Locating Milton

Locating Milton: Places and Perspectives collects nine previously unpublished essays that examine Milton’s works as the product of his unique intellectual experiences at home and abroad, while also tracing the ways in which those works themselves express the influence of his travel, his reading, and his political engagement. Following an interpretive introduction that seeks to locate Milton through his last surviving letter, the first group of essays examine how young Milton locates himself through his travels in Italy, how Milton’s early reading leads him to situate himself intellectually, and how the intellectual framework Milton generated remains pertinent to students and communities today. The second group calculates the impact of early modern mathematical and scientific models on Milton’s cosmology, demonstrating how Milton’s complex negotiations of such models give form and perspective to his greatest poetic works. The final group of essays locates Milton distinctly through his works’ global reception, ranging from the anonymous English poem Praeexistence, to Milton’s place in the “new world” and science fiction, to his presence as a figure inspiring political resistance in communist Hungary.

Locating Milton was awarded the Irene Samuel Award from the Milton Society of America, in recognition of its significance as “a distinguished multiauthor collection on Milton.”

“Together, the essays invite readers (in the spirit of Emerson’s contribution) to think about the perspectives that produce the various models of Milton that populate our teaching and research… the collection’s conceptual framework is a welcome contribution to Milton studies.”
—Jason A. Kerr, Seventeenth-Century News

Table of Contents
Thomas Festa | Locating Milton: An Introduction
Part 1: Milton at Home and Abroad at Once
1. John Rumrich | John Milton’s Night at the Opera
2. Elizabeth Sauer | Studied for Action: Milton’s Bookscape and Communes Loci
3. Jameela Lares | “Milton for Mississippi”: A New Call for Public Intellectuals—or Some Better Term
Part 2: Milton’s Mathematical Models
4.  Matthew Dolloff | “Gabriel’s Trumpet”: Milton and Seventeenth-Century Conceptualizations of Infinity
5. Christopher Koester | Mathematical Milton: Number Theory and Nesting Infinities in Paradise Lost
6. D. Geoffrey Emmerson | When Milton “Comes to Model Heav’n”: Experimenting with Scientific Genre and Diagram in Paradise Lost
Part 3: Milton’s Multitudinous Returns
7. Clay Greene | Giving Laws to Milton’s God: Præexistence (1714) as Revision of Paradise Lost
8. Miklós Péti | Samson: An Unlikely Hero of Socialism