ABSTRACTS

Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism – Edited by Michael Lieb and Albert C. Labriola

Matthew Allen. “‘Entertaining the Irksome Hours’: Paradise Lost 2.521–76 as the Fallen Counterpart of Milton's Curriculum in Of Education.”Peter Auksi. “‘Considerate Building’: The Scriptural Roots of Areopagitica.”Andrew T. Barnaby. “‘Reason is but choosing’: Moral Agency and the Call to Discipleship in Milton's Readie and Easie Way.”Nancy K. Barnard. “‘In Mind Prepared’: Proclaiming the Kingdom of God in Paradise Lost.”R. D. Bedford. “Irony in L ‘Allegro and Il Penseroso.”Tony Bellette. “Milton and the Baroque: A Reassessment.”Joan Heiges Blythe. “Sex‐Marked Direct Objects of Desire in Paradise Lost.”David Boocker. “Milton at Vallombrosa.”James B. Brophy. “Blake's Reinterpretation of Comus: Charity Regained.”Lana Cable. “The Politics of Decorum in Protestant Satire and Milton's Polemics.”Douglas Chambers. “Improved by Tract of Time: Art's Synopticon in Paradise Lost 12.”Alexander Chameyev and Nina Diakonova. “Byron's Manfred and Romantic Milton Worship.”Annemarie Christy. “Satan, Sin, and Death: A Paradigm of the Incestuous Family.”Thomas N. Corns, Lou Burnard, and Roy Flannagan. “Electronic Miltons, Past, Present, and To Come.”Denise Cuthbert. “Milton, Marvell and Queen Christina.”R. W. Desai. “The Human Norm in Paradise Lost: Thus measuring things in Heav‘n by things on Earth.’”Jackie Di Salvo. “Manly Reformation in Samson Agonistes.”Martin K. Doudna. “‘In Our Image’: Father and Son in Paradise Lost.”Charles W. Durham. “Satan and the Hierarchy of Hell in Paradise Lost.”Angela Esterhammer. “Words, Worlds, and Speech Acts: A Miltonic Poetics of Creation.”J. Martin Evans. “Milton's Imperial Epic.”Robert T. Fallon. “The ‘Mole’ and the ‘Lanthorn’: Milton's State Letter to Tuscany.”Ida Fasel. “The Dialectic of the Oxymoron in Paradise Lost.”Noam Flinker. “Pagan Holiday and National Conflict: A Philistine Reading of Samson Agonistes.”Claire Fowler. “The Commonwealth ‘miscalled’: Iconoclasm and Mythography in Eikonoklastes.”Coburn Freer. “A Victorian Poetic Critique of Milton.”Donald M. Friedman. “‘Sex’ in Paradise Lost.”Bryan N. S. Gooch. “Handel's L'Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato: A Reassessment.”Achsah Guibbory. “Idolatrous Images, Imitation, and True Creation in Milton's Eikonoklastes.”John K. Hale. “The Pre‐Criticism of Milton's Latin Verse, Illustrated from the Ode Ad Joannem Rousium.”R. F. Hall. “Pronouns, Tenses, and Fluidity in the Nativity Ode.”Gary D. Hamilton. “Paradise Regained and the Private Houses.”Philip Hardie. “Milton's Reading of Lucretius and the Reader in Lucretius.”J. P. Hardy. “The Tempter Foiled.”Dayton Haskin. “Choosing the Better Part with Mary and with Ruth.”Burton Hatlen. “When God Smiles: Paradise Lost 8.311–559.”Wyman H. Herendeen. “Milton's Accedence Commenc't Grammar and the Deconstruction of Grammatical Tyranny.”T. H. Howard‐Hill. “Milton and Contemporary Theatre: An Investigation of Experience and Influence.”Keith N. Hull. “Rhyme and Disorder in Samson Agonistes.”Lee M. Johnson. “Language and the Illusion of Innocence in Paradise Lost.”Motohiro Kisaichi. “Comus and the Proserpina Myth.”Thomas A. Langford. “‘That one talent which is death to hide’: The Poet as Teacher.”John Leonard. “Milton's Vow of Celibacy: A Reconsideration of the Evidence.”Walter S. H. Lim. “What Happens When God Doesn't Speak in Samson Agonistes?”Peter Lindenbaum. “The Poet in the Marketplace: Milton and Samuel Simmons.”David Loewenstein. “Paradise Lost and the Politics of Rebellion.”Bei‐Yei Loh. “Lycidas as the Manifesto of a Divinely Dedicated Scholar‐Poet and ‘Church‐outed’ Reformer.”Kristin Pruitt McColgan. “Abundant Gifts: Hierarchy and Reciprocity in Paradise Lost.”Donald Peter McDonough. “The Iconography of Milton's expulsion Scene.”Polly Mander. “The Charms of Milton's Ludlow Masque.”Catherine Gimelli Martin. “The ‘Artifice of Eternity’: The Return(s) of a Miltonic Metaphor.”Christopher Martin. “Contending with the Cyclops: Nobodies and Somebodies in the Defensio Secunda.”Michael A. Mikolajczak. “Milton's ‘Reformed’ Heaven.”Janel Mueller. “Dateline: London, May 1641. Byline: John Milton, English Republican.”Brian J. Opie. “Urania Revisited.”Ted‐Larry Pebworth. “‘Conversation with His Like’: Masculine Friendship in Paradise Lost.”G. Nageswara Rao. “Christ as ‘Poornapragna.’”David Reid. “Free Obedience and Freedom from Constraint in Paradise Lost.”Stella P. Revard. “Alpheus, Arethusa, and the Pindaric Pursuit in Lycidas.”Lawrence F. Rhu. “Milton's Change of Note: Italian Precedents for Tragedy in Eden.”David Robertson. “Soliloquy and Self‐Creation in Paradise Lost.”John P. Rumrich. “Milton Criticism and the Matter of Chaos.”Peggy Samuels. “Samson Agonistes and English Renaissance Closet Drama.”Malabika Sarkar. “Milton's Satan and the Renaissance Magus‐Astronomer.”Michael C. Schoenfeldt. “‘So Absolute She Seems’: Authority and Desire in Paradise Lost.”Paul R. Sellin. “Alexander Morus in Court: Some Insight into Milton's Polemics in Pro Se Defensio.”Hideyuki Shitaka. “The Aeneid and the Bible in Paradise Lost.”Louise Simons. “The Prairie as Eden: The Miltonic Cooper.”Ken Simpson. “The Discipline of the Word in Milton's Anti‐Episcopal Tracts.”Michael R. G. Spiller. “Directing the Audience in Samson Agonistes.”Claude J. Summers. “The (Homo)Sexual Temptation of Paradise Regained.”Margo Swiss. “Satan's Obduracy in Paradise Lost.”John S. Tanner. “Adam's Doom: Knowing Good by Evil in Milton's Eden.”Roberta White. “Milton's Presence in the Poetry of Nemerov and Berryman.”Michael Wilding. “‘Their Sex Not Equal Seem'd’: Equality in Paradise Lost.”Susanne Woods. “Milton's Poetic Authority and Early Protestant Women Poets.”

The paper aims to explore how the opposing thrones between God and Satan spread out in dreams in John Milton's Paradise Lost. Dreams regarded as fields for Satan to induce Eve make Satan temporarily win the battle; however, God turns the tables with little effort to subjugate Satan by appearing in Adam and Eve's dreams. In Milton's elaboration of Paradise Lost, God the father, the incarnation of morality represents supreme power in universe. Howbeit, Satan not only embraces the image of the representative of evilness but plays the embodiment of the root of human crime. Due to the hatred out of jealously, dissemination with malevolent rumor against God becomes Satan's measure to persuade falling angels that they should possess equal status with God instead of being inferior to God. Furthermore, Satan incarnates himself as animals to induce Eve to rebel against doctrines and orders made by God. Impressively, images of evilness and goodness both appear in Eve and Adam's dreams reflecting the tug of war between justice and injustice. Dreams symbolize the space of the universe containing positive and negative power. Disregarding the influence of biblical works and other relevant elements in accord with Milton's imagination, the issue of the opposed thrones between God and Satan plays a pivotal role in enriching the epic.

John Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained are among the most profound epic poems in the English literary canon. Paradise Lost recounts the dramatic and compelling story of humanity's fall from grace a narrative filled with rebellion, betrayal, and the battle between innocence and corruption. This epic depicts an intense struggle between God and Satan for control over humanity’s fate, spanning the realms of Heaven, Hell, and Earth. Central to this conflict are Adam and Eve, whose susceptibility to temptation lies at the heart of mankind's downfall, orchestrated by Satan and his band of rebel angels. Published in 1667, Paradise Lost vividly portrays Satan’s defiance, his expulsion from Heaven, and his cunning role in leading Adam and Eve into sin, thereby causing their exile from Eden. Its sequel, Paradise Regained (1671), shifts focus to Christ’s unwavering resolve during Satan’s efforts to tempt Him in the wilderness. Where the former epic depicts humanity's fall through disobedience, the latter celebrates redemption by highlighting Christ’s triumphant resistance. Together, the two works present a striking contrast while Paradise Lost illustrates the origin of sin; Paradise Regained reveals the victory over it through steadfast faith and moral fortitude in the face of temptations like lust, pride, and power. These epics aim to assert “Eternal Providence” and illuminate the divine purpose by justifying “the ways of God to men.” In Paradise Lost, Milton narrates the descent of Satan and his followers into Hell’s inferno, Satan’s subsequent escape to Eden’s untainted beauty, and his insidious manipulation of Eve, which ultimately leads to Adam’s choice to share in her fate. Yet even amid humanity’s tragic fall, there remains a promise of redemption. In Paradise Regained, Milton explores Satan’s attempts to undermine Jesus’ mission by tempting Him with worldly power, culminating in a greater triumph as Christ emerges victorious. Together, these epics celebrate the Son as a resplendent hero the ultimate conqueror over sin and death, who reconciles mankind with God. Read as a cohesive narrative, these masterpieces not only exalt the Son’s glory but also provide profound reflections on faith, temptation, and salvation.

'Threshold Poetics: Milton and Intersubjectivity' is a study of the challenge intersubjective experience poses to doctrinal formulations of difference. Focusing on 'Paradise Lost' and 'Samson Agonistes' and using feminist and relational psychoanalytic theory, the project examines representations of looking, working, eating, conversing, and touching, to argue that encounters between selves in 'threshold space' dismantle the binary oppositions that support categorical thinking. A key term throughout the study is recognition, defined as the capacity to tolerate both sameness and difference between separate selves. Recognition of likeness-in-difference thus undermines the exclusionary logic of patriarchal and poitical hierarchies. Both Eve and Dalila demonstrate the ability to respect the borders of the other while seeking out similarity, but where 'Paradise Lost' depicts the eventual achievements of intersubjective understanding between Adam and Eve after the fall, 'Samson Agonistes' records its failure when Samson, maintaining the boundaries of difference, refuses Dalila's effort to make contact.

Reviewed by: Privacy in the Age of Shakespeare by Ronald Huebert Frank Swannack Huebert, Ronald, Privacy in the Age of Shakespeare, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2016; cloth; pp. 352; 11 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. CA $65.00; ISBN 9781442647916. Ronald Huebert begins the introduction with Sir John Harington's The Prayse of Private Life. He argues Harington's prose treatise reveals that privacy has renewed importance in 'the age of Shakespeare', which he defines as the period 1516–1667 (p. 4). This range refers to Sir Thomas More's challenge to privacy in Utopia, and John Milton's spiritual privacy in Paradise Lost. In Chapter 1, Huebert investigates what privacy means to Shakespeare. In Hamlet, Huebert finds a dichotomy between private and public spaces. He examines the invasion of private thoughts through overhearing Hamlet's soliloquies, and of space such as Ophelia's closet. In Twelfth Night, Huebert analyses the anxiety of misinterpreting the inner self, in particular, Olivia's veil and Malvolio's attempt to protect his privacy from Feste, Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Chapter 2 charts a spiritual interiority for both Protestants and Catholics. Huebert examines the prayer closet to argue that the dichotomies of 'Protestant and Catholic, male and female, body and soul' are dissolved(p. 61). He shows this through a close analysis of Christ's agony in the garden, and the spiritual allegory positing Christian souls as Christ's bride. The chapter ends with an investigation of John Saltmarsh's private devotions. Saltmarsh privileges the soul to the point where his flesh is superfluous to private spiritual needs. Chapter 3 focuses on voyeurism. Through the story of Diana and Actaeon in Ovid's Metamorphoses and the History of Susanna in the Apocrypha, Huebert demonstrates how the male voyeur's intrusion of female privacy ends in his death. After examining poetic striptease, Huebert delivers an inspired reading of Much Ado About Nothing. He argues persuasively that Claudio is a voyeur through the way he observes and discusses Hero. Huebert reads Beatrice's passionate command to Benedick to kill Claudio as following the same pattern. Chapter 4 has an experimental, even voyeuristic, tone as Huebert analyses commonplace books. His fascinating rationale is that texts in manuscript form reveal more of the private self than their published counterparts. These less well known works capture a sense of undisturbed private thoughts, as they are not shaped by a history of critical reading in the public domain. With Chapter 5, Huebert investigates whether early modern men and women share a similar understanding of privacy. Lady Anne Clifford's diary reveals a woman who endured a privacy of isolation. Her husband is frequently absent and, when at home, he often retreats into his private study. In contrast to her husband, Clifford's reading of literature and needlework are constantly monitored and interrupted. In a diary by John Ramsey, he is always on the [End Page 217] move and rarely with his family. He only mentions one of his eight children. Huebert concludes that early modern women occupy a shadowy exposed privacy, while men enjoy travelling and private meditative retreats. Chapter 6 examines utopic privacy. In More's Utopia, Huebert discovers an exposed society where privacy is seen as encouraging abusive practices. He then examines Adam and Eve's bower in Milton's Paradise Lost. The Garden of Eden allows intimate privacy for a sexual relationship free from the sin of voyeurism. Chapter 7 investigates if privacy protected early modern heterodoxy. Christopher Marlowe's Edward II reveals the king's desire for privacy to spend time alone with Piers Gaveston. Huebert then examines how Galileo's discovery of a heliocentric universe led to enforced privacy. John Donne's Roman Catholic background and public position as Anglican priest are scrutinized. His poetry published posthumously reveals he considered God's love universal, not subject to affiliation. Huebert establishes that early modern privacy meant cooperating superficially with authority through textual ambiguity. Chapter 8 examines privacy in Andrew Marvell's poetry and prose. Huebert argues that Marvell needed privacy for his dubious erotic tastes, though he finds complexity in Marvell's poetry he terms 'the grammar of supposition and surmise...

H. Sylvia Anthony. “Mercurius Politicus.”Bruce P. Baker, II. “Ironic Contrasts in Milton's Paradise of Fools.”Paul J. Dolan. “Milton and Eliot: A Common Source.”Ann Gossman. “The Use of the Tree of Life in Paradise Lost.”John Huntley. “A Revaluation of the Chorus' Role in Milton's Samson Agonistes.”Lawrence W. Hyman. “Milton's Samson and the Modern Reader.”Harry Levin. “Paradises, Heavenly and Earthly.”George W. Nitchie. “Lycidas: a Footnote.”John T. Shawcross. “The Author of ‘A Postscript’.”J.M. Steadman. “Demetrius, Tasso, and Stylistic Variations in Paradise Lost.”J.M. Steadman. “‘Magnific Titles’: Satan's Rhetoric and the Argument of Nobility.”Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. “Blake's Philosophy of Contraries: A New Source.”

This study challenges traditional accounts of the origins of modern Anglo-American culture by focusing on the emergence of print culture in England and the North American colonies. It postulates a modern middle class that consisted of authors and intellectuals who literally wrote a new culture into being. Milton's Paradise Lost marks the emergence of this new literacy. The authors show how Milton helped transform English culture into one of self-enclosed families made up of self-enclosed individuals. However, the authors point out that the popularity of Paradise Lost was matched by that of the Indian captivity narratives that flowed into England from the American colonies. Mary Rowlandson's account of her forcible separation from the culture of her origins stresses the ordinary person's ability to regain those origins, provided she remains truly English. In a colonial version of the Miltonic paradigm, Rowlandson sought to return to a family of individuals much like the one on Milton's depiction of the fallen world. Thus the origin both of modern English culture and of the English novel are located in North America. America captivity narratives formulated the ideal of personal life that would be reproduced in the communities depicted by Defoe, Richardson, and later domestic fiction.

This chapter examines conventional views of Renaissance allegory, focusing on the materiality of allegorical figures in John Milton and Francis Bacon. Modern theorists such as Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault have shown how the status of knowledge changed radically in the seventeenth century. The chapter explores the changes in the allegorical mode as expressions of this epistemological shift and looks at the implications for particular allegorical figures in Milton's Paradise Lost as well as their ideological originals in Bacon's Advancement of Learning. It argues that allegorical significance is contingent not only on an absent meaning, but also on a material presence. The chapter also offers a reading of Bacon's two fables in The Wisdom of the Ancients, namely, “Cupid, or the Atom” and “Coelum, or the Origin of Things,” both of which appear to have influenced Milton's rejection of Augustine's ex nihilo creation theory.

A remarkable strategy of Wollstonecraft's cultural criticism, especially on the state of women, is her method of reading society as a text, a “prevailing opinion,” so she calls it in the title of chapter V of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. To regard the regulating forms of social existence as “opinion,” and not a dictate of divine law or natural order, is to identify a human construction – a set of ideas and practices – that may be subject to critical reading, to revision, to rewriting. Wollstonecraft's method of cultural criticism is at once assisted and logically enabled by her actual literary criticism, applied to such prestigious texts as John Milton's Paradise Lost (and its biblical bases), Alexander Pope's epistle To a Lady, Of the Characters of Women, Samuel Richardson's epic novel Clarissa, J.-J. Rousseau's influential “education” novels, Emile and Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, and such works of patriarchal advice as Dr. James Fordyce's Sermons to Young Women and Dr. John Gregory's A Father's Legacy to His Daughters. Reading the social text and its literary instances,Wollstonecraft sets her sights, and trains ours, on a lexicon (cherished by poets) by which women are flattered into subjection – innocent, delicate, beautiful, feminine – to expose a specious syntax of faint praise for “fair defects” of character and a suspect reverence for “angels” and “girls” rather than respect as capable, intelligent adults. She is particularly sharp on how notions of natural are summoned to rationalize a social text: worn into “the effect of habit,” a social system is “insisted upon as an undoubted indication of nature” (VRW 5:150). “Such is the order of nature,” Rousseau intones of man's claims to women's obedience (except in matters of pleasure, where she “naturally” directs him). Taking the form of factual statement about “the order of nature,” such assertions conceal a structure of values and power relations, what modern cultural critique would call “ideology.”

Wordsworth's last quarto, by the way, is bigger Than any since the birthday of typography, A drowsy frowzy poem, call'd the `Excursion,' Writ in a manner which is my aversion. (Don Juan 3.94)(1) WHAT MIGHT WELL BE CALLED APPLIED LANGAN. IN RESPONDING to Understanding Media in 1805: Audiovisual Hallucination in The Lay of the Last Minstrel I will do little more than place a frame Langan's brilliant suggestion that need to unravel the Lay as an allegorical history of the transformation of poetry by the book--that is, by the print (63). I will play out her meditations on the connection between blank verse and print by returning with her to the first blank verse in English, and then moving beyond Scott to Keats and Byron, closing with a brief discussion of the role of Coleridge in the publication of The Lay of the Last Minstrel. The heart of Langan's provocative reading of the Lay is a complex set of claims about the relationship between print and blank verse, the oral and the written, sound and silence: If the poem leaves untold the story of blank verse's origin, it suggests how blank verse--invented to translate the dead letters of Latin poetry into vernacular language--comes to define a literary vernacular that signals, evokes, or mediates, rather than records, the aural component of poetry. We fully understand the point of Scott's nostalgic evocation of an oral poetic tradition, in other words, only in recognizing how the print medium turns all verse into a blank and silent screen. (63) A dazzling extension from the seemingly gratuitous appearance of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey within the song of the fictional bard Fitztraver in Canto Six of the Lay enables Langan to seize the vision of his beloved Geraldine that the alchemist Cornelius Agrippa offers Surrey in Fitztraver's song as both a historical point de depart and a tour de force of a conclusion. If the raptured line of her beloved that seemed her inmost soul to find as Geraldine, alone in her midnight chamber, pensively reads, points to Surrey's contributions to the sonnet, as Scott's notes direct, Langan's bravura commentary points to another singular contribution to the history of English literary forms: he is, we recall, usually considered to be the inventor of English blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter (66).(2) To illustrate Surrey's strange meter, as the original publisher, John Day, called it, the Norton Anthology fortuitously excerpts from his posthumously published translation of Book IV of the Aeneid fifty-odd lines from the episode of the hunt (Virgil's lines 129-68). The choice is apposite for Langan's argument, because the full passage, recording the fateful meeting of Dido and Aeneas in the cave, contains all the elements that her account associates with blank verse: secrecy, inwardness, mystery, and delusion, for if to Dido her Juno-contrived union with Aeneas is wedlock (52) it is, tragically, no such thing to Aeneas. Most pertinently, the spectacular romanticism of the scene joins to lightning skies (51) the sound effects on which Langan concentrates: the final paragraph of the excerpt begins, In the meanwhile the heavens gan rumble sore and ends with the marvelously resonant line: And the nymphs wailed from the mountain's top (43; 53).(3) An audiovisual hallucination indeed. The model for the blank verse of Scott's day was Milton's Paradise Lost, particularly the invocations, where Milton's speaking of himself descended through the introspective poetry of Akenside and Cowper to Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey. The provenance suggests that Langan's pinpointing of a shift around 1800 needs the supplement of a precursor. The prefatory note to Paradise Lost bears extensive citation: The measure is English heroic verse without rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin; rime being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre. …

Envy, Jealousy, and Zeal in Milton's Paradise Lost

(ProQuest-CSA LLC: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) The of Babel, standing unfinished, has become cultural icon, symbolizing the preposterous pride of its builders and the divine punishment for all such acts of arrogance. It has cast its long shadow over the entire history of interpretation of the biblical narrative in Gen 11:1-9 in which it is found. In this interpretive history, the tower with its top in the heavens (11:4 NRSV) has been adopted as the key to the story's theme: the human attempt to assert autonomy, attack heaven, and challenge God. The division of languages and dispersion of peoples-that is, the origin of the worlds cultures-that concludes the story of Babel is inseparably linked to this iconic symbol. Differentiating the world's peoples is the sign of God's displeasure with the tower; it is both the penalty for human pride and the means to restrain further assertions of it. The pride-and-punishment reading of the story of Babel is already firmly fixed in the earliest extant interpretation of Gen 11:1-9 in the book offubilees (ca. 200 B.C.E.), where it is found in the author's explanatory additions to his retelling of the biblical narrative. It has been embraced with little basic variation by both Jewish and Christian exegetes throughout the history of interpretation, and it is still dominant in recent scholarly commentaries on Genesis. Outside of biblical scholarship, this reading of the Babel story has been given broad cultural legitimacy in classics such as John Milton's Paradise Lost, in many works of art such as Pieter Brueghel's masterpiece, and in all children's story Bibles.1 Recently, particular ancient version of this pride-and-punishment reading has become popular. This approach, defended most extensively by Christoph Uehlinger and supported by biblical scholars writing from liberation or postcolonial perspectives, such as J. Severine Croatto, views the story as critique of empire.2 According to this approach, the story is about pride and punishment, yet now the pride about which it speaks is the hubris of imperial domination, and the punishment it describes is God's judgment on the empires, in particular Babylon (Babel), that oppressed Israel and Judah.3 The emphasis on one language at the beginning of the story represents the imperial suppression of local languages and cultures, and God's punishment brings down the empire with its monolithic aims, setting free the local languages and cultures to flourish. This contemporary approach builds on an ancient view, which appears first in Josephus (Ant. 1.113-14) and is adopted widely afterward, that the building of Babel in Gen 11:1-9 was really an imperial venture masterminded by the violent king Nimrod, who is identified with Babel in the genealogy in Gen 10:8-10. In recent years, few interpreters have begun to question aspects of the traditional pride-and-punishment reading of the story and have given greater attention to the story's theme of cultural origins on its own terms. This approach began with the work of Bernhard W. Anderson, who, while retaining the basic pride-andpunishment framework, also saw in the story a conflict of centripetal and centrifugal forces and prominent theme of the homogeneity versus the heterogeneity of peoples. He thus gave new emphasis to the story's explanation of the diversification of humankind after the flood.4 This shift away from the pride-andpunishment reading toward new interest in the story's theme of cultural diversification has subsequently been advanced by Ellen van Wolde, and it is reflected to some extent in the commentaries of Terence Fretheim and Walter Brueggemann.5 I wish to take up this recent work and extend it by arguing that the story of Babel in Gen 11:1-9 is exclusively about the origins of cultural difference and not about pride and punishment at all. The story's terminology, explicit claims, and repetitive structure all focus on the tension between singularity and multiplicity with the purpose of explaining the origin and variety of the world's cultures. …

In Milton's Paradise Lost, creation is mediated from the beginning. The Fall of humanity changes some modes and degrees of mediation, but the epic suggests that considering differences among kinds of mediation is more fruitful than seeking to avoid it. Paradise Lost offers a useful context for our own debates about incessant digital distractions by exploring the affordances and challenges of different kinds of mediation, by positing links between femininity and mediation, and by considering how mediation affects attention.

Dante's Commedia is the poem which, in the author's own intentions, comes closest to the Bible and, more even than Milton's Paradise Lost, constitutes a re-Scripture. This article offers a sketch of this rewriting, which focuses first on some general structural problems and then on selected passages of the poem.