Passions on Trial: Early Modern Passions and Affections in John Milton and Paradise Lost

This dissertation is about Milton’s moral vision of the passions in a century that thought passions were the difference between a free body and a materially determined body, justified knowledge and error, paradise and hell – in short, the difference between a virtuous life and an enslaved soul. In what has been called an ‘affective turn’ within literary studies, Passions on Trial adds to the growing body of scholarship characterised by a fascination with early modern agency, passions, senses, humours, and the body, and proposes that the next turn points towards ethics. My dissertation contributes to the field of knowledge by providing the first full-length study of Milton’s thinking on the passions throughout his life. It argues that seventeenth-century passions help develop Milton’s concepts of matter and knowledge, agency, and ethics.