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Barbieri
Fellow Paul Wright reassesses the “radicalism” of John Milton
Maureen McKew
 Was
the seventeenth century English poet John Milton a radical, a republican
or did he really have a basic distrust of the masses? As modern scholars
continue to examine his work, it would appear that the answers become
less clear and certain.
On March 19, Dr. Paul Wright, Barbieri Post Doctoral Fellow, Core Humanities
Program, addressed these contradicting views in a lecture titled “The
Skirts and Suburbs of Religion: Uncommon Sense from Eikon Basilike to
Milton’s Paradise Regained.” He came to the conclusion that
although Milton’s early prose indicated that he was open to persuading
people through the indirection of reason, he increasingly grew to distrust
public judgment.
Wright examined three texts: Eikon Basilike (Or the King’s Book),
written in 1649 and purported to be the final meditations of England’s
King Charles in prison as he awaited his execution; Milton’s Eikonoklastes
(1649), written in response and described by Wright as one of early modern
England’s most celebrated defenses of regicide; and Milton’s
later work, Paradise Regained (1671), which he wrote after the restoration
of the monarchy in the person of Charles II. Milton himself took no joy
in the return of the king leader and he lamented the backsliding of one-time
republicans into supporters of the monarchy. According to Wright Paradise
Regained demonstrated that Milton placed no faith in any earthly monarchy.
His disillusionment left him with little confidence in the popular voice.
Wright stated that “if Milton remained a polemicist against the
Restoration and emergent statism, his emphasis on privatized virtue also
keyed into a continuing polemic against public judgment.”
The title of the lecture was drawn from a statement by King Charles I
in Eikon Basilike that most civil strife tends only to “the skirts
and suburbs of religion.”
Wright’s lecture was part of the Barbieri Lecture Series, a component
of the Rocco A. and Gloria C. Barbieri Faculty Fellowship in the Core
Humanities. It was endowed in 1993 by Rocco Barbieri ’59.
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