Fleshly Tabernacles

"Fleshly Tabernacles is an important investigation of the Incarnation in Milton's thought and works and in revolutionary England, especially in the 1640s and 1650s. This is a learned, often powerful, and conceptually rich study of an important topic in its broad cultural context. Bryan Adams Hampton makes an original contribution to the field of seventeenth-century literary and religious studies." —David Loewenstein, University of Wisconsin-Madison

"In Fleshly Tabernacles Bryan Adams Hampton brings fresh attention to the critical topic of Milton's heterodox Christology and its implications for his efforts as polemicist and poet. Hampton's arguments are particularly illuminating as they concern the idiosyncratic doctrine of the incarnate word presented in Milton's theological treatise in relation to his poetry. This original and thought-provoking book concludes with telling studies of heterodox incarnational theology as it shapes the writings of other radical seventeenth-century English religious writers such as Gerrard Winstanley and James Nayler." —John Rumrich, University of Texas at Austin

“Bryan Hampton’s book makes an original and important contribution to the field of Milton studies, as well as to the study of seventeenth-century radical English religious thought. His work has further implications for the study of comparative hermeneutics, proposing provocative continuities and correlations between medieval and early modern approaches to interpretation on the one hand, and contemporary theories of language and meaning on the other. Exhaustively researched and meticulously annotated, Hampton’s readings of incarnational epistemologies offer a wealth of insights and suggestive parallels among early modern writers who are not often taken together.” —Jeffrey Spencer Shoulson, University of Miami

“By taking the Logos seriously as divinity and language, Fleshly Tabernacles finds new depths in seventeenth-century religious poetry, and adds a great deal to our understanding of Milton’s Christology. It develops a wide array of critical approaches, deftly synthesizing Patristic with postmodern theologians, with the historically specific discourses of early modern preachers and radicals, with language theorists such as Ricoeur and Wittgenstein, with Milton and Milton criticism.” —Milton Quarterly

“Hampton’s Fleshly Tabernacles is an interesting exposition of how Milton’s Christology shaped his reading, writing, and politics. It focuses on the Incarnation as a central preoccupation throughout Milton’s oeuvre and how Incarnational thinking was applied to such disparate realms as poetics, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and economics. . . . Hampton’s book can be praised for its boldness, and the requisite command of the Miltonic corpus required to sustain such a sweeping argument is impressive.” —Sixteenth Century Journal

“Fleshly Tabernacles is a clearly learned and meticulously researched piece of Milton scholarship, which students of intellectual and cultural history will find extremely useful.” —Renaissance Quarterly

“. . . anyone interested in Milton will want to engage Fleshly Tabernacles. Hampton’s scholarship here is certainly worthy of the common accolade offered in each of three back-cover blurbs from eminent Milton scholars (David Loewenstein, John Rumrich, Jeffrey Spencer Shoulson): this book makes an ‘original’ and ‘important’ (or ‘thought-provoking’) contribution to Milton studies. This I affirm and add only that Hampton does this in a lucid prose style that incarnates his superb reading of Milton’s texts in a more virtuous fashion.” —Modern Philology

“The strength of this book lies in Hampton’s wide interests in literature, theology, and hermeneutics. . . . Fleshly Tabernacles sets us well on the way toward discovering new registers of meaning in writing that embodies the complex material, spiritual, and political meanings of the Incarnation in seventeenth-century England.” —Renaissance and Reformation