“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645incompatibility and emphasis on “fit conversation,”^99 and likens Milton’s paean to
marriage as a “Mystery of Love” to the “wilde, mad, and franticke divinitie” of the
Antinomian women preachers of Aldgate. His strongest arguments call attention to
practical issues Milton ignores: the plight of the children of divorced couples, the
wife’s legal rights and how to enforce them, and the social disgrace a divorced wife
would suffer.^100
When this reply appeared, Milton’s Areopagitica, published about November 23,
1644, was already in press. That tract was also prompted by personal experience –
the fact that Milton’s divorce tracts fell foul of the new licensing ordinance – but he
also claimed to voice the “generall murmur” of many learned authors who “loaded
me with entreaties and perswasions” to serve as their spokesman (CPW II, 539).
Constructed as an oration to parliament, Areopagitica came forth without printer’s
or bookseller’s names – too dangerous for them – but with Milton’s name boldly
inscribed on the title page: Areopagitica; a Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of
Unlicenc’d Printing, To the Parlament of England.^101 As everyone knows, Milton’s ar-
gument, couched in poetic imagery and high rhetoric, has become a cornerstone in
the liberal defense of freedom of speech, press, and thought. Its argument and art
are discussed on pages 190–7.
Areopagitica calls for the free circulation and conflict of ideas and for broad though
not absolute religious toleration, representing these as essential preconditions for
the development of free citizens. Specifically, he calls for parliament to replace its
new order for prior censorship of books with that of January 29, 1642, which
simply required registration of authors’ or printers’ names (and thereby helped se-
cure their rights).^102 Milton has only scorn for his former Presbyterian colleagues
who have forgotten their own experience of persecution and now seek to be in-
quisitors themselves (CPW II, 568–9). He castigates the Stationers Company, as
idle “patentees and monopolizers” seeking to retain their monopoly in the book trade
and to make vassals of authors and printers who “labour in an honest profession to
which learning is indetted.”^103 Intellectually he associates himself with the parlia-
mentary Erastians and their leader John Selden, as well as with Independents and
Sectaries whose watchword was toleration. During these months he probably came
to know personally some of the radicals linked with him as proper targets for cen-
sorship: John Goodwin, Roger Williams, and Richard Overton.
Areopagitica, like Of Education, is concerned with preparing citizens for the re-
formed commonwealth in the making, envisioned as an aristocratic republic, not a
monarchy. In the education tractate, Milton sketched out the humanist principles
and plan of studies that would best prepare upper-class youth for future leadership
roles. In Areopagitica he proposed continuous unrestricted reading, writing, and
disputation to exercise mature citizens in making the free choices through which
they will grow in knowledge and virtue, learn to value liberty, and act to secure it
in the state. Milton’s highly structured course of study in Of Education might seem
at odds with the intellectual freedom Areopagitica celebrates. But Milton clearly