Milton, the sublime and dramas of choice: Figures of Heroic and Literary Virtue

By Irene Montori

Milton, the Sublime and Dramas of Choice challenges readers and scholars to rethink Milton’s relationship to the sublime in terms of ethics. The book demonstrates that Milton’s sublimity merges the early modern reception of Longinus with classical, medieval, and Renaissance categories of magnanimity, wonder, and inspiration to investigate the relations between human and divine agency. Under the influence of early modern models of sublimity, including Spenser and Shakespeare, Milton speaks through his fictional characters about the making of heroic and literary virtue. In turn, the work also sheds light on the importance of tragedy as an additional source to the formation of the Renaissance sublime. Milton’s tragic plots illustrate how the character’s virtue is tested, strengthened, and eventually transformed into an experience of elevation. The study explores the heroic path from dramatic choice to self-realisation, offering extensive treatments of Milton’s dramas – A Maske and Samson Agonistes. The redefinition of the pairing “Milton and the sublime” in this work aims to relocate the poet within the English literary history as the climax of earlier traditions and receptions of the sublime, but also as the starting point of modern sublimity

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edizioni Studium S.r.l.
• Release date: Nov 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9788838250217

Book preview

Sublimity

1. Beyond the Aesthetics of Sublime

The eighteenth century was the age in which Milton was celebrated as the supreme exponent of the English sublime, so much so that in 1787 Mary Wollstonecraft declared, «I am sick of hearing of the sublimity of Milton» [1] . Despite its ancient origin in Hellenic rhetoric, the sublime has been elevated as a phenomenon of modernity produced by the new aesthetic field and, since the early eighteenth century, Milton has been the founding father of the modern sublime. Even though earlier in the seventeenth century, poets such as Dryden and Marvell had already paid respect to the sublimity of Milton’s epic poem, discussions about his sublime poetry only intensified after the publication of Milton’s great epic works and focused exclusively on Paradise Lost [2] .

The study of the sublime has mostly been considered within an aesthetic framework since discussions of the sublime developed in eighteenth-century artistic debates, which centred on how to control and stimulate various passions in the audience. For eighteenth-century British writers, Paradise Lost was the perfect instance of what was meant by the epithet sublime [3] . What defined Milton’s poetry in Paradise Lost as sublime was the capacity of its lofty expression and its imagery to activate the creative faculty and to produce strong passions, such as admiration, awe and wonder, in the reader.

Nevertheless, Milton’s aesthetic experience through his sublime poetry retains an ethical stance. There has been a recent tendency among scholars to revaluate modern sublimity not only as a result of aesthetics but also as a phenomenon included in a network of concomitant discourses [4] . The rising interest in the sublime was not only generated by discussions and thoughts on aesthetic pleasure, but it also contained strong ethical and rhetorical grounding. The sublimity of Milton’s poetry, thus, cannot exclusively be identified as an aesthetic experience, conveyed by elevated thoughts through a lofty style. Rather the sublime in Milton should also be addressed as a deliberate creation of the fictional character and the author alike. The sublime, in brief, is for Milton the ability of the artist to generate through a character in the fiction a sublime event, which makes the character an example of heroic virtue and the author a model of artistic fame. In such instances, the sublime becomes a poetics of elevation and a revolutionary practice of virtuous heroism for the character, the reader, and the author alike. As a condensed and complex phenomenon, Milton’s model of sublimity needs to be valued not only for its aesthetic import but also for its ethical, political, theological, philosophical, and social implications for both the author and the receiver of the artistic work. Yet, focusing on the ethical grounding does not mean to disregard the aesthetic dimension of Milton’s sublimity. Examining the moral stance of the sublime should be rather seen as an additional and contiguous aspect of sublimity, which aims at offering a more accurate understanding of this multi-faceted concept. Moreover, adding further complexity to the concept expands the range of Milton’s poetic works in which the sublime operates, reaching beyond the exalted images and powerful effects produced in the individual’s subjectivity from the reading of Paradise Lost.

The understanding of the sublime within the aesthetic framework, which has been dominant until the twentieth century, has produced a number of faulty premises. There is, first of all, the widespread assumption that the sublime as an autonomous category of experience was effectively created in the eighteenth century through the aesthetic paradigm. The danger of addressing the eighteenth-century sublime exclusively under the rubric of aesthetics is the false impression that there were no prior theoretical debates in Britain about the relationship between the represented object and its viewers. By contrast, eighteenth-century criticism drew on a rich corpus of Renaissance discussions over rhetoric and the means of stimulating powerful emotions in the audience. Within the past few years, classicists, medievalists, and Renaissance scholars have shifted the origin of the sublime back into Renaissance literary theory as well as they have demonstrated how the English Renaissance sublime relies on ancient and medieval ideas and patterns [5] .

Furthermore, placing the genesis of the sublime in aesthetics has turned the eighteenth century into a preliminary theoretical workshop of those concepts which would be later synthesised in Kant’s subjectivism, and then held by the Romantics [6] . The most eloquent exponent of this highly influential view was Samuel Monk. His path-breaking work The Sublime (1935) established the scholarly tradition, which understood the beginnings of eighteenth-century British aesthetics as the antecedent to Kantian aesthetic thought. According to Monk, «eighteenth-century aesthetic has as its unconscious goal the Critique of Judgment» (1790), whose philosophical system brought order to the chaos of the aesthetic theories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries [7] . Monk’s established account, which was dominant throughout the 1960s, conceptualised seventeenth and eighteenth-century English theories of the sublime in Kantian terms by adopting the assumption that «true sublimity must be sought only in the mind of the one who judges, not in the object in nature» [8] . From the viewpoint of the Kantian third critique, the sublime is an aesthetic judgement, and as such, it does not depend on the nature of the object. Like the beautiful, the sublime is not a quality inherent to the empirical world, rather judgments of taste are the result of our subjective conditions of perception [9] . Aesthetic judgments are thereby the result of the exercise of our faculties. In this light, the story of the sublime since the eighteenth century is the story of the unfolding of the sublime as an utterly subjective experience. This standpoint has not only shaped the understanding of the modern sublime, but it has also been endorsed in discussions of antiquity. In his very influential translation of Longinus’s tractate, D.A. Russell claims that the sublime is «a special effect, not a special style» [10] . In Russell’s view, the sublime is most clearly distinguished by its effect on the hearers, rather than a great diction. By understanding the sublime as a subjective sensation, regardless of its rhetoric, Russell adopts the language of Samuel Monk (his translation of Longinus was published a few years later the reprinting of Monk’s book in 1960) [11] .

But the bias of the sublime as a special effect in the reader is not Monk’s invention. Rather this conception of the sublime directly stems from Boileau’s French translation (1674) of Longinus’s work that passed the Peri Hupsous on to the English, as Johnson recognised in his Dictionary, « The sublime is a Gallicism, but now naturalised» [12] . Boileau’s work determined the significance of the English term sublime in two ways: the idea that a sublime discourse does not imply a deliberate magniloquent language, and the accent on the effects of the sublime on the audience. At the end of the preface to the Traité du Sublime, Boileau’s definition synthesises his contribution to the meaning of the modern and proto-Romantic sublime, drawing on the Peri Hupsous:

Il faut donc savoir que, par sublime, Longin n’entend pas ce que les orateurs appellant le style sublime, mais cet extraordinaire et ce merveilleux qui frappe dans le discours, et qui fait qu’un ouvreage enléve, ravit, transporte. Le style sublime veut toujours de grands mots; mais le sublime se peut trouver dans une seule pensée, dans une seule figure, dans un seul tour de paroles. […] Il faut donc entendre par sublime, dans Longin, l’extraordinaire, le surprenant, et, comme je l’ai traduit, le merveilleux dans le discours [13] .

As the subtitle to Boileau’s treatise shows, the sublime was used as a device to adapt the concept du merveilleux to neoclassic prescriptions of beauty, order, harmony, and decorum about art. For Boileau and his followers, the sublime was a weapon with which to defend the position of the Ancients in the quarrel with the Moderns. Earlier discussions of the sublime were therefore associated with traditional standards of beauty and proportion, in France as in England. John Dennis, who was the first to introduce the concept in English literary criticism, characterised the sublime as a superlative degree of beauty [14] . By the same token, Peri Hupsous increasingly became the locus for the disintegration of neo-classicist standards in England. Due to the exceptional nature of its discourse, whose rapture brings the soul’s strongest passions into play, eighteenth-century British critics used Longinus’s sublime as an instrument to resist neoclassic sublime and the grand style in France. In England, then, the sublime flourished within the philosophy of British empiricists, such as Locke and Hume, to identify a pleasure with specific psychological and emotional features. As the interest in the sublime focused on modes of perception and the emotional effects of artistic and natural works, the term sublime extended from an adjectival use – the style in which elevated ideas were expressed – to identify the idea itself of a distinctive aesthetic pleasure, separate from the beautiful. Although a conceptual distinction between the sublime and the beautiful is only systematised in Burke’s Enquiry, the early eighteenth century laid the foundations of the difference between a reasoned feeling of beauty and the excessive emotional drive of sublimity. It was John Dennis the foremost critic to strengthen the influence of the pairing Milton and sublimity. Dennis embellished his Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701) with sublime passages from Paradise Lost to highlight the superiority of Milton’s poetry over the Ancients [15] . The nature of Milton’s sublimity, for Dennis, lies not only in the lofty expression of his poetry but also in the capacity to affect the mind of the reader:

the Sublime is nothing else but a great Thought, or Great Thoughts moving the Soul from its Ordinary Situation by the Enthusiasm which naturally attends them. Now Longinus had a notion of Enthusiastick Passion; for he establishes it in that very Chapter for the second Source of Sublimity [16] .

On the one hand, Dennis follows Longinus’s tradition when arguing that the effect of Paradise Lost has its source in the sublime style; on the other, Dennis develops Boileau’s emotional discourse in defining the excellence of Milton’s epic in terms of its power to astonish the reader and to produce passions, such as admiration and terror [17] . Joseph Addison aligns himself with Dennis in recognising that the first book of Paradise Lost duly shows how «to inflame the Mind of the Reader, and to give it that sublime kind of Entertainment, which is suitable to the Nature of an Heroick Poem» [18] . However, he also differs from Boileau and Dennis when he argues that the seventh book of Paradise Lost «is an instance of that Sublime that is not mixed and worked up with Passion» [19] . Building on the Longinian claim that the pathetic is not essential to the sublime, Addison identifies another kind of sublimity in Paradise Lost. The seventh book of Milton’s epic fills the reader’s mind with great calm, rather than agitate the mind.

A confusion remains in the concept until the late eighteenth century, whether the sublime resides in the style in which lofty ideas are expressed, or it is produced by the lofty ideas themselves. Edmund Burke eventually dismisses rhetoric from the discourse of the sublime, as well as he consolidates the association between Paradise Lost and the sublime in aesthetic terms. In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1759), Burke affirms that «the cause of the sublime» is the negative pleasure caused by pain or terror, and «no person seems better to have understood the secret of heightening, or setting terrible things, if I may use the expression, in their strongest light, by the force of a judicious obscurity, than Milton» [20] . Since Burke, the close relation between Milton’s ability to excite strong emotions such as terror, awe, and wonder and the sublime remains unchallenged throughout the nineteenth century, so much so that in 1819 Byron remarks, «the word Miltonic mean[s] Sublime» [21] .

The understanding of sublimity in Paradise Lost in terms of the reader’s emotive experience is intimately related to Monk’s reading of the formation of the British sublime as a gradual consolidation from an objective to a subjective discourse from Dennis and Addison to Kant, via Burke. On the basis of the eighteenth-century aesthetic theory which placed much emphasis on the intense pleasure and the passions evoked in Milton’s great poem, contemporary criticism has mainly focused on Paradise Lost and the emotional effects produced in its audience [22] . It is under these terms that Monk’s idea of a progressive shift towards Kantian subjectivism has been questioned and rephrased in several ways. Walter J. Hipple, for instance, defined Monk’s idea of the aesthetic sublime in eighteenth-century England as «an unconscious prolegomenon to Kant», although he doubted «that the intellectual history of any age can be viewed, without distortion, as a progression towards some one culmination» [23] . Theodore Wood recognised that «although it [Monk’s work] has long been considered to be the most authoritative and complete treatment of the English eighteenth-century sublime, its approach struck me as being seriously biased and narrow» and thus he adjusted Monk’s viewpoint by resuming the different contexts in which the formation of the word sublime occurred [24] . More recently, Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla advanced another influential perspective to engage the study of eighteenth-century attraction of the sublime. For Ashfield and de Bolla, «the aesthetic, at least since Kant, has been understood as without political or ethical motivation» [25] ; indeed, aesthetics is not only concerned with art, but it comprises other realms of human experience, such as ethics and rhetoric. Consequently, Ashfield and de Bolla’s collection of pre-Kantian texts offers an alternative «to de-couple the British eighteenth-century tradition of the sublime from the Kantian analytic» [26] . Such an alternative wishes to interpret the appearance of the sublime in a context not « primarily about art but about how we are formed as subjects, and how as subjects we go about making sense of our experience» [27] . Without denying Monk’s significance in the history of criticism, Ashfield and de Bolla’s study aims to contextualise eighteenth-century discussions on the sublime with their aesthetic, as well as ethical and social, implications in the light of the formation of the modern subject. Likewise, Timothy M. Costelloe offers a unique and comprehensive account of the presence of the sublime in a variety of disciplinary perspectives (art, philosophy, religion, architecture) with the aim of reconsidering the long history of the sublime from antiquity to the present [28] .

On this premise, the study of Milton’s sublimity can no longer proceed a posteriori, by applying to his poetry those theories on which the eighteenth-century aesthetic sublime was articulated. Instead, by examining Milton’s sublimity through an array of implications might contribute broadening the study of the sublime beyond Paradise Lost. Only recently this aspect has begun to be given new critical attention, after much-prolonged neglect. Catherine Gimelli Martin has pointed out, for instance, the historical reasons for the dismissal of the sublime in Samson Agonistes. In her essay, Martin attributes John Dennis’s avoidance of the drama from his formulation of tragic sublimity to the violence and the political implications of Milton’s work [29] . However, the sublimity of Samson Agonistes is incidentally examined in Martin’s essay, which rather scrutinises Dennis’s dismissal of the tragedy in contrast with Locke’s support of political resistance.

Rethinking sublimity beyond the realm of aesthetics is also necessary given the very recent studies which locate the sublime not only in the Longinian tradition but also in other classical and medieval authors and philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, Lucretius, Lucan, Virgil and Seneca, Augustine. The existence of classical, medieval, and Renaissance forms of sublimity has an important consequence also for the pairing Milton and the sublime, since the origin of Milton’s sublimity should be considered as part of a broader history of the concept which includes non-Longinian sources. Yet again, scholarly accounts of Milton’s sublimity broadly fall into the aesthetic field, whereas Milton’s creation of the sublime takes most of its inspiration from the making of his characters’ virtue.

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[1] M. Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: with Reflections on Female Conduct in the More Important Duties of Life, London 1787, repr. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2014, p. 52.

[2] John Dryden in the Apology to The State of Innocence and Fall of Man: An Opera. Written in Heroique Verse and Dedicated to Her Royal Highness, The Duchess (London, 1667) defined Paradise Lost «one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime Poems, which either this Age or Nation has produc’d», [page unnumbered, accessed August 2020. http://eebo.chadwyck.com/]. In the ode On Mr. Milton’s Paradise Lost, published in the second edition of Paradise Lost (London, 1674), Andrew Marvell attributed the adjective sublime both to the theme and the expression of his friend’s poem, see The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. by N. Smith, rev. ed., Pearson Longman, Harlow 2007, pp. 180-184.

[3] In her important contribution to the making of the concepts of the beautiful and the sublime in Paradise Lost, Leslie E. Moore has stated that, «few pairings [sublime and Milton] appear with such regularity in modern commentary on Milton and his early scholarship. The sublime Milton may well be a fiction of eighteenth-century criticism, but it functions as a near truth in literary history», in Beautiful Sublime, cit., p. 2.

[4] The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, cit.; P. Cheney, English Authorship, cit. Less recent is The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, ed. by A. Ashfield-P. de Bolla, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1996.

[5] The history of the sublime prior to Milton has recently gained the attention of scholars, who have been doing groundbreaking work in the field: in his monumental study, The Sublime in Antiquity (cit.), James I. Porter dismantles the idea of the classical sublime as a single word related to a single author, namely Longinus; in medieval studies, Piero Boitani ( The Tragic and the Sublime, cit.) and C. Stephen Jaeger ( Magnificence and the Sublime, cit.) have pointed out the centrality of the sublime in the Middle Ages, despite the absence of Longinus’s text. Eugenio Refini’s article in Translations of the Sublime (cit.) and Éva Madeleine Martin’s article in The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present (cit.) argue for a circulation of Longinian concepts in Italian and French Renaissance, respectively. In English early modern literary studies, Patrick Cheney has filled the gap in the history of the sublime between Dante and Milton ( English Authorship, cit.); David Norbrook ( Writing the English Republic, cit.) and Philip Hardie ( Lucretian Receptions, cit.) have uncovered the presence of the Lucanian and Lucretian sublime in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Nevertheless, as Porter writes, «despite some gains, […] it would probably take a generation if not a team of researchers to approach this goal» J.I. Porter, The Sublime in Antiquity, cit., p. 37, 91n.

[6] K. Axelsson, The Sublime: Precursors and British Eighteenth-Century Conceptions, Peter Lang, Oxford 2007, p. 39.

[7] S.H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in Seventeenth-Century England, The University of Michigan Press, Michigan 1960, p. 6.

[8] I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, ed. by P. Guyer, trans. by P. Guyer-E. Matthews, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2000, II.31, p. 139.

[9] It is Kant’s renowned Copernican revolution in philosophy, which assumes «that objects must conform to our cognitions, rather than our cognitions to objects» S. Monk, The Sublime, cit., pp. 4-5.

[10] Longinus, On the Sublime, ed. with introduction and commentary by D.A. Russell, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1964, p. xxxvii.

[11] J.I. Porter, The Sublime in Antiquity, cit., p. 9.

[12] See the entry sublime in A Dictionary of the English Language; in Which the Words Are Deduced from Their Originals and Illustrated in Their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers. To Which Are Prefixed, a History of the Language, and an English Grammar, By Samuel Johnson, 2 vols., London, 1755.

[13] N. Boileau Despréaux, Traité du sublime ou du merveilleux dans le discours , in Oeuvres complètes , Firmin Didot Frères, Paris 1837, pp. 316-348, p. 318.

[14] S. Monk, The Sublime, cit., p. 54.

[15] In his reflections upon Milton (1721-22), he wrote «for these last Thirty Years I have admir’d Milton above them all for one thing, and that is for having carried away the Prize of Sublimity from both Ancients and Moderns». J. Dennis, Letters upon Milton and Wycherley, in The Critical Works of John Dennis: Volume II 1711-1729, ed. by E.N. Hooker, The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1943, pp. 221-235, p. 221.

[16] J. Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, London 1704, p. 78.

[17] S. Monk, The Sublime, cit., p. 54.

[18] J. Addison-R. Steele, The Spectator: A New Edition, Reproducing the Original Text Both As First Issued and As Corrected by its Authors, ed. by H. Morley, George Routledge and Sons, London 1891, 3 vols., II:303, p. 343.

[19] Ibid., II:339, p. 478.

[20] E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, London 1759, pt. IV sect. viii, p. 258; pt. I, xviii , p. 100.

[21] Lord Byron, Dedication to Don Juan, ed. by T.G. Steffan-E. Steffan-W.W. Pratt, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1973, 4 vols., I, 10, p. 75. For further references to eighteenth-century authors referring to Milton’s sublimity, see R.D. Havens, The Influence of Milton on English Poetry, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1922; J. Crawford, Raising Milton’s Ghost, cit.; Milton: the Critical Heritage, ed. by J.T. Shawcross, Routledge, New York and London 1972, 2 vols.

[22] V. Kahn, Allegory and the Sublime in " Paradise Lost", in John Milton, ed. by A. Patterson, Longman, London 1992, pp. 185-201; L.E. Moore, Beautiful Sublime, cit.; S. Knapp, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA) 1985.

[23] Walter J. Hipple Jr., The Aesthetics of Dugald Stewart: Culmination of a Tradition, in «The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism», XIV, 1, 1955, pp. 77-96, p. 77.

[24] T.E.B. Wood, The Word Sublime and its Context 1650-1760, Mouton, The Hague, Paris 1972, p. 7. In the same year, David B. Morris published The Religious Sublime, whose purpose was to reconsider the idea that the sublime chiefly depended on the observation of external nature, in The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in Eighteenth-Century England, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington 1972.

[25] The Sublime: A Reader, cit., p. 2.

[26] Ibid., p. 3.

[27] Ibid., p. 2.

[28] The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, cit.

[29] C.G. Martin, John Dennis, John Locke, and the Sublimation of Revolt: Samson Agonistes after the Glorious Revolution, in Milton in the Long Restauration, ed. by B. Hoxby-A.B. Coiro, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2016, pp. 121-142.

2. Towards a Redefinition of Milton's Sublimity

Any modern and contemporary readings of the sublime start with two caveats. First, a definition of the sublime is problematic, since the term entails a rhetorical style in the discourse as well as an experience. In his New Critical Idiom volume, The Sublime , Philip Shaw addresses the problem in the introduction What is the sublime?, in which he claims that «The word has many implications» [1] . Second, the experience of the sublime has two aspects: sublimity is simultaneously the cause, generating the state, and also the effect felt by the individual. Whether the sublime is to be considered the object or the effect on the subject has been a source of endless confusion since antiquity. According to theorists of the natural sublime, for instance, ideas of greatness and excess originate from the external world; also Longinus establishes a catalogue of several natural wonders, such as the Nile or the Danube, the Ocean, and the volcanic eruptions of Etna ( OS 35.4): this natural grandeur instils greatness in man. For Kant, on the contrary, sublimity is a mode of consciousness which does not depend on the nature of the object. By tackling these two key topics and their related aspects, the purpose is to move towards a redefinition of the Miltonic sublime in different areas from those explored so far through modern aesthetics.

On the current understanding, the sublime is beyond definition, so much so that traditional literary and philosophical theory commonly associate it with the je ne sais quoi, something that is undefinable, inexpressible, unknowable [2] . Ineffability and elusiveness translate Boileau’s modern idea of the sublime. In the 1701 preface to his writings, Boileau draws on Bouhours’s formula je ne sais quoi to connect a great work of art with the aesthetic experience of the subject: «Un ouvrage a beau être approuvé d’un petit nombre de Connoisseurs, s’il n’est plein d’un certain agrément et d’un certain sel proper à piquer le goust general des Hommes, in ne passera jamais puor un bon ouvrage […] Que si on me demande ce que c’est cet agrément et ce sel, Je répondray que c’est un je ne sçay quoy qu’on peut beaucoup miex sentir, que dire» [3] . For Boileau, an undefinable feeling, the je ne sais quoi, manifests itself before great art and it is only through this feeling that the connoisseur can judge the artistic value of a work. Therefore, Boileau recognises that the individual is actively involved in the aesthetic experience, rather than being a mere recipient of emotions. The subject is the key element within the modern narrative of the sublime, as Jean-François Lyotard suggests in commenting Boileau’s Traité. Following Boileau’s logic, Lyotard associates the sublime with the feeling of indeterminacy, which is the ability to sense «something incomprehensible and inexplicable, a gift from God, a fundamentally hidden phenomenon that can be recognised only by its effects on the addressee» [4] . The central problem with the sublime, for Boileau, is that its content exceeds the grasp of reason and, consequently, the unrepresentable is only offered to the reader or viewer as a missing content. Analogously, postmodern interpretations on the sublime are centred on the quest for a definition of the matter [5] .

But the point is that a term to define the sublime is missing because, as James I. Porter argues, «the sublime is not a word […] rather a whole range of ideas, meanings, and experiences that are embedded in conceptual and experiential patterns» [6] . The sublime is neither to be found in a single term nor a single author, such as Longinus for antiquity or Boileau and Kant for modernity. The sublime, on the contrary, gathers around an array of images, themes, markers, and structures which are not necessarily located in contexts where the word sublime is used. Take Richard of St. Victor, for example. As Porter clarifies, he was a twelfth-century prominent theologian and prior in France who could not possibly know Longinus, given the problematic reception history of Longinus’s treatise that resurfaced only in late fifteenth-century Italy