Templanza distinguishes the Athens temptation in Paradise Regained from the Kingdoms of the World section to suggest that, in rejecting classical learning, Jesus champions the distinction between wisdom and knowledge, advocating a Socratic idea of education as process. Gardner Campbell uses Bateson’s concept of the double bind to show how the requirement to love and obey God creates a fruitful tension that may result in an individual’s higher level of understanding. Addressing Milton’s relation to the trivium, Emma Annette Wilson returns to the Art of Logic as the means to interrogate Empson’s assessment of Milton’s God, arguing that Milton justifies God by laying out ‘the cosmic structure to which we are all subject’, not by proving that God is ‘good’ (p. 125). Russell Hugh McConnell uses Milton’s Latin grammar to explore the way his deployment of tense in Paradise Lost draws attention to time, perspectives, and the nature of God. Joshua R. Held considers Raphael’s peroratio in Book viii in relation to examples in the Aeneid and the Pauline Epistles to argue that Raphael not only offers a successful peroration, but that his surpasses earlier models by addressing all the passions as it ties together his afternoon’s lesson. Placing Milton among scholars, Emma E. Stelzer investigates the moral significance of the ingredients Michael uses in purging Adam’s optic nerve to explore the question of visual perception and its connection to eloquence in Paradise Lost. Nicholas Allred demonstrates the way in which early finding aids, such as tables, indices, and concordances, both reveal how early modern readers engaged with the poem and shaped their understanding of what mattered. Edward Jones addresses the difficulties inherent both in editing the state letters and in determining how much control Milton might have had over the final versions. It should be clear that the essays in this volume speak to one another in fruitful ways; they foreground Milton the educator as much as Milton the scholar. Both educators and scholars will find it equally useful. Margaret Thickstun Hamilton College Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association

Courts, Jurisdictions, and Law in John Milton and His Contemporaries by Alison A. Chapman

Reviewed by: Courts, Jurisdictions, and Law in John Milton and His Contemporaries by Alison A. Chapman Brandon Taylor Alison A. Chapman, Courts, Jurisdictions, and Law in John Milton and His Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 216 pp. Alison Chapman's thoughtful and probing new book, Courts, Jurisdictions, and Law in John Milton and His Contemporaries, builds on her earlier work on Milton's legal thinking by adding more detail and nuance to his understanding of how seventeenth-century England's patchwork of legal systems worked. Where her Legal Epic (2017) deploys the law to explore Milton's theodicy in Paradise Lost, this new work turns its critical eye toward some of Milton's prose to explore the way in which scholars have often overlooked English legal jurisdictions in their attempt to piece together Milton's sometimes paradoxical thinking. Over and again, Chapman's book highlights how the slow march of history compresses complex topics into two-dimensional constructs, commonly occluding the strangely imperfect but interconnected webs contemporary writers often felt them to be. Seventeenth-century England's legal system represents a conceptual labyrinth for modern readers and, as Chapman argues in the first chapter, Milton presents an unusually helpful case study because "more than any other major figure of the seventeenth century, he thought a lot about questions of jurisdiction, about the boundary lines that divided different spheres of influence and collections of legal norms" (4). In this, Chapman presents Milton's polemical prose as a sophisticated Rosetta stone or conceptual lodestar for scholars attempting to parse the complexities of seventeenth-century England's legal system, a system in transition from a functional but profoundly confusing patchwork into today's more obviously coherent system. To clarify these concepts, the preface provides thorough definitions for some of the key terms found throughout the book. Chapman outlines the nuanced distinctions between Roman law, canon law, and civil law. A notion that the book returns to repeatedly is that modern readers tend to view the law as a monolithic and unified construction and read that backward into the writings of Milton and his contemporaries. What Chapman proves is that reading seventeenth-century English literature without a clear sense of how the many presiding legal systems interacted needs to be reassessed, particularly with writers of the era who were deeply ensconced in the legal world, as Milton was. The finest example of Chapman's approach is demonstrated in the third chapter, which covers Areopagitica and its seemingly paradoxical defense of free speech, where in one breath Milton is the champion for unlicensed printing and in the next is saying some texts should be burned and thrown into the sea. The crucial insight Chapman unearths is that Milton's curious circumlocutions are not due to any ideological inconsistency but instead to a concern about the impact of libel, [End Page 229] particularly as printed polemics became more common. The concern Milton demonstrates is moral, where a descent into libelous treatises circumvents the very purpose of this public discourse, which is to focus on ideas, concepts, and the betterment of England. The stability of Milton's ideal where everyone is arguing and learning through public discourse is obviously undermined by the specter of petty libel, which helps round out the contours of Chapman's argument. As she claims, "if we think of libels only as forms of political critique, we are not in a position to understand Areopagitica" (54). Milton's typical conceptual dexterity is met in kind by Chapman in the book's fourth chapter that explores the divorce tracts, civil law, and the notion of equity, which the preface clarifies has two specific meanings in England's seventeenth-century contexts. One definition "could mean the specific approaches and remedies available only to judges in courts of equitable jurisdiction" and the other definition "could also refer to those broad ideas of fairness and justice that were shared by all legal systems" (xvi). The distinction may seem minor at first, but the fourth chapter highlights how Milton's capacious sensibilities help distinguish the subtle differences between the two forms of equity, especially in relation to Roman or civil law. This reasoning comes to the...

Scholarly Milton. Edited by Thomas Festa and Kevin J. Donovan. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press, 2019. Pp. vii+295.

<i>Scholarly Milton</i>. Edited by Thomas Festa and Kevin J. Donovan. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press, 2019. Pp. vii+295.

The Poetics of Scriptural Quotation in the Divorce Tracts

The Poetics of Scriptural Quotation in the Divorce Tracts

Roman Law and Equity in John Milton’s Divorce Tracts

Critics have often observed that Roman law plays an outsized role in Milton two major divorce tracts, Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and Tetrachordon. This essay argues that Milton turns so repeatedly to Roman law because it offers a model of equitable interpretation, one that allows statutes to be read flexibly in light of their perceived intent. While canon law too prided itself on being an equitable system, the canonists’ approach to equity was crucially different from that of Roman jurists. For centuries, theologians had read the Bible’s passages on divorce through the lens of canonical equity, and the upshot was that divorce had been effectively banned. But Milton wants his readers to view these same Biblical passages as Roman jurists would and thus to bring a different understanding of equity to bear. Read in this way, he argues, the Bible allows divorce to all. Milton’s ultimate goal is to put divorce outside the cognizance of all forms of temporal law. Ironically, his argument relies upon the approach to statutory interpretation that he finds in Roman law and applies to the Christian Bible.

Solitude and Difference in Books 8 and 9 of Paradise Lost

Solitude and Difference in Books 8 and 9 of Paradise Lost Christopher Koester From the melancholic speaker of Il Penseroso to the solitary narrator of Paradise Lost, John Milton's literary personas frequently emphasize their own physical, mental, and spiritual apartness. Nor is this solitary condition limited to his poetic voices; the same can be said about most of Milton's major characters. Beginning with his God, who describes himself as "alone / From all eternity" (PL 8:405–06), solitude is the modus operandi of characters as diverse as the Son, Samson, Satan, and the Lady of Comus, as well as the subject of the present discussion, Adam and Eve.1 Despite its nearly ubiquitous presence in his poetry, though, the solitary is often overlooked among critics who identify Milton as a man more committed to religious and political solidarity than individual solitude. As I argue, however, Milton's notion of solidarity, including marital solidarity, actually depends on his concept of solitude. Without solitude, solidarity risks turning into conformity, as the search for unity erases the individualities of those seeking it. Aware of this dilemma, yet still an avid supporter of unity, Milton attempts to solve the problem in his epic by depicting Adam and Eve as simultaneously committed to unity and individuality, marital society and personal solitude. Focused [End Page 155] primarily on Adam, my essay investigates the way he responds to this dual commitment during moments of critical decision, beginning with his original solitude and subsequent request for a mate in book 8, followed by his conversation with Eve in book 9 about the function of solitude in marriage. I conclude that solitude in Milton's first humans should not be regarded simply as a passing condition or imbalance of bodily humors but instead as an ongoing orientation predicated on the idea that their differences from each other protect them from conformity. The better to understand the connection between solitude and difference, I begin with an analysis of Adam's origin story in book 8. Through a vividly conceptualized account of Adam's solitude, Milton depicts the first man's growing awareness of his differences from beast and God, differences that ultimately prompt him to decline both the surrounding creatures and the deity as potential companions.2 By gradually asserting his difference from the beasts and God, Adam embodies the early modern belief that, as Erica Fudge writes, "humans are created and not simply born."3 Though equipped with certain innate human faculties, including the capacity to speak and think rationally, Adam does not become a fully realized human until after he gains self-knowledge, a progression that shows Milton adhering to the early modern belief that humanness depends to some degree on education and a creation of self through processes of development and discovery. With this acquisition of self-knowledge through education, however, comes the possibility of losing it. According to Fudge, early moderns well understood "the risk that humans may cease to be human, may stop acting according to their education, and may revert back to their natural sensuality."4 Such a loss occurs in the wake of Adam's decision to eat the fruit, which sees him momentarily regressing from a fully realized human to a more animalistic state, as indicated by his lust-filled sex with Eve, as well as his desire to "In solitude live savage, in some glade / Obscured" (9.1085–86). If humanness, for Milton, entails knowing oneself aright, an education that occurs through a sincere commitment to contemplative solitude, then refusing—or, in the case of an indissoluble marriage, [End Page 156] being forbidden—to act on that self-knowledge can result in a loss of humanity and a return to the much more "savage" solitude that Milton repeatedly denounces throughout his divorce tracts. As these last comments about marriage make clear, Adam's struggle to know himself and to recognize his difference from the creatures around him does not end with the creation of Eve. Instead, Adam brings the lessons he learns in solitude concerning difference with him into marriage, a marriage based, at least in part, on Milton's belief, stated in Tetrachordon, that the soul "cannot well...

Inside “Paradise Lost”: Reading the Designs of Milton’s Epic

Inside “Paradise Lost”: Reading the Designs of Milton’s Epic

The Metaphysics of Milton’s Masque, 1634 to 1645

The Poems of 1645 marks a defining moment in the poet’s career. Milton’s need for respectability to counter the attacks on his divorce tracts, combined with anxiety that his “late spring no bud or blossom shew’th” (“Sonnet 7” 4), converge in the printing of this volume of poetry. Though A Masque was the longest poem he had composed thus far, length was perhaps the least of Milton’s reasons for placing at the center of the collection. In this paper, I suggest that the career of the Masque from its performance in 1634 to its inclusion in the 1645 Poems may be traced by observing the changes in Milton’s metaphysical view of the world, from rudimentary Platonic abstraction in the early poems, through a more serious exploration of the body-soul dualism in the more mature poems, and finally to glimpses of materialist monism in the divorce tracts. In the end, I argue that the success or failure the virtuous soul in the Masque depends on how one views the materiality of the soul, but this metaphysical question is yet to be worked out in 1645, and the Lady continues to sit in ambiguity.

Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to MiltonRethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton. Edited by Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. vii+306.

<i>Ann Baynes Coiro</i> and <i>Thomas Fulton</i> Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton<i>Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton</i>. Edited by Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. vii+306.

“Uniform in Virtue”: Discipline and Reform in Milton's Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643 and 1644)

Though John Milton would claim retrospectively that his divorce tracts were written in defense of domestic liberty, they often justify their conclusions in terms of national discipline. This essay proposes that the disciplinary rhetoric used in the first and second editions of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643, 1644) is indicative of Milton's close engagement with contemporary London-based discussions over the settlement of ecclesiastical discipline. Each edition considers and contends with the issues being debated by the divines of the Westminster Assembly and the “Presbyterian” and “Independent” party lines emerging in contemporary printed polemic. This essay argues that Milton's first divorce tract – both versions – articulates its case in a manner acceptable to those for whom national and ecclesiastical discipline was indispensible; yet, at the same time it subtly redefines discipline's meaning by repudiating legal coercion and lauding the virtue of self-restraint as the true basis of disciplined people.

De Doctrina Christiana and Milton’s Theology of Liberation

If Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana has fostered debate about his theological positions, this essay argues that, in terms of the treatise, his theological process takes on greater importance than its results. Milton’s treatise theorizes a model of interpretative liberty rooted in his understanding of a Father and Son who differ in both number and essence, but who are unified through participation in the same process of profession. In a similar vein, human unity requires freely engaging in the process of working out one’s beliefs for oneself, even if the process invariably produces divergent results. The key to unifying these divergent results is the same “rule of charity” that Milton had articulated in the divorce tracts of 1643–45. As an illustration of Milton’s process, this essay probes his practice of rendering scripture into Latin, which brings out the complexities of the agency that engaging in this process of charitably liberated interpretation requires.

“To due conversation accessible”: or, The Problem of Courtship in Milton's Divorce Tracts and Paradise Lost

“To due conversation accessible”: or, The Problem of Courtship in Milton's Divorce Tracts and <i>Paradise Lost</i>

Pious Fraud: Extralegal Heroism in Samson Agonistes

For a work that vindicates divorce, the strict preservation of religious and national purity, Nazarite separateness, and the massacre of the enemy, Samson Agonistes surprisingly also invites a reassessment of the apparently antithetical relationship between Hebrew and Philistine. This article first studies the significance of the exogamous marriage of Samson and Dalila in the context of Milton’s divorce tracts. It then analyzes the complementary legal arguments of the poem’s key characters, as well as their psychological and behavioral connections. These generate various interpretations of their sacrifices made in the name of pietas , a correlative of religious and national duty.

Who Printed Milton's Tetrachordon (1645)?

This article examines the evidence regarding the printing of John Milton's Tetrachordon (1645), the third in the author's series of divorce tracts. This work appeared without a printer's name, thus contravening the 1643 Licensing Order. While it has long been understood that Tetrachordon was printed collaboratively, this article questions the common attribution to the printers Samuel Simmons and Thomas Paine, who had printed The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), and introduces the possibility that Francis Neile had a hand in the work, and that printing likely involved a network of printers working together. Exploring the forensic evidence of type, the complex printing contexts of Milton's divorce writings, and examining the unstable political identities of printers also brings to light Milton's long association with news-men. Further, the reappearance of Tetrachordon in John Starkey's book catalogues from the 1670s is addressed.

Politics in Milton’s Areopagitica and Divorce Tracts

Politics in Milton’s Areopagitica and Divorce Tracts

Van den Berg, Sara J.; Howard, W. Scott (eds.): The Divorce Tracts of John Milton. Texts and Contexts

Article van den Berg, Sara J.; Howard, W. Scott (eds.): The Divorce Tracts of John Milton. Texts and Contexts was published on October 1, 2012 in the journal Kritikon Litterarum (volume 39, issue 3-4).

The divorce tracts of John Milton: texts and contexts

In a span of only 18 months from August 1643 to March 1645 John Milton published five tracts on divorce: The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, a much enlarged edition of that tract, The Judgement of Martin Bucer, Tetrachordon, and Colasterion. This book presents all five full-length pamphlets and documents in order to fully represent Milton's views on divorce, liberty, gender, and social institutions. Van den Berg and Howard also present Milton's work in the context of his contemporaries by including four other publications that represent the first wave of engagement with Milton's divorce tracts: the anonymously written An Answer to a Book, intituled, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1644); William Prynne's Twelve Considerable Serious Questions (1644); Herbert Palmer's The Glasse of God's Providence (1644); and Daniel Featley's The Dippers Dipt (1645). The current volume is unique in that it is the first in the field to showcase Milton's writings on divorce side by side with these related documents, and it provides the first modern transcription of An Answer. Milton's argument that divorce could be to the good of both sexes makes this often intimidating writer and his era accessible and compelling to contemporary readers. Indeed, his claim for divorce on the basis of mutual incompatibility established the groundwork for the justification of divorce in late twentieth century Anglo-American law. Milton's rhetorical methods from cogent advocacy to speculative commentary and poignant vignettes, from citation of authorities and carefully reasoned biblical exegesis to defensive vituperation demonstrate the range of debate in seventeenth century pamphlet warfare.