Steven N. Zwicker is Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written monographs and edited essay collections on the literature, politics, and history of seventeenth-century England, including, most recently, John Dryden: Selected Works in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series (2020); ‘Jacques-Benigne Bossuet: Voyages d’un évêque français à Londres’ (2021) with Jonathan Koch; Andrew Marvell at 400 edited with Matthew Augustine for the British Academy (2022) and The Oxford Handbook of Restoration Literature (forthcoming).
In the most elevated terms, Milton urges an understanding of marriage altogether spiritual and intellectual, a union nearly without bodies, for in the divorce tracts he repeatedly figures marriage as the joining of rational souls, as the mind’s solace and satisfaction, its source of “comfort and peace,” an apt and cheerful conversation that hedges a man against the solitary life.