Immortality and the Body in the Age of Milton

Description

Seventeenth-century England teemed with speculation on body and its relation to soul. Descartes' dualist certainty was countered by materialisms, whether mechanist or vitalist. The most important and distinctive literary reflection of this ferment is John Milton's vitalist or animist materialism, which underwrites the cosmic worlds of Paradise Lost. In a time of philosophical upheaval and innovation, Milton and an unusual collection of fascinating and diverse contemporary writers, including John Donne, Margaret Cavendish, John Bunyan, and Hester Pulter, addressed the potency of the body, now viewed not as a drag on the immaterial soul or a site of embarrassment but as an occasion for heroic striving and a vehicle of transcendence. This collection addresses embodiment in relation to the immortal longings of early modern writers, variously abetted by the new science, print culture, and the Copernican upheaval of the heavens.

John Rumrich is A. J. and W. D. Thaman Professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin. He has written monographs on John Milton, Matter of Glory: A New Preface to 'Paradise Lost' (1987) and Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation (Cambridge, 1996), and he has co-edited several editions of Milton's works for Modern Library (with Stephen M. Fallon and William Kerrigan) as well as the Norton Critical Edition: Seventeenth-Century British Poetry, 1603-1660 (2005, with Gregory Chaplin). In 2013 he was named an Honored Scholar of the Milton Society. Stephen M. Fallon is John J. Cavanaugh Professor of the Humanities at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (1991) and Milton's Peculiar Grace: Self-Representation and Authority (2000), and has co-edited Modern Library's Milton editions (with William Kerrigan and John Rumrich). In 2011 he was named an Honored Scholar of the Milton Society and subsequently served as the Society's president.