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Milton’s life and career confound our latter-day theories of separate realms:   he was at once an ivory tower intellectual and a practical servant to a government that had violently broken with centuries of monarchical rule, a poet of empire and an anti-imperialist.  His prose tracts make the case for regicide and revolution, for radical reform in religion, governance, and relations between the sexes, but he was also a consummate spokesman for unreconstructed patriarchy.  Reading broadly in the major poems (especially Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes) and selected prose, we will try to understand how this poet and his era--the complex social, political, and religious unfolding of the English Reformation--transformed the written word.