Milton’s Moving Bodies (Rethinking the Early Modern)

A collection of innovative examinations of embodiment in Milton’s oeuvre that challenge assumptions about disciplinary boundaries

This volume brings unprecedented focus to the forms, spaces, and implications of embodied motion in Milton’s writing and its afterlives to explore how and why he privileges the body—human and textual—as a site of dynamic movement. The contributors bring a variety of lenses to Milton’s moving bodies: political history, kinematics, mathematics, cosmology, translation, illustration, anatomies of racialized and disabled bodies, and twenty-first-century pedagogies. From these wide-ranging vantage points, they consider anew Milton’s contributions to the histories of scientific development, global exploration and imperial expansion, migration and diaspora, and translation and adaptation in England, Europe, and the Americas, from the early modern period to today. Milton’s Moving Bodies draws together established and emerging scholars, offering fresh analyses of the poet’s legacy for multiple traditions within and beyond Milton studies.

MARISSA GREENBERG is an associate professor of English at the University of New Mexico. She is the author of Metropolitan Tragedy: Genre, Justice, and the City in Early Modern England.

RACHEL TRUBOWITZ is a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature.