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Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture

This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and post-canonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fields of study and providing the experienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the field.

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89. A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien Edited by Stuart D. Lee

90. A Companion to the English Novel Edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley, J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke

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92. A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature Edited by Yingjin Zhang

93. A New Companion to Digital Humanities Edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth

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95. A New Companion to Milton Edited by Thomas N. Corns

A NEW COMPANION TO MILTON

EDITED BY

THOMAS N. CORNS










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Notes on Contributors

Sharon Achinstein is Sir William Osler Professor of Renaissance Literature at Johns Hopkins University. In recent years her work on Milton has concentrated on issues concerning marriage, divorce, gender, and the family. She is editor of Milton's Divorce Tracts for The Complete Works of Milton and has authored Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (1994), an award-winning study of the pamphlet culture and political communication of the English Revolution, and Literature and Dissent in Milton's England (2003). With Elizabeth Sauer, she co-edited Milton and Toleration (2007), which won the Irene Samuel Award from the Milton Society of America.

Amy Boesky is Professor of English at Boston College, where she directs the minor in Medical Humanities, Health, and Culture. She is author of Founding Fictions: Utopias in Early Modern England (1996) and various articles on Milton in journals, including Milton Studies, SEL, and Modern Philology. Her recent work has focussed on representations of illness in literature; she has published a memoir, What We Have (2010) and edited a collection of personal essays, The Story Within: Personal Essays on Genetics and Identity (2013).

Cedric C. Brown is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Reading and founder editor, now co-editor, of the long-running book series Early Modern Literature in History. Most of his work of the past few years has led to a forthcoming book on The Discourses of Friendship in the Seventeenth Century. Recent publications also include studies of recusant manuscripts, letters, and gift-texts, and of Milton's friendship with Charles Diodati.

Thomas N. Corns is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Bangor University. His recent publications include John Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana (2007, with Gordon Campbell, John K. Hale, and Fiona Tweedie); A History of Sevententh-Century English Literature (2007); and John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (2008, with Gordon Campbell). He edited The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley (2009, with Ann Hughes and David Loewenstein); and The Milton Encyclopedia (2012). With Gordon Campbell, he is the general editor of The Complete Works of John Milton (2008–).

Martin Dzelzainis is Professor of Renaissance Literature and Thought at the University of Leicester. He is currently editing the Histories for The Complete Works of John Milton; Andrew Marvell’s verse and prose; and (with Edward Holberton) The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell. He is also General Editor, with Paul Seaward, of The Works of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon.

Stephen M. Fallon is Cavanaugh Professor of the Humanities at the University of Notre Dame. He is author of Milton among the Philosophers (1991), recipient of the Milton Society of America’s Hanford Award, and of Milton's Peculiar Grace: Self-representation and Authority (2007). He has published articles on Milton and on the Renaissance in the Journal of the History of Ideas, English Literary Renaissance, PMLA, and multi-contributor volumes. Twice the recipient of NEH Fellowships, he is writing a book on Milton and Isaac Newton.

Tobias Gregory is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He has published From Many Gods to One: Divine Action in Renaissance Epic (2006) and articles on Milton, Spenser, Tasso, Empson, Ariosto, Browne, Herbert, and others. He is completing a study entitled Milton’s Strenuous Liberty.

Achsah Guibbory is Professor of English at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her most recent books are Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel in Seventeenth-century England (2010), which won the John T. Shawcross Award from the Milton Society of America, and Returning to Donne (2015). Previous publications include The Map of Time: Seventeenth-century English Literature and Ideas of Pattern in History (1986); Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-century England (1998); The Cambridge Companion to John Donne (2006); and numerous articles on seventeenth-century literature, culture, and religion.

Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex and visiting Professor at the University of Granada. He is the author of a number of works on early modern literature, including Edmund Spenser: A Life (2012); Shakespeare and Republicanism (2005, paperback, 2008); and Literature, Travel and Colonialism in the English Renaissance, 1540–1625 (1998, paperback, 2007). He is vice-chair of the Society for Renaissance Studies and is currently writing a book on lying in early modern England.

John K. Hale is an Honorary Fellow of the Department of English at the University of Otago. His books include Milton’s Languages: The Impact of Multilingualism on Style (1997) and Milton’s Cambridge Latin (2005). Most recently, with Donald Cullington, he has edited and translated Milton's De Doctrina Christiana for The Complete Work of John Milton, vol. VIII (2012).

Tianhu Hao is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Peking University, Beijing, China. A recent Erasmus Mundus scholar (2013), he specializes in early modern English literature and comparative literature. His publications include English essays in The Library, Milton Quarterly, Spenser Studies, and Studies in Bibliography, and a Chinese monograph entitled ‘Hesperides, or the Muses’ Garden’: A Study of an Early Modern English Commonplace Book (2014). He is working on the book-length project of Milton in China.

Islam Issa is Visiting Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Birmingham. He has published numerous studies on the reception of Milton’s poetry and prose in the Arab world, including an award-winning census of Arabic translations of Milton. He is author of the book Milton in the Arab-Muslim World, co-editor of the volume Milton in Translation, and is writing and editing the first Arabic translations of Milton’s sonnets.

Margaret Kean is Helen Gardner Fellow in English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She is the editor of John Milton's Paradise Lost: A Routledge Study Guide and Sourcebook (2004) and has recently completed Inferno: A Cultural History of Hell (forthcoming, 2016).

N. H. Keeble is Professor Emeritus of English Studies at the University of Stirling, Scotland. His academic and research interests lie in English cultural (and especially literary and religious) history of the period 1500–1725. His publications include studies of Richard Baxter: Puritan Man of Letters (1982); The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in later Seventeenth-century England (1987); The Restoration: England in the 1660s (2002); and a two-volume Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter (1991, with Geoffrey F. Nuttall). He has edited texts by Richard Baxter, John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, Lucy Hutchinson, and Andrew Marvell, and is, with Nicholas McDowell, editor of volume 6 of The Complete Works of John Milton, Vernacular Regicide and and Republican Writings. He currently leads an AHRC-funded project preparing a scholarly edition of Richard Baxter’s Reliquiae Baxterianae.

Maggie Kilgour is Molson Professor of English at McGill University, Montreal, where she has received the Principal’s Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Her main publications include From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (1990); The Rise of the Gothic Novel (1995); and, most recently, Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid (2012), recipient of the James Holly Hanford Award from the Milton Society of America.

Peter J. Kitson is Professor of English at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Exchange (2013); Romantic Literature, Race and Colonial Encounter (2007); and Romantic Literature and Exploration: Bodies of Knowledge (2004, with Tim Fulford and Debbie Lee). He is also the editor of Coleridge and the Armoury of the Human Mind: Essays on His Prose Writings (1991, with Thomas N. Corns); Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation (1999, with Debbie Lee); Romanticism and Colonialism (1998, with Tim Fulford). Kitson has served as President of the English Association and of the British Association of Romantic Studies.

Sarah Knight is Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of Leicester. Her current interests lie in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English and Latin literature, particularly works written at or about institutions of learning (schools, universities, Inns of Court). She is editing and translating Milton’s Prolusions for the new Complete Works. She is also editing the plays of Fulke Greville, and has recently co-edited (with Stefan Tilg) The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin (2015).

Laura Lunger Knoppers is Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (2011); Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–1661 (2000); and Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (1994). Her scholarly edition of Milton’s Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (2008) won the John Shawcross Award from the Milton Society of America. Knoppers has edited five essay collections, including most recently The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution (2012). Since 2010, she has served as the editor of Milton Studies.

Byung-Eun Lee is Professor of English at Hansung University, Seoul, Korea. He has published mainly on Milton and Shakespeare in journals such as English Language Notes, Milton and Early Modern English Studies of Korea, Journal of Classic and English Renaissance Literature of Korea, Shakespeare Review of Korea, and Medieval and Early Modern English Studies of Korea. He has co-authored Shakespeare’s Theories of Blood, Character and Class with some American scholars, and introductory books on Milton and Renaissance major poets with his Korean colleagues. He is currently interested in the translation of Milton’s prose tracts into Korean.

John Leonard is Professor of English at Western University in Canada. He has edited Milton’s poetry, and his books Naming in Paradise (1990) and Faithful Labourers: A Reception History of ‘Paradise Lost’, 1667–1970 (2013) won the Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hanford Award. He also won the Hanford Award for most distinguished article published on Milton in 2000. He became an Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America in 2014.

Barbara Kiefer Lewalski is William R. Kenan Emerita Professor of History and Literature and of English Literature at Harvard University. Her books include The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (2000); Writing Women in Jacobean England, 1603–1625 (1993); Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (1985); Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-century Religious Lyric (1979); Donne’s Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise (1973); and Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained (1966). She edited with Estelle Haan volume 3 of The Shorter Poems (2012) in The Complete Works of John Milton, and John Milton: Paradise Lost (2007).

David Loewenstein is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and the Humanities, Pennsylvania State University-University Park. His publications include Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (1990); Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose (co-editor, 1990); Milton: Paradise Lost (1993); Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (2001); The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (co-editor, 2002); The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley (co-editor, 2009); and Treacherous Faith: The Specter of Heresy in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (2013). With Thomas Corns, he is editing Paradise Lost for The Complete Works of John Milton.

Diane Kelsey McColley taught British Literature and the Literature of Nature at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, Camden College of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of Milton’s Eve (1983); A Gust for Paradise: Milton’s Eden and the Visual Arts (1993); and Poetry and Music in Seventeenth-century England (1997). She became an Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America in 1999. Research for her essay was aided by a Mellon Fellowship at the Huntington Library.

Leah S. Marcus is Edwin Mims Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Childhood and Cultural Despair (1978); The Politics of Mirth (1986); Puzzling Shakespeare (1988); and Unediting the Renaissance (1996); and, along with Janel Mueller and Mary Beth Rose, edited Elizabeth I: Collected Works (2000). She has also published editions of Shakespeare and John Webster. Her recent work in Milton includes articles on ‘Milton among Women’ (Milton Studies) and two versions of ‘Ecocriticism and Vitalism in Paradise Lost’ (Milton Quarterly), and a collection of essays on ecocriticism.

Feisal G. Mohamed is Professor of English at the Graduate Center, CUNY. A past president of the Milton Society of America, his most recent book is Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism (2011). With Mary Nyquist, he has edited Milton and Questions of History: Essays by Canadians Past and Present (2012), recipient of the Irene Samuel Award.

Mario Murgia is Professor of English at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), in Mexico City. He has translated into Spanish Milton’s Areopagitica (2009): The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (2011): and The Ludlow Mask (2013). His research revolves around sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poetry and drama, particularly the works of William Shakespeare and John Milton. He is currently preparing for publication Lines Writ in Water: The Influence of Paradise Lost on Byron, Keats, and Shelley.

Ryan Netzley is Associate Professor of English at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the author of Lyric Apocalypse: Milton, Marvell, and the Nature of Events (2015) and Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry (2011). He is also the editor, with Thomas P. Anderson, of Acts of Reading: Interpretation, Reading Practices, and the Idea of the Book in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (2010). He is currently at work on a study of the conceptual relationship between debt and allegiance in seventeenth-century verse.

Graham Parry is Emeritus Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of York. He has written a number of books on seventeenth-century topics, including The Trophies of Time (1995) on the rise of antiquarian studies and Glory, Laud and Honour (2008) on the arts of the Laudian Movement in the 1620s and 1630s. His current interests lie in the area of seventeenth-century ecclesiology. He was the organizer of the Sixth International Milton Symposium at York in 1999.

Annabel Patterson is Sterling Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University. She has written sixteen books and about seventy refereed articles on topics as varied as Holinshed’s Chronicles, eighteenth-century libel law, the reception of Virgil’s eclogues in Europe, editions of Aesop’s fables, censorship, liberalism, parliamentary history, as well as Shakespeare, Donne, John Locke, and Andrew Marvell, whose canon she has helped to reshape. The two-volume edition of his Prose Works, of which she was editor-in-chief, will be the standard edition for decades. As for Milton, she produced a short Longman Critical Reader on him, featured him grandly in Early Modern Liberalism (1997), and most recently gave him a book all to himself, Milton’s Words (2009).

Joad Raymond is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of various books on early-modern newspaper history and print culture, including The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (1996, 2005); Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (2003); Milton’s Angels: the Early-Modern Imagination (2010); and the editor of various books, including The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, vol. 1: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660 (2011) and News Networks in Early-Modern Europe (2015), based on the eponymous Leverhulme Trust-funded research network. He is presently editing Milton’s Defences for The Complete Works of John Milton, and preparing a book on news in early modern Europe.

Noam Reisner is Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and American Studies, Tel Aviv University. He is author of Milton and the Ineffable (2009) and John Milton's 'Paradise Lost': A Reading Guide (2011). Other publications include articles and essays on different aspects of Milton's poetry and theology, as well as related work on metaphysical poetry, the early modern sermon, and Marlovian drama. He is currently completing a study of the ethics of theater in early modern revenge tragedy.

Stella P. Revard, who died in July 2014, was Professor Emerita at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. She had been President of the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies, and an Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America. She published numerous articles and two books on Milton – The War in Heaven (1980) and Milton and the Tangles of Neaera’s Hair (1997) – both of which were awarded the Hanford Prize from the Milton Society of America, as well as Pindar and the Renaissance Hymn-Ode: 1450–1700 and Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode 1450–1700, and an edition of The Shorter Poems of John Milton. Tributes to her by David Loewenstein and Arlene Stiebel are printed in the December 2014 Milton Quarterly.

John Rumrich is Professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of Matter of Glory (1987) and Milton Unbound (1996), and co-editor of the Modern Library's Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton (2007).

Hiroko Sano is Professor of English at Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo. Her publications in English include ‘The Lily and the Rose: Milton’s Carpe diem Sonnet 20’, in Di Cesare (ed.), Milton in Italy: Contexts, Images, Contradictions (1991); ‘Milton Studies in Japan Now’, in Tournu and Forsyth (eds.), Milton, Rights and Liberties (2007); ‘Japanese Milton Scholarship, 1980–2006’, in Milton Quarterly 42 (2008); ‘Translating Milton’s Poetry into Japanese with a Case Study of Samson Agonistes’, in Duran, Issa, and Olson (eds.), Milton in Translation (forthcoming). She translated Samson Agonistes into Japanese (2011) and is engaged in translating Milton’s other major poems. She was the organizer of the Tenth International Milton Symposium at Tokyo in 2012.

Malabika Sarkar was Vice-Chancellor of Presidency University in Kolkata, India, until May 2014. Earlier, she was Professor of English at Jadavpur University. She is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. Her publications include Cosmos and Character in Paradise Lost (2012); Moneta’s Veil: Essays on Nineteenth-century Literature (2010); and essays on Milton, the History of Science and the Romantics. She is currently working on two projects: space and English Romantic poetry and English Literature at Hindoo College (founded 1817), now Presidency University.

Michael Schoenfeldt is the John Knott Professor of English Literature at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (1991); Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (1999); and The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poetry (2010); and editor of the Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2006). He is currently editing John Donne in Context, working on a book entitled Reading Seventeenth-century Poetry, and researching a book-length study of pain and pleasure in early modern England.

Regina M. Schwartz is Professor of English and Religious Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of Remembering and Repeating: On Milton’s Theology and Poetics (winner of the James Holly Hanford Book Award in 1989); The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (1997); Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism (2008); and the forthcoming Justice: What’s Love (and Shakespeare) Got to Do With It? She is the editor of The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory (1990), Transcendence: Philosophy, Literature and Theology Approach the Beyond and co-editor of Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature (1994, with Valeria Finucci) and The Postmodern Bible. Her essays on Milton appear in Representations, Milton Studies, English Literary History, PMLA, and Religion and Literature. She was President of the Milton Society of America and is co-chair of the Newberry Milton Seminar.

Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler is Professor of English at Texas State University, where she teaches seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature and history of rhetoric. The author of The Rhetoric of Politics in the English Revolution, 1642–1660 (1992) and articles on Milton, the royalist tract Eikon Basilike, and early modern logic and rhetoric, she is completing a book on Milton’s poetics.

Kay Gilliland Stevenson was Reader, and is now a Fellow, in the Literature Department of the University of Essex. She is author of Milton to Pope: 1650–1720 (2001). With Clive Hart, she is co-author of Heaven and the Flesh: Imagery of Desire from the Renaissance to the Rococo (1995) and, with Margaret Seares, of Paradise Lost in Short: Smith, Stillingfleet and the Transformation of Epic (1998).

Rachel Trubowitz is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-century English Literature (2012). Her most recent publication is ‘As Jesus Tends to Divinity in Paradise Regained: Mathematical Limits and the Arian Son,’ in Milton Now: Alternative Approaches and Contexts, Catherine Gray and Erin Murphy (eds.) (2014).

Preface

The preparation of this New Companion has afforded me the opportunity to supplement substantially the work of the original Companion through the addition of new essays on Milton's poetic oeuvre, giving a platform to newer voices in the always controversial and expanding field of Milton scholarship.

I have added a substantial section both to recognize Milton's global impact outside Anglocentric and Eurocentric environments and to reflect the current and emerging critical engagement with that impact.

The first edition was published at a time when uncertainty and controversy surrounded the canonicity of De Doctrina Christiana. Those problems are largely resolved, and there has emerged a near unanimity about its place in the Milton canon.

I have retained all but one essay from the original Companion, and their authors have responded to the invitation to refresh and revise their work as seemed appropriate, and recommendations for further reading have been augmented to incorporate important material subsequently published. I am grateful to Carter Revard for permission to update, modestly, the recommended further reading of the essay by the late Stella Revard. In place of the chapter on Milton's life records, I have supplied a chronology to chart Milton's life and works in the context of his age.

Thomas N. Corns

Bangor University
May 2015

Note on Editions Used

Unless otherwise stated, all biblical references are to the Authorized Version, also known as the King James Bible, first published in 1611. The selection of editions for works of the Milton oeuvre remains problematic and necessitates some compromise. Where volumes of The Complete Works of John Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008–) are available, those provide the editions cited. This applies to Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, the minor poetry, the vernacular prose of 1649 and 1660, and De Doctrina Christiana (Christian Doctrine). Other prose is cited from Complete Prose Works of John Milton, edited by Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), and Latin prose is sometimes cited from The Works of John Milton, edited by Frank Allen Patterson et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–8). Paradise Lost is cited from the second edition of Paradise Lost, edited by Alastair Fowler (London and New York: Longman, 1998). Editorial material from other editions is drawn upon from time to time, most frequently from the second edition of Complete Shorter Poems, edited by John Carey (London and New York: Longman, 1997).

The principal texts considered within each chapter are listed under ‘Writings,’ followed by a list of suggested ‘References for Further Reading.’

List of Abbreviations

AV
Authorized Version of the Bible (the King James Bible)
CPW
Complete Prose Works of John Milton
CSP
Complete Shorter Poems, edited by John Carey
CWJM
The Complete Works of John Milton
MQ
Milton Quarterly
MS
Milton Studies
ODNB
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
OED
Oxford English Dictionary
PL
Paradise Lost, edited by Alastair Fowler
WJM
The Works of John Milton

Part I
The Cultural Context