humanism and heresy in milton's england

© Blackwell Publishing 2004

Literature Compass 1 (2004) 17C 099, 1–12

Humanism and Heresy in Milton’s England

Nicholas

McDowell

University of Exeter

Abstract

Over the last twenty years radical writing during the English Revolution hasbecome established as a legitimate category of early modern literary achievement.However, radicalism and its literature has almost exclusively been associated withthe experience of the culturally, as well as politically and socially, disenfranchised.In

Milton and the English Revolution

(1977) Christopher Hill offered this ‘popularheretical culture’ as a new context for the evolution of Milton’s own heresies butconcluded that Milton could not wholly accept these ideas because of his ‘middle-class and academic upbringing and outlook’. Yet to understand more fully theculture of radicalism, and Milton’s relation to that culture, we need to develop agreater understanding of how it was shaped not simply by conflict between thecultural worlds of the high and the low, of the learned and the unlearned, but

by their interaction.

One of the most famous passages in

Areopagitica

(1644), Milton’s greatprotest against pre-publication censorship, is the eulogy of Civil War Londonas ‘the mansion house of liberty’. In the midst of his defence of ‘the mencry’d out against for schismaticks and sectaries’, Milton imagines Londoners‘sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notionsand ideas . . . fast reading, trying all things’. He emphasizes that these citizen-scholars are working people by using metaphors of artisanal and rurallabour to describe their ‘pursuance of truth and freedom’: they are ‘wiseand faithful labourers’ tilling ‘a towardly and pregnant soile’, ‘fashion[ing]the plates and instruments of arm’d Justice’, ‘squaring the marble’ and‘hewing the cedars’ to construct the Temple of the Lord.

1

London is at oncea Hebraic ‘City of Refuge’, the spiritual centre of a ‘Nation of Prophets’,and a second Athens, where artisans who may lack a humanist educationnonetheless act as both editor and exegete in the spirit of the classicalhumanist tradition. It is an exhilarating celebration of popular literacy asthe apocalyptic instrument of Reformation.

Less famous is Milton’s assertion earlier in

Areopagitica

that ‘books ofcontrovesie in Religion’ are the most dangerous because they spread an‘infection’ that is ‘most and soonest catching to the learned, from whomto the common people what ever is hereticall or dissolute may quickly be

2 Humanism and Heresy in Milton’s England

© Blackwell Publishing 2004 Literature Compass 1 (2004) 17C 099, 1–12

convey’d’. Milton’s immediate polemical point is that pre-publicationlicensing is no protection against such infectious books because the hand-picked licensers are themselves more susceptible to heretical ideas than the‘ignorant’: ‘learned men be the first receivers out of books and dispreadersboth of vice and error’.

2

Yet the assertion that it is the ‘learned’ whointerpret and convey the matter of heretical books to the ‘common people’would seem to negate the radical energies of popular literacy in favour ofa top-down model of heresy. Here it is the learned who come into directcontact with heresy by virtue of their literacy: the ‘common people’ cometo heterodox ideas second-hand. (Moreover, they only get exposed to –or are perhaps only attracted to – the ‘dissolute’ aspects of these ideas.)

Milton’s notion of heresy as transmitted from high to low, from theeducated elite to the common people, challenges familiar historiographicaland critical accounts of the emergence of radical religious ideas in theseventeenth century. These accounts have been inspired rather by the morememorable (and more positive) association later in

Areopagitica

of heresywith popular literacy. In

The World Turned Upside Down

(1972) and a seriesof eloquent, exciting and hugely influential books and articles over thelatter half of the twentieth century, Christopher Hill represented religiousradicalism during the English Revolution as a popular culture that evolvedoutside institutional educational and cultural structures. In the absenceof effective state and ecclesiastical censorship in the 1640s, Hill argued,‘unorthodox men and women of the lower classes’ were free to print, forthe first time, views that had previously circulated orally in the radicalunderground. Although this was a period of ‘glorious flux and intellectualexcitement’, the radical ideas surveyed by Hill were articulated by peoplewho had little experience of or contact with early modern intellectualculture. Indeed by emphasizing ‘reliance on the holy spirit within one, onone’s own experienced truth as against traditional truths handed downby others’, the radicals violently rejected the notion that a humanist educationand a facility in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, conferred superior spiritualknowledge.

3

In

Milton and the English Revolution

(1977) Hill offered this ‘popularheretical culture’ as a new context for the evolution of Milton’s ownheretical ideas about free will, monism, materialism and anti-trinitarianism.Nevertheless Hill concluded that Milton lived ‘in a state of permanentdialogue with radical ideas which he could not wholly accept’ because ofhis ‘middle-class and academic upbringing and outlook’. As a ‘leisure-classintellectual’, Milton combined ‘radical intellectual convictions with patr-ician social prejudices’. Yet, we have seen that at one point at least Miltonassociated the diffusion of heresy not with plebeian culture but with thereading of the ‘learned’. In arguing for the greater susceptibility of thelearned to heresy in

Areopagitica

, he cites the example of the Dutch theologianArminius, who, though ‘acute and distinct’, had been ‘perverted’ afterhaving been asked to refute a heretical book – something of an irony given


Humanism and Heresy in Milton’s England 3

that in

Areopagitica

Milton voices for the first time a belief in the role of freewill in salvation that was associated by Calvinists with ‘Arminian’ heresy.

4

Over the last twenty years radical writing during the English Revolutionhas become established as a legitimate category of early modern literaryachievement.

5

Every major anthology of English literature now has a sectionon Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, Quakers, Fifth Monarchists and the variouswomen prophets. There will soon be a new dedicated, extensive literaryanthology that traces the development of radical thought and style through-out the seventeenth century.

6

The greatest influence on literary critics hasbeen, and in many ways remains, the work of Hill, who had long arguedboth for the historical value of literary texts and for the literary qualitiesof the political and religious writing of the seventeenth century.

7

Particu-larly influential has been Hill’s contention in a lecture on radical prosestyle that radical texts brought ‘the speech of ordinary people’ into thepreviously elite sphere of printed opinion and were addressed to a popularrather than a ‘Latin-educated or court audience’. They were designed tobe read by ‘craftsmen and yeoman’ and ‘read aloud to illiterate audiences’.Eloquent in its rough, natural simplicity, radical writing is seen to haveits roots in ‘utilitarian artisans’ prose’ rather than the grammatical andrhetorical training of the early modern schoolroom.

8

Consequently radicalliterature has been valued by critics as a record of early modern popularbelief that is not mediated through sources produced by the elite, thelearned and educated few at the top of society.

9

Radicalism has beenassociated with the experience of the culturally, as well as politically andsocially, disenfranchised. In particular the opportunity for public expres-sion granted to women by the sectarian conviction that women werethe spiritual equals of men before God and that the simple and the weakwere more likely to be subject to prophetic visions has been the focus ofa considerable amount of scholarship.

10

The radical world of the English Revolution as depicted in literarycriticism has reflected, then, the image of a world of labouring-classheretics projected by Milton in the ‘Nation of Prophets’ passage in

Areopagitica

– the phrase is in fact used by Hill as a chapter title in

The WorldTurned Upside Down

. How, though, do we account for Milton’s alternativemodel in

Areopagitica

of the top-down transmission of radical ideas fromthe ‘learned’ to the ‘common people’?

To appreciate the culture of radicalism in the English Revolution weneed to develop a greater understanding of how that culture was shapednot simply by conflict between the cultural worlds of the high and thelow, of the learned and the unlearned, but by their interaction. As G. E.Aylmer suggested in an important presidential address to the RoyalHistorical Society in 1987, one of the ways in which we can begin tounderstand radical ideas more fully, and what they signified, is by exploringthe pre-Civil War background and education of well-known figures.

11

Manyof those who made important contributions to the extraordinary ferment



of these years had been to university and so possessed a considerable levelof formal education. As I have recently shown in

The English RadicalImagination

(2003), some of these university-educated radicals drew ontheir knowledge of learned culture and their experience of institutionaleducation to launch rhetorically elaborate attacks on those systems andstructures of knowledge.

12

Writers such as the Leveller Richard Overton(Queens’, Cambridge), the Ranter Abiezer Coppe (Merton and All Souls,Oxford), the Fifth Monarchist John Rogers (King’s, Cambridge) and theQuaker Samuel Fisher (Trinity and New, Oxford) express their heterodoxreligious ideas through satirical application of the cultural resources pro-vided by their orthodox humanist education, or through the heterodoxinterpretation of learned texts – whether Latin grammars, academic plays,humanist satires or works of biblical philology – usually considered rep-resentative of orthodox values. They scramble and misapply the languagesof the dominant culture for the purposes of parody and subversion, butalso to develop and articulate new and radical modes of thought. SamuelFisher, for instance, uses his extensive knowledge of oriental linguistics,developed in Caroline Oxford, to demonstrate the unreliability of theHebrew texts of the Old Testament and so deny the clerical claim to superiorreligious knowledge on the grounds of a linguistic education. Paradoxically,learning is deployed to undermine the claims of learning and establish thevirtue of inspiration.

13

Others in the radical spectrum had little or no formal educationbut were nonetheless in contact with and influenced by major Europeanintellectual traditions through reading translations of classical andEuropean authors, of which there were increasing numbers in the bookshopsof Caroline and Civil War London. William Walwyn, who came from acomparatively prosperous background but did not go to university, readtranslations of the major texts in the French sceptical tradition, Montaigne’s

Essays

(trans. John Florio, 1603) and Pierre de Charron’s

Of Wisdom

(trans. Samson Lennard, 1606), that he bought in London in the 1630s.Walwyn uses these sceptical humanist texts to develop theories aboutthe uncertainty of knowledge and the consequent necessity of religioustoleration.

14

This is a different instance of how heterodox ideas were formedfrom an interaction between elite and popular cultures. Yet as with theuniversity-educated radicals, the instance of Walwyn’s reading in the 1630scomplicates Hill’s theory that heterodox ideas had previously been trans-mitted orally for generations in a lower-class radical underground, burstinginto public view in the 1640s with the greater publishing freedoms broughtabout by the breakdown of centralized authority. Indeed as new historicalwork by Peter Lake and David Como is revealing, heterodox beliefs wereoften circulating close to the Puritan mainstream in early Stuart England.

15

Of course the example of Walwyn, while illustrating the debt of radicalideas to ‘elite’ intellectual traditions, also suggests that Milton’s vision in

Areopagitica

of ‘popular’ literacy in the service of religious and intellectual



discovery was a historical reality in Civil War London. More work nowneeds to be done on both the intellectual interface between elite and popularcategories of knowledge and the social interface between the learnedand the merely literate. Another example of the former process is the roleplayed by the writings of the Laudian divine Jeremy Taylor in forming theanti-Scriptural beliefs of Clement Writer, an infamous radical (and friendof Walwyn) who was accused by the Presbyterians of atheism.

16

Writer,who had no university education, found in Taylor’s writings scholarly andlinguistic proofs concerning the unreliability of the Biblical texts whichhe could then ironically turn against his learned clerical opponents, whomaintained that scholarship in Latin, Greek and Hebrew provided themwith access to spiritual truth in Scripture that was denied to the unlearned.Taylor’s aim in demonstrating the insufficient testimony of Scripture was tochallenge Presbyterian certitude: the Anglican tradition of rejecting PuritanBiblical fundamentalism in favour of arguments from natural reason andprobability which would complement those from Scripture stretches backto Richard Hooker. Writer appropriated Taylor’s scholarship to developa full-blown rejection of the authority of the Bible as a rule of faith.Ironically, then, ideas associated with the evolution of Anglican modes ofthought were also used to elaborate and bolster sectarian, anticlerical andsceptical positions; although, importantly, Writer shared with Taylor a profounddistaste for Calvinism, the dominant theological doctrine between 1640and 1660. Writer’s use of Taylor provides another striking instance of therole played by literacy in creating and shaping heresy in the 1640s.

An interesting distinction might be identified here between thoseuniversity-educated radicals, such as Coppe, who employ their formallearning satirically to ridicule the claim that linguistic scholarship grantsthe clergy spiritual authority, and those without Latin, such as Walwyn,who similarly reject the identification of learning with spiritual insight butnonetheless gather the intellectual resources for their heterodox positionfrom their omnivorous readings of vernacular texts, whether by Frenchsceptics or Anglican divines. In truth the distinction is better made betweenthe enthusiastic tradition of the Ranters and the Quakers, in which the verycategories of reason and human learning are rejected as stumbling blocksto the supra-rational wisdom released by experience of the Spirit within,and a more politically directed radical tradition which encourages thecommon people to break free from intellectual and political subjection byexercising their reason. In this latter tradition, exemplified in the 1640sby the Leveller leaders Walwyn and Richard Overton, issues of languageand literacy are seen in relation to wider questions of political represen-tation and social organization. To generalize, prophetic radicalism is alogical extension of Calvinist doctrine in that human nature and reason areseen as inherently depraved, even though the enthusiast and some of hisor her fellow sectarians have been redeemed by the infusion of the HolySpirit. Rational radicalism, on the other hand, is driven by an optimistic



conception of man and his natural capacities; in Leveller thought thisconfidence in individual natural reason is a corollary of demands for anextension of the franchise and popular participation in the political process.

17

Gerrard Winstanley the Digger, innovative as ever, straddles both radicalpositions by fusing an enthusiastic theology with a concept of universalgrace and a practical plan for political, social and economic reform.

It is thus misleading to think of the rational strain of radicalism in theseventeenth century in terms of an extension of Calvinist doctrine. RadicalPuritans distrusted the powers of reason because they viewed the humancreature as inherently corrupt and sinful; Walwyn and Overton viewed allmen as endowed with grace and the capacity to improve themselves andtheir society through the exercise of reason. If anything, then, theserational radicals were the heirs of the humanist, rather than the Puritan,tradition; of the Erasmian emphasis on man’s capacity for self-sufficientrational virtue. Consequently they regarded education as essential to thespiritual and moral formation of all men, not merely of a clerical castewhich would then instruct the laity in spiritual matters.

18

What theyobjected to was the appropriation of the humanist curriculum to defineruling elites of church and state, bolstered by the equation of Latin literacywith social and religious hierarchy.

19

Moreover, if education is the key tomoral improvement, then reading must be unprejudiced and the circula-tion of knowledge must be free. Walwyn provocatively directed his clericalopponents to one of the most celebrated passages in Montaigne, the essay‘On Cannibals’, to ridicule their lack of Christian charity:

And in his twentieth Chapter, pag: 102. he saies, speaking of the Cannibals, thevery words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulation, covetousnesse,envy, detraction, and pardon, were never heard of amongst them. These and likeflowers, I think it lawfull to gather out of his Wildernesse, and to give themroom in my Garden; yet this worthy Montaign was but a Roman Catholique;yet to observe with what contentment and swoln joy he recites these cogita-tions, is wonderful to consider: and now what shall I say? Go to this honestPapist, or to these innocent Cannibals, ye Independent Churches, to learncivility, humanity, simplicity of heart; yea, charity and Christianity.

20

Walwyn puts into practice Milton’s argument in

Areopagitica

that, as NigelSmith has put it, ‘truth lies in the choices made available to the individualin the course of acquiring knowledge, that is reading’. Indeed whileMilton ostensibly took it for granted that Catholic writings ought to besuppressed, Walwyn’s catholic attitude towards books brings out the radicalimplications of Milton’s assertion that ‘[t]o the pure all things are pure[Titus 1. 15], not only meats and drinks, but all kinde of knowledgewhether of good or evill; the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequentlythe books, if the will and conscience be not defiled’.

21

This returns usthen to the images of the ‘Nation of Prophets’ passage in

Areopagitica

; exceptnow we can place those images in the context of a continuous interaction



between humanist and vernacular traditions. I want to conclude with anepisode in post-regicide England which exemplifies Milton’s alternativemodel of heresy as transmitted from the learned to the common people, inthis case through translation from Latin; the episode is also suggestive ofhow a revised concept of radical religious culture as socially and culturallydiverse might shed light on Milton’s own relations to that culture.

The limits of religious toleration under the Cromwellian Protectoratewere defined by the case of John Biddle, the foremost anti-trinitarian of themid-seventeenth century. Biddle was arrested in July 1655 for preachingthat ‘Jesus Christ was not the Almighty or most High God’. The Presbyterianclergy were particularly anxious to prosecute Biddle under the 1648Blasphemy ordinance, which stipulated a sentence of death for denial ofthe divinity of Christ. At the same time a petition on Biddle’s behalf wassigned by Independents and Baptists and submitted to Cromwell. After atrial at the Old Bailey Cromwell finally decided to avoid confrontationwith either side by exiling Biddle to the Isle of Scilly (with an annualpension), where he remained for almost three years.

22

As Barbara Lewalskiobserves of the Biddle incident, Milton – whose own heretical positionon the Trinity is outlined in the

De Doctrina Christiana

– may have ‘foundin Cromwell’s tolerationist inclinations his chief reason to continuesupporting the Protector’.

23

On the other hand, Biddle’s activities earlier in the 1650s may have helpedlose Milton his job as the Commonwealth’s official licenser of books.Milton had written a note to the printer William Dugard in August 1650,apparently to authorize the publication of an infamous anti-trinitariantreatise, the

Catechesis Ecclesiarum quae in Regno Poloniae

, which James I hadordered to be burnt in 1614. This book appeared in January 1652; withindays the Council of State issued a warrant for Dugard’s arrest and for theseizure of all copies of the book. In early February the strongly CalvinistCommittee of Parliament for the Propagation of the Gospel presented aformal petition against the catechism. Milton was subsequently summonedon 21 February to give evidence before a special committee appointed bythe House. His name disappears from the

Stationers’ Register

at this timeas the licenser of the Republic’s official newsbook

Mercurius Politicus

.While it is by no means clear that Milton was relieved of his post becausehe licensed this heretical text, his sonnet ‘To the Lord General Cromwell,May, 1652. On the proposals of certain ministers at the Committee forthe Propagation of the Gospel’ suggests that he was deeply unhappy withthe persecutory attitudes of the Puritan and Independent clerics on theCommittee.

24

Milton warned Cromwell, who was on the Committee, that,

new foes arise

Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains:Help us to save free conscience from the pawOf hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw.

25



Yet, an English translation of the

Catechesis Ecclesiarum quae in Regno Poloniae

,under the title the

Racovian Catechism

, still appeared later that year. Thiswas almost certainly the work of John Biddle, who was an accomplishedLatinist: far from the stereotype of the illiterate tub preacher, Biddle hadbriefly been a Fellow of Magdalen Hall, Oxford after taking his MA atthe College in 1641. In 1634 he had published competent verse translationsof Virgil’s

Eclogues

and Juvenal’s

Satires

. At some stage Biddle had beenreading, presumably in Latin, the works of the Polish heretic Sociniusas well as the writings of other continental anti-trinitarians, and by themid-1640s had begun to publish Socinian views on the humanity of Christwhich landed him in and out of prison between 1648 and caused him toreceive the sentence of exile in 1655. His translation of the

RacovianCatechism

appears to have been his most influential publication: accordingto (hostile) newsbook accounts of 1652, the translation was much indemand amongst unlearned sectarians.

26

In 1655 John Owen, head of the Committee for the Propagation ofthe Gospel and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, issued a 750-page refutationof Biddle and Socinian ideas,

Vindiciae Evangelicae; or The Mystery of theGospell Vindicated

. The Calvinist clergy pursued Biddle with such tenacityand responded to him with such gravity because they knew a scholar ofhis eminence could lend intellectual authority to heretical ideas. MoreoverBiddle was not interested in making heresy respectable: rather, throughtranslation he sought to provide the common people with the means bywhich they could judge the truth of rival theological arguments. Foraccording to Socinius, every individual should apply their powers ofreason to the reading of Scripture, and it is through the strenuous exerciseof reason in religion that the individual comes to understand the work ofChrist and accept his own redemption. It was surely these aspects of theSocinian heresy that appealed to Milton, given his conversion to free-willtheology and emphasis on reason as choosing in

Areopagitica

. As Miltonpoints out in

A Treatise of Civil Power

(1673), employing his humanistcommand of etymology, the Greek root of heresy,

haîresis

, means ‘only thechoise or following of any opinion good or bad in religion or any otherlearning’.

27

It seems fair to speculate that Milton’s encounter with theSocinian ideas of the

Racovian Catechism

in the early 1650s may have ledhim to follow some new opinions in religion.

Milton, though he insisted on the absolute distinction of Father and Sonin the

De Doctrina Christiana

, never went so far as to assert, with Biddle, thehuman origins of Christ. Yet Milton’s inability to write about the Passionreveals, as John Rogers has recently shown in an admirable essay, ‘aninstinctive literary sympathy for the Arminian and Socinian reaction toCalvinism’s overvaluation of the death of Christ. Where the period’s highCalvinism had proclaimed the Crucifixion’s irresistible and unconditionalelection of the elect, the Socinians and Arminians had [given] primacy tothe believer’s voluntary acceptance of the decidedly resistible and conditional



work of Christ’.

28 Biddle, the Oxford tutor turned arch-heretic, is anotherexample of the rational, optimistic strain of seventeenth-century radicalism.But this humanist heretic also represents a native tradition of learnedradicalism in which we now need to locate with more precision theevolving beliefs of the century’s greatest writer.29

Notes

1 Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., gen. ed. D. M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1953–82), vol. 2, pp. 554–5. Cited hereafter as CPWM.2 Ibid., pp. 519–20.3 C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1991 [1972]), pp. 13, 368 and passim; Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London:Faber and Faber, 1977), pp. 69–71; Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994 [1993]), especially pp. 196–252. See also Hill, ‘From Lollardsto Levellers’ in Collected Essays of Christopher Hill. Volume 2: Religion and Politics in 17th CenturyEngland (Brighton: Harvester, 1988 [1986]), pp. 89–116.4 Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, pp. 113, 160; Hill, The World Turned Upside Down,pp. 400–1; CPWM, vol. 2, p. 519. On Milton’s complicated relationship with ‘Arminianism’, seeS. M. Fallon, ‘“Elect Above the Rest”: Theology as Self-Representation in Milton’, in Miltonand Heresy, ed. S. B. Dobranski and J. P. Rumrich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1998), pp. 93–116.5 For book-length studies, see N. Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in EnglishRadical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); T. N. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue:English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Pamphlet Wars: Rhetoricin the English Revolution, ed. J. Holstun (London: Frank Cass, 1992); The Emergence of Quaker Writing,ed. T. N. Corns and D. Loewenstein (London: Frank Cass, 1995); H. Hinds, God’s Englishwomen:Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press, 1996); C. Hawes, Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from theRanters to Christopher Smart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); J. Holstun, Ehud’sDagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London/New York: Verso, 2000); D. Loewenstein,Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries: Religion, Politics and Polemics in RadicalPuritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Radicalism in British Literary Culture,1650–1830, ed. T. Morton and N. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).6 Seventeenth-Century Radicalism: An Anthology, ed. N. McDowell and N. Smith (Ontario:Broadview, forthcoming).7 For an appreciation see M. Heinemann, ‘How the Words Got on the Page: Christopher Hilland Seventeenth-Century Literary Studies’, in Reviving the English Revolution, ed. G. Eley andW. Hunt (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 53–72.8 C. Hill, ‘Radical Prose in Seventeenth-Century England: From Marprelate to the Levellers’, Essaysin Criticism 32 (1982), pp. 103–5, 116, reprinted in Collected Essays of Christopher Hill. Volume1: Writing and Revolution in 17th Century England (Brighton: Harvester, 1985), pp. 75–95.9 For a polemical defence of Hill’s argument that radical writing of the English Revolution isimportant because it records authentic voices of lower-class protest, see J. Holstun, ‘Rantingat the New Historicism’, English Literary Renaissance 19 (1989), pp. 189–225; Holstun, Ehud’sDagger, pp. 1–140.10 Some of the most notable studies are E. Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing1649–88 (London: Virago, 1988), pp. 25–53; Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, pp. 45–53; R. Trubowitz,‘Female Preachers and Male Wives: Gender and Authority in Civil War England’, in PamphletWars, ed. Holstun, pp. 112–33; P. Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-CenturyEngland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Hinds, God’s Englishwomen; Holstun,Ehud’s Dagger, pp. 257–304.11 G. E. Aylmer, ‘Collective Mentalities in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England: III. Varieties ofRadicalism’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series 38 (1988), p. 5. David Como



has recently shed much new light on the pre-origins of Civil War radicalism in Blown by theSpirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stan-ford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 2004). See also Ariel Hessayon’s work on Thomas Tany:‘“Gold Tried in the Fire”: the Prophet Theauraujohn and the Puritan Revolution’ (PhD thesis,University of Cambridge, 1996).12 N. McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630–1660(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003).13 Ibid, ch. 5.14 Ibid., pp. 72–88.15 See Como, Blown by the Spirit; P. Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Heterodoxy’, andthe Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).16 N. McDowell, ‘The Ghost in the Marble: Jeremy Taylor’s Liberty of Prophesying (1647) andits Readers’, in Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England, ed. A. Hessayon and N. Keene(Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming).17 For further discussion of these strands in English radical thought, see N. McDowell, ‘LevellingLanguage: the Politics of Literacy in the English Radical Tradition’, Critical Quarterly 46(2)(Summer, 2004), pp. 39–62.18 On the ambivalence in mainstream Puritanism concerning the role of reason and educationin religion, see J. Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning, and Education,1560–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).19 See McDowell, ‘Levelling Language’; McDowell, ‘Latin Drama and Leveller Ideas: Pedagogyand Power in the Writings of Richard Overton’, The Seventeenth Century 18(2) (Autumn, 2003),pp. 230–51. On Latin as a badge of ‘class’, see F. Waquet, Latin or the Empire of a Sign, trans.J. Howe (London: Verso, 2001), pp. 207–29.20 Walwyns Just Defence (1649), in The Writings of William Walwyn, ed. J. R. McMichael and B. Taft(Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989), pp. 399–400.21 N. Smith, ‘Areopagitica: Voicing Contexts, 1643–5’, in Politics, Poetics and Hermeneutics inMilton’s Prose, ed. D. Loewenstein and J. G. Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1990), p. 106; CPWM, vol. 2, p. 512. Walwyn quotes Titus 2. 11–12 on the title page of ThePower of Love (1643).22 D. M. Masson, The Life of John Milton, 7 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1959–94), vol. 5,pp. 64–6; B. Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate’, Studies in Church History21 (1984), pp. 199–233. See also the entry for Biddle in the Dictionary of National Biography.23 B. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), p. 329.24 For a discussion of the evidence for Milton’s involvement in licensing the Catechism, seeS. B. Dobranski, ‘Licensing Milton’s Heresy’, in Milton and Heresy, ed. Dobranski and Rumrich,pp. 139–58.25 J. Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. J. Carey (Harlow: Longman, 1992), p. 325, lines 11–14.26 [Samuel Sheppard], Mercurius Phreneticus, 12–19 July 1652, p. 26.27 CPWM, vol. 7, pp. 246–7.28 Rogers persuasively argues for a (closet) staging of aspects of Socinian heresy in SamsonAgonistes (1671) in ‘Delivering Redemption in Samson Agonistes’, in Altering Eyes: New Perspectiveson ‘Samson Agonistes’, ed. M. R. Kelley and J. Witterich (Newark: University of Delaware Press,2002), pp. 72–97.29 See the epilogue to McDowell, The English Radical Imagination, pp. 183–92. I have made aninitial effort to locate the Milton of the great poems in the context of the learned radicalismof the 1640s in ‘The Nature of Liberty and the Liberty of Nature: Conceptions of Creation inthe Writings of Richard Overton the Leveller and Paradise Lost’, Journal of the History of Ideas(forthcoming). I intend to continue these arguments in a monograph on ‘Literature and Heresyin Early Modern England: From Marlowe to Milton’.

Bibliography

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