Author: Sharon Achinstein
File Type: pdf
Locating John Miltons works in national and international contexts, and applying a variety of approaches from literary to historical, philosophical, and postcolonial, Milton and Toleration offers a wide-ranging exploration of how Miltons visions of tolerance reveal deeper movements in the history of the imagination. Milton is often enlisted in stories about the rise of toleration his advocacy of open debate in defending press freedoms, his condemnation of persecution, and his criticism of ecclesiastical and political hierarchies have long been read as milestones on the road to toleration. However, there is also an intolerant Milton, whose defence of religious liberty reached only as far as Protestants. This book of sixteen essays by leading scholars analyses tolerance in Miltons poetry and prose, examining the literary means by which tolerance was questioned, observed, and became an object of meditation. Organized in three parts, Revising Whig Accounts, Philosophical Engagements, Poetry and Rhetoric, the contributors, including leading Milton scholars from the USA, Canada, and the UK, address central toleration issues including heresy, violence, imperialism, republicanism, Catholicism, Islam, church community, liberalism, libertinism, natural law, legal theory, and equity. A pan-European perspective is presented through analysis of Miltons engagement with key figures and radical groups. All of Miltons major works are given an airing, including prose and poetry, and the book suggests that Miltons writings are a significant medium through which to explore the making of modern ideas of tolerance.ReviewEditors Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer have drawn together a timely, important, and remarkably coherent collection of essays.... All in all, this volume offers a trove of meticulous historical research and exemplary literary criticism.--Thomas Fulton, Renaissance QuarterlyEditors Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer have drawn together a timely, important, and remarkably coherent collection of essays.... All in all, this volume offers a trove of meticulous historical research and exemplary literary criticism.--Thomas Fulton, Renaissance QuarterlyA powerful, scholarly account of Miltons writings about toleration and persecution on religious and other grounds from the antiprelatical tracts to the final great poems.-Milton QuarterlyAbout the AuthorSharon Achinstein is Reader in Renaissance Literature at Oxford University, and author of Literature and Dissent in Miltons England(2003). Her Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (1994) won the Milton Society of Americas James Holly Hanford Prize, and she has edited a special issue of Womens Studies on Literature and Gender in the English Revolution (1994), and published numerous essays on Milton, Dryden, womens writing, and culture and politics in the seventeenth century. She is a consulting editor for the forthcoming Milton Encyclopedia (Yale University Press) and is an editor for Volume VI of The Complete Works of John Milton (under preparation for Oxford University Press).Elizabeth Sauer is Professor of English at Brock University, Canada where she was also awarded a Chancellors Chair for Research Excellence. She has published on early modern English literature and history, Milton, print culture, womens literary history, and the history of imperialism. Her books include Paper-contestations and Textual Communities in England 1640-1675 (2005), Barbarous Dissonance and Images of Voice in Miltons Epics (1996) and 8 editionsco-editions, including Reading Early Modern Women (2004), winner of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women Best Collaborative Work and Milton and the Imperial Vision (1999), winner of the Milton Society of America Irene Samuel Memorial Award.