This volume on John Milton shows how much effect the preaching of his time had on his poetry. The author argues that Milton's poetry and prose cannot be fully understood without the knowledge of 16th and 17th century preaching.

Milton and the Preaching Arts

Literature & Fiction

Lares, Jameela

British & Irish

Ingram Publisher Services

This study truly breaks new ground in Milton scholarship by demonstrating the extent to which Milton's work reflects the dominant discourse of his age - preaching. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the pulpit consistently commanded greater audiences than did the stage, and many of the era's great poets were also preachers. Milton himself argued that poetry can serve "beside the office of a pulpit" and prepared for his life's work at the greatest English center for formal homiletics of its time, Christ's College, Cambridge, but this connection has been virtually ignored by scholars and critics in examining Milton's poetry Lares now challenges the longstanding assumption that Milton the poet paid no attention to the ministerial training of his past, and she demonstrates how Milton appropriated many structures from English preaching in his own work. That preaching was informed by five sermon types - doctrine, reproof, correction, instruction and consolation - first enumerated by the continental reformer Andreas Gerhard Hyperius (1511 - 1564). Milton, we find, favored an odd combination of correction and consolation. Of all the preaching manuals published in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, only one so combines consolation and correction: Methodus concionandi by William Chappell, Milton's first tutor at Christ's College, Cambridge. Milton's use of homiletics, as explained by Lares, may be used in particular to resolve many critical issues related to the last two books of Paradise Lost, which are composed of Adam's dream vision and Michael's narration thereof. These diffuse books, which scholars have been unable to place into any critical paradigm, are actually sermonic in structure and content. And Paradise Regained, in which Milton seems to reject classical rhetoric, actually reflects then-contemporary pulpit concerns over the stylistic inadequacy of the Bible. Moreover, Milton's prose commentaries - often deplored as strident and uncharitable - follow the structure of a sermon of reproof.

Milton and the Preaching Arts (Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies)

Literary

Pennsylvania State Univ Pr

This volume surveys all important and influential line-by-line commentary published between 1667 and 1970 on the impressive conclusion to Paradise Lost in books 11-12. In these last two books, Milton has taken the account of biblical history known to all his contemporaries and rendered it fresh by having the archangel Michael relate it to Adam in ways only partly suggested by the original text. In a series of visions in book 11, Michael shows Adam the results of his disobedience, and by a narration in book 12 the promise and revelation of "the greater Man" promised at the epic's beginning (1.5). Adam and Eve move from repentant sorrow to invigorated hope, with the world before them and guided by Providence.
The biblical influences on these last two books would have been instantly recognizable to Milton's original audience, but the helpful notes in this volume identify biblical references and other theological matters for modern audiences. Similarly, Milton's classical references to Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Seneca, and others are located and explained, along with Milton's use of patristic, medieval, and early modern authors as well as later authors' use of Milton.
This volume will challenge the longstanding idea that the last two books of Paradise Lost are in any way inferior to the rest of the epic or unrelated to it. Besides the helpful introduction that traces the arguments over the value of the last books, the commentary to books 11 and 12 also demonstrates how many important and influential arguments about the epic are tied into these books. Successfully synthesizing a huge mass of Milton scholarship, Lares presents complex ideas clearly and succinctly.
Begun by Columbia University Press in the early 1970s, A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton presented three volumes. Now under the auspices of Duquesne University Press, an award-winning volume was published in 2009 on Samson Agonistes and the first volume on Paradise Lost in 2011. This volume by Jameela Lares represents the continuation of the project, with future volumes planned on the remaining books of Paradise Lost and Milton's English prosody as well.

A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton: Paradise Lost, Books 11-12

Reference

Duquesne Univ Pr

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