Visitation Unimplor'd
Milton and the Authorship of De Doctrina Christiana

by William B. Hunter

$48.00s Cloth / Includes Index
ISBN 0-8207-0289-7
 

Book Information

Since a few years after its discovery in England's Public Records Office in 1823, the long religious treatise entitled De Doctrina Christiana has been unquestioningly accepted as the work of John Milton. It occupies one whole volume of the eight that today reprint all of his prose. Scholars have used it as the key to many of their most important insights into Milton's thought, especially significant because so much of his poetry is responsive to religious issues.

The treatise has been notorious since its discovery, however, for its support of eccentric dogmas, most notable the Arian heresy that denies the full divinity of Christ. Far from being acclaimed as the great poet of Protestantism as he once was, Milton has increasingly been seen in its light as merely a doctrinal oddity, his ideas not pertinent to informed religious thought today. Now this book, for the first time in a century and a half, challenges the acceptance of the treatise as Milton's and concomitantly challenges much of the scholarship of this century that has been based upon its acceptance as his. This radical thesis invites a complete reappraisal of Milton's religious thought and of what authority De Doctrina has for scholars and critics today.

The author brings together the substance of four essays already published on this crucial subject and two others not hitherto printed, together with a wealth of supplemental information that questions further Milton's responsibility for the treatise. That his thesis has already proved to be a fertile field for investigation is proved by recently published significant new insights into Milton's views on predestination and Arminianism, and by the revisionist understanding of chaos and the materiality of God argued here. Another chapter reappraises his supposed heretical Arianism.

 

Author Information

WILLIAM B. HUNTER, a renowned Miltonist, received the Hanford Award of the Milton Society of America for the best article published on Milton in 1992. He is the general editor of A Milton Encyclopedia, 9 volumes (1978-1983) and is the author of The Descent of Urania: Studies in Milton, 1946-1988 (1989). Dr. Hunter was the Milton Society of America's Honored Scholar in 1982.

 
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