#POSTPONED# Milton’s Anglican Hermit

The lecture will draw on the final twenty lines of Milton’s ‘Il Penseroso’ to pursue two themes. The first is biographical: the lines depict a poet moved by ecclesiastical architecture, stained glass, and sacred music. Such sentiments do not suit the common image of Milton as a youthful Puritan. An alternative model of a young Milton with high church sympathies who is radicalised as a young adult is proposed. The second theme is an unexpected strand in Milton’s posthumous reputation. The description of the hermit and his mossy hermitage proved to be an important influence on the fashion for ornamental garden hermits in the mid-eighteenth century. The cultural void created by the demise of the garden hermit may have been filled by the garden gnome, the unlikely successor to Milton’s Anglican hermit.

Free Registration via Eventbrite. 

You are welcome to join us for a glass of wine before the lecture from 5.30pm in the Berrick Saul foyer. 

Gordon Campbell is Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Leicester and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is an international authority on the poetry of John Milton and on the King James Bible. He received a doctorate at the University of York in 1973, when his supervisor was C.A. Patrides, after whom the lecture is named. More recently he was made D.Litt at York in 1998. Among his many distinctions outside the academy he was the scholarly consultant on the world’s largest Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C. His most recent publications are Garden History: a Very Short Introduction and the Oxford Illustrated History of the Renaissance.

Sponsored by the Department of English and Related Literature and the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies