The calls for freedom of press in the mid-seventeenth century, like the earlier calls for freedom of speech, also came mostly from devoutly religious people: Puritans and Nonconformists and their religious-based demands. That religious basis was mostly a desire to disseminate religious preaching and knowledge, and an imperative to do that not only by preaching and other speech but by publishing religious books and pamphlets, in addition to a religious basis in freedom of conscience. John Milton, the trailblazer in seeking "the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience," tried to extend parrhesia from speech to publications, and built his case in Areopagitica and in other pamphlets on freedom of conscience, on Bible passages, and on similar religious messages. Though Areopagitica is generally described in scholarly literature as unnoticed and overlooked until the end of the seventeenth century, it in fact was relatively widely known, as nearly fifty quotations or allusions show before that century’s end. Besides Milton, other Puritans were the dominant advocates for freedom of press before the end of the seventeenth century, including three who wrote a generation before Milton (an anonymous minister, Leonard Busher, and William Ames), and Levellers and others.

Chapter 5 illuminates the literary, political, and ecological significance of Milton’s depiction of contentment. In Eikonoklastes, Milton responds directly to the appropriation of contentment discourse in Eikon Basilike. Charles I had identified his opponents as malcontents and positioned himself as a contented martyr-king. By contrast, Milton describes Charles’s discontent as the immediate cause of the English Civil War and as the epitome of tyranny. In Paradise Lost, he adds an environmental dimension to the religious and republican significances of content and discontent. The language of self-containment has limited applications for unfallen Adam and Eve, who interact harmoniously with their environment. Satanic discontent reconstitutes the experience of selfhood as a space defined in opposition to the natural world. Satan perverts contentment and finds it impossible to relate to the world around him in any way other than as a conqueror. When Adam and Eve choose to sin, they emulate diabolic discontent and subject all of creation to imperialism. Milton’s revision of Christian contentment reveals his efforts to endure, lament, and resist the Restoration.

The central theme of Chapter 2 is anti-monarchism. The chapter shows that during the free state monarchy was widely thought to be the worst form of government. Monarchy entailed tyranny and the concomitant slavery of the people. However, an even more powerful anti-monarchical argument rose to prominence during the free state. Based largely on 1 Samuel 8, numerous advocates of the free state maintained that monarchy was against God and thus both idolatrous and sinful. Already in early December 1648, a radical pamphlet, Light shining in Buckingham-shire, equated kingship with the devil. But the argument that monarchy was a sin and idolatry became particularly vociferous during the Engagement controversy. It was argued repeatedly that monarchy, as a form of government, was against God’s express will. Such an argument led to the conclusion that monarchy was finished in England and would soon be so elsewhere in Europe as well.

Johnson’s Lives of the Poets are a classic not only of literary criticism but of biography as well. Originally intended as brief prefaces in an anthology of fifty-eight poets from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they increased in scope as Johnson worked on them, and as one commentator has said, they became “a book of wisdom and experience … a commentary on human destiny.” The lives of Milton, Swift, Dryden, and Pope are really books in their own right, and the earlier Life of Savage is a deeply felt account of someone Johnson knew well in his youth. He made good use of such documentary material as he was able to obtain, and for recent poets was able to draw upon his own memory of telling anecdotes. Above all, the Lives explore the range of human achievement, its failures and also its triumphs.

Milton’s late poems suggest that the best way to represent the experience of modernity is to turn to and to reimagine the work of the Ancients—the modern paradox. This raises questions of periodization, and time. Milton is more “Renaissance” than “early modern,” at least in terms of how the early modern is usually understood, i.e., as a temporally delimited historical period after the medieval and before Enlightenment modernity. The Renaissance was modernizing in its appropriation of the Ancients. Milton’s late poems are obsessed with temporality—well, temporalities, plural, actually—since Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes narrate three different temporalities. Paradise Lost narrates the continual backwards and forwards of living in history—a present affected by the past, and by anticipatory imaginings of an as-yet unrealized future. Paradise Regained stays in the present, bringing readers along in a story that moves from a beginning to an end. In Samson Agonistes, Samson sees no future. The key subsequent literary development in verbally representing forms of modernity, the novel has a deep presentism which persists. Milton is received in a literary-critical tradition deeply affected by the novel’s focus on the present and on the synchronous life of the characters.

This chapter explores structural differences between the 1667 ten-book edition and the revised twelve-book version of 1674, not only to continue a reconsideration of Eve, but to revive attention to the implications of the formal properties of the revision, and to argue that this reformation formally embodies the narrative’s claims about how to adjust to modernity. The drama created by the final, reconfigured two books highlights how Adam and Eve and their relationship change and grow during the poem. At the end, the poem’s profound linguistic tensions are instantiated by Eve, while Adam’s reaction and the narrator’s description emphasize the pleasures of pluralistic readings. In short, the reformation of Paradise Lost rebalances the poem, by countering the scale of the consequences from the War in Heaven with a proportional rearrangement of the invocations. Its twelve-book shape mitigates against loss and creates a space to emphasize the continued growth of the two human characters, particularly Adam. Perhaps most importantly, the new, concluding pair of books provide a space of non-domination in which Eve can emerge and be recognized as the poet she is.

Milton’s last poems operate as an array, a contiguous set of shifts in narrative and generic evaluation published over just a seven-year period. Charles Taylor argues that modernity “must be understood as . . . multiform contestation.” In Milton’s last three poems, it is. As an epic as a sui generis brief epic, and as a tragedy, respectively, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes represent, then, the values, the pressures, and sometimes even the losses, of pluralism. That these positions can overlap, though, is central to Milton’s contribution to a discussion of modernity, contrary to the familiar epochal break and shift of ideas that modernity is usually taken to represent. The different responses to the experience of modernity, while not necessarily modern, are part of that modernity nonetheless. In the introduction, I preliminarily I develop senses of modernity and responses to it. I also explore the relationship between context, fiction, anachronism, and the novel in the reception of Milton three late poems.

Paradise Regained, which opens with an “eremite” (I.10) and ends at home, examines different recurring response to the conditions of modernity: how some people attempt a retreat from the world. By expanding on the Temptation of Jesus (the Son of God in Paradise Regained) by Satan, a set of stories told in the Gospels of Matthew (4:1-11), Mark (1:12-13), and Luke (4:1-13), Milton’s Paradise Regained revises the Temptation in the Desert, casting the world as a series of temptations to be avoided, just four years after Paradise Lost narrates giving into temptation as a felix culpa. To generations of readers, “retreat” comes freighted with political or military connotations that can unfortunately lead the contextual scholar back to the Restoration, i.e., with Milton in retreat from the Stuart monarchy. Paradise Regained proposes a spiritual domestic retreat, and one in which the particular government is irrelevant.

Samson’s violence, his impulsive actions, his patriarchal threats toward Dalila, and his loathing of an ethnic Other make Samson Agonistes, it has been argued, the least modern of Milton’s last three major poems. Instead of the late equanimity of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, or the consistent temperance of the Son in Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes highlights tensions over the modern, as well as between the ancient and the modern, prompting readers of all three poems into reflecting on their own ideas of the modern. Milton’s version of the Samson story calls the question: precisely because it is the third and last of his late poems, Samson Agonistes puts readers in an untenable place of dialectic and decision between the three late poems’ visions of modernity.

In the tensions between sight and sound, between the horizontal and the vertical, and between the narrative and the order of its telling, Paradise Lost hosts an expansive plurality to which each reader potentially contributes. What Milton’s epic offers to reading is central to the poem’s relationship to the experience of modernity. With a 1668 printing of the first, 10-book edition, Paradise Lost initiates a pattern for Milton’s late poems: prose prefaces in which Milton highlights how the poem is organized, and thus presumably ways the poems should be read. The story told in Paradise Lost seems to be simple in its familiarity: Satan rebels against God, comes to Earth, tempts Eve to eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and then she offers the fruit to Adam, who also partakes, after which God sentences both of them to different curses, and banishes them out of Eden. In Milton’s telling, though, the story is at first ten then ultimately twelve books (and roughly 10,000 lines) long, and layered with opposed possibilities, often in the same sentences and lines. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

In “Lucretian Materialism,” Brent Dawson examines how Lucretius’ first-century BCE epic poem The Nature of Things, which was lost and then rediscovered in the fifteenth century by Poggio Bracciolini, influenced the development literature and philosophy in the early modern period and beyond. Dawson contends that the poem supplies a model for thinking about plurality and universality, two of modern nature’s essential features. The chapter includes detailed definitions of key concepts from Lucretius’ poem including matter, void, swerve, image, and soul, and examines how these concepts influenced subsequent authors and philosophers like Milton, Hobbes, and Bacon. Dawson ends the chapter with a Lucretian interpretation of one of nature’s most important appearances in early modern English literature: Edmund Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos. He argues that the most Lucretian feature of Spenser’s deity Nature is her indeterminate character – she is universal insofar as she persists in mutability.

This essay tests the definition of an institution as ‘an assemblage that organises, transmits, and validates’ something, ‘and that self-consciously represents itself as doing so’ that is offered in the introduction to this collection, particularly as it applies to large, diffuse institutions such as Authorship. I argue that much of the organization, transmission, and validation of authors that makes Authorship an institution is done by seemingly minor, but highly self-conscious microgenres, such as the sessions poem or the stylistic imitation. I then explore this idea by considering the phenomenon of Miltonic imitations, which detach John Milton’s manner from his exalted matter and antimonarchic politics in order to use it as a clever means of making familiar (and often highly unMiltonic) topics new. In so doing, they suggest that the essence of ‘Milton’ is somehow to be found in his style and so are, both individually and collectively, organizing, transmitting, and validating ‘him’. At the same time, these imitations are making the case that Authorship, as an institution, has the right and the duty to make such pronouncements about the essence of authors. Similar kinds of pronouncements were made through other microgenres, including the use of Milton’s ‘head’ as a shop sign for booksellers and scenes of Milton’s ghost interacting with other writers, both living and dead

Taking as its starting point a little-known text by George Buck entitled The Third Universitie (1615) and as its endpoint the early years of the Royal Society, this chapter explores seventeenth-century knowledge exchange, research networks and innovation. What began as a civic challenge to Oxbridge ended in an outward-facing institutional sphere that drew its inspiration, founding figures and key personnel from the archipelagic and colonial contexts within which its pioneering interests developed. The Royal Society’s origins lie in a range of institutions identified by Buck, including Gresham College; in later developments such as the Invisible College and the Hartlib Circle; and in the idea for a directory of expertise, or ‘Office of Address’. Colonial investors and adventurers hard-wired into emerging networks of experts working across collaborative communities of scholar-practitioners ensured the advancement of knowledge was intimately intertwined with political intelligence and economic exploitation. There was no new medicine without frontiers, no new husbandry without fresh fields to plant, and, crucially, no knowledge exchange without satire.

This chapter deals not with a single form or genre, but with the satiric, invective or humourous use of several. As it happens, the patterns of previous scholarship have proved particularly distorting in relation to Anglo-Latin satiric verse, with neo-Latin scholars tending to focus on Renaissance versions of the classical Roman genre of hexameter satire, typically interpreted in terms of ‘Horatian’ vs ‘Juvenalian’ (less often Persian) style. In England, however, there were almost no examples of this genre of satiric verse until the early eighteenth century. This chapter takes a different approach, attempting to survey the various ways in which Anglo-Latin verse of various genres and forms functioned as satire or invective, focusing in particular on satiric epigram, iambic verse, rhyming verse and various kinds of 'free' or experimental poetry. In this way, the chapter offers a guide to the main ways in which Latin verse was used for humourous, satiric and invective purposes in early modern England, with attention to changing patterns over time.

The tradition of unclassical scriptural paraphrase, such as that found in Du Bartas’ Sepmaines and Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder, has attracted some thoughtful critical attention in recent years. But Du Bartas’ work was modelled – albeit with elements of contention – on didactic epic of the type exemplified by Palingenius’ Zodiacus Vitae, an ubiquitous schooltext which was the very opposite of 'sub-canonical' in the seventeenth century. For the modern reader, approaching Milton's Paradise Lost via Virgil and Homer, the digressive mode of Du Bartas and the unclassical elements of Paradise Lost seem anomalous. Early modern poets and readers, however, were taught to approach the classics via approved Protestant or quasi-Protestant works composed by near contemporaries. Of these, the Zodiacus Vitae, though now largely forgotten and when remembered, almost universally misrepresented, was in England among one of the most influential. This chapter takes the achievement and allure of Palingenius’ poem seriously as a model in examining some of the very large number of examples of ‘unclassical epic’ read and composed by English authors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This chapter examines Milton’s discourses of liberty, slavery, and hierarchy in order to test Quentin Skinner’s claim that the theory of neo-Roman liberty is positively and intrinsically connected with equality. Neo-Roman liberty was an important element in Milton’s political arguments, as was the terminology of slavery which was used to encapsulate the absence of that freedom from domination. However, neo-Roman liberty for Milton is less aptly defined as freedom from the will of another than as freedom from arbitrary domination. Milton’s commitment to the existence of rightful hierarchies, and to the Aristotelian principle that the superior should rule the inferior, meant that many (whether wives, servants, actual slaves, or inferior or wicked citizens) could not appeal to the principle of neo-Roman liberty to free them from subjection to another, as that subjection was rightful rather than arbitrary. Milton’s emphasis on free will and virtue meant that expected hierarchies might be disrupted by exceptional virtue or vice, but these exceptions caused a certain dissonance in Milton’s texts, and his use of the language of slavery and subjection was not entirely consistent.

This chapter examines the double vision of hope, sacred and profane, epitomized in English literature by the jointly authored poem, “On Hope,” in which Cowley’s satire on worldly wishes is interlaced with Richard Crashaw’s encomium on religious hope. Yet religious hope is de-centered in the Protestantism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Milton, in Paradise Lost, shies away from hope as a theological virtue, seeing it tied to ambition and original sin. Hobbes, focused on things seen rather than unseen, treats worldly hope as a necessary part of human motivation and the reason, along with fear, for the strictures of civil authority. Hobbes’s naturalism tinges subsequent Christian writers, including Addison, Pope, and Johnson, who alternately satirize worldly hopes and treat them as inevitable and consolatory. In the French Revolutionary era there arises a new, properly political hope, aimed at alleviating or eliminating the structural conditions of poverty via democratic-representative activity. Hope as an anodyne for poverty, and for slavery, is questioned by laborer poets and the former slave and anti-slavery polemicist, Olaudah Equiano.

The book’s final chapter, on the work of Phyllis Wheatley, considers the aesthetics and politics of imitation. Wheatley’s poems both enact and challenge assimilation, by performing a form of Christian whiteness and decorum through acts of imitation for which she has been repeatedly criticised by contemporary readers. But notes of resistance can be heard in her images of chains, oceanic voyages and flight from earthly constraint. Wheatley’s poems transform constraint into ornament, but in a way that ironises her own experiences of capture and enslavement. This introduces a productive incompatibility between the prevailing aesthetic and the experience of bondage that must be overcome if the poem can be written. The chapter argues against contemporary readings of Wheatley as only a ‘sickly little black girl’, for whom whiteness itself was a constraint, and shows how she manages with limited means to particularise dominant poetic traditions to her own experience of enslavement and the Middle Passage.