Areopagitica: A Speech of Mr John Milton for the Liberty of the Unlicenc'd Printing, to the Parliament of England

Areopagitica: A Speech of Mr John Milton for the Liberty of the Unlicenc'd Printing, to the Parliament of England, by Milton, published in 1644. The title imitates the Areopagiticus of the Athenian orator Isocrates, which was addressed to the Council that met on the Areopagus in Athens.

This discourse, one of Milton's most impassioned prose works, was an unlicensed and unregistered publication. It attempted to persuade Parliament to repeal the licensing order of 14 June 1643, which effectively reinstated the Stuart machinery of press censorship. Milton opens with a selective history of licensing, identifying it with the Papal Inquisition, which he satirizes. He sanctions the reader's freedom to judge for himself between good and bad books, since good and evil are inseparable in the fallen world and the condition of virtue is the recognition of evil and the power to resist it: ‘I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue.’ Milton argues that the regulation of reading is in practice ineffective, ironically suggesting that it logically entails the censorship of all ‘recreations and pastimes’. Finally, he analyses Truth as complex and many-angled, scattered in the fallen world, to be recovered by sifting and debate. He quotes the case of Galileo, whom he recalls meeting under house arrest, ‘grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition’. Milton builds his rhetoric to a magnificent exhortation to the ‘Lords and Commons of England’ to consider ‘what Nation it is whereof ye are…A Nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit…methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks.’