Dear Friends and Colleagues,

We hope this newsletter finds you looking forward to a joyful December with friends, family, and good books. May we all nurture the hope, as Milton did, that this holiday season might bring in “a universal peace through sea and land.”

Below, you’ll find the latest in the MSA community, and if it’s a long-ish newsletter, well, what a testament to the vibrancy of the Milton scholarly world–and, a good problem to have in the soundbite age! (Annual meeting info is positioned strategically at the end so as to lure you onward.)

MSA Happenings

Membership

• Everyone, please renew your membership! Please? Even Lifetime Members and Uncouth Swains (respectively, our cherubim and seraphim of generosity) need to log in annually and update their status. Members who don’t register will be considered inactive and won’t receive emails or updates.

Awards

• You should have gotten an email from Eric Song with an update on our 2022 award winners, so we’ll just take a moment to congratulate Elizabeth Sauer as our Honored Scholar this year (her impressive Milton creds are detailed here), and our other winners, Welburn, Festa and Ainsworth, and Rosenblatt. Laurel crowns for all!
• Remember that the submission process for awards is a little different this year. The Submissions Guidelines on our website has been updated to reflect our new procedures. The short version is that we encourage nominations and self-nominations for all awards.
• We’ll note that the Labriola award (for currently enrolled graduate students) has been vacant for several years. If you are working with graduate students, please consider nominating their published work. We would love to place MSA laurel wreaths on their heads, too.

Passages

Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear

Alastair Fowler, former Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, passed away on October 9. Fowler was a renowned scholar-editor, a generous mentor, and a devoted friend. For more on his remarkable life, see this article in the Herald.

Professional moves and advancements

Islam Issa has been promoted to full Professor of Literature and History, effective August 1, 2022, at the Birmingham City University.

Member Accomplishments

It’s always such a pleasure to see our members publishing their works. (If we missed something, our apologies, and don’t hesitate to send us an update so we can feature it next time.)

Recent Books (quite the impressive line-up here)

• John Creaser, Milton and the Resources of the Line (Oxford University Press, 2022)
• Stephen B. Dobranski, Reading John Milton (Stanford University Press, 2022)
• Elizabeth Hodgson, The Masculinities of John Milton (Cambridge University Press, 2022)
• Lee Morrissey, Milton’s Late Poems: Forms of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Recent Articles and Essays

• Maura Brady, “‘Disabled’ Milton: A Genealogy,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 16 (2022)
• Feisal Mohamed, “Race and Historicism: A Polemic in Three Turns,” ELH 89 (2022)
• Vanita Neelakanta, “Paradise Lost under Heaven: Milton’s Surveillance Society,” ELH 89 (2022)
• Eric Song, “Frankenstein, Paradise Lost, and the Fiction of Translation,” Modern Philology 119 (2022)
• Tim Windsor, “Paradise Lost: Milton’s Last Poem,” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews (January 2022)  
• Tim Windsor, “Xenos and Xenia Within and Beyond the Phaeacian Allusive Frame of Paradise Lost,” Notes and Queries (OUP), 69.2 (June 2022; published online: April 2022) 

Journals

Our community is enriched by the dedicated editorial work of Stephen B. Dobranski and Edward Jones–backed by those MSA members who write articles, write book reviews, and review manuscripts. Here’s a quick recap of the latest:

• Milton Studies 64.2 (2022), which includes the following MSA member articles:
  • John Hale, “‘Tis the hupsos I looke after'”
  • Rebecca Rush, “Like Alcestis: Milton’s Twenty-Third Sonnet and Lyric Personhood”
  • Michal Zechariah, “Satanic Ingratitude and Psychological Determinism in Paradise Lost“
• Milton Quarterly 55.3-4 (2021)
  • (No MSA members as article authors but highly recommended articles on Restoration Dalilahs, domestic narratives in the prose tracts, and the Nativity Ode.)

Broadcast Media

Islam Issa’s documentary “Forbidden Fruit,” also featuring Gordon Campbell, aired on BBC Radio 3, and is available on this link.

Honors and Prizes

The 2021 Natalie Zemon Davis Prize for the best article in Renaissance and Reformation has been awarded to James M. Clawson and Hugh F. Wilson for their essay in vol. 44: “De Doctrina Christiana and Milton’s Canonical Works: Revisiting the Authorship Question.”

Germaine Warkentin (Emeritus, Toronto) was Awarded the Order of Canada in July 2022
“For her lifelong devotion to her work on the material culture of the book, as a visionary scholar and educator.”

Conferences

Renaissance Society of America, March 2023

The RSA’s virtual conference has recently finished, and we are eagerly looking forward to an in-person gathering in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The MSA will be sponsoring three panels:

• Milton and the Experience of Loss
  • Marlin Blaine, “Formal Consolation and Eschatology in Milton’s Early Poetry”
  • Gregory Chaplin, “The Tomb of Damon: Milton and the Poetics of Loss”
  • Danielle St. Hilaire, “Loss, Self-Sufficiency, and Freedom in Paradise Lost“

• Milton after Political Theology
  • Sylvester Cruz, “Milton and Political Theology: Bicameral Sovereignty in Paradise Lost“
  • Travis DeCook, “Milton and the Political Theology of Bible Reading”
  • Rayna Kalas, “Milton’s Constitutionalism, or Media Theory and the Body Politic”
  • Aidan Selmer, “Remnant Poetics: Paradise Lost and Paul’s Corinthian Prophecy”

• New Perspectives on Milton’s Poetics
  • Yulia Ryzhik and Taro Ishiguro, “Milton in Japan: Paradise Lost in Translation”
  • Tomos Evans, “Milton’s ‘Diodatian’ Poetics: Friendship and Imitation in Epitaphium Damonis“
  • James Turner, “Milton in Italy: What Did He See and Tell?”

The Thirteenth International Milton Symposium, July 2023

John Rogers and the folks at the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies have put together an exciting event for this summer, and plenary speakers include MSA members Achsah Guibbory, Feisal Mohamed, Sue Fang Ng, and David Quint.

Calls for Papers

The South Central Renaissance Conference – Exploring the Renaissance 2023

• April 27-29, 2023 — University of California, Berkeley
• SCRC welcomes 15- to 20-minute papers on all aspects of Renaissance studies.
• Deadline: December 30, 2022

Tenth Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies

• June 12, 14, 2023–St. Louis, MO
• The goal of the Symposium is to promote serious scholarly investigation into al topics and in all disciplines of medieval and Renaissance studies, including all aspects of Milton studies.
• Deadline: December 31, 2022

The Seventeenth International Conference of the Taiwan Association of Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Studies (TACMRS)

• 20-21 October 2023–Taipei, Taiwan
• Harmony and Chaos: The Dialectics of Order and Disorder. This conference calls for research from scholars working in art history, literature, philosophy, history, geography, religious studies, cultural studies, classical studies, anthropology, social sciences, and beyond. We also welcome studies on the cultural dialogue between East and West.
• TACMRS warmly invites papers in English or Chinese that include and reach beyond the traditional chronological and disciplinary borders of Classical, Medieval, and Early Modern Studies.
• Deadline: January 6, 2023

Annual Meeting

Our annual meeting will be a post-RSA virtual gathering (date TBA–stay tuned!). As much as we regret not gathering in person as we did in the days of not-so-yore, virtual meetings have had the equitable result of allowing members of all ranks and walks to attend without the expense of conference travel. We might fine-tune this practice going forward, but at least for now, this is a happy medium. So to speak.

The annual meeting is a business meeting, but it’s just as much a celebration of our community and especially of our Honored Scholar, Elizabeth Sauer.

Featured Poet

• It’s been a favorite tradition to commission a prominent poet to write something in response to Milton’s works. We are delighted to announce that this year’s Featured Poet is T. Urayoán Noel, an award-winning poet, translator, and NYU faculty member (who–fittingly–also hails from Puerto Rico). Many thanks to former MSA president Angelica Duran and current MSA secretary Eric Song for helping bring Noel to our gathering.

Booklet

• Remember to submit your 2022/2023 publications for inclusion in the booklet. The best method is to send an email to MiltonSocietySec@gmail.com.

The Milton Society of America is such a vibrant and congenial intellectual community, and it’s our privilege to help support it. We are grateful for the work you do, and we extend our heartfelt good wishes to you and your families.

Alison A. Chapman, MSA President

Brooke Conti, MSA Past-President