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" “Jews natural,” “Jews virtual”: Milton and the problem of typological hermeneutics "
Daveena Tauber
J. Miller
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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55091
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| Doc. No
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TL25045
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| Call number
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3249359
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| Main Entry
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Daveena Tauber
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| Title & Author
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“Jews natural,” “Jews virtual”: Milton and the problem of typological hermeneutics\ Daveena Tauber
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| College
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Rutgers The State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick
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| Date
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2006
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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2006
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| Page No
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238
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| Abstract
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In the period before and during the English Revolution, Protestants of all stripes began to claim that the Old Testament pointed not only to the New Testament, but also to the events of their own moment. English reformers began to construct images of self, nation, and history in explicitly typological terms, imagining the nation as the New Jerusalem and its people as the chosen Israel. Milton was one of many who utilized typological imagery to express his hopes for the English Republic. This project argues that even as Milton uses typology to express his social, political, and historical hopes, his work also registers the ways that the truth claims of typological hermeneutics were being called into question. This project reads Milton in the context of the many pressures that were being exerted on the typological reading of history. Among these pressures was the sheer proliferation of Protestant sects, each claiming an authoritative reading of scripture. The midcentury debates over Jewish readmission also gave rise to the problem of how to address Jews as both potential converts and competing exegetes with millenarian agendas of their own. Finally, there was the spectacular failure of contemporary events to bear out the Republican typological reading of history. This project is a reading that shows how these larger cultural and hermeneutic tensions inform Milton's three late works Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. Among the many issues Milton grapples with in these works, are the questions of how to reconcile his simultaneous belief in a pre-determined history narrative with his desire for free and uncompelled human agency; how to reconcile the desire to encourage individual reading with the belief that scripture contains a particular set of truths; how to continue using Judaic and Old Testament images as vehicles for Christian meaning without incurring reference to world-historical people, who were threatening to re-emerge on English soil. These are not questions that Milton resolves, but their play in his works gives us a glimpse of a man and a moment poised between a sacred and a secular view of history, of scripture, and of the Jew.
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| Subject
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Language, literature and linguistics; England; Hermeneutics; Jews; John Milton; Milton, John; Typology; British and Irish literature; 0593:British and Irish literature
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J. Miller
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Rutgers The State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick
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