John Milton - John Milton Prose: Major Writings on Liberty, Politics, Religion, and Education

This excellent selection is what I have always wanted for my students: un-modernized texts very well edited and contextualized. Miltons seering radicalism, the extraordinary controlled freedom of his rhetoric, the engagement with the great issues of Englands revolution, but also with universal themes of God, Humankind, liberty, accountability, are made accessible as never before.

John Morrill, Professor of British and Irish History, Cambridge University

David Loewensteins scrupulous edition offers a remarkably generous range of Miltons prose works on religion, politics, and domestic issues. The Prefatory Notes to each work are a model of clarity and concision, and annotations are precise and informative. The volume will be a wonderful resource for Milton scholars, teachers, and students alike.

Laura Knoppers, Editor, Milton Studies

Richly annotated and with a fine, purposeful introduction, this wholly new edition makes available ten major prose works by Milton in their entirety, together with generous selections from Miltons other tracts. No other edition allows the reader to appreciate so fully Miltons original engagement with concepts of political, religious, and domestic liberty. It is the best edition for teaching purposes and the general reader. Scholars too will appreciate the wealth of fresh annotations.

Thomas N. Corns, University of Wales, Bangor

This is the most ambitious one-volume edition of Miltons prose to date, one that both invites the general reader who is curious about the author of Paradise Lost, and that also satisfies the needs of classrooms. Readers will have at their fingertips works from across Miltons writing career, with its wide range of occasions and styles. We see the scrappy polemicist, the rhetorically powerful tyrannicide, the critic and participant in religious reform, a Milton who was always daring, witty and engaged. With crisp prefatory introductions to each work, helpful annotations, and a generous introduction to the whole, there is no better guide to Miltons prose treasures than this one. I will be eager to assign this to students.

Sharon Achinstein, University of Oxford

David Loewenstein is Helen C. White Professor of English and the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. His books include Representing Revolution in Miltonand his Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (2001), which received the Milton Society of Americas James Holly Hanford Award for Distinguished Book. He is the author of Treacherous Faith: The Specter of Heresy in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (2013). He has co-edited The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (2002), Early Modern Nationalism and Miltons England (2008), and The Complete Works of GerrardWinstanley (2009). He is an Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America.

Also available:

John Milton: Paradise Lost

Edited by Barbara K. Lewalski

John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems

Edited by Stella P. Revard

The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography

Barbara K. Lewalski

This edition first published 2013
2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Milton, John, 16081674.
[Prose works. Selections]
John Milton prose : major writings on liberty, politics, religion, and education / edited by David Loewenstein.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-4051-2930-5 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4051-2931-2 (pbk.)
I. Loewenstein, David. II. Title.
PR3569.L64 2013
824.4dc23

2012022349

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: William Blake, The Angel of Revelation (detail), c. 1805. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York / The Bridgeman Art Library.
Cover design by Richard Boxall Design Associates

For Barbara Lewalski and in Memory of Norman T. Burns

Figure 1 Portrait of Milton at age 62 by William Faithorne; from The History of Britain (1670). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

This is an original spelling edition of Miltons prose (except, of course, for translations of Miltons Latin texts). It is intended for a broad readership: students, teachers, scholars, and general readers. I have prepared fresh annotations for all the texts; however, because of the need to keep this large one-volume edition from becoming too big, I have not provided annotations (except for several contemporary names) to the substantial selections from Miltons theological treatise, De Doctrina Christiana. I have aimed to keep the annotations concise but full, so that readers of Miltons prose can get as much as possible from the old-spelling texts. I have also followed the original punctuation.

In preparing this edition, I have followed the chosen copy-texts closely. In cases where there are clearly typographical errors in the original, I have made emendations without noting them. Biblical citations in the annotations are from the Authorized (King James) Version.