Milton’s Precarious Data

ABSTRACT Milton’s writing understands and disassembles data as a source of certainty. His use of data (yes, he used data frequently in his work) and his understanding of the data-obsessed movements of his own historical moment show a writer attuned to the successes and failures of technological and scientific developments. With characteristic anxious subtlety, Milton attempts to manage the pressures and contradictions of data-focused uncertainty. Paradise Lost takes up thematic and formal gestures toward seventeenth-century scientific discourse, including many discussions on the nature of knowledge. These gestures can be made more legible by using computational methods to highlight overlooked word- and line-level features of Milton’s verse. Employing both quantitative and qualitative approaches to examine Paradise Lost and the history of the term data in the early modern period, this article shows that Milton’s understanding of the precarity of knowledge is rooted in a complex engagement with data of various forms.