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In the current debate regarding Milton's authorship of De Doctrina Christiana, one piece of objective evidence seems irrefutably to support proponents of Milton's authorship. This is, of course, the well-known remark in Liber I, Caput X, about another "treatise."l In analyzing "fornication" in order to explain divorce, the author alludes parenthetically to inquiry that he evidently made into the subject earlier. As Charles Sumner, the first editor and translator of De Doctrina Christiana, considered this statement the "only direct reference to any of Milton's printed works" that the treatise contains, scholarship since 1825 has always echoed Sumner in identifying the passage as a specific cross-reference to Tetrachordon (1645).2 In rebutting William B. Hunter, for example, Barbara K. Lewalski recently denied the assertion that "the lack of any direct allusions [to other of Milton's canonical writings] in the Christian Doctrine . . . is striking."3 "[T]he passage on Divorce (I.x, Yale Prose 6:377-78)," she rejoined,
does just that: it defines fornication very broadly ("some shameful thing") to justify divorce for virtually any cause disrupting marital harmony, and concludes, "I have proved this elsewhere, basing my argument on several
scriptural texts." The cross-reference is to a passage in Tetrachordon (Yale Prose 2:671-73) which expounds the term in the same way, citing the same central text from Judges 19:2.4
Similarly, Christopher Hill's defense of Milton's authorship against Hunter took the statement as referring specifically to Tetrachordon and its "very idiosyncratic definition of 'fornication' as grounds for divorce."5 He observed that, like John Selden, "whom Milton regarded as an authority on such matters,"
The author of the DDC also saw "fornication" as a reason for divorce, and also had an unusual definition of the word: "continual headstrong behavior," "the lack of some quality which might reasonably be required in a wife" ( Yale Prose, 6:378). He too attributed his view to Selden's Uxor Hebraica (Yale Prose, 6:378). Interesting coincidences.
Indeed, when confronted with Lewalski's objection to his statement that the De Doctrina Christiana fails to refer to any of Milton's other works, Hunter himself conceded that the locus on divorce to which she refers is in fact a "cross reference" to the passage in Tetrachordon that Sumner identified, and he termed it "[a] telling argument favoring Milton as author"...