Milton and Religious Controversy
Satire and Polemic in Paradise Lost

A study of Milton's epic in the context of religious debate and visual satire, first published in 2000.

John N. King (Author)

9780521771986, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 June 2000

248 pages, 25 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.54 kg

'King has recovered for our time a style of reading and a religio-historical context that enrich our understanding of Paradise Lost. Essential reading for Milton scholars, this book will attract and hold the interest of historians of genre, of intellectual historians, and of historians of religion. It will be useful not only for its argument, but as a reference work on religious abuse, satire and polemic.' Stephen Fallon, University of Notre Dame

Religious satire and polemic constitute an elusive presence in Paradise Lost. John N. King shows how Milton's poem takes on new meaning when understood as part of a strategy of protest against ecclesiastical formalism and clericalism. The experience of Adam and Eve before the Fall recalls many Puritan devotional habits. After the Fall, they are prone to 'idolatrous' ritual and ceremony that anticipate the religious 'error' of Milton's own age. Vituperative sermons, broadsides and pamphlets, notably Milton's own tracts, afford a valuable context for recovering the poem's engagement with the violent history of the Civil Wars, Commonwealth and Restoration, while contemporary visual satires help to clarify Miltonic practice. Eighteenth-century critics who attacked breaches of decorum and sublimity in Paradise Lost alternately deplored and ignored a literary and polemical tradition deployed by Milton's contemporaries. This important study, first published in 2000, sheds light on Milton's epic and its literary and religious contexts.

1. Controversial merriment
2. Milton reads Spenser's May Eclogue
3. Satan and the demonic conclave
4. Milton's den of error
5. The paradise of fools
6. Laughter in heaven
7. Miltonic transubstantiation
8. Idolatry in Eden
9. Images of both churches
Conclusion
Appendix: Transcriptions from satirical broadsheets.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]