Margaret Thickstun, the Jane and Ellis Bradford '45 Distinguished Writing Professor Emerita, delivered a paper on angelic development in John Milton's Paradise Lost at the Biennial Conference on John Milton at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, on Oct. 24.
Current scholarship argues that Milton imagines angelic ecstatic blending in the poem as non-reproductive. Thickstun argues that other characters' lack of surprise when Satan disguises himself as a teenage angel suggests that angelic sex must be reproductive, with the most likely model being the conjugation of paramecium.
Posted November 10, 2026
