In January, 1649, James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormond, signed a treaty with the Catholic Confederacy, not knowing that the king on whose behalf he spoke was on trial in London. On January 30, 1649, Charles is executed, and a week later England became a republic, having a nonmonarchical form of government. A Council of State was created, and John Milton was appointed its “Secretary of Foreign Tongues.” The Council charged Milton to write observations on Ormond’s peace treaty and other recent documents from Ireland. The most geographically interesting reflection on Ireland to involve Milton’s work the resulting Articles of Peace offers a map of Ireland, a cultural and political geography overlaid on the ancient provinces of the island, to which Milton adds complicated interisland tensions, on the eve of Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland. Articles reflects the complexity of the situation in Ireland, ramified by English management: A Protestant Royalist signs an extraordinarily generous Peace Treaty with Irish Catholics; the Parliamentary representative in Dublin complains of English influence; the Ulster-Scots make the case for a Protestant Church in Ireland that is neither Anglican nor Episcopalian.

Lord Lieutenant Thomas Wentworth, arriving in Ireland in 1633, unified disparate Ireland into opposition, culminating in his 1641 impeachment, trial, and execution in London. Months later, Ulster and then Ireland more broadly, rose in rebellion. Milton’s first published prose works, including his formative anti-prelatical tracts precede and follow the Ulster Rising. Increasingly Milton addresses Ireland, and the Rising. In James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, Milton finds an Irish interlocutor, and foil.

Days after the execution of Charles I, Eikon Basilike, a book purported to be written by the king, was published posthumously. Parliament commissioned Milton to write a response. With chapters on Wentworth’s execution and the Irish Rising of the early 1640s, Ireland is threaded throughout Charles’ Eikon Basilike and Milton’s response, Eikonoklastes. When Milton began writing Eikonoklastes, Cromwell was preparing to invade Ireland. By the time Eikonoklastes was published, in October of 1649, Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland had been underway for two months. Its most infamous battles, the siege of Drogheda had already taken place. In 1650, Milton publishes a revised second edition of Eikonoklastes, in which he hits upon the term “pluralist,” and invokes it scornfully against his opponents in Ireland. Milton is now up against a principle: pluralism, which Milton implies is built into the cultural and political map of Ireland. As Milton confronts in Ireland a different way of thinking about government, administration, and policy, the Stuart idea of Great Britain must be defeated in Ireland, because it threatens a century-old project of centralization.

Milton’s poem, “Lycidas,” written in memory of Edward King, who drowned sailing from England to his native Ireland, represents a turning point in Milton’s development, his culminating intervention in the ancient pastoral elegy tradition. Considered archipelagically, “Lycidas” narrates a crisis that is spiritual, political, and regional at the same time: A Cambridge-educated Protestant, King represents an interisland possibility for Irish reformation, lost. With “Lycidas,” Milton rereads Spenser’s "Colin Clouts," revising Spenser’s earlier poem. A new, better-educated Colin – Edward King – does not come home again. The loss of Edward King alters what Milton thinks could have been a more positive, reformed relationship on both sides of the Irish Seas.

After nine months in Ireland, Cromwell is recalled to London. Andrew Marvell writes “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return,” an ambiguous encomium. In Ireland, Cromwell’s early return to London is largely forgotten in public memory. By revising existing English-language discussions of Ireland, and incorporating its demographic variety into an emerging idea of “the Irish,” Milton contributes to reconceptualizing Ireland from pluralist variety to a new, flatter pairing, “the Irish” and “the English.” The Cromwellian conquest produces a stronger Irish Catholic identitarian response, as can be seen in the November 1649 meeting of “The Archbishops, Bishops, and other Prelates” at Clonmacnoise (and their subsequent, 1650 publication, to which Cromwell and Milton both responded). Around the same time that Certaine Actes and Declarations of the Clonmacnoise conference was published, the Council of State assigned Milton the task of responding to Defensio Regia pro Carolina I, by Salmasius. Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland is wrapped into Milton’s response, known in English as A Defence of the People of England (1651).

William Blake’s literary prophecies constantly unsettle symmetries, “pulling the rug out” from under the harmony and balance neoclassical readers were trained to expect in a text or a painting. Blake’s prophecies have long been read through the teleological system of Ezekiel’s “merkabah” (chariot) vision. Each biblical allusion in Blake’s work seems to build to a greater whole, or can be explained through the prophetic “system.” However, what if Blake’s prophecies were refracted through Isaiah’s more dim vision? In the multiple versions of Isaiah’s initiation in Blake’s work, we encounter a prophecy of stutter, glitch, and weakness, and a flickering, partial vision. Rather than presenting a single bombastic image as a method to unlock a biblical allegory, Blake offers Isaiah’s prophetic walking as a figure for the interpretation of the difficult, irregular biblical text. From the perspective of the walker, the biblical text is full of hardened surfaces, desolate rocks, and irregular encounters, which must be read “with the feet,” topologically – not typologically – before the poet-prophet-walker can arrive at their destination.

John Milton argues that liberty of conscience requires the freedom to express one’s innermost commitments to others, specifically in speech and writing. Hypocritical conformity robs individuals of crucial opportunities to foster political capacities of citizenship, specifically the skill of independent judgment. Milton hints at an intuition that other early modern figures will later foreground – that hypocritical conformity to the state religion hardens dissenters and makes them incapable of being judicious political citizens. If individuals live in a political society that does not afford them liberty of conscience, they will slowly lose the capability to exercise their conscience over time. This freedom requires a robust view of freedom and agency in the public sphere, since it implies far more than an inward freedom of conviction. Conscience must be cultivated independently of political and ecclesiastical authorities and requires confrontation with other individuals in the public sphere, implying the open exchange of ideas and the freedom to express one’s ideas publicly in writing or speech. Milton insists that the circulation of ideas in print allows for an extended opportunity for individuals to exercise their conscience, as the written word persists over time longer than speech, which dissipates in the immediate moment, only to be recounted by witnesses. Liberty of conscience is so crucial to Milton’s understanding of freedom that he describes it as the highest liberty above all liberties, even justifying other political freedoms.

This book argues that liberty of conscience remains a crucial freedom worth protecting, because safeguarding it prevents political, social, and psychological threats to freedom. Influential early modern theorists of toleration, John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and Pierre Bayle, I show, defend liberty of conscience by stressing the unanticipated repercussions of conformity. By recovering the intellectual origins of liberty of conscience in early modern politics and situating influential theorists of toleration in overlooked historical debates on religious dissimulation and hypocritical conformity, I demonstrate that infringements on conscience risk impeding political engagement, eroding civic trust, and inciting religious fanaticism. While this is a book about freedom, it is also a book about threats to freedom, specifically conformity, hypocrisy, and persecution. It considers the social, psychological, and political harms done by political refusals to tolerate religious differences and allow individuals to practice their religion freely in accordance with the dictates of conscience. By returning to a historical context in which liberty of conscience was not granted to religious dissenters –but rather actively denied – this book foregrounds Bayle’s argument that coercing conscience exacerbates religious fervor and inflicts significant psychological harm on dissenters, thereby undermining the goal of cultivating social cohesion in politics. In controversies on the politics of conscience, I suggest that we acknowledge that refusals to tolerate claims of conscience – while perhaps well-grounded in democratic laws and norms – might exacerbate conscientious fervor and empower resentment against the state. This Baylean intuition does not necessarily tell us where to draw the limits of toleration – what should be tolerated and what goes beyond the pale – but it does tell us something about how to approach invocations of conscience and what to expect when we deem something intolerable.

The seventh chapter studies how Blake’s poem Milton (c.1804) reconceives key aspects of epic tradition as it refigures missionary work as a metaphor for promoting freedom from the limitations of imperial discourse. Showing how literal missionary work can assist empire by holding people in states of subjection, Blake more abstractly repudiates the limitations that Equiano addresses concretely. I argue that Blake locates in the tensions between missionary work and empire the resources to oppose imperialism. While some of Blake’s rhetoric resembles that of actual missionaries and imperialists of his day, I suggest that Blake works from within such orthodox discourses to undermine them. The unresolved contradictions in Blake’s Milton – both in his use of the epic genre and in his appeals to religious and imperial rhetoric – heighten the challenge that he poses to the stable circumscriptions of imperial discourse.

This chapter turns from a broader consideration of poetic works on divine and human creation to the most influential biblical epic in English: Milton’s Paradise Lost. Recent work on Milton has shown harmony between the content and form of Paradise Lost and the methods and aims of modern science. However, an underappreciated strand of scientific reform still needs to be integrated into our understanding of Milton’s relationship to science: a marginalization of natural theology. By working against this trend, Milton aligns himself instead with those scientific reformers who promoted natural theology, providing in Paradise Lost a rubric for applying human science to theological understanding while resisting the anthropocentrism and modern notion of reason that undergirded many contemporary prose works of natural theology. In contrast with contemporaries who emphasized the evidence of divine power in nature, Milton insists that love is the divine attribute most visible in creation, even outside of Eden. A natural theology that discerns divine love is more at home in Milton’s poetic world than in the increasingly reductive material reality on which works of physico-theology drew.

The calls for freedom of press in the mid-seventeenth century, like the earlier calls for freedom of speech, also came mostly from devoutly religious people: Puritans and Nonconformists and their religious-based demands. That religious basis was mostly a desire to disseminate religious preaching and knowledge, and an imperative to do that not only by preaching and other speech but by publishing religious books and pamphlets, in addition to a religious basis in freedom of conscience. John Milton, the trailblazer in seeking "the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience," tried to extend parrhesia from speech to publications, and built his case in Areopagitica and in other pamphlets on freedom of conscience, on Bible passages, and on similar religious messages. Though Areopagitica is generally described in scholarly literature as unnoticed and overlooked until the end of the seventeenth century, it in fact was relatively widely known, as nearly fifty quotations or allusions show before that century’s end. Besides Milton, other Puritans were the dominant advocates for freedom of press before the end of the seventeenth century, including three who wrote a generation before Milton (an anonymous minister, Leonard Busher, and William Ames), and Levellers and others.

Chapter 5 illuminates the literary, political, and ecological significance of Milton’s depiction of contentment. In Eikonoklastes, Milton responds directly to the appropriation of contentment discourse in Eikon Basilike. Charles I had identified his opponents as malcontents and positioned himself as a contented martyr-king. By contrast, Milton describes Charles’s discontent as the immediate cause of the English Civil War and as the epitome of tyranny. In Paradise Lost, he adds an environmental dimension to the religious and republican significances of content and discontent. The language of self-containment has limited applications for unfallen Adam and Eve, who interact harmoniously with their environment. Satanic discontent reconstitutes the experience of selfhood as a space defined in opposition to the natural world. Satan perverts contentment and finds it impossible to relate to the world around him in any way other than as a conqueror. When Adam and Eve choose to sin, they emulate diabolic discontent and subject all of creation to imperialism. Milton’s revision of Christian contentment reveals his efforts to endure, lament, and resist the Restoration.

The central theme of Chapter 2 is anti-monarchism. The chapter shows that during the free state monarchy was widely thought to be the worst form of government. Monarchy entailed tyranny and the concomitant slavery of the people. However, an even more powerful anti-monarchical argument rose to prominence during the free state. Based largely on 1 Samuel 8, numerous advocates of the free state maintained that monarchy was against God and thus both idolatrous and sinful. Already in early December 1648, a radical pamphlet, Light shining in Buckingham-shire, equated kingship with the devil. But the argument that monarchy was a sin and idolatry became particularly vociferous during the Engagement controversy. It was argued repeatedly that monarchy, as a form of government, was against God’s express will. Such an argument led to the conclusion that monarchy was finished in England and would soon be so elsewhere in Europe as well.

Johnson’s Lives of the Poets are a classic not only of literary criticism but of biography as well. Originally intended as brief prefaces in an anthology of fifty-eight poets from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they increased in scope as Johnson worked on them, and as one commentator has said, they became “a book of wisdom and experience … a commentary on human destiny.” The lives of Milton, Swift, Dryden, and Pope are really books in their own right, and the earlier Life of Savage is a deeply felt account of someone Johnson knew well in his youth. He made good use of such documentary material as he was able to obtain, and for recent poets was able to draw upon his own memory of telling anecdotes. Above all, the Lives explore the range of human achievement, its failures and also its triumphs.

Milton’s late poems suggest that the best way to represent the experience of modernity is to turn to and to reimagine the work of the Ancients—the modern paradox. This raises questions of periodization, and time. Milton is more “Renaissance” than “early modern,” at least in terms of how the early modern is usually understood, i.e., as a temporally delimited historical period after the medieval and before Enlightenment modernity. The Renaissance was modernizing in its appropriation of the Ancients. Milton’s late poems are obsessed with temporality—well, temporalities, plural, actually—since Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes narrate three different temporalities. Paradise Lost narrates the continual backwards and forwards of living in history—a present affected by the past, and by anticipatory imaginings of an as-yet unrealized future. Paradise Regained stays in the present, bringing readers along in a story that moves from a beginning to an end. In Samson Agonistes, Samson sees no future. The key subsequent literary development in verbally representing forms of modernity, the novel has a deep presentism which persists. Milton is received in a literary-critical tradition deeply affected by the novel’s focus on the present and on the synchronous life of the characters.

This chapter explores structural differences between the 1667 ten-book edition and the revised twelve-book version of 1674, not only to continue a reconsideration of Eve, but to revive attention to the implications of the formal properties of the revision, and to argue that this reformation formally embodies the narrative’s claims about how to adjust to modernity. The drama created by the final, reconfigured two books highlights how Adam and Eve and their relationship change and grow during the poem. At the end, the poem’s profound linguistic tensions are instantiated by Eve, while Adam’s reaction and the narrator’s description emphasize the pleasures of pluralistic readings. In short, the reformation of Paradise Lost rebalances the poem, by countering the scale of the consequences from the War in Heaven with a proportional rearrangement of the invocations. Its twelve-book shape mitigates against loss and creates a space to emphasize the continued growth of the two human characters, particularly Adam. Perhaps most importantly, the new, concluding pair of books provide a space of non-domination in which Eve can emerge and be recognized as the poet she is.

Milton’s last poems operate as an array, a contiguous set of shifts in narrative and generic evaluation published over just a seven-year period. Charles Taylor argues that modernity “must be understood as . . . multiform contestation.” In Milton’s last three poems, it is. As an epic as a sui generis brief epic, and as a tragedy, respectively, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes represent, then, the values, the pressures, and sometimes even the losses, of pluralism. That these positions can overlap, though, is central to Milton’s contribution to a discussion of modernity, contrary to the familiar epochal break and shift of ideas that modernity is usually taken to represent. The different responses to the experience of modernity, while not necessarily modern, are part of that modernity nonetheless. In the introduction, I preliminarily I develop senses of modernity and responses to it. I also explore the relationship between context, fiction, anachronism, and the novel in the reception of Milton three late poems.