“To All Baptized”: The Watery Dissent of Paradise Regained

This essay reads the opening scene of Paradise Regained—in which Jesus goes down to the River Jordan to be baptized—in the contexts both of the intense seventeenth-century debates about baptism and Milton’s own stated support for adult, believer baptism (as opposed to infant christening) in De Doctrina Christiana. Especially in light of the crackdown on Dissenters after the Restoration, Milton’s decision to feature a scene of full-immersion adult baptism was a polemical one that expressed his tacit solidarity with the community of baptistic believers.