In stark contrast to my literal discussion of “place,” Dayton Haskin opens his Milton's Burden of Interpretation by noting how “Martin Luther wrote an account of what he took to be the turning point in his life. He connected it with an interpretative insight into a ‘place,’ as he called it, a particular biblical passage.” In Luther's case, the “place” in question was a phrase from Romans 1:17, “the righteousness of God.” As Haskin makes clear, it was commonplace in the seventeenth century to feel a certain connection with a biblical “place,” to feel like Luther when the passage suddenly “spoke to him immediately, as if he were in the same ‘place’ that Paul had occupied many centuries earlier.” However, what made Luther's epiphany such a turning point was that he used an interpretative strategy of linking passages to get to this “place,” prompting him fatefully to “study linguistic usage, comparing text to text, concentrating on how biblical language conveys meaning.”

Similarly, “in the critical period of 1643–45,” Haskin argues, “Milton began radically to revise his thinking about biblical ‘places.’” Faced with the apparent biblical condemnation of divorce, Milton devised interpretative strategies to find a “place” in a text that seemingly offered no refuge for the divorced.