Espousing Liberty: The Gender of Liberalism and the Politics

of Miltonic Divorce
Ben Labreche

ELH, Volume 77, Number 4, Winter 2010, pp. 969-994 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/elh/summary/v077/77.4.labreche.html

Access Provided by Loyola-Notre Dame Library at 01/19/11 11:05PM GMT

Espousing Liberty: The Gender of Liberalism
and the Politics of Miltonic Divorce

by ben labreche

i.

The first recorded criticism of Milton’s divorce tracts appears in

a sermon by the Presbyterian divine Herbert Palmer on the proper
limits of toleration and liberty of conscience in Parliamentary Eng-
land. Preaching before Parliament in August 1644, Palmer at times
reserved a limited measure of “libertie to dispute and debate” to those
who were not “Schismaticall . . . nor Opposite to sound Doctrine,”
but he primarily urged Parliament not to succumb to the appeal-
ingly reformist rhetoric of liberty of conscience: both the necessities
of secular government and the religious obligations of the Solemn
League and Covenant demanded that Parliament should suppress
religious and social deviations.1 Palmer’s concern lay in pleasing God
and reversing the Puritan military defeats of the preceding months,
but for modern readers this sermon’s interest stems primarily from
its examples of contemporary heresies, in particular the defense of
“divorce for other causes then Christ and His Apostles mention; Of
which a wicked booke is abroad and uncensured, though deserving to
be burnt, whose Author hath been so impudent as to set his Name to
it, and dedicate it” to Parliament.2
The wicked book in question was The Doctrine and Discipline of Di-
vorce, which Milton had first printed in August 1643 and then expanded
in February 1644. Milton’s bold position on divorce certainly departed
from the more conservative opinions that Palmer had voiced on the
subject in Scripture and Reason Pleaded for Defensive Armes (1643),
but more was at stake in Palmer’s attack than the mere regulation of
marriage.3 His sermon questioned Milton’s very right to participate
actively in the debates of the commonwealth, to address Parliament
directly under his own name, and to circulate his ideas “abroad and
uncensured.” Palmer’s recommendation that Doctrine and Discipline
be burned was, moreover, only the beginning of contemporary criti-
cism that sought to limit Milton’s freedom of speech.4 Scholars have

ELH 77 (2010) 969–994 © 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 969
often identified Areopagitica, which appeared in November 1644 and
which clearly envisions a politics grounded in free, public discourse,
as Milton’s response to these attacks, but Milton also defended free
speech throughout the divorce tracts themselves. Unlike the earlier
anti-prelatical pamphlets, all the divorce tracts subsequent to the first
edition of Doctrine and Discipline began with an address to Parliament
that specifically argued for the right of a broad swath of citizens—“men
of what liberall profession soever” in the words of the revised Doctrine
and Discipline (2:230)—to speak publicly on issues of governmental
policy. The Judgement of Martin Bucer (July 1644) reinforced its pref-
ace, moreover, by asking whether Parliamentary England will prove
“a time of free speaking, free writing” and whether Milton’s tracts on
divorce will find “liberty now among us” or will on the contrary “not
find a permission to the Presse” (2:479). And in March 1645 the last
volume of divorce tracts containing Tetrachordon and Colasterion
continued Areopagitica’s earlier critique of licensing and responded
directly to Palmer’s attack—Milton in fact quotes Palmer’s criticism
verbatim—by proposing “true liberty through the right information
of religious and civil life” rather than “the ill counsell of a bashfull
silence” as the ideal of public discourse (2:578, 585).5 Far from merely
seeking to influence specific policies on marriage, then, the divorce
tracts intervened in the broader question of how the Parliamentary
regime would make policy at all.
Milton’s challenge lay in asserting this politics of discursive freedom
without a framework of cultural or institutional precedent for politi-
cal speech by mere private citizens. A figure like Palmer could claim
the right to address public affairs on the basis of his official position
within the government: he was a licensed minister and a member of
the Westminster Assembly, and as the order of Parliament that prefaces
his published sermon notes, the government not only invited him to
speak, but also specifically “desired” him “to print” his sermon. Milton,
in contrast, was only a private individual liable to Palmer’s charge of
being “wicked” and “impudent” when he aired his opinions publicly.
Milton made this vulnerability a source of strength, however, by turning
to the private household as a source of authority distinct from—and
potentially in competition with—that of the state. Milton voiced this
view most memorably in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649),
where he wrote of “that power, which is the root and sourse of all lib-
erty, to dispose and oeconomize . . . as Maisters of Family in thir own
house” (3:237). This assertion of the inextricable connection between
liberty and mastery of the household expanded on a point made years

970 Espousing Liberty

earlier in Doctrine and Discipline, which claims that “God & the law
of all Nations” have put authority over divorce in the hands of “the
master of family.” Already in 1643, then, Milton had come to frame
the debate over divorce as a struggle between the natural rights of
“domestick prerogative” and ecclesiastical courts’ competing “encroach-
ment” or “external & unbefitting judicature” (2:343–44).
Because of this “domestick prerogative,” the household becomes
a natural basis for Milton to argue the right of “private persons”
freely to give “publick advice” in Areopagitica, where he defends
himself from the charge of being “new or insolent” by appealing to
the example of Isocrates, who “from his private house” wrote to “the
Parlament of Athens” (2:488–9). Milton returns to the connection
between free speech and the household, moreover, a decade later in
The Second Defense of the English People, where he reflects back on
the relationship between his divorce tracts and Areopagitica. As the
Second Defense explains, both his pamphlets on “the nature of mar-
riage” and his writing on “freedom to express oneself” participated in
a single, coordinated effort to promote “domestic or private liberty.”6
Here liberty of divorce and liberty of discourse come together as two
related ways in which the household could legitimate private citizens’
exercise of new kinds of personal and political authority.
The basis for this enfranchisement lies not merely in the household
itself, however, but in the conjugal relationship at its center. Milton’s
theory of this marital bond, like his theory of political liberty, is above
all discursive: as Doctrine and Discipline famously argues, “conversa-
tion” rather than procreation or material help represents “the chiefest
and the noblest end of mariage” (2:246).7 The nature of marital con-
versation and its significance for his political views is, however, deeply
conflicted. At times, Milton suggests that this conversation underpins
a fundamentally egalitarian and companionate mode of marriage that
models how citizens should relate in free public discourse. At other
times, though, Milton presents marital conversation as distinctly differ-
ent from and inferior to the discussions of men in the public sphere,
and here the conventions of sexual hierarchy allow Milton to assert that
men’s domestic authority over their wives establishes their fitness to
exercise a similar authority publicly in matters of church and state.
Over the past two decades, work on the divorce tracts has focused
on the conflict between these egalitarian and masculinist views of
marriage. In earlier scholarship, as Stanley Fish noted in 1990, this
generally meant describing how the divorce tracts fail to fulfill their
promise of imagining a more egalitarian form of marriage: critics like

Ben Labreche 971

Mary Nyquist, James Turner, and Stephen Fallon, he writes, focused
on the way in which “Milton’s ‘deeply masculinist assumptions’ . . . war
with Milton’s more radical sympathies” with the end result that the
“radical sympathies lose out.”8 More recent work on the divorce tracts
has to some extent departed from the original feminist critique that Fish
opposes. Gina Hausknecht, for example, has written that Milton makes
freedom potentially accessible to women as well as men because in his
prose writings “liberty is gendered, not sexed,” and Gregory Chaplin
has attempted to show that Miltonic marriage tends to efface sexual
difference.9 Fundamentally, however, critical attention to the divorce
tracts has continued to center on the rationalizing, either-or principle
identified by Fish: in Hausknecht, either liberty is gendered or it is
sexed; in Chaplin’s account, either “hierarchical gender difference
almost disappears” or, as he ultimately has to concede, “hierarchy and
gender difference reemerge” over the course of the divorce tracts.10
I would argue, however, against interpreting the divorce tracts’
contrasting positions on marital hierarchy as a “war” in which one
side or the other must lose out. Rather, these juxtaposed views reveal
how Milton simultaneously pursues two distinct rhetorical strategies
in an anxious attempt to justify his protoliberal approach to politics.
Conflicts certainly arise between these strategies, but these conflicts
reveal not how Milton’s views on sexual hierarchy diverge, but rather
how he struggles to make very different views of gender and marriage
converge in support of a single claim for the authority of free discourse
and government.
Categorizing Milton as “protoliberal” of course risks teleological
distortion of his political views; Quentin Skinner and Steve Pincus have
in fact recently argued strongly against understanding Milton’s concep-
tion of liberty in terms of modern liberalism.11 An attentive reading
of the divorce tracts reveals, however, that during the civil war years
Milton engages deeply with a variety of issues central to later theories
of liberalism, particularly the separation of public and private spheres,
and freedom of thought and expression. Moreover, an examination
of these pamphlets in the broader tradition of liberal and feminist
thought—from Nyquist’s well-known work on gendered subjectivity to
the theorizing of Jürgen Habermas and his critics—suggests that even
the divorce tracts’ seemingly illiberal assumption of gender hierarchy
advances Milton’s emerging theory of political liberty.
While these feminist critiques have suggested that sexual inequal-
ity is a blind spot or unacknowledged basis of liberalism, however,
the divorce tracts suggest that Milton self-consciously uses gender

972 Espousing Liberty

to grapple with the problematic balance in a free polity between
acknowledging difference and achieving consensus. This is not to say
that the divorce tracts successfully resolve this issue; on the contrary,
Milton’s attempt in these works to combine egalitarian and masculinist
analogies between public and domestic life ultimately demands an a
priori similarity between spouses that has disastrous implications for
his conception of freedom. Nonetheless, this failure in the divorce
tracts does not represent the sum total of Milton’s engagement with
marital conversation and its relationship to liberty. Rather, as I will
briefly examine in concluding, it provides a basis for Milton to return
to these issues years later in Paradise Lost, where the failure of Eve
to achieve freedom of speech within marriage plays an integral part
in her fall.

ii.

The role of conversation in the divorce tracts has been a source of

interest and contention since their first appearance in the 1640s. Even
before the rise of modern feminism, readers saw Milton’s emphasis on
conversation as presenting the possibility of intellectually engaged and
egalitarian marriage. In November 1644, for example, the anonymous
pamphlet An Answer to a Book, Intituled, The Doctrine and Discipline
of Divorce argued in a satirical vein that Milton’s handling of conversa-
tion founded marriage on rationality and equality: “[W]e believe,” the
author wrote, “you count no woman to due conversation accessible, as
to you, except she can speak Hebrew, Greek, Latine, & French, and
dispute against the Canon law as well as you, or at least be able to
hold discourse with you.”12 Recent readers have generally viewed the
role of conversation in the divorce tracts more sympathetically, but
they too have tended to identify Milton’s focus on conjugal discourse
with rational equality. David Norbrook, for example, has acknowledged
the “patriarchal character” of Milton’s republicanism, but nonetheless
found in Milton’s “emphasis on conversation” a basis for “rational
communication” and “nurturing freedom” between spouses.13 More
recently, Gregory Chaplin and Thomas Luxon have connected Milton’s
focus on marital conversation to the classical tradition of philosophiz-
ing, egalitarian friendship between men.14
These optimistic readings of conversation’s role in Miltonic marriage
find a measure of support in the language that Doctrine and Disci-
pline uses to discuss conjugal love. This pamphlet describes Adam’s
loneliness before Eve’s creation, for example, as a “rationall burning”

Ben Labreche 973

and an “intelligible flame” and later asserts “intellectual delight,” not
mere “brute desire” to be the essential quality of successful marriages
(2:251–52, 339). On its surface, this “rationall” experience of love
implies intellectual attraction between spouses—and consequently a
measure of intellectual equality—in marriage. Such an interpretation
of the divorce tracts’ language is, however, disputable. The rational-
ity to which the divorce tracts refer in these quotations relates not to
marital conversation itself, as has been suggested, but to men’s experi-
ence of loneliness and love. Thus though these pamphlets attribute
psychological depth to the husband’s experience of marriage, they do
nothing to endow either wives or the conversation that they supply
with rational substance.
On the contrary, Milton carefully distinguishes marital conversation
from the intellectually freighted discussions of free citizens in the
public sphere. In Doctrine and Discipline, for example, he praises the
“conversation of man with woman” in terms that make no reference
to rationality or intellectual substance. Wives’ conversation is “apt and
cheerfull,” and the wife herself is “a ready and reviving associate in
marriage,” but such observations in no way suggest that wives’ conversa-
tion is informative or intellectually challenging. Instead, Doctrine and
Discipline presents this conversation as merely a form of recreation
that can “comfort and refresh” the husband (2:235, 251).
Milton elaborates on the special nature and limited scope of mari-
tal conversation in the later divorce tracts, where he responds to An
Answer’s rationalistic and egalitarian reading of his theory of conversa-
tion. In Colasterion, Milton claims that God created Eve rather than
a male companion for Adam “to convers with” because there are two
sorts of conversation, “one society of grave freindship, and another
amiable and attractive society of conjugal love” (2:740). Similarly, in
Tetrachordon he explains that God provided Eve to Adam rather than
a male friend because men cannot

alwayes be contemplative, or pragmaticall abroad, but have need of

som delightfull intermissions, wherin the enlarg’d soul may leav off a
while her severe schooling; and like a glad youth in wandring vacancy,
may keep her hollidaies to joy and harmles pastime: which as she
cannot well doe without company, so in no company so well as where
the different sexe in most resembling unlikenes, and most unlike
resemblance cannot but please best and be pleas’d in the aptitude of
that variety. (2:597)

974 Espousing Liberty

The distinction that Milton draws between marital conversation in the
domestic sphere and same-sex male discourse in the public sphere
makes clear his commitment to a distinctly gendered and hierarchi-
cal view of discourse. Men participate freely both in public forms of
discourse “abroad” and domestic forms in the home, and their con-
versations with one another can rise to the level of rational debate
on “grave,” “contemplative,” and “pragmaticall” topics—presumably
political and religious reform. Women, in contrast, participate only
in domestic conversations that serve as “intermissions” in these “con-
templative, or pragmaticall” discussions. Milton’s theory of marital
conversation thus clearly coordinates with his gendered discussion of
the authority that arises from within the household. Just as in Doctrine
and Discipline it is the “master of family” who enjoys “domestick pre-
rogative” (2:343–44), here it is specifically the husband who is free to
speak on a full range of topics in a variety of settings. Thus although
the divorce tracts hint at the possibility of conjugal discourse that is
rational and egalitarian, they also clearly—and in the later divorce
tracts, increasingly—suggest that spouses converse across the divide
of a distinct sexual hierarchy.
Milton’s conflicted handling of marital conversation allows him to
advance the cause of liberty through two quite different strategies. In
their more straightforward form, Milton’s views on marriage support
his politics by fostering cultural values essential to the emergence of
the liberal public sphere. As Habermas maintains in The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere, the companionate marriages
of the early modern bourgeoisie presented (in theory) a model for
social relationships based not on coercion but on “voluntariness” and
“community of love.”15 This highly affective and richly psychologized
bond between husband and wife encouraged respect for one another’s
subjectivity and in doing so fostered the “generality and abstractness”
that encouraged assent to the rational and egalitarian application of
law.16 Milton’s emphasis on marital conversation similarly presents
the conjugal bond in deeply personal and affective terms that make
the home—and, by analogy, society at large—a sphere of liberty and
equality.17 In Tetrachordon, for example, Milton imagines an egalitar-
ian and reciprocally just marriage bond that brings “equity and good
to either part” and grants wives “just appeal against wrong, and ser-
vitude” (2:612, 625).
This relatively egalitarian view of marriage supports the inclusivity
necessary to liberal government. In part, this inclusivity is a matter of
establishing a legitimate form of political representation. As Habermas

Ben Labreche 975

explains, the loving companionship of early modern spouses encouraged
them to see one another as “common human beings,” and this ideology
of “‘pure’ or ‘common’ humanity” in turn provided a basis for liberals
to claim that, although the early modern public sphere excluded the
unpropertied and the uneducated de facto, it nonetheless represented
the interests not only of the middle class, but of all “common human
beings.”18 Additionally, the “principle of universal access” legitimized
liberalism’s discursive method of determining governmental policy.
Only genuine inclusivity could make good the public sphere’s claim
to allow the free exercise of reason and thus the discovery of the
fundamental laws of a just society: the “ordre naturel” and “what was
practically necessary in the interest of all.”19
Despite the constraints that he puts on wives’ conversation at times,
Milton also acknowledges the pressure on free, rational political sys-
tems to be inclusive. Areopagitica, for example, argues in its defense
of domestic liberty that Parliament gives “no greater testimony” of its
own excellence and legitimacy than when it “acknowledges and obeyes
the voice of reason from what quarter soever it be heard speaking”
(2:490). Milton had already connected this position specifically to the
issue of gender, moreover, in the prose work that immediately pre-
ceded the divorce tracts, An Apology Against a Pamphlet (1642), which
endorses the authority of Parliament on the basis of its openness to
the counsel and petitions of all sorts of English citizens, even work-
ing class men and “at other times also women” (1:926). The divorce
tracts, in turn, support this new mode of politics by developing the
position that genuine inclusivity must encompass both sexes. These
pamphlets frequently discuss the rights and liberties of marriage and
divorce in the gender-neutral language of “humanity,” for example,
as where they defend “human dignity” and the “human shape” or
where they argue from “the principles of humanity” (2:592, 625–26).
Similarly, the principle of inclusivity makes itself felt in Tetrachordon’s
definition of marriage, which acknowledges a role in public affairs for
those exceptional women whose exercise of virtue will “extend furder”
than the narrow sphere of the household (2:613).
What is true of exceptional women, however, necessarily does not
hold for the majority, and even a cursory examination of the divorce
tracts reveals that they undercut their egalitarian claims for marriage
as soon as they set them forth. The claim for women’s right of “just
appeal against wrong, and servitude,” for example, follows directly
after an assertion of “the mans right above the woman” (2:625, my
emphasis); Milton’s attack on undesired marriage as enslavement of the

976 Espousing Liberty

“human shape” ends by asserting the bondage of unwanted marriage to
be specifically “unmanly” (2:626); and he undercuts his assertion that
women’s exercise of virtue may “extend furder” than the household
by observing that “I finde the properties and excellencies of a wife
set out only from domestic vertues” (2:613). Such contradictions of
his own support for women’s dignity recapitulate the tension already
seen between the simultaneous psychological richness and intellectual
barrenness of marital conversation.
These contradictions do not, however, represent mere logical weak-
ness in his argument; rather, Milton’s ambivalence about the status of
wives and their discourse allows him to employ a second, gendered
means of justifying free politics. As already mentioned, Milton at times
justifies the private individual’s political authority on the basis of his
being a “master of family,” and the gendering of “master” here is not
incidental to Milton’s protoliberal instincts; as feminist historians and
political theorists have noted, liberalism has generally proven un-
able to realize its own ideals when the emancipation of women is in
question.20 Habermas demonstrates liberal theory’s capacity for this
oversight where he notes without further comment that the authority
of the bourgeois subject was largely “paternal” and enhanced by “the
dependence of the wife and children on the male head of the fam-
ily.”21 And on the basis of liberalism’s spotted history, Nyquist suggests
that the divorce tracts’ “liberal-humanist” elements—their conferral
of “illusory . . . autonomy” on women and their “discourse of ‘equal
rights’”—serve not to liberate women but to impose a new, bourgeois
mode of internalized “paternal law.”22
Since the writing of Nyquist’s article, however, political theorists
have asserted a contrary possibility: instead of liberalism bringing
about patriarchy, patriarchy may help bring about liberalism. The role
of patriarchy in fostering liberalism is already implicit in Habermas’s
passing acknowledgment that not only “human closeness” but also “pa-
triarchal authority” helped enfranchise the middle-class householder.
Domesticity thus offered a gendered (and in itself illiberal) basis for
liberalism as well as an egalitarian one.23 In response to recent feminist
scholarship, moreover, Habermas has revised his earlier position and
acknowledged fully the role of domestic hierarchy in the emergence
of liberalism. As he notes in a 1992 essay, patriarchal authority and
women’s exclusion from politics were factors of “structuring signifi-
cance” that proved “constitutive for the political public sphere.”24
Milton, too, gives sexual hierarchy an important role in the institu-
tion of political freedom, but his theory of gender’s role in politics is

Ben Labreche 977

quite different from the account given by either Habermas or Carole
Pateman, the scholar whose work most directly influenced Habermas’s
1992 essay. According to Pateman, the social contracts of liberal politi-
cal theory result in an unacknowledged but essential “sexual contract”
that subordinates women to their husbands.25 Milton in contrast argues
not that women’s subjection derives from men’s political engagements,
but rather that this subjection is a prerequisite to such engagements:
a man’s exercise of authority over his wife demonstrates his aptitude
to exercise authority in the public sphere as well.
Pamphlets such as Eikonoklastes and the Defenses claim again
and again that men cannot participate in legitimate government if
they have failed to dominate their own wives.26 Writing of Charles
I in Eikonoklastes, for example, Milton cannot emphasize enough
the fact that subjection to Queen Henrietta Maria was a cause of his
misgovernment. The threat posed by the queen was of course in part
religious, but Milton also singles out very clearly the issue of gender
where he asserts that:

Examples are not farr to seek, how great mischeif and dishonour hath
befall’n to Nations under the Goverment of effeminate and Uxorious
Magistrates. Who being themselves govern’d and overswaid at home
under a Feminine usurpation, cannot but be farr short of spirit and
autority without dores, to govern a whole Nation.27

Subjection to a wife here demonstrates not only weakness “at home,”

but also deficiency in public affairs, a lack of the “spirit and autority”
necessary to rule “without dores, to govern a whole Nation.” Similarly,
in his merciless attacks on Salmasius in the Defenses, Milton repeatedly
harps on his antagonist’s allegedly hen-pecked marriage and accuses
these domestic affairs of motivating Salmasius’s support of royal tyr-
anny: “naturally you want to force royal tyranny on others after being
used to suffer so slavishly a woman’s tyranny at home.”28 He in fact
accuses Salmasius of being

a foul Circean beast, a filthy pig well used to serving a woman in the
lowest sort of slavery where you never had the slightest taste of manly
virtue [gustum virtutis] or the freedom which springs from it; you would
have all men slaves, for in your own heart you feel nothing noble or
free, and you breathe and talk nothing but meanness and slavery.29

For Salmasius, then, as for Charles, marital relations prove to be a test

of mettle that determines whether he is slavish (servilis) or whether

978 Espousing Liberty

he instead possesses the capacities necessary to rule over himself and
others (the gustum virtutis, et . . . libertatis, the pectus generosum
aut liberum).
The relationship between domestic hierarchy and political freedom
is not only at issue in the negative example of royalists. Male citizens of
the new Parliamentary republic also have a responsibility to establish
appropriate sexual dominion over their wives, as Milton suggests in a
well-known passage of the Second Defense:

[I]n vain does he [any man] prattle about liberty in assembly and
market-place who at home endures the slavery most unworthy of
man [vir], slavery to an inferior. Concerning this matter [divorce]
then I published several books, at the very time when man and wife
were often bitter foes, he dwelling at home with their children, she,
the mother of the family, in the camp of the enemy, threatening her
husband with death and disaster.30

Readers have often related this description of wartime estrangement

to Milton’s own life in the early 1640s, but the references to children
and the wife’s political activity makes such an autobiographical asso-
ciation imprecise at best. The parallel drawn in this passage between
the household turned upside-down—the husband “at home” with the
children, the wife “abroad”—and civil war indicates instead Milton’s
concern to show that a man’s handling of his marriage logically quali-
fies him for or disqualifies him from political participation. If—like
Charles and Salmasius—the republican subject submits to “slavery to
an inferior,” he demonstrates that he is most unworthy (indignissimus)
of authority and that his presence among other men “in assembly”
would be “vain” (frustra). Conversely, if he does master his wife ap-
propriately, he will presumably demonstrate a corresponding worthiness
to exercise political authority as an enfranchised citizen.
This argument from husbandly superiority in the family poses certain
problems for the divorce tracts. First, the modes of rule exercised by
men in the domestic and public spheres are not necessarily compat-
ible with one another. Although the husband may need to show “spirit
and autority” in each, the nature of this authority is different: in the
home it is distinctly hierarchical, but in the public sphere the husband
must rule jointly with others through the egalitarian mechanisms of
rational debate and consensus. Second, in basing his politics on a
parallel with domestic hierarchy Milton comes dangerously close to
the patriarchal justification of royal authority against which his First
Defense strongly protests. Milton’s household/state analogy based on

Ben Labreche 979

husband and wife is of course less threateningly hierarchical than the
absolutist analogy based on father and child, but Milton nonetheless
skirts a school of political logic—embodied most notably in Robert
Filmer’s Patriarchia—that John Locke would later be at pains to
repudiate in his classic articulation of liberal politics, Two Treatises
of Government.31
There is distinct irony in the fact that Milton, who had previously
attacked “custome” virulently in the preface to Doctrine and Discipline
and in the introduction of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, should
draw support from the highly conventional presumption of male supe-
riority.32 It is presumably this claim on tradition, however, that makes
the argument from domestic authority so appealing to Milton. To base
citizens’ liberty solely on the precedent of companionate marriage
would merely replace one radically innovative and contentious claim
to common humanity and equality with another one. Thus rather than
risk overestimating his contemporaries’ willingness to see women as
equals, Milton hedges his bets by also arguing from the position that
women are naturally subject to their husbands. The divorce tracts’
patriarchalism is thus not an end of Milton’s liberalism as Nyquist
claims, but rather part of the means by which he may dramatically
broaden—though not universalize—political participation.
Milton pulls together both strands of his argument at the beginning
of Tetrachordon, where he dramatically juxtaposes the egalitarian impli-
cations of rational liberty with his own rhetoric of sexual hierarchy:

[M]an is not to hold her [woman] as a servant, but receives her into a
part of that empire which God proclaims him to, though not equally,
yet largely, as his own image and glory: for it is no small glory to him,
that a creature so like him, should be made subject to him. Not but
that particular exceptions may have place, if she exceed her husband in
prudence and dexterity, and he contentedly yeeld, for then a superior
and more naturall law comes in, that the wiser should govern the lesse
wise, whether male or female. But that which far more easily and
obediently follows from this verse, is that, seeing woman was purposely
made for man, and he her head, it cannot stand before the breath of
this divine utterance, that man . . . joyning to himself for his intended
good and solace an inferiour sexe, should so becom her thrall, whose
wilfulnes or inability to be a wife frustrates the occasionall end of her
creation, but that he may acquitt himself to freedom by his naturall
birthright, and that indeleble character of priority which God crown’d
him with. (2:589–90)

980 Espousing Liberty

This passage takes the daring step of fully, if momentarily, following
through on the fundamental premises of free government. Although
Milton begins by asserting only the proportional equality of women—
they are to be admitted “largely,” but not “equally” into man’s empire—
he then takes a radically different position by suggesting that women
may in some cases legitimately enjoy superiority over their husbands:
“[P]articular exceptions may have place, if she exceed her husband in
prudence and dexterity, and he contentedly yeeld, for then a superior
and more naturall law comes in, that the wiser should govern the lesse
wise, whether male or female.” This assertion infuses Milton’s theory
of marriage with the rationality, inclusivity, and egalitarianism that in
principle characterize the liberal public sphere: in place of ascriptive
hierarchy, “naturall law” and reason (“prudence and dexterity”) come
to underpin power in the household, and on this basis women as well
as men enter the class that will “govern” in England. This passage thus
presents the household as an epitome of the rational, egalitarian pol-
ity: the originally more powerful partner, the husband, “contentedly”
gives way here to the greater authority of his wife’s wisdom, and by
this means a power structure based solely on reason emerges.
At the same time, however, this passage also stresses how the
subordination of his wife can help fashion a man psychologically as
a political actor. No sooner does Milton acknowledge that “the wiser
should govern the lesse wise, whether male or female,” in fact, than
he revises this rationalist position by adding that it nevertheless “far
more easily and obediently follows” from the biblical verse in question
that “woman was purposely made for man, and he her head” and that
women are, moreover, an “inferiour” and “occasionall” sex (2:589). Mil-
ton must include these contradictory denials of wives’ equality because
the ability of his male subject to “acquitt himself to freedom” depends
specifically on his sexual superiority over his wife: it is his “indeleble
character of priority”—sexual priority—that underpins his “naturall
birthright” of “freedom.” Sexual hierarchy has in fact “crown’d” man
with this priority, an image that, though its suggestion of monarchal
power may sit uneasily with Milton’s Parliamentarian sympathies,
clearly incorporates husbands at all levels of society into the political
class. Through marital hierarchy, then, husbands become governors
and demonstrate the “freedom,” “priority,” and “glory” that provide
an ethical and psychological basis for political activity.
This deeply traditional assumption of male superiority would have
served to undercut the conservative attacks of critics like Palmer, but
Milton’s gendering of freedom also betrays a fundamental arbitrariness

Ben Labreche 981

and authoritarianism that threaten to nullify the rationality, equality,
and inclusivity that underpin his politics. Milton compounds this
problem, moreover, by grounding men’s worthiness to rule in their
comparative excellence: as he writes, it is precisely the fact that woman
is “a creature so like” man that endows her husband with glory. Given
this comparative basis for male political rights, it logically follows that
women, too, are worthy of political participation, or close to it: were
women clearly unworthy, men’s superiority to them would offer only
an ambiguous argument for male political freedom. This argument
from the similarity of the sexes, however, makes marital hierarchy
inherently arbitrary: while sexual difference might reasonably justify
a differential in male and female authority, similarity logically implies
a corresponding equality.33
In order to maintain a semblance of logical consistency, Milton
needs a rhetoric that will bridge the divide between his egalitarian
and hierarchical arguments, a rhetoric that will simultaneously liberate
and restrain wives, that will both accord them the autonomy essential
to political freedom and prevent them from exercising this autonomy
in a way that questions the authority of their husbands. Ironically, he
finds this compensatory rhetoric in precisely the principle of similar-
ity between husbands and wives that might otherwise upset the logic
of his defense of liberty. This similarity lies not in equality of rights
and abilities, however, but in a priori resemblance of disposition and
perspective that makes possible harmonious, companionate marriage
without substantive debate.
The importance of similarity to Milton’s view of marriage appears
as early as Doctrine and Discipline, where he argues on the basis of
a variety of authorities the principle that “a man . . . will cleave to his
like” (2:271). This claim provides a basis for Tetrachordon as well to
equate Eve’s “meet” nature or “fitnes” as a wife with her “likenes” to
Adam (2:605). This recourse to similarity allows Milton to assert Eve’s
autonomy while simultaneously maintaining male authority in the
household, as where he writes of her “fitnes of mind and disposition,
which may breed the Spirit of concord, and union” between husband
and wife (2:605). In emphasizing her “mind,” “disposition,” and “Spirit,”
this passage accords to Eve the psychological and affective depths
that underpin companionate marriage and its emphasis on freedom,
inclusion, and rationality. At the same time, however, this description
also curtails the scope and exercise of this rational autonomy: the
acknowledgment of the original wife’s “mind and disposition” serves
not to foster the contesting engagement of debate, but to align her

982 Espousing Liberty

perspectives and motives with those of her husband and thus to justify
her voluntary agreement—her “concord, and union”—with her hus-
band’s views. The similarity paradoxically praised in Tetrachordon as
a “most resembling unlikenes, and most unlike resemblance” (2:597)
thus holds the possible promise of both affirming and undercutting
the independence of spouses, of allowing Milton to have his domestic
liberty and male superiority, too.
The rhetoric of similarity plays a central role in one of the divorce
tracts’ most famous passages, the allegory of Eros and Anteros in the
1644 edition of Doctrine and Discipline. This figurative excursus rep-
resents companionate marriage as “not . . . a forc’t cohabitation, and
counterfeit performance of duties, but . . . unfained love and peace”
that permits free and honest expression of feelings and that as a result
can be described as a “coequal” and “mutual” bond (2:254–56). Milton’s
interest in equality and mutuality appears moreover in his choice of
Eros and Anteros as the basis of this allegory. Chaplin has claimed
that that Milton borrows these figures from the platonic tradition of
higher and lower or celestial and terrestrial loves, but Milton never
suggests that one brother is ethically superior to the other. Instead, he
apparently chooses Eros and Anteros to figure companionate marriage
on the basis of the classical and early modern iconographic tradition
in which the struggle of these cupids over a palm branch signified lov-
ers’ or friends’ reciprocity of love and competition to provide benefits
to one another.34 This allegory’s “coequal” and “mutual” account of
“matrimoniall love” thus argues for the conjugal basis of free politics
that both Milton and Habermas seek in the domestic sphere.
Consistent with his practice elsewhere, Milton secures the relation-
ship of Eros and Anteros in the attraction of like to like: the success
of their relationship lies in the fact that they are “homogeneal” and
“wondrous like” (2:254–55). Despite idealizing companionate marriage
between “homogeneal” figures, however, this allegory also epitomizes
the problems that similarity entails for Milton’s politics. These ten-
sions arise first in the extraordinary rhetorical strain of representing
heterosexual marriage through a homoerotic and incestuous union,
which Annabel Patterson has attributed to “a generic and a gendered
discomfort.”35 The particular features that make these figures’ sexual
relationship so striking and even transgressive stem from their similar-
ity, their shared sex and close familial relationship. The strain of this
figure would thus appear to result not only from gender and genre,
but also from Milton’s dependence on a priori likeness as a basis for
happy marriages.

Ben Labreche 983

 The sheer physicality of these brothers’ resemblance also troubles
this allegory. Although Milton sets out to represent a psychologically
rich form of companionate marriage, Eros’s experience of his brother
and his brother’s counterfeits consists entirely of looking at and touch-
ing their bodies when he “imbraces and consorts” with them (2:255).36
Some readers might dismiss this blatant physicalization of Eros and
Anteros’s love as merely a convention of allegory, but Milton’s turn
from the psychological to the physical here is in fact in keeping with
his broader practice in the divorce tracts. In discussing spouses’ dis-
agreements over religion, for example, Doctrine and Discipline equates
this difference of opinion with physiological difference: the unhappy
spouses may separate on the principle that Jewish law forbids sow-
ing or yoking together different kinds of seeds or livestock (2:270),
and the husband trying to redeem his idolatrous wife may “set some
reasonable time to himselfe after which he may give over washing an
Ethiope” (2:267). Milton continues in the same vein in Tetrachordon,
where he describes debate and disagreement within marriage as weav-
ing a garment of dry sand, as a process of impossible digestion, and as
a physiological “heat or mortal chilnes” that “joyns them, or disjoyns
them irresistibly” (2:605–6). Stephen Fallon has astutely observed a
sinister determinism in the divorce tracts’ references to the body, but
these physiological images have implications not only for his concern
with individual spouses’ experience of love, but also for the distribu-
tion of political authority and power.37
In transforming the minds and debates of disagreeing spouses into
merely physical objects and processes, Milton calls into question the
efficacy and even the possibility of rational discourse as a means of
resolving differences between spouses. In the allegory of Eros and Ante-
ros, for example, not only emotional bonding but conversation itself has
completely dropped out of the cupids’ coupling. This problematic turn
away from discourse appears as well in Milton’s examination of religious
differences. Although he acknowledges in Doctrine and Discipline that
scripture leaves some hope for converting idolatrous spouses, Milton
generally assumes that reconciling religious difference is impossible.38
His divided spouses do not merely disagree on matters of faith, their
“thoughts and spirits flie asunder as farre as heaven from hell” (2:263),
and thus their conversation with one another cannot identify and win
mutual assent to the superior religious truth. Difference in views con-
sequently becomes a matter of “spirituall contagion” and “seducement”
(2:261–62, 267), and as a result the divorce tracts threaten to contradict
Areopagitica’s faith in rational discourse as a means of reform.

984 Espousing Liberty

 Milton’s reliance on likeness to ensure the wife’s voluntary compli-
ance thus leaves him without a clear theory of how spouses can achieve
agreement and concord if they do not possess them a priori, and his
allegory of companionate marriage ultimately shows the strain of this
theoretical failure. Although Milton proclaims the love of Eros and
Anteros to be “mutual” and “coequal,” the short narrative of their
relationship shows none of the joint activity that would characterize
either companionate marriage or free politics. Instead, all the agency
and activity of the allegory belongs solely to Eros; Anteros, like the
wife formed in her husband’s image or subjects in a system of authori-
tarian government, can do nothing more than submit to his brother’s
affection when they are at last united.
The illiberal implications of Milton’s reliance on similarity intensify
in Tetrachordon as he considers the implications of the phrase “meet
for him” in Genesis’ description of marriage:

The originall heer is more expressive then other languages word for
word can render it; but all agree effectuall conformity of disposition
and affection to be heerby signify’d; which God as it were not satisfy’d
with the naming of a help, goes on describing another self, a second
self, a very self it self. (2:600)

Here Milton argues not only for a degree of likeness in marriage, but
for absolute identity: Eve is not merely compatible with her husband,
she is an actual extension of him, “another self, a second self, a very
self it self.” At one level, this description flatters Eve. Presenting a
person as “another self” or an alter ipse was a convention of same-sex
male friendship in classical and humanist texts, and such friendship
provided an important model for voluntary, affective, and egalitarian
relationships in the early modern period. As we might expect, how-
ever, Milton’s assertion of Eve’s likeness to her husband denies her
autonomy even as it grants her this measure of dignity: the meetness
of Eve, Milton claims, gives divine mandate not for her autonomy,
but for her “conformity of disposition and affection.” Thus even as
he asserts Eve to possess the psychological qualities of companionate
marriage—“disposition and affection”—Milton also removes from her
any possible motive to challenge her husband’s authority. Disagree-
ment and debate, it seems, are to have no place in divinely ordained
marriage.
The construction of this passage, however, makes glaringly appar-
ent how this appeal to similarity conflicts with Milton’s politics. The
translation of “meet for him” as “another self, a second self, a very self

Ben Labreche 985

it self” is philologically unsupported. Although the Tremellius-Junius
bible glosses Eve in this passage as an “alter ipse,” such an annotation
hardly justifies Milton’s claim to be offering an accurate account of the
original text: the Hebrew conventionally translated as “meet for him”
is in fact an idiom that literally means only “alongside him” or, as the
Geneva bible glosses it, “before him.”39 Milton’s translation thus reflects
not the original text but his own interpretation of it, and the passage’s
own language emphasizes this fall into intellectual arbitrariness: Mil-
ton introduces his translation with an apologetic caveat regarding the
adequacy of his or any rendering of this idiom: “the originall heer is
more expressive then other languages word for word can render it,”
and he ends with a compulsively hammering or stammering syntax—
“another self, a second self, a very self it self”—that suggests sheer
insistence on a point that he cannot prove. These concessions to the
dubiousness of his own philology reveal the weakness of Milton’s trans-
lation, and—worse—they highlight as well the fact that he fails to hew
to the ideal of rational debate fundamental to his political theories.
The authoritarian demand for a priori agreement that characterizes
Milton’s account of heterosexual marriage thus comes to contaminate
the presumably male sphere of public discourse in which the divorce
tracts appeal for domestic and political freedom.
This logical extension of Milton’s illiberal domestic arguments into
same-sex male relationships culminates in Tetrachordon, where he
compares the ties of married couples to friendships between men in the
bible, Abraham and Lot in the Old Testament, Paul and Barnabas in
the New.40 Milton’s discussion of marriage in this passage recapitulates
his contradictory views. On one side, conjugal bonds are “therin only
rational and human, as they are free and voluntary” and thus have a
foundation in the same fundamental principles as the liberal public
sphere. On the other side, however, marital love resists the rational
resolution of differences between spouses: an unhappy couple’s plight
is a “most natural and most necessary disagreement” that reflects
“permanent and radical discords of nature” and “antipathies” that
“are invincible.” These points have of course appeared throughout
the divorce tracts, but here Milton supports his argument that spouses
cannot resolve their differences rationally by appealing to the parallel
case of male friends:

Abraham and Lot, though dear friends and brethren in a strange

Country, chose rather to part asunder, then to infect thir friendship
with the strife of thir servants: Paul and Barnabas joyn’d together by
the Holy Ghost to a Spiritual work, thought it better to separate when

986 Espousing Liberty

 once they grew at variance . . . these great Saints joynd by nature,
friendship, religion, high providence, and revelation, could not so
govern a casual difference, a sudden passion, but must in wisdom
divide from the outward duties of a friendship, or a Collegueship in
the same family, or in the same journey, lest it should grow to a wors
division[.] (2:622)

The examples of Abraham and Paul and their respective friends may
offer authoritative evidence that married couples should be allowed to
separate, but they also do violence to Milton’s claim that men should
be free to persuade one another and come to consensus through ra-
tional discourse: Abraham and Paul and their respective friends can-
not discuss and debate with one another in order to form a common
policy, but can only “separate when once they gr[o]w at variance.” Like
the allegory of Eros and Anteros, then, this passage opens up male
relationships to precisely the discursive constraints that characterize
Milton’s theory of marriage.
If even these men “joynd by nature, friendship, religion, high
providence, and revelation” find their reasoning foiled by “a casual
difference, a sudden passion,” what hope can there be for a broad
spectrum of seventeenth-century Englishmen to reform their nation
through debate in the impersonal medium of print? This passage’s
reliance on a priori similarity between men of course suggests that
there is very little room for such rational debate. The constraints on
discourse that Milton used in earlier divorce tracts to establish un-
coercive, but also unequal, spousal relations in the domestic sphere
have here come to taint relationships between men as well. Milton had
in fact already hinted at the incompatibility of his hierarchical views
on marriage and his egalitarian ideals in public politics three months
earlier in Areopagitica. In this explicit defense of free discourse, Mil-
ton discusses Adam and the fall prominently, but he entirely effaces
Eve and the pivotal role that she plays as Adam’s wife (2:514, 527).
This conspicuous absence of course does not explicitly comment on
the divorce tracts approach to free speech, but it does suggest that
by November 1644 Milton felt more comfortable bracketing the im-
plications of gender and domesticity for political liberty than relying
on them for support.

iii.

Given the conflicts that arise as Milton experiments with the

fundamental principles of free politics, some scholars might urge

Ben Labreche 987

identifying Milton not as a precursor of liberalism and its system of
competing individual interests, but as an heir to the tradition of clas-
sical republicanism and its grounding in civic virtue and collective
liberties. Precedent for such a substitution of categories in fact exists:
in particular, as noted before, Skinner has presented Milton as the
type of a pre-liberal liberty that focused on the state’s freedom rather
than that of the individual, and Pincus has argued that Milton’s disdain
for commercial society and the pursuit of individual interests in the
marketplace sharply distinguished him from genuine liberalism.41 These
important works on Milton and republicanism have almost exclusively
focused, however, on Milton’s writings between Charles I’s execution
and the Restoration, years when he wrote either in support of official
governmental decisions or else as a governmental official himself. It
is thus not in this later period of his career but in the earlier, more
oppositional writings of the 1640s that we find him laying a foundation
for later liberalism by defending the ordinary citizen who writes like
Isocrates from his “private house.”
Milton’s interest in free speech did not end, however, with the
coming of the English republic. Even while he remained in office,
his Second Defense, as already seen, drew attention to his earlier de-
fenses of “domestic liberty.” Moreover, the issues of free speech and
the public-private divide—and the attendant problems of gender and
marriage—returned in Milton’s first Restoration publication, Paradise
Lost, as he once again found himself outside the institutions and rul-
ing ideologies of English government. This epic’s telling of the fall
effectively restages the divorce tracts’ conflict over gender hierarchy
and marital conversation. At the end of book eight, Adam anxiously
confesses uncertainty regarding his own sufficiency in comparison
with Eve’s “greatness of mind.”42 He only claims, of course, that she
“seems wisest,” but this book has already asserted that Eve is “de-
lighted” by intellectual discussion and “capable . . . / Of what [is] high”
(PL, 8:49–50, 550, my emphasis). Adam’s acknowledgment of her
rational qualities thus cannot be entirely dismissed, and there is con-
sequently something here of Tetrachordon’s admission that “particular
exceptions may have place” if a wife “exceed her husband in prudence
and dexterity, and he contentedly yeeld.” In contrast, Raphael’s con-
demnation of Adam’s doubts recalls the divorce tracts’ illiberal enfran-
chisement of men based on their superiority to their wives. Raphael
reminds Adam that he will soon need “wisdom” nigh and then urges
Adam to prepare for rationally withstanding temptation—that is, for
fulfilling his role in the politics of Paradise—by asserting a “self-esteem”

988 Espousing Liberty

whose basis in superiority to Eve neither Raphael nor Adam manages
to justify rationally (PL, 8:562–73).
These conflicted views on Adam and Eve’s marriage continue into
book nine, where they play an integral role in shaping the crisis of the
poem. The disagreement between Adam and Eve in this book over
their work habits concerns not merely whether Eve may safely labor
apart from her husband, but whether she and Adam will be able to
resolve their difference on this serious issue through discussion; their
disagreement is in effect less a debate over separation than it is a
debate over debating itself. Early in this scene, Adam describes his
conversation with Eve as “refreshment” and “talk between” labors,
and in doing so he clearly echoes the divorce tracts’ claim that marital
conversation is merely recreational (PL, 9:237). Eve, however, desires
something more than what she calls “casual discourse” (PL, 9:223).
She initiates the scene by proposing that an egalitarian give-and-take
on substantial matters be part of their marital conversation: “thou . . .
now advise / Or hear what to my mind first thoughts present”
(PL, 9:212–13). She is hardly offering herself here as, in the words of
An Answer, a wife who “can speak Hebrew, Greek, Latine, & French,
and dispute against the Canon law,” but her desire for mutual advise-
ment nonetheless appeals to the same ideals of intellectually egalitarian
companionship that readers have so often found implicit in the divorce
tracts. Adam, however, refuses to admit intellectually serious debate
into the conjugal bond, much as Milton had refused to admit wives to
the sphere of “contemplative, or pragmaticall” debate; instead Adam
dismisses Eve before they can arrive at agreement (PL, 9:372).
This decision to dismiss his wife may not determine her fall, but
it certainly structures her temptation by a serpent who promises not
only knowledge and pleasure, but also a means (fraudulent, of course)
to acquire speech. The serpent’s acquisition of language is what Eve
first remarks on in their encounter, when “at the voice much marvel-
ling” she immediately asks him, “how cam’st thou speakable of mute”?
(PL, 9:551, 563). Later, moreover, the serpent sways Eve’s final de-
liberations through a bravura display of language and rhetoric; as
the narrator reports, the serpent delivers his final address to her like
“some orator renowned / In Athens or free Rome, where eloquence /
Flourished, since mute” (PL, 9:670–72). The comparison is complex:
on the one hand the serpent here is a manipulative rhetorician who
is acting a “new part” and who relies on “passion” rather than mere
reason (PL, 9:667); on the other hand, however, Milton’s genuine at-
traction to the “free” states of antiquity and their oratorical tradition

Ben Labreche 989

can hardly be doubted, and there is a distinct nostalgia—perhaps even a
yearning for reform—in the observation that this tradition has become
“mute.” Eve would of course not possess the historical perspective to
appreciate the nuances of the narration even if the narrator’s words
were accessible to her, but nonetheless her description of the fruit
as having given “elocution to the mute, and taught / The tongue not
made for speech to speak” just after the serpent’s performance shows
her powerful response to the serpent’s recently acquired command of
language (PL, 9:748–9). Read in the context of the separation scene
and Milton’s tracts of the 1640s, then, Eve’s fall appears to result not
simply from insufficiency of reason, will, or faith, but from her desire
for the discursive role in weighty human affairs that Milton himself
sought during the civil wars.
Eve’s pursuit of this desire of course ends in catastrophe; in Paradise
Lost, as in the divorce tracts, Milton considers the discursive equality
of women only to deny both their inclusion in the sphere of reasoned
debate and the possibility of realizing true “rational liberty” on earth.
Milton’s failure to realize a fully consistent theory of free government
should not, however, invalidate his engagement with the key issues of
liberal politics. Milton may be masculinist, but his writings of both the
1640s and 1660s nonetheless wrestle at length with the implications
of this masculinism, and his attention to and anxiety over the status of
women in these works clearly indicates his interest in individual per-
spectives and freedoms. Milton’s gendered theory of liberty ultimately
does not depart from liberalism so much as typify the contradictions
and limitations that shaped the early modern emergence of liberalism
and that continues to figure in the ongoing critiques, defenses, and
expansions of free systems of government today.
University of Mary Washington
notes
I would like to express my gratitude to Jill Campbell, Thomas Fulton, Annabel Pat-
terson, David Quint, and John Rogers, who generously provided me with encourage-
ment and feedback on this article.
1 
Herbert Palmer, The Glasse of Gods Providence (London, 1644), 53, 56–57.
2 
Palmer, 57.
3 
Palmer, Scripture and Reason Pleaded for Defensive Armes (London: 1643),
35–36.
4 
John Milton’s fears in The Judgement of Martin Bucer that “new fetters” will be
cast on learning were realized in August 1644, when the Company of Stationers pe-
titioned Parliament to restrain Doctrine and Discipline and other unlicensed books
(Milton, Complete Prose Works, ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vol. [New Haven: Yale Univ.

990 Espousing Liberty

Press, 1953–1982], 2:141–42, quotation from 479. Hereafter cited parenthetically by
volume and page number.). The Stationers were not entirely successful; Parliament
did not summon Milton to be examined until December, and there is no evidence
that the examination ever took place. Nonetheless, 1644–1645 brought further
threats from the anonymous pamphlet An Answer to a Book, Intituled, the Doctrine
and Discipline of Divorce, which argued that “all that read” Doctrine and Discipline
“must needs count it worthie to be burnt by the Hangman,” and from Daniel Featley’s
Katabaptistai kataptüstoi (The Dippers Dipt), which referred specifically to Doctrine
and Discipline after its initial attack on “Anabaptist” publications and suggestion that
these “Heretiques and Schismatiques” be “utterly exterminated and banished out of
the Church and Kingdome” (An Answer to a Book, Intituled, the Doctrine and Dis-
cipline of Divorce, in Milton’s Contemporary Reputation, ed. William Riley Parker
[Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1940], 41; Katabaptistai Kataptüstoi (The Dippers
Dipt) [London, 1645], Bv and B2v). See also The Life Records of John Milton, ed.
J. Milton French, 5 vol. (New York: Gordian Press, 1966), 2:106–7, 108–9; Gordon
Campbell, A Milton Chronology (Houndmills: Macmillan Press, 1997), 81–97; and
Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 2000), 181–82, 202–3.
5 
For the continuation of Areopagitica’s critique in Tetrachordon and Colasterion,
see Milton, Complete Prose Works, 2:725, 753, 757.
6 
These quotations are adapted from Helen North’s translation, CPW, 4.1:624. The
original Latin refers to liberty that is “domesticam seu privatam” (Milton, The Works
of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson and others, 18 vol. [New York: Columbia
Univ. Press, 1931–1938], 8:130). This edition hereafter abbreviated “Col.” and cited
by volume and page number.
7 
“Conversation” could in this period refer to sexual as well as discursive relations,
but as scholars have widely agreed, Milton’s divorce tracts use this word primarily to
refer to the non-physical aspects of marriage. James Turner offers a nuanced discus-
sion of this term; see Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in
the Age of Milton (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 204–5.
8 
Stanley Fish, “Wanting a Supplement: The Question of Interpretation in Milton’s
Early Prose,” in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loe-
wenstein and Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), 66. Fish quotes from
Mary Nyquist, “The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity in the Divorce Tracts and in
Paradise Lost,” in Re-Membering Milton, ed. Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New
York: Methuen, 1987), 106. Jason P. Rosenblatt has more recently offered a similar
appraisal of criticism on the divorce tracts; see his “Milton, Natural Law, and Tolera-
tion,” in Milton and Toleration, ed. Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), 142n22.
9 
Gina Hausknecht, “The Gender of Civic Virtue,” in Milton and Gender, ed. Cath-
erine Gimelli Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), 31.
10 
Gregory Chaplin, “‘One Flesh, One Heart, One Soul’: Renaissance Friendship and
Miltonic Marriage,” Modern Philology 99 (2001): 282, 287.
11 
See Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1998); and Steve Pincus, “Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Indi-
vidualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Commonwealth,” The
American Historical Review 103 (1998): 705–36. Other scholars have of course sought
to retain the category of liberalism by carefully historicizing their use of it to discuss
Milton. See, for example, Annabel Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism (Cambridge:

Ben Labreche 991

Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997); and Thomas Fulton, “Areopagitica and the Roots of
Liberal Epistemology,” ELR 34 (2004): 42–82.
12 
An Answer, 16.
13 
David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics,
1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 115–18.
14 
See Chaplin, “One Flesh,” 278–82; and Thomas H. Luxon, Single Imperfection:
Milton, Marriage and Friendship (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 2005), 20, 57,
64, 149.
15 
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans.
Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 1989), 47. Habermas’s historical model focuses primarily on late seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century Europe; however, his ideas also have clear relevance for the
pamphleteering of the civil war period. For an overview of recent discussions of
Habermas’s historical argument, see Peter Lake and Pincus, “Rethinking the Public
Sphere in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 45 (2006): 270–92. Eliza-
beth Maddock Dillon has recently criticized Habermas’s account of the emergence
of the liberal subject from a pre-political privacy to public political activity as a myth
of origin similar to (and as fictive as) the theories of social contract that characterized
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political thought. Her critique is important, but
need not dissuade us from studying the myths of origin that were Milton’s stock in
trade. See Dillon, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary
Public Sphere (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2004).
16 
Habermas, Structural Transformation, 54.
17 
The similarity between the theories of these two thinkers is of course not surprising.
Milton was himself a member of the bourgeoisie discussed by Habermas, and although
Habermas nowhere refers to the divorce tracts in The Structural Transformation of
the Public Sphere, he does note the relevance of Areopagitica and “Milton’s secretary,
Marvell” to the development of the public sphere (33, 134). For the relationship
between Habermas’ work and Areopagitica, see Donald L. Guss, “Enlightenment as
Process: Milton and Habermas,” PMLA 106 (1991): 1156–69; and Norbrook, “Are-
opagitica, Censorship, and the Early Modern Public Sphere,” in The Administration
of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere, ed. Richard Burt
(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1994), 3–33.
18 
Habermas, Structural Transformation, 47, 54, 56.
19 
Habermas, Structural Transformation, 55, 83, 85.
20 
For the feminist critique of liberalism and the public sphere, see, for example,
Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution
(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988), 7–8; Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere:
A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25/26
(1990): 56–80; Seyla Benhabib, “Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal
Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas,” in Feminism, the Public and the Private, ed. Joan B.
Landes (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), 65–99; Landes, “The Public and the Private
Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration,” in Feminism, the Public and the Private, ed.
Landes (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), 135–163; and Marie Fleming, Emancipa-
tion and Illusion: Rationality and Gender in Habermas’s Theory of Modernity (Univ.
Park: The Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1997), 210–16. An intriguing alternative to
the conflict between feminism and the liberal tradition has recently been offered by
Katharine Gillespie, who argues that female separatists developed a public sphere in the
mid-seventeenth century. As Gillespie herself acknowledges, however, the reputation

992 Espousing Liberty

and writings of these women had little if any direct influence on the later history of
liberalism. See Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century: English
Women Writers and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004).
21 
Habermas, Structural Transformation, 47.
22 
Nyquist, “Gendered Subjectivity,” 99, 120, 23.
23 
Habermas, Structural Transformation, 55.
24 
Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” in Habermas and the Public
Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), 428.
25 
Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1988), esp.
93–111. Habermas cites Pateman’s article “The Fraternal Social Contract,” in Civil
Society and the State: New European Perspectives, ed. John Keane (London: Verso,
1988), 101–27.
26 
For more general discussion of Milton’s views on Charles and Salmasius, see Turner,
One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton, 223; and
Nyquist, “‘Profuse, Proud Cleopatra’: ‘Barbarism’ and Female Rule in Early Modern
English Republicanism,” Women’s Studies 24 (1994): 85–130, esp. 93–4.
27 
Milton, Complete Prose Works, 3:421. See also 3:474, 525–26, 538, 541.
28 
Milton, Complete Prose Works, 4.1:380. “Mirum non est velle te regiam domi-
nationem aliis obtrudere, qui foemineum ipse domi dominatum ferre tam serviliter
assuevisti” (“Col.,” 7:160).
29 
Milton, Complete Prose Works, 4.1:518. “Id est vile animal Circéum, porcus
immundus, turpissima servitute etiam sub foemina assuetus; unde nullum gustum
virtutis, et quae ex ea nascitur, libertatis habes; omnes esse servos cupis, quòd nihil in
tuo pectore generosum aut liberum sentis, nihil non ignobile atque servile aut loqueris
aut spiras” (“Col.,” 7:510–2).
30 
Milton, Complete Prose Works, 4:1.625. “Frustrà enim libertatem in comitiis &
foro crepat, qui domi servitutem viro indignissimam, inferiori etiam servit; ea igitur
de re aliquot libros edidi; eo praesertim tempore cùm vir saepè & conjux hostes inter
se acerrimi, hic domi cum liberis, illa in castris hostium materfamilias versaretur, viro
caedem atque perniciem minitans (“Col.,” 8:132).
31 
Constance Jordan addresses the difference between the rhetoric of marital and
parental relations in the household-state analogy. See Jordan, “The Household and the
State: Transformations in the Representation of an Analogy from Aristotle to James
I,” MLQ 54 (1993): 307–26. For the seventeenth-century debate over patriarchy as a
justification for absolutism, see Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975); and Mary Lyndon Shanley, “Marriage Contract and
Social Contract in Seventeenth Century English Political Thought,” The Western Po-
litical Quarterly 32 (1979): 79–91. Robert Filmer’s treatise was printed only in 1680,
but was in circulation amongst royalists by the early 1640s.
32 
See Milton, Complete Prose Works, 2:222–23, 3:190. For an overview of the re-
sponsibility of husbands to control their wives and households, see Anthony Fletcher,
Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press,
1995), 269–73.
33 
Similarly, John Rogers has recently argued that arbitrariness haunts the masculinist
views presented in De doctrina Christiana and Paradise Lost. See Rogers, “Transported
Touch: The Fruit of Marriage in Paradise Lost,” in Milton and Gender, ed. Martin
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), 115–32, esp. 125–9.
34 
See Gregory Chaplin, “Milton and the End of Renaissance Friendship” (PhD
dissertation, The Univ. of Texas at Austin, 2001), 282. For a broader view of this

Ben Labreche 993

iconographic tradition, see Robert V. Merrill, “Eros and Anteros,” Speculum 19 (1944):
265–84; Guy de Tervarent, “Eros and Anteros or Reciprocal Love in Ancient and Re-
naissance Art,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1965): 205–08,
esp. 205; Peggy Muñoz Simonds, “Eros and Anteros in Shakespeare’s Sonnets 153 and
154: An Iconographic Study,” Spenser Studies 7 (1986): 261–85.
35 
Annabel Patterson, “No Meer Amatorious Novel?”, in Politics, Poetics, and Herme-
neutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1990), 97.
36 
In the context both of the passage and seventeenth-century English more broadly,
“consort” suggests sexual contact rather than more general social and conversational
interactions.
37 
See Stephen Fallon, “The Metaphysics of Milton’s Divorce Tracts,” in Politics,
Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, 78.
38 
See Milton, Complete Prose Works, 2:262, 266.
39 
For the marginal glosses of the Tremellius-Junius bible, I have consulted both the
frequently reprinted Biblia sacra sive libri canonici (London, 1581), which represents
Eve as “tale auxiliū quod sit veluti alter ipse” and the Testamenti Veteris Biblia Sacra
(London, 1593), which claims that Eve “sit tamquam alter ipse.” For the Hebrew I
have relied upon The Anchor Bible Genesis, ed. E. A. Speiser (Garden City: Doubleday
& Company, 1981), 17. For the Geneva bible, I have consulted the online resource
“Bible in English,” (Chadwyck-Healey, 1996).
40 
See Milton, Complete Prose Works, 2:622.
41 
See Skinner, 23 and following; and Pincus, “Neither Machiavellian Moment,”
715, 735–36. Literary scholars have made similar claims: Norbrook has asserted that
“Areopagitica can more fruitfully be seen against the background of Renaissance
republicanism than of a later liberalism” (“Areopagitica, Censorship, and the Early
Modern Public Sphere,” 10); and Janel Mueller’s study on Of Reformation argues
that Milton conceived of political participation in terms of estates, not individuals
(“Contextualizing Milton’s Nascent Republicanism,” in Of Poetry and Politics: New
Essays on Milton and His World, ed. P. G. Stanwood [Binghamton: Medieval and
Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995]).
42 
Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, rev. 2nd ed. (Harlow: Longman, 2007),
8:557. Hereafter abbreviated PL and cited parenthetically by book and line number.

994 Espousing Liberty