Jutta pointed us to this 18th century satiric image aimed at the work of Balthasar Bekker , a Dutch Calvinist who wrote Betoverde Weereld (...

There were two general areas or positions on the existence of diabolical evil current in Milton's day: On the one hand, there were those...

Another of Milton's semi-contemporaries was Giovanni Domenico Cassini : Cassini was an astronomer at the  Panzano Observatory , from...

As was suggested the other day, the allusion to bees at the end of Book I of Paradise Lost could be a dig at a powerful Roman family. Figu...

A few notes on Tartarus, which came up yesterday: There's only one mention of the name Tartarus in the Bible - it comes in the Second...

We belatedly acknowledge a milestone in Milton's career: He was 401 last Wednesday, Dec. 9. There's a timeline of Milton and his l...

Shaw sends a link to a glimpse of an old Hebraic tradition about hell. We'll find, by the way, that Milton was very conscious of the nu...

Brecht's Life of Galileo at the Asolo is rich in the ingredients that made the rift in the Renaissance between Aristotelian knowledge a...

From Selma to Montgomery On March 21, 1965, civil rights leaders began marching from Selma, Alabama to the state capitol in Montgomery....

With  these  in troop Came  Astoreth,  whom the  Phoenicians   call'd Astarte,  Queen of  Heav'n , with crescent Horns; To whose ...

An interesting sidelight to the previous post regarding cosmology. If one is wondering whether the ideas of continental thinkers such as ...

The dimensions of Milton's cosmology are virtually impossible to gauge -- any pictorial representation is bound to be misleading. We r...