Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Foreword: Milton’s Personal Best
- Acknowledgements and Dedication
- Preliminaries: Authorship, Medium, Audience
- 1 The Address to Readers: A Close Reading of Milton’s Epistle
- PART 1 MATERIALS
- PART 2 ARTS OF LANGUAGE
- PART 3 TRINITY
- Appendix 1 Further Etymologies
- Appendix 2 Hobbes and Dryden
- Bibliography
- Index
PART 2 - ARTS OF LANGUAGE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Foreword: Milton’s Personal Best
- Acknowledgements and Dedication
- Preliminaries: Authorship, Medium, Audience
- 1 The Address to Readers: A Close Reading of Milton’s Epistle
- PART 1 MATERIALS
- PART 2 ARTS OF LANGUAGE
- PART 3 TRINITY
- Appendix 1 Further Etymologies
- Appendix 2 Hobbes and Dryden
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Part One has concerned materials. In showing how these are personal to Milton, in the sense of individual, chosen, and imperious, a second sense of “personal” has emerged, the interpersonal by which Milton names and engages with other exegetes. In Part 2, similarly, his arts of language tend at first to keep some distance from named individuals when he supports his views by philology (Chapter 6), sometimes lumping his opposition as “grammarians and lexicographers.” These gentry think alike and in doing so tend to be wrong, like the theologi in Chapter 5. By contrast, when he quotes from pagan authors (being on firm ground, home ground), he adduces them by name in corroboration (Chapter 7). When he waxes dialectical, however, we meet a more varied array of other persons—not, now, that they are named, but that their representation by pronouns gives each such passage of argument a more fully dialectical animation (Chapter 8).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Milton's Scriptural TheologyConfronting De Doctrina Christiana, pp. 65 - 66Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019