John Milton’s "Paradise Lost" and Lucy Hutchinson’s "Order and Disorder"Master ClassIn-Person
Wednesday, Nov 05, 2025
9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m
Columbia University
535 W 116th St
New York, NY 10027
Our partner, Columbia University, is hosting this event.
In this class, we will focus on Book 9 of John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Canto V of Lucy Hutchinson’s lesser-known but equally wonderful Order and Disorder. Both epic poems are wildly creative revisions of Genesis, and both focus on the terrible costs of Adam and Eve’s Fall, including for relations between the sexes. We will discuss how the two authors’ ideas about gender and sexuality are often surprising: Milton, popularly known as a “puritan,” is gloriously pro-sex, and his poem is structured around inviting readers to blame Eve, and then denying them the satisfaction of being right; Hutchinson, famous for her memoirs of her husband, is bracingly critical of women being subject to “foolish and froward” husbands. Along the way, we will also consider the authors’ radical natural philosophies, political activism, and commitment to a godly republicanism.
ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS, CLASSICS, POETRY, GENDER & SEXUALITY
Julie Crawford
Julie Crawford is Mark van Doren Professor of Humanities at Columbia University. She has published widely on authors ranging from Shakespeare and Milton to Aemilia Lanyer and Mary Wroth, and on topics ranging from the history of reading to the history of sexuality. She is the author of Marvelous Protestantism and Mediatrix, and is the new editor for the early-seventeenth century volume of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Currently, she is serving as the general editor of the Oxford Handbook of Margaret Cavendish, and is working on two books: one on gender and resistance theory in Renaissance literature, and the other on Milton’s Paradise Lost for the Core Knowledge Series.