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Description of  Single Imperfection: Milton, Marriage and Friendship (Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies)

0820703737 pdf This book takes a fresh look at John Miltons major poems Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, and Paradise Regained and a few of the minor ones in light of a new analysis of Miltons famous tracts on divorce. Luxon contends that Miltons work is best understood as part of a major cultural project in which Milton assumed a leading role the redefinition of Protestant marriage as a heteroerotic version of classical friendship, originally a homoerotic cultural practice. Schooled in the humanist notion that man was created as a godlike being, Milton also believed that what marked man as different from God is loneliness. Miltons reading of Genesis it is not good for man to be alone prescribes a wife as the remedy for this single imperfection, but Milton thought marriage had fallen to such a degraded state that it required a reformation. As a humanist, Milton looked to classical culture, especially to Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, for a more dignified model of human relations friendship. Milton reimagined marriage as a classical friendship, without explicitly conceptualizing the issues of gender construction. Nor did he allow the chief tenet of classical friendship, equality, to claim a place in reformed marriage. Read more