Abstract
Using the parallel temptation scenes involving Uriel and Eve in Paradise Lost and the Lady in Comus as case studies, this essay examines the treatment of evil mendacity and virtuous resistance in John Milton. It highlights Milton's engagement with two specific cultural and epistemological contexts: firstly, the Baconian new science and epistemology, and secondly, the Battle of the Sexes', a ...
Abstract
Using the parallel temptation scenes involving Uriel and Eve in Paradise Lost and the Lady in Comus as case studies, this essay examines the treatment of evil mendacity and virtuous resistance in John Milton. It highlights Milton's engagement with two specific cultural and epistemological contexts: firstly, the Baconian new science and epistemology, and secondly, the Battle of the Sexes', a seventeenth-century pamphlet war whose female participants defended women as virtuous and demanded female education. The author argues that, despite the poet's denigration of Eve's fallen feminism in Paradise Lost, there are important philosophical alignments between Milton's Baconianism and the philosophy of education as proposed by the female pamphleteers of the querelle des femmes'.
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