Libertinism and Toleration: Milton, Bruno, Aretino

Abstract The ‘benefit of books promiscuously read’ haunts Milton's conception of toleration, and in Areopagitica he frequently cites bawdy or erotic authors such as Petronius or Pietro Aretino, ‘promiscuous’ books in another sense. Even the Bible ‘describes the carnal sense of wicked men not unelegantly’. The heart of Milton's argument involves, not merely the impracticality of censorship or the benefits of toleration in the abstract, but the positive necessity of encountering unlawful sex in literary form. Virtue is constituted by knowing forbidden sexuality as deeply as possible without actually doing it, and Aretino offers precisely those ‘objects of lust’ that allow us to take that test. An essential (but unrecognized) link between Aretino and Milton is the persecuted heretic Giordano Bruno. Both Milton and Bruno propose that personal growth depends on ‘contrariety’, and that the wise reader must therefore experience to the full the ‘ribald’ writings of libertines like Aretino.