Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

There has been a tendency in much writing about the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially in the broadly empirical British tradition, to subordinate the categories of religion to those of politics. British historians, for example, have often treated the Reformation less as an ideological development and more as a series of ‘legislative enactments’ (Tyacke 1998: 1). The old Whig interpretation of history had put revolutionary Protestantism at the centre of social and political change in early modern England, so had placed ideology in a central position. However, after its collapse as the dominant paradigm, revisionist historians for a while at least found religion displaced in their explanations. (For the older ideological argument see the work of Christopher Hill, especially Hill [1958] and in this context Hill [1977], and Michael Walzer [1965].) Later, some revisionist historians, for example Nicholas Tyacke (1987) and John Morrill (1993), sought to place religion on the agenda again. Literary scholars, too, have used various materialist categories or wished, as recently with the influential book of David Norbrook (1999), to trace revolutionary thought in the seventeenth century by following secular ideas of republicanism. This largely historical chapter sketches some Jacobean cultural contexts for the young John Milton, touching on aspects of his boyhood experience in ... log in or subscribe to read full text