Delivery of conference paper at international Interdisciplinary Arendt Conference, 22-25 August 2023
Description
This paper builds on previous work, which proposed Arendt rather than Habermas as a lens through which to view seventeenth-century English politics and poetry, focussing on orality amid an explosion of print culture, and Milton's insistence on the classical equation of 'poetry and all good oratory', on speech as action, and on speaking out of the self in public as constituting true identity and appearance. Given Milton's recurrent tendency to characterise his writing and fiction-generating self as 'feminine', in face of the emphasis on masculinity/virtù in the republican rhetorical tradition, how does he use Saints Augustine and Paul to move beyond such binaries? Assisted by some actual, seventeenth-century women, does Milton, rather than Arendt, in fact push at the boundaries of how a post-classical public realm might preserve the sanctity of the divide between oikia and polis and yet afford entry to previously non-citizen groups, not least women?