During the Interregnum, figures such as Thomas Hobbes, James Harrington, and John Milton produce substantial works of political philosophy. As can be seen in their titles, Hobbes’s Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civill (1651), Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), and Milton’s Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), each set out to describe a commonwealth. For Hobbes, Harrington, and Milton, the question after 1649 is how to understand – and, in some cases, how to reconstitute — the “one” that is at the Greek root of monarch. None of the proposals created, under the great pressures of the moment, could be implemented; however, they offered models for English-language political philosophy for decades, even centuries, to come. Later generations had a reservoir of English-language republican actions, rhetoric, and philosophy on which to draw, including in Ireland.

Max Weber understood how democracy in the seventeenth century was tied to Calvinist individualism and the rejection of external forms. Thomas Hobbes hated the consequences of puritan rule and argued that politics needed to accept the principle of the mask in order to create social order. The lawyer William Prynne in his Histrio-mastix portrayed theatre as the root of all evils in the royalist regime, but he himself proved a masterly performer in working to undermine the regime. The most radical democratic thinking came from the ‘Levellers’ who harked back to the Garden of Eden and natural human innocence. Shakespeare interrogated the ambivalent myth of Eden in Henry VI Part Two, as did Milton in Paradise Lost. The Putney debates constitute the main focus of this chapter. Common soldiers with Leveller views argued with their generals about constitutional principles. Close analysis of the debate reveals the complications that followed from claims to sincerity, couched as insistence that because God had spoken to them speakers were following their consciences, avoiding rhetoric or hypocrisy. The religious context in fact allowed a high level of democratic exchange.

John Milton is a major author in the history of writing the nation in early modern England. A visionary Protestant writer with a keen sense of prophetic vocation, he aligned his authorial identity closely with England as an exceptional ’Nation chos’n before any other’. Yet in his works written before, during and after the English Revolution, Milton agonises over the godly nation’s susceptibility to political and religious servility, so that he vacillates between intense identification with England and strong repulsion. Milton’s evolving relation to the nation thus remains conflicted and volatile. England’s exceptionalism can never be taken for granted: it must be strenuously tested, reassessed and reimagined. Although the late Milton turns away from national exceptionalism and challenges Restoration’s cultural, religious and political values, the 1688 folio edition of Paradise Lost, published close to the Glorious Revolution, tells another complex story about the posthumous creation of Milton as England’s exceptional national poet.

This chapter explores georgic writing that appeared during the second half of the seventeenth century, with special attention to engagements with civil war and its aftermaths. The discussion also attends closely to Virgilian strains in English georgic writing and to the significances of literary imitation and translation. Authors covered include Andrew Marvell, John Evelyn, Abraham Cowley, John Milton, Joseph Addison and John Dryden, as well as the ancient writers Hesiod and Virgil.

Milton’s Sonnet XVIII (‘On the Late Massacre in Piedmont’) propounds a familiar opposition between the ‘pure’ religion of Protestants and a corrupt Catholicism obsessed with material objects and images (‘stocks and stones’). Yet this ostensibly anti-Catholic poem veers brazenly and repeatedly into the language of relic veneration. Beginning with the poignant spectacle of the Waldensians’ bones scattered on the mountainsides, the sonnet goes on to weaponize human remains and grants them sacred force in the form of ‘martyred blood and ashes’ to be sprinkled over Italy. This chapter explores historical, confessional, and literary contexts for Sonnet XVIII’s surprising investment in human remains, both as objects arousing pity and as capable of a kind of material efficacy. Milton’s poem is situated within an extensive tradition of English Protestant poets and preachers, including Michael Drayton, John Donne, and Richard Crashaw, who had wrestled with the question of relics and the problem of scattered bones.

Milton's sonnets, which present Milton's self as a fictionalized persona, reveal the ways in which Milton's masculinity and his subjectivity interact in a highly masculinized poetic form. In his political and personal sonnets, Milton makes himself a vulnerable but also authoritative figure who makes his own authority through poetic form. Claiming public status while eschewing public alliances, creating enemies while claiming popularity, and naming friends while walking in solitary glory, Milton's sonnet-speakers confirm the ambivalent, tactical, and self-authorizing manhood which is Milton's default.

The Introduction describes the kinds of masculinism and forums for manhood in Milton's works that the book will study. Outlining the chapters and framing the theory and cultural history underlying the book, the Introduction places its study of Milton's masculinity in current scholarly conversations on gender, queer theory, critical race theory, and Milton's major works. Using "Lycidas" and Milton's sonnets as frames, the Introduction shows how Milton makes his own manliness.

This chapter explores Blake’s vocation to a public role and his exploration of creativity and conformity in his engagement with the Bible, literature and art. In his engagement with Milton and the Bible, Blake carved out for himself a creative space in his use of both, and criticised their shortcomings, while recognising the significance of what he had taken from them.In wrestling with Milton’s texts, Blake pioneered an interpretative method for any who sought a more creative and contemporary relationship with the tradition they received. Similarly, engaging with the Bible’s major themes informed his critique of the contemporary church and politics and enabled him to criticise other, to him, less palatable biblical themes, as well as pointing to a different kind of society. In so doing, Blake brought out the latent meaning of the words of the Bible, exposing the shortcomings of the biblical texts while preserving their truths. A crucial part of this hermeneutical process is the way in which Blake regarded boundaries and constraints as the necessary complement to inspiration and imagination, both crucial components of Blake’s art and his understanding of human life.

The word ‘hero’ in ancient terminology does not refer to the ’hero’ of a poem or play, and ancient epics do not require a central hero to unify the action. This understanding of the role of the leading figures in epic is still current for John Milton in Paradise Lost.

From Homer on, the first similes in epic are strongly paradigmatic and symbolic; they emblematise an order on the human or cosmic scale, showing a contest between order and chaos. This pattern is analysed from Homer, Lucretius, Virgil and Lucan up to Milton’s Paradise Lost, whose first similes show a deep understanding of this ancient template.

The afterword considers the crisis of experience in Milton’s Samson Agonistes. Samson’s uncertainties about God’s plans and his difficulties interpreting his own heart capture the plight of the godly individual in a world with a hidden God (a deus absconditus). His desire for freedom and his will to instigate political action in the absence of divine guidance capture the modern condition inaugurated by the nominalist sense of God’s distance and inscrutable power. Baffled by his own inner promptings and unable to tolerate this opacity, Samson feels compelled to experiment and hazard his strength against his enemies. Samson’s skeptical doubt results in revenge and apocalyptic violence. The sublime ending – its atmosphere of dread and horror subdued by twisting rhetorical summations – captures the dialectic of skepticism and the sublime. The illegibility of private experience – with its explosive possibilities – provides a fitting conclusion to a book about skeptical doubt in early modern English literature.

This chapter argues that Andrew Marvell’s skepticism hones an aesthetic sensibility attuned to the sublime effects of fluctuating appearances, a skeptical apprehension of the sublime that contributes to the budding culture of taste. Giorgio Agamben supports the linking of skepticism and aesthetics since he sees taste as “an excessive sense, situated at the very limit of knowledge and pleasure,” explaining that “aesthetics takes as its object a knowledge that is not known” (2017, 51, 66). Marvell’s lyric poetry demonstrates the aesthetic pleasures afforded by a skeptical sensibility, even as it charts the emergence of the aesthete from the godly individual struggling to understand radical historical change and his role in the divine plan. Certain poems explore the intersections of secular and kairotic time, terms borrowed from Charles Taylor. His spectator poems show how the problematics of vision become secularized. If the deceptions of the eye in prior decades elicited the correction of both religious reformers and the early scientific establishment, here the wayward gaze is no longer an obstacle to truthful perception, but rather an occasion for enchantment.

This fourth chapter of Part IV turns to the gender of wartime contributions. A common cultural construction draws a sharp distinction between men who leave their families to go to fight and women who wait for their men to return. As demonstrated in this chapter, the Song of Deborah and the prose account that precedes it do not partake in the gender polarity that informs the cultural productions of so many societies, modern and ancient. By subverting the status quo and repudiating the conventions of male heroism, they do much the opposite. In addition, the investigation reveals that women, although rarely having opportunities to take up arms in defense of their communities, played a central role in war commemoration as “memory makers.”

This chapter explores the ways in which the practice of cookery and the act of eating were understood as analogous to the making and experiencing of literature in early modern writing – a set of similarities that was both exciting and disquieting. It begins with the word “conceit,” which could refer either to a wittily rhetorical piece of language or to something dainty and edible. This leads to a discussion of the ways in which eating causes distinctions between people and practices both to be made and to break down in this period (especially in the work of Shakespeare and Jonson). It ends with a discussion of the place of food in the writings of Margaret Cavendish – who distinguishes her own labours from the typical culinary work of women even as she sees Nature as a productive cook – and John Milton, who places a striking emphasis on prelapsarian eating as common to human and angel, while recognizing food as the most devilish of temptations.