Milton and the Humanist Attitude Toward Women

Author(s): Paul N. Siegel

Source: Journal of the History of Ideas , Jan., 1950, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Jan., 1950), pp. 42-
53
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2707451

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 MILTON AND THE HUMANIST ATTITUDE
TOWARD WOMEN

BY PAUL N. SIEGEL

Dr. Johnson's notion that Milton had a "Turkish contempt of

females" has long held sway. In recent years, however, a better
understanding of Milton's attitude toward women has been
reached, although the Johnsonian tradition has not quite died out.
In 1920 Allan H. Gilbert studied Milton's ideas about women more
closely than they had been studied before' and by 1930 E. M. W.
Tillyard could write (Milton, London, 1930, 148): "It is now
fairly widely recognized, I should guess, that Milton tempered a
Hebraic belief in the superiority of man over woman with ideas
remarkable in his day for their enlightenment." Recently Wil-
liam Haller has shown2 that Milton's ideas, far from being re-
markable, were absorbed from the teachings of the Puritan clergy-
men.
In advocating divorce for mutual incompatibility, Haller found,
MIilton was merely capping the logic of the Puritan writers, who
argued that marriage was based on an intellectual companionship
in which the husband played the dominant role. The Puritan ideali-
zation of married love was derived from the lady-worship which
the Middle Ages had learned from Plato and Ovid. In reaching
in the sixteenth century a popular audience affected by Puritanism,
the literature of lady-worship was transformed. Amour courtois
became amour bourgeois, in which marriage was the necessary end
of love. Milton knew and was inspired by Plato, Ovid, Dante,
Petrarch and the chivalric romances, Haller concluded, but Spenser
and the Puritan preachers taught him that love must be sealed in
marriage.
Spenser, however, was only one in the line of Renaissance hu-
manists behind Milton. In his divorce tracts, Milton referred to
the humanist Erasmus' Matrimonii Christiani Institutio as well as
to the clergyman William Perkins' Christian Oeconomie. In this
article I wish to supplement and somewhat modify Haller 's article
1 Allan H. Gilbert, "Milton on the Position of Women," Modern Language Re-
view, XV (1920), 7-27, 240-64.
2 William Haller, "Hail Wedded Love," A Journal of English Literary History,
XIII (1946), 79-97.
42

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 MILTON AND THE HUMANIST ATTITUDE 43

by examining the humanist literature on women. We shall find,

I think, that Milton's views represent Puritan doctrine reinforced
and enriched by humanist theory.
The humanist literature on women embodies many of the ideas
of the middle-class Puritan domestic conduct books. This is not
surprising. The " new learning" was both a revival of the classics
and a renewed study of the Bible in a spirit opposed to scholastic
interpretation. The English humanists had been associated with
the Protestant new landed aristocracy of the Tudor court, who, as
Sir Edmund Chambers has noted,3 were more receptive to the
''new learning" than the older aristocracy with feudal traditions.
"Der englische Humanismus ist mit dem Puritanerum verwandt,
ist der erste Stufe der puritanischer Revolution."4
Elsewhere I have shown that the older nobility continued the
chivalric practice of free love and adultery, while the new Tudor
aristocracy, although its manners of courtly love-making were in-
fluenced by chivalric tradition, counterposed to chivalric love the
doctrine of neo-Platonic love.5 Chivalric love had always been
opposed to Christianity. To writers of Puritan temper the chival-
ric romances tended to be tales of "open mans slaughter, and
bold bawdrye." Even Milton, although able to extract from
them incitements to virtue, realized that to "many others they
have bin the fuell of wantonnesse and loose living."7 And by
the time of the Reformation, the practices of chivalric love had
become the elegant and frivolous trifling of a degenerate aristoc-
racy. Cavalier cynicism was only the reverse side of the idoliza-
tion of women, for the literary and social convention which gave
them this spurious elevation sprang from a point of view in which
they were so many conquests to be gained. The Puritans and
3 "Sir Thomas Wyatt," Sir Thomas Wyatt and Some Collected Studies (Lon-
don, 1933), 100.
4 Walter F. Schirmer, Antike, Renaissance und Puritanismus (Munich, 1924),
75. The early humanists whom I shall cite remained loyal to the Catholic Church,
but it is generally recognized that they were the precursors of the Puritans in their
attitudes.
5 "The Petrarchan Sonneteers and Neo-Platonic Love," Studies in Philology,
XLII (1945), 164-82.
6 Roger Ascham, English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1904), 231.
7 "An Apology for Smectymnuus," Works, ed. John Mitford (London, 1863),
III, 271.

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 44 PAUL N. SIEGEL

the humanists, by emphasizing the inferior status allotted to

woman in the Bible, gave her a new freedom. She was no longer
a being whose sole occupation consisted of being made love to,
but a loyal help-mate. The fall of woman from her previous ex-
alted position was, like the Fall of Man, in reality a blessing.
Although the humanists and Puritans were thus in fundamen-
tal agreement in their views on the position of woman, there is a
vital difference between the tone of the humanist discussions and
that of the Puritan domestic conduct books. The domestic con-
duct book is grimly business-like in its discussion of woman's
place in the home: a series of rules governing the mutual relations
of the various members of the household is magisterially set forth,
the most important of which concern the relationship between
husband and wife. The guidance and instruction of the husband
is limited almost entirely to religious matters. The family is
seen as a congregation of which the husband is the elder who
guides its members in this religious training, and the wife is his
deacon. As compared with the humanist discussions, the intel-
lectual horizon of the domestic conduct book is limited and its
atmosphere oppressive. The humanists believed in the glories of
man's reason and the powers of education with a fervor which
was checked only by a belief in the Fall of Man. And were not
women, after all, a part of mankind, possessing reasonable souls
and redeemed by Christ? This optimistic idealism contrasts with
the sober gravity of the domestic manuals. The stream of clas-
sical thought, flowing through and enriching the humanist trea-
tises, saved them from the aridness of the Puritan tracts. In
their writings about women, as about everything else, the human-
ists mixed the teachings of the classical philosophers with those
of the Bible.
The women of Plato's Republic have the same duties, follow
the same pursuits, and receive the same education as the men.
This does not violate the cardinal principle of the differentiation
of labor according to faculty, argues Socrates, for women do not
have essentially different natures than men-the difference that
one bears and the other begets children is beside the present point
-and therefore they have no separate function to fulfill in society.
They have the same qualities as men, although, generally speak-
ing, men possess them in a superior degree. Therefore, "all the

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 MILTON AND THE HUMANIST ATTITUDE 45

pursuits of men are the pursuits of women also, and in all of

them a woman is only a weaker man. e8 In the Symposium, Plato
had described a love guided by reason which enabled the lover to
rise above this material world of the senses to the world of ideas.
Renaissance Platonists applied this love to women and, in a some-
what different form, this ideal of Platonic love was joined to the
ideal of married love.
These concepts of Plato were modified by others of Aristotle.
Aristotle emphasized (Politics, I, 2) that the household is the pri-
mary essential human association out of which grows the state,
the highest form of human association. The relation of husband
to wife, he held (Politics, I, 12), is like that which rulers in a con-
stitutional country bear to their subjects, except that it is per-
manent. In his Oeconomica (I, 3), he stated that the association
of male and female among human beings differs from that among
animals in that it is based on reason and its purpose is not merely
existence but a good life. Towards this end the functions of both
are adapted. The man, who is stronger and hence more coura-
geous, is fitted to acquire possessions outside the house; the woman,
who is weaker and hence more cautious, is fitted to preserve the
possessions inside the house.
Using these classical sources and the Bible, the humanists de-
veloped their concept of the woman who would share her hus-
band's intellectual interests, accept his authority and manage his
household. This concept they expressed in numerous discussions
of the position of woman. To understand how much a part of the
humanist tradition Milton's ideas are, it is necessary to review
the opinions of some representative humanist writers. Some
repetition will be unavoidable, since we are not so much concerned
with finding a particular source as with the reiteration of the ideas
themselves.
"He has brought up his whole family in excellent studies,"
writes Erasmus of Sir Thomas More, "a new example, but one
which is likely to be much imitated, unless I am much mistaken, so
successful has it been.' "' ''The school of Sir Thomas More,'"
presided over with amiable benevolence by More, acting as guide,
friend and philosopher, where the new learning was taught on the
8 Republic, V, 455.
9 E. M. G. Routh, Sir Thomas More and his Friends 1477-1535 (Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1934), 127.

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 46 PAUL N. SIEGEL

basis of equal instruction of the sexes, where harmony, sober

piety, virtue, eager activity and quiet mirth reigned, has become
famous through the beautiful picture of Erasmus. More himself
set forth the philosophy which animated the "school" in a letter
to Gunnell. Learning is not to be pursued through vanity, but
for the attainment of virtue and true Christian humility. For
this reason, learning is as appropriate for women as for men.
For both of them bear name of a reasonable creature equally, whose nature
reason only doth distinguish from brute beasts, and therefore I do not see
why learning in like manner may not equally agree with both sexes; for by it,
reason is cultivated, and (as a field) sowed with the wholesome seed of good
precepts, it bringeth forth excellent fruit. But if the soil of woman's brain
be of its own nature bad, and apter to bear fern than corn (by which saying
many do terrify women from learning) I am of opinion, therefore, that a
woman's wit is the more diligently by good instructions and learning to be
manured, to the end, the defect of nature may be redressed by industry.10
In one of his delightful letters to his daughter Margaret, he praises
her because she studies not for fame but for the sake of learning
itself, and is satisfied with her father and husband as sole spec-
tators of her good qualities. As a reward for this he hopes that
she will have a child "most like yourself, except only in sex."
"Yet if it be a wench, that it may be such a one as would, in time,
recompence by imitation of her mother's learning and virtues,
what by the condition of her sex may be wanting; such a wench
I should prefer before three boys."" In Utopia husbands are the
heads of the household, although women work and study on the
same basis as men. Utopia also anticipates Milton by granting
divorce for mutual incompatibility.
" The Instruction of a Christian Woman by Vives," writes Fos-
ter Watson, "is the leading theoretical manual on women's edu-
cation of the sixteenth century, not only for England and the Eng-
lish, for whom it was primarily produced, but also for the whole
of Europe."12 Education for girls. Vives firmly believes, is nec-
10 Vives and the Renaissance Education of Women, ed. Foster Watson (Lon-
don, 1912), 179.
1 Cresacre More, The Life of Sir Thomas More (London, 1828), 155-6.
12 Vives and the Renaissance Education of Women, 21. Vives appears, to
gether with Erasmus, as one of the interlocutors in A Brief and Pleasant Discours
of Duties in Mariage Called The Flower of Friendshippe, a dialogue closely im
tative of Castiglione's Courtier, written by Edmund Tilney, Queen Elizabeth
Master of Revels. Louis B. Wright notes (Middle-class Culture in Elizabetha

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 MILTON AND THE HUMANIST ATTITUDE 47

essary to make them better women and better Christians. He

cites the example of the daughters of his friend, Sir Thomas More,
who proved their father's theory that learning molds character.
We should stir up by the figure and strength of reason, and receive the love
of virtue, and give the precepts of wisdom against the corruption of false
opinions, and by assuefaction and use, resist our natural proneness and in-
clination to vice, continually to the utmost of our power, striving with the
same. The woman, even as man, is a reasonable creature and hath a flexible
wit both to good and evil, the which with use and counsel may be altered and
turned.'3

The only limit imposed upon education is the broad requirement

that all studies should contribute to the development of character,
although men should have a greater knowledge of politics and
government and women be instructed more in ethical philosophy.
Vives bitterly condemns the chivalric romances, which turn the
minds of their readers to evil. The love of which they tell is the
"causer of most unhappiness." Adam "for love of Eve lost and
cast away mankind. "'4 True love is found only in marriage,
which is the source of virtue and in which the Christian woman
attains her completest development. Marriage is based on reason
and virtue.'5 "Wouldest thou be married unto a gentleman born,"
Vives lectures his female readers, "which is a filthy and naughty
living, for his blood? As well then thou mightest choose the
image of Scipio or Caesar. In very deed, it were better to be
married unto an image16 or a picture, or unto a painted table, than
to be married to a vicious, or a foolish, or a brainless man."'7

England [University of North Carolina Press, 1935], 206n.): "Erasmus shared with
Vives a reputation for wisdom in domestic affairs because of the comments in his
various works, even though his longest contribution to the subject, Matrimonii
Christiani Institutio, was not well known in England." The central idea of the
Brief and Pleasant Discourse is that marital happiness, "the flower of friendship,"
can be attained by the couple trusting in God and the wife submitting to her hus-
band's gentle rule and paying attention to her care of the house.
13Idem, 198. Cf. Milton's stress on the possession of reason and free will by
men and women, Paradise Lost, ix, 351-6.
14 Idem, 104.
15 Cf. Milton's invocation to wedded love (Paradise Lost, iv, 750-75), which,
unlike the lusts of the brutes, is "founded in reason" and is the source of virtue.
16 Cf. Milton, recoiling from Mary Powell (III, 194): "an image of earth and
phlegm."
17 Vives and the Renaissance Education of Women, 111.

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 48 PAUL N. SIEGEL

Women who delight in such men descend to the level of beasts.

Since marriage is based on reason, man should be the dominant
partner. For, in relation to man, woman is distinguished by her
mental triviality. "A woman is a frail thing, and of weak dis-
cretion, and that may be lightly deceived, which thing our first
mother Eve sheweth, whom the Devil caught with a light argu-
ment . . ."18 In his On the Duty of Husbands, however, Vives
warns men that they should not hold women in contempt on that
account and keep them in ignorance, but should act as their com-
panions and intellectual guides:
The woman's wit is no less apt to all things than the man 's is. She wanteth
but counsel and strength. Therefore I exhort you husbands to teach your
wives those things that ye would they should do. . . The Lord doth admit
women to the mystery of his religion, in respect of which all other wisdom is
but foolishness, and he doth declare that they were created to know high
matters, and to come as well as men unto the beatitude, and therefore they
ought and should be instructed and taught, as we men be. .. If the husband
be the woman's head, the mind, the father, the Christ, he ought to execute
the office to such a man belonging, and to teach the woman: for Christ is not
only a saviour and a restorer of his Church, but also a master'9. . . And
thus shall she perceive and understand in what things true religion doth
eonsist, and how they should honour God and love their neighbour, and
thereby know how she ought to love and honour her husband, whom she
should take as a divine and holy thing, and obey his will as the law of
God. . .20

It is the woman who should manage the domestic affairs. For, as

Aristotle says, it is the man's duty to get, and the woman's to
keep. The characteristic feminine virtues are piety, modesty, de-
mureness, temperance, meekness.2' The obedience of the wife
springs from an inner concord between the two: "If the wife and
husband love together, they shall both will and nill one thing,
which is the very and true love. For there can never be discord
18 Idem, 56. Cf. Milton's reference to Eve (Paradise Lost, ix, 644
credulous Mother."
19 Cf. The Judgment of Martin Bucer, IV, 329: "The wife must honour and
obey her husband as the Church honours and obeys Christ her head. The husband
must love and cherish his wife as Christ his Church."
20 Idem, 200-2. Cf. Paradise Lost, iv, 299: "Hee for God only, shee for God
in him."
21 Compare with Milton's description of the maiden whom men desire (Samson
Agonistes, 1. 1036): "Soft, modest, meek, demure" and with Paradise Lost, iv, 297-8.

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 MILTON AND THE HUMANIST ATTITUDE 49

nor debate between those, in whom is one heart, not desiring con-
trary things, and one mind not of contrary opinion."22 Nor in a
harmonious family is the woman a mere household drudge:
A woman well brought up is fruitful and profitable unto her husband, for so
shall his house be wisely governed, his children virtuously instructed, the
affections less ensued and followed, so that they live in tranquillity and
virtue. Nor thou shalt not have her as a servant, or as a companion of thy
prosperity and welfare only, but as a most faithful secretary of thy cares
and thoughts, and in doubtful matters a wise and a hearty counsellor.23
Sir Thomas Elyot, whose young wife sometimes participated
in the studies of More's daughters, wrote a dialogue called The
Defence of Good Women in which the merits of women are de-
bated. Calididus, the champion of women, answers Caninius's
diatribes by quoting Aristotle 's Oeconomica on the role of woman
in the household as a necessary part of the good life. He then
gets Caninius to agree that man's chief excellence is his reason
and, arguing that reason is more necessary for the preservation
than the acquiring of property, states that woman's rational fac-
ulty is superior to that of man. This exaggerated laudation of
womankind, however, is corrected by Zenobia, who represents
Catherine of Aragon, the discarded wife of Henry VIII and the
pupil of Vives. She gives Vives' view of marriage:
For by my study in moral philosophy, wherein I spent the years between
sixteen and twenty, I perceived that without prudence and constancy,
women might be brought lightly into error and folly, and made therefore
unmeet for that company whereunto they were ordained, I mean to be of
assistance and comfort to man through their fidelity, which other beasts
are not, except they be by force of man thereto constrained.24 I found also
22 Fives and the Renaissance Education of Women, 116-7. Cf. The Judgment
of Martin Bucer, IV, 329: "God requires of them both so to live together, and to
be united not only in body, but in mind also. . . They must communicate and consent
in all things both divine and human which have any moment to well and happy
living."
23 Idem, 209. Let us strive, says Adam after the reconcilement (Paradise Lost,
x, 959-61),
In offices of Love, how we may light'n
Each others burden in our share of woe.
24 Cf. Paradise Lost, viii, 389-92:
Of fellowship I speak
Such as I seek, fit to participate
All rational delight, wherein the brute
Cannot be human consort.

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 50 PAUL N. SIEGEL

that Justice teacheth us

which honour resteth in
is in a more fervency, f
displeasure, she nothing
Temperance, whereby in her words and deeds she always useth a just moder-
ation, knowing when time is to speak, and when to keep silence, when to be
occupied, and when to be merry. And if she measure it to the will of her
husband, she doeth the more wisely, except it may turn both to loss or dis-
honiesty. Yet then she should seem rather to give him wise counsel than to
appear disobedient or sturdy.25

Humanist discussion of woman's place in society was not, of

course, limited to treatises devoted specifically to that subject.
Another type of literature in which the topic was treated was the
courtesy book. Castiglione Is Courtier was by far the most influen-
tial of these. Side by side with the figure of the courtier, in Cas-
tiglione's dialogue, appears the figure of the court-lady. Without
her presence the polished society of the Court of Urbino would be
impossible. She has assimilated the culture of the Renaissance
and participates freely in the philosophical discussion, although
significantly the leader of the symposium each day is a courtier
and the court-lady merely serves to bring out his best efforts.
Like the idea of the courtier, the idea of the court-lady and
her place in society is exemplified in the dialogue and discussed by
the speakers themselves. The statement of woman's relation to
man is the familiar one: male and female are both of the species
man and hence share the essential characteristic of the species-
reason.26 The inferiority of women is not stressed-the Mag-
nifico Giuliano even laughingly suggests that women have better
intellects than men-in a court where the ruler was a woman.
However, the Magnifico believes that "a woman ought to be very
unlike a man; for just as it befits him to show a certain stout and
sturdy manliness, so it is becoming in a woman to have a soft
and dainty tenderness . . . Those qualities of mind which es-
pecially befit a woman are "kindness, discretion, ability to man-
25 Vives and the Renaissance Education of Women, 235-6. Cf. Paradise Lost,
ix, 232-4: "For nothing lovelier can be found/ In Woman, than to study house
hold good,/ And good works in her Husband to promote."
26 Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, tr. Leonard Eekstein Op-
dyke (New York, 1903), 182.
27 Idem, 175.

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 MILTON AND THE HUMANIST ATTITUDE 51

age her husband's property and her house and children if she be
married, and all those capacities that are requisite in a good house-
wife . . .' 28 For nature has adapted man and woman to a single
common end: the woman, with her greater caution and placidity
of spirit, preserves at home what the man earns abroad. Most
important, Castiglione counterposed to chivalric love, with its
sensual core, a rational love through which man was to attain the
highest felicity. Romei, in his Courtier's Academy, a book in-
fluenced by The Courtier, distinguished between three kinds of
rational love: the first kind is represented by the divine lover, who
has proceeded from the love of the beauty of a single woman to
the love of universal beauty; the second kind by the lover who,
although above sensual desire, finds pleasure in the company of
his mistress, whom he loves more for the beauties of her mind
than her body; the third kind by the lover who seeks bodily union
within the lawful bonds of matrimony. All other kinds of love,
where reason is not in control, are bestial rather than human.
Castiglione's Bembo regards the second kind of rational love as
merely a stage in the ascent to divine love, but another interlocu-
tor, Lord Magnifico, discusses it at some length and finds that it
should lead to marriage.29
Castiglione's ideals received their highest poetic expression in
The Faerie Queene, which indeed-its purpose, we may remember,
was "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and
gentle discipline'"3Ois a kind of courtesy book. The knights of
The Faerie Queene are what Romei calls the second kind of ra-
tional lovers-or rather a mixture of the second and third kinds, for
Spenser joins the neo-Platonic and the Calvinist ideals of love.3'
He shows us the marriage of the Redeross Knight with Una, and
presumably his other heroes and heroines end up in similar domes-
tic felicity. The love of Britomart, the personification of Chas-
tity-and chastity for Spenser is the purity of soul requisite for
28Idem, 176.

29 Idem, 224.
30 Prefatory letter to The Faerie Queene.
31 Milton inherited this Platonic strain, the main element which the humanists
added to the Puritan doctrine of married love. Compare with his statement in
Paradise Lost (viii, 589-93) that true love "refines/ The thoughts, and heart en-
larges, hath his seat/ In Reason, and is judicious, is the scale/ By which to
heav'nly Love thou may'st ascend,/ Not sunk in carnal pleasure."

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52 PAUL N. SIEGEL

marital love rather than monastic asceticism-for Artegal, the

personification of Justice, symbolizes the fact that the most per-
sonal of ties is bound up with the political and social welfare of
the commonwealth, that the home is the foundation of society.
Artegal's imprisonment by the amazon Radigund, who forces men
to work at female tasks, is an allegorical depiction of uxorious-
ness, which subverts the proper relation of the sexes. Such
women have shaken off "the shamefast band/ With which wise
Nature did them strongly bynd,/ T'obay the heasts of man's well
ruling hand," but "'vertuous women wisely vnderstand,/ That
they were borne to base humilitie,/ Vnlesse the heauens them lift
to lawful soueraintie.932
The gentlewoman received the dignity of a book devoted en-
tirely to her in The English Gentlewoman, written by Richard
Brathwaite as a companion-piece to his English Gentleman. In
these books, Brathwaite "presented the Puritans with a draft of
a character by no means destitute of polite accomplishments yet
grounded at all points on religious precepts. "133 Brathwaite 's
gentlewoman, whom he advises that loving submission to her hus-
band will lift her above the spurious elevation of the Cavalier's
mistress, is descended from Castiglione 's court-lady, although, as
an English gentlewoman, religious piety is the most important
element of her character, and as the wife of a Puritan commercial
squire of the seventeenth century, she looks at the court in disdain.
For in the seventeenth century, the ideal of married love, to-
gether with the other ideals of Spenser, found lodging in homes
of Puritan culture like those of Milton and Colonel Hutchinson.
Mrs. Hutchinson is the "new woman" about whom the humanist
theorists have been writing, an intellectual companion of her
husband, aiding him in his endeavors and managing the domestic
economy, but allowing herself to be ruled by him without question.
In her Memotirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, she writes:
Never man had a greater passion for a woman, nor a more honourable esteem
of a wife; yet he was not uxorious, nor remitted he that just rule which it
was her honour to obey, but managed the reins of government with such
prudence and affection that she who would not delight in such an honourable

32 The Faerie Queene, V, v, 25.

33 Introduction to The Book of the Courtier from the Italian of Count Baldas-
sare Castigione: done into English by Sir Thomas Hoby, ed. W. Raleigh (London,
1900), lxxxv-lxxxvi.

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 MILTON AND TiHE HUMANIST ATTITUDE 53

and advantageable subjection, must have wanted a reasonable soul. He

governed by persuasion, which he never employed but to things honourable
and profitable for herself; he loved her soul and her honour more than her
outside, and yet he had even for her person a constant indulgence, exceeding
the common temporary passions of the most uxorious fools.34 If he esteemed
her at a higher rate than she in herself could have deserved, he was the
author of that virtue he doated on, while she only reflected his own glories
upon him . . . So liberal was he to her . . . that he hated the mention of
severed purses; his estate being so much at her disposal, that he never would
receive an account of anything she expended ... Yet even this love, which
was the highest love he or any man could have, was yet bounded by a supe-
rior, he loved her in the Lord as his fellow-creature, not his idol, but in such
a manner as showed that an affection, bounded in the just rules of duty, far
exceeds every way all the irregular passions in the world.35

The relations between Colonel Hutchinson and his wife and the
language of Mrs. Hutchinson in speaking of her husband remind
us of Milton's Adam and Eve before the Fall (except that Colonel
Hutchinson, unlike Adam, does not seem to have needed to be
warned by Raphael against uxoriousness). For Mrs. Hutchinson,
in glorifying the Colonel as an ideal husband, and Milton, in de-
picting marriage in an earthly Paradise, each drew upon the views
concerning the relationship of the sexes which had been made cur-
rent by the humanists and the Puritan domestic conduct hook
writers.
Ripon College.
34 Cf. Raphael's warning to Adam (Paradise Lost, viii, 566-9): "For what
admir'st thou, what transports thee so,/ An outside? fair no doubt, and worthy
well/ Thy cherishing, thy honouring, and thy love,/ Not thy subjection."
35 Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson (London,
1846), 30-1.

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