Browse

Coming To argues that poetry played a central but forgotten role in the seventeenth-century invention of the concept of consciousness. The story of consciousness’s emergence is usually told in a purely philosophical register: sometime between René Descartes’s Meditationes (1641) and the second edition of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1694), philosophers developed the concept of consciousness to advance epistemological theories about the role of the subjective observer in the scene of knowledge production. Coming To revises this narrative by arguing that poetry—sensuous mimetic fiction enhanced by verse—played a major, even necessary role in the emergence of consciousness as a concept. The poetry of John Milton and Thomas Traherne illuminated and even contributed to early modern understandings of consciousness by clarifying the extent to which the concept was entangled with new understandings of human natality, the condition of life as it begins—either at the moment of creation in Paradise or at the moment when embryonic sensation begins in the womb. By situating Milton and Traherne within an intellectual milieu that includes embryology, metaphysics, theology, law, and political theory, among other discourses, this book argues that when Locke and his followers drew out the implications of consciousness as a concept, they smuggled poetry into the heart of modern epistemology. They deployed an idea hatched in the poetic imagination: to understand mindedness one must examine the birth of consciousness insofar as it intersects with the consciousness of birth.

John Milton is widely known as the poet of liberty and freedom. But his commitment to justice, which runs throughout his prose works, is often missed when viewed at the distance of the twenty-first century. This book shows that Milton’s work is not only saturated in legal arguments of his day, but that he also actively shifts between citing Roman, common, and canon law to best suit his purpose in any given text. This book provides literary scholars with a working knowledge of the multiple, jostling, real-world legal systems in conflict in seventeenth-century England and brings to light Milton’s use of the various legal systems and vocabularies of the time—natural versus positive law, for example—and the differences between them. Surveying Milton’s early pamphlets, divorce tracts, late political tracts, and major prose works in comparison with the writings and cases of some of Milton’s contemporaries—including George Herbert, John March, Ben Jonson, and John Bunyan—this book shows the variety and nuance in Milton’s juridical tool-kit and his subtle use of competing jurisdictions in pursuit of justice.

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.