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  1. Home
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  3. Paradise Lost and the Cosmological Revolution
  • Cited by 10
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
November 2014
Print publication year:
2014
Online ISBN:
9781139521482
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139521482
Subjects:
Literature, Renaissance and Early Modern Literature
Information

Book description

This volume brings John Milton's Paradise Lost into dialogue with the challenges of cosmology and the world of Galileo, whom Milton met and admired: a universe encompassing space travel, an earth that participates vibrantly in the cosmic dance, and stars that are 'world[s] / Of destined habitation'. Milton's bold depiction of our universe as merely a small part of a larger multiverse allows the removal of hell from the center of the earth to a location in the primordial abyss. In this wide-ranging work, Dennis Danielson lucidly unfolds early modern cosmological debates, engaging not only Galileo but also Copernicus, Tycho, Kepler, and the English Copernicans, thus placing Milton at a rich crossroads of epic poetry and the history of science.

Reviews

'Dennis Danielson’s remarkable new book, Paradise Lost and the Cosmological Revolution, is a highly readable, lucid, and important account of the universes of Milton’s epic poem in their historical context … Danielson offers his book as ‘the full rescue mission’ necessary for readers ‘to relish the astonishing engagement of the plot, persons, and poetry of Paradise Lost with the Cosmos’. He succeeds famously, and along the way he demolishes the view of Milton as scientifically obscurantist or backward or as settling for an antiquated cosmology for poetic convenience. Milton emerges instead as an early master of informed science fiction.'

Stephen M. Fallon Source: The Review of English Studies

'… all serious students of Milton’s poem will turn to Danielson’s analysis as one of the top three or so most valuable labor-, time-, and mind-saving treatments of the topic.'

Pamela Gossin Source: Journal for the History of Astronomy

'Danielson enables us to appreciate just how rich and complex his knowledge of contemporary astronomy and cosmology really was.'

Peter Barker Source: Milton Quarterly

'Danielson’s monograph will appeal mostly to those interested in contextual studies, especially the history of astronomy, but it contains some inspiring ideas for Miltonists too.'

Šárka Tobrmanová Source: Notes and Queries

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Contents

Contents
References

Bibliographical note

Rather than provide a bibliography of such heterogeneous materials as have fed into this study, I would direct interested readers in the first instance to my footnotes, which provide full citations of texts quoted or referred to. Many authors appearing there may be searched in the Index. Primary works are also increasingly searchable and accessible electronically. I particularly recommend the following access points:

  • EEBO (Early English Books Online, based on the Short Title Catalogue)

  • Accessible via major research libraries.

  • www.worldcat.org

  • WorldCat offers enhanced access via major research libraries and provides direct links to many digitized rare books.

  • www.e-rara.ch

  • Digitized rare books published from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries and held in Swiss libraries.

  • www.hab.de

  • Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel (offering access to many digitized rare books).

If one wishes to explore the history of astronomy and cosmology further, one cannot do better than to sample the writings of the great astronomers themselves: Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo. Wilkins’s Discovery and Discourse are likewise highly worthwhile, as is Burton in his function as a gatherer of miscellaneous opinions (in the “Digression of Air” in The Anatomy of Melancholy). Michael J. Crowe’s Theories of the World From Antiquity to the Copernican Revolution provides an accessible introduction to the problems of astronomy. Albert Van Helden’s Measuring the Universe: Cosmic Dimensions From Aristarchus to Halley is also informative and historically interesting. My own anthology The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining the Universe From Heraclitus to Hawking offers stimulating, historically organized excerpts from more than eighty prominent cosmological writers across more than two millennia. Another useful and intriguing anthology is Crowe’s The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, Antiquity to 1915: A Source Book (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008) . Two large, ambitious studies of Copernicanism are Blumenberg’s The Genesis of the Copernican World and, more recently, Robert Westman’s The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011) . Also indispensible in this category, of course, is Thomas Kuhn’s The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Finally, few studies are as informative and stimulating as John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler’s The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) .

Most articles on Milton are searchable and accessible electronically via the Modern Language Association (MLA) bibliography and via the JSTOR collection. Many of the books relevant to Miltonic themes pursued in this volume are given astute critical attention in John Leonard’s magisterial final chapter of Faithful Labourers, “The Universe” (pp. 705–819), in addition to appearing in his extensive bibliography.

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