International Milton Symposium - IMS12
17-21 June 2019, Palais Universitaire, Strasbourg
IMS12 CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
Wednesday 19 June 2019
08h30-09h45: Panel sessions 6
(6a) Talking in Paradise Lost - Chair: Stephen B. Dobranski (Room 112)
Antoinina Bevan Zlatar (Academic Associate, University of Zurich, Switzerland): “God talk: seeing and hearing the dialogue in heaven in Paradise Lost”
Milton’s audacious representation of God the Father and Son in Book III of Paradise Lost has always courted controversy. In the eighteenth century, Addison admired the beautifully wrought restraint of Milton’s portrayal while John Clarke thought making God the Father and Son actors in his poem ‘an unpardonable Boldness’. In the nineteenth century, Coleridge judged ‘the conduct of the celestial part of the story...very exquisite’ and justified the dramatisation on poetic grounds, but Walter Bagehot feared that making God ‘argue’ was not compatible with his omniscience and might subject him to the critique of subsequent logicians. In the 20th century, Maurice Kelley, C. A. Patrides and Irene Samuel would reconsider the dialogue in heaven in the context of the larger debate on Milton’s theology unleashed by the discovery of the De Doctrine Christiana, a debate concerning Milton’s Trinitarian, Anti-Trinitarian or Arian beliefs which continues today.
This paper seeks to contribute to this inquiry by situating Book III of Paradise Lost in the context of the rich, varied, and no less controversial iconography of the Trinity that flourished in the 14th and 15th-centuries on the Continent and in England in a range of media, an iconography that would be subject to reform during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, but which was still visible in Milton’s England. This visual legacy can be divided into four branches: three-headed Trinities; the ‘Throne of Grace’ which depicts the enthroned Father holding the crucified Son between outstretched arms and bent knees with the dove descending on the Son’s head; the more horizontal conceptualisation featuring three figures (or two figures flanking a dove) sitting in harmonious discourse, and the more abstract rendition of the mystery, favoured by Protestants, with a tetragrammaton in a triangle of light or a circle split into three.
Focusing on these subtly different pictorial traditions serves two purposes. Firstly, it attests to the complexity of the doctrine of the Trinity and its reception, which developed with different inflections according to writer, painter, sculptor or glazier and the polemical force fields in which they operated. Secondly, it will bring Milton’s embodied representation of the godhead into starker relief, inviting us to take a closer look at the two protagonists and to hear their dialogue afresh. Like Masaccio in Florence or the medieval alabaster carvers of Nottingham or the woodcut artists whose images appeared in pre-Reformation printed books, Milton, in marked contrast to other Protestant poets, did not shy away from the challenges of giving theology figural form.
Benjamin Myers (Director of the Millis Institute, Christian Heritage College, Brisbane, Australia): “Arguing with God: the dialogue on solitude in Paradise Lost book 8”
This paper explores Milton’s use of biblical sources by investigating his embellished retelling of Genesis 2:18: “And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone.” In Milton’s account, a prelapsarian Adam questions God, argues with God, criticises God’s reasoning, and challenges God’s conclusions – all in a way that brings pleasure to God (PL 8.357-451). I explore this scene against the backdrop of early Christian commentary and homiletical interpretations of Genesis 2, and I show that Milton’s inventiveness is more restrained than is sometimes thought, especially when compared to early Christian practices of scriptural embellishment. I also argue that the theological underpinnings of the scene are more conventional than might at first appear. Milton is doing, in his own way, what early Christian interpreters did when they identified anthropomorphism in Old Testament narratives while nevertheless getting full dramatic effect from that anthropomorphism (e.g. biblical stories in which God debates with human beings, engages in reasoning, changes his mind, etc.). The scene in Paradise Lost portrays real reciprocity between Adam and God, while nevertheless qualifying that reciprocity by stressing God’s sovereignty and infallible foreknowledge (“Thus far to try thee, Adam, I was pleased…”). Milton’s invention of an argument between Adam and God achieves a delicate balance between reciprocity and divine sovereignty, and illustrates the larger theological and dramatic challenges that Milton set himself when he constructed his “great argument” concerning the ways of God to men.
(6b) The Law in Paradise Lost - Chair: Catherine Cox (Room 113)
Clay Greene (PhD Student, Yale University, USA): “Natives and Sons of Heaven: Legal and Scientific Autochthony in Paradise Lost”
Autochthony, “springing from the land,” is a core symbolic structure in Paradise Lost. Cutting across legal, metaphysical, and natural scientific discourses, autochthony describes the rights, powers, and characters of beings in relation to the physical environments from which they are understood to originate. Autochthony inscribes the telos of an entity in terms of its relationship to land, space, or place understood as its originator.
Milton’s Satan speaks the language of autochthony when he demands the other angels stand by him to demonstrate their merit as “Natives and Sons of Heaven” (5.789). In Hell, Moloch asserts in the natural scientific, as well as Platonic-metaphysical idiom, that “in our proper motion we ascend / Up to our native seat: descent and fall / To us is adverse.” (2.75-77) Even the angel Raphael implies a connection between bodily quality—in this case, spirit—and physical location, suggesting that if Adam and Eve are not “Natives and Sons of Heaven,” then by physical-cum-spiritual transformations, they may become so.
The need for this transformative process marks out how place in Paradise Lost influences, perhaps determines, the destinies of the entities contained therein. Tracing the idea of autochthony through its legal, natural-scientific, and metaphysical manifestations, this paper argues that the language of autochthony in Paradise Lost creates a cosmic model in which personal development results from the subtle shaping powers of divinely-instituted environment rather than from individual self-direction.
Björn Quiring (Assistant Professor, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland): “The Knot of Divine Law and the Sinlessness of Sin in Paradise Lost”
Personified Sin and Death in Paradise Lost have often been regarded as aesthetic problems: critics have considered it inappropriate that these quasi-allegorical figures mingle with the mythico-historical characters of the epic. But the liminal status of Sin also involves an ethical problem: for what transgression has Sin been thrown into hell? It is never implied that she participated in the War in Heaven; she seems to have been thoroughly passive in all her misfortunes before the reader encounters her in Book II. Apparently, she is punished for the sins of her father (a practice Milton justifies in De Doctrina Christiana). This enactment of divine justice derives additional weight from the fact that Sin, chronologically, is the first terminally female figure in Paradise Lost, since the specificity of her punishment forbids her to “either sex assume or both”. Furthermore, Sin herself is also ascribed the role of executing divine justice in Milton’s world: according to the Almighty, Sin and Death are His “hell-hounds, to lick up the draff and filth/ Which man’s polluting sin with taint hath shed/ On what was pure”. Corrupting Sin is thus supposed to purge the very sin she incarnates. The paper will demonstrate that this paradoxical figure is emblematic of divine law in Paradise Lost.
(6c) Milton's Early Poetry (1624-42) (CHANGED FROM "Milton and his Environment") - Chair: Edward Jones (Room Pasteur)
Chika Kaneko (PhD, Lecturer, Matsuyama University, Ehime, Japan) “Milton as Phoebicolis, a Follower of Phoebus” (MOVED FROM 6e)
This paper follows a pattern of self-assessments of Milton in the role of a follower of Phoebus, the god of poetry. In his Latin poems, Milton describes an allegorical pasture where Phoebus as a shepherd cares for Milton as a sheep. This paper traces the relationship between Phoebus and Milton through Milton’s Latin pastorals Carmina elegiaca, Elegia prima, Elegia quinta, Ad Patrem, Mansus, and Epitaphium Damonis. These works show Milton as conscious of the relationship between success and the favours of Phoebus. Milton presents himself as a follower of Phoebus. Moreover, in the poems Ad Patrem and Mansus, as Noro and Branken indicate, Milton builds a pattern in which he is an adopted son of Phoebus. This is demonstrated in Epitaphium Damonis, where Milton’s intention to depart from the pastoral field is declared. The poem’s climax shows the figure of an imitation of Phoebus. This shows that Milton’s poetic vocation relates to the god of poetry, like the Christian Father and Christ. Here, I illustrate the making of the poet in Milton.
Christopher D’Addario (Associate Professor, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, USA): “Milton on 12 November 1642: or, How Close Is Too Close?”
This paper takes as its starting point Milton’s little commented on Sonnet 8, penned in the early days of November 1642, as London’s inhabitants worried that royalist soldiers would overwhelm the trained bands and sack the city. The sonnet has occasioned remarkably little commentary, perhaps because the poem’s fear of violence and presumption of royalist military victory do not align comfortably with our sense of Milton’s state of mind circa 1642–44.
I aim to take the poem’s sentiment seriously, as a legitimate, if sardonic, expression of Milton’s state of mind this week in 1642. I wish to do so not precisely to expose that writers, even writers so magisterially confident as Milton, can change their positions or beliefs, although that certainly is the case. My point rather is that the understandable fear lurking behind the sonnet reminds us that in times of crisis an individual may feel and express a variety of contradictory emotions, that amidst the daily, even hourly, uncertainties of military and political conflict, writers may inhabit sporadically a variety of distinct affects.
In detailing the poet’s state of mind in these specific days, I hope to introduce a number of methodological questions relating to such fine-grained analyses. What do we gain in looking at the shifting realities of individuals as they move through their everyday lives? Perhaps more difficult to ascertain, what do we lose in the narratives we construct about our authors when examining transient if deeply felt experiences? How close is too close?
Nicholas McDowell (Professor of Early Modern Literature and Thought, University of Exeter, G.-B.): “Edward Phillips, the Sublimity of Paradise Lost, and the Character of a Miltonic Education (CANCELLED)
The first reference to the sublimity of Paradise Lost comes not in Marvell’s commendatory poem to the 1674 edition, as is habitually claimed, but in a Latin survey of modern poets that Edward Phillips appended to his 1670 edition of an educational handbook by Joannes Buchlerus. Phillips also appended to this edition a Latin essay on ancient dramatic poetry. Given Edward and his younger brother John were both educated entirely and intensively by Milton during the 1640s, we might have good reason to think that these views on poetics reflect something of those of their uncle. Yet, despite the fact that nobody was closer to the composition of Paradise Lost than Edward Phillips—who served as amanuensis during the composition and on whose authority we know the poem was largely composed between 1658 and 1663—his reputation is still largely overshadowed by the moral disapproval of William Godwin. According to Godwin, the brothers rejected their uncle’s teachings and preferred to write in a licentious, Cavalier mode. This paper takes another look at Edward’s writing career in the light of his Miltonic education, focusing on how Phillips handles the topic of sublime eloquence.
(6d) Paradise Regained (I) - Chair: Miklòs Péti (Room 124)
Michiko Mori (Professor Emerita, Otemae University, Nishinomiya, Japan): The Passion of Christ Hidden: Epic Similes in Paradise Regained
Paradise Regained announces at its end that Jesus defeated Satan’s temptations and built Paradise in the wilderness. Adam’s disobedience and fall is compensated by Jesus’s obedience to God and victory over Satan. However, the original sin of mankind should be redeemed by Jesus’ passion and death, not by his triumph over Satan’s temptations only. Many readers and scholars were dissatisfied because Paradise Regained was an ethical poem, not mystical. In Paradise Regained, Milton avoids confronting the theme of the Passion, charging the task implicitly with his epic similes. There are two epic similes related to Jesus which occupy important positions in the poem. The first epic simile appears in the beginning of the Temptation where Jesus is compared to Moses and Elijah. The second is placed at the very end of the Temptation, where Satan’s fall is likened to that of Antaeus and of the Sphinx, and the conquerors of the monsters, Heracles and Oedipus, are associated with Jesus. This paper tries to elucidate how the Redemption is ingeniously hidden in the drama of the Temptation, analyzing those two epic similes.
Chien-wei Yang (Lecturer, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan): “My Heart Hath Been a Storehouse long of things”: The Passionless Son in Paradise Regained”
The fact that the Son is intentionally rendered deficient in essential human qualities has puzzled and divided critics since the publication of Paradise Regained. The perceived lacuna in the Son’s humanity in fact stems from his “calm of mind,” or rather lack of human emotions. Why would Milton envision the Son of God, a prime example for his fallen readers, as a character scanty in human emotions? How do the readers interpret a hero devoid of affections? I argue to fully appreciate Milton’s passionless Son one has to consult the early modern discourses on emotions. As emotion drew wide attention in the seventeenth-century Europe, treatises by Thomas Wright, Edward Reynolds, Jean François Senault, and William Fenner were composed to investigate the nature of passions and, more significantly, to distinguish between affection and passion. The intellectual consensus reached then is that while passion, being unruly and disruptive, must be suppressed or even purged, affection, being pure and holy, should be nurtured. The Son’s arcane insufficiency in emotions, or passions, viewed in the light of the early modern understanding of passion and affection, is therefore to be justified, whereas Satan’s appealing abundance in passions testifies to his fallen state. However, the absence of passions in the Son does not preclude him from sensing joy, a dominant affection commonly approved by Milton’s contemporaries, which is also partaken by Mary, disciples, and the angelic choirs.
(6e) Milton's Poetics (CANCELLED)
Chika Kaneko (PhD, Lecturer, Matsuyama University, Ehime, Japan) “Milton as Phoebicolis, a Follower of Phoebus” (MOVED TO 6c)
This paper follows a pattern of self-assessments of Milton in the role of a follower of Phoebus, the god of poetry. In his Latin poems, Milton describes an allegorical pasture where Phoebus as a shepherd cares for Milton as a sheep. This paper traces the relationship between Phoebus and Milton through Milton’s Latin pastorals Carmina elegiaca, Elegia prima, Elegia quinta, Ad Patrem, Mansus, and Epitaphium Damonis. These works show Milton as conscious of the relationship between success and the favours of Phoebus. Milton presents himself as a follower of Phoebus. Moreover, in the poems Ad Patrem and Mansus, as Noro and Branken indicate, Milton builds a pattern in which he is an adopted son of Phoebus. This is demonstrated in Epitaphium Damonis, where Milton’s intention to depart from the pastoral field is declared. The poem’s climax shows the figure of an imitation of Phoebus. This shows that Milton’s poetic vocation relates to the god of poetry, like the Christian Father and Christ. Here, I illustrate the making of the poet in Milton.
Emma Wilson (Assistant Professor of English, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, USA): “Chasing Pegasus: The Logic of Milton’s Poetic Ambitions” (CANCELLED)
Why did Milton write Paradise Lost? This paper proposes to apply the discursive precepts that Milton learnt through his formal education in logic at the University of Cambridge, and then reworked in his own logic textbook, Artis Plenior Logicae, whilst tutoring his nephews in the 1640s, to read the causal dynamics of Milton’s relationship with his muse in Paradise Lost to understand how and why he wrote his epic. The paper will scrutinize the invocations in Books 1 and 3 of Paradise Lost through the lens of Milton’s logic to understand how the poet takes inspiration from his muse, and what cause motivates him to do so. Is he driven by divine purpose? By poetic ambition? Does he configure poetic ambition as a divine purpose? Milton’s Artis Plenior Logicae was, of course, based on the principles of the controversial pedagogue and logician Petrus Ramus, who reoriented discursive logic to focus not on the static, descriptive ‘categories’ of his Aristotelian counterparts and rivals, but rather on the dynamic logical elements of cause, end, and effect. Applying Milton’s Ramist principles of agency and causal analysis allows for new insights into Milton’s conception of the reasons driving both he and his muse to creative action, and consequently, into the rationale propelling his poetic ambitions.
As a young man, Milton wrote to Charles Diodati in 1637 to confess that he is thinking about ‘immortality’. Blushing at his grandiloquent designs, Milton explains that, as yet, his ‘Pegasus still raises himself on very tender wings’. At this early stage in his career, the fledgling poet adopts Pegasus as the emblem for his poetic praxis, representative of his first publications whilst he is ‘growing [his] wings and practicing flight’. Some thirty years later, in 1667, in the invocation of book 7 of Paradise Lost, Milton’s narrator ‘soar[s]’ ‘above the flight of Pegasean wing’ in pursuit of his muse Urania. At this stage in his writing, he sees that he has surpassed his youthful poetic motif as his voice soars beyond the reach of Pegasus’ wing. At both ends of his career, Milton’s conception of poetic ambition found an outlet in the form of the Pegasus, first as a steed, and then as a rival surpassed. In this paper, I characterize Milton’s Pegasus as his logic: the discursive staple of early modern education, governing the invention and disposition of all forms of writing (including the poetic) as the vehicle responsible for giving his poetic ambitions flight before ultimately being surpassed by the poet himself and his imaginative abilities. Hale, Festa, and Knight have advocated for the importance of Milton’s education in forging Paradise Lost. Early modern students of the trivium used the principles of logic to scrutinize and to write about agency and cause - - about motivation. Drawing on these ideas in tandem with criticism about Milton’s reasons for writing Paradise Lost, from C18th and C19th claims mediated by Leonard to Teskey’s recent discussion, I apply principles from Milton’s formal training and his logic textbook to generate a new reading of the agencies driving the productive but competitive relationship between Milton and his divine muse in Paradise Lost to understand how and why he wrote his epic.
(6f) Roundtable on “The Authorship of De Doctrina Christiana” - Chair: Hugh Wilson (Room 118)
Hugh F. Wilson (Professor, Grambling State University, Louisiana, USA) and James Clawson (Ann Petry Endowed Professor of English, Grambling State University, Louisiana, USA): “Another Candidate for the Primary Authorship of De Doctrina Christiana, the Treatise Currently Attributed to Milton”
Ever since its “discovery” in 1823, the heterodox Latin treatise, De Doctrina Christiana, has been controversial. King George IV and Prime Minister Robert Peel proclaimed the treatise as a long-lost work by Milton. Although series of once prominent figures, led by Thomas Burgess, Bishop of Salisbury, doubted the attribution, dissident voices were marginalized, ignored, suppressed and largely forgotten. Even the great David Masson overlooks the controversy. Late in the twentieth century, William B. Hunter, the esteemed editor of the nine volume Milton Encyclopedia, seconded by Paul Sellin of UCLA, rediscovered the objections of Bishop Burgess and found new reasons to doubt the attribution.
Many scholars assumed that Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana [2007] restored the conventional consensus, but other scholars remain skeptical. In 2014, Oxford University Press published a new translation of the treatise among Milton’s works, but the controversy continues. In addition to William Hunter and Paul Sellin, a series of contemporary scholars, Michael Lieb, Ernest W. Sullivan II, John Mulryan, Hugh F. Wilson, Grant Horner and Filippo Falcone offered reasons to doubt of the certainty of the attribution.
Our paper will offer philological arguments and digital analysis that call in question the conventional attribution of De Doctrina Christiana to John Milton. Through a computational analysis of our philological suspicions, a new candidate for the authorship of the treatise has emerged. Milton scholars may have to reconsider scholarship predicated on the premise that Milton composed De Doctrina Christiana.
<< back to Panel sessions 6 MENU
09h45-10h15: Coffee break (Great Hall)
10h15-12h00: Plenary session III by John Leonard (Distinguished University Professor at the University of Western Ontario, Canada): “‘Or’ in Paradise Lost: the Poetics of Incertitude Reconsidered", and Gordon Teskey (Professor of English, Harvard, USA): "Snakes and Ladders: Some Problems in Annotating Paradise Lost" (Room Pasteur)
12h00-14h00: Lunch break at "Le 32" - 32, Avenue de la Victoire, Strasbourg
14h30-18h30: Afternoon excursions
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The organizers.
Updated: 14 June 2019
