“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645schooling; and like a glad youth in wandring vacancy, may keep her hollidaies to joy
and harmles pastime: which as she cannot well doe without company, so in no com-
pany so well as where the different sexe in most resembling unlikenes, and most
unlike resemblance cannot but please best and be pleas’d in the aptitude of that vari-
ety. (596–7)This formulation seems an unfortunate restriction of the ideal of “fit conversation,”
but it is worth noting that Milton’s examples are Wisdom playing before the Al-
mighty (Proverbs 8), and the “ravishment and erring fondness” in wedded leisures
described in the Song of Songs (597).^120
Milton knew some women capable of more than intelligent playfulness. Sonnet
IX praised a studious, religious young woman, actual or ideal, who devoted herself
to the things of the mind and the spirit. Sonnet X praised his married friend Lady
Margaret Ley as the remarkable embodiment of her father’s noble virtues. He comes
close to rethinking gender roles in Tetrachordon when, probably thinking of such
cases, he allows for “particular exceptions” to the norms of marital hierarchy: “if
she exceed her husband in prudence and dexterity, and he contentedly yeeld... a
superior and more naturall law comes in, that the wiser should govern the lesse
wise, whether male or female” (589). As early as Prolusion VI he was ready to
challenge stereotypes of masculinity in defence of his own values and lifestyle; and
in the divorce tracts he is led by common experience, and his own experience, to
challenge conventional assumptions about love, sex, marriage, and adultery, and to
recognize how social customs and constraints militate against choosing a mate wisely.
Experience also led him to formulate this exception to gender hierarchy for supe-
rior women but, as the terms of his formulation indicate, he cannot break free of
the ideology of hierarchy, which must sabotage his companionate ideal, to embrace
the gender equality which alone could realize it. That concept had to await another
century.
Milton’s most literary and most enduring tract, Areopagitica, transforms the Ren-
aissance genre of “Advice to Princes” into a republican advice to a council or
senate. He links the concept of civic humanism rooted in classical republicanism to
the Puritan prophetic vision of England as a New Israel, challenging parliament and
the English people to realize that ideal at this propitious historical moment. Specifi-
cally, they should replace their new licensing ordinance for the pre-publication
censorship of books with one simply requiring the name of the publisher and/or
author and guaranteeing copyright. The liberty he proposes is far-reaching but not
absolute: his metaphor of the censor as a cross-legged Juno preventing a birth offers
to protect manuscripts at delivery but assumes that after they emerge they can and
should fend for themselves in the marketplace of ideas.^121 Like humans they may be
prosecuted for libel and “mischief” (apparently scandal and sedition), after publica-
tion and by due legal process (CPW II, 491, 569).
Milton’s anti-licensing position also involves tolerating religious dissent, so Milton’s