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This book is a wide-ranging exploration of the interactions of literature, polemics and religious politics in the English Revolution. Loewenstein highlights the powerful spiritual beliefs and religious ideologies in the polemical struggles of Milton, Marvell and their radical Puritan contemporaries during these revolutionary decades. Loewenstein's portrait of a faction-riven, violent seventeenth-century revolutionary culture is an original and significant contribution to our understanding of these turbulent decades and their aftermath.
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This page intentionally left blank David Loewenstein’s Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries is a wide-ranging exploration of the interactions of literature, polemics, and religious politics in the English Revolution. Loewenstein highlights the powerful spiritual beliefs and religious ideologies in the polemical struggles of Milton, Marvell, and their radical Puritan contemporaries during these revolutionary decades. By examining a wide range of canonical and non-canonical writers – John Lilburne, Winstanley the Digger, and Milton, amongst others – he reveals how radical Puritans struggled with the contradictions and ambiguities of the English Revolution and its political regimes. Loewenstein’s portrait of a faction-riven, violent seventeenthcentury revolutionary culture is an original and significant contribution to our understanding of these turbulent decades and their aftermath. By placing Milton’s great poems in the context of the period’s radical religious politics, this book should be of interest to historians as well as literary scholars. is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, ), which won the Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hanford Award for Distinguished Book. He has also written Milton: Paradise Lost (Cambridge, ). He is co-editor of Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose (Cambridge, ) and of the forthcoming Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature. John Lilburne, engraved by George Glover; taken from A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens ( ) by Richard Overton with William Walwyn’s collaboration, Thomason Collection, British Library R E PR ESE N T I N G R E VOLU TIO N IN MILTON AND HIS CO N T E MP O R A R I E S Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism DAV I D LO E W E N S T E I N Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © David Loewenstein 2004 First published in printed format 2001 ISBN 0-511-03404-0 eBook (Adobe Reader) ISBN 0-521-77032-7 hardback To my father and in memory of my mother Contents Acknowledgements Note on abbreviations and citations page ix xi Introduction Lilburne, Leveller polemic, and the ambiguities of the Revolution Gerrard Winstanley and the crisis of the Revolution Ranter and Fifth Monarchist prophecies: the revolutionary visions of Abiezer Coppe and Anna Trapnel The War of the Lamb: the revolutionary discourse of George Fox and early Quakerism Ma