Milton's Leveller God
A look at political evolution in Milton’s epic poems, from feudal monarchy to Leveller-style democracy in heaven and on earth.
Three and a half centuries after Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain’d were written, do Milton’s epic poems still resonate with contemporary concerns? In Milton’s Leveller God, David Williams advances a progressive and democratic interpretation of Milton’s epics to show they are more relevant than ever.
Exploring two blind spots in the critical tradition - the failure to read Milton’s poetry as drama and to recognize his depictions of heaven’s political and social evolution - Williams reads Milton’s “great argument” as a rejection of social hierarchy and of patriarchal government that is more attuned to the radical political thought developed by the Levellers during the English Revolution. He traces echoes between Milton’s texts and thousands of pages of Leveller writings that advocated for popular rule, extended suffrage, and religious tolerance, arguing that Milton’s God is still the unacknowledged ground of popular sovereignty. Williams demonstrates that Milton’s Leveller sympathies, expressed in his early prose, conflicted with his official duties for Oliver Cromwell’s government in the 1650s, but his association with the journalist Marchamont Nedham later freed him to imagine an egalitarian republic.
In a work that connects the great epic poet in new ways to the politics of his time and our own, Milton’s Leveller God shows how the political landscape of Milton’s work fundamentally unsettles ancient hierarchies of soul and body, man and woman, reason and will, and ruler and ruled.
"David Williams has written a closely argued and original book that anyone with an interest in either Milton or the Levellers will want to read. Milton's Leveller God is a scholarly and valuable addition to the discussion of democratic and republican ideas in the seventeenth century and an important corrective to less radical interpretations of Milton's epic poetry." Milton Quarterly
"[Milton's Leveller God] enriches our view of the development of the poem while challenging us with a clear political thesis. [Williams's] extensive engagement with Leveller writings also adds depth and breadth to our knowledge of the period. Highly recommended to all students of early modern radical writing, republicanism, history, theology, and Milton." English Studies in Canada
"When Williams turns to the text of 'Paradise Lost,' no reader will be unmoved, since he presents perhaps the most grandly revisionist reading the poem since Fish's 'Surprised by Sin.'" Renaissance and Reformation
"[Milton's Leveller God] is a powerful corrective to the assumption that Milton's thought and poetic practice was not significantly shaped by the populist, progressive, and hopeful political thought of the Levellers. John Foxe's 'Acts and Monuments' supplied Milton with the definitive print model of how readers can be gathered - in their own acts of 'labourious gathering' - into a Leveller community of equals." Studies in English Literature
"Williams's elegant prose recreates for a modern reader the excitement that must have been part of what politics was like in that brief period when England was a republic in the middle of the seventeenth century. Putting free will at the centre of Milton's thought is a common enough tactic among Milton scholars, but here, in Williams's meticulous account, it means revising his theology to the point that God himself (or itself) becomes a Leveller. Heaven is political." Times Literary Supplement
"This beautifully written book is one that all scholars of Milton will have no choice but to read and contend with." John Rogers, Yale University