Milton's “Paradise of Fools” and Reformation Iconography

Milton’s derogatory portrayal of monks, pilgrims and catholic devotional objects being buffeted through space in the ‘Paradise of Fools’ was informed by a previously unrecognised strand of reformation iconography. Illustrations showing blasts of divine retribution striking down Popes and scattering sacred paraphernalia circulated in anti-catholic graphic satire of the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries. These images provide direct precursors for central aspects of Milton’s account that do not appear in the literary sources. Tracking this iconographic tradition shows that Milton’s imagery in this section of Paradise Lost is not just a stale set of sixteenth-century antimonastic tropes, as has sometimes been suggested, but rather that it had continuing saliency for Protestants with antiprelatical views at least as late as the 1640s. It also provides new evidence for Milton’s knowledge of the works of Alexander Leighton, who provides a direct link between Milton’s poem and earlier visual satires created on mainland Europe.