Eureka!!!

Well, once again I am completely useless in that I seem to have a mental block against remembering to post to this blog on time. Geez. Anyway, this weekend I had a massive breakthrough. I was sitting down to start working on my paper for Milton II. My paper is concerning nature as a fallen entity in "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," a topic which I chose because of its proximity to my thesis topic so that I can begin to generate ideas. I was sitting in front of this very computer with my Milton text open about to start looking up secondary sources when the fancy struck me to look through my book's table of contents to see if anything jumped out at me. That's when I discovered on of Milton's Latin poems that I had never heard of before, "Naturam Non Pati Senium" ("That Nature does not suffer from old age"). This title intrigued me, naturally, so I leafed through the pages to find it. Reading the paragraph preceding the poem, I was astonished to discover an account of "an important seventeenth-century debate" about the idea of Nature as fallen. I further discovered that two books were mentioned to have been written on the subject before Milton composed the Nativity Ode in 1629: Goodman's The Fall of Man, and Hakewill's much longer-titled response to Goodman.

After wiggling around in my chair from excitement for a minute, I started searching for these two primary texts. The library of course failed me, but I managed to find both on EEBO. Of course, they are very difficult to read and very long, but I am going to try and use better researching skills like skimming in order to be more efficient. I also found an essay on the MLAIB concerning Milton and these two authors that I have ordered from inter-library loan. I hope I hear something soon about it.

At any rate, this little weekend breakthrough has once again made me excited about school--and it's been a while since I felt able to get excited about school. I guess this means I'll be hanging out in the library this week, trying to stay ahead of the game.