Download or read book Torah and Law in Paradise Lost written by Jason P. Rosenblatt and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has been the fate of Milton, the most Hebraic of the great English poets, to have been interpreted in this century largely by those inhospitable to his Hebraism. To remedy this lack of balance, Jason Rosenblatt reveals Milton's epic representations of paradise and the fallen world to be the supreme coordinates of an interpretive struggle, in which Jewish beliefs that the Hebrew Bible was eternally authoritative Torah were set against the Christian view that it was a temporary law superseded by the New Testament. Arguing that the Milton of the 1643-1645 prose tracts saw the Hebrew Bible from the Jewish perspective, Rosenblatt shows that these tracts are the principal doctrinal matrix of the middle books of Paradise Lost, which present the Hebrew Bible and Adam and Eve as self-sufficient entities. Rosenblatt acknowledges that later in Paradise Lost, after the fall, a Pauline hermeneutic reduces the Hebrew Bible to a captive text and Adam and Eve to shadowy types. But Milton's shift to a radically Pauline ethos at that point does not annul the Hebraism of the earlier part of the work. If Milton resembles Paul, it is not least because his thought could attain harmonies only through dialectic. Milton's poetry derives much of its power from deep internal struggles over the value and meaning of law, grace, charity, Christian liberty, and the relationships among natural law, the Mosaic law, and the gospel.

Download or read book Torah and Law in Paradise Lost written by Jason Philip Rosenblatt and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has been the fate of Milton, the most Hebraic of the great English poets, to have been interpreted in this century largely by those inhospitable to his Hebraism. To remedy this lack of balance, Jason Rosenblatt reveals Milton's epic representations of paradise and the fallen world to be the supreme coordinates of an interpretive struggle, in which Jewish beliefs that the Hebrew Bible was eternally authoritative Torah were set against the Christian view that it was a temporary law superseded by the New Testament. Arguing that the Milton of the 1643-1645 prose tracts saw the Hebrew Bible from the Jewish perspective, Rosenblatt shows that these tracts are the principal doctrinal matrix of the middle books of "Paradise Lost," which present the Hebrew Bible and Adam and Eve as self-sufficient entities. Rosenblatt acknowledges that later in "Paradise Lost," after the fall, a Pauline hermeneutic reduces the Hebrew Bible to a captive text and Adam and Eve to shadowy types. But Milton's shift to a radically Pauline ethos at that point does not annul the Hebraism of the earlier part of the work. If Milton resembles Paul, it is not least because his thought could attain harmonies only through dialectic. Milton's poetry derives much of its power from deep internal struggles over the value and meaning of law, grace, charity, Christian liberty, and the relationships among natural law, the Mosaic law, and the gospel.

Download or read book Illuminating Moses written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-11-21 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Illuminating Moses: A History of Reception, readers discover the roles of Moses from the Exodus to the Renaissance--law-giver, prophet, writer--and their impact on Jewish and Christian cultures as seen in the Hebrew Bible, Patristic writings, Catholic liturgy, Jewish philosophy and midrashim, Anglo-Saxon literature, Scholastics and Thomas Aquinas, Middle English literature, and the Renaissance. Contributors are Jane Beal, Robert D. Miller II, Tawny Holm, Christopher A. Hall, Luciana Cuppo-Csaki, Haim Kreisel, Rachel S. Mikva, Devorah Schoenfeld, Gernot Wieland, Deborah Goodwin, Franklin T. Harkins, Gail Ivy Berlin, and Brett Foster.

Download or read book Dominion Undeserved written by Eric B. Song and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-15 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: That the writings of John Milton continue to provoke study and analysis centuries after his lifetime speaks no doubt to his literary greatness but also to the many ways in which his art both engaged and transcended the political and theological tensions of his age. In Dominion Undeserved, Eric B. Song offers a brilliant reading of Milton’s major writings, finding in them a fundamental impasse that explains their creative power. According to Song, a divided view of creation governs Milton’s related systems of cosmology, theology, art, and history. For Milton, any coherent entity—a nation, a poem, or even the new world—must be carved out of and guarded against an original unruliness. Despite being sanctioned by God, however, this agonistic mode of creation proves ineffective because it continues to manifest internal rifts that it can never fully overcome. This dilemma is especially pronounced in Milton’s later writings, including Paradise Lost, where all forms of creativity must strive against the fact that chaos precedes order and that disruptive forces will continue to reemerge, seemingly without end. Song explores the many ways in which Milton transforms an intractable problem into the grounds for incisive commentary and politically charged artistry. This argument brings into focus topics ranging from Milton’s recurring allusions to the Eastern Tartars, the way Milton engages with country house poetry and colonialist discourses in Paradise Lost, and the lasting relevance of Anglo-Irish affairs for his late writings. Song concludes with a new reading of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in which he shows how Milton’s integration of conflicting elements forms the heart of his literary archive and confers urgency upon his message even as it reaches its future readers.

Download or read book Lines of Equity written by Elliott Visconsi and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In England, the late seventeenth century was a period of major crises in science, politics, and economics. Confronted by a public that seemed to be sunk in barbarism and violence, English writers including John Milton, John Dryden, and Aphra Behn imagined serious literature as an instrument for change. In Lines of Equity, Elliott Visconsi reveals how these writers fictionalized the original utterance of laws, the foundation of states, and the many vivid contemporary transitions from archaic savagery to civil modernity. In doing so, they considered the nature of government, the extent of the rule of law, and the duties of sovereign and subject. They asked their audience to think like kings and judges: through the literary education of the individual conscience, the barbarous tendencies of the English people might be effectively banished. Visconsi calls this fictionalizing program "imaginative originalism," and demonstrates the often unintended consequences of this literary enterprise. By inviting the English people to practice equity as a habit of thought, a work such as Milton's Paradise Lost helped bring into being a mode of individual conduct—the rights-bearing deliberative subject—at the heart of political liberalism. Visconsi offers an original view of this transitional moment that will appeal to anyone interested in the cultural history of law and citizenship, the idea of legal origins in the early modern period, and the literary history of later Stuart England.

Download or read book Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth Century English Literature written by Rachel Trubowitz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-31 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rachel Trubowitz connects changing 17th century English views of maternal nurture to the rise of the modern nation, especially between 1603 and 1675.

Download or read book The Life of John Milton written by Barbara K. Lewalski and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 816 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing a close examination of Milton's wide-ranging prose and poetry at each stage of his life, Barbara Lewalski reveals a rather different Milton from that in earlier accounts. Provides a close analysis of each of Milton's prose and poetry works. Reveals how Milton was the first writer to self consciously construct himself as an 'author'. Focuses on the development of Milton's ideas and his art.

Download or read book Courts Jurisdictions and Law in John Milton and His Contemporaries written by Alison A. Chapman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-10-10 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Milton is widely known as the poet of liberty and freedom. But his commitment to justice has been often overlooked. As Alison A. Chapman shows, Milton’s many prose works are saturated in legal ways of thinking, and he also actively shifts between citing Roman, common, and ecclesiastical 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 Donne, Ben Jonson, and John Bunyan—Chapman reveals the variety and nuance in Milton’s juridical toolkit and his subtle use of competing legal traditions in pursuit of justice.

Download or read book Philosemitism in History written by Jonathan Karp and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-28 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A broad and ambitious overview of the significance of philosemitism in European and world history, from antiquity to the present.

Download or read book Literature and the Law of Nations 1580 1680 written by Christopher N. Warren and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-05-28 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature and the Law of Nations, 1580-1680 is a literary history of international law in the age of Shakespeare, Milton, Grotius, and Hobbes. Seeking to revise the ways scholars understand early modern English literature in relation to the history of international law, it argues that scholars of law and literature have tacitly accepted specious but politically consequential assumptions about whether international law is "real" law. Literature and the Law of Nations shows how major writers of the English Renaissance deployed genres like epic, tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, and history to solidify the canonical subjects and objects of modern international law. By demonstrating how Renaissance literary genres informed modern categories like public international law, private international law, international legal personality, and human rights, the book over its seven chapters and conclusion helps early modern literary scholars think anew about the legal entailments of genre and scholars in law and literature long accustomed to treating all law with a single broad brush better confront the distinct complexities, fault lines, and variegated histories at the heart of international law.

Download or read book Living Texts written by Kristin A. Pruitt and published by Susquehanna University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this collection are a testimony to Milton's claim that books doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are. They are proof that Milton's progeny, whether poetry or prose, continue to inspire readers to investigate and interpret, and that even the poet himself is at times the subject of scrutiny. Although these essays examine issues as widely diverse as the reliability of Adam's narration to Raphael and the portrayal of chaos in Paradise Lost to the poet's role as an object of erotic attention in the nineteenth century, all suggest that Milton's are still living texts.

Download or read book Returning to John Donne written by Achsah Guibbory and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected in this volume are Achsah Guibbory’s most important and frequently cited essays on Donne, which, taken together, present her distinctive and evolving vision of the poet. The book includes an original, substantive introduction as well as new essays on the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, the Songs and Sonnets, and the subject of Donne and toleration. Over the course of her career, Guibbory has asked different questions about Donne but has always been concerned with recovering multiple historical and cultural contexts and locating Donne’s writing in relation to them. In the essays here, she reads Donne within various contexts: the early modern thinking about time and history; religious attitudes towards sexuality; the politics of early modern England; religious conflicts within the church. While her approach has always been historicist, she has also foregrounded Donne’s distinctiveness, showing how (and why) he continues to speak powerfully to us now. Presented together here, with reflections on the trajectory of her engagement with Donne, Achsah Guibbory illuminates Donne’s understanding that erotic, spiritual, and political issues are often intertwined, and reveals how this understanding resonates in our own times.

Download or read book Secular Chains written by Philip Connell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secular Chains offers an original and richly contextualized account of the relationship between poetry and religious controversy between 1649 and 1745. This was a period of political conflict and intellectual upheaval, in which traditional sources of spiritual authority were variously challenged and transformed. This study reveals the importance of English literary culture for our understanding of this process and sheds new light on the dynamics of change and continuity between the puritan revolution and the early Enlightenment. Based on extensive research in both printed and manuscript sources, the book combines detailed case studies of major literary figures with a sustained historical narrative linking the republican moment of the 1650s, the conflicts and crises of the Restoration, and the ecclesiastical politics of the early eighteenth century. Milton and Dryden provide the principal focus of the first three chapters, which explore the divisive issue of church settlement in the work of both writers, together with the increasingly prominent rhetoric of anti-clericalism and irreligion in the poetry and polemics of the later seventeenth century. Subsequent chapters extend the book's argument to the embattled condition of the Church of England in the decades after 1688 and the significant contribution of contemporary literary culture to a range of religious and philosophical argument, from heterodox free-thinking to Newtonian natural theology. Secular Chains demonstrates the close and continued relationship between poetry and religious politics in the age of Milton and Pope and provides a new framework for understanding this complex and turbulent period in English literary history.

Download or read book Milton and Midrash written by Golda Werman and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ""This is a book not only for Milton scholars but for academics writing in the recently active field of literature and Midrash (and literature and the Bible). There are deep reserves of learning behind it; unlike Saurat, Fletcher, and Baldwin, Dr. Werman reads the Hebrew and Aramaic sources expertly. She provides a wealth of new information which less scholarly academics will probably exploit.""--Jason P. Rosenblatt, Professor of English, Georgetown University ""Werman's study corrects much that has been written about Milton's Hebraism and adds significant new information. The appendix is enormously valuable and will assist future scholars in pursuing more specifically detailed study of Milton's use of midrash.""--James H. Sims, Distinguished Professor of English, The University of Southern Mississippi The use of Jewish nonbiblical sources (Midrash) in Paradise Lost has never been so thoroughly examined as in this volume, in which Golda S. Werman combines esoteric scholarship with interesting facts and insightful commentary to answer questions that have perplexed literary scholars for decades. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when literary scholars first discovered the midrashic elements in Paradise Lost, one school of critics responded with skepticism and disbelief--why, they asked, would a Puritan poet dig through ancient Hebrew and Aramaic texts for material to be used in a Christian epic on the fall of man? They insisted that Milton could not read difficult midrashic texts and that everything not taken from Christian or classical sources is a product of the poet's own rich imagination. Another school regarded Milton's use of Midrash as proof of his profound knowledge of Talmud, Midrash, the Zohar, and other Hebrew/Aramaic texts. In Milton and Midrash, Werman effectively demonstrates that both camps err: Milton did indeed use midrashic sources, but he did not read the difficult midrashic texts in the original languages. She shows, in a detailed analysis of the nonbiblical Judaic materials included in the prose works, that Milton's limited understanding of Midrash rules out any possibility of his having read the sources in the original. Yet her investigation revealed that Milton uses midrashim on almost every page of the epic, and that many of these midrashim come from the eighth-century Midrash Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer. Further research showed that this Midrash had been translated into Latin in 1644, just before Milton began Paradise Lost. At last the puzzle was solved--Milton's midrashic materials were taken from translations made by Christian Hebraists. Indeed, Milton had many Latin translations by Christian Hebraists of midrashic works available to him, and here Werman surveys the contemporary intellectual climate in which these translations flourished. These findings have revolutionized Milton scholarship, correcting much that has been written about the poet's Hebraism. All future source studies of the poem will make use of the book's appendix, which provides an invaluable line-by-line gloss of Paradise Lost that matches passages from the epic with their analogues in the midrashic literature. Golda S. Werman was educated in the United States and now lives in Jerusalem, Israel. Her other field of interest is Yiddish, and she has published several important English translations of Yiddish literature, including most recently S. Ansky's The Dybbuk and Other Writings.

Download or read book John Selden written by Jason P. Rosenblatt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The life of John Selden (1584-1654) was both contemplative and active. Seventeenth-century England's most learned person, he was also one of the few survivors who continued in the Long Parliament of the 1640s his vigorous opposition, begun in the 1620s, to abuses of power, whether by Charles I or, later, by the Presbyterian-controlled Westminster Assembly. His gift for finding analogies among different cultures--Greco-Roman, Christian, Jewish, and Islamic--helped to transform both the poetry and prose of the century's greatest poet, John Milton. Regarding family law, the two might have influenced one another. Milton cites Selden, and Selden owned two of Milton's treatises on divorce, published in 1645, both of them presumably acquired while he was writing Uxor Ebraica (1646). Selden accepted the non-biblically rabbinic, externally imposed, coercive Adamic/Noachide precepts as universal laws of perpetual obligation, rejecting his predecessor Hugo Grotius' view of natural law as the innate result of right reason. He employed rhetorical strategies in De Jure Naturali et Gentium (The Law of Nature and of Nations) to prepare his readers for what might otherwise have shocked them. Although Selden was very active in the Long Parliament, his only surviving debates from that decade were as a lay member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. The Assembly's scribe left so many gaps that the transcript is sometimes indecipherable. This book fills in the gaps and makes the speeches coherent by finding their contexts in Selden's printed works, both the scholarly, as in the massive De Synedriis, but also in the witty and informal Table Talk.

Download or read book Milton Toleration and Nationhood written by Elizabeth Sauer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines how Milton's polemical and imaginative literature intersects with representations of English Protestant nationhood. Through detailed case studies of Milton's works, Elizabeth Sauer shows the extent to which seventeenth-century English notions of nationhood and toleration can be subjected to literary and historicist inquiry.

Download or read book Renaissance England s Chief Rabbi John Selden written by Jason P. Rosenblatt and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2006-01-19 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Renaissance England's Chief Rabbi' examines John Selden and his rabbinic and especially talmudic publications, which take up most of the six folio volumes of his complete works and constitute his most mature scholarship. It traces the cultural influence of these works on some early modern British poets