Academic Seminar – 6th Feb // Dr. Karis Riley – ‘Shipwrecks, Seashells, and Civil War: Reading Milton’s Arthurian Epic in Early Modern England c. 1639-1645’’

Seminars run from 2-3pm, On most Fridays during the weeks of the University of Oxford’s full term

You are warmly invited to join us beforehand for community worship at 12.30pm and lunch in the Manor house (1-2pm). 

Abstract:

In this seminar, we will examine an overlooked allusion which John Milton makes to Silius Italicus’s Punica 17.274-279 in his neglected Latin pastoral elegy, the Epitaphium Damonis (c. 1640). It is the moment Hannibal’s ships fracture in the supernatural sea-storm. Milton makes his new shepherd’s pipes break like a ship in Hannibal’s fleet. As Milton is writing his elegy in late 1639/early 1640 and announcing his plan to write an epic on King Arthur, political tensions in England are rising that will culminate in the English Civil War. I offer an argument which establishes the allusion and explains its significance for Milton studies.More widely, this research sets the stage to look at epics of rebellion and rebellious readers, how the Punica (and other Flavian epics) were read in England in the 1630s-40s and became important sources of imagery to help anti-royalist readers make sense of, navigate, and express personal responses to the political upheaval of Civil Wars

Karis Riley is a literary scholar of Medieval and Renaissance Literature. She was a postdoctoral research associate on the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge for the AHRC project Remembering the Reformation (2018-2019). She has a BA in philosophy from Wheaton College, IL (2012), a PhD in English Literature from the University of York (2016), and a Master’s in Classics from the University of Oxford (2017). She is currently preparing her first book, Milton’s Passions, which investigates the complex and varied relationship between emotion, morality, and literary history from the Plato to the Renaissance with a particular focus on the poet John Milton. She has published in Renaissance Studies, The Seventeenth Century, and Routledge’s Remembering the Medieval and Early Modern World series and has spoken at the Renaissance Society of America. Karis is married to Malcolm and together they started Trinity Church Central London in 2014, an evangelical church-plant and community in the capital city.