Abstract

Although historiography is at once a rhetorical and a critical activity, the recognition of the contingency of historiographical constructs is rarely reflected in the study of the seventeenth century. This dissertation examines the normative historiographical assumptions brought to bear on the study of the seventeenth century in England: namely, that the English Revolutions of the 1640's saw the emergence of the liberal subject, the birth of secular rationalism, and what Michael Walzer has called the "crisis of modernization." In English studies, John Milton is often located as the central and transitional figure in this historical narrative. My study documents the construction of Milton the individual, the repressed and canonically effaced agent of Eliot's "dissociation"--from Toland's appropriation of Milton for Whig politics to Bloom's more recent estimation of him as "a Protestant Church of one, a sect unto himself." By attending to what J. G. A. Pocock has called the "patterns of polyvalence" implicit in Miltonic discourse, the dissertation demonstrates how the varying cultural traditions which find their origins in Milton do so with authority, though not without trespassing upon the discursive conflicts and ambivalences elaborated in his texts. Antinomian and civic republican discourses, for example--understood by later traditions as radically incommensurate--coexist in Milton's prose from Areopagitica to the Ready and Easy Way. The confluence of these discourses, at once registers Milton's radical epistemological skepticism , yet is nonetheless responsive to the demands of Milton's theological and political pedagogy. My dissertation therefore attends not only to the Milton who calls in Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce for the independence of "every mind and spirit," but also to the Milton who enjoins these spirits "by skill of wise conducting to become uniform and true." Where current critical discourses often find that the claims of skepticism and community are mutually exclusive, the forms of mediation in Milton's texts--the republicanism of the prose tracts, the theology of Christian Doctrine, and the principles of poetic accommodation in Paradise Lost--allow Milton the possibility of skeptical engagement