Introduction

For the seventeenth-century English reader, a crisis of faith might be one book or pamphlet away, provoked by exposure to new ideas or differing interpretations of scripture. A godly reader in the 1640s and 1650s faced the challenges of an array of personal testaments of faith, sermons, scriptural interpretations, and doctrinal arguments, in addition to the challenge of the Old and New Testaments. A variety of Protestant believers, members of churches and sects ranging from Anglican to Presbyterian to Ranter, all published tracts and pamphlets, books and guides, with the aim of spreading the true Christian faith, which none of them could entirely agree upon. As if this crisis of faith were not enough, English politics remained inextricably connected with English religion, and political polemics regularly appealed to God and the Bible to justify their authors’ positions. Within such a cultural and religious environment, belief could not be passive. Ultimately, this crisis of faith was a crisis of reading.1 What interpretative strategies might make sense out of the wide variety of Biblical interpretations and religious beliefs? In the pages following, I examine the answers, as well as the strategies for spiritual reading, developed by John Milton, and those of some of his contemporaries. I consider how the model of spiritual reading which Milton develops and presents sheds new light on his own work, and I compare his spiritual reading to that of select but diverse Puritan contemporaries.