McGill-Queen's University Press Milton's Leveller God

Three and a half centuries after Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain’d were written, do Milton’s epic poems still resonate with contemporary concerns? In Milton’s Leveller God, David Williams advances a progressive and democratic interpretation of Milton’s epics to show they are more relevant than ever. Exploring two blind spots in the critical tradition – the failure to read Milton’s poetry as drama and to recognize his depictions of heaven’s political and social evolution – Williams reads Milton’s “great argument” as a rejection of social hierarchy and of patriarchal government that is more attuned to the radical political thought developed by the Levellers during the English Revolution. He traces echoes between Milton’s texts and thousands of pages of Leveller writings that advocated for popular rule, extended suffrage, and religious tolerance, arguing that Milton’s God is still the unacknowledged ground of popular sovereignty. Williams demonstrates that Milton’s Leveller sympathies, expressed in his early prose, conflicted with his official duties for Oliver Cromwell’s government in the 1650s, but his association with the journalist Marchamont Nedham later freed him to imagine an egalitarian republic. In a work that connects the great epic poet in new ways to the politics of his time and our own, Milton’s Leveller God shows how the political landscape of Milton’s work fundamentally unsettles ancient hierarchies of soul and body, man and woman, reason and will, and ruler and ruled. Review "This beautifully written book is one that all scholars of Milton will have no choice but to read and contend with." John Rogers, Yale University "Williams's elegant prose recreates for a modern reader the excitement that must have been part of what politics was like in that brief period when England was a republic in the middle of the seventeenth century. Putting free will at the centre of Milton's thought is a common enough tactic among Milton scholars, but here, in Williams's meticulous account, it means revising his theology to the point that God himself (or itself) becomes a Leveller. Heaven is political." Times Literary Supplement From the Author David Williams is a retired professor of English at St Paul’s College at the University of Manitoba and the author of Media, Memory, and the First World War. About the Author David Williams is a retired professor of English at St Paul s College at the University of Manitoba and the author of Media, Memory, and the First World War.