This paper examines the relationship of verbal expression, political engagement, and historical progress in a poem which has traditionally been labelled undramatic and read as an allegory of Milton’s post-revolutionary resignation to quietism. While “Paradise Regained” consists primarily of a debate between two speakers and thus appears hostile to multivocality, the verbal combat, E. Sauer contends, transforms the poem into a historically engaged, politically charged text in which the Son challenges the oppressive homogeneity of Satan’s opposing discourse and reemplots the events of his master-narrative. In part 2, the author argues that Satan’s fall from the temple pinnacle-Nebuchadnezzar’s reconstructed tower of Babel, the site of contending voices and contested identities in “Paradise Regained”-represents the silencing of the monological, negating voice and the symbolic collapse of monarchy (Prose, 3: 405).

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Sauer, E., (2025), "The Fall of Nebuchadnezzar", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Sauer, Elizabeth. "The Fall of Nebuchadnezzar." Renaissance and Reformation 29 (3): 2010. 43-72. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v29i3.11432. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.