Abstract
John Milton was born in 1608, eight years after Giordano Bruno had been burnt at the stake and two years before Galileo’s first discoveries with the telescope were published in Sidereus Nuncius. John Dee, that remarkable figure of Renaissance England, died the year Milton was born, but when he was a small boy, Thomas Harriot and the Northumberland circle1 were still conducting experiments in alchemy and magic while Harriot was also engaged in telescopic observations in England at the same time as Galileo. The year 1614, when Milton was six, was a critical one in which Isaac Casaubon’s dating of the Hermetica was announced, an event described by Yates as “a watershed separating the Renaissance world from the modern world,”2 and the controversial Rosicrucian texts first appeared. The impact of these incidents that happened during Milton’s childhood continued to reverberate throughout Britain and Europe for a considerable period of time. The late 1620s, Milton’s university years, witnessed growing debate about the admissibility of the new astronomy into the university curriculum. The 1630s, the period of his self-education at Horton and Hammersmith, was marked by intense speculation regarding the scientific and millennial implications of the new stars of 1572 and 1604.
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Notes
Harriot resided with Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland, at Sion House from 1606 until his death in 1621. Northumberland was Harriot’s chief patron and also a lifelong friend of Sir Walter Raleigh. For further details about this enigmatic figure, see Frances A. Yates, A Study of Love’s Labour’s Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936);
and Robert Fox (ed.), Thomas Harriot, An Elizabethan Man of Science (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2000).
Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), p. 398. However, scholars have since questioned the decisiveness of this event, believing the erosion of the authority of the Hermetica to have been much more gradual.
See “Alchemy, Magic and Moralism in the Thought of Robert Boyle,” in Michael Hunter, Robert Boyle (1627–91): Scrupulosity and Science (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2000), pp. 93–118.
See also Lawrence M. Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).
William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), p. xi.
John Swan, Speculum Mundi, Or, a Glasse Representing the Face of the World (Printed by the Printers to the University of Cambridge, 1935).
Bernard Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500–1800 (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1979), p. 292.
See Don Cameron Allen, The Star-Crossed Renaissance: The Quarrel about Astrology and its Influence in England (Duke University Press, 1941; rpt New York: Octagon Books Inc., 1966).
William Lilly, Englands Propheticall Merline, Foretelling to all Nations of Europe until 1663. The Actions Depending upon the Influences of the Conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter 1642/3 (1644), from “The Address to the Reader.”
See William Lilly, William Lilly’s History of His Life and Times from the Year 1602 to 1681, Written by Himself (2nd ed., 1715),
ed. by K. M. Briggs under the title The Last of the Astrologers (Ilkley, Yorkshire: The Scolar Press, Ltd., 1794), p. 32; Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press, p. 210.
Ann Geneva, Astrology and the Seventeenth Century Mind (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 21.
Mark H. Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition 1558–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 227.
For a survey of the position of astronomical knowledge in Renaissance England, see F. R. Johnson, Astronomical Thought in Renaissance England (New York: Octagon Books Inc., 1968).
A. R. Hall, The Scientific Revolution 1500–1800: The Formation of the Modern Scientific Attitude (London, New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green & Co., 1954), p. 193, footnote.
Paul Arno Trout, Magic and the Millennium: A Study of the Millenary Motifs in the Occult Milieu of Puritan England, 1640–1660 (PhD Dissertation of the University of British Columbia, Canada, 1975). See Dissertation Abstracts International, A—The Humanities and Social Sciences, January 1976, vol. 36, no. 7.
See David Mulder, The Alchemy of Revolution: Gerard Winstanley’s Occultism and Seventeenth-Century English Communism (New York, Bern, Frankfurt, and Paris: Peter Lang, 1990).
See Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–60 (London: Duckworth, 1975);
Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 21–31;
Charles Webster, “The College of Physicians: ‘Solomon’s House’ in Commonwealth England,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 41 (1967), 393–412; and “New Light on the Invisible College: The Social Relations of English Science in the Mid-seventeenth Century,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, fifth series 24 (1974), 19–42.
James Orchard Halliwell (ed.), A Collection Of Letters Illustrative Of The Progress Of Science In England From The Reign Of Queen Elizabeth To That Of Charles The Second (London, 1841), p. 80.
See also S. J. Rigaud (ed.), Correspondence of Scientific Men of The Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1841), 2 vols.
See J. L. E. Dreyer, A History of Astronomy from Thales to Kepler, 2nd ed. (New York: Dover Publications, 1953), pp. 374 and 405.
Harris Francis Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), vol. 1, pp. 301–302.
For an account of Bruno’s Oxford debates, see Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), pp. 166–68;
and R. McNulty, “Bruno at Oxford,” Renaissance News XIII (1960), 300–305.
The suggestion of Arthur and Alberta Turner, CPW1, 322, endorsed by Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), p. 64.
See also William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography, 2nd ed., 2 vols, vol. I, The Life, revised version ed. by Gordon Campbell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 143.
Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John Milton, Life, Work, and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 85, 403.
See Urszula Szulakowska, The Alchemy of Light: Geometry and Optics in Late Renaissance Alchemical Illustration (Leiden, Boston, Koln: Brill, 2000), pp. 175–77.
See ibid.; and Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), pp. 492–95.
William Poole, “Milton and Science: A Caveat,” in Milton Quarterly vol. 38, no. 1 (March 2004), 18–34. See also George F. Butler, “Milton’s Meeting with Galileo: A Reconsideration,” in Milton Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 3 (October 2005).
Donald Friedman, “Galileo and the Art of Seeing,” in Milton in Italy: Contexts, Images, Contradictions, ed. Mario A. Di Cesare (Binghamton, New York: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1991), pp. 159–74.
Julia M. Walker, “Milton and Galileo: The Art of Intellectual Canonization,” in Milton Studies, ed. James D. Simmonds, vol. XXV (1989) (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1990), pp. 109–23.
For earlier work on Milton and the new astronomy, see A. H. Gilbert, “Milton and Galileo,” SP 19 (1922), 152–85; “The Outside Shell of Milton’s World,” SP 20 (1923), 444–47;
Grant McColley, “The Theory of a Plurality of Worlds as a Factor in Milton’s Attitude toward the Copernican Hypothesis,” MLN 47 (1932), 319–25; “The Astronomy of Paradise Lost,” SP 34 (1937), 209–47; “The Seventeenth-Century Doctrine of a Plurality of Worlds,” Annals of Science 1 (1936), 385–430; “Milton’s Dialogue on Astronomy: The Principal Immediate Sources,” PMLA vol. LII, no. 3 (1937), 728–62;
Marjorie Hope Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect of the “New Science” upon Seventeenth Century Poetry (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1950); “Milton and the Telescope,” ELH (1935), 1–32;
Kester Svendsen, Milton and Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956).
For earlier work on Milton and magic and alchemy, see Marjorie Hope Nicolson, “Milton and the Conjectura cabbalistica,” PQ 6 (1927), 1–18;
R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, “Milton and the Conjectura Cabbalistica,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 18 (1955), 90–113;
Denis Saurat, Milton: Man and Thinker, 2nd ed. (London: Dent, 1944).
Lawrence Babb, The Moral Cosmos of Paradise Lost (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1970). See the chapter on “The New Astronomy.”
Harinder Singh Marjara, Contemplation of Created Things: Science in Paradise Lost (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1992).
Angelica Duran, The Age of Milton and the Scientific Revolution (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 2007).
Joad Raymond, Milton’s Angels, The Early-Modern Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 9.
Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Toward “Samson Agonistes”: The Growth of Milton’s Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 351; emphasis in the original.
Columbia Milton, vol. XVII, p. 151; and Life of Peter Ramus in Don M. Wolfe et al. eds., Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953–1982), vol. II.
See Frances A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979).
Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), pp. 379, 106.
Michael Lieb, “Encoding the Occult: Milton and the Traditions of Merkabah Speculation in the Renaissance.” in Milton Studies, ed. by Albert C. Labriola, vol. XXXVII (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 42–88.
See also Michael Lieb, The Dialectics of Creation: Patterns of Birth and Regeneration in Paradise Lost (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970).
Lyndy Abraham, Marvell and Alchemy (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990).
Alastair Fowler (ed.), Milton, Paradise Lost (Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman Limited, 2nd ed., 1998). All quotations from Paradise Lost are from this edition.
John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996).
Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1984).
Karen Silvia de Leon-Jones, Giordano Bruno and the Kabbalah: Prophets, Magicians, and Rabbis (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 1.
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© 2012 Malabika Sarkar
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Sarkar, M. (2012). Introduction. In: Cosmos and Character in Paradise Lost. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137007001_1
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