In Paradise Lost II.531-8 modern editors often see an allusion to Josephus’ account of armies appearing in the sky shortly before the fall of Jerusalem. In fact, reports of spectral soldiers and aerial battles were quite common in seventeenth-century English pamphlets, such as Mirabilis Annus and Five Strange Wonders. Airy apparitions do not seem to have held much fascination for Milton. But this does not mean that he could not exploit their popular appeal and their political symbolism in Paradise Lost.

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Original publication: Leonard, John. "“To Warn Proud Cities”: a Topical Reference in Milton’s “Airy Knights” Simile (Paradise Lost II.531-8)." Renaissance and Reformation 31 (2): 2010. 63-71. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v31i2.11612. 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/.