Milton's Loves: From Amity to Caritas in the Paradise Epics

by Rosamund Paice

Overview

This book is about the multiple loves of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained: sanctioned loves and outlawed loves, sincere loves and false loves, Christian loves, classical loves, humanist loves, and love as emotion. In showing how these loves motivate the most significant actions of the Paradise epics, it reveals Milton to have made creative use of the tensions between philosophical ideals, social conventions, and the rather messier ways in which love emerges in practice. Love, so central to Milton’s view of Edenic joy and obedience to God, unsettles earthly and heavenly communities and is the origin of Miltonic transgression. Milton’s Loves sheds new light on some of the most prominent concerns of Milton scholarship, including why Milton’s God is so difficult for readers to connect to, Satan’s apparent heroism, Milton’s radical theology, and the nature of Milton’s muse. It is a book that will appeal to students and scholars of Milton and early modern studies more broadly and is structured in a way that will aid easy reference.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032390215
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	04/25/2023
Series:	Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Rosamund Paice is Associate Lecturer in English Literature at Newcastle University and Northumbria University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Critical Loves

2 The Loves of an Educated Man

3 Love and Emotion

4 Love and Conflict

5 An Unlikely Couple

6 ‘Milton’s Bogey’

7 Milton’s Epic Loves

1 Lessons in Love: Raphael and Adam

1.1 Virtuous and Obedient Love

1.2 Loving Things

1.3 Ascending and Descending Ladders

1.4 ‘The Affable Arch-Angel’

2 Falling in Love: Adam and Eve

2.1 The Terms of Marriage

2.2 Separation

2.3 The Theory and Practice of Love

3 Strange Love: God the Father

3.1 Fatherly Distance

3.2 Princely Companionship

3.3 Creating an Equal

3.4 ‘All in All’

4 The Anti-Friend: Satan

4.1 False Friendship

4.2 Companions of Woe

4.3 The Temptation of Friendship

4.4 Satan’s Solitude

5 Suspended in Love: The Son

5.1 Between God and Humans

5.2 The Missing Body

5.3 ‘The Glorious Eremite’

6 In the Name of Love: The Narrator and Muse

6.1 One or Two Voices

6.2 Visitations

6.3 Urania

6.4 Being Led

Conclusion

Index