Fleshly Tabernacles: Milton and the Incarnational Poetics of Revolutionary England - Softcover

Hampton, Bryan Adams

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0268030960 ISBN 13: 9780268030964

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012

Synopsis

In Fleshly Tabernacles, Bryan Hampton examines John Milton’s imaginative engagement with, and theological passion for, the Incarnation. As aesthetic symbol, theological event, and narrative picture of humanity’s potential, the Incarnation profoundly governs the way Milton structures his 1645 Poems, ponders the holy office of the pulpit, reflects on the ends of speech and language, interprets sacred scripture or secular texts, and engages in the radical politics of the Civil War and Interregnum. Richly drawing upon the disciplines of historical and postmodern theology, philosophical hermeneutics, theological aesthetics, and literary theory, Fleshly Tabernacles pursues the wide-ranging implications of the heterodox, perfectionist strain in Milton’s Christology. Hampton illustrates how vibrant Christologies generated and shaped particular brands of anticlericalism, theories of reading and language, and political commitments of English nonconformist sects during the turbulent decades of the seventeenth century. Ranters and Seekers, Diggers and Quakers, Fifth monarchists and some Anabaptists―many of those identified with these radical groups proclaim that the Incarnation is primarily understood, not as a singular event of antiquity, but as a present eruption and charged manifestation within the life of the individual believer, such that faithful believers become “fleshly tabernacles” housing the Divine.

About this title

About the Author:

Bryan Adams Hampton is the Dorothy and James D. Kennedy Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

Review:

“Hampton’s Fleshly Tabernacles is an interesting exposition of how Milton’s Christology shaped his reading, writing, and politics. It focuses on the Incarnation as a central preoccupation throughout Milton’s oeuvre and how Incarnational thinking was applied to such disparate realms as poetics, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and economics. . . . Hampton’s book can be praised for its boldness, and the requisite command of the Miltonic corpus required to sustain such a sweeping argument is impressive.” ―Sixteenth Century Journal

"Fleshly Tabernacles is an important investigation of the Incarnation in Milton's thought and works and in revolutionary England, especially in the 1640s and 1650s. This is a learned, often powerful, and conceptually rich study of an important topic in its broad cultural context. Bryan Adams Hampton makes an original contribution to the field of seventeenth-century literary and religious studies." (David Loewenstein, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0268030960
• ISBN 13: 9780268030964
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 374