Cultural and Intellectual Contexts in Milton's Paradise Lost

Step 1. Choose one aspect of seventeenth-century English culture that Milton addresses or explores in Paradise Lost and that interests you. You may, for example, want to focus on some aspect of Christian theology, English politics or political theory, or early modern science.
Step 2. Find one primary text** that addresses the subject you have chosen and that you believe may illuminate Paradise Lost.
For the purposes of this assignment, a primary text is any text written or created between 1580 and 1680. You may choose a literary, historical, philosophical, theological, political, scientific, visual, or musical text (among many others); you may use popular as well as elite texts. I have listed some suggestions below. Note: I do not expect you to read the entire primary text.
See 18th Century Book Tracker, which indexes links to freely-available digital facsimiles of seventeenth and eighteenth-century texts available at sites like Google Books and the Internet Archive.
After you have located and glanced over or studied sections your primary text, do the following four exercises:
A. First, identify whatever strikes you (an American college student in the year 2021) as puzzling, strange, illogical, perhaps even incomprehensible. What are you not getting? What aspects of your chosen text seem most alien to your contemporary way of seeing the world?
B. Then, identify three or four distinguishing characteristics of the text you have chosen. You may, for instance, take note of a particularly powerful, unusual, or memorable metaphor or other figure of speech; a startling or intriguing description; a line of argument that seems particularly striking to you; a rhetorical strategy that is particularly effective or unusual; a cultural belief that engages or puzzles you.
C. Next, identify some of the ways your text might illuminate Paradise Lost. These may focus on content (common themes, controversies, ideas, beliefs); on rhetoric (strategies of persuasion, ways of engaging the reader, rhetorical devices like the catalog or allusion); on aesthetics or poetics; on structure; on cultural attitudes.
D. Finally, generate a series of questions about the relation between the primary text you have chosen and Paradise Lost. These questions should be exploratory. They should open up interesting areas of exploration for you. Ideally, they will be provocative, engaging, exciting, intriguing–questions that might lead you to real discoveries.
**Some suggested primary texts:
a political pamphlet that deals with the beheading of Charles I, the English civil war, the Restoration, authority, hierarchy, or rebellion
a work that records the discovery or exploration of the New World
one of Milton’s own prose tracts (e.g., On Christian Doctrine or The Divorce Tracts) — a sermon or religious tract that deals with a theological issue pertinent to Paradise Lost
a Protestant marriage manual
a 17th-century medical, theological, political, or philosophical text on the nature of women
a 17th-century work of visual art that depicts Eden, the fall, Satan, the War in Heaven, an allegory of sin or death, a blind prophet, etc.
a 17th-century opera based on a classical myth
a 17th-century map of the world or of the cosmos
See 18th Century Book Tracker, which indexes links to freely-available digital facsimiles of seventeenth and eighteenth-century texts available at sites like Google Books and the Internet Archive.
You may write this assignment up in section or steps. An essay format is not required; however, be sure all components of the assignment are addressed substantively.
Word requirement: 1200 words minimum.