The influence of seventeenth-century Anglo-Saxon scholarship on Milton's prose, 'The History of Britain', and 'Paradise Lost'

This thesis seeks to answer the question, "Was John Milton's prose and poetry in any way influenced by seventeenth-century Anglo-Saxon scholarship?" The answer to that question is "yes." Just as John Milton was in dialogue with radical seventeenth-century political groups such as the Levellers, and Diggers---a ground-breaking thesis first proposed by Christopher Hill---so Milton was also in dialogue with those academics and antiquarians researching and, in some ways, reinventing the Anglo-Saxon past. Up until now, scholars approaching the question of how much Milton was influenced by the Anglo-Saxon scholarship of his day have concentrated on the ultimately unanswerable, and perhaps unimportant, question of whether or not Paradise Lost was in part based on the Anglo-Saxon Genesis poem. The much more important question of how much Milton's work as a whole was influenced by research into the Anglo-Saxon past has been left unanswered.