Historicizing Milton

by Laura Lunger Knoppers

Although Milton's three major poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, appeared well into the Restoration era, they have long been regarded as belonging philosophically to the earlier seventeenth century. The canonical view is of Milton as a relic in the Restoration - either belated humanist or belated Puritan. Addressing this long-standing anomaly of literary history, Historicizing Milton shows how Milton's major poems respond specifically and powerfully to royalist spectacles of the 1660s and 1670s, spectacles that were intended as displays of divinely approved monarchical power. Laura Lunger Knoppers traces such public spectacles as the execution of the regicides, the exhumation of Cromwell, the punishment of fifth monarchists, and the coronation triumph of Charles II. Drawing on a range of sources, including letters, diaries, newspaper accounts, sermons, royal proclamations, and parliamentary accounts, Knoppers reconstructs the discourses that interpreted and