Annual Milton Lecture 2018: The Starry Messenger: Milton v. the New Science

The Milton Lecture is organised by the Friends of Milton's Cottage

Venue: Mercers Hall, Ironmonger Lane, London EC2
Date: 15 March 2018, at 1800
Speaker: Dr William Poole, fellow of New College, Oxford

In Paradise Lost (1667) the blind poet John Milton (1608-1674) reimagined the human drama of the Fall of Man, but located within a cosmic setting, where the tragedy in the garden is juxtaposed with voyages through chaos, battles in heaven, and the creation of the material universe itself. 

Milton exerts himself to make the universe of his poem a consistent and coherent one, replete with discussions about not just morality and theology, but astronomy and physics. How ‘scientific’ is Milton, then? He was obviously fascinated by the theories of Galileo, whom he had met in Italy in the 1630s. He was also intelligently interested in the controversies within matter theory in his own day. Was the universe reducible to atoms and space? Are ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ different things or just different types of the same thing? Does the Earth go around the Sun or vice versa? These were controversial questions in Milton’s time, and Milton’s views, not often easily extractable from his epic verse, remain a matter of controversy too. 

In this talk I will examine Milton’s interests in, and sympathies for, the ‘New Science’ — but also his worries and his disagreements. We often like to enlist our favourite writers for what we think are the progressive movements of the day; but we should be careful of forcing a modernism upon Milton that he does not want. The real picture is more complex, and more interesting.

Admission donation £5.

Further details available from Dr K C Sugden

Annual Milton Lecture: Armchair Revolutionary

9 March 2016, 18.00pm, organised on behalf of the Friends of Milton's Cottage.

Place: Mercers Company, Ironmonger Lane, London EC2V 8HE — nearest tube St Paul's. (Before Henry VIII gave it to the Mercers, part of this building housed the convent where Thomas à Becket had been a novice.)

Programme:

Joad Raymond (Professor of Renaissance Studies, Queen Mary, University of London) will speak on 'Milton: Armchair Revolutionary'

Prof Raymond, who has worked on seventeenth-century pamphleteering, will discuss Milton's work for the republican government and his rise to international fame.

The lecture will be followed by a reception upstairs.

ADMISSION

For reasons of security, the Mercers Company requires a list of audience members. So anyone wishing to attend MUST NOTIFY Dr Keith Sugden (keith sugden <keith.sugden@hotmail.co.uk>) BY 3 MARCH.

There is no formal admission charge but members of the audience are invited to make a donation in support of Milton's Cottage, a grade one listed Elizabethan house in Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire, which is run by an independent charity and is open to the public.