This proposed panel on Milton and Visibility is sponsored by the Milton Society of America and aims to contribute to the presidential theme. The well-known facts that John Milton lost his sight and that he dictated late compositions such as Paradise Lost to amanuenses have anchored productive exchanges between Milton scholarship and disability studies. The Milton Society has been sponsoring conference panels at recent conferences to facilitate this important work. This panel seeks to build on these conversations. Frances Ringwood’s paper turns to Milton’s early and later works to show that we can discern early modern precursors to disability theory in the way that humoral logical naturalized the contiguity between physical and mental function. This proto-medical logic, Ringwood argues, reconstrues a medieval logic of sin resulting in physical abnormality.

At the same time, this panel seeks to expand our conversations about vision and visibility in Milton’s writings so that the insights of disability theory can be put in dialogue with a wider range of concerns. Joseph Torres attends to the relationship between vision and blindness at the end of Paradise Lost, in which Adam is offered a visual survey of the world to come. This literal vision, however, breaks down and is replaced by a verbal narrative. Torres traces how Milton’s religious and literary configuration of seeing versus hearing informs William Blake’s and Gustave Doré’s projects to illustrate Paradise Lost. These illustrations are familiar to readers of Milton, but this paper promises new insights about how a theological understanding of vision in relation to belief gives rise to experiments in visual art’s relationship to text. Tom Clayton’s paper considers the visibility of labor. This paper argues that Milton developed his early conception of a poetic career in contrast to the labor of postal carriers; while at Cambridge, Milton wrote two mock elegies on Thomas Hobson, the university’s postal carrier. While Milton’s vocational anxieties and proto-bourgeois thinking about property and authorship are established scholarly topics, this paper offers fresh thinking on a relatively neglected topic, showing how Milton sought to distance himself from a visible and embodied form of practical work that he deemed para-literary. Together, these papers on Milton and Visibility promise to extend to expand the scholarly conversations between early modern literary studies and disability studies while also contributing to the presidential theme of visibility.

Presenters will be asked to limit their talks to fifteen minutes so that we have ample time for discussion; the moderator will facilitate a question-and-answer session that puts these different perspectives on visibility in dialogue with each other. The Milton Society of America is excited not only by the range of topics and perspectives this panel accommodates—medicine, theology, visual art, labor, and university life—but also by the proposed participation of a scholar from South Africa. Especially in recent years, our society has been promoting exchanges among Miltonists working around the world; this effort includes a roundtable at the 2024 meeting of the Renaissance Society of America on Milton’s place in the academic profession, with speakers based not only in the U.K. and U.S., but also from Beirut, China, and South Korea, as well as the United States.