“Loneliness” was a new concept in early modern England. Milton was particularly attracted to it: whereas Shakespeare had only used the word four times in his career, Milton used it seven times in the The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce alone. Though his transformation of ideas about the relationship between husband and wife in this text has been well-documented, however, his equally important contribution to the invention of the nascent affective category of loneliness has been overlooked.

Studies of early modern selfhood have tended to treat the questions of affect and embodiment as separate objects of study: paying attention to loneliness offers a corrective, in that it puts pressure on the relation between them. This paper considers Milton’s role in the emergence of a concept that not only impacted notions of marriage, but also transformed ideas about subjectivity, interiority, and identity.

—Amelia Worsley, Princeton University