This panel locates the writings of John Milton (1608-1674) in networks of artistic and intellectual influence that cross temporal and national boundaries. This panel is organized and sponsored by the Milton Society of America, which seeks to contribute to the ongoing work of situating Milton’s writings outside of a narrowly Anglocentric frame. In recent years, scholars have paid new attention to Milton’s interlocutors, translators, and adaptors in places including China, Mexico, and India. Such growing awareness has, in turn, refined our historical understanding of the relationship between Milton’s seventeenth-century writings—famously produced at the juncture of a rigorously theological and more modern or philosophical outlooks—and later centuries.

This proposed panel begins in the seventeenth century, with Madison Wolfert’s talk on Milton’s near contemporary Thomas Tillam. Wolfert seeks to present recently uncovered archival evidence of how Milton’s controversial writings about divorce shaped not only Tillam’s thinking about marriage but also his founding of a Sabbatarian colony in the Palatinate. Wolfert’s talk shows us a previously unknown route whereby Milton’s religious thinking traveled to Continental Europe. This talk concludes with some speculations about what gender, kinship, and reproduction may have looked like in Tillam’s colony, and how this picture complicates the ideals of marriage described by Milton’s divorce tracts.

Luis Sà and Miriam Mansur’s joint presentation takes us from seventeenth-century Europe to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Brazil. They offer readings of Claudio Manuel de Costa’s twelve-stanza ode “To Milton” and Junqueira Freire’s eight-stanza ode “Milton.” Freire sees Milton as a Homeric figure who “dreams of innocence and of innocence speaks,” while da Costa approaches the English poet as an author comparable to Camões and Dante Alighieri. This talk seeks to spark two-way conversations about Milton’s importance for Brazilian poetry and how a Brazilian sense of literary history should refine our sense of the historical significance of Milton's writings.

Noam Flinker’s talk shuttles us into the twentieth century by detailing an important facet of Milton’s influence on Joyce’s Ulysses. Flinker contributes to ongoing scholarship on this topic by proposing that Joyce’s description of fruit in the Calypso episode knowingly echoes Milton’s account of Edenic fruit. This echo meaningfully connects the forbidden fruit of Milton's Eden with Zionism, and the "Orangegroves and immense melon fields north of Jaffa.” Flinker argues that Joyce reimagines the paradise that is lost in Milton becomes as Jewish nationalism—which the Joycean protagonist Bloom rejects but still acknowledges ("Nothing doing. Still an idea behind it.”).

If accepted, this panel will be moderated by Stephen Fallon (who will be the President of the Milton Society of America at the time of the MLA Convention). Panelists will be asked to keep their presentations to no longer than twenty minutes in order to leave ample time for the Q&A. The Milton Society would promote this panel through multiple email newsletter updates.