Milton’s ‘Naturam non pati senium’ and ‘De Idea Platonica’ as Cambridge Act Verses: A Reconsideration in Light of Manuscript Evidence

Abstract

Abstract This article offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of Milton’s Latin poems ‘Naturam non pati senium’ and ‘De Idea Platonica quemadmodum Aristoteles intellexit’ based upon a reconstruction of their context in the academic institutions of 1620s Cambridge. After framing the poems in the broader context of the fairly large corpus of surviving printed and manuscript carmina comitalia or ‘Act Verses’, the documentary evidence for the Latin disputations which they conventionally preceded, and the surviving evidence for the rôle of such verses in university exercises, the article argues for the importance of Sarah Knight’s 2010 manuscript discovery connecting Milton’s poems to the calendar year 1629, but shows that an alternative reading of the manuscript evidence offers a more convincing and much more illuminating account of the poems’ relation to their context. Finally, the article will argue that such a reconsideration of the poems can elucidate the striking absence of consensus concerning the philosophical positions that they take and the nature of their arguments, while revealing a hitherto unsuspected aspect of the student Milton’s deep involvement in university culture.