Serpentine Eve: Milton and the Seventeenth‐Century Debate Over Women

While debates about Milton’s representation of women have assumed a significant place within Milton criticism in the last two decades, it is remarkable that there has been such slight attention to the influence of the“anti-feminist”pamphlet debate on Milton’s representation of Eve, the Fall, and his ideas about gendered culpability in Paradise Lost. Mary Nyquist has suggested that “Milton could not but have known that questions of priority figure prominently in the Renaissance debate over ‘woman’” (107), while Kari McBride and John Ulreich suggest that Milton be read “in the light of early modern treatises on the nature of women and the entire history of the querelle des femmes” (109 ).Yet little critical consensus exists on Milton’s likely or probable exposure to the texts within this tradition, a debate very active in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries if less popular by the time Paradise Lost is published. Nor have either Nyquist or McBride and Ulreich suggested that Milton was an active interlocutor of this tradition. And yet, Milton’s poem appears deeply steeped in the terms of this debate, especially questions of women’s secondariness, Eve’s motivations for the Fall, and of course the character of women. Given the critical caution about whether this body of texts was drawn into a conversation with Paradise Lost, this essay’s central claim may appear bold: the seventeenth-century “anti-feminist” debates, particularly the exchange between Joseph Swetnam and three women pamphleteers who respond (Rachel Speght, Ester Sowernam, and Constantia Munda) produce arguments for and against the culpability of women that Milton dramatizes within Paradise Lost. Such an assertion lacks the smoking gun that would clinch such a claim: a copy of Rachel Speght’s Mouzell for Melastomus in Milton’s library, for example.Yet we have every reason to conclude that Milton would have been among a community of readers of these or similar tracts: himself an author engaged in the Smectymnuus debate in the early 1640s, Milton was an avid reader of a huge range of texts, as well as a participant within print-mediated debates of the period. Milton also was fully located within what Robert Darnton has called the communication circuit of the “anti-feminist” tracts. Marching about amid the booksellers’s stalls in the 1630s, Milton details in a letter to Alexander Gill, Jr., that Gill is to “look for me (God willing) in London on Monday, among the booksellers” (Milton, Familiar 12-13).The shop owned by Matthew Simmons, which Sabrina Baron claims Milton would have known well, was located in Aldersgate; it was on the other side of Christ’s Church from the very “Saracen’s Head” where copies of Joseph Swetnam’s “Arraignment” were reprinted in both 1634 and 1637. A revolution of printing and of reprinting framed Milton’s world, and Milton was fully a member of this world, both as a reader and as a participant. Milton Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 1, 2008