Account Me Man : Economic Incarnation and Common Wealth in \u3cem\u3eParadise Lost\u3c/em\u3e

Recent scholarship has considered the materialist and economic logic of Medieval Catholicism\u27s theology of redemption, and suggested that Protestant ideology suppressed an earlier economic conceptualization of belief. In this paper, I consider John Milton\u27s Paradise Lost, a late work in this history that, despite is Protestant authorship, offers Christian redemption in explicitly economic terms. Milton\u27s unusually materialist theology, I argue, constituted a political challenge to the Restoration by demystifying social hierarchies and privileging wealth shared communally ˆ Commonwealth ˆ over the Satanic idolatry of kingship