| My dissertation considers how John Milton's later works demonstrate the intensive struggle of spiritual reading. Milton presents his own rigorous process of reading in order to instruct his readers how to advance their spiritual knowledge. Recent studies of Milton's readers, for example Sharon Achinstein's Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, neglect this spiritual dimension and focus on politics. Since Milton considers the individual soul at least as important as the body politic, I focus on uncovering the spiritual characteristics of the reader Milton tries to shape through his texts. I also examine Milton's reading practices without postulating the existence of some ideal or universal reader, and without assuming a gullible or easily manipulated reader as Stanley Fish does in his well-known and engaging study, Surprised by Sin. Milton does not simply hope for a fit audience, but writes to nurture fit readers. His works offer models of strenuous and suspicious close reading, subjecting all authors except God to the utmost of scrutiny. Milton presents Biblical interpretation as an interior struggle, a contention not between reader and text, but within that reader's individual understanding of scripture. My study rethinks the basic relationship between reading and religion in seventeenth-century England, and concludes that for Milton, and his contemporaries, distinguishing divine truths in worldly texts required a spiritually guided form of close reading. I examine spiritual reading in Areopagitica, Eikonoklastes, De Doctrina Christiana, Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained, and I compare Miltonic spiritual reading with that of two of his Puritan contemporaries, Richard Baxter and George Fox. I also propose a methodology for interpreting De Doctrina Christiana, suggest some of Milton's purposes in Books XI and XII of Paradise Lost and discuss Jesus' process of interpretation in Paradise Regained, as well as the ways in which that process instructs and inspires readers of the poem. |
