Milton and the Parables of Jesus

“Urban’s book makes a valuable contribution to an understanding of the parables—of Milton’s use of them—as well as to a comprehension of a significant aspect of the Renaissance and the Reformation.”

—Jonathan Locke Hart Renaissance and Reformation

“A significant addition to Milton scholarship in its own right, the book’s detailed endnotes provide a working critical compendium of major studies of Milton over at least the last half-century, up to and including very recent publications. There is not a significant controversy over Milton’s work that David Urban is unwilling to engage, and he does so with judicious fair-mindedness even to scholars with whom he finds himself disagreeing.”

—William Shullenberger Review of English Studies

“Shrewdly engaging Milton criticism, both new and old, and fastidiously taking stock of Milton’s major works, early and late, Urban proves himself a faithful steward as well here. Subsequent studies on Milton’s debt to the parables will have to track through Urban’s house.”

—Bryan Adams Hampton The Seventeenth Century

“Urban’s chapters on the sonnets (especially 7 and 19) and the early poems, as well as his discussion of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and De Doctrina Christiana, make a persuasive case for Milton’s reliance on Jesus’s parables as means of ethical self-conception.”

—Ryan Netzley SEL: Studies in English Literature

“While Urban leaves more work to be done with Milton and parables, this book usefully extends the range of future conversations on that topic. I very much recommend it and urge readers to be sure to read all the notes.”

—David Ainsworth Ben Jonson Journal

“In this highly readable book, Urban offers a sharp focus on the relationship of the personal and the poetic by arguing that, over the course of his life, Milton found deep connections between his own concerns and four of Jesus’s parables from the book of Matthew.”

—Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler Renaissance Quarterly

“Perhaps Urban’s most evident strength is his extensive engagement with earlier scholarship and controversies within Milton studies, a prowess surely due at least in part to his role as cocompiler and coeditor of John Milton: An Annotated Bibliography, 1989–1999. With respect to the variety and extensiveness of the notes, Urban is a Miltonist’s Miltonist.”

—Joshua R. Held Modern Philology

“In seeing Milton through the spectacles of the parables and in projecting that vision into his dramatic and poetic works, Urban sheds light on Milton’s meta-narrative of the self, which is at once artistic, theological and existential. Miltonists and readers of Christianity and Literature may welcome Milton and the Parables of Jesus as a major contribution to the study of Milton’s hermeneutic of the Bible and of self.”

—Filippo Falcone Christianity and Literature

“Milton and the Parables of Jesus offers the most comprehensive critical discussion of Milton’s engagement with biblical parables and consequently provides a potential model for other studies of early modern engagement with biblical parables. . . . Urban’s study introduces a consistent clarity to the topic of early modern parabolic reading that results in a wide range of insights regarding each of Milton’s major poetic works.”

—Phillip J. Donnelley Religion and Literature

“With his insightful close readings and his rich response to Milton criticism, Urban offers an engaging and coherent argument for assuming Jesus’s parables as a hermeneutic key to understand Milton’s personal and poetic vision, which will be a useful addition to Milton studies and to those interested in the relation between Christianity and English literature.”

—Irene Montori Early Modern Literary Studies

“Urban’s book provides the first systematic treatment of Milton’s interpretation of a New Testament narrative genre and, as such, contributes greatly to our understanding of the dynamic of Milton’s exegetic practice and his self-presentation.”

—Miklós Péti Orpheus Noster