Milton and the English Revolution

By Christopher Hill

In this remarkable book Christopher Hill used the learning gathered in a lifetime’s study of seventeenth-century England to carry out a major reassessment of Milton as man, politician, poet, and above all, religious thinker.  The result is a Milton vastly different from popular imaginings: instead of a gloomy, sexless ‘Puritan’, we have an original thinker, sympathetic to polygamy, even branded with the contemporary reputation of a libertine. In this study, Hill demonstrates how Milton’s religious and political predicament is reflected in the classic poetry of ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Samson Agonistes’.