Both medieval and early modern studies have, in recent years, been reckoning with race. Scholars have confronted the possibility that a clear-cut bifurcation between premodern understandings of human difference and modern racism may not only function as an insistence on historical accuracy. That bifurcation may also serve as a pretext for ignoring the racial thinking that was operative in earlier periods. Critical attention to premodern race thinking has been advanced by scholars including Kim F. Hall, Geraldine Heng, Ania Loomba, and Ayanna Thompson, among others. Within early modern studies, Shakespearean drama and Renaissance love poetry have been two of the forms studied most intently with an eye toward racial logics. Yet discussions about race have only just started to be taken up in earnest within the scholarship on the writings of John Milton. Mary Nyquist’s 2013 monograph Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life has offered one powerful provocation by locating Milton in a very long trajectory of Western thinking that makes it possible to demand liberty and decry political servitude while ignoring the reality of chattel slavery.

This panel seeks to advance the conversation about early modern race thinking in Milton’s writings. The proposed papers represents a range of the important work being done at this moment in Milton scholarship. Urvashi Chakravarty discerns how discourses of racialized enslavement and white womanhood shape Paradise Lost’s depiction of motherhood. More specifically, Chakravarty argues that the monstrous motherhood of Sin’s allegorical body is aligned with a racial understanding of bondage and slavery. This alignment allows the poem to imagine Eve’s reproductive future, which should include all of humanity, as a white future. Ross Lerner’s talk revisits the question of Milton’s handling of the so-called curse of Ham—the biblical story of Noah’s son being cursed for his transgressions, which was subsequently deployed as a justification for enslaving Black Africans as Ham’s cursed descendants. This is a topic that Nyquist details at length, following previous discussions by Maureen Quilligan and Stephen Jablonski. Yet Lerner finds grounds to refine our understanding of how the description of Noah and Ham in Paradise Lost functions not only within the broader context of the epic poem, but also in relation to Milton’s political prose. Reginald Wilburn reconstructs a neglected instance of a productive exchange between Milton’s religious verse and American discourses concerning race, slavery, and abolition. Wilburn considers two seemingly disparate writings by Frances Gage: her journalistic reporting of Sojourner Truth’s 1851 “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech and her poem “Adam’s Thanksgiving for Eve.” By reading these two texts together, Wilburn examines how Gage turns Milton’s religious verse into a resource for thinking across color lines—and with Sojourner Truth in particular—about racial and gender equality.

In order to accommodate questions from the audience as well as extemporaneous conversations among the panelists, this panel has been limited to three participants. Asking the participants to keep each of their presentations under twenty minutes in length will ensure ample time for the question and answer session.