Joseph Mede, one of John Milton’s tutors at Christ’s College, Cambridge, thought that Calvinists who believed in the doctrine of absolute reprobation were themselves fixed in strong opinions and so ‘according to their own Tempers made a judgement of God and his Decrees’. Men invent God in their own image. It’s much the same with Miltonists.
For this reason, postwar Milton scholarship is a map of the changing demographics and politics of universities. In this outstanding new biography of the poet and polemicist, Nicholas McDowell takes on what he identifies as two main tendencies in biographically oriented Milton scholarship. The first identifies young Milton as a Laudian or conformist churchman, who became radicalised through personal experience and later turned into the outspoken revolutionary. The second views him as always a radical, whose politics were crystallised, without rupture or sudden shift, through the 1630s and 1640s.