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A collection examining representations of the embodied self in the writings of Milton and his contemporaries.
List of contents
Part I. 1. The enfolded sublime of incarnate immortality Gardner Campbell; 2. Milton's 'Lycidas', or Edward King's two bodies James Nohrnberg; Part II. 3. Narcissus in the boudoir: Aretino's Petrarchan postures Gordon Braden; 4. Carnality into creativity: sublimation in John Bunyan's 'Apology' to The Pilgrim's Progress Vera Camden; 5. Milton's beautiful body Gregory Chaplin; 6. The fortunate, unfortunate fall and two varieties of immortality in Paradise Lost Stephen M. Fallon; Part III. 7. The miracle in Francis Bacon's natural philosophy Gregory Foran; 8. Flesh made word: pneumatology and Miltonic textuality John Rumrich; 9. Milton beyond iconoclasm David A. Harper; Part IV. 10. Hester Pulter's brave new worlds Louisa Hall; 11. Death-weddings or living books: Cavendish rewriting Donne Dustin Stewart; 12. Paradise Lost and the creation of Mormon theology John Rogers.
About the author
John Rumrich is A. J. and W. D. Thaman Professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin. He has written monographs on John Milton, Matter of Glory: A New Preface to 'Paradise Lost' (1987) and Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation (Cambridge, 1996), and he has co-edited several editions of Milton's works for Modern Library (with Stephen M. Fallon and William Kerrigan) as well as the Norton Critical Edition: Seventeenth-Century British Poetry, 1603–1660 (2005, with Gregory Chaplin). In 2013 he was named an Honored Scholar of the Milton Society.Stephen M. Fallon is John J. Cavanaugh Professor of the Humanities at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (1991) and Milton's Peculiar Grace: Self-Representation and Authority (2000), and has co-edited Modern Library's Milton editions (with William Kerrigan and John Rumrich). In 2011 he was named an Honored Scholar of the Milton Society and subsequently served as the Society's president.
Summary
The seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution unsettled traditional conceptions in theology and psychology. Perhaps the soul was neither immaterial nor immortal. Milton and certain of his contemporaries explored new ways of thinking about the soul and its relation to body, and imagined transcendence as including the body.
