Harper, David A. "'Perhaps More
Than
Enough': The Dangers of Mate-Idolatry in Milton's Samson Agonistes."
Milton
Quarterly 37.3 (2003): 139-51. Harper discusses the depictions
of women in Samsom Agonistes and
Paradise Lost, arguing
that reading
Dalila vis-à-vis Eve demonstrates Milton's belief about women:
"before
and after the Fall, women have a mysterious excess, an
overabundance that makes them dangerous, even to
appointed saints of
God," yet these women "are crucial agents of regeneration who force
their spouse to recognize
and correct his sin." Harper analyzes
Milton's earlier exploration of the nature of women in Comus, and then
turns to an analysis of the "therapy" that occurs between Adam and
Eve,
and Samson and Dalila. Harper argues
that these two relationships
demonstrate "the dangers of mate-idolatry for the unwary patriarch and
saint," and
he concludes that women who love overmuch are at the root
of both fall and regained glory in these two texts.
Mandelbrote, Scott. "The Bible and Didactic Literature in Early Modern
England." Didactic Literature in
England,
1500-1800:
Expertise
Constructed. Ed. Natasha Glaisyer and Sara Pennell. Burlington,
VT:
Ashgate, 2003. 19-39.
This book chapter examines the way attitudes toward the
Bible represented in didactic literature changed during the
seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries. Mandelbrote argues that the
Congregationalist minister Philip Doddridge
(1702-51) and other writers
of didactic literature were influenced by the Lockeian emphasis on the
primacy of sensory
experience; "readers of Locke who were also students
of Shaftesbury substituted a pedagogical method that suggested
that
delight and the desire for the beautiful might be enough to move the
child to a life of religion and virtue."
Mandelbrote argues that
William Smith's A New Primer
(1661-4) deliberately attempted to
"subvert the contemporary
genre of didactic writing" that was most
concerned with biblical knowledge for children: the rote learning of
catechetical and related texts for the purpose of remembering what
had
been read. The Presbyterian Isaac Ambrose
(1604-63) and others
emphasized the role of Bible reading as part of a "continuing act of
self-analysis." Mandelbrote
further argues that nonconformist readers
in the seventeenth century concentrated on "the extraction of personal
meaning from particular texts of Scripture." The interpretation of
the
written word was increasingly stressed, and it
came to function as "a
check on the excesses of preaching." After the outbreak of the
English Civil War, an
increased awareness of the Bible "as a collection
of stories that could affect the emotions" paralleled changes in
eighteenth-century reading habits such as the development of the
novel.
