Visiting Assistant Professor of English, Dr. Sarah S. Keleher (CC ’11), has published a new essay, “‘So all was cleared’: Corrupted Fancy and Purgative Tears in Paradise Lost.” Her work appeared this past fall in the collection Milton in Strasbourg: a collection of essays based on papers delivered to the IMS 12, 17-21 June 2019 (Peter Lang Publishing Group, 2022). Keleher’s essay brings together the history of early modern medicine with religious discourse to interrogate Book IV of John Milton’s magisterial epic poem, Paradise Lost. Keleher explains how Milton’s narrator describes Satan “inspiring venom” into Eve’s ear to access “the organs of her fancy” and “taint / The animal spirits that from pure blood arise” (iv.802-7), causing Eve to have “distempered thoughts” (thus distempering her body). Keleher’s reading shows how Satan renders Eve’s animal spirits impure, a process indicating a biological and spiritual effect based on early modern medical theories of fancy and the animal spirits. For Keleher, the connection between body and soul in Milton’s cosmology raises the possibility that unwilled bodily corruption could materially compromise the soul, making spiritual purity subject to material conditions outside of the control of free will. 

Central to Keleher’s groundbreaking argument is the way that Milton works to establish a material and spiritual type of healing capable of countering such bodily corruption via Eve’s own tears. Building on Galenic medical theories popular in 17^th-century England, Keleher demonstrates how Milton offers fancy as a necessary cure for spiritual and bodily health. The essay goes on to caution that the material corruption of fancy and the spirits that Satan inflicts on Eve becomes the inherent condition of all humanity after the Fall. That corruption, Keleher concludes, impedes the possibility for the spiritual ascent of the soul after the Fall. In that context, the healing nature of fancy that Milton establishes through Eve’s remorseful tears acts as a model for all readers of Paradise Lost.