Naming,Paradise Lost, and the Gendered Discourse of Perfect Language Schemes

Abstract

In the seventeenth century, the search for perfect language was a major European intellectual movement. The quest was motivated by a broad range of concerns, from apocalyptic hopes/fears to the need for scientific precision to a drive for the political stability that would presumably accompany a language freed from semantic slippage. In order to re‐discover or invent a perfect language, early modern scholars tried to reconstruct Edenic speech or turned to abstract mathematical linguistic codes. Modern scholars have discussed Milton's participation in this intellectual project, noting the apparently odd absence of engagement with the subject given Milton's intellectual interests, his circle of friends, and the fact that he wrote a major poem on prelapsarian Eden. However, discussions of Milton and perfect language have tended to lump together various distinct strands of this intellectual inquiry. A far more subtle picture appears when we consider different lines of thought within the movement, the scientific Baconian model and the mystical approach taken up by the followers of Jacob Boehme. Not only have scholars lumped these two together, but the inquiry for perfect language has been presumed to be a masculinist or a gender‐neutral intellectual endeavor. In fact, language schemes were deeply dependent upon gendered idioms and structures. Considering the different ways in which Baconian and Boehmian approaches to perfect language deploy gender allows us to see how these different strands are manifest through the respective modes of naming used by Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost. (K.P.)

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