Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors
Note on the Text and List of Abbreviations
Miltons' Life: Some Significant Dates
Part I: Lives
1: Edward Jones: 'Ere Half My Days': Milton's Life, 1608-1640
2: Nicholas von Maltzahn: John Milton: The Later Life, 1641-1675
Part II: Shorter Poems
3: Estelle Haan: 'The Adorning of My Native Tongue': Milton's Latin Poetry and Linguistic Metamorphosis
4: Gordon Teskey: Milton's Early English Poems: The Nativity Ode, 'L'Allegro', 'Il Penseroso'
5: Ann Baynes Coiro: 'A thousand fantasies': The Lady and the Maske
6: Nicholas McDowell: 'Lycidas' and the Influence of Anxiety
7: John Leonard: The Troubled, Quiet Endings of Milton's English Sonnets
Part III: Civil War Prose, 1641-45
8: Nigel Smith: The Anti-Episcopal Tracts: Republicanism Puritanism and the Truth in Poetry
9: Sharon Achinstein: 'A Law in this matter to himself': Contextualising Milton's Divorce Tracts
10: Diane Purkiss: Whose Liberty? The Rhetoric of Milton's Divorce Tracts
11: Ann Hughes: Milton Areopagitica, and the Parliamentary Cause
12: Blair Hoxby: Areopagitica and Liberty
Part IV: Regicide, Republican, and Restoration Prose
13: Stephen M. Fallon: 'The Strangest Piece of Reason': Milton's Tenure of Kings and Magistrates
14: Nicholas McDowell: Milton's Regicide Tracts and the Uses of Shakespeare
15: Joad Raymond: John Milton, European: the Rhetoric of Milton's Defences
16: Estelle Haan: Defensio Prima and the Latin Poets
17: N. H. Keeble: 'Nothing nobler then a free Commonwealth': Milton's Later Vernacular Republican Tracts
18: Elizabeth Sauer: Disestablishment, Toleration, the New Testament Nation: Milton's Late Religious Tracts
19: Paul Stevens: Milton and National Identity
Part V: Writings on Education, History, Theology
20: William Poole: The Genres of Milton's Commonplace Book
21: Timothy Raylor: Milton, the Hartlib Circle, and the Education of the Aristocracy
22: Martin Dzelzainis: Conquest and Slavery in Milton's History of Britain
23: Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns: De Doctrina Christiana: An England That Might Have Been
Part VI: Paradise Lost
24: Charles Martindale: Writing Epic: Paradise Lost
25: John Creaser: 'A mind of most exceptional energy': Verse Rhythm in Paradise Lost
26: Stephen B. Dobranski: Editing Milton: the Case against Modernization
27: Karen L. Edwards: The 'World' of Paradise Lost
28: Nigel Smith: Paradise Lost and Heresy
29: Stuart Curran: God
30: Susan Wiseman: Eve, Paradise Lost, and Female Interpretation
31: Martin Dzelzainis: The Politics of Paradise Lost
Part VII: 1671 Poems: Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes
32: Laura Lunger Knoppers: 'Englands Case': Context of the 1671 Poems
33: John Rogers: Paradise Regained and the Memory of Paradise Lost
34: R. W. Serjeantson: Samson Agonistes and 'Single Rebellion'
35: Regina M. Schwartz: Samson Agonistes: the Force of Justice and the Violence of Idolatry
36: Elizabeth D. Harvey: Samson Agonistes and Milton's Sensible Ethics
Part VII: Aspects of Influence
37: Anne-Julia Zwierlein: Milton Epic and Bucolic: Empire and Readings of Paradise Lost, 1667-1837
38: Joseph Wittreich: Miltonic Romanticism

About the Author

Nicholas McDowell is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Exeter. Previously he was a Research Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. He is the author of The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630-1660 (Oxford University Press, 2003), Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit (Oxford University Press, 2008), and essays on Milton in Journal of the
History of Ideas, Milton Quarterly, and Review of English Studies. He is editing Milton's 1649 prose for the Oxford Complete Works of John Milton. In 2007 his research was recognized by the award of a Philip Leverhulme
Prize by the Leverhulme Trust. Nigel Smith is Professor of English and Co-director of the Center for the Study of Books and Media at Princeton University. He was previously Reader in English at Oxford University and Fellow and Tutor in English at Keble College. He is the author of Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640-1660 (Oxford University Press,1989); Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (Yale University Press, 1994),
Is Milton better than Shakespeare? (Harvard University Press, 2008), and Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (Yale University Press, forthcoming, 2010). He has edited the Ranter pamphlets, the Journal of George Fox and the
Longman Annotated English Poets edition of the poems of Andrew Marvell (a TLS 'Book of the Year' 2003, Guardian Paperback of the Week, 2006). He is a recipient of British Academy awards, Guggenheim, and National Humanities Center fellowships.

Reviews

Highly recommended
*Times Higher Education Supplement, February 2012*

This volume is a feast... A number of the essays are of outstanding quality; the overall standard is high; and an imposing abundance of rigorous learning and of critical discernment is deployed.
*Blair Worden, The English Historical Review*

An impressive contribution to Milton studies... This will be a most useful tool for the study or teaching of Milton. Highly recommended.
*Choice*

a body of scholarship that brings textual criticism and the history of the book to Milton studies in vital and interesting ways... a significant and extremely useful handbook
*Thomas Fulton, Renaissance Quarterly*

destined to become required reading for serious Milton students and academics alike... a work which will assuredly set a new, exacting standard for Milton studies for years to come
*Philip Major, Modern Language Review*

an impressive achievement [which] offers the reader an excellent sense of the strongest critical work being done in Milton studies... This excellent Oxford handbook [has] established a new and higher standard for such volumes.
*David Loewenstein, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900*

This is a very impressive and useful collection of essays that deserves all of the praise it has gotten so far.
*Milton Quarterly*