Satan In Paradise Lost

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By the early Seventeenth Century, tools such as the cross staff, astrolabe, quadrant, sextant, astronomical clock, telescope, and torquetum had led scientists like Copernicus, Digges, Bruno, Tycho, Kepler, and Galileo to new discoveries about the universe. People were fascinated with astronomy and geography and by maps, globes, and celestial globes. Milton himself visited Galileo in 1638. As Lawrence Babb, Robert H. Cawley, Walter Clyde Curry, Alastair Fowler, Allen H. Gilbert, Grant McColley, Marjorie Nicolson, Howard Schultz, Susan Shibanoff and Elizabeth H. Hageman, Kester Svendsen, and others have amply demonstrated, Milton's interest in and knowledge of geography and astronomy was extensive--too extensive for him to have been unaware of the implications of the details he provides about Satan's orbits in Book IX of Paradise Lost. As Gunnar Qvarnström points out, Milton "stresses the element of time" and directs the reader's attention "to the epic chronometer" (25), and, as Alastair Fowler explains, Milton's cosmology is "an exact reproduction, correct in every geographical detail, of the actual world as it appears from a unique view point" (447). Walter Clyde Curry has delineated the path of Satan and the rebel angels' fall from Heaven to Hell and the path of Satan's first journey to the earth, but he ignores Satan's other journeys (9.48-86). Malabika Sarkar and Harinder Singh Marjara write about the lines in Book Nine which describe Satan's orbits. Sarkar has devoted her attention to the seven orbits described in Book IX, 63-66, a passage she calls "one of the finest examples of Milton's astronomical imagination" (63). Her attention is focused on the path of Satan's orbits with respect to the sun and the earth's shadow; my interest here is in Satan's orbits with respect to geography. And Marjara points out that Milton's images of the cosmos "are drawn from

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