Rhetoric and Rethinking in Bentley's Paradise Lost

This article seeks to re-evaluate Richard Bentley's notorious 1732 emended edition of Paradise Lost by considering the exercise as a way of engaging with Milton's cognitive rhetoric. It looks at Bentley's characteristic interventions, and in particular his objections to metaphorical or figurative language, as an indication of what is most conceptually ambitious in Milton's poem. Rather than representing a failed attempt at philological scholarship, it argues that the edition should be seen as a vibrant engagement with what Bentley takes as living thought. The 1732 edition emerges as an extraordinary cross-historical conversation that witnesses both the power of Milton's creative imagination and the force of Bentley's ratiocinative drive.