Mapping the moralized geography of Paradise lost

Randa El Khatib

David Currell

pp. 129-152

in: David Currell, Islam Issa (eds), Digital Milton, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

Paradise Lost contains hundreds of individual place names. This chapter analyzes the multitemporal richness of Milton's geographical imaginary, which spans biblical, classical, and Renaissance registers, and describes a project to map and interpret Milton's geographical allusions. The result of this geocoding endeavor is a navigable visualization environment that can be used to explore various dimensions of Paradise Lost. One of the chapter's hypotheses is that Milton's geography is moralized: that place names are associated with moral valences informed by and informing the reader's understanding of the space of human history. The kinds of methodological contribution that digital mapping can make to the exploration of how Paradise Lost represents moralized, historicized space are illustrated by a focus on the poem's layered depiction of the Mediterranean basin and the Holy Land, and by reading the new digitally created visualizations of these territories in the cartographical context of Milton's period.