John Milton's Paradise Lost in the Anti-Trinitarian Crisis 1674-1732: Heresy, Orthodoxy, Poetics

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

My doctoral project will examine the impact of John Milton's Paradise Lost (1674) on later seventeenth and early eighteenth-century advocates and adversaries of the great heresy of the era: Anti-Trinitarianism, the argument that Christ and God were not one and the same. Scholarship on Milton's theology has predominantly focused on the earlier influences upon Milton's heterodox beliefs; scholarship on his poetry's reception has focused upon the debates it provoked among poets or political thinkers. There has been no thorough modern study which evaluates the legacy of the radical theology Milton developed in his poetry. Using archival and literary analysis, my project will take three of Milton's earliest readers as its case studies, demonstrating Paradise Lost's significance for those on both sides of the Anti-Trinitarian controversy. It will show, for the first time, that the theology embodied within Milton's epic poetry was a vital part of the poet's legacy to his first readers.