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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am genuinely indebted to both the individuals and the institutions that helped to make this work possible. These include Albert C. Labriola and David Loewenstein, to whom I am deeply grateful for their astute and sensitive readings of my manuscript. To the guiding hands of Susan Wadsworth-Booth and the staff of Duquesne University Press, I extend my heartfelt thanks. I thank as well those several institutions that proved so supportive. Under the superb leadership of Mary Beth Rose, the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago offered me a year of uninterrupted research and writing , as well as the opportunity to share my work with the other fellows. A summer fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities allowed me to focus on particular aspects of the study, and a month at that island of serenity and scenic wonder, the Rockefeller Center at Bellagio, Italy, proved to be among the most fruitful of my career. A travel grant from my own institution helped to support my trip to the Public Record Office in the United Kingdom to examine the manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana. Finally, a year as a senior fellow at the Martin Marty Center, University of Chicago Divinity School, allowed me to carry on my research in a wonderfully rich environment. I offer thanks to W. Clark Gilpen, director of the Center, Richard Rosengarten, dean of the Divinity School, and my dear friend and colleague Anthony C. Yu for ix x Acknowledgments all their encouragement and support. I am especially indebted to Stanley Fish and Walter Benn Michaels, both of whom have been wonderfully supportive. John T. Shawcross is one to whom this book (and in fact all my work) owes an incalculable debt of gratitude. I also take this opportunity to acknowledge the memory of Michael Masi, colleague, teacher, scholar, and friend. My most profound expression of gratitude and affection I reserve for the one to whom this volume is dedicated , my wife and partner in everything, Roslyn. Portions of this book represent revisions of previously published studies: chapter 4, “The Theopathetic Deity,” previously published as “Reading God: Milton and the Anthropopathetic Tradition,” in Milton Studies 25, edited by James D. Simmonds (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), 213–43; chapter 5, “The Odium Dei,” was previously published as “‘Hate in Heav’n’: Milton and the Odium Dei,” ELH 53 (1986): 519–39; chapter 6, “Our Living Dread,” was previously published as “‘Our Living Dread’: The God of Samson Agonistes,” Milton Studies 33, The Miltonic Samson, edited by Albert C. Labriola and Michael Lieb (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), 3–25; chapter 7, “The Socinian Imperative,” was previously published in Milton and the Grounds of Contention, edited by Mark R. Kelley, Michael Lieb, and John T. Shawcross, 234–83, 318–33 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003); chapter 8, “Arianism and Godhead,” was previously published as “Milton and ‘Arianism,’” Religion and Literature 32 (2000): 197–220. Permission to use the foregoing material as part of the present study is gratefully acknowledged. ...

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