Milton among the Puritans

Catherine Gimelli Martin teaches at the University of Memphis, USA, where she has been the recipient of a Dunavant Professorship and several distinguished research awards. The Milton Society of America and the John Donne Society have similarly honored her with essay and book awards.

• Carlyle's Ghost; I: The Revolutionary Era; 1: A Brief History of the “Puritan Revolution”; 2: Milton among the Puritans; 3: Vocation, Prophecy, and Secular Reform in the Early Poems and Prose; 4: The Humanist Ethics, Metaphysics, and Aesthetics of Milton's Spenserian Masque; 5: Mid-Century Debates on Law, Religion, Rhetoric, Education, and Science; II: Restoration Culture and Milton's Major Works; 6: The Secular Cosmology and Anthropology of Milton's Civilized Eden; 7: The Neoclassical Poetics of Paradise Regained; 8: The Classical Republican Tragedy of Defeat in Samson Agonistes; Afterword

A Yankee Book Peddler US Core Title for 2011 'Deeply thoughtful and widely researched, Catherine Gimelli Martin's account of Milton's religious and cultural milieu and disposition offers a boldly challenging interrogation of the usual orthodoxies about the poet and his work.' Thomas N. Corns, Bangor University, UK 'Catherine Gimelli Martin's book is a bold and salutary attempt to provide a new historical and conceptual foundation for the study of Milton. Martin works fiercely to dismantle the seldom questioned, but long orthodox, identification of John Milton as a "Puritan." And in so doing, she offers us a revisionist glimpse of how a new, more nuanced analysis of the period's politics and religion could enrich our understanding of England's greatest poet.' John Rogers, Yale University, USA '...Martin's lucid prose style makes this book accessible to a broad audience, and she provides footnotes rather than endnotes and a lengthy bibliography. Martin's audacious challenge to the assumption of Milton's Puritanism will surely figure importantly in debate over Milton's religion and literature, and the book is consequently a necessary addition to any academic library supporting the teaching of Milton...Highly recommended.' Choice 'The evidence Martin gathers is not new, but she marshals it so effectively that her case seems irrefutable. No careful reader of her book will glibly allude to the "Puritan" Milton again.' Times Literary Supplement 'Milton among the Puritans returns us to some familiar aspects of Milton's life and intellectual composition - his republicanism, his rationalism, his interest in science and his commitment to humanist learning - and it does so in a way that reminds us of the unique power of Milton's mind and art in secular, political, and Baconian terms. This book also brings us back to questions that naturally invite us to prod and probe Milton's complex and sometimes heterodox relationship to seventeenth-century English Puritanism...'