This collection includes twelve new studies of representations of the embodied self in Milton and some of his near contemporaries. These studies offer fresh assessments of the body and aspirations for transcendence in Milton's works and in a wide range of other early modern authors, including Pietro Aretino, Francis Bacon, John Donne, John Bunyan, Hester Pulter, and Margaret Cavendish.
Part 1 begins with a piece by W. Gardner Campbell that elaborates William Kerrigan's idea of the “the enfolded sublime”—Kerrigan's term in The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of “Paradise Lost” (1983) for embodied hermeneutics—to illuminate the idea of incarnate immortality in Milton. This is a fitting opening given the volume's emphasis on the interconnections between body and mind in Milton. Campbell's essay, however, is weakened by turgid prose, including terms like “addressivity and meta-thematic density,” or the phrase “the meta-message of symbolicity in all symbols.” The subsequent essay, by James Nohrnberg, offers a brilliant account of the tension in Lycidas between Edward King's two bodies: King's mortal body, subjected to a terrible death at sea, and his spiritual body, associated, in the poem's consolation, with his apotheosis and immortality in the afterlife.
Part 2 begins with Gordon Braden's lively account of the interconnection between the body and mind in Aretino's erotic poetry. “That notorious ribald of Arezzo,” as Milton refers to him, provides the most extreme example of this volume's concern with the immortalization of the flesh: the indulgence in sexual pleasure in Aretino's sonnets is a response to human mortality and a rejection of Petrarch's poetry of unconsummated love. The contrast with Bunyan could hardly be greater. Drawing on Freud's work, Vera Camden perceptively shows how the sublimation of Bunyan's instinctual drives fuel his literary creativity in The Pilgrim's Progress. The final two chapters in this part offer illuminating accounts of Milton's sense of the body in relation to his poetic creativity and theology. Gregory Chaplin draws upon disability studies to show how Milton exemplifies “a radical ableism” (92)—a keen sense of mental and physical ability supported by his disciplined relationship to his own body—that places him at odds with a Calvinist sense of depravity. Stephen Fallon makes a nuanced argument about the Fall in Paradise Lost by acknowledging that, while it is unfortunate from a theological point of view, it is fortunate in terms of offering new possibilities for heroic virtue, choice, and labor in a postlapsarian world. One could argue, however, that Milton's experience of the Restoration's “heavy persecution” (12.531), while providing opportunities for solitary acts of heroism “in a World perverse” (11.701), also darkens the late Milton's sense of a fortunate fall; the poem's bitterest passage in this regard follows after Adam's outburst, which is sometimes interpreted as Milton's endorsement of the felix culpa.
Part 3 turns to seventeenth-century natural philosophy and its reformation with a strong essay by Gregory Foran that explores Bacon's concern with the renovation of corruptible human bodies. John Rumrich then offers a fresh account of authorial potency in Milton by considering how his conception of books as conveying an author's lifeblood and soul is inseparable from his vitalist monism. In a chapter that valuably reconsiders Milton the iconoclast in light of Areopagitica's monist theory of the active book, David Harper expands Rumrich's argument by examining Milton's sense of the material potency of books in relation to his iconoclasm.
The essays in part 4 devote further attention to embodiment and immortality in Milton's contemporaries and in his reception. Louisa Hall writes well about Hester Pulter's reimagination of the afterlife in terms of Copernican science; confined to her country house as a result of her pregnancies, Pulter envisions her reembodied soul orbiting among multiple worlds, a perspective that gives Pulter great imaginative freedom. Dustin Stewart illuminates how Margaret Cavendish's vitalist materialism is stimulated by her reading of Donne's poetry. This section concludes with a fascinating study by John Rogers in which he shows how the Mormon leader Joseph Smith drew upon Milton's Christian Doctrine and Paradise Lost to forge the distinctive theologies of atonement and creation in Mormon theology, including its theory of a creation ex materia.
Immortality and the Body in the Age of Milton is fittingly dedicated to William Kerrigan, who died in 2020 and whose work on Milton, intellectual history, and psychoanalysis has inspired this volume's contributors. Just as Kerrigan's work has illuminated the meaning of “one first matter all” (Paradise Lost 5.472) in Milton, so too have the contributors of this impressive volume given us a deeper, more varied appreciation of these words for embodiment in the age of Milton.
