Milton And The Rhetoric Of Zeal

Milton's radically aggressive English prose emerged from a dynamic rhetorical milieu. A rhetoric of radical excess developed among the Puritan wing of English Protestantism throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, scriptural injunctions to will the sword of the spirit against the enemies of the Lord. The first part of Kranidas's study demonstrates the widespread acceptance of the attack on 'lukewarmness' and the celebration of a passionate and immoderate commitment to action against the Laudian campaign for 'Holy Decency', the reform of ritual and discipline generally in the Church of England. The book then turns to an analysis of Milton's antiprelatical tracts, with particular, but not exclusive, reference to the tradition of zeal. The book ends with a brief coda that argues the similarities of radical Puritan rhetoric and the rhetoric of the radical American movement of the 1960s and 1970s.