'Nature’s coyn must not be hoorded': Milton and the economics of salvation, 1634-1674

BT Doctrinal Theology;HC Economic History and Conditions;PR English literature

Swann, Adam ; Maley, Willy

University:University of Glasgow

Department:School of Critical Studies

关键词: John Milton, 17th-century literature, economic history, theology;   

Others  :  http://theses.gla.ac.uk/4823/1/2014swannphd.pdf

来源: University of Glasgow

【 摘 要 】

Milton’s use of economic tropes has attracted very little critical attention, and the connections between economics and theology in his thought have not yet been explored.Blair Hoxby’s Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (2002) focuses on the influence of economic ideas on Milton’s political thought, arguing that thepoet persistently associates trade monopolies with autocratic abuses of monarchical power. David Hawkes places Milton’s lifelong professional usury at the centre of his 2009biography, John Milton: A Hero of Our Time, and his 2011 essay, ‘Milton and Usury,’ fruitfully reads key passages from Paradise Lost in relation to contemporary tracts onusury. Hoxby and Hawkes have astutely highlighted the relationship between economics and Milton’s thought, but neither scholar has pursued these connections into Milton’stheology. Economic ideas lie at the very heart of Milton’s soteriology, and my thesis offers a historicised investigation of Milton’s corpus, demonstrating that the tropes of contemporary economic thought were crucial to his understanding of sin and, more importantly, salvation.Chapter 1 traces the roots of this economic soteriology to the economic and theological treatises of the 1620s and early 1630s, which argued that money must be not stockpiled but circulated, and that salvation was a transaction between man and God. Chapter 2 considers how Ben Jonson and George Herbert, whose work Milton was familiar with in his youth, used The Staple of Newes (1626) and The Temple (1633) to respond to contemporary developments in economic and theological thought. Chapter 3 reads Milton’s early works as studies of hoarding and consumption, traced through the debateover sexual stockpiling in Comus (1634), the sinfulness of a hoarding nation in the History of Moscovia (early 1640s), and the clergy torn between their compulsions to covet andconsume in Of Reformation (1641). Chapter 4 finds in Gerrard Winstanley’s Fire in the Bush (1650) an explicitly economic understanding of the Fall, and demonstrates how Milton’s political and religious writings of the 1650s betray an anxiety that the English cannot govern their economic appetites and, therefore, themselves. Chapter 5 examineshow Milton uses tropes of investment, profit, loss, and repayment in the Christian Doctrine and Paradise Lost (1667) to represent redemption as a transaction between Jesus and Godon man’s behalf. Chapter 6 reads the History of Britain (1670) as an indictment of isolationist economic policies, with Milton demonstrating that free interactions betweenpeoples facilitate national refinement, and thus strangers become saviours.