Date of Graduation
1998
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Type
MA
College
Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
Department
English
Committee Chair
Patrick W. Conner
Abstract
Was John Milton’s prose and poetry in any way influenced by seventeenth-century Anglo-Saxon scholarship? The answer is "yes." Just as John Milton was in dialogue with radical seventeenth-century political groups such as the Levellers and Diggers—a ground-breaking thesis first proposed by Christopher Hill—so Milton was also in dialogue with those academics and antiquarians researching and, in some ways, reinventing the Anglo-Saxon past. Through a close reading of Milton’s first Defense and other selected prose works, as well as the History of Britain and Paradise Lost, this thesis proposes to reexamine an old issue that has never been satisfactorily explicated. In the Defense, Milton is traditionally patriotic, since he praises the Anglo-Saxons for their achievements in government and lawmaking; whereas in the History of Britain, Milton adopts the prophetic style in order to highlight the vices and failures of the pre-Saxon British and Anglo-Saxon peoples. This approach to the history of the Anglo-Saxon period sets him at odds with those among his contemporaries who believed in the Norman Yoke theory. Finally, in Paradise Lost, in abandoning his plans for a proposed Arthuriad, Milton also abandons his plans to make the history of his nation the subject of his great epic poem. Yet Milton does not abandon many of the lessons he learned from his study of the Anglo-Saxon past, which he attempted to impart in the History of Britain. Rather, in Paradise Lost, Milton simply adopts a different form in which to express his educational program. Up until now, scholars approaching the question of how much Milton was influenced by the Anglo-Saxon scholarship of his day have concentrated on the ultimately unanswerable, and perhaps unimportant, question of whether or not Paradise Lost was in part based on the Anglo-Saxon Genesis poem. The much more important question of how much Milton’s work as a whole was influenced by research into the Anglo-Saxon past has been left unanswered.
Recommended Citation
McCrady, Matthew B., "The influence of seventeenth-century Anglo-Saxon scholarship on Milton's prose, "The History of Britain", and "Paradise Lost"." (1998). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 10363.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/10363