John Milton’s fame rests largely on his epic poetry, but over the course of his career as a writer he worked across an exceptionally broad range of genres and discursive forms: not only epic, lyric, pastoral, elegy, masque, and tragedy, but religious and political pamphlet, ecclesiastical satire, theological treatise, history, and many more. Milton was also a writer unusually concerned with what since the mid nineteenth century we have called epistemological questions: questions about the nature, origins, conditions, and limits of knowledge. In his great epic, Paradise Lost, he sought not merely to relate what his friend and poet Andrew Marvell called “the sacred truths” but to establish the conditions under which it is possible to know and tell of things invisible to mortal sight and occurring before the creation of the world. He reconsidered fundamental epistemic categories such as witness, testimony, and evidence.

This panel inquires into the relation between epistemology and form. Rather than treating knowledge as the disembodied cognitive possession of justified true belief (as in Plato’s Meno and Theatetus), participants will investigate the theories of knowledge embodied in the various genres and forms in which Milton worked. They will ask how he challenged or revised earlier epistemologies as he sought to articulate his own, situating his writings in the contexts and traditions in which he wrote them and comparing his deployments of discursive forms to those of his contemporaries and his predecessors.

While participants focus on Milton’s works and the theories of knowledge appropriate to the genres and forms in which they are written, participants also draw on recent developments in, among other approaches, feminist, standpoint, virtue, social, and historical epistemology. Amy Weng opens the panel with a reconsideration of biblical and classical precedents as evidentiary forms that justify war. Weng begins with Milton’s theological treatise, De Doctrina Christiana, in which he extrapolates violent allowances for human justice that align with imperialism in Ireland but run contrary to his own professed hermeneutics of charity and right reason. Weng then argues that only in Milton’s late poems, after the failure of his political cause, is this earthly “right of war” recast as a devils’ doctrine rather than a divine truism. Next, Melanie Kessinger reads Margaret Cavendish’s “The Hunting of the Stag” alongside Milton’s Paradise Lost to examine how genre shapes seventeenth-century epistemologies of the natural world. Whereas Cavendish’s poem invokes and revises the courtly love tradition to distribute perception throughout the material world, Milton’s uses the epic to imagine animation emerging within a hierarchical continuum of matter created by God. Daniel Shore concludes the session with a reconsideration of Paradise Lost as preparing the way for the realist novel and its portrayals of forms of knowledge and their acquisition. Shore proposes instead a narrative of epistemic, and therefore generic, loss and constraint to the immanent plane of this world.

Even with a bit of framing by the chair, the twenty minutes allotted to each of these talks will allow ample time for Q&A, in the spirit of Milton’s call for us to “to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience.” Indeed, by taking up different literary genres and forms of knowledge in and about Milton’s writings, the organizers of this session seek to engage a wide audience—not only scholars of Milton or the early modern period. Its papers speak to MLA members interested in genre studies, religious studies, the novel, and women’s writing. Through this session, and in the spirit of the 2027 Presidential Theme, this panel seeks to spur “antagonistic cooperation” across the MLA’s scholarly communities.