Milton's Military Heaven Revisited

Abstract

Among the several ways of reading the episode of the War in Heaven in 'Paradise Lost' there has been a view, since at least Voltaire, that the account is mock epic, and therefore satirical or ironic. Exactly how the satire in the narrative of the War in Heaven works, or who or what is being mocked, and with what effect and to what ends, has been the subject of much discussion. Since Milton's eighteenth-century commentators, the War has been predominantly glossed in terms of its relation to biblical analogues, classical epic analogues (Homer, Virgil, Statius, Lucan), and occasionally Renaissance analogues (Tasso, Ariosto, Vondel, Spenser), and has therefore been engaged with primarily at the level of allusively literacy rather than - despite the poem's appearance in a post-civil war context - the historically local, contemporary and circumstantial.