Reading Milton and Newton in the Radical Reformation: Poetry, Mathematics, and Religion

In a recent essay, Nicholas McDowell demonstrates that, as mortalists, John Milton and Isaac Newton should be situated in the same, historically specific “radical Reformation”--and not separated on opposing sides of the “two cultures” of humanism and science. Pointing McDowell’s argument in a slightly different direction, I maintain that Milton’s and Newton’s shared heresy also is informed by kindred strands of new mathematical thinking. If as a mortalist, Newton becomes Milton’s radical Reformational contemporary, then, by upholding mathematics as the perfect paradigm of scientia (in Areopagitica and elsewhere), Milton becomes Newton’s intellectual compeer--and not his outmoded opposite.