Lynne Greenberg

Lynne Greenberg is a Professor in the Department of English at Hunter College, CUNY. She specializes in seventeenth-century English literature, particularly the work of John Milton. Her research explores the intersections of law, politics, material culture, and gender in early modern literature. Professor Greenberg has been at Hunter since 2001. She earned her Ph.D. from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 2001. She also has a law degree from the University of Chicago Law School and practiced intellectual property law before her academic appointment.

She teaches a wide range of early modern literature courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, including John Milton, Studies in Milton, Milton and His Influence, Seventeenth-Century Literature, Early Modern Women Writers, Gendered Writings in the Renaissance, the Renaissance Pastoral, Fairies in Renaissance Literature, Survey of British Literature I, and Law and Literature. She also teaches Creative Non-Fiction writing workshops.

She is the author of the memoir The Body Broken, published by Random House in 2009, which offers a personal re-telling of Milton’s Paradise Lost. She was interviewed by Diane Sawyer for ABC’s Good Morning America and various podcasts, video blogs, local news, and radio programs upon the book’s publication. She has also written several articles and book chapters on the work of John Milton and on early modern laws concerning women. She is the editor of Legal Treatises, 3 vols., in Ashgate Publishing Company’s series “The Early Modern Englishwoman: Essential Works for the Study of Early Modern Englishwomen.” 

BOOKS AND VOLUMES:

Selected and Edited. Fairy Poems. Everyman's Library / Vintage & Anchor Books. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2023.

The Body Broken. Random House, 2009. (Press and Reviews available upon request.)

Selected and Introduced. Legal Treatises. 3 vols., in The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works. Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2005.

CURRENT PROJECT:

Masculine Births: Milton, Women, and the Law (under contract).

ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS:

“Married Women and the Law in Print.” In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing. Eds. Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2022. Retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01537-4_22-1.

“Women and Legal Petitions in Print.” In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing. Eds. Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2022. Retrieved from: http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01537-4_27-1.

“‘Whordoms and adulteries’: Sexual Crimes and Legal Reform in Milton’s Prose” in Milton Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 4 (December 2020).

“Law,” in Milton in Context. Ed. Stephen B. Dobranski. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010.

“Comus and the Problems of Gender,” in Approaches to Teaching Milton’s Shorter Poetry and Prose. Ed. Peter C. Herman. New York: Modern Language Association, 2007.

“‘Cursd and Devised Proprieties’: Traherne and the Laws of Property,” in Re-reading Thomas Traherne: A Collection of New Critical Essays. Ed. Jacob Blevins. Tempe, Arizona: ACMRS, 2007.

“Paradise Lost and The Enclosure of the Feme Covert,” in Milton and the Grounds of Contention. Ed. John Shawcross. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 2003.

“‘a peal of words’: Criminal Speech in Samson Agonistes,” in Reassembling Truths: Twenty-first-Century Milton. Eds. Charles W. Durham and Kristin P. McColgan. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna UP, 2003.

“Dalila’s ‘feminine assaults’: The Gendering and Engendering of Crime in  Samson Agonistes,” in Altering Eyes: New Perspectives on Milton’s Samson Agonistes. Eds. Joseph A. Wittreich and Mark R. Kelley. Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 2002.

“A Preliminary Study of Informed Consent and Free Will in the Garden of Eden: John Milton’s Social Contract,” in Living Texts: Interpreting Milton. Eds. Kristin P. McColgan and Charles W. Durham. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna UP, 2000.

“The Art of Appropriation: Puppies, Piracy, and Post-Modernism” in Cardozo Journal of Law and Entertainment, vol. 11, no. 1 (Summer 1992.

REVIEW ESSAYS:

Bjorn Quiring. Trials of Nature: The Infinite Law Court of Milton's Paradise Lost." Bjorn Quiring. Milton Quarterly, vol. 57:1-2 (March-May, 2023): 33-35. Retrieved from: https//doi.org.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/10.1111/milt.12345 

“Milton’s Jurisprudential Play: Review of Courts, Jurisdictions, and Law in John Milton and His Contemporaries by Alison Chapman.” The New Rambler Review (May 6, 2021). Retrieved from: https://newramblerreview.com/book-reviews/literary-studies/milton-s-jurisprudential-play