Milton's parable of misreading: Navigating the contextual waters of the "night-founder'd skiff" in paradise lost, 1.192-209

Milton Studies

Volumn , Issue 43, 2004, Pages 86-110

  Hampton, Bryan Adams ^a  

^a NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 70449858844     PISSN: 00768820     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book Series    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (49)

1. Paradise Regained 3.209-10
2. Of Reformation, YP 1:596
3. Reason of Church Government, YP 1:753, 821
4. Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, YP 2:254
5. Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, YP 3:257
6. Eikonoklastes, YP 3:416, 501
7. For alternate readings of this epic simile, see Richard J. DuRocher, Milton and Ovid (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), 134-35
8. Christopher Grose, Milton's Epic Process (New Haven, Conn., 1973). 150-52
9. See Jackson Campbell Boswell, Milton's Library (New York, 1975)
10. For a study of Milton and Origen, see Harry F. Robins, "If This Be Heresy": A Study of Milton and Origen (Urbana, 1963)
11. Areopagitica (YP 2:510)
12. Eikonoklastes (YP 3:518)
13. See Madelein Boucher, The Mysterious Parable (Washington, D.C., 1977)
14. For key contemporary scholarship on the parable, see Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy (Cambridge, Mass., 1979)
15. For studies of the parable and postmodern theory, see especially the works of John Dominic Crossan: In Parables: The Challenge of the Historical Jesus (New York, 1973)
16. The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story (Niles, Ill., 1975)
17. Cliffs of Fall: Paradox and Polyvalence in the Parables of Jesus (New York, 1980)
18. For a critique of Crossan, see Lynn Poland, Literary Criticism and Biblical Hermeneutics: A Critique of Formalist Approaches (Chicago, 1985)
19. Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy, 3
20. Boucher, The Mysterious Parable, 25
21. C. H. Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom (New York, 1935), 23
22. For more on how Milton and other revolutionary writers construct a "fit" audience, see Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, N.J., 1994)
23. See also David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge, 2001), chap. 7
24. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, N.J., 1979), 86
25. Christopher Love, The naturall Man's Case stated; or, An Exact Map of the little world man . . . in XVII Sermons, sermon 12 (London, 1652)
26. William Johnson, A Sermon Preached upon a Great Deliverance at Sea (London, 1672)
27. Basil, Address to Young Men, 387-89
28. Basil, Address to Young Men, 389, 381; emphasis added
29. See Camille Bennett, "The Conversion of Vergil: The Aeneid in Augustine's Confessions," Revue des Études Augustiniennes 34 (1988): 47-69
30. For more on the spiritual aspects of reading, see Scott G. Huelin, "Spiritual Reading: Tropology, Discernment and Early Modern European Literature" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2002), chap. 1
31. See Hughes, Complete Poems and Major Prose, 1022-23
32. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 112 n. 38
33. See Bernard Capp, "The Political Dimension of Apocalyptic Thought," in The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns, Antecedents and Repercussions, ed. C. A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984): 93-124
34. Augustine, Confessions, 1.1
35. Fiore, Milton and Augustine, 16
36. See Regina Schwartz, "Real Hunger: Milton's Version of the Eucharist," in Religion and Literature 31 (autumn 1999): 1-18
37. See Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 200-201
38. Regina Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating: On Milton's Theology and Poetics (Chicago, 1993), 68
39. See, for example, William Kerrigan, The Prophetic Milton (Charlottesville, Va., 1974)
40. Mindele Ann Treip, Allegorical Poetics and the Epic (Lexington, Ky., 1994), 222
41. John Preston, The Breastplate of Faith and Love (London, 1634), 2.224-26
42. and Peter McCuUough, Sermons at Court: Religion and Politics in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge, 1998)
43. Jameela Lares, Milton and the Preaching Arts (Pittsburgh, 2001), 28
44. G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1933), 203
45. Scanlon, Narrative, Authority and Power, 81
46. Compare "On Regeneration" in The Christian Doctrine (YP 6:461): "This is how supernatural renovation works. It restores man's natural faculties of faultless understanding and of free will more completely than before." The proper "government" of oneself, it seems, hinges on conversion
47. Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, 8
48. See Plato, Protagoras, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, N.J., 1961), 324d-25b. Milton shares Plato's assumption, made throughout the Socratic dialogues, that the state is only as just as its citizens
49. Plato, The Republic, 488d-89