Abstract
Over the last several decades, critics have taken up this possible connection and offered different accounts of it.2 Alongside these important and illuminating connections between Milton's late poetry and the radical, extrapolitical religious movements of the second half of the seventeenth century, other readers have suggested important links between the themes of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes and the concerns of more explicitly political religious radicals such as the Fifth Monarchists.3 How might competing historical forces have played on the mind of a Restoration Milton, reeling from the catastrophic failures of "the Good Old Cause"? Does Milton reject out of hand the violent solutions of the Fifth Monarchy Men or does he continue to support resistance in various forms to the restored- and very worldly- king of England? POSSESSION, PERFORMANCE, AND PATHOLOGY Claims of prophetic gifts and direct divine inspiration are as old as revealed religion itself and with predictable inevitability, periods noted for widespread outbreaks of such claims- periods of revivals or awakenings- are also periods that witness emerging critiques of these claims. The term "enthusiasm," from the Greek enqousia, the fact of being enqeos, or possessed by a god, makes its first appearance in an English text in the second half of the sixteenth century.4 As Michael Heyd observes, however, the Protestant critique of enthusiasm began somewhat earlier, coinciding with the earliest stages of the Reformation, when Luther attacked the Zwickau prophets of Wittenburg in 1522.5 The effect of Luther's repudiation of enthusiastic movements such as the Münster Anabaptists, whose theological views were far more consistent with his own reforming movement than with the Catholic Church, was manifold, but most important for our purposes it set the tone for ongoing hostilities between what was emerging as a kind of normative Protestantism and its more radical extremes.6 For much of the century that followed Luther's attacks, enthusiasm was regarded by its opponents as a tactic of Satan to corrupt the faithful.