Milton and Maternal Mortality

Description

All too often, childbirth in early modern England was associated with fear, suffering and death, and this melancholy preoccupation weighed heavily on the seventeenth-century mind. This landmark study examines John Milton's life and work, uncovering evidence of the poet's engagement with maternal mortality and the dilemmas it presented. Drawing on both literary scholarship and historical research, Louis Schwartz provides important readings of Milton's poetry, including Paradise Lost, as well as a wide-ranging survey of the medical practices and religious beliefs that surrounded the perils of childbirth. The reader is granted a richer understanding of how seventeenth-century society struggled to come to terms with its fears, and how one of its most important poets gave voice to that struggle.

'The careful and detailed research that went into this book is reflected in cautious wording and a multitude of footnotes and cross-references, making it useful as a reference tool as well as adding interpretative suggestions that should be considered in future work on the poems concerned.' English Studies 'Schwartz is to be highly commended for drawing back the curtain, not only on the reproductive drama of the seventeenth-century birthing chamber but also on Milton's rich and varied life-long poetic engagement with it.' Karen Bollerman, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching