Notes to Chapter 1critiquing various definitions of marriage, he defines it as “a divine institution joyning
man and woman in a love fitly dispos’d to the helps and comforts of domestic life 612.”
119 Pages 661–2. See Sirluck, introduction, CPW II, 156–8.
120 In the Song of Songs he points to the singing “of a thousand raptures between those
two lovely ones [Christ and the Church] farre on the hither side of carnal enjoyment.”
121 See Ann Baynes Coiro, “Milton and Class Identity: The Publication of Areopagitica
and the 1645 Poems,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22 (1992), 261–89.
122 Muslim and pagan cults would seem to fall under Milton’s exclusion but that issue
would hardly arise in seventeenth-century England. Jews would not be targeted if they
were to return to England, given Milton’s recognition of the Hebraic Covenant and
Law as divinely given and perpetual. Milton would have encountered the view that
natural law is embodied in the Noachide laws in Selden’s De Jure Naturali et Gentium
juxta Disciplinam Hebraeorum (Of the Law of Nature and Nations According to the
Rule of the Hebrews) which he cites in the divorce tracts and again in this work.
123 The Seventh Oration of Isocrates, the Areopagiticus, written c. 355 BCE, proposes that
the Areopagus, the Court of the Wise, which had become a criminal court of limited
jurisdiction, again exercise control over education and the censorship of manners.
Isocrates also composed his orations to be read. Milton’s title may allude as well to
Paul’s address to the Athenians on the hill called Areopagus, identifying the God he
declares to them with the “unknown god” to whom they have erected a shrine (Acts
17:18–34).
124 See Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, NJ, 1994),
3–70.
125 Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 125–39.
126 Milton quotes lines 438–41, in Greek and then in English. See Annabel Patterson,
Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern Eng-
land (Madison, Wis., 1984), 115–16.
127 Milton’s tract especially addresses the Erastian MPs, led by Selden, who were con-
cerned to prevent further Presbyterian encroachment on parliament’s control over the
church.
128 Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, 58–67.
129 Pages 514–16. As Sirluck notes (CPW II, 516) the Palmer did not accompany Guyon
to Mammon’s cave (as he did to the Bower of Bliss); Milton’s mistake stems from his
belief that reason must always dictate virtuous choice.
130 See Nigel Smith, “Areopagitica: Voicing Contexts, 1643–45,” in David Loewenstein
and James Grantham Turner, eds, Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose
(Cambridge, 1990), 103–22.
131 Page 563. See Faerie Queene III, passim, and for Proteus, Book III, canto viii.
132 Pages 553–4. The next sentence sounds like a prediction of imminent apocalypse:
“We reck’n more then five months yet to harvest; there need not be five weeks, had
we but eyes to lift up, the fields are white already” (554). But the allusion (John 4:35)
is to preaching and gathering a harvest of prepared souls: “Say not ye, there are yet
four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and
look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.” Why Milton changed four
months to five is unclear.
Notes to Chapter 6