Milton's Secrecy

James Dougal Fleming is Assistant Professor of English at Simon Fraser University, Canada.

• Contents: Foreword; Introduction: against secrecy; Expressing the conscience; The armor of intention; The armor of intension; Talking and learning in Paradise; Conclusion: secrecy again?; Works cited; Index.

'Superbly learned and lucid ... Fleming brilliantly explores the modern logic of discovery that construes knowing as the disclosure of the secret hidden beneath surfaces and between the lines - the hermeneutic of suspicion, of scientific reductionism, of Straussian esotericism, of psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and original intent. Through a dazzling analysis of Milton's own "root-and-branch opposition to secrecy," he reconstructs the unfamiliar hermeneutics of early modern Protestantism.' Debora Shuger, UCLA; author of Censorship and Cultural Sensibility and Political Theologies in Shakespeare's England 'Fleming counters the quest to reveal the text's secret meaning - and the deconstructive skepticism that results from that quest's inevitable failure - by opening up its internal dialogue, the play of question and answer through which we recognize and respond to the words we read.' Donald Marshall, Seaver College, Pepperdine University, USA ’Fleming writes with clarity, grace, and considerable wit.’ Renaissance Quarterly 'Milton's Secrecy And Philosophical Hermeneutics will spark new debates about Milton's concernment with both esoteric and exoteric Renaissance/early-modern traditions.' Seventeenth-Century News