Solidly grounded in Milton's prose works and the long history of Milton scholarship, Milton among the Puritans: The Case for Historical Revisionism challenges many received ideas about Milton's brand of Christianity, philosophy, and poetry. It does so chiefly by retracing his history as a great "Puritan poet" and reexamining the surprisingly tenuous Whig paradigm upon which this history has been built. Catherine Martin not only questions the current habit of "lumping" Milton with the religious Puritans but agrees with a long line of literary scholars who find his values and lifestyle markedly inconsistent with their beliefs and practices. Pursuing this argument, Martin carefully reexamines the whole spectrum of seventeenth-century English Puritanism from the standpoint of the most recent and respected scholarship on the subject. Martin also explores other, more secular sources of Milton's thought, including his Baconianism, his Christian Stoic ethics, and his classical republicanism; she establishes the importance of these influences through numerous direct references, silent but clear citations, and typical tropes. All in all, Milton among the Puritans presents a radical reassessment of Milton's religious identity; it shows that many received ideas about the "Puritan Milton" are neither as long-established as most scholars believe nor as historically defensible as most literary critics still assume, and resituates Milton's great poems in the period when they were written, the Restoration.

Remarkable reinterpretation of Milton and his poetry by one of the most famous historians of the 17th Century In this remarkable book Christopher Hill used the learning gathered in a lifetime's study of seventeenth-century England to carry out a major reassessment of Milton as man, politician, poet, and religious thinker. The result is a Milton very different from most popular imagination: instead of a gloomy, sexless 'Puritan', we have a dashingly original thinker, branded with the contemporary reputation of a libertine. For Hill, Milton is an author who found his real stimulus less in the literature of classical and times and more in the political and religious radicalism of his own day. Hill demonstrates, with originality, learning and insight, how Milton's political and religious predicament is reflected in his classic poetry, particularly 'Paradise Lost' and 'Samson Agonistes'.

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