Spring 2024: Milton and Revolution

This semester’s class will take up the question of revolution. Milton himself wrote in support of the Parliamentary forces over the supporters of Charles I before and during the English Civil War, and he wrote multiple defenses of the overthrow of the monarch and his subsequent trial and execution. Underpinning this political writing are a series of claims about the consent of the governed which resonate through Milton’s other works, especially his late, great poems.

 How does Milton’s revolutionary zeal relate to his theology? If Paradise Lost argues against Satan’s attempts to overthrow God, does the poem represent a change in Milton’s earlier political thinking (as some of his political opponents believed), or does it reinforce that thinking?