Both the prose and poetry of John Milton (1608-1674) are replete with references, allusions and digressions on oriental topics. Yet, this profusion of detail has received no systematic examination. Thus, this thesis examines the ways that the Milton depicts "the Orient." In doing so, it offers a reconsideration of the methodologies used by western scholars to analyse literary investigations of non-western peoples and places. Notably, it endeavours to outline how we can examine the Orient in literature without resorting to the paradigms of "Orientalism," as delineated by Edward Said (1935-2003). This thesis notes how all these avenues of enqury lead to a single conclusion: Milton's abiding sentiments about "the Orient" were the fear of assault by a superior force and the dread of contamination by all that he considered alien.

Lady Hester Pulter's literary manuscript, comprising over one hundred poems and a prose romance, was uncovered in Leeds University Brotherton Library in 1996. Since then, there has been increasing scholarly interest in Pulter's compositions but as yet no edition of her text has been produced.

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This thesis proceeds from the observation that Milton is concerned by the presence of surplus material in the physical world. The blind Pharisee in Samson Agonistes dismisses his 'redundant locks, / Robustious to no purpose clustering down.' In the Ludlow masque, Comus complains that the Lady's 'moral babble' would leave nature 'strangled with her waste fertility.' Creation, in Paradise Lost, requires the expulsion of 'black tartareous cold infernal dregs' and leaves behind an abyss full of matter. Adam and Eve live in a garden where the sun shines with more warmth than they need, where the nighttime sky is bright with a perplexing canopy of lights. Vines and overgrown branches threaten to make their walks unpassable, while fruit, uncollected and uneaten, falls to the ground. An interest in superfluity is a characteristic feature of Milton's imagination. He insists on limits, then turns to what is left out as excess or waste. This habit of mind influences Milton's description of acts of choosing and gives shape to his account of the relationship between creation and God. It complicates his answer to the sort of question Augustine asks of God in the Confessions: 'Do heaven and earth contain you because you have filled them? Or do you fill them and overflow them because they do not contain you?' Milton is troubled by the idea of purposeless divine work. He is bothered by the thought of a creation that is useless or unnecessary. In Paradise Lost, I argue, the reason for the existence for the world is tied to the reason for sin.

Thomas Traheme (1637?-1674), Hereford born poet, priest and writer, has been variously understood as a nature poet, mystic, or even simply as a facile optimist. Sometimes he has been taken as an honorary Romantic poet, a sort-of Wordsworth before his time. Moreover, it has been common for critics either to divorce his theological beliefs from his literary contribution altogether, or to dismiss his spirituality as undisciplined and immature and his theological views as insubstantial. Based in part on new manuscript evidence, this thesis argues, on the contrary, that Traheme's literary works must be understood in the light of his comprehensive theological vision. Central to this theological vision were the interwoven concepts of felicity, the powers of the human soul, childhood innocence, love and glory, and transfiguration. Transfiguration, for Traheme, was the means by which his goals of felicity, love and glory were attained. For him, the fully human person may by God's grace anticipate even now the experience of final beatitude in which all the powers of the soul are fully employed and enlightened by the Spirit of God. The soul thus transfigured is able in turn 'to transfigure all things, and be delighted' to the glory of God. It is within this sweeping theological vision that Traheme's writings must be understood. It is an articulate vision, rooted in Christian theological tradition and an integrated Renaissance world picture of interdependent spheres, outward and inward, cosmic and anthropological. If we fail properly to appreciate Traheme's theological understanding, then we are in danger of misinterpreting his aesthetic and spiritual contribution. In contrast, when Traheme's devotional prose and poetry are seen in the light of his theological vision, then we are better able to see what Traheme saw - 'a transformed world of glory, inspired with a love as infinite as a creature can hold'. Accordingly, this thesis begins in Chapter 1 with an account of Traheme's biography and his place in the seventeenth century. Chapter 2 reviews the complex story of the Traheme sources, including manuscript discoveries past and present, before turning to a summary of the main lines of interpretation that have emerged in criticism of his writings. Chapter 3 examines the broader context in which Traheme's understanding of transfiguration arises. Chapter 4 traces the ways in which Traheme's anthropology, pneumatology, and eschatology undergird his theological vision of transfiguration. Chapter 5 focuses on a detailed discussion of transfiguration as process and event in Traheme's writings. A final concluding chapter offers a summary account of Traheme's view and demonstrates how this theological vision offers an enriched reading of his devotional prose and poetry while giving particular attention to the concept of transfiguration as action.

To mark its 250th anniversary in 2002, the British Museum decided to make one of the earliest existent depictions of Lilith, or Astarte, its chief acquisition. Called The Burney Relief —after Sidney Burney, who had purchased it in 1935— it was purchased in June 2003 from a Mr Sakamoto at the price of ₤1,500,000. To celebrate its entrance into the museum's collections, it was renamed the “Queen of the Night” by the British Museum (Collon 2005 511). It has been connected to feminine divine and demonic figures, such as Ishtar, Lilith, Astarte, and has been called “Queen of the Underworld” (Collon 2007 50). My thesis looks at these figures of the feminine demonic and the evolution of occult philosophy, and particularly demonology, within Early Modern England, and how demonological studies influenced and were influenced by current sociopolitical climates. Within much occult writing, nonChristian sources (including preChristian philosophy and Hebraic Cabala) were incorporated into the Christian world view, and affected Christian systems of angelic hierarchies and man's place within these hierarchies. English occult thought was influenced by continental writers and philosophers such as Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Leon Modena. One figure, in particular, featured strongly in many of the demonological writings which were making their way into English occultism: Lilith. When dealing with issues of political and sexual power, Lilith often appears as a focal point for philosophers as they attempt to discover links between gender, demons, and evil. This thesis examines the feminine demonic and the figure of Lilith in the art and literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, looking both at the occult practioners John Dee, Simon Forman, and Edward Kelley, and at the literary traditions that came out of that occult philosophy. It explores how Lilith manifests in literature which tries to address anxieties surrounding the feminine demonic and sexuality, and the implications of a demonic, political inversion. Lilith and the feminine demonic are seen to be relevant to the works of Ben Jonson, James VI and I, Thomas Dekker, Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and John Selden, with a final chapter examining the evidence of Lilith in Milton's poetry, and in particular, Milton's Paradise Lost.

This thesis examines the treatment of the theme of justice in the works, both poetry and prose, of Andrew Marvell and, in a final chapter, the justice of certain aspects of his behaviour. In order to do this, it seeks to locate particular works in the context of contemporary debates or discussions as to ancient rights, the ancient constitution (and competing theories as to the king's power) and the disagreement between Hugo Grotius and John Selden on the subject of the legal status of the sea and, more generally, the laws of nature and nations. !e discussion of the justice of his behaviour offers a reinterpretation of the Chancery pleadings and other records in a cluster of cases arising after Marvell's death out of the collapse of a bank in which his friend, Edward Nelthorpe, was a partner. It is argued that these records have, up to now, been misunderstood. The thesis concludes that Marvell's work evinces an ambiguity about justice, with the poetry tending to give voice to his scepticism, while the sense that justice might be at least partly achievable is more likely to appear in the prose works. The conclusion as to his actions is also a matter of some ambivalence: while the evidence does not show that he colluded in a fraud on the bank's creditors, the suspicion that he behaved badly towards his wife is complicated by a lingering uncertainty that he had, in fact, married.

In contradistinction to critical trends which have rendered Milton’s thought disembodied, this thesis studies how seventeenth-century material culture informed Milton’s poetry and prose at the epistemic level and by suggesting a palette of forms for literary play. The first chapter explores the early modern culture of fruit. At the epistemic level, practices of fruit cultivation and consumption inform Milton’s imagination and his vocabulary, thereby connecting their historic-material lives with their symbolic ones. Milton further turns commonplace gestures of fruit consumption into narrative devices that frame discussions of agency, aspiration, sinful and right practice. The second chapter examines two floral catalogues to discover how they find shape through the epistemologies of flowers, ceremony, and decorative arts. Here material culture shapes literary convention, as one catalogue is found to secret ceremonial consolation in its natural ingenuousness, while the other’s delight in human physicality upsets the distinctions between inner virtue and outer ornament, faith and rite. In the third chapter, urban epistemologies of light, darkness, movement, and space are examined through urban phenomena: skyline, suburbs, highways, theft, and waterways. By interpellating contemporary debates, these categories anatomise fallen character, intent, action, and their consequences. Milton’s instinctive distaste for urban nuisances is interesting in this Republican figure and is subversive of some ideologies of the text. Discursive and material aspects meet again in the fourth chapter in a discussion of his graphic presentations of geography on the page. Usually prone to analyses of textual knowledge, they are also informed by the embodiment of knowledge as material object. Milton’s search for a fitting cartographic aesthetic for the Biblical narrative and for the rhetoric of his characters leads him to an increasing consciousness of the ideologies energising these material forms. The fifth chapter explores Milton’s engagement with forms of armour and weapons. Military preferences for speed and mobility over armour help Milton explore the difference between unfallen and fallen being. Milton also uses his inescapably proleptic knowledge of arms and armour as a field of imaginative play for representations that are both anachronistic and typological. These lead to a discussion of imitation in the mythic imagination. In each of these studies, we witness Milton’s consciousness of his temporal and proleptic location, and his attempts to marry the temporal and the pan- or atemporal. In the conclusion I suggest that Milton’s simultaneous courting of the atemporal while he is drawn to or draws on temporal material culture imply an incarnational aesthetic.