John Milton and Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh: The Biography of a Friendship
Alison Chapman, University of Alabama-Birmingham
Scholarship on the life of John Milton has often focused on his enduring friendships with men and the largely male worlds of early modern authorship, printing, poetry, and politics. Largely missing from these scholarly conversations is Milton’s deep and sustained friendship with Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh. Until recently, little has been known about Jones or the central role she played in seventeenth-century London society. Drawing on a growing body of new research into Jones’s life as well as on letters by Milton and his contemporaries, this paper will fill in more detail about the Jones-Milton friendship, which spanned almost three decades, from 1642-3 when he first tutored her nephew through the publication and revision of works such as Paradise Lost. I suggest that this friendship was a deeply significant one, and that, given Jones’s premier position within seventeenth-century experimental circles, it provides us with a new lens on Milton’s access to the emerging New Science.
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This Center of Renaissance Studies seminar brings together interested scholars to read and discuss pre-circulated papers on aspects of Milton studies.
The Newberry’s Milton Seminar is organized by Stephen Fallon (University of Notre Dame), Christopher Kendrick (Loyola University Chicago), Paula McQuade (DePaul University), and Regina Schwartz (Northwestern University).