At this point, I hope I have convinced most readers that allusions to contemporary obstetric conditions and to Milton's own biographical experience of them are of central importance to Paradise Lost. There is, however, one aspect of the epic that requires further comment in this respect: Milton's cosmology. This is a difficult and contested area of study, and comprehensive conclusions about it lie outside the framework of this book, but the reproductive images that Milton used to describe his cosmos have long been recognized as important, and it has been rare for scholars to pay much attention to contemporary obstetric contexts in interpreting them. I would therefore like to conclude with some suggestions about how attention to such contexts, especially to anxieties attendant upon maternal mortality, might help us to better understand some of the stranger aspects of these images.

Milton's descriptions of the physical layout of his universe have caused a good deal of confusion over the years, and his seeming failure to be clear about particular details has been attributed to a number of causes. Some have said that he was himself confused in the face of the various debates of his day concerning astronomy, and that this led him either to self-contradiction or to an unsuccessful attempt at reconciling the traditional Ptolemaic scheme (in its later Alphonsine elaboration) with the cosmologies implied by Genesis and by various classical, medieval and contemporary authors.