Areopagitica Archaeology

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Fish, Stanley. "Driving from the Letter: Truth and Indeterminacy in Milton's Areopagitica." How Milton Works. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001. 187-214.
Milton, Areopagitica

Areopagitica

compares books to meats; each man will have to judge for himself whether they are bad (165)

"I conceive therefore, that when God did enlarge the universall diet of mans body, saving ever the rules of temperance, he then also, as before, left arbitrary the dyeting and repasting of our minds; as wherein every mature man might have to exercise his owne leading capacity." (165)

claims virtue comes from knowing vice

  • "He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian." (167)
  • Spenser referenced -- Guyon goes through the bower of bliss "that he might see and know, and yet abstain" (167)
  • "Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read." (167)
  • "to all men such [bad] books are not temptations nor vanities, but useful drugs and materials wherewith to temper and compose effective and strong medicines, which man's life cannot want" (170)

whole world of experience / perception forms our personal "book"

"And albeit whatever thing we hear or see, sitting, walking, travelling, or conversing may be fitly call'd our book, and is of the same effect that writings are, yet grant the thing to be prohibited were only books, it appears that this order hitherto is far insufficient to the end which it intends." (175)

English Reprints Jhon Milton Areopagitica

Amazon listing: [1]

English Reprints Jhon Milton Areopagitica later put back on Google Books, with limited preview -- since it's now under the purview of BiblioLife [2]

  • "Copyrighted material" in the bottom right corner; usually refers to text, but here refers to the actual material -- text is out of copyright, scan probably isn't

Areopagitica (Volume 1); 24 November 1644: Preceded by Illustrative Documents

Amazon listing: [3]

Archive.org: [4]