Scholarship
"Public Reason Just”: Reason, Freedom and Sacrifice in Paradise Lost and the English Revolution
Milton Studies, 2022
(under review)
This essay argues for a reassessment of what Milton is doing with Reason in Paradise Lost (1674). More specifically, I try to show that the poem engages with a formative conflict of huge importance for the development of liberal society in England, a conflict in which the meaning of Reason as a universalising evaluative concept was socially and ideologically contested. The second part of my argument is that it does so deliberately. Overall, my case relies, first, on the claim that the various invocations of Reason in Paradise Lost can be differentiated in terms of specific historical events and contexts; and, secondly, on the claim that these invocations are patterned within the poem in such a way as to reflect the historical dynamics of a contest over reason that was a central feature of the English Revolution.
Breaking The Church: George Herbert's Problem with "Obedience"
Studies in Philology, 2020
This essay begins by asking why, in revising, restructuring, and extending his work in the Bodleian Manuscript, George Herbert broke the original sequence of The Church after "Obedience." I then offer a speculative response to this question based on a close reading of "Obedience" and an effort to historicize its theological and social content. Ultimately, I argue that "Obedience" not only marks a theological impasse that was decisive for Herbert's restructuring of The Church in the Bodleian manuscript, but additionally, and crucially, that it shows us how his poetry and theology were vitally responsive to changing social and class relations in England during the early seventeenth century.
Poetics of Obedience: John Donne’s “A Litanie” and the Oath of Allegiance Controversy (1606–1610)
Modern Philology, 2017
This essay re-evaluates one of John Donne’s early religious poems, written during a prolonged “crisis of nothingness.” I examine some aspects of the Litany’s liturgical history and establish some of the form’s historical meanings at the turn of the seventeenth century in England. In so doing I propose a discursive field that I believe Donne wished to negotiate in “A Litanie,” one pertaining to questions of communal identity and exclusion, and one that clearly frames this devotional poem within the context of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, the Oath of Allegiance controversy, and the poet’s impending conformity to the English Church.