Milton and Maternal Mortality

"[Schwartz] has indeed chosen a dauntingly complex project, but here it is, tenaciously and convincingly executed … he pieces together a carefully evocative account of the ritual-magical female subculture that enclosed and concealed the mysteries of the birth chamber, that curtained, candlelit space at the heart of the house from which men were consistently excluded … For taking the argument ever further beyond the old received image of Milton the misogynist, Schwartz earns his place alongside Diane McColley, James Grantham Turner, and William Kerrigan. Our understanding has been enlarged, and that's a fine achievement."
Geoffrey Wall, The Cambridge Quarterly,

"Louis Schwartz has written a book that usefully examines a much neglected aspect of Milton’s authorial and biographical persona, his unusual attention to female suffering in childbirth and its too often disastrous consequences."
Catherine Gimelli Martin, The University of Memphis

"Carefully written, richly detailed, and ultimately persuasive, Milton and Maternal Mortality offers a new way of thinking about the familiar problem of Milton and women, one that moves beyond discussions of prelapsarian Eve towards an appreciation of the development of Milton’s thought."
Paula McQuade, DePaul University

"Schwartz is to be highly commended for drawing back the curtain, not only on the reproductive drama of the seventeenth-century birthing chamber but also on Milton's rich and varied life-long poetic engagement with it."
Karen Bollerman, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching