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The seventeenth-century French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche thought that philosophy could learn a valuable lesson from prayer, which teaches us how to attend, wait, and be open for what might happen next. Death Be Not Proud explores the precedents of Malebranche’s advice by reading John Donne’s poetic prayers in the context of what the author coins "the art of holy attention.” If, in Malebranche’s view, attention is a hidden bond between religion and philosophy, devotional poetry is the area where this bond becomes visible. The book shows that in works like “Death be not proud,” Donne’s most triumphant poem about the resurrection, the goal is to allow the poem’s speaker to experience a given doctrine as his own thought, as an idea occurring to him. But while the thought must feel like an unexpected event for the speaker, the poem itself is a careful preparation for it. And the key to this preparation is attention, the only state in which the speaker can perceive the doctrine as a cognitive gift. Along the way, the book illuminates why attention is required in Christian devotion in the first place, and uncovers a tradition of battling distraction that spans from ascetic thinkers and Church Fathers to Catholic spiritual exercises and Protestant prayer manuals.

The first sustained study of the poet John Milton’s considerable involvements with and knowledge of law, this book argues that Milton's great epic poem Paradise Lost sits at the apex of the early modern period’s long fascination with law and judicial processes. Readers have overlooked the crucial role that law plays in Milton’s poem because they bring to bear specifically modern, positivist ideas about law as an imposition of the secular state. But seventeenth-century Natural Law adherents, like Milton, regarded law and religion as linked disciplines, and so in different ways, both law and religion should reflect the will of God. This book argues that throughout Paradise Lost, Milton invites his readers to judge actions not only using reason and conscience but also using core principles of jurisprudence drawn from varying early modern jurisdictions such as common law and Romano-canon law. Law thus stands at the center of Milton’s attempt to “justify the ways of God to men.” By using law so pervasively in Paradise Lost, Milton also points readers toward the kinds of legal justice that should prevail on Earth. The Legal Epic adds to the growing interest in the cultural history of law by showing that England’s preeminent epic poem is also a sustained reflection on the role that law plays in human society.

During the seventeenth century, England was beset by three epidemics of the bubonic plague, each outbreak claiming between a quarter and a third of the population of London and other urban centers. Surveying a wide range of responses to these epidemics—sermons, medical tracts, pious exhortations, satirical pamphlets, and political commentary—this book aims to bring to life the many and complex ways Londoners made sense of such unspeakable devastation. The book argues that the plague writing of the period attempted unsuccessfully to rationalize the catastrophic, and that its failure to account for the plague as an instrument of divine justice fundamentally threatened the core of Christian belief. It also trains a critical eye on the works of Jonson, Donne, Pepys, and Defoe, which, it posits, can be more fully understood when put into the context of this century-long project to “write out” the plague.