Milton and the Space Age: Bright Universes, Dark Universes, and the History of the Cosmological Imagination

This article examines the cosmology of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” in the context of the shift from a bright to a dark universe in the European cosmological imagination. While other comparable transformations—from geocentrism to heliocentrism, or a bounded to an unbounded universe—have been extensively studied, the turn from bright to dark space remains almost entirely neglected. Drawing on textual and visual evidence from antiquity to the present day, this article provides the first sustained exploration of the subject as well as a novel reading of Milton’s cosmology and the challenges it presents to the contemporary reader.