13. Galileo at that point was old, blind, crushed by the Inquisition which had forced him to renounce his great discoveries.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
14. Galileo made a strong impression on Milton, the fierce Protestant, himself later blind & crushed by counterrevolution
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15. Paradise Lost makes reference to many Biblical and historical figures but only one of Milton's contemporaries: Galileo.
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16 Last fact is from an unpublished article by Simon Bredin (I need to figure out how to do footnotes in tweets).
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16. The references to Galileo in Paradise Lost show a fascination with telescopes (which Milton might have seen during their meetings).
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17. The meeting with Galileo should remind us that Milton lived in the wake of a cosmological revolution: Copernicus, Bruno & beyond
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18. Cosmological revolution overlapped with "Age of Discovery" -- exploration and conquest of "New Words" of the Americas.
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19. So Milton was living in a period where "new worlds" abounded, both in outer space and on other continents (new to Europeans).
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20. Milton was both intoxicated & scared by the possibilities of "new worlds." For if space aliens existed, what did they know of Christ?
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21. In Paradise Lost we see Milton trying to incorporate the cosmological revolution, speculate about these new worlds, but also retreating
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22. Milton almost wrote science fiction - certainly fantastical elements of Paradise Lost are close - but retreated into theological fiction
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Replying to @HeerJeet
23. Donne was arguably more radical than Milton: someone who dared to think through the cosmological revolution.
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24. My thoughts on Donne shaped by William Empson's controversial 1957 essay "Donne the Space Man" (in his Essays on Renaissance Literature)
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