Milton and the non secular Reader considers how John Milton’s later works exhibit the in depth fight of religious examining. Milton offers his personal rigorous technique of interpreting to be able to educate his readers the way to boost their religious wisdom. contemporary reports of Milton’s readers overlook this religious size and concentrate on politics. considering Milton considers the person soul a minimum of as very important because the physique politic, Ainsworth specializes in uncovering the religious features of the reader Milton attempts to form via his texts. He additionally examines Milton’s analyzing practices with out postulating the lifestyles of a few excellent or common reader, and with no assuming a gullible or simply manipulated reader. Milton doesn't easily desire for a healthy viewers, yet writes to nurture healthy readers. His works provide versions of strenuous and suspicious shut analyzing, subjecting all authors other than God to the maximum of scrutiny. Milton offers Biblical interpretation as an inside fight, a competition no longer among reader and textual content, yet inside that reader’s person knowing of scripture. Ainsworth’s examine rethinks the elemental dating among examining and faith in seventeenth-century England, and concludes that for Milton and his contemporaries, distinguishing divine truths in worldly texts required a spiritually guided kind of shut reading.