Preface

Responding to the outcry produced by his divorce tracts, Milton deployed the age-old technique of denigrating his critics: "Licence they mean when they cry libertie."¹ Milton's satiric Sonnet 12 recounts how he had "but prompt[ed] the age to quit their cloggs / By the known rules of antient libertie" (1-2), only to find himself misunderstood and maligned, environed by "a barbarous noise . . . / Of Owles and Cuckoes, Asses, Apes and Doggs" (3-4). In Sonnet 11, Milton similarly imagined the passersby gawking at the Greek title of Tetrachordon in the bookseller's stall ("bless us! what a word on / A title page is this!" [5-6]), while others "in file / Stand spelling fals" [6-7]. With regard to his cherished topic of liberty (domestic, religious, civil), Milton kept a close eye on his readers: sometimes praising, sometimes disparaging, and sometimes despairing over their real or imagined responses.

A number of essays in this volume of Milton Studies reconsider questions of reading and interpretation, especially in regard to liberty in Milton's time and its resonance for our own day. Breaking new ground and challenging previous assumptions, the contributors to this volume look at readers of Milton from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, at Milton himself interpreting and reworking tradition, and at Miltonic characters such as Adam and Eve as they strive to interpret the nature and limits of their freedom in relationship to one another and to God. In the first section, "Language, Style, and Form," John K. Hale and J. Donald Cullington remind us of the importance of attending to the form, address, style, and etymology of Milton's Latin, with particular attention to the epistle to De doctrina Christiana, as it negotiates authority, community, and heterodoxy. Reexamining the form of Lycidas, James Rutherford finds not a tripartite structure but a gradual process of resolution, moving from irregular to regular rhythms, rhyme patterns, and paragraph forms, and he argues that this process has both ontological and political meaning, adumbrating Milton's revolutionary prose and the monism of Paradise Lost.

Beginning part 2, "Gender, Law, and Liberty in the Garden," Elisabeth Liebert brings domestic conduct books to bear on the much-debated separation scene of book 9 of Paradise Lost. For Liebert, conduct book advice on modes of marital address and management of disputes serves as a lens for evaluating Adam and Eve's domestic exchange. Michael Komoroski examines how, as a part of natural law, divorce for Milton takes precedence over marriage as a positive law, contributing to Adam and Eve's fatal confusion over the limits of natural law and helping to bring about the Fall in Paradise Lost. Joseph Wallace shows how the delicate balance of hierarchical relationships and human freedom in the seventeenth century discourse of lots shapes Milton's representation of gender, proportionality, and freedom in Eden and makes particularly effective Satan's deployment of chance and the lot in tempting Eve.

Part 3, "Hermeneutics and Interpretation," includes both Milton's revisions of earlier traditions and practices and the uses of biblical hermeneutics to interpret Milton's own texts. Opening this part, Beatrice Groves situates Adam's misunderstanding of place in his lament for the garden in book 11 of Paradise Lost as part of Milton's larger critique and transformation of place-pilgrimage into spiritual growth and discipleship. Patricia Crouch examines the role of the Archangel Michael in Milton's war in heaven alongside a visual and interpretive tradition of Michael as rival to the Son of God, demonstrating how Milton's reworking has political significance in the context of the English revolution. Esther Yu shows a shift in critical analysis from eighteenth century readers (including the notorious Richard Bentley) who construed Milton's text using the aesthetic precepts of Aristotelian principles to other readers who turned to biblical hermeneutics and scriptural exegesis to develop close readings of the Miltonic text, strikingly aligned with mid-twentieth-century New Criticism.

In part 4, "Legacy, Choice, and the Human Condition," Carter Revard explores how later poets, including Keats, Shelley, and Frost, use the "classic" work of Milton to amplify their own voices, appropriating Miltonic keywords, characters, and situations to construct their own poetic identity and to delineate shared struggles. Finally, Rachel Falconer examines Milton's Paradise Lost and DeLillo's Falling Man, a novel on 9/11, as meditating on human freedom in the face of tragedy, constituting a choice to embrace one's fall, whether from a burning tower or on the brink of heaven, pursued by a wrathful deity.

Essays in this volume, by both newer and more established scholars in the Milton community, thus meditate on hermeneutics and freedom, on Adam and Eve themselves engaged in herme-neutical endeavor (not least to understand and implement their own free choices), on Milton negotiating with earlier practices and traditions, and on Milton's own voice appropriated and revised. If a far cry from the ruminations of the gawking customers in the seventeenth century London bookseller's stall, our debate on Miltonic texts and ideas continues. Indeed, Milton's views can speak to modern views of liberty and to modern pressures and realities that could not have been imagined in his own day.