From Belfast to Baghdad: editing Milton's prose for the twenty‐first century

“Is this our boasted constitution? Is this our liberty?”: Reading Milton in Ireland

“…Milton's negative responses to the Islamic world and the Jews, for example, have been documented in recent years (e.g., Brooks, ; Campbell, ; MacLean, ; Mohamed, ), but the severity of his attitude towards Ireland is more explicit. One major reason, then, for the lacuna which this essay attempts to redress possibly centres on the fact that Milton's image as proto‐liberal thinker and tolerationist is acutely undermined when the Irish context is taken into consideration, simply because it brings into focus the limits of his perceived toleration and exposes the inconsistencies and discordances upon which the Miltonic ideology that has influenced the Western liberal tradition is based (McDowell, ).…”

“…The liberal packaging of Milton, which is not only encomiastic but anachronistic in the way that it often overlooks the nuances and limits of Milton's ideas of tolerance, freedom, and liberty, was reinforced in the middle decades of the 20th century. This is reflected in the Yale editions of his prose works, the general editor of which celebrated Milton initially as a spokesperson for anti‐fascist democratic ideals at a time when they were under threat in Europe from Nazi Germany, and, later, as a bastion of civil and religious liberties that stood entirely at odds with the aggressive anti‐communist policies of McCarthyism that sought to persecute any and all forms of political dissent or nonconformity (Achinstein, ; McDowell, ). In revolutionary France, similarly, Milton's theories of civil and religious liberty were introduced through translations and adaptations of Areopagitica (1644) and A Defence of the People of England (1695 edition) to address topical issues ranging from the freedom of the press to the execution of a king after due legal process, while in the figure of Satan revolutionaries identified a voice of opposition to despotism (e.g., Shawcross, ; Tournu, ).…”

“…The questions posed by Corns and Maley have retained a currency ever since and are echoed and responded to by Stevens (), Daems (), Gregerson (), Raymond (), Fenton (), Lim (), and McDowell (, , ), all of whom tackle the subject of Milton's writings about the Irish dimension to the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the issues of colonialism, plantation, empire, nationhood, and identity that it raises. With the exception of Elizabeth Sauer, who explores the topic of English Protestant nationalism and the corresponding crisis in Ireland through the lens of Milton's sonnet “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” (Sauer, ), the overwhelming emphasis is placed on Milton's prose works of the 1640s, especially the antiprelatical tracts (1641–1642), the Observations upon the Articles of Peace (1649), and Eikonoklastes (1649).…”