Looking Into Providences: Designs and Trials in Paradise Lost

What is the role of providence in Paradise Lost? In Looking into Providences, Raymond B. Waddington provides the first examination of this engaging subject. He explores the variety of implicit organizational structures or ‘designs’ that govern Paradise Lost, and looks in-depth at the ‘trials,’ or testing situations, which require interpretation, choice, and action from its characters.

Waddington situates the poem within the context of providentialism’s centrality to seventeenth-century thoug...