English liberty and Turkish tyranny: The symbolic function of the East in Milton's poetry and prose

European identity (that is Europeans' conception of themselves as European) was formed by the thousand year confrontation from the seventh to the seventeenth century with an aggressive and expansionist Islam. European Christians saw in Islam a symbolic inversion of themselves that was mapped onto geography on an East/West axis. Though Milton and his contemporaries were aware of differences between cultures and religions in the East and the complexities of history that produced these differences (for example Milton's differentiation of Saracens and Turks in Prolusion 7), they often overlooked them in order to deploy a set of commonplaces associated with Turks, Moors, and Saracens. Changes in the West from the end of the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century made possible the development of Orientalist discourse in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I contend that the peculiar ideological construction of "the East" present in a proto-Orientalist discourse was an influence on Milton's effort to understand and practice Christianity, on his political worldview, and on his poetic practice. I conclude that Milton did recognize an East/West dichotomy, and that this dichotomy was expressed most obviously in his chorographic descriptions in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained where he traces the rise and fall of empires across space and through time. Milton's understanding of the East comes from and draws on notions of Providential Christian history that posits the East as a point of fallen origin which will be redeemed at the second coming of Christ when geographic and political differences will be comprehended in the fullness of God. Throughout my dissertation I look at the promise of a recuperated East that is offset by a fear that the East remains obstinately unassimilated to this understanding of history.