Reforming the garden: The experimentalist Eden and paradise lost

ELH - English Literary History

Volumn 72, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 23-78

  Picciotto, Joanna ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 64049097010     PISSN: 00138304     EISSN: 10806547     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/elh.2005.0009     Document Type: Review

References (145)

1. Robert Boyle, Occasional Reflections Upon Several Subjects, in Works, ed. Thomas Birch, 6 vols. (Hildesheim: G. Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1965-1966), 2:364-65;
2. all subsequent quotations from this scene are from this passage. John Milton, Areopagitica, A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicens'd Printing, to the Parlament of England (London, 1644), 17.
3. St. Augustine, St. Augustine's Confessions, trans. William Watts (London, 1650), 346-53 (book 10, chap. 34-35).
4. "Things themselves" is a signature phrase of experimentalist discourse: see, for example, Sir William Petty, The Advice of W. P. to Mr. Samuel Hartlib for the Advancement of Some Particular Parts of Learning (London, 1647), 13;
5. Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing: Or Confidence in Opinions Manifested in a Discourse of the Shortness and Uncertainty of our Knowledge, and its Causes: With Some Reflexions on Peripateticism, and an Apology for Philosophy (London: E. C[otes] for Henry Eversden, 1661), 151;
6. Robert Hooke, Micrographia, or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon (London: Jo. Martyn and Ja. Allestry, 1665), sig. Av;
7. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (London: Eliz. Holt for Thomas Basset, 1690), 56, 72, 178, 206;
8. and Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (London: T. R. for J. Marytn, 1667), 16, 18, 69.
9. Henry Power, Experimental Philosophy in Three Books: Containing New Experiments Microscopical, Mercurial, Magnetical (London: T. Roycroft for John Martin and James Allestry, 1664), 6-7.
10. Power, 3, 25, 16-18.
11. The theater of the creatures was a commonplace; see, for example, Godfrey Goodman, The Creatures Praysing God (London: Felik Kingston, 1622), 16.
12. For a typical contemporary response to the divesting of teleology from human perception, see John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (London: Samuel Smith, 1691), 127-30.
13. Important recent accounts of this shift include Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), especially 347, 364-75, 384-90;
14. and Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995), chap. 3.
15. Although this substitution was perhaps an inevitable product of the Protestant discomfort with the imitatio Christi of the old religion, thoughtfully explored by Elizabeth K. Hudson ("English Protestants and the imitatio Christi," Sixteenth Century Journal 19 [1988]: 541-58), plenty of anti-Catholic Protestants were still horrified by the "Adamolatry" of their fellow Christians: see, for example, Samuel Pack, The Mystery of the Gospel Unvail'd: Wherein is Plainly Shewed and Proved, that the Man CHRIST JESUS has honoured all the Perfections of God more than Adam and all his Posterity could have done, had they continued in their Primitive State of Innocency (London, 1691).
16. For the role of Adam in constructions of the prisca theologica, see Hans Aarsleff, "Leibniz on Locke on Language," American Philosophical Quarterly 1 (1964): 165-88;
17. and Danton Sailor, "Moses and Atomism," Journal of the History of Ideas 25 (1974): 3-16. The present essay pulls together Adams that others may prefer to segregate as specifically Baconian or hermetic, Commonwealth or Royalist, but attempts to organize seventeenth-century intellectual life along these fault lines have distorted our understanding of experimentalism (now known as "Restoration science" and identified with royalism) and its impact on the literary imagination.
18. See Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis, chapters 1-5, trans. George V. Schick in Luther's Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, 55 vols. (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955-1986) 1:68, 120;
19. Francis Bacon, The Two Bookes of Francis Bacon: The Proficiencie and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Humane (London: Henrie Tomes, 1605), 3-4, 28-29 (18-19 in the more commonly cited Watts edition, Of the Advancement and Proficience of Learning, or the Partitions of Sciences. . .interpreted by Gilbert Wats [Oxford: Leon. Lichfield for Rob. Young and Ed Forrest, 1640]).
20. The concept of an original commerce between the mind of man and the nature of things could be understood variously. The association of innocence with insight promotes a pessimistic anthropology, closer to the spirit of Luther than of Bacon, in William Bloys, Adam in his Innocencie (London: Robert Young for George Lathum, 1638) and Godfrey Goodman, The Fall of Man, or the Corruption of Nature, proved by the light of our naturall Reason (London: Felix Kyngston, 1616).
21. For a hermetic take on Adam's names as both probative and causally efficacious, see John Webster, Academiarum Examen, Or the Examination of Academies, Wherein is Discussed and Examined the Matter, Method and Customes of Academick and Scholastick Learning, and the insufficiency thereof discovered and laid open (London: Giles Calvert, 1654).
22. Webster was swiftly taken to task for his credulity, however, by the experimentalists Seth Ward and John Wilkins in Vindiciae Academiarum Containing some Brief Animadversions upon Mr. Webster's Book (Oxford: Leonard Lichfield for Thomas Robinson, 1654).
23. The search for "Adam" became so freely generalized that it came naturally to Walter Charleton to refer to "the Adam, or Radical and Primary Cause of all motion," which he located in the atom: the most primitive unit of matter is homophonically fused with the original witness who first discerned its qualities (Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo- Charltoniana, Or a Fabrick of Science Natural, Upon the Hypothesis of Atoms, Founded by Epicurus, Repaired by Petrus Gassendi, Augmented by Walter Charleton [London: Tho(mas) Newcomb for Thomas Heach, 1654], 436).
24. John Milton, Paradise Lost, 4.207. Hereafter cited parenthetically by book and line number. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Milton's poetry come from the facsimile edition of the Complete Poetical Works, ed. Harris Francis Fletcher, 4 vols. (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1943-1948).
25. For Galileo on the corpo sensitivo see Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in The Scientific Background to Modern Philosophy, ed. and trans. Michael R. Matthews (New York: Hackett Publishing Company, 1989), 65.
26. On the spectatorial body see my "Optical Instruments and the Eighteenth-Century Observer," Studies in the Eighteenth Century 29 (2000): 123-54.
27. Glanvil, Vanity, 108, 72.
28. I take the pregnant term "de-education" from G. A. Starr's "Sentimental De-Education" in Augustan Studies: Essays in Honor of Irvin Ehrenpreis, ed. Douglas Lane Patey and Timothy Keegan (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1985), 253-62.
29. The conviction that the truth value of a proposition cannot be determined by its content, only by its mode of production, links faith in experiments to the "experimental faith" of various radical Protestantisms. So Milton: "Truth is compar'd in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetuall progression, they sick'n into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man may be a heretick in the truth; and if he beleeve things only because his Pastor sayes so, or the Assembly so determins, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds, becomes his heresie" (Areopagitica, 26).
30. Experimental and its cognates are ubiquitous in Puritan discourse, which does not distinguish in any systematic way between experiment and experience. When preaching to the Army in 1647, for example, Thomas Collier promised that "I shall for your satisfaction confirm unto you from scripture, although I trust I shall deliver nothing unto you but experimental truth" (in Puritanism and Liberty, Being the Army Debates [1647-9] from the Clarke Manuscripts with Supplementary Documents, ed. A. S. P. Woodhouse [London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1951], 390).
31. The concept of experimental faith is explored in N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1987), 156-63, 176, 181-83, 185.
32. See also Christopher Hill, The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 328.
33. Hooke, Micrographia, 154, sig. Al;
34. Glanvil, Vanity, 5.
35. Milton, Paradise Lost, 5.262;
36. for a description of these and similar difficulties, see Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London: Verso, 1988), 94.
37. Michael Hunter reproduces Stillingfleet's notes in Robert Boyle by Himself and His Friends (London: William Pickering, 1994), 36.)
38. Stephen Pumfrey explores the "cares" of Hooke's curatorship in "Ideas Above His Station: A Social Study of Hooke's Curatorship of Experiments," History of Science 29 (1991): 1-44.
39. Bacon, Advancement (1640), book 1, 42.
40. W. Hawes, Essay on Idleness: or, Chusing to Live without Business (London, 1707), 3;
41. Bacon, Advancement, 5-6, 42-43.
42. In Volatiles from the History of Adam and Eve (London: T. Bassett, 1674), Sir John Pettus suggests that Eve and her female descendants "take irregular courses ... to gain experimental knowledge" (140); the feminine error identified with original sin is procedural and suggests nothing untoward about the search for experimental knowledge itself.
43. Boyle, Works, 4:36.
44. See Hunter's introduction to Robert Boyle by Himself and "Robert Boyle: A Suitable Case for Treatment?" British Journal for the History of Science 32:3 (Sept. 1999): 261-275.
45. Other virtuosi employed the term scruple to similar effect; see, for example, Hooke, The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke, M. D. S. R. S. Geom. Prof. Gresh. &c. Containing his Cutlerian Lectures, and Other Discourses, ed. R. Waller (London: Sam. Smith and Benj. Walford, 1705), 342.
46. Charleton, 8. A dynamic relationship between progressive enlightenment and "slipping and sliding" is a signature of experimental and experimentalist faith: see, for example, William Gibson, Election and Reprobation Scripturally and Experimentally Witnessed (London, 1678), 12.
47. John Salkeld, Treatise of Paradise, and the Principall Contents Thereof (London: Edward Griffin for Nathaniel Butter, 1617), 145;
48. Boyle, quoted in Hunter, "Robert Boyle: A Suitable Case for Treatment?" 262;
49. Joseph Hall, Works of Joseph Hall, Bishop of Norwich (London: M. Flesher for Ed. Bruster, 1647), 777.
50. So Pettus: "[A]bove all he [Adam in Eden] had opportunity there to express a harmless industry" (27). Robert South expounds the "severe" nature of Adam's joy in A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Novemb. 9. 1662 (London: J. G. for Tho. Robinson, 1663), 45-47.
51. See my "Optical Instruments" for a fuller treatment of the experimentalist alphabetization of nature and references. For a different account, see James Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1995).
52. Hooke, Posthumous Works, 338; see also 280 and 319.
53. Eugenius Philalethes (Thomas Vaughan) offers an alchemical twist on this motif, which stands alongside a celebration of the powers of the lens, in Magia Adamica: or The antiquity of magic, and the descent thereof from Adam downwards, proved (London: John Allen, 1656), 63, 87 (on the lens, see sig. B6, 11).
54. On Baconian philosophy and maker's knowledge, see Antonio Perez-Ramos, Francis Bacon's Idea of Science and the Maker's Knowledge Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988);
55. on the porous boundary between Adamic language and knowledge, see John Leonard, Naming in Paradise: Milton and the Language of Adam and Eve (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), and Aarsleff.
56. See Genesis 30:31-43
57. and Philalethes, Magia Adamica, 35-37.
58. Walter Blith, The English Improver Improv'd: or the Survey of Husbandry Surveyed Discovering the Improveableness of all Lands (London: for John Wright, 1652), 3-4.
59. Thomas Bradley, Nosce te Ipsum in a Comparison Between the First and Second Adam, with their Influence upon all Mankind (York: Stephen Bulkley, 1668), 37;
60. The notion that original sin is "contracted" through a mechanism analogous to political representation, supervenient on Adam's status as humanity's representative, appears across the spectrum of Protestant belief (though such explanations often stand alongside appeals to an inbred organic corruption). Robert Harris, the staunch Parliamentarian whom Cromwell made president of Trinity College, declares that Adam and Eve "must not here be personally considered, but as . . . representatives of mankind"; it is in this quasi-legal sense that "We are Adam" (Harris, A Brief Discourse of Man's Estate in the First and Second Adam [London: J. Flesher for John Bartlet the elder and John Bartlet the younger, 1653], 11).
61. Benjamin Keach explains that Adam "was a publick Person" who could impart "legal Guilt" to those he represented (Keach, A Medium Betwixt Two Extremes: Wherein it is proved that the whole First Adam was condemned, and the whole Second Adam justified [London: Andrew Bell, 1698], 12, 2).
62. The association between Adam and the monarch goes in the other direction in Basilikon Doron where James I warns his heir that "any sinne that ye commit, not being a single sinne procuring but the fall of one; but being an exemplare sinne, and therefore drawing with it the whole multitude to be guiltie of the same" (The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles Howard McIlwain [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1918], 12).
63. William Rabisha, Adam Unvailed, and Seen with Open Face: Or, Israel's Right Way from Egypt to Canaan, Lately Discovered (London: Giles Calvert, 1649), 96.
64. South remarked that the identification of the sovereign with the innocent Adam "savors of the tenets of the fifth monarchy" (34). Nonetheless, some defenders of divine right would continue to elaborate the analogy well into the eighteenth century; on the anniversary of King Charles's death in 1694, John Evelyn attended what he considered an "excellent" sermon on "the Excellency of Kingly Government above all other, deriving it from Adam" (Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, 6 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955], 5:165).
65. Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994), 108, 110;
66. see also Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 211.
67. See, for example, the fifth act of John Marston's Histrio-Mastix;
68. Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and others (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 5.1.29-31;
69. William Basse's Sword and Buckler: Or, The Serving Man's Defense (London: M. L., 1602), stanzas 31-40;
70. and Richard Bancroft, Survay of the Pretended Holy Discipline (London: John Wolfe, 1593), 8-9.
71. For Adam's "experimentall knowledge" as the product of the union of action and contemplation, see Hall, Works, 774-78. All such accounts are of course based on Bacon (for example, Advancement, 40).
72. Milton, Poems, &c. with a small tractate of education to Mr. Hartlib (London: Tho. During, 1673), 97 (second pagination).
73. Milton, Poems, &c, 98, 107, and see also 115;
74. Simon Sturtevant, Dibre Adam, Or Adam's Hebrew Dictionarie: A Rare and New Invention (London, 1602), 7.
75. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 430, 271-72;
76. Evelyn, Sylva: or, A discourse of forest-trees, and the propagation of timber in His Majesties dominions, 3rd ed. (London: Jo. Martyn, 1679), 256 (misnumbered as 265).
77. Gerrard Winstanley, Fire in the Bush: The Spirit Burning, not Consuming but Purging Mankind (London: Giles Calvert, 1650), 50-53;
78. Winstanley, A New-Yeer's Gift for the Parliament and Armie (London: Giles Calvert, 1650), 28.
79. Winstanley, New leer's, 5;
80. Throughout Winstanley's writings, the phrase "without respect of persons" is the constant companion of "mankind": see, for example, An Humble Request to the Ministers of both Universities and to all Lawyers in every Inns-a-Court (London: J. C., 1650), 2, 3.
81. Winstanley, Fire, 47.
82. Winstanley, New Yeer's, 32.
83. Winstanley, Humble Request, 1.
84. See John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996), 49-51, 58-60, 66-69.
85. See William Everard, The True Leveller's Standard Advanced: Or, The State of Community Opened, and Presented to the Sons of Men (London: s.n., 1649);
86. "true Levelling" is defined in Winstanley, New Yeer's, 38-43.
87. See Andrew Bradstock, "Restoring All Things From the Curse: Millenarianism, Alchemy, Science and Politics in the Writings of Gerrard Winstanley," in The Arts of Seventeenth-Century Science: Representations of the Natural World in European and North American Culture, ed. Claire Jowitt and Diane Watt (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2002), 95-108, 98-99.
88. Winstanley, New Yeer's, 3, 43.
89. Winstanley, The Law of Freedom in a Platform: Or True Magistracy Restored (London: J. M. for the Author, 1652), 57;
90. Winstanley, Law of Freedom, 10;
91. George Fox, The Journal of George Fox, ed. John L. Nickalls (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1952), 1, 6, 27.
92. Milton, Paradise Regained, in Complete Poetical Works, 1.7, 156; see also 4.608.
93. Ellwood, The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood (London: Assigns of J. Sowie, 1714), 246-47.
94. Milton, Paradise Regained, 4.600, 1.192, 4.635.
95. For the contemporary identity of the seeker, which I believe Milton's Son models at the start of Paradise Regained, see Michael Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), 104, 110, 184-86.
96. See James Alsop, "Gerrard Winstanley's Later Life," Past and Present 82 (1979): 73-81;
97. Steven Marx "The Prophet Disarmed: Milton and the Quakers," Studies in English Literature 1500-1800 32 (1992): 111-28.
98. See Milton, Collected Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Douglas Bush, vol. 2, ed. Ernest Sirluck (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1953-1982)
99. John Eachard, The Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy and Religion Enquired Into (London: W. Godbid for N. Brooke, 1670), sig. A5.
100. Milton, Samson Agonistes, line 1716.
101. I of course refer to Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971)
102. and his article "Things and Actions Indifferent: The Temptation of Plot in Paradise Regained," Milton Studies 17 (1983): 163-85.
103. Milton adopted the personal motto "My strength is made perfect in weakness" in the 1650s, when he became completely blind (Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography [London: Blackwells, 2000], 338).
104. For more on this passage see James D. Tabor, Things Unutterable: Paul's Ascent to Paradise in Its Greco-Roman, Judaic, and Early Christian Contexts (Lanham, Maryland: Univ. Press of America, 1986).
105. George Boas explores how primitivism was reconciled to Christian doctrine in Primitivism and Related Ideas in the Middle Ages (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997).
106. "Adam lay ibounden," in Medieval English Lyrics, ed. R. T. Davies (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1964), 160-61.
107. Albert the Great and Abbot Adam of Perseigne, quoted in Jean Delumeau, The History of Paradise: The Garden of Eden in Myth and Tradition, trans. Matthew O'Connell (New York: Continuum, 1995), 124-25.
108. John Bale, A Tragedie or Enterlude, Manifesting the Chiefe Promises of God unto Man (London: John Charlewoode for Stephen Peele, 1577), 3.
109. John Donne, "Twickenham Garden," lines 8-9, in The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John T. Shawcross (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1967).
110. George Herbert: The Complete English Poems, ed. John Tobin [New York: Penguin Books, 1991]).
111. The rose window in the north transept of the Lincoln Cathedral, for example, features the angel instructing Adam and Eve in the arts of digging and spinning. Diane Kelsey McColley explores this image repertoire in her fascinating study A Gust for Paradise: Milton's Eden and the Visual Arts (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993), 51, 68;
112. also see N. J. Morgan, The Medieval Painted Glass of Lincoln Cathedral (London: Published for the British Academy by Oxford Univ. Press, 1983), 16-17.
113. The image is reproduced in Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001), 51.
114. Thomas Savile, Adam's Garden (London: Thomas Haveland, 1611), sig. A3v, 1.
115. William Coles's exhaustive "necessary observations" on England's plants is called Adam in Eden, or Nature's Paradise: The History of Plants, Herbs, Fruits and Flowers (London: J. Streater for Nathaniel Brooke, 1657);
116. For contemporary "leveling" of the spaces of hell, heaven, and earth into a purgatorial continuum, see Abeizer Coppe, A Fiery Flying Roll: A Word from the Lord to all the great Ones of the Earth (London, 1650)
117. and George Hammon, A Discovery of the Latitude of the Loss of the Earthly Paradise by Original Sin (London: Ro. Ibbitson for Francis Smith, 1655).
118. Delumeau describes the dismantling of the hortus conclusus in the pictorial tradition in History, 127-34.
119. The critical literature on Milton's relationship to Galileo and his glass is sufficiently vast to make extensive citation pointless, but I have drawn encouragement from Julia M. Walker, "Milton and Galileo: The Art of Intellectual Canonization," Milton Studies 25 (1987): 109-23;
120. Judith Scherer Herz, "'For whom this glorious sight?': Dante, Milton, and the Galileo Question" in Milton in Italy: Contexts, Images, Contradictions, ed. Mario A. Di Cesare (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 90), 147-157;
121. and Marjorie Hope Nicolson, "Milton and the Telescope," ELH 2.1 (Apr. 1935): 1-32. My book manuscript eviews the evidence for Milton's involvement in experimentalist culture, which provides further justification for my account of his treatment of Galileo in Paradise Lost.
122. Donne, First Anniversary, line 11.
123. John Eachard, Some Observations upon the Answer to an Enquiry into the Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy and Religion, reissued with separate pagination in Grounds and Occasions, 9th ed. (London: R. Holt for Obadiah Blagrave, 1685), 173, 178-79.
124. Milton, The Reason of Church Government Urg'd Against Prelaty (London: E. G. for John Rothwell, 1641), 23.
125. The "instrument of truth" is William Browne's epithet for the telescope, an alternative to shepherd's pipes, in Britannia's Pastorals (London: Thomas Snodham for George Norton, 1616), book 2, song 1, 23-28.
126. References to these objections can be found in Paradise Lost, ed. Alistair Fowler (New York: Longman Group, 1971), 11-17, 20.
127. Glanvill, Vanity, sig. B2, B3.
128. Lucy Hutchinson piously abstains from this narrative responsibility in her counter-hexameral epic Order and Disorder (ed. David Norbrook [Oxford: Blackwell, 2001]).
129. And alongside Andrew Marvell as well; the passage references his own poem-as-lens, the Last Instructions to a Painter, with which he exposed the "spots" of Charles II: "So his bold Tube, Man, to the Sun apply'd, / And Spots unknown to the bright Star descry'd" (lines 949-50), The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).
130. Antonius Sucquet, quoted in David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989), 185.
131. My sense of the relationship between the mind's eye and body's eye in the act of reading has been shaped by Christopher Collins, The Poetics of the Mind's Eye: Literature and the Psychology of Imagination (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), chap. 5.
132. My understanding of Chaos has been enriched by Regina Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating: Biblical Creation in Paradise Lost (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), especially chapter one;
133. and Robert M. Adams, "A Little Look Into Chaos," in Illustrious Evidence: Approaches to English Literature of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Earl Miner (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975).
134. Milton, Pardise Lost, 2.1048, 3.76.
135. In Samson Agonistes, Dalila tries to excuse her perfidy by blaming her "Curiosity, inquisitive, importune" to know Samson's secret (line 775);
136. Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001), 40-71, 158-92.
137. See Scarry, Dreaming, 91.
138. As Fowler's note points out, purpureas means "shining" - the Latin pun highlights the floral explosion of color. A fuller account of Milton's presentation of this scene would take into account the supplementary role of radiant ignition. On Aretino and Paradise Lost, see James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1987), 248-49.
139. On the concept of a Puritan art of love, see William and Malleville Haller, "The Puritan Art of Love," Huntington Library Quarterly 5 (1942): 235-72
140. Glanvill, Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion (London: J. D. for John Baker and Henry Martlock, 1676), 17. It is crucial to note that the line specifies that "some" rather than all of Adam's descendants are stained by original sin, asserting a spiritual equivalence between the state of nature and the state of grace.
141. Evelyn, Essay on the First Book of P. Lucretius Carus De Rerum Natura. Interpreted and Made English Verse (London: for Gabriel Bedle and Thomas Collins, 1656), 3.
142. So Hooke, observing the "Putrefaction" of his urine, found that its corrosion was caused by the "working of some of the parts of the Urine upon others, and thereby setting others at Liberty" (Posthumous Works, 59).
143. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986), 9.
144. See Fish, "Things and Actions Indifferent."
145. Milton, Paradise Riegained, 4.635.