“To Warn Proud Cities”: a Topical Reference in Milton’s “Airy Knights” Simile (Paradise Lost II.531-8)
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…
Listée dans Article | publication par groupe Iter Community
Version 1.0 - publiée le 24 Apr 2025
Sous licence Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0
Description
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.
Citer ce travail
Les chercheurs doivent citer ce travail comme suit :
Tags
Notes
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/.
Aperçu de la publication
Iter Community
This publication belongs to the Iter Community group.
When watching a publication, you will be notified when a new version is released.