Milton and the Network of Disability, Embodiment and Care

by Angelica Duran (Editor), Pasquale Toscano (Editor)

Overview

The governing questions of Milton and the Network of Disability, Embodiment and Care are threefold: What does reading Milton’s texts – and literature generally – through the theoretical lens of disability, embodiment and care studies (DEC) reveal that was illegible before? How have Milton’s visual and mobility impairments, as well as his artistic representations of human biodiversity, factored into his status as a canonical author? And what insights does bringing a DEC lens to Milton’s body of work and its reception give us into literature and longstanding stereotypes about humans and their cultural and physical environments? The thirteen chapters, Foreword and Afterword of this collection, composed by established and emerging scholars, provide cogent answers by drawing on the contributors’ expertise in various fields. The volume advances what Milton’s texts – from sonnet to epic and political tract to tragedy – can tell us about not only literary representations of human variation, physical and mental, but also cultural responses to disability, embodiment and care that affect all readers – and all people – today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399541459
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	12/31/2025
Series:	Edinburgh Critical Studies in Early Modern Literature and Disability
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Angelica Duran is Professor of English, Comparative Literature and Religious Studies at Purdue University, where she has also served as Purdue’s Director of Religious Studies (2009–2013), Interim Director of Creative Writing (2022–24) and affiliate faculty of Critical Disability Studies. She is the author, editor and co-editor of ten books, including Milton among Spaniards (2020), Global Milton and Visual Art (2021) and Milton Across Borders and Media (2023). She has served on the Executive Committee (2012–21) of the Milton Society of America, on the editorial board of Milton Quarterly (2005–) and as Conference Chair of the Renaissance Society of America (2022–27).

Pasquale Toscano is Assistant Professor of English at Vassar College, after earning a master’s degree in Classics from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and a PhD in English from Princeton University. He is a co-winner of the Sixteenth Century Society’s Harold J. Grimm Prize for scholarship on the Reformation and was named a 2023–24 Peter Ogden Jacobus Fellow, Princeton’s highest honour for graduate students. His scholarship appears in Studies in English Literature, 1550–1900 (SEL), Classical Receptions Journal, Disability Studies Quarterly, The Oxford Handbook of George Herbert and Shakespeare and Early Modern Madness. His public-facing and creative writing focus primarily on disability-related issues and appear in The New York Times, The Atlantic and other venues.

Table of Contents

List of figures
Notes on contributors
Foreword by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
Acknowledgements

Part I. 'A Darksome House of Mortal Clay'
1. 'With wand’ring steps and slow'
Angelica Duran and Pasquale Toscano
2. Milton and disability
Thomas N. Corns
Appendix 1: Milton’s Letter to Philaras about his blindness (Epistolae familiares 15), Latin transcription and English translation
Sarah Knight

Part II. 'Spirited with Various Forms'
3. Milton’s stammer
Joe Moshenska
4. Incapacity and human life in Paradise Lost, Artis logicae, and De doctrina Christiana
Timothy M. Harrison
5. Milton and the human condition
Elizabeth Sauer
6. The matter of blindness in the Second Defence and Samson Agonistes
Susannah B. Mintz
7. Disability and the drama of Folly in Samson Agonistes
Maura Brady

Part III. 'Gathering Up Limb by Limb'
8. Blind self-governance in Milton’s 'Cyriack, This Three Years’ Days These Eyes'
Teri Fickling
9. Paradise Regained, prophetic practice, and the Quaker communities of care
Joan Curbet Soler
10. Access, ableism, and accommodation in Samson Agonistes and its Restoration successors
Pasquale Toscano

Part IV. 'Written to Aftertimes'
11. The blind Milton as caretaker, Englishman, and husband on the Spanish stage
Angelica Duran
12. When Tyehimba Jess (re)considers Milton’s Sonnet 'When I Consider How My Light Is Spent'
Reginald A. Wilburn
13. Picturing Satan’s body in Paradise Lost
John Leonard

Afterword
Georgina Kleege

Index