Austen Saunders (Director of the Printed Books Census for the Oxford Traherne) has published new research about John Milton, a near-contemporary of Traherne's.
Dr Saunders' latest article considers the rewards of anachronistic readings of Milton's poetry. These readings concentrate on correspondences between Milton's poems and much later ideas about society and the natural world which Milton could not have known about. Readers of Traherne's poetry might have been struck by similar instances in which Traherne's poems seem to anticipate a wide range of exciting ideas we wouldn't normally expect to encounter in seventeenth-century English poetry.
Dr Saunders' article was published as ‘Paradise Lost in a Chaotic Century’, Milton Studies, 62.2 (2022), 228–58.
