ABSTRACT
In 1644, John Milton knew what historians only relatively recently have accepted: that the Reformation was not an event, but a dynamic and vexed process that happened in fits and starts. Sensing a moment of opportunity, in Areopagitica he addressed Parliament with a confidence in God’s divine mandate for England’s continued reform. “God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in his Church,” Milton averred, “ev’n to the reforming of Reformation itself.”3 The Reformation was not simply or even primarily a part of the institutional history of the church that could be located in Henry VIII’s break with Rome, the Elizabethan Settlement, or the Root and Branch Petition. It was, rather, the start of a new ethical position premised on the liberty of the individual conscience and the continued vigilance of both the
religious institutions and the citizens that made up England, God’s chosen nation. The war-torn city of London as Milton imagines it is a “vast City, a City of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompast and surrounded with [God’s] protection.” Despite this divine safeguarding, London was entrenched in two forms of battle, one physical, the other intellectual: “the shop of warre hath not there more anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed Justice in defence of beleaguer’d Truth, then there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and idea’s wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty, the approaching Reformation: others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement.”4
