Review of Milton and the Network of Disability, Embodiment and Care, edited by Angelica Duran and Pasquale Toscano (Edinburgh, 2026)

Bridger M. Bartlett, PhD

AMEND Postdoctoral Research Associate, Swansea University

Duran, Angelica, and Pasquale Toscano, editors. Milton and the Network of Disability, Embodiment and Care. Edinburgh University Press, 2026. £95.00 (hardback | app ebook | PDF ebook)

Milton and the Network of Disability, Embodiment and Care, edited by Angelica Duran and Pasquale Toscano, is the first volume in Edinburgh University Press’s new Edinburgh Critical Studies in Early Modern Literature and Disability series. This edited collection’s very title signals its relevance to AMEND and the themes driving our project. Neurodivergence and disability are deeply connected, overlapping topics, of course, and AMEND’s interests in how neurodivergent people engage with and might benefit from (particularly early modern) literature compel us to reflect on the embodied considerations of being neurodivergent and the relations of human interdependence that support neurodivergent life. John Milton himself is obviously of interest to us just by being a major literary figure from the early modern period; excitingly, though, this volume envisions its titular network of disability, embodiment and care (often shortened in the text to DEC) as extending across Milton’s cultural afterlives and even the ways the book’s own contributors engage with its topics.

Particularly given the longstanding emphasis on biography within Milton studies, a certain awareness of disability has generally been present in criticism on this poet who gradually lost his eyesight and composed much of his most famous work with the assistance of sighted friends and relatives. Noting these points in their introductory chapter, Duran and Toscano write that their collection nevertheless does something quite new with Milton and disability by attending to the previously neglected ways Milton and his writings were and are embedded in supra-individual and cultural realities of disability, particularly where it comes to questions of authority and vulnerability. Indeed, the editors highlight their choice of a cover image depicting Milton dictating to the religiously and politically marginalized Quaker Thomas Ellwood while a woman shelves books in the background and invite us to consider how it represents a dynamic DEC network (pp. 3-6). The book’s stated “fundamental premise is that the cultural authority of Milton’s texts and the consistent engagement with his biography for over three centuries have played unrecognised roles in the rise of the discursive and identity category we know today as disability” (7). The degree of immediacy with which different chapters illustrate or speak to that premise varies throughout the collection, but the constituent parts of the volume certainly do support its argument “that DEC is an advantageous heuristic lens – a critical prosthesis, so to speak – with which to interpret Milton’s work, life, and afterlives in particular, as well as literature and ideas of authorship more generally” (4).

The point that one can learn about Milton and draw broader literature-related implications out of this book may be one of the most useful where AMEND is concerned. Milton can be intimidating, and Milton criticism can sometimes feel impenetrable or uninteresting to those who are not deeply versed in the man’s biography. Milton and the Network of Disability, Embodiment and Care explicitly aims for accessibility (8), and it achieves this goal through its assemblage of chapters from scholars with diverse ranges of approaches and disciplinary backgrounds. Non-Miltonist Disability Studies luminaries Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Georgina Kleege bookend the chapters proper with a foreword and an afterword respectively that both offer personal reflections on the significances of Milton and this volume in relation to Disability Studies, teaching, and learning. In between these two contributions, chapters variously devoted to factual information, close reading, and adaptations offer 13 distinct and exciting ways to think about DEC with and through Milton.

The editors do not include individual chapter descriptions in their introduction. Chapter-by-chapter overviews for a collection this size can feel unwieldy, and for that reason it does feel inappropriate to do so comprehensively in this review. Nonetheless, neither the physical book nor the online version includes abstracts, and the lack of chapter summaries may be worth noting as one small drawback on the accessibility front. Such features can be quite helpful both for newcomers to the scholarship and for even seasoned experts who experience (often fluctuating) cognitive disabilities like brain fog or aphasia. Duran and Toscano do, though, provide useful thematic descriptions of the four parts into which the chapters are divided.

Part 1, “A Darksome House of Mortal Clay,” consists two chapters that each serve as a kind of introduction and an appendix to the second chapter. I have already quoted from Chapter 1 is written by the editors and opens the book with concise overviews of its content, claims, and significance. Chapter 2, “Milton and Disability” by Thomas N. Corns, is an informative introduction to the topic of Milton and disability, particularly from a DEC angle, and an especially productive starting point for readers who may not be habitual Miltonists. The valuable appendix to this chapter, a Latin transcription of a 1654 letter Milton wrote describing his then-progressing blindness, may, conversely, be of interest largely to those who are already at home in the weeds of Milton studies.

Part 2, “Spirited with Various Forms,” consists of 5 chapters that each take up the DEC angle to perform readings of one or more text authored by Milton. All five chapters may be described as, to different extents, investigating Milton’s thought on the relationships between disability, human sinfulness and free will. Chapter 4, by Timothy M. Harrison, most directly addresses the tangle of these themes and their centrality to Milton’s theology and philosophy. Harrison’s chapter is of additional note for its concern with Milton’s understanding and representation of the nature of human minds and its close reading of relevant passages in Paradise Lost. Perhaps even more clearly related to AMEND’s interests is Chapter 7, “Disability and the Drama of Folly in Samson Agonistes” by Maura Brady. Brady notes the recurring concern with being perceived as a fool in Samson Agonistes and explains how the idea of folly condenses moral weakness and difficulties associated with cognitive disabilities into a single sense of an incapacity for self-control.

Part 3, “Gathering Up Limb by Limb,” approaches Milton and his writing within early modern contexts. In first of the three chapters in this section, Teri Fickling reads “Cyriack, This Three Years’ Day These Eyes” in the contexts of ableist attacks on Milton and relevant biblical material, advocates for and practices a close reading of poetic language informed by intertextual contexts, argues that Milton works against received attitudes about blindness in the poem to assert not only a continued ability to rule himself, but disability gain in the form of an enhanced capacity. The other two chapters in this section stand out for their readability and clarity of argument; Joan Curbet Stoler’s chapter helpfully explains that it addresses parallel interests in care and embodiment within Paradise Regained and among early Quakers, “and it argues that this commensurability is based on Milton’s affinity with Quakerism as an organised community of bodily care” (167); Pasquale Toscano’s chapter – descriptively but too prosaically titled “Access, Ableism, and Accommodation in Samson Agonistes and its Restoration Successors” – offers an exciting new reading of Milton’s closet drama by attending to “Samson’s ability to imagine a notion of accommodation” well before the named disability concept as such existed and “expos[ing] Samson’s accommodation request as an alternative climax to the bloodier one that follows, a signal of his burgeoning self-awareness that shows he can be something far different from either protagonist of villain” (185).

Part 4, “Written to Aftertimes,” extends the DEC attention to networks across time: Angelica Duran examines a 19^th-century Spanish play’s depiction of Milton as complexly embedded in a multidirectional network of care with the other members of his household; Reginald A. Wilburn, locating the contemporary poet Tyehimba Jess in a line of Black writers who have drawn on and repurposed Milton to comment on racial injustice, describes how Jess works with/from “When I Consider How My Light Is pent” to address intersections and interactions between Blackness and disability; John Leonard, finally, described the considerations about Satan’s body and its representation that have arisen in the process of selecting images to accompanying an audio version of Paradise Lost.

Edited collections are difficult to review. Like just about any collection of essays by multiple scholars, this one showcases various argumentation styles, different critical priorities, and multiple sets of value assumptions. But the volume’s basic takeaway appears to be, in fact, an invitation to think about Milton in terms of networks, relationships, and dynamic interactions rather than in terms of mighty, unified monumentality. The chapters of Milton and the Network of Disability, Embodiment and Care are themselves a stimulating network of provocations, bringing the concerns of disability studies and adjacent fields into timely engagement with Milton.

Bridger M. Bartlett, PhD, is AMEND's postdoctoral research associate. Broadly, their research focuses on neurodiversity as an intersectional consideration in 16th- and 17th-century English culture. With Laura Seymour and Bradley J. Irish, they are a co-editor of the collection Neurodiversity and Early Modern English Literature (forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press). Bartlett's research has appeared in ELH and JEMCS, and they have recently completed a monograph manuscript on neurodiversity and race-making in early modern English literature.