ABSTRACT
This essay examines the influence of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius on Paradise Lost’s ongoing engagement with the idea that God might continue to create “new worlds” apart from our own. By shifting the discussion of Milton’s references to Galileo away from the debate over heliocentrism and towards the subjects of astronomical observation and the plurality of worlds debate, this essay offers a new way of conceiving Milton’s engagement of seventeenth-century astronomy while also demonstrating that, for his seventeenth-century readers, Galileo’s theories did not invariably signal the displacement of humankind from the center of God’s universe.
