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Humanism and Heresy in Milton's England
Author(s) -
McDowell Nicholas
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2004.00099.x
Subject(s) - heresy , political radicalism , humanism , context (archaeology) , literature , psychology , english revolution , aesthetics , sociology , psychoanalysis , history , philosophy , theology , art , law , political science , politics , archaeology
Over the last twenty years radical writing during the English Revolution has become established as a legitimate category of early modern literary achievement. However, radicalism and its literature has almost exclusively been associated with the experience of the culturally, as well as politically and socially, disenfranchised. In Milton and the English Revolution (1977) Christopher Hill offered this ‘popular heretical culture’ as a new context for the evolution of Milton's own heresies but concluded that Milton could not wholly accept these ideas because of his ‘middle‐class and academic upbringing and outlook’. Yet to understand more fully the culture of radicalism, and Milton's relation to that culture, we need to develop a greater understanding of how it was shaped not simply by conflict between the cultural worlds of the high and the low, of the learned and the unlearned, but by their interaction.