Seminar Materials
Lecture slides will be posted on the Module Information page under the Syllabus 2026/27 heading. Questions to consider in preparation for seminars will be posted here. We may not cover all these areas but the questions are given as points for you to think about and to use as a way into your readings.
Week 2: Areopagitica
- What are Milton's main arguments against pre-publication censorship?
- Areopagitica is described as a speech to Parliament. Why do you think Milton wanted to present this pamphlet as a speech? What effect does this have on your understanding of the text?
- What different images and metaphors does Milton use to describe books? What鈥檚 their impact and how do they influence your interpretation of his argument?
- What limits are there to Milton鈥檚 argument for freedom of the press?
- How is truth represented in Areopagitica?
- Does Milton anywhere take account of the possibility that the people might not live up to the high standards he sets out for them?
Week 3: Anne Bradstreet
Whilst we may focus on "A Dialogue Between Old England and New", you should read all the poems in Ross and Scott-Baumann and consider how some of the issues from the "Dialogue" recur and develop in other poems. On Bradstreet, then:
- Look up the following early modern genres or forms: mother鈥檚 legacy; poetic dialogue; prophecy. In what ways do you think Bradstreet is adapting the conventions of these genres or forms in the "Dialogue"? Further materials to help with this will be made available in the seminars.
- How does Bradstreet present the mother / daughter relationship? How does she map this familial relationship onto politics and history? What does the family / state analogy imply about politics and history?
- What is the significance of the turn to prophecy in the concluding lines of the "Dialogue"? And what how does Bradstreet use prophetic registers elsewhere in her work?
Week 4: Regicide Literature
- Look at the picture on the front of the Eikon Basilike (here). How do you interpret the different elements of the image and how do those elements work together? Do the poems you've read this week replicate this image's interpretation of the king? Do they do anything different?
- Thinking about Katherine Philips' poem "Upon the Double Murder" how does she approach the task of defending the king? How are speech and silence imagined in the poem?
- How do Hester Pulter's two poems on the execution ("On the Horrid Murder" and "On the Same") compare to Philips'? What do we learn about royalist elegy after the regicide by looking at these three poems together?