Milton among the Iconoclasts

Abstract

This chapter seeks to focus on an aspect of Milton’s alleged Puritan persona, namely his iconoclasm. Since E. B. Gilman’s subtly nuanced Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation (1986), it has become fashionable to discuss Milton the iconoclastic polemicist or to debate the extent of his iconoclastic poetic strategies. All too often this criticism rehearses the old Puritan / Laudian binary and assumes that Milton the Puritan is intrinsically iconoclastic. Yet, as the notorious 1632 Star Chamber trial of Henry Sherfield demonstrates, Calvinist iconoclasm was but the most extreme end of a rich spectrum of Protestant attitudes to images in seventeenth-century England. By reading Milton’s embodied representation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in Paradise Lost in the context of the Sherfield trial, I hope to make the case for a more iconophile poet, thus rescuing Milton from the refashioning conducted by later writers and critics.