“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645injurious and unnaturall tribute that can be extorted from a person endew’d with
reason, [is] to be made to pay out the best substance of his body, and of his soul too,
as some think, when either for just and powerfull causes he cannot like, or from
unequall causes finds not recompence” (CPW II, 271). Here, semen is the quintes-
sence, not of an excrement but of both soul and body.
Milton insists that “not to be belov’d, and yet retain’d, is the greatest injury to a
gentle spirit” (DDD 1, 152), which none can rightly estimate “unlesse he have a
soul gentle anough, and spacious anough to contemplate what is true love” (CPW
II, 333). Behind all this is a rather remarkable critique of contemporary gender
norms that recalls the protest of the Cambridge student who so scornfully objected
in Prolusion VI to a definition of masculinity based on frequenting taverns and
brothels.^70 He also challenges the near-universal designation of adultery as the grav-
est affront to marriage and to masculine honor:
For that fault committed [adultery] argues not alwaies a hatred either natural or inci-
dental against whom it is committed; neither does it inferre a disability of all future
helpfulnes, or loyalty, or loving agreement, being once past, and pardon’d, where it
can be pardon’d.... a grave and prudent Law of Moses... contains a cause of divorce
greater beyond compare then that for adultery... this being but a transient injury,
and soon amended, I mean as to the party against whom the trespasse is. (331–3)Milton’s ideal of a wife as a “fit conversing soul” challenges conventional belief that
her value resides essentially in her physical beauty, chastity, and fertility. And he
flatly denies the assumption that a man can easily separate sexual pleasure from the
realm of emotion and intellect: “where the minde and person pleases aptly, there
some unaccomplishment of the bodies delight may be better born with, than when
the minde hangs off in an unclosing disproportion, though the body be as it ought;
for there all corporall delight will soon become unsavoury and contemptible” (DDD
1, 148).
On or before June 5, 1644 Milton published an eight-page tractate, simply headed
Of Education, To Master Samuel Hartlib, couched as a letter to that émigré scholar
from Elbing, who had become a one-man institution for scholarly and scientific
exchange among scholars in England and abroad. Hartlib was involved with projects
for educational reform at all levels, as well as libraries, foundations for the poor,
scientific discoveries and inventions, and schemes for promoting Protestant unity;
his circle of associates forms a link between Bacon and the post-Restoration Royal
Society.^71 This time Milton’s tract was registered and officially licensed, but its
brevity and its format – without title page, author’s name, or publication data –
suggests that it was privately printed for limited circulation to the Hartlib circle and
perhaps a few others. Milton evidently decided not to interrupt his focus on di-
vorce to work out his educational ideas in the detail necessary for public presenta-
tion.
He probably came to know Hartlib sometime between April and September,