Milton and the Book of Enoch — An Alternative Hypothesis

In an examination of the influence of the Book of Enoch on certain motifs in Milton's Paradise Lost, Mr. Grant McColley challenges the commonly accepted belief that Bruce was the first to restore to Western Civilization the knowledge of the existence of I Enoch, which had passed out of circulation during the early centuries of Christianity. Mr. McColley's belief that at least the existence of I Enoch was known to certain persons in the mid-seventeenth century and before rests on quotations from three popular travel books of the time: Sandys' Relation of a Journey (1615), Purchas His Pilgrimage (1613), and Peter Heylyn's Cosmography (1652). These authors all agree that the Ethiopians, or Abyssinians, had books containing the ‘oracles’ or ‘writings’ of the patriarch Enoch.