NOTES

Introduction. Two University Scenes

1. The Anglican Canons, 1529–1947, ed. Gerald Bray (Woodbridge, 1998), 320.

2. Sarah Knight, ‘Milton’s Student Verses of 1629’, Notes and Queries, 255, 1 (2010), 37–9; although it has now been argued that Milton’s verses were recited at the university’s Great Commencement ceremony in July 1629 rather than before the French ambassador two months later: see Robert Dulgarian, ‘Milton’s “Naturam non pati senium” and “De Idea Platonica” as Cambridge Act Verses: A Reconsideration in Light of Manuscript Evidence’, The Review of English Studies, 70 (2019), 847–86.

3. The Judgment and Decree of the University of Oxford past in their Convocation July 21, 1683, against certain Pernicious Books and Damnable Doctrines Destructive to the Sacred Persons of Princes, their State and Government, and of all Humane Society (Oxford, 1683), 1, 3, 7. The decree was initially issued in Latin.

4. A proclamation for calling in and suppressing of two books written by John Milton (1660), broadside. See further Leo Miller, ‘The Burning of Milton’s Books in 1660: Two Mysteries’, English Literary Renaissance, 18, 3 (1988), 424–37.

5. The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, ed. Andrew Clark (Oxford, 1894), 5 vols., 3: 62–4.

6. Hobart quoted in Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘The Early Reception of Paradise Lost (1667)’, Review of English Studies, 47 (1996), 479–99. The letters in which Hobart discusses Milton are Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 45, fol. 258; MS Tanner 45*, fol. 271.

7. Letter of John Beale to John Evelyn, Evelyn Papers, British Library, Additional MS 78313, Letter 93, 18 Dec. 1669; Letter 108, 24 Dec. 1670. For discussion, see Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Laureate, Republican, Calvinist: An Early Response to Milton and Paradise Lost (1667)’, Milton Studies, 29 (1992), 181–98; von Maltzahn, ‘Early Reception of Paradise Lost’, 496–9; William Poole, ‘Two Early Readers of Milton: John Beale and Abraham Hill’, Milton Quarterly, 38 (2004), 76–99.

8. Christopher Wase, ‘Epilogue’, in Electra of Sophocles presented to Her Highnesse the Lady Elizabeth (1649), 3.

9. For Hyde’s letter to Sir Edward Nicholas, see Bodleian Library, Clarendon MS 29, fol. 183; Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘An Early Comment on Milton’s Poems (1645)’, Milton Quarterly, 48 (2014), 15–18; Ten books of Homers Iliades, translated out of French, by Arthur Hall Esquire (1581), 25.

10. Poems of Mr John Milton, Both English and Latin (1645), 57.

11. Judgment and Decree of the University of Oxford, 8.

12. Barbara K. Lewalski, ‘How Radical was the Young Milton?’, in Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich (eds.), Milton and Heresy (Cambridge, 1998), 49–74 (50), which summarizes the arguments made in greater detail in Lewalski, Life.

13. In his two-volume biography, first published in 1968 and the most exhaustive twentieth-century life of Milton, William Riley Parker distanced Milton from Puritanism without ever directly addressing the issue of Milton’s religious identity; and he did so by offering an unhistorical caricature of the ‘Puritan’ as a ‘narrow, dehumanized’ character, inherently hostile to the classical culture that animated Milton as a poet. See William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography, 2nd edn., ed. Gordon Campbell, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1996), 1: 10.

14. Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 95.

15. Ibid., 84.

16. See e.g. the concise accounts and critiques of revisionist historiography of the period in Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War, 2nd edn. (1998); Mike Braddick (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution (Oxford, 2016).

17. Milton, The Reason of Church-government Urg’d against Prelaty (1641), 40.

18. See e.g. the wide-ranging account of ingenium in Rhodri Lewis, ‘Francis Bacon and Ingenuity’, Renaissance Quarterly, 67 (2014), 113–63. In arguing for Milton’s commitment to the cause of wit, both on a personal and at a national level, I am continuing some of the concerns of an earlier book, in which I argue that the allegiance to wit of Milton’s friend Andrew Marvell, over and above political faction, helps to explain some of the apparent ambiguities of Marvell’s early political identity: see Nicholas McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit (Oxford, 2008).

19. Milton, Areopagitica; A Speech of Mr John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing (1644), 24.

20. Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven, CT, 1986), 99.

21. See e.g. Angus Nicholls, Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic (Woodbridge, 2006); Gregory Leadbetter, Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (Basingstoke, 2011).

22. The identification was first made by Jason Scott-Warren on the blog of the Cambridge Centre for Material Texts on 9 September 2019 (https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cmt/?p=5751) on the basis of a study of the annotations in the Free Library’s copy of the First Folio by Claire M. L. Bourne. I am grateful to Jason Scott-Warren for sharing with me his some of his preliminary work on the Folio, which I have not been able to examine in person for this volume. For Bourne’s thorough analysis of the annotations, published prior to the ascription to Milton, see ‘Vide Supplementum: Early Modern Collation as Play-Reading in the First Folio’, in Kathy Ache-son (ed.), Early Modern English Marginalia (2019), 195–233.

23. The very latest research suggests that Shakespeare may have been more appreciated in the early Stuart universities than has been thought: see Daniel Blank, ‘“Our Fellow Shakespeare”: A Contemporary Classic in the Early Modern University’, The Review of English Studies (2020), https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgz146.

24. A recent biography which is more directed towards speculation about Milton’s personal and emotional life is Anna Beer, Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot (2008). I have been particularly influenced in my method by two comparatively recent biographies of early modern English writers: David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (2004) and Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind, and World of William Shakespeare (2008). Beyond the early modern, I have tried to learn from the first part of Joseph Frank’s great five-volume life of Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849 (Princeton, NJ, 1979).

25. Marco Santagata, Dante: The Story of His Life, trans. Richard Dixon (Cambridge, MA, 2016), 162.

26. Paul J. Korshin, ‘The Development of Intellectual Biography in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 73, 4 (1974), 513–23 (513).

27. For Johnson’s Lives of the Poets as emergent intellectual biography, see Korshin, ‘Development of Intellectual Biography’, 518–19, 522–3; Johnson, ‘Milton’, in Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 5 vols. (Oxford, 2006), 1: 265, 276.

1. Londiniensis

1. Life Records, 5: 173–4; Alan Dures, English Catholicism 1558–1642: Continuity and Change (Harlow, 1983), 28–9.

2. Life Records, 5: 161–3.

3. Early Lives, 1, 35.

4. Dekker, Jests to make you Merie (1607), 35–6.

5. See e.g. V. F. Harding, ‘City, capital and metropolis: the changing face of seventeenth-century London’, in J. F. Merritt (ed.), Imagining Early Modern London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype, 1598–1720 (Cambridge, 2001), 117–43.

6. Early Lives, 50–1.

7. Anon., The Character of a London Scrivener (1667), sig. A3r; J. M. French, Milton in Chancery: New Chapters in the Lives of the Poet and his Father (New York, 1939).

8. See Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005), the arguments of which are usefully summarized in Withington, ‘Andrew Marvell’s Citizenship’, in Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 2011), 102–21. On Ciceronian prudentia and honestas, see Cicero, On Obligations: A New Translation, trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford, 2000), xviii, liv.

9. On Milton as a money-lender, see David Hawkes, ‘Milton and Usury’, English Literary Renaissance, 41, 3 (2011), 503–28; Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Making Use of the Jews: Milton and Philo-Semitism’, in Douglas A. Brooks (ed.), Milton and the Jews (Cambridge, 2008).

10. See respectively Jonathan Barry, ‘Civility and Civic Culture in Early Modern England: the Meanings of Urban Freedom’, in Peter Burke, Brian Harrison, and Paul Slack (eds.), Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas (Oxford, 2000), 181–96; Peter Earle, ‘The Middling Sort in London’, in Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brook (eds.), The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800 (Harlow, 1994), 141–58.

11. Withington, ‘Andrew Marvell’s Citizenship’, 108.

12. The Latin text of Milton’s Prolusion VI is given with translation in John K. Hale, Milton’s Cambridge Latin: Performing the Genres, 1625–1632 (Tempe, AZ, 2005); Ad Salsillum, line 9, in Oxford Milton, 3: 202.

13. Gataker, Abrahams Decease . . . Delivered at the Funerall of that Worthy Servant of Christ, Mr Richard Stock, Late Pastor of All-Hallowes Bread Street (1627), 4.

14. See e.g. the classic study by Peter Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English Church, 1570–1635’, Past and Present, 114 (1987), 32–76; see also the various essays in Peter Lake and Michael Questier (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660 (Cambridge, 2000), and the up-to-date set of essays on the historiographical issues and debates over ‘Puritanism’ in John Coffey and Paul H. Lim (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, 2008). For a fine single-author study, see John Spurr, English Puritanism 1603–1689 (Harlow, 1998).

15. Richard Stock, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse (1609), 15–16, 19. On the size of All Hallows parish church, see Fletcher, Intellectual Development, 1: 28.

16. Daniel W. Doerksen, ‘Milton and the Jacobean Church of England’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 1.1 (1995), 5.1–23; Jeffrey Alan Miller, ‘Milton and the Conformable Puritanism of Richard Stock and Thomas Young’, in Edward Jones (ed.), Young Milton: The Emerging Author 1620–1642 (Oxford, 2012), 73–95. For examples of the content of Stock’s sermons, see ‘Notes taken, at 61. Severall sermons of one Mr Richard Stock in London. A°. 1606. & 1607’ (British Library MS Egerton 2977).

17. Reason of Church-government, 37; Early Lives, 18. It was argued by Helen Darbishire in Early Lives that the author of the anonymous life was Milton’s nephew and pupil John Phillips, brother of Edward, but the ascription to Skinner is now generally accepted: see Peter Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, Volume II 1625–1700 (1993), 86.

18. On this gap, see e.g. Edward Jones, ‘ “Ere half my days”: Milton’s Life, 1608–1640’, in McDowell and Smith, Oxford Handbook, 3–25.

19. Ian Green, ‘ “For Children in Yeeres and Children in Understanding”: The Emergence of the English Catechism under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 37 (1986), 397–425; Ian Green, The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Religious Instruction in England, c. 1530–1740 (Oxford, 1996).

20. See Paul C. H. Lim, Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2012); Gordon Campbell, Thomas N. Corns, John K. Hale, and Fiona J. Tweedie, Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana (Oxford, 2007), 98–101.

21. Milton, Of Education (1644), 1.

22. Complete Prose Works, 4. 1: 612.

23. On the dating of the poem, see Complete Shorter Poems, 148, which goes for 1632; Campbell, Milton Chronology, 59; Oxford Milton, 3: cxxiii. In support of a 1632 dating, compare, for example, the dream of the speaker of ‘Il Penseroso’ (‘There in close covert by som Brook, / Where no profaner eye may look’ (lines 139–40)), with the delight of the speaker of Ad Patrem that he shall no longer mingle ‘with the witless populace, but my footsteps will avoid eyes profane’ (lines 103–4; I use here the translation in The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Patterson et al., 18 vols (New York, 1931-8), 1: 276–7.).

24. Ovid, Tristia, 4.10.17–20; Amores, 1.15.5–6; Jacobus Philippus Thomasinus, Petrarcha Redivius Laura Comite (Padua, 1635), 15; John Harington, ‘Life of Ariosto’, in Orlando Furioso (1591), 415–16. For the note on Thomasinus’s life of Petrarch in Milton’s commonplace book, see Oxford Milton, 11: 247–8.

25. Early Lives, 51.

26. Early Lives, 48.

27. Gordon Campbell, ‘Shakespeare and the Youth of Milton’, Milton Quarterly, 33 (1999), 95–105.

28. One candidate for another of Milton’s tutors is Patrick Young (1584–1652), also a Scot educated at St Andrews who may have been a relation of Thomas and was certainly his correspondent when Thomas was in Hamburg. Patrick was royal librarian from 1612 and became treasurer of St Paul’s Cathedral in 1621. He was renowned for his learning, particularly in patristics, and in 1633 published a landmark edition of the first epistle of Clement. Milton certainly knew of Patrick Young, as at some point after 1645 he sent him a bound copy of ten of his printed works (now Trinity College, Dublin, R. dd. 39), perhaps to show an ex-tutor what his teaching had achieved; Franciscus Junius observed in a letter to Isaac Vossius that Milton was ‘Patrick Young’s disciple’ (‘disciplum Patricii Junii’). For comment on Patrick Young as Milton’s possible tutor, see Fletcher, Intellectual Development, 1: 145–6; Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 389 n. 42.

29. The letter is translated in Complete Prose Works, 1: 312.

30. For a lively discussion of this culture of literary gift-giving, see Jason Scott-Warren, Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (Oxford, 2001).

31. Lisa Jardine, ‘Reading and the Technology of Textual Affect: Erasmus’s Familiar Letters and Shakespeare’s King Lear’, in Jardine, Reading Shakespeare Historically (London, 1996), 78–97 (88).

32. For the argument that Milton imagined the ideal marriage in the terms of classical friendship between men, see Thomas H. Luxon, Single Imperfection: Milton, Marriage and Friendship (Duquesne, PA, 2005).

33. Estelle Haan, ‘Milton’s Elegia Quarta and Ovid: Another “Cross-Comparison” ’, Notes and Queries, 54, 4 (2007), 400–404; Maggie Kilgour, Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid (Oxford, 2012), 50–3.

34. ‘The Constant Method of Teaching in St Pauls Schoole London’ (Trinity College, Cambridge, MS. 0. 10. 22) was found in the manuscripts of Thomas Gale, High Master of St Paul’s in 1672–97. For transcripts and very full discussion of the manuscript and its use for reconstructing the curriculum earlier in the century, see T. W. Baldwin, Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana, IL, 1944), 1: 118–33; Donald Leman Clark, Milton at St Paul’s School: A Study in Ancient Rhetoric in English Renaissance Education (New York, 1948), 109–26. Clark notes that William Lilly the astrologer cites Ovid’s Tristia as the first poetic text that he studied at Ashby de la Zouch Grammar School, where he began in 1613; it is also the first poetic work in the curriculm in John Brinsley, Ludus Literarius: Or, the Grammar Schoole (1612). See also Kilgour, Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid, 30–1.

35. Hoole, A new discovery of the old art of teaching schoole in four small treatises . . . shewing how children in their playing years may grammatically attain to a firm groundedness in and exercise of the Latine, Greek, and Hebrew tongues : written about twenty three yeares ago (1661), 156–7.

36. Of Education, 3–4.

37. An Apology Against a Pamphlet (1642), 32; Reason of Church-government, 37.

38. John Brinsley, Ludus Literarius: Or, the Grammar School (1612), 222–3.

39. Early Lives, 2.

40. Steven J. Reid, Humanism and Calvinism: Andrew Melville and the Universities of Scotland, 1560–1625 (Aldershot, 2011), 173. Reid makes it clear that of the three colleges which constituted St Andrews in the period, it was St Leonard’s—Young’s college—that had been most active in seeking to establish a Calvinist regimen.

41. See e.g. Lewalski, Life, 25, who describes Young as ‘a voluntary exile for his Puritan views’, ‘exposed by Stuart policies to the dangers of the continental religious wars’; and Neil Forsyth, John Milton: a Biography (Oxford, 2008), 23: ‘Young, who in 1627 was in voluntary exile in Hamburg because of his Presbyterian views’.

42. Milton, Eikonoklastes (1649–50), in Oxford Milton, 6: 308. Compare Lewalski, ‘How Radical Was the Young Milton?’, 50, who presents Milton’s closeness ‘with militants opposed to Stuart pacifism in the Thirty Years’ War’ as a telling example ‘of his early oppositional associates and attitudes’.

43. Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), 505. On Young’s sermon before Frederick V, see Edward Jones, entry for Thomas Young, ODNB; Jones also points out that Young spoke of his time in Hamburg with affection.

44. See Miller, ‘Conformable Puritanism’, 84–9, to which I am indebted here. See more generally Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: the Rise of English Arminianism, c.1590–1640 (Oxford, 1990); Peter Lake, ‘Moving the Goal Posts? Modified Subscription and the Construction of Conformity in the Early Stuart Church’, in Lake and Questier (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, 179–205.

45. Jill Kraye, ‘ “Ethnicorum omnium sanctissimus”: Marcus Aurelius and his Meditations from Xylander to Diderot’, in Jill Kraye and M.W.F. Stone (eds.), Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy (2000), 107–35 (114–18).

46. Fletcher, Intellectual Development, 1: 48.

2. Pure Chaste Eloquence

1. Clark, Milton at St Paul’s School, 119, 121, 145–6, 177.

2. Of Education, 2; Early Lives, 12.

3. Riggs, World of Christopher Marlowe, 37.

4. There is a recent scholarly edition of the first part of the text: Lily’s Grammar of Latin in English, ed. Hedwig Gwosdek (Oxford, 2013).

5. See Ian Green, Protestantism and Humanism in Early Modern English Education (Aldershot, 2009), 127–8. See also Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630–1660 (Oxford, 2003), 100–115.

6. See the lively discussion in Bate, Soul of the Age, 83–92.

7. Of Education, 3.

8. Nicholas Orme, ‘Schools and Schoolbooks, 1400–1550’, in Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume III: 1400–1557 (Cambridge, 1999), 449–69 (469); Fletcher, Intellectual Development, 1: 169–70.

9. Articles to be Enquired of within the Diocese of London (1640), cited in Ian Green, Humanism and Protestantism, 74.

10. The first poem is entitled Carmen Elegiaca, ‘Elegiac Verses’, and the second, warning a governor of the consequences of oversleeping, is untitled. The manuscript is housed in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas, as Pre-1700 MS 127. For a thorough discussion of whether the items can be considered authentic, with the conclusion that they should be classified as dubia, see William Poole’s discussion in Oxford Milton, 11: 378–81.

11. See Lily’s Grammar, ed. Gwosdek, 194.

12. Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1995), 27; Clark, Milton at St Paul’s School, 17–19, 237; Oxford Milton, 3: lxxxvi–vii.

13. Wyman Herendeen, ‘Milton’s Accidence Commenc’t Grammar and the Deconstruction of Grammatical Tyranny’, in P. G. Stanwood (ed.), Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and his World (New York, 1995), 297–312.

14. See generally Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge, 2003), esp. 55–68, the arguments of which are usefully encapsulated in Mack, ‘Humanist Rhetoric and Dialectic’, in Jill Kraye (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge, 1996), 82–99.

15. Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford, 2002), 112–13; see also Cummings, ‘Erasmus and the End of Grammar: Humanism, Scholasticism and Literary Language’, New Medieval Literatures, 11 (2009), 249–70.

16. English Works of Roger Ascham, ed. W. A. Wright (Cambridge, 1904; repr. 1970), 259.

17. Apology, 13. The phrase ‘cause them to be read’ probably refers to having others read to him rather than his own teaching.

18. Erasmus quoted in Kristian Jensen, ‘The Humanist Reform of Latin and Latin Teaching’, in Jill Kraye (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, 63–81 (68); Colet’s statutes are transcribed in Admission Registers of St. Paul’s School from 1748–1876, ed. Robert Barlow Gardiner (London, 1884), 382.

19. William Poole, ‘More Light on the Literary Remains of Alexander Gil the Younger (1596/7–1644)’, Milton Quarterly, 53 (2019), 215–21 (215–16); Andrew Wallace, Virgil’s Schoolboys: The Poetics of Pedagogy in Renaissance England (Oxford, 2011), 47–8.

20. P. Albert Duhamel, ‘The Oxford Lectures of John Colet: An Essay in Defining the Renaissance’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 14 (1953), 493–510; Admissions Registers of St. Paul’s School, 382–3.

21. Mordecai Feingold, ‘The Humanities’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford. Volume IV: Seventeenth-Century Oxford, 211–358 (243).

22. See e.g. the classic essay by Theodor F. Mommsen, ‘Petrarch’s Conception of the “Dark Ages” ’, Speculum, 17 (1942), 226–42.

23. Clark, Milton at St Paul’s School, 121.

24. Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, Volume I: Books 1–2, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell, Loeb Classical Library 124 (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 197 (12. 1. 1).

25. Apology, 5.

26. English Works of Roger Ascham, 265.

27. Clark, Milton’s at St Paul’s School, 54.

28. Carmen de Moribus is translated in William Haine, Lillies Rules Construed (1633), sig. G5r; this translation is also given in T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 1: 145.

29. Cicero, On the Orator: Books 1–2, ed. and trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA, 1942), 25 (I. 33); Ben Jonson, Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (Harmondsworth, 1996), 430.

30. I use here the old but lively translation by W. H. Woodward, Desiderius Erasmus concerning the Aim and Method of Education (Cambridge, 1904), 161–78.

31. Alexander Nowell, A Catechisme, or First Instruction and Learning of Christian Religion, trans. Thomas Norton (1570); for the use of various forms of Nowell’s catechism in grammar schools, see Green, Humanism and Protestantism, 290.

32. English Works of Roger Ascham, 183.

33. John K. Hales, Milton’s Languages: the Impact of Multilingualism on Style (Cambridge, 1997), 1–18.

34. See Estelle Haan, ‘The “adorning of my native tongue”: Latin Poetry and Linguistic Metamorphosis’, in McDowell and Smith, Oxford Handbook, 51–65 (57).

35. The date at which these poems were composed is unknown, and the translation of the Horatian Ode, in particular, has been a matter of dispute; however, Haan makes a persuasive case for both Apologus De Rustico et Hero and the Ode as school exercises; although it is of course possible (if perhaps psychologically unlikely) that Milton later revised them before publication (‘ “The adorning of my native tongue” ’).

36. Paradise lost. A Poem in Ten Books (1668), ‘The Verse’, sig. a3v.

37. English Works of Roger Ascham, 223; see further Robert Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1994), 29.

38. Brinsley, Ludus Literarius, 107. A concise account of this subtle shift of emphasis in educational practice is provided by Joseph Loewenstein, ‘Humanism and Seventeenth-Century English Literature’, in Kraye (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, 269–93.

39. See e.g. Joost Keiser and Todd Richardson, ‘Introduction’, in Keiser and Richardson (eds.), The Transformation of Vernacular Expression in Early Modern Arts (Leiden, 2012), 1–26; Peter Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2004), 61–88; Maurizio Campanelli, ‘Languages’, in Michael Wyatt (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, 2014), 139–63.

40. Gil, Logonomia Anglica (London, 1619), sigs. P4v, N4v, M3r-v.

41. Gordon Campbell’s entry for Alexander Gil the Younger in the ODNB gives ‘1642?’ as the year of his death, but the recent recovery of Gil’s testament establishes that he died in 1644; see Poole, ‘More Light on the Literary Remains of Alexander Gil the Younger’, 215.

42. See further Stefano Villani, ‘The Italian Protestant Church of London in the Seventeenth Century’, in Barbara Schaff (ed.), Exiles, Emigrés, and Intermediaries: Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions (Amsterdam and New York, 2010), 217–36.

43. See CELM, s.v. ‘John Milton’; Oxford Milton, 11: 24.

44. Maurice Kelley, ‘Milton’s Dante–Della Casa–Varchi Volume’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 66 (1962), 499–504.

45. Feingold, ‘Humanities’, 270.

46. For the evidence, see respectively Gordon Campbell ‘Milton’s Spanish’, Milton Quarterly, 30 (1996), 127–32; Esther van Raamsdonk, ‘Did Milton Know Dutch?’, Notes and Queries, 63, 1 (2016), 53–6. On Dutch, see further Esther van Raamsdonk, Milton, Marvell, and the Dutch Republic (2020).

47. Feingold, ‘Humanities’, 272; The Life of Edward, First Lord Herbert of Cherbury, ed. J. M. Shuttleworth (1976), 16–17.

48. Of Education, 6.

49. See Jason Lawrence, ‘Who the devil taught thee so much Italian?’ Italian Language Learning and Literary Imitation in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2006), 5, 11. See now also John Gallagher, Learning Languages in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2019).

50. See Ovid, Tristia, 3. 1. 11–12.

51. I use the translations in Complete Prose Works, 1: 316, 314; Leo Miller, ‘On some of the verses by Alexander Gil which John Milton read’, Milton Quarterly, 24 (1990), 22–5.

52. Feingold, ‘Humanities’, 256; L. A. Ferrell, ‘An imperfect diary of a life: the 1662 diary of Samuel Woodforde’, Yale University Library Gazette, 63 (1989), 141.

3. The Pursuit of Universal Learning

1. I use the translation of the Defensio Secunda in Complete Prose Works, 4. 1: 612; An Apology, 2.

2. For a comprehensive account of Milton’s consistent representation of himself as beyond moral reproach, with an emphasis on the consequences for his theology, see Stephen Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace: Self-Representation and Authority (Ithaca, NY, 2007).

3. Leon Battista Alberti, ‘Self Portrait of a Universal Man’, trans. James Bruce Ross, in The Portable Renaissance Reader, ed. James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin (New York, 1953; repr. 1967), 480–2.

4. I prefer here John Carey’s translation of lines 86–8 of Ad Patrem in Complete Shorter Poems, 154.

5. ‘An Epistle to Master Selden’, in Jonson, Complete Poems, 147–9, lines 29–34.

6. Feingold, ‘Humanities’, 220; J. H. Elson, John Hales of Eton (New York, 1948), 11.

7. Isaac Barrow, ‘Of Industry in our Particular Calling, as Scholars’, in Works of Isaac Barrow, ed. R. J. Hamilton, 3 vols. (1845), 1: 492, col. 2.

8. Victor Morgan, with the assistance of Christopher Brooke, History of the University of Cambridge. Volume 2: 1546–1750 (Cambridge, 2004), 461; The Works of the Pious and Profoundly-learned Joseph Mede, B.D., Sometime Fellow of Christ’s Colledge in Cambridge, 2nd edn. (1672), ii; Milton, Areopagitica, 11.

9. Cicero, On the Orator, 6–7, 17, 53; see also 13–14; I prefer here the older translation in Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge, MA, 1963), 1. 4. 4, 1. 10. 1. See further Teresa Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Cambridge, 1998), 50–89.

10. On the concept of ‘general learning’ in England, see Generall Learning: A Seventeenth-Century Treatise on the Formation of the General Scholar by Meric Casaubon, ed. Richard Serjeantson (Cambridge, 1999), 13–25; on its importance to the curriculum at Oxford and Cambridge in the seventeenth century, see Feingold, ‘Humanities’, 218–42.

11. M. T. Ciceronis oratio pro A. Licinio Archia, ed. Philip Beroaldus (Lyons, 1517), sig. C2r, translated (in the style of early modern English) in Mike Pincombe, Elizabethan Humanism: Literature and Learning in the Later Sixteenth Century (Harlow, 2001), 39. See also the definition of humanitas as ‘erudition and instruction in all good and liberal arts’ by the influential second-century Roman commentator, Aulus Gellius, in his Noctes Atticae, trans. Peter K. Marshall (Oxford, 1968), 13. 17. On the importance of the Pro Archia poeta for Petrarch and the foundation of Italian humanism, see Michael D. Reeve, ‘Classical Scholarship’, in Kraye (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, 20–46.

12. Extracts from Boccaccio’s De Genealogia Deorum (c. 1363), in Boccaccio on Poetry, trans. C. G. Osgood (New York, 1956), 39–40.

13. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governor (1531), fol. 52v. On Elyot’s importance for early modern educational practice in England, see e.g. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, 21–3.

14. Elyot, Boke Named the Governor, fols. 31v, 32v–33r; Chapman’s Homer, ed. Allardyce Nicoll, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1967), 1: 14. See further Rosalie L. Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre Theory in the Renaissance, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Berkeley, 1973), 22–3.

15. Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri septem. Sieben Bücher über die Dichtkunst, ed. Luc Deitz, Gregor Vogt-Spira, and Manfred Furhmann, 6 vols. (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1994–2011), 1: 6–8, 126.

16. Wallace, Virgil’s Schoolboys, 5, 48.

17. Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Stratford upon Avon, 1913), 160–1; Dryden, ‘A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire’ in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker, H. T. Swedenberg, and Vinton A. Dearing, 20 vols. (Berkeley, 1956–2000), 4: 3–90.

18. For ‘polyhistor’, see OED; Anthony Grafton, ‘The World of the Polyhistors: Humanism and Encyclopedism’, Central European History, 18 (1985), 31–47 (33–4).

19. Milton, Defensio Secunda, 83; Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 2nd edn. (1644), 64; Lewalski, Life, 89.

20. Obadiah Walker, Of Education, especially of Young Gentlemen (Oxford, 1673), 101; Early Lives, 2; Oxford Milton, 3: 14; Johnson, Lives of the Most Eminent Poets, 1: 243.

21. Gabriel Naudé, ‘Bibliographia politica’, in Hugo Grotius et al. (eds.), Dissertationes de studiis instituendis (Amsterdam, 1645), 23, trans. in Grafton, ‘World of the Polyhistors’, 39–40. See also Grafton, ‘The New Science and the Traditions of Humanism’, in Kraye (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, 203–23 (208–10).

22. Generall Learning, ed. Serjeantson, 85–6.

23. Defensio Secunda, 82–3; Reason of Church-government, 36.

24. Prolusion VII (‘In Sacrario habita pro Arte. Oratio.’), trans. in Complete Prose Works, 1: 300. For the dating of this Prolusion, see below.

25. Of Education, 8. Early Lives, 60–1. For intensive discussion and reconstruction of the curriculum in which Milton instructed his pupils, see William Poole, Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost (Cambridge, MA, 2017), 49–65, 297–300.

26. Grafton, ‘New Science and the Traditions of Humanism’, 208–9.

27. Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart and Pierre Le Motteux (1994), 196–7; Brian Cummings, ‘Encyclopedic Erasmus’, Renaissance Studies, 28, 2 (2014), 183–204 (184–5). See also Donald R. Kelley, ‘History and the Encyclopaedia’, in Donald R. Kelley and Richard H. Popkin (eds.), ‘The Shapes of Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment’, Archives internationales d’histoire des idées/ International Archives of the History of Ideas, 124 (1991), 7–22.

28. Milton, Areopagitica and Other Writings, ed. William Poole (Harmondsworth, 2014), xii.

29. Feingold, ‘Humanities’, 229.

4. Philology and Philosophy

1. See e.g. the classic essay by Donald Lemen Clark, ‘John Milton and William Chappell’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 18 (1955), 329–50; Oxford Milton, 3: civ. Elegia prima is usually ascribed to spring 1626, although Campbell and Corns argue that the rustication, if it occurred, is more likely to have been in spring 1627, for this is when Milton signed documents in London during term time (John Milton, 41–2).

2. For use of the Circe personification, see e.g. Ascham, Scholemaster, in English Works of Roger Ascham, 226–7.

3. Early Lives, 10; Cambridge University Library, Add. MSS 6986. Elegia prima was interpreted by Samuel Johnson as making reference to Milton’s rustication; see Lives of the Eminent Poets, 1: 243–44.

4. Joseph Mede, Works of the Pious and Most Profoundly Learned Joseph Mede (1664), vii; Johnson, Lives of the Eminent Poets, 1: 243. On the role of the College tutor, see further Lawrence Stone, ‘Social Control and Intellectual Excellence: Oxbridge and Edinburgh (1560–1983)’, in Nicholas Phillipson (ed.), Universities, Society and the Future (Edinburgh, 1983), 3–30. The break with Chappell is seemingly confirmed in a 1654 letter by Bishop John Bram-hall, referring to Milton being ‘turned away by [Chappell] as he well deserved to have been both out of the University and out of the society of men’ (Life Records, 3: 374-5). This latter phrase leads Campbell and Corns (John Milton, 38) to suggest that Milton’s offence may have been sexual in nature, but Bramhall, a royalist exiled in Antwerp, was writing at a time when Milton’s character, including his sexual history and behaviour at Cambridge, were under (seemingly groundless) public attack by Salmasius and others after his defences of the execution of Charles I.

5. Ascham, Scholemaster, in English Works of Roger Ascham, 187. See the useful account of discipline in the humanist schoolroom in Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY, 1993), 23–72.

6. Clark, Milton at St Paul’s, 62; A Shorte Dictionarie quoted in Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton, NJ, 1997), 93; Brinsley, Ludus Literarius, 74, 290, 295.

7. Early Lives, 14.

8. On the discipline of learning Latin as a rite of admission to the extra-familial world of male public life, see the classic essay by Walter J. Ong, ‘Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite’, Studies in Philology, 56 (1959), 103–24.

9. Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 2nd edn. (1644), 80. All further references are to the 2nd edn. unless otherwise stated. Areopagitica, 20–1.

10. Alan Cobham, English University Life in the Middle Ages (London, 1999), 46. On the earlier tradition of a weekly display of the whipping of undergraduates in some Cambridge colleges, something which seems to have been out of use by Milton’s time, see Fletcher, Intellectual Development, 2: 59.

11. Middleton, Women Beware Women and Other Plays, ed. Richard Dutton (Oxford, 1999), 3. 2. 131–7).

12. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross (Oxford, 1980), 3.2.

13. For the suggestion of political and religious disagreement, see Clark, ‘John Milton and William Chappell’, 335–6; Lewalski, Life, 21–2.

14. J. B. Williams, The Lives of Philip and Matthew Henry (1825), 17.

15. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 28–35.

16. Quentin Skinner, ‘The Generation of John Milton at Cambridge’, in Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge, 2018), 118–38 (131), citing Mede’s account books in Christ’s College Muniments Room, T. 11.

17. Clement Barksdale, An Oxford Conference of Philomathes and Polymathes (1660), 3.

18. Of Education, 2.

19. For current ideas about the impact of Ramism, which has been much disputed, see the essays in Steven J. Reid and Emma Annette Wilson (eds.), Ramus, Pedagogy and the Liberal Arts: Ramism in Britain and the Wider World (Aldershot, 2011). The very latest research suggests the influence of Ramism had waned in Milton’s Cambridge: see Katrin Ettenhuber, ‘Milton’s Logic: the Early Years’, in The Seventeenth Century (2020), https://doi.org/10.1080/0268117X.2020.1755356

20. Private Memoirs of John Potenger, ed. C. W. Bingham (1841), 29.

21. For recent accounts of this culture of performance and Milton’s place in it, see Hale, Milton’s Cambridge Latin: Performing in the Genres, 1625–1632, 91–106; Sarah Knight, ‘Milton’s Forced Themes’, Milton Quarterly, 45 (2011), 145–60.

22. See Clark, Milton at St Paul’s, 208–17; Skinner, ‘Generation of John Milton’, 135.

23. Walker, Of Education, 119.

24. Life and Times of Anthony Wood, 1: 133–4, 138–40. Hale concludes that Cambridge saltings in Milton’s time seem to have been more scripted and benign than the later Oxford performance described by Wood (Milton’s Cambridge Latin, 197–8).

25. I use the rather free but very effective translation here in Hale, Milton’s Cambridge Latin, 81, 83.

26. [Holdsworth], ‘Directions for a Student in the Universitie’, in Fletcher, Intellectual Development, 2: 637; Brinsley, Ludus literarius, 280–6.

27. Cicero, On the Orator, 444–45 (II. 325); on the suitability of Milton’s choice of the title ‘prolusions’, see Knight, ‘Milton’s Forced Themes’, 4–5.

28. James D. Tracy, Erasmus, the Growth of a Mind (Geneva, 1972), 65; definition of aemulatio in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1879).

29. I use here the translation in John Milton: Complete Poems and Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (1957; repr., Indianapolis, 2003), 595.

30. The English verses delivered at the end of the Prolusion that Milton published in his 1673 Poems as ‘At a Vacation Exercise in College’ state that they were composed at the age of nineteen, which would date them to 1628; Campbell and Corns make ingenious, if certainly not definitive, arguments for 1631, although they are forced to insist that Milton must have misremembered the date of this own composition and performance (John Milton, 58–60, 398–9). Hale points out that a reference to the failed military expedition of the Duke of Buckingham to the Isle of Rhé in 1627 would make more sense in 1628 (Milton’s Cambridge Latin, 185 n. 1).

31. Complete Prose Works, 1: 313–15; Hale, Milton’s Cambridge Latin, 37.

32. Lambeth Palace MS 770, 238–9; the account was discovered by Sarah Knight, ‘Royal Milton’, Times Literary Supplement (5 February 2010), 15; Knight, ‘Milton’s Student Verses of 1629’. Compare Dulgarian’s alternative interpretation that the verses were written for the university’s Great Commencement ceremony in July 1629 (‘Milton’s “Naturam non pati senium” and “De Idea Platonica” as Cambridge Act Verses’).

33. W. H. Kelliher, entry for ‘Thomas Randolph’ in ODNB; Rosalyn Richek, ‘Thomas Randolph’s Salting (1627), Its Text and John Milton’s Sixth Prolusion as Another Salting’, English Literary Renaissance, 12 (1982), 102–31.

34. A. D. Cousins, entry for ‘John Cleveland’, in ODNB; see ‘Oratio habita ad Legatum quendam Gallicum, et Hollandiae Comitem, tunc temporis Academiae Cancellarium’, in Clievelandi Vindiciae (1677), 180.

35. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, ‘Concerning education’, in The Miscellaneous Works of . . . Edward, Earl of Clarendon (1727; 2nd edn., 1751), 326; Skinner, ‘Generation of John Milton’, 133–4, citing Mede’s account books, which survive in Christ’s College, Cambridge, Muniments Room T. 11.

36. Skinner, ‘Generation of John Milton’, 120–1, 136.

37. Joannis Miltonii Angli, Epistolarum familiarium liber unus (1674), 11, translated in Complete Prose Works, 1: 313.

38. See e.g. Jill Kraye, ‘Philologists and philosophers’, in Kraye (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, 142–60; Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 23.

39. Prolusion I as translated in Milton: Complete Poems, ed. Hughes, 595.

40. Complete Prose Works, 1: 293; Milton, Epistolarum familiarium, 141-2; Prolusion III as translated by Hughes in Milton: Complete Poems, 605. The 1630 date is suggested by Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 36, who date it before Prolusion VI, which they believe was performed in the summer vacation of 1631; Hale, however, argues persuasively for Prolusion VII as Milton’s last declamation (Milton’s Cambridge Latin, 91).

41. See Hale’s translation of the Latin prose parts of Prolusion VI in Milton’s Cambridge Latin, 261.

42. Of Education, 2–3. Feingold, ‘Humanities’, passim. See also Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Social Order (Cambridge, 1987), 73, 85: ‘Many of the theological notebooks which have been used to demonstrate the scholasticism of seventeenth-century Oxbridge are . . . in fact substantially devoted to refutations of scholastic theology . . . to assume the focus of the early Stuart curriculum was Neo-scholastic rather than humanistic is to disregard thousands of folios of evidence in the Trinity College library alone.’

43. See the illuminating etymological discussion in Paul Hammond, Milton and the People (Oxford, 2013), 22.

44. For a discussion of the use of ‘rude’ in Shakespeare, see Patricia Parker, ‘ “Rude Mechanicals” ’, in Margreta de Grazia et al. (eds.), Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge, 1994), 44.

45. Cicero, Pro Archia poeta, VIII. 19; Prolusion I, as translated by Hughes in Milton: Complete Poems, 598. See also a passage in Cicero’s De oratore which had become a commonplace of early modern apologies for rhetoric and poetics: ‘Who therefore would not rightly admire this faculty, and deem it his duty to exert himself to the utmost in this field, that by so doing he may surpass men themselves in that particular respect wherein chiefly men are superior to animals? To come, however, at length to the highest achievements of eloquence, what other power could have been strong enough either together scattered humanity into one place, or to lead it out of its brutish existence in the wilderness up to our present condition of civilization as men and as citizens, or, after the establishment of social communities, to give shape to laws, tribunals, and civic rights?’ (I. 33).

46. For the inclusion of De officiis in the grammar school curriculum, usually in the fifth or sixth forms, see Clark, Milton at St Paul’s School, 121–4.

47. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: the America-Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, 1987), 16. The claim that barbaros was onomatopeic—such people spoke what sounded to the Greeks like ‘barbar’—is made by Strabo in his Geography, 14. 2. 27–8.

48. Of Education, 2.

49. Aristotle, The Politics, ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge, 1988), 186 (1252b 5, 1337b 5-20); Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, 47; E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (1948; Princeton, NJ, 2013), 37.

50. William Harrison, ‘An Historicall Description of the Iland of Britaine’, in The First and Second Volumes of Chronicles . . . first collected and published by Raphaell Holinshed, William Harrison, and others (1587), 162; Johnson’s Dictionary: A Modern Selection, ed. E. L. McAdam and George Milne (1963), 234; John Marston, The Scourge of Villanie (1599), in Poems of John Marston, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool, 1961), 96.

51. Harrison, ‘Historicall Description’, 162.

52. Prolusion I as translated in Milton: Complete Poems, ed. Hughes, 595.

53. The Erasmus Reader, ed. Erika Rummel (Toronto, 1990), 55. For a recent interrogation of this representation and its profound importance in structuring northern European ideas of literary and cultural history, see Brian Cummings and James Simpson (eds.), Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (Oxford, 2010). Cummings and Simpson observe in their introduction how the Reformation ‘gave ideological exactitude and political compulsion to emerging prejudices’ in Renaissance humanism (4–5).

54. English Works of Roger Ascham, 281.

55. Ibid., 282, 265.

56. ‘A Book was writ of late call’d Tetrachordon’, lines 13–14. This sonnet was first published in the 1673 Poems as Sonnet XI.

5. Beginning as a Poet

1. I prefer here the translationin Complete Shorter Poems, 35–6.

2. André Grabar, Christian Iconography: A Study of its Origins (Princeton, NJ, 1968), 35.

3. See ‘A Premonition of his Maiesties, to all most Mightie Monarches, Kings, free Princes and States of Christendome’, in James I, An Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance, rev. 2nd edn. (1609), 43.

4. Jeffrey Alan Miller, ‘Reconstructing Milton’s Lost “Index Theologicus”: The Genesis and Usage of an Anti-Bellarmine, Theological Commonplace Book’, Milton Studies, 52 (2011), 187–219.

5. The classic essay on this matter is William Kerrigan, ‘The Heretical Milton: From Assumption to Mortalism’, English Literary Renaissance, 5, 1 (1975), 125–66; see further Nicholas McDowell, ‘Dead Souls and Modern Minds: Mortalism and the Early Modern Imagination from Marlowe to Milton’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 40, 3 (2010), 559–92.

6. George Buchanan, The Political Poetry, ed. Paul J. McGinnis and Arthur H. Williamson (Edinburgh, 1995), 168–9, 225–6.

7. Cf. Gil, Parerga sive Poetici Conatus Alexandri ab Alexandro Gil Londinensis (1632), 10–13. On the significance placed upon the disaster, which became known as the ‘Fatal Vespers’, in Protestant propaganda, see Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), 266–80.

8. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Ashmole 36/37, fols. 22r (Milton), 109r–110v (Gil)—the poems are admittedly almost 90 folios apart in the miscellany. The title in the Ashmole manuscript is similar to the one originally given the poem in Milton’s poetic notebook of the 1630s and early 1640s, the Trinity manuscript, but which has been scored out: ‘. . . set on a clock case’. The words before ‘set’ have been lost due to deterioration of the manuscript but are likely something such as ‘To be’.

9. As observed by Leo Miller, ‘On some of the verses by Alexander Gil which John Milton read’, Milton Quarterly 24 (1990), 22–5. The Latin original makes the same comparison. On Gil and In Quintum Novembris, see also David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, NJ, 1993), 278–81.

10. Phineas Fletcher, Locustae Vel Pietas Jesuitica, ed. Estelle Haan (Leuven, 1996), xx. See the list of neo-Latin Gunpowder Plot poems in J. W. Binns, Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (Leeds, 1990), 447 n. 31.

11. Richard Stock, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, the Second of November. 1606 (1609).

12. Hale, Milton’s Cambridge Latin, 165; The Poems of John Cleveland, ed. Brian Morris and Eleanor Withington (Oxford, 1967), 72–4 (under ‘Poems probably by Cleveland’).

13. See British Library Egerton MS 2875, ff. 153r–79r, which is dedicated to Prince Henry and so must date from earlier than 6 November 1612, when Henry died aged fourteen.

14. ‘The Locusts, or Apollyonists’, in Giles and Phineas Fletcher, Poetical Works, ed. Fredrick F. Boas, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1908), 1: 133, 135. As David Quint has observed, in the only concerted discussion of the matter, Fletcher’s Gunpowder poem ‘appears to have haunted Milton’s career’ (Epic and Empire, 269; see further 271–81).

15. James I, ‘A Premonition’, in An Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance, 44.

16. ‘A Sermon Preached before the King’s Majestie, at White-Hall, on the V. of November. A. D. MDCXIII’, in XCVI. sermons by the Right Honorable and Reverend Father in God, Lancelot Andrevves, late Lord Bishop of Winchester. Published by His Majesties speciall command (1629), 943. There are ten sermons preached on 5 November included in this edition.

17. William Laud, A Sermon Preached before his Maiestie, on Wednesday the Fift of Iuly, at White-hall. (1626), 21, 24.

18. Nicholas Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, c. 1530–1700 (Manchester, 2001), 167.

19. On the aesthetics of the Laudian ‘counter-reformation’, see Graham Parry, The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation: Glory, Laud and Honour (Woodbridge, 2006); Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c. 1700 (Oxford, 2007).

20. Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Archbishop Laud’, in Kenneth Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church (Basingstoke, 1993), 51–79 (62). See also Peter McCullough, ‘Making Dead Men Speak: Laudianism, Print, and the Works of Lancelot Andrewes, 1626–1642’, The Historical Journal , 41 (1998), 401–24.

21. David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (1989). See also Mary Morrisey, Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons, 1558–1642 (Oxford, 2011), 152–3.

22. David Randall, ‘Joseph Mead, Novellante: News, Sociability and Credibility in Early Stuart England’, Journal of British Studies, 45 (2006), 293–312; British Library, MS Harley 389, fol. 247.

23. Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), 119.

24. Joseph Mede, Works of the Pious and Most Profoundly Learned Joseph Mede, 3rd edn. (1677), 818; Jeffrey K. Jue, Heaven Upon Earth: Joseph Mede (1586–1638) and the Legacy of Millenarianism (Dordrecht, 2006), 28–33; Alan Ford, entry for ‘William Chappell (1582–1649)’, in ODNB.

25. On the allegations against Buckingham and their reception, see Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, The Murder of King James I (New Haven, CT, 2015).

26. Gil, In Obitum Arthur Lake, Episcop. Bathon & Wellens, in Parerga (1632), 10. Gil’s elegy is, however, only eight lines long.

27. Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson D 40, quoted in Feingold, ‘Humanities’, 246; Walker, Of Education, 109.

28. Lewalski, Life, 17.

29. Bodleian MS Malone 23, pp. 28–31. All quotations from libels on Buckingham are from Early Stuart Libels, ed. Alastair Bellany and Andrew McRae, http://www.earlystuartlibels.net.

30. Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 38, fol. 229r–v, lines 25–8.

31. Andrew McRae, Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State (Cambridge, 2004), 82.

32. Public Records Office, State Papers Domestic 16/111/51, 16/117; Gordon Campbell, ‘Alexander Gil the Younger’, in ODNB.

33. ‘Tandem (propitio Deo) post quindecim mensium ærumnas optimum Regem tetigit hominis omnibus fortunis exuti miseratio; vitâ Ille me priùs donaverat, nunc etiam carcere solutum luci reddidit’ (‘At last, with God’s assistance, after fifteen months of distress, compassion for a man stripped of all fortune has moved the best of kings; he who had first granted me my life has now also released me from prison and into the light.’) See East Sussex Record Office, FRE 690, p. 62. I am indebted to William Poole for sending me details of this manuscript letter. See further William Poole, ‘The Literary Remains of Alexander Gil the Elder (1565–1635) and Younger (1596/7–1642?)’, Milton Quarterly, 51 (2017), 163–91.

34. Complete Prose Works, 1: 285, lines 1–6. British Library Add. MS 29492, fol. 55r.

35. Randall, ‘Joseph Mead, Novellante’, 306; Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Poet. c. 50, fols. 14r–15r, lines 37–45.

36. The libel is ascribed to Drummond in one manuscript copy (Bodleian MS Eng. Poet. c.50) and was included in a 1711 edition of Drummond’s works. To complicate things further, there is a version of the poem in Scottish, which has also been ascribed to Drummond. Gil’s authorship is argued for by Clark, Milton At St Paul’s School, 86–7. For (serious) question marks over the ascription to Drummond, see Allan H. Gilbert, ‘Jonson and Drummond or Gil on the King’s Senses’, Modern Language Notes, 62 (1947), 35–7.

37. See CELM, s.v. ‘William Drummond’, DrW 117.17.

38. East Sussex Record Office, FRE 690, p. 65: ‘quid me vetet in mei Principis honorem cui vitam et salutem acceptam fero, Virgiliana adinstar Æneidos, Caroloïdem aliquando contexere?’

39. Decollato Comite Straffordio (1641); Gratulatoria dicata sereniss. ac potentiss. Carolo regi, e Caledone ad Trinobantes suos reverso (1641).

40. I prefer here the translation of the letter in Clark, Milton at St Paul’s School, 88.

41. On this translation, see Poole, ‘Literary Remains’, 177, 182 n. 10, 184 n. 36.

42. Epinikion, a song of victorie, vpon the proceedings and successe of the warres vndertaken by the most Puissant King of Sweden. / Dedicated in latin to our Gracious Soveraigne Lord, King Charles by the author, Alex. Gil. Heere Englished and explaned with marginall notes by W.H. (1632), 6. For the Latin original, see The new starr of the north, shining vpon the victorious King of Sweden (1632), to which is appended Gil’s Epinikion de gestibus successibus et victoriis Regiae Sueciae in Germania 1631.

6. Heroes and Daemons

1. Skinner, ‘Generation of John Milton’, 129.

2. Fletcher, Intellectual Development, 2: 625–47; Private Memoirs of John Potenger, ed. C. W. Bingham (1841), 30–1; Feingold, ‘Humanities’, 228.

3. Campbell, Milton Chronology, 43.

4. ‘On the University Carrier who sicken’d in the time of his vacancy, being forbid to go to London, by reason of the Plague. Another on the same’, in Oxford Milton, 3: 26–7, lines 7–10, 32–4.

5. Bodleian, MS Malone 21, fol. 69r; Huntington Library, HM 116, 100–1; St John’s College Library, Cambridge, MS S. 32 (James 423), fols. 18v–19r; Folger Library, MS V.a.96, fols. 79v–80r. For an account of these manuscripts, see CELM, s.v. ‘John Milton’, MnJ2, MnJ 4, MnJ 5, MnJ19.

6. Early Lives, 62.

7. ‘On the Marchionesse of Winchester whoe died in Childbedd. Ap: 15. 1631 [altered from 1633]’, in British Library, Sloane MS 1446, fols. 37v–38v.

8. Jonson’s An Elegie On the Lady Jane Pawlet, Marchion: of Winton is found, for instance, in a 1630s miscellany (Trinity College, Dublin, MS 877, [Part II], fols. 176r–77v.); John Creaser, ‘Milton: The Truest of the Sons of Ben’, in Margo Swiss and David A. Kent (eds.), Heirs of Fame: Milton and Writers of the English Renaissance (Lewisburg, PA, 1995), 158–83 (158).

9. See Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993).

10. Bodleian, MS Ashmole 36/37, fol. 22r; Donne, Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth, 1996), 313, lines 13–14.

11. William Poole has pointed out that the clumsy nature of the other (much more minor) variants in the Ashmole version cast some doubt on whether the text is authorial (‘Milton’s Two Poems to be Fixed on Objects’, Notes and Queries, n.s. 56, 2 (2009), 213–15).

12. Jonson, Complete Poems, 263–5; on variants of the text of Milton’s poem in the Second Folio, see Complete Shorter Poems, 122.

13. John Guillory, Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton and Literary History (New York, 1983), 19.

14. The Shakespearean references and echoes in Milton’s political prose will be surveyed in the second volume of this biography, but see in the meantime Nicholas McDowell, ‘The Uses of Shakespeare in Milton’s Regicide Tracts’, in McDowell and Smith, Oxford Handbook, 252–71; Oxford Milton, 6: 32–6, 72–5.

15. Lines 253–9. See the important discussion in Paul Stevens, ‘Subversion and Wonder in Milton’s Epitaph on Shakespeare’, English Literary Renaissance, 19 (1989), 375–88.

16. It is nonetheless worth noting that Milton, or possibly his printers, had some doubt about the sense of ‘our fancy of it self bereaving’, because while both the 1645 and 1673 Poems have ‘it self’, the 1632 Folio has ‘her self’, while the text of the poem as included in the 1640 publication, Poems: Written by Wil. Shakespeare, is now ascribed to ‘J. M.’ and has the markedly different ‘our self’.

17. The text of the two libels is given in Clark, Milton at St Paul’s School, 94–6; see also Jonson, Poems, 350 (lines 15–16).

18. On the Italian models for these poems, see the brief but still suggestive account by F. T. Prince, The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse (Oxford, 1954), 63–6.

19. See Purgatorio, 29: 22–30; Paradiso, 32: 7–9, in Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. Peter Dale (2004). The notion of sin preventing men from hearing the divine harmonies in the music of the spheres is common enough, however, and is most memorably expressed by Lorenzo in Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 5. 1. 65–71.

20. Gil, Logonomia Anglica, trans. Robin C. Alston, ed. Bror Danielsson and Arvid Gabriel-son (Stockholm, 1972), 86.

21. See e.g. Philip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin (eds.), Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory and Praxis (New York, 2002); Joanne Paul, ‘The Use of Kairos in Renaissance Political Philosophy’, Renaissance Quarterly, 67, 1 (2014), 43–78.

22. See Keith Rinehart, ‘A Note on the First Fourteen Lines of “Lycidas” ’, Notes and Queries, 198 (1953), 103; John Kerrigan, ‘Milton and the Nightingale’, in Kerrigan, On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature (Oxford, 2001), 217–29.

23. Milton: Complete Poetry, ed. Hughes, 603; for the dating of Prolusion II to the MA period, see Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 36–7.

24. Hale, Milton’s Cambridge Latin, 202–7.

25. See Alastair Fowler’s review of John K. Hales, Milton as Multilingual: Selected Essays, 1982-2004 (Otago, 2005), Translation and Literature, 15, 2 (2006), 277–81; Julius Pollux, Onomasticon (Frankfurt, 1608), Christ’s College Old Library N. 6. 30; Pollux quoted in Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation, trans. Henry Thornton Wharton, 3rd edn. (1908), 180.

26. Early Lives, 72, although Phillips makes it clear that the primary model was Robert Stephanus, Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (1532).

27. Ovids Elegies, 1. 5, in Collected Poems of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Patrick Cheney and Brian J. Striar (Oxford, 2005).

28. Noam Reisner, ‘Obituary and Rapture in Milton’s Memorial Latin Poems’, in Jones (ed.), Young Milton, 161–81 (176). Reisner points out that in Amores 3. 23, lines 25–6, the maidens are dressed out with ‘golden feet’, i.e. slippers, as part of the marriage rites.

29. Pico della Mirandola, from Orate de dignitate hominis, and Ficino, ‘The Soul of Man’, in Ross and McLaughlin (eds.), Portable Renaissance Reader, 478, 390–1.

30. I use the translation of Prolusion VII in Milton: Complete Poems, ed. Hughes, 625.

31. ‘To his Tutor. Master Pawson. An Ode’, in John Hall, Poems (1646/7), 61–4.

32. Paul Hammond, Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester (Oxford, 2002), 221; McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars, 31–3.

33. Milton: Complete Poems, ed. Hughes, 625.

34. Cicero, De officiis, 1. 60–2; on the Renaissance cult of magnanimity, see e.g. Margaret Greaves, The Blazon of Glory: A Study in Renaissance Magnanimity (1964); some comment on Milton and the Ciceronian vir sapiens can be found in Paul A. Rahe, Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory Under the English Republic (Cambridge, 2008), 24–5, 106–7.

35. Milton: Complete Poems, ed. Hughes, 624; see further on this passage, Hammond, Milton and the People, 17–18.

36. Joseph Mede, The Apostasy of the Latter Times . . . or the Gentiles’ Theology of Daemons (1641), sig. a2r, 9–10, 18. For the dating of this work to 1617–24, see Jue, Heaven Upon Earth, 100. On Mede’s work, see further the striking essay by Debra Shuger, ‘Milton’s Religion: the Early Years’, Milton Quarterly, 46 (2012), 137–53. See also Sarah Hutton, ‘Mede, Milton, and More: Christ’s College Millenarians’, in Juliet Cummins (eds.), Milton and the Ends of Time (Cambridge, 2003), 29–41.

37. Mede, The Apostasy of the Latter Times, 24, 18, 19. For a recent account of Greek daimonology, see Guilia Sfameni Gasparro, ‘Daimonic Power’, in Esther Edinow and Julia Kindt (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion (Oxford, 2015), 413–28.

38. Thomas Jackson, The knowledg[e] of Christ Jesus. Or The seventh book of commentaries ipon the Apostles Creed: containing the first and general principles of Christian theologie (1634), 282; William Twisse, A Discovery of D. Jacksons Vanity (1631), 438. Jackson’s 1634 volume was the seventh in a series of twelve volumes of commentaries on the Creed, and Twisse was responding to the same ideas proposed in earlier volumes. See further Sarah Hutton, ‘Thomas Jackson, Oxford Platonist, and William Twisse, Aristotelian’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 39, 4 (1978), 635–52.

39. William Poole, Milton and the Idea of the Fall (Cambridge, 2005), 128. The various versions of ‘At a Solemn Musick’ are transcribed in Oxford Milton, 3: 562–5.

40. Milton: Complete Poems, ed. Hughes, 604. Campbell and Corns date Prolusion II to the 1629–32 period (John Milton, 36–7).

41. Oxford Milton, 3: 563; Milton: Complete Poems, ed. Hughes, 603.

42. Complete Prose Works, 1: 283; Early Lives, 194.

43. Gordon Campbell, ‘Milton and the Lives of the Ancients’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 47 (1984), 234–8; Complete Prose Works, 1: 284.

7. The Poetics of Play and Devotion

1. For the popularity of this poem in manuscript in university circles, see the entry for the poem in CELM, s.v. ‘Randolph, Thomas’, RnT 205–212.

2. Kilgour, Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid, 15.

3. On the influence of the classical and particularly Virgilian cursus in the Renaissance and beyond, see e.g. Philip Hardie and Helen Moore (eds.), Classical Literary Careers and Their Reception (Cambridge, 2010).

4. David Quint, ‘Expectation and Prematurity in Milton’s “Nativity Ode” ’, Modern Philology, 97 (1999), 195–219 (204).

5. I use the translations of Diodati’s Greek letters in Parker, Milton: A Biography, 1: 59–60. See also Complete Prose Works, 1: 336–8.

6. See Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (gen. eds.), Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture (Oxford, 2007), 426–7.

7. See CELM, s.v. ‘Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’, B&F 111.5–153; ‘William Strode’, StW 641–663.

8. The Family Album, Glen Rock, Pennsylvania, Wolf MS, 73-4; Bodleian Library MS Rawl. D. 1092, fol. 273r–v. See also Bodleian Library, Malone MS 21, fol. 80r–v (c. 1634); Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. poet. c. 50, fols. 128v, 130r (1630s); Aberdeen University Library, MS 29, 187–9 (c. 1631).

9. Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 36/7, fol. 26r.

10. Taylor and Lavagnino, Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, 296–7.

11. Text taken from Bodleian Library MS Rawl. D. 1092, fol. 273r, lines 7–10.

12. See John Creaser, ‘ “Through Mazes Running”: Rhythmic Verve in “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” ’, The Review of English Studies, 52 (2001), 376–410 (392), who observes that ‘L’Allegro’ has ‘at least 54’ heptameter lines out of 142 lines of tetrameter, and ‘Il Penseroso’ has 28 out of 166.

13. Corpus Christi College, Oxford, MS 325, fol. 140. Strode’s ‘An Opposite to Melancholy’ was first printed in Wit Restor’d (1658). On Strode’s lyric and ‘L’Allegro’, see the somewhat neglected essay by J. B. Leishman, ‘ “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” and Their Relation to Seventeenth-Century Poetry’, in Alan Rudrum (ed.), Milton: Modern Judgements (1968), 58–93 (60–5).

14. See Adam Smyth, ‘ “Art Reflexive”: The Poetry, Sermons, and Drama of William Strode (1601?–45)’, Studies in Philology, 103, 4 (2006), 436–64 (454–5).

15. MS Ashmole 36/7, fol. 26r, lines 1–3, 9–11, 16.

16. Areopagitica (1644), 13.

17. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991, ed. Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson (Toronto, 2006), 141.

18. As claimed by Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 61. See Hero and Leander, 1. 162, 212, in Cheney and Striar (eds.), Complete Poems of Christopher Marlowe.

19. The philosophie, commonlie called, the morals written by the learned philosopher Plutarch of Chaeronea, trans. Philemon Holland (1603), 398. John Leonard has argued strongly that the young Milton did not have a peculiar attachment to celibacy, as opposed to chastity, in ‘Milton’s Vow of Celibacy: A Reconsideration of the Evidence’, in P. G. Stanwood (ed.), Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World (New York, 1995), 187–201.

20. Giles and Phineas Fletcher, Poetical Works, 1: 18–19.

21. Giles and Phineas Fletcher, Poetical Works, 1: 19, 39; J. B. Leishman, Milton’s Minor Poems, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson (1969), 58.

22. Matthew Wren’s statutes of the Watt Foundation, quoted in Austin Warren, Richard Crashaw: A Study in Baroque Sensibility (Baton Rouge, LA, 1939), 215–16. See also Thomas F. Healy, Richard Crashaw (Leiden, 1986), 57–8.

23. W. Hilton Kelliher, ‘The Latin Poems Added to Steps of the Temple in 1648’, in Robert M. Coope (ed.), Essays on Richard Crashaw (Salzburg, 1979), 14–34.

24. Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 46, 32v–36v.

25. Thomas Philipot, Poems (1646), 46-50. See further the useful survey of common topoi in Caroline devotional poetry in Thomas N. Corns, ‘ “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”, “Upon the Circumcision”, and “The Passion” ’, in Corns (ed.), A Companion to Milton (Oxford, 2001), 215–32, repr. in Corns (ed.), A New Companion to Milton (Oxford, 2016), 213–30.

26. Morgan, History of the University of Cambridge. Volume 2, 461.

27. Joseph Mede, A Key of the Revelation, trans. Richard More (1643), 1; Mede ‘A Summary View of the Apocalypse’, in Works of the pious and profoundly-learned Joseph Mede, 3rd edn. (1677), Book V, 921–3.

28. Jue, Heaven Upon Earth, 39; Sarah Hutton, ‘The Appropriation of Joseph Mede: Millenarianism in the 1640s’, in James E. Force and Richard H. Popkins (eds.), The Millenarian Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics, and Everyday Anglo-American Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Dordrecht, 2001), 1–14.

29. Mede, Apostasy of the Latter Times, 9.

30. Diatribae. Discourses on divers texts of Scripture: delivered upon severall occasions, by Joseph Mede, B.D. late fellow of Christs Colledge in Cambridge (1642), 181.

31. Of Education, 4. A recent account of early modern ideas about the cessation of the oracles is Anthony Ossa Richardson, The Devil’s Tabernacle: The Pagan Oracles in Early Modern Thought (Princeton, NJ, 2013).

32. The philosophie, commonlie called, the morals, 1296. The most extensive argument for Milton’s reliance on Selden is Joseph Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford, 2006), 74–92, although the reliance is more assumed than demonstrated.

33. Mede, Apostasy of the Latter Times, 17.

34. See e.g. Andrew Laird, ‘Re-inventing Virgil’s Wheel: the poet and his work from Dante to Petrarch’, in Hardie and Moore (eds.), Classical Literary Careers and their Reception, 138–59 (141–3).

35. Quint, ‘Expectation and Prematurity in Milton’s “Nativity Ode” ’, 198. On the Homeric hymn to Apollo in relation to the ‘Ode’, see Stella Revard, Milton and the Tangles of Naeara’s Hair: the Making of the 1645 Poems (Columbia, MO, 1997), 64–90.

36. Thomas Jackson, The eternall truth of scriptures, and Christian beleefe, thereon wholly depending, manifested by its owne light Delivered in two bookes of commentaries upon the Apostles creede (1613), 48–50, 89; Jackson, The knowledg[e] of Christ Jesus. Or The seventh book of commentaries upon the Apostles Creed, 43, 48.

37. John Carey, Milton (1969), 27–8.

8.. Laudian Poet?

1. See further Hutton, ‘The Appropriation of Joseph Mede’.

2. William Twisse, ‘The Preface to the Reader’, in Mede, Apostasy of the Latter Times, sig. A4r.

3. Ibid., sig. A5r.

4. Mede, The Name Altar, or Thysiasterion, Anciently Given to the Holy Table (1637), sigs. A3r–v.

5. Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 95; Graham Parry, The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation, 154–5.

6. Stephen Porter, ‘University and Society’, in Tyacke (ed.), Seventeenth-Century Oxford, 64.

7. Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 26; Porter, ‘University and Society’, 67.

8. Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 40. On Tovey’s connection to Diodati, see Gordon Campbell, ‘Nathaniel Tovey: Milton’s Second Tutor’, Milton Quarterly, 21 (1987), 81–90.

9. Mede, Works, 2nd edn. (1672), 848–9, 818. All further references are to this edition unless otherwise noted.

10. For an excellent account of this development, see Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 93–127.

11. Mede, Works, 818.

12. Mede, Works, 796; Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 536.

13. Jue, Heaven Upon Earth, 29–30; Mede, Works, xviii–ix, 868.

14. Thomas Jackson, Treatise of the Divine Essence (1628), 90, 94; Twisse, A Discovery of D. Jacksons Vanity, 173–4. Cf. Hutton, ‘Thomas Jackson, Oxford Platonist’, 651. On Jackson as an important intellectual influence on English Arminianism, see Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590–1640 (Oxford, 1990), 65–7, 83–4, 120–1, 142–4.

15. Prynne, Canterburies doome, or, The first part of a compleat history of the commitment, charge, tryall, condemnation, execution of William Laud, late Arch-bishop of Canterbury (1646), 178, 511; Alan Ford, ‘ “That Bugbear Arminianism”: Archbishop Laud and Trinity College, Dublin’, in Ciaran Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2005), 135–60.

16. Ford, ‘ “That Bugbear Arminianism” ’, 154; Matthew Reynolds, Godly Reformers and Their Opponents in Early Modern England: Religion in Norwich, c. 1560–1643 (Woodbridge, 2005), 180 n. 93; Alan Ford, entry for ‘William Chappell (1582–1649)’ in ODNB.

17. Morgan, History of the University of Cambridge. Volume 2, 32–3; Robert Porter, The life of Mr. John Hieron with the characters and memorials of ten other worthy ministers of Jesus Christ (1691), 3–4.

18. ‘Author’s Life’, in Works of the Reverend and Learned John Lightfoot (1684), II; Mede, Works, v. Such contemporary testimony rather undermines Leo Miller’s colourful depiction of Chappell as ‘this uninspired mediocrity of a tutor’: ‘Milton’s Clash with Chappell: A Reconstruction’, Milton Quarterly 14 (1980), 77–87 (79).

19. See e.g. Benjamin Myers, Milton’s Theology of Freedom (Berlin, 2006), 76–7. For the argument that this passage in Paradise Lost grafts a remnant of Calvinist election onto Milton’s Arminian theology, see Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace, 182–202.

20. An Apology, 12.

21. John Rumrich sketches some broad-brush ‘instances of intellectual resemblance’ in ‘Milton and Mead’, Milton Quarterly, 20 (1986), 136–9 (137).

22. The documents were discovered in 1996 by the late Jeremy Maule; see Campbell, Milton Chronology, 43, 46–7, which lists the records in the Hammersmith and Fulham Record Office.

23. John Bowack, Antiquities of Middlesex (1705), 35.

24. Cambell, Milton Chronology, 49; Edward Jones, ‘ “Ere Half my Days”: Milton’s Life, 1608–1640’, in McDowell and Smith, Oxford Handbook, 3–25 (14 n. 31).

25. Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 68; Beer, Milton, 57.

26. ‘Charles I – volume 153: December 1629’, in Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Charles I, 1629–31, ed. John Bruce (London, 1860), 111–30. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/domestic/chas1/1629-31/pp111-130. Thomas Faulkner, History and Antiquities of the Parish of Hammersmith (1839), 96–100.

27. Victor Slater, entry for ‘Edmund Sheffield, first Early of Mulgrave (1565–1646)’, in ODNB; Elizabeth Allen, entry for ‘John Everard (1584?–1640/41)’, in ODNB. C. H. Firth’s entry for ‘Edmund Sheffield, second Earl of Mulgrave (1611–58)’, mistakenly ascribes the association with Everard to the grandson rather than the grandfather. On Everard’s importance in the emergence of radical religious ideas in England, see also David R. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford, CA, 2004), 4–9, 219–65.

28. Ariel Hessayon, ‘John Everard’, in Marco Sgarbi (ed.) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy (Cham, 2017), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_485-1; Mr. John Arndt (that famous German divine) his book of Scripture . . . translated out of the Latine copie by Radulphus Castrensis Antimachivalensis (1646), sig. a4r. For the radical Puritan and sectarian contexts in which these mystical texts were read during the civil wars, see Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1989).

29. Faulkner, History and Antiquities of the Parish of Hammersmith, 106.

30. John Newman, ‘The Architectural Setting’, in Tyacke (ed.), Seventeenth-Century Oxford, 135–78 (164).

31. Hessayon, ‘John Everard’. Milton could have learned about Hermetic philosophy from more orthodox sources—Lactantius, one of the Church Fathers in whom Milton was most interested, quotes from the Hermetic books. See Edward Chauncy Baldwin, ‘A Note on “Il Penseroso” ’, Modern Language Notes, 33, 3 (1918), 184–5.

32. See Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 145–77.

33. Nigel Smith, ‘Retranslating the Bible in the English Revolution’, in Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith, and Rachel Willie (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530–1700 (Oxford, 2015), 98–112 (108); Como, Blown by the Spirit, 8. See also See Hutton, ‘Mede, Milton and More’, 33–5.

34. Peter Lake, ‘The Laudian Style: Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s’, in Kenneth Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church, 1603–42 (Basingstoke, 1993), 72–106.

35. All references to Crashaw’s poems are to Poems: English, Latin, and Greek, ed. L. C. Martin, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1957).

36. Corns, ‘ “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”, “Upon the Circumcision”, and “The Passion” ’, 219.

37. See Thomas Healy, entry for ‘Richard Crashaw (1612/13–1648)’, in ODNB.

38. See e.g. Austin Warren, Richard Crashaw: A Study in Baroque Sensibility (London, 1957). On the tendency to exclude Crashaw from the English literary tradition because of his ‘foreign’, i.e. Catholic, style, see also Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge, 1999), 97–104.

39. Healy, Richard Crashaw, 64.

40. British Library, Add. MSS 23146, fol. 33v.

41. Ann Hughes, ‘Thomas Dugard and his Circle in the 1630s: A “Parliamentary–Puritan” Connexion?’, Historical Journal, 29 (1986), 784. See also McDowell, English Radical Imagination, 92–5.

42. Sarah Barber, A Revolutionary Rogue: Henry Marten and the English Republic (Stroud, 2000), 9–10, 75; Roger Pooley, entry for ‘John Saltmarsh (d. 1647)’, in ODNB.

43. John Saltmarsh, A Solemn Discourse upon the Grand Covenant (London, 1643), 72.

44. John Saltmarsh, Poemata Sacra Latine et Anglice Scripti (Cambridge, 1636), 6.

45. Saltmarsh, ‘Meditation IX’, in Poemata Sacra, vernacular book, 11.

46. The ‘Directions’ are printed in Fletcher, Intellectual Development, 2: 623–64. See the illuminating discussion in relation to Crashaw in Healy, Richard Crashaw, 45–52.

47. John Harper, ‘ “One equal music”: the Music of Milton’s Youth’, Milton Quarterly, 31 (1997), 1–10.

48. The phrase is Carey’s in Complete Shorter Poems, 123. See e.g. Marshall Grossman, ‘ “In pensive trance, and anguish, and ecstatic fit”: Milton on the Passion’, in Mary Maleski and Russell A. Peck (eds.), A Fine Tuning: Studies of the Religious Poetry of Herbert and Milton (Binghamton, NY, 1989), 206–20; Lewalski, Life, 424.

49. Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, sig. A2r; Tetrachordon, 9.

9. In Search of Patronage

1. Defensio Secunda, 82–3. I prefer here the translation in Milton: Complete Poems, ed. Hughes, 828.

2. Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 69; Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Introduction’, in Tyacke (ed.), Seventeenth-Century Oxford, 16.

3. The Reason of Church-government, 41.

4. Parker’s arguments both for the 1633 dating of the letter, and for Young as the most likely addressee, remain persuasive if far from watertight (Milton: A Biography, 1: 783).

5. References are to the ‘transcription’ of the letter in Complete Prose Works, 1: 319–21, though it should be noted that the text is presented as what the editors believe ‘to have been Milton’s final intention’ (318).

6. Euripides, Medea, trans. Rex Warner (1944), lines 791–4. The echo is noted by Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace, 16 n. 4. On Milton’s copy of Euripides, see Maurice Kelly and S. D. Watkins, ‘Milton’s Annotations of Euripides’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 60 (1961), 680–87.

7. See Nicholas McDowell, ‘Milton’s Euripides and the Superior Rationality of the Heathen’, The Seventeenth Century, 31, 2 (2016), 215–37.

8. I am indebted here to Fallon’s detailed reading of the letter (Milton’s Peculiar Grace, 17–18).

9. The Reason of Church-government, 37, 41.

10. Leah Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (1996), 106.

11. Campbell and Corns mix up ‘the late R.’ and the ‘common friend R.’, identifying them both with Randolph and speculating on how Milton became friends with Randolph (104).

12. Lewalski, Life, 76. The point is well made by Ann Baynes Coiro, ‘Anonymous Milton, or “A Maske” Masked’, English Literary History, 71, 3 (2004), 609–29 (613–14).

13. CELM, ‘Introductions’, s.v. ‘John Milton’.

14. See now Poole’s discussion in Oxford Milton, 11: 322–3.

15. Cedric Brown, John Milton’s Aristocratic Entertainments (Cambridge, 1985), 47; Louise A. Knafla, entry for ‘Alice Spencer, Countess of Derby (1559–1637)’, in ODNB.

16. Ian Spink, Henry Lawes: Cavalier Songwriter (Oxford, 2000), 56.

17. See the extensive discussion of the personal and political contexts of this sonnet in Nicholas McDowell, ‘Dante and the Distraction of Lyric in Milton’s “To My Friend Mr Henry Lawes” ’, The Review of English Studies, 59 (2008), 232–54.

18. Mede, Apostasy of the Latter Times, 19.

19. Complete Prose Works, 1: 327.

20. Prynne, Historio-Mastix: the Players Scourge (1633), 587.

21. The original argument was made by Barbara Breasted, ‘Comus and the Castlehaven Scandal’, Milton Studies, 3 (1971), 201–24; Campbell and Corns go into some detail on the legal case (John Milton, 69–72).

22. Jonson, Complete Poems, 345–6.

23. See Emmanuel College, Cambridge, MS 68 (1. 3. 16), II, fols. 8r–16v, dated to c. 1630; CELM, s.v. ‘William Browne of Tavistock’.

24. See Gillian Wright, ‘Giving Them But Their Own: Circe, Ulysses, and William Browne of Tavistock’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 12 (1999), 190–217.

25. The text cited is [Townshend], Tempe Restored. A Masque Presented by the QVEENE, and foureteene Ladies, to the KINGS MAIESTIE at Whitehall on Shrove-Tuesday, 1631 (1631–2).

26. Sophie Tomlinson, Women on Stage in Early Stuart Drama (Cambridge, 2005), 52–4.

27. English Works of Roger Ascham, 225; see Gareth Roberts, ‘The Descendants of Circe: Witches and Renaissance Fictions’, in Jonathan Barry, Michael Hester, and Gareth Roberts (eds.), Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief (Cambridge, 1996), 183–206.

28. [Townshend], Tempe Restored, 17.

29. See e.g. Bonnie Lander Jonson, Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture (Cambridge, 2015), 103–37.

30. See e.g. Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge, 1989), passim.

31. The Muses Looking-Glass, in Thomas Randolph, Poems with the Muses looking-glasse; and Amyntas (Oxford, 1638), 31.

32. Conte, Mythologiae, trans. John Mulryan and Steven Brown, 2 vols. (Tempe, AZ, 2006), 2. 474. On Milton’s Maske in relation both to Homeric commentary and Tempe Restored, see Sarah Van de Laan, ‘Circean Transformation and the Poetics of Milton’s Masque’, The Seventeenth Century, 31, 2 (2016), 139–60.

33. Ann Baynes Coiro, ‘The Lady and the Maske’, in McDowell and Smith (eds.), Oxford Handbook, 89–111 (99).

34. [Townshend], Tempe Restored, 10.

35. Achsah Guibbory, ‘Milton and English Poetry’, in Corns (ed.), Companion to Milton, 72–90 (75).

36. Poems of Thomas Carew, ed. Rhodes Dunlop (Oxford, 1949), 157, lines 141–3.

37. On the Shakespearean echoes, see Complete Shorter Poems, 173; on Charles I’s copy of the 1632 Second Folio—where he presumably read Milton’s epitaph—see McDowell, ‘Milton’s Regicide Tracts and the Uses of Shakespeare’, 252–4.

38. Areopagitica, 13. Guillory makes a complex and influential argument for the tension between the Shakespearean and Spenserian elements of the Maske in Poetic Authority, 68–93; for various views on the Spenserian influence, which is undeniable but the nature of which is much contested, see the set of essays in the special issue of Milton Quarterly, 37 (2003), 179–244: ‘The Faerie Queene at Ludlow’.

10. Many Are the Shapes of Things Daemonic

1. Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 83–4.

2. The Bridgewater manuscript is now British Library, Loan MS 76. For detailed analysis of the various revisions, including some more minor changes to the text in the 1673 Poems, see Brown, Milton’s Aristocratic Entertainments, 132–52. The Trinity and Bridgewater texts are printed in the appendix to Oxford Milton, 3: 300–60. A ‘corrected impression’ of this volume was issued in 2014 after Paul Hammond identified errors of transcription, many of them in the texts of the Maske from manuscript (The Seventeenth Century, 28 (2013) 239–41).

3. This debt to Plutarch was first noted by Michael Lloyd, ‘ “Comus” and Plutarch’s Demons’, Notes and Queries 205 (1960), 421–3; see also Carey’s notes to the speech in Complete Shorter Poems, 175; and Shuger, ‘Milton’s Religion’, 143–4.

4. Plutarch, Philosophie, commonlie called, the morals, 1219, 1182. Further references to Holland’s translation of the Moralia are included in parentheses in the text.

5. Comus’s declaration that he and his crew are ‘spirits of purer fire’ seems to be taken from Randolph’s poem, ‘An Eclogue to Mr Jonson’, in which the shepherd Tityrus, who stands for Ben Jonson, tells the younger shepherd Damon, who stands for Randolph, that those such as themselves who write for a living are ‘souls of purer fire’; once again, the poetry of Milton’s more successful Cambridge contemporary, known for his libertine verse, is given to Comus—perhaps one reason why Milton, if he suffered from injured merit with regard to Randolph, can summon such rhetorical ‘vehemence’ in the Lady’s responses to Comus’s blandishments (Randolph, Poems, 100).

6. Luigi Battezato, ‘Dithyramb and Greek Tragedy’, in Barbara Kowalzig and Peter Wilson (eds.), Dithyramb in Context (Oxford, 2013), 93–110 (95).

7. See the suggestive discussion of Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s concept of sophrosyne in relation to the Maske in John Arthos, ‘Milton, Ficino, and the Charmides’, Studies in the Renaissance, 6 (1959), 261–74 (264).

8. See the illuminating discussion of how ‘the masque of temperance became the masque of virginity only in the 1637 printed text’ in J. Martin Evans, The Miltonic Moment (Lexington, KY, 1997), esp. 51–3.

9. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, ‘Oration: on the Dignity of Man, 1486’, trans. Douglas Brooks-Davies and Stevie Davies, in Renaissance Views of Man, ed. Stevie Davies (Manchester, 1979), 68–9.

10. Of Education, 5; Milton: Complete Poems, ed. Hughes, 600. See the classic essay by D. P. Walker, ‘Orpheus the Theologian and Renaissance Platonists’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 16, 1–2 (1953), 100–120. The various writings ascribed to Orpheus, including the Hymns, could be read in Lectius’s Poetæ Græci veteres carminis heroici scriptores (Geneva, 1606), with accompanying Latin glosses and an index.

11. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 10. 1–85.

12. My argument here has elements in common with William Kerrigan’s Freudian-inflected reading of the Maske in The Sacred Complex: On the Pyschogenesis of Paradise Lost (Cambridge, MA, 1983), esp. 42–4, 54–5.

13. On this aspect of the theology of the Maske, see also Shuger, ‘Milton’s Religion’, 113–14.

14. A venerable study of possible sources for Milton’s Platonic thought is Irene Samuel, Plato and Milton (Ithaca, NY, 1947).

15. The Life of Henry More by Richard Ward (1710), ed. Cecil Courtney, Sarah Hutton, Michelle Courtney, Robert Crocker, and A. Rupert Hall (Dordrecht, 2000), 18–20. On the availability and reception of Platonism in early modern England, see more generally Platonism and the English Imagination, ed. Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton (Cambridge, 1994), esp. 65–75. On Milton and Lactantius, see William Poole, ‘The Genres of Milton’s Commonplace Book’, in McDowell and Smith, Milton Handbook, 367–81 (377–9). Dimitri Levitin has recently argued, however, that More’s version of Platonism had little to do with that of Ficino (Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science (Cambridge, 2015), 132–9).

16. Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Peter Sterry MSS 289.

17. On Pico, see Jill Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, in Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, 1988), 303–85 (313–14).

18. Evans, Miltonic Moment, 64.

19. Twisse, A Discovery of D. Jacksons Vanity, sig. ***v, 438, 682; Hutton, ‘Thomas Jackson, Oxford Platonist’, 651–2.

20. John M. Steadman, ‘Milton’s Haemony: Etymology and Allegory’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 77, 3 (1962), 200–07.

21. Oxford Milton, 3: 60.

22. Complete Prose Works 1: 325–38. For the Latin (and Greek, in the Euripides quotation), see Milton, Epistolarum Familiarium (1674), 18–19.

23. Euripides, The Bacchae, in The Tragedies of Euripides, trans. T. A Buckley (1850), lines 1388–91.

24. Neil Rhodes, ‘Introduction’, in English Renaissance Translation Theory, ed. Neil Rhodes with Gordon Kendal and Louise Wilson (2013), 34.

25. Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1892), 1: 573-4, which, despite its age, is closer to Miltonic terms than more recent versions; Marsilio Ficino, ‘Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, 1484’, trans. Gordon Neal, in Davies (ed.), Renaissance Views of Man, 47.

26. Despite reading the Symposium as Christian allegory, Ficino did not deny the importance of male friendship to the Platonic philosophy of love, and maintained that spiritual love between men could lead to God. There is a learned and sensitive account of Milton’s ideas of friendship with Diodati in the context of Platonic homoeroticism in Gregory Chaplin, ‘ “One Flesh, One Heart, One Soul”: Renaissance Friendship and Miltonic Marriage’, Modern Philology, 99, 2 (2001), 266–92. Beer, Milton: Poet, Polemicist, and Patriot, 45–52, is more speculative about the homoerotic qualities of the friendship.

27. Nathanial Culverwell, An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature (1652), 47-8; he depends upon Romans 2: 14–15.

28. Shuger, ‘Milton’s Religion’, 142.

29. Stuart Clark, ‘Wisdom Literature of the Seventeenth Century: A Guide to the Contents of the “Bacon-Tottel” Commonplace Books. Part II’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 7, 1 (1977), 46–73 (49).

30. The shelf-mark of Milton’s Euripides is Bodleian Library Don. d. 27 and 28; the edition is Tragoediae quae extant, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1602). For accounts of the annotations, see Kelley and Atkins, ‘Milton’s Annotations of Euripides’; John K. Hale, ‘Milton’s Euripides Marginalia: Their Significance for Milton Studies’, Milton Studies, 27 (1991), 23–35.

31. Thomas Festa, The End of Learning: Milton and Education (2006), 26–7; see e.g. Bodleian Library Don. d. 27, 484.

32. Complete Prose Works, 1: 322–4.

33. For the identification of the copy of Boccaccio, see William Poole, ‘John Milton and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante’, Milton Quarterly 48 (2014), 139–70.

34. The Milton family Bible is British Library Add. MSS 32310.

11. The Circle of Studies

1. Complete Prose Works, 1: 323.

2. The supposed evidence for Milton senior’s discharge at his own request from the Company of Scriveners on 12 May 1636 has been lost since the late nineteenth century; see Jones, ‘Milton’s Life, 1608–40’, 16–17.

3. See Hilton Kelliher, entry for ‘Thomas Randolph (bap. 1605–1635)’, in ODNB.

4. Brett Usher, entry for ‘Thomas Gataker (1574–1644)’, in ODNB; Edward Jones, ‘ “Church-outed by the Prelates”: Milton and the 1637 Inspection of the Horton Parish Church’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 102, 1 (2003), 42–58.

5. Oxford Milton, 8: 116–19; Homer, The Odyssey, trans. A. T. Murray, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA., 1919), I, 1. 32–4. For some discussion of the quotations from Homer, see Sarah Van der Laan, ‘Milton’s Odyssean Ethics: Homeric Allusions and Arminian Thought in Paradise Lost’, Milton Studies, 49 (2009), 48–76.

6. Hilary Gatti, ‘Giordano Bruno and the Stuart Court Masques’, Renaissance Quarterly, 48, 4 (1995), 809–42. The classic study is Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964).

7. Justin Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge, 1992), 133–69.

8. On Hartlib’s access to Bodin’s manuscript, see Poole, ‘Milton’s Scholarship’, 39–40; and Louis I. Bredvold, ‘Milton and Bodin’s Heptaplomeres’, Studies in Philology, 21 (1924), 399–402.

9. Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge, 1987), 53–95, shows the ubiquity of Erasmus in student commonplace books; Fletcher, Intellectual Development of John Milton, 2: 562–3, 588, 620–1.

10. Erasmus, Literary and Educational Writings 2: De Copia / De Ratione Studii, ed. Craig R. Thompson, trans. Betty I. Knot and Brian McGregor, vol. 24 of Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto, 1978), 636, 638.

11. Peter Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book’, in W. Speed Hill (ed.), New Ways of Looking at Old Texts (Binghamton, NY, 1993), 131–47 (134).

12. John Hales, Golden Remains, 2nd edn. (1673), 288, 271, 274.

13. See John T. Murray, ‘John Hales on History’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 19, 3 (1956), 231–3. Compare Degory Wheare’s textbook De Ratione et Methodo Legendi Historias Dissertatio (1623), where the ‘philosophical’ (as opposed to ‘philological’) reading of history is divided into ‘Moral, Politick, Oeconomick and Military Examples’. The indispensable guide to Milton’s commonplace book is now William Poole’s introduction in Oxford Milton, 11: 11–82, whose scholarship I follow on the matters of dating the manuscript and its entries.

14. Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, in Schmitt and Skinner (eds.), Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, 305.

15. Jeffrey Alan Miller, ‘Reconstructing Milton’s Lost “Index Theologicus” ’, Milton Studies, 52 (2011), 187–219.

16. Bartholomaeus Keckermannus, Apparatus Practicus siue Idea Methodica et Plena Totius Philosophiæ Practicæ nempe Ethicæ, Oeconomicæ, & Politicæ (Hanover, 1609), 2nd pagination, 63; Joseph Freedman, ‘The Career and Writings of Bartholomew Keckermann (d. 1609)’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 141, 3 (1997), 305–64 (320).

17. The authoritative study is Jean-Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: the Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17th Century (Oxford, 2009).

18. John Hales, Sermons Preach’d at Eton (1660), 11–12; Quantin, Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 211.

19. Feingold, ‘Humanities’, 265. The presentation volume is now Trinity College, Dublin, 4. dd. 39. On Young’s reputation and practice as a biblical scholar, see Nicholas Hardy, Criticism and Confession: The Bible in the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters (Oxford, 2017), esp. 277–80.

20. See my discussion in the introduction to Oxford Milton, 6: 16–17.

21. Thomas Fulton, Historical Milton: Manuscript, Print, and Political Culture in Revolutionary England (Amherst and Boston, 2010), 156.

22. Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT and London, 2000), 318; Sharpe makes in passing an explicit comparison of the note-taking of Drake and Milton (292).

23. Oxford Milton, 11: 113–14, which also gives the original Latin text.

24. Areopagitica, 12, 17.

25. Oxford Milton, 11: 114–15.

26. Oxford Milton, 11: 211–12.

27. It is Bodleian Library, Arch A f. 145; for the identification, see Poole, ‘John Milton and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante’, which gives a full list of Milton’s annotations in appendix.

28. Poole, ‘John Milton and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante’, 11–12.

29. Of Reformation, 30. Bodleian Library, MS. Rawl. D. 929, ‘Juvenile Collecting of the Famous Joseph Mead’; the Petrarch translation appears on fol. 27r, entitled ‘The discriptione of hell’. See Deidre Serjeantson, ‘Milton and the Tradition of Protestant Petrarchism’, The Review of English Studies, 29 (2015), 632-49.

30. Complete Prose Works, 2: 764.

31. Foxe, Acts and Monuments (1576), bk. 4, 418; John R. King, Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in Paradise Lost (Cambridge, 2000), 24–5.

32. Oxford Milton, 11: 226–7. The index to the commonplace book has an entry for ‘de libris prohibitis’ but the reference is under the heading ‘lenitas’ (mildness), where Sarpi and de Thou are cited on prohibition of books.

33. Of Reformation, 53. See further Nigel Smith, ‘Milton and the Index’, in Holly Nelson and Donald R. Dickson (eds.), Of Paradise and Light: Essays for Alan Rudrum (Cranbury, NJ, 2004), 101–22.

34. Areopagitica, 24.

35. Jacobus Philippus Thomasinus, Petrarcha Redivivus Laura Comite (Padua, 1635), cited at Oxford Milton, 11: 247–8, probably sometime after 1643.

36. Boccaccio, Life of Dante, trans. G. R. Carpenter (New York, 1900), 83.

37. Apology Against a Pamphlet, 16.

38. Boccaccio, Life of Dante, 41–2.

39. Ibid., 42, 56, 96, 99, 104, 140.

40. Ibid., 127, 56.

41. Edward Jones, ‘ “Filling in a Blank in the Canvas”: Milton, Horton, and the Kederminster Library’, Review of English Studies, 53 (2002), 31–60; Poole, ‘Milton’s Scholarship’, 31–2, points out the problem with the different editions.

42. Oxford Milton, 3: 61.

43. William Poole, ‘‘Analysing a Private Library: A Shelf-List Attributable to John Hales of Eton, c. 1624’, in Edward Jones (ed.), A Concise Companion to the Study of Manuscripts, Printed Books, and the Production of Early Modern Texts (Oxford, 2015), 41–65.

44. Basil Greenslade, entry for ‘John Hales (1594–1656)’, in ODNB.

45. W. R. Parker, ‘Wood’s Life of Milton: Its Sources and Significance’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 52 (1958), 1–22 (4 n. 6).

46. A useful account of the circumstances surrounding the publication of the Historia in London is Hilary Gatti, Ideas of Liberty in Early Modern Europe: From Machiavelli to Milton (Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2015), 127–33.

47. Hales, Golden Remaines, 2nd edn. (1673), sig. A4v.

48. For the appeal of Erasmus to the Circle, see e.g. Sarah Mortimer, ‘Great Tew Circle (act. 1633–1639)’, in ODNB; Thomas Roebuck, ‘Milton and the Confessionalization of Antiquarianism’, in Jones (ed.), Young Milton, 48–71 (67 n. 16).

49. See Nicholas McDowell, ‘Self-Defeating Scholarship? Antiscripturism and Anglican Apologetics from Hooker to the Latitudinarians’, in Killeen, Smith, and Willie (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Bible, 223–54 (242–5).

50. Hales, Tract Concerning Schismes and Schismaticks, 1, 3, 7; Hales, Sermons Preach’d at Eton, 10–11.

51. Areopagitica, 26, 31.

52. Francis Cheynell, The Rise, Growth, and Danger of Socinianisme (1643); Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge, 2010), 22.

53. Campbell, Milton Chronology, 135 (20 February 1652); see further Campbell et al., Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana, 99–101; Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Milton and Antitrinitarianism’ in Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.), Milton and Toleration (Oxford, 2007), 171–85.

54. Chillingworth’s unpublished ‘Observations on the Scottish Declaration’, Lambeth Palace Library, Wharton MSS 943, fol. 890, quoted in Robert Orr, Reason and Authority: The Thought of William Chillingworth (Oxford, 1967), 192.

55. John Butt, ‘Izaak Walton’s collections for Fulman’s life of John Hales’, Modern Language Review, 29 (1934), 267–73.

12. Love and Death in ‘Lycidas’

1. Complete Prose Works, 1: 326–7.

2. Johnson, Lives of the Eminent Poets, 1: 278.

3. Norman Postlethwaite and Gordon Campbell, ‘Edward King, Milton’s “Lycidas”: Poems and Documents’, Milton Quarterly, 28 (1994), 77–111 (79).

4. Samson Briggs, ‘When common souls break from their courser clay’, in the English book of Justa Edouardo King naufrago (Cambridge, 1638), ‘Obsequies to the memorie of Mr Edward King’, 14–15, ll. 13–16; the text of Paman’s elegy is included in Postlethwaite and Campbell, ‘Edward King, Milton’s “Lycidas” ’, 92–5.

5. Bodleian Library, MS Rawl. poet. 147; Poetry and Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish Verse, 1625–1660 (Oxford, 1998), ed. Peter Davidson, 58–9 n. 53.

6. There is an ingenious account of the possible names on which Milton puns in both the Latin Prolusion and the English verses which followed it, to which I am indebted here, in Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 58–9.

7. Sarah Knight, ‘Milton and the Idea of the University’, in Jones (ed.), Young Milton, 137–60 (142).

8. Majorie Nicholson, ‘Milton’s “Old Damaetas” ’, Modern Language Notes, 61 (1926), 293–300.

9. Boccaccio, Life of Dante, 140.

10. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary Innes (Harmondsworth, 1955), 246–7.

11. On how images of sparagmos ‘struck at the heart of Milton’s sense of himself and his vocation’, see Michael Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1994), 38–82 (42).

12. An extended recent analysis of how allusion works in ‘Lycidas’ is Gordon Teskey, The Poetry of John Milton (Cambridge, MA, 2015), 166–202.

13. ‘Virgil Pastorals’, in The Works of Virgil, trans. John Dryden (1697), 1.

14. Amyntas, in Randolph, Poems, new pagination, 6.

15. Michael Lieb, The Sinews of Ulysses: Form and Convention in Milton’s Works (Pittsburgh, PA, 1989), 67; Evans, Miltonic Moment, 80. See also G. W. Pigman III, Grief and Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge, 1985), 109–24.

16. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche (Harmondsworth, 1987), I. x. 59.

17. Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Possession: Ovid, Spenser, and Counter-Nationhood (Toronto, 1997).

18. Alessandro Barchiesi and Philip Hardie, ‘The Ovidian Career Model: Ovid, Gallus, Boccaccio’, in Hardie and Moore (eds.), Classical Literary Careers and Their Reception, 59–88; James C. Kriesal, ‘Boccaccio and the Early Modern Reception of Tragedy’, Renaissance Quarterly, 69, 2 (2016), 415–48.

19. Rudierde, The Thunderbolt of God’s Wrath Against Hard Hearted and Stiff-Necked Atheists (1618) Chapter 22, 29; J. B. Leishman (ed.), The Three Parnassus Plays (1949), lines 290–93.

20. Nicholas McDowell, ‘ “Lycidas” and the Influence of Anxiety’, in McDowell and Smith, Oxford Handbook, 112–35 (112–17); Kilgour, Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid, 86–91; Paradise Lost, ed. John Leonard (Harmondsworth, 2000), xiii–xiv.

21. References are to Cheny and Striar (eds.), Collected Poems of Christopher Marlowe.

22. Warren Boutcher, ‘ “Who taught thee Rhetoricke to deceive a maid?”: Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Juan Boscán’s Leandro, and Renaissance Vernacular Humanism’, Comparative Literature, 52 (2000), 11–52.

23. This is to disagree with the influential reading of Stanley Fish, who regards the various digressive voices in the poem to leave it finally without a ‘unified consciousness’ (‘ “Lycidas”: A Poem Finally Anonymous’, in C. A. Patrides (ed.), Lycidas: The Tradition and the Poem, 2nd edn. (Columbia, MO, 1983)).

24. Evans, Miltonic Moment, 81; Works of Virgil, trans. John Dryden (London and New York, 1903), 483–6, lines 98–9.

25. Brinsley, Virgils Eclogues (1620), 95, 98; Ramus, P. Virgilii Maronis Bucolia (Paris, 1555); Melanchthon, Argumenta . . . in Eclogas Virgili (1568).

26. Dryden (trans.), Works of Virgil, lines 3–6.

13. Writing and Society in ‘Lycidas’

1. Animadversions, 58–9.

2. In David Norbrook’s influential reading, ‘Lycidas’ ‘marks a decisive and unambiguous commitment to the Spenserian tradition’ of reformist, anticlerical complaint (Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 2002), 256–8). For ‘bite-sheep’, see John Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 2 vols. (1583), 2: 1218.

3. Oxford Milton, 11: 117–18; again I use the the terza rima translation in The Divine Comedy, trans. Peter Dale (1996).

4. Of Reformation, 30.

5. Randolph, Poems, 95; CELM, s.v. ‘Thomas Randolph’.

6. David R. Como, ‘Predestination and Political Conflict in Laud’s London’, The Historical Journal, 46, 2 (2003), 263–94; Jason Peacey, ‘ “Printers to the University” 1586–1658’, and William Poole, ‘The Learned Press: Divinity’, in The History of Oxford University Press. Volume 1: Beginnings to 1780, ed. Ian Gadd (Oxford, 2013), 51–78 (64–5), 351–70 (355).

7. Randolph, Poems, 96.

8. Complete Prose Works, 1: 314.

9. Cleveland, ‘On the Memory of Mr. Edward King, Drown’d in the Irish Seas’, in Justa Eduardo King naufrago, ll. 1–8.

10. J. M. French, ‘The Digressions in Milton’s “Lycidas” ’, Studies in Philology, 50 (1953), 485–90 (488).

11. For a recent survey of the long history of elaborate explanations of the image, see John Leonard, ‘ “Lycidas” and the Millennium at the Door’, in Jones (ed.), Young Milton, 252–79.

12. Mede, ‘Epistle LXVI: Mr Mede’s Answer to Dr Twisse’s 7 Quare’s’, in Works (1664), 1031.

13. See Hutton, ‘Mede, Milton, and More’, 36–7.

14. See Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 99; Patrick McGrath, ‘Lycidas and Laud’, The Review of English Studies, 70 (2019), 252–71.

15. See Mede, Works (1677), 796, 818.

16. Constitutional Documents of the Reign of James I, ed. J. R. Tanner (Cambridge, 1961), 55–6.

17. Anthony Milton, Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England: The Career and Writings of Peter Heylin (Manchester, 2007), 53.

18. Oxford Milton, 11: 128–32. I use here the English translation of Dies Dominica published in 1672, with a preface by Richard Baxter: The Lords-day, or, A succinct narration compiled out of the testimonies of H. Scripture and the reverend ancient fathers, sig. a8v. As Poole observes, Jerome’s conspicuous absence from Milton’s commonplace book is due to the material collected in the manuscript being of a strictly ethical, rather than theological, nature (Oxford Milton 11: 46 n. 126).

19. Young, The Lords-day, sigs. b2v–b3r.

20. Hartlib cited in Miller, ‘Milton and the Conformable Puritanism of Richard Stock and Thomas Young’, 89–90.

21. John Bastwick, The answer of John Bastwick, Doctor of Phisicke . . . In which there is a sufficient demonstration, that the prelats are invaders of the Kings prerogative royall, contemners and despisers of holy Scripture, advancers of poperie, superstition, idolatry and prophanesse ([Leiden], 1637), 7.

22. For speculation about the ‘Index Theologicus’, see Oxford Milton, 11: 89.

23. John Rushworth, ‘The Star Chamber on printing, 1637’, in Historical Collections of Private Passages of State: Volume 3, 1639–40 (1721), 306–16 (British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/rushworth-papers/vol3/pp306-316).

24. Prynne, Canterburies doome, or, The first part of a compleat history of the commitment, charge, tryall, condemnation, execution of William Laud, late Arch-bishop of Canterbury (1646), 245.

25. Prynne, Twelve Considerable Serious Questions Touching Church Government (1644), 7.

26. Oxford Milton, 3: 571.

27. The argument was first made by John Leonard, ‘ “Trembling Ears”: The Historical Moment of “Lycidas” ’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 21 (1991), 59–81.

28. Piers quoted in John Reeks, ‘ “The churchwardens have not used to meddle with any seate”: Seating Plans and Parochial Resistance to Laudianism in 1630s Somerset’, The Seventeenth Century, 33, 2 (2018), 161–81 (175).

29. See the full account and references to parish records in Jones, ‘ “Church-outed by the Prelates”: Milton and the 1637 Inspection of the Horton Parish Church’.

30. Reeks, ‘ “The churchwardens have not used to meddle with any seate” ’, 177.

31. Of Reformation, 80–1.

32. John Leonard argues there is no need to equate King’s apotheosis with celibacy rather than chastity, as the ‘unexpressive nuptiall song’ more likely refers to Revelation, 19: 1, in which St John hears the voice of ‘all [God’s] servants . . . saying “Alleluia” ’, than 14: 1–4 (‘Milton’s Vow of Celibacy: A Reconsideration of the Evidence’, 191–3). But celibate or chaste, King’s sexual purity is seemingly rewarded with spiritual marriage to Christ.

33. See The Erasmus Reader, ed. Rummel, 239–48.

34. Dryden (trans.), Works of Virgil, lines 100–1, 110–14. There is also an echo of the end of Eclogue 1; see Pigman, Grief and Renaissance Elegy, 121–3.

35. Cleveland, ‘I like not tears in tune’, lines 11–12; F. T. Prince, The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse (Oxford, 1954), 71–88.

36. The Reason of Church-government, 38; Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (1579), sig. iir.

37. Patrick Cheney, ‘ “Joy on, joy on”: European Career Paths’, in Patrick Cheney (ed.), European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Toronto, 2002), 3–23 (9).

38. Christopher Ricks, ‘Milton: Poems (1645)’, in Christopher Ricks (ed.), Penguin History of Literature, ii. English Poetry and Prose, 1540–1674, rev. edn. (Harmondsworth, 1993), 245–75 (255).

14. Come un Virtuoso

1. Timothy Raylor, ‘Exiles, Expatriates and Travellers: Towards a Cultural History of the English Abroad, 1640–1660’, in Philip Major (ed.), Literatures of Exile in the English Revolution and its Aftermath, 1640–1690 (Aldershot, 2010), 15–44 (22–4). Vivian wrote a lengthy narrative of his travels (New College, MS 348), which is discussed by William Poole, ‘Daniel Vivian’s Grand Tour, 1636–37’, in New College Notes, 8 (2017) https://www.new.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2018-07/8NCN1%20%282017%29%20Poole%20on%20Vivian_0.pdf

2. In his account of his travels in the Defensio Secunda, Milton states that after about fifteen months abroad he returned just as the second Bishops’ War was about to occur; but that would date his return to the summer of 1640 and would mean he was away for 27 months, so the conclusion must be that Milton confused the first and second Bishops’ Wars.

3. Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 127.

4. Complete Shorter Poems, 254; Kerrigan, ‘Milton and the Nightingale’, 223.

5. I use the translation in Complete Prose Works, 4. 1: 619–20.

6. French, Life Records, 1: 149. Cerdogni’s album amicorum is now in the Houghton Library, Harvard University (MS Sumner 84, Lobby XI. 3. 43). See Horace, Epistulae, 1. 11. 27: ‘caelum, non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt’.

7. Wilfrid Prest, ‘John Cook (bap. 1608, d. 1660)’, in ODNB; Edmund Ludlow, A Voyce from the Watch Tower. Part Five: 1660–1662, ed. A. B. Worden (1978), 229.

8. English Works of Roger Ascham, 223.

9. Ibid., 225, 229, 232.

10. Complete Prose Works, 1: 330.

11. English Works of Roger Ascham, 234.

12. Oxford Milton, 3: 62.

13. Areopagitica, 24.

14. Michael J. Redmond, Shakespeare, Politics, and Italy (2009), 98. I thank Paul Slade for bringing this work to my attention in ‘Italia Conquistata: The Role of Italy in Milton’s Early Poetic Development’, PhD thesis, University of Exeter (2017).

15. William Thomas, Historie of Italie (1549), sig. A2r; Sir Philip Sidney: The Oxford Authors, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford, 1989), 286.

16. Greenslade, entry for Hales in ODNB; Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution, 83-4 (84).

17. Estelle Haan, From ‘Academia’ to ‘Amicitia’: Milton’s Latin Writings and the Italian Academies (Philadelphia, 1998), 19–21, 36; see also A. M. Cinquemani, Glad to go for a Feast: Milton Buonmetti, and the Florentine Academici (Oxford, 1998). Milton’s Italian tour has been well served by scholarship: see further Mario A. Di Cesare (ed.), Milton in Italy: Contexts, Images, Contradictions (New York, 1991); Filippo Falcone, ‘Milton in Italy: A Survey of Scholarship, 1700–2014’, Milton Quarterly, 50 (2016), 172–88; Catherine Gimelli Martin, Milton’s Italy: Anglo-Italian Literature, Travel, and Connections in Seventeenth-Century England (2016).

18. The manuscript was only rediscovered in 2010, having been missing since the eighteenth century; see Antonio Malatesti, La Tina: equivocali rusticali, ed. Davide Messina (2014).

19. Complete Prose Works, 4. 1: 615–16.

20. Complete Prose Works, 2: 767.

21. Complete Prose Works, 1: 334; Poole, ‘Daniel Vivian’s Grand Tour’.

22. Hardy, Criticism and Confession, 285–303.

23. Complete Prose Works, 1: 333.

24. Complete Prose Works, 2: 768–72.

25. Complete Prose Works, 2: 765; Feingold, ‘Humanities’, 265–6. For some interesting comments on the career of textual scholar as ‘an alternative scholarly future’ for the young Milton, see Sharon Achinstein, ‘High Enterprise: Milton and the Genres of Scholarship in the Divorce Tracts’, in Thomas Festa and Kevin J. Donovan (eds.), Scholarly Milton (Liverpool, 2019), 19–40 (20).

26. McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars, 61–8; Of Reformation, 35.

27. The point is well made by Poole, Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost, 45–7.

28. Oxford Milton, 3: 106–15; Campbell, ‘Milton’s Spanish’.

29. As Teskey nicely observes, in heaven Milton ‘will not gaze upon God (as Dante does) but, as we should expect, on himself’ (Poetry of John Milton, 207).

30. Satires, 1. i. 66, in Works of Horace, trans. James Londsdale and Samuel Lee (1900).

31. Roebuck, ‘Milton and the Confessionalization of Antiquarianism’, 50–1.

32. Helen Cooper, ‘Milton’s King Arthur’, The Review of English Studies, 65 (2013), 252–65.

33. Mark Greengrass, ‘Thinking with Calvinist Networks: From the “Calvinist International” to the “Venice Affair” (1608–1610)’, in Vivienne Larminie (ed.), Huguenot Networks, 1560–1780: The Interactions and Impact of a Protestant Minority in Europe (2018), 9–28 (13–14); for more detail on Élie Diodati’s association with Galileo, see Stephane Garcia, Élie Diodati et Galilée (Florence, 2006). See also Donald Clayton Dorian, The English Diodatis (New York, 1950).

34. Complete Prose Works, 2: 763.

35. See David Baker, ‘Cavalier Shakespeare: The “1640 Poems” of John Benson’, Studies in Philology, 95, 2 (1998), 152–73.

36. Dryden (trans.), Works of Virgil, lines 33–4.

37. R. W. Condee, ‘The Latin Poetry of John Milton’, in J. W. Binns (ed.), The Latin Poetry of English Poets (London and Boston, 1974), 58–92 (82).

38. Oxford Milton, 11: 115.

39. Brooke Conti, ‘Milton, Jerome, and Apocalyptic Virginity’, Renaissance Quarterly, 72 (2019), 194–230 (204); Jerome, ‘Letters and Select Works’, trans. W. H. Freemantle, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series (1994), 6: 366.

40. Hilmar M. Pabel, ‘Reading Jerome in the Renaissance: Erasmus’ Reception of the “Ad-versus Jovinianum” ’, Renaissance Quarterly, 55 (2002), 470–97.

41. For Calvin’s interpretation, see Institutes of the Christian Religion (1634), trans. Thomas Norton, 615; Sermons of John Donne, ed. Evelyn M. Simson and George R. Potter, 10 vols. (Berkeley, CA, 1953–62), 10: 43.

42. On Taylor and Revelation 14: 4, see Patrick McGrath, ‘Reconsidering Laud: Puritans and Anglican Asceticism’, Prose Studies, 34, 1 (2012), 32–49; on Taylor’s various unorthodox views, see McDowell, ‘Self-defeating Scholarship?’, in Killeen et al. (eds.), Oxford Handbook of the Bible; Poole, Milton and the Idea of the Fall, 50-7.

15. Becoming a Polemicist

1. J.H.M. Salmon, ‘Precept, example and truth: Degory Wheare and the ars historica’, in D. R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks (eds.), The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1997), 11–36.

2. Oxford Milton, 11: 189; Fulton, Historical Milton, 139, whose view is shared by Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2004), 237–8. Blair Worden argues against what he sees as a scholarly tendency to conflate the languages of civic humanism with constitutional republicanism in ‘Republicanism, Regicide and Republic: the English Experience’, in Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage. Volume I: Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2002), 307–28.

3. Drake cited in Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, 85; Alexandra Petrina, Machiavelli in the British Isles: Two Early Modern Translations of The Prince (Abingdon and New York, 2009), 64; Oxford Milton, 6: 151; 11: 216, 250–1.

4. Oxford Milton, 11: 221, 237–9.

5. Oxford Milton, 11: 212–13, 214. The Reason of Church-government, 29. On the early modern development of reading aids such as marginal notes and commonplace books, see e.g. Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT and London, 2010).

6. Oxford Milton, 6: 161.

7. Oxford Milton, 11: 360; Early Lives, 72–3.

8. Complete Prose Works, 5: 164.

9. Oxford Milton, 11: 277–8, where it is observed that Milton’s source may in fact be pseudo-Cyprian.

10. See, most recently, Russ Leo, ‘Scripture and Tragedy in the Reformation’, in Killeen et al. (eds.), Oxford Handbook of the Bible, 498–517; and, more generally, Leo, Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World (Oxford, 2019). For the argument that Milton’s reading in the 1640s of Buchanan’s late sixteenth–century Latin history of Scotland influenced his attitude to Arthurian myth, see Su Fang Ng, ‘Milton, Buchanan, and King Arthur’, The Review of English Studies, 70 (2019), 659–80.

11. See further Nicholas McDowell, ‘The Nation’s Poet? Milton’s Shakespeare and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms’, in Willy Maley and Rory Loughnane (eds.), Celtic Shakespeare: The Bard and the Borderers (Aldershot, 2013), 205–16.

12. Oxford Milton, 11: 369; Of Reformation, 68.

13. Complete Prose Works, 4. 1: 618–19.

14. Apology Against a Pamphlet, 9.

15. Jones, ‘Milton’s Life, 1608–40’, in McDowell and Smith, Oxford Handbook, 24–5.

16. Johnson, Lives of the Eminent Poets, 1: 248–9.

17. For more detailed discussion of the activities of the Phillips brothers, see Nicholas McDowell, ‘Family Politics: Or, How John Phillips Read His Uncle’s Satirical Sonnets (with Transcription from Bodleian MS Rawl. Poet. 30’, Milton Quarterly, 42 (2008), 1–22; Nicholas McDowell, ‘Refining the Sublime: Edward Phillips, a Miltonic Education, and the Sublimity of Paradise Lost’, Milton Studies, 61 (2019), 239–60.

18. Poole, Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost, 50, 65; see further the appendix, 297–300, which offers a systematic comparison of the curriculum proposed in Of Education with that experienced by Edward Phillips.

19. See Timothy Raylor, ‘Milton, the Hartlib Circle, and the Education of the Aristocracy’, in McDowell and Smith, Oxford Handbook, 382–406.

20. Of Education, 3.

21. ‘Smectymnuus’, An Answer to a Booke Entituled, An Humble Remonstrance (1641), 5, 65, 32.

22. The attribution of the ‘Postscript’ to Milton, first proposed by Masson in the nineteenth century, has been confirmed by the various techniques of stylistic attribution applied in David L. Hoover and Thomas N. Corns, ‘The Authorship of the Postscript to An Answer to a Booke Entituled, An Humble Remonstrance’, Milton Quarterly, 38 (2004), 59–75.

23. [Milton], ‘A Postscript’, in ‘Smectymnuus’, An Answer to a Booke Entituled, An Humble Remonstrance, 95.

24. Ibid., 95, 97, 103.

25. Milton, History of Britain (1670), 99.

26. The existence of the book was first noted by Edward Jones, ‘The Wills of Edward Goodall and Thomas Young and the Life of John Milton’, in Kristin A. Pruitt and Charles W. Durham (eds.), John Milton: ‘Reasoning Words’ (Selinsgrove, PA, 2008), 60–76 (72–3).

27. On the Reformatio and its reception in Elizabethan England, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven, CT, 1996), 501–2, 611; see also Karl Gunther, Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525–1590 (Cambridge, 2014), 52–3.

28. On the densely metaphorical style of the anti-prelatical writings, see Thomas N. Corns, The Development of Milton’s Prose Style (Oxford, 1982).

29. [Milton], ‘A Postscript’, in ‘Smectymnuus’, An Answer to a Booke Entituled, An Humble Remonstrance, 104; Of Reformation, 2–3.

30. Of Reformation, 13.

31. Oxford Milton, 11: 117–18, 119; Dante, Divine Comedy, 19. 7–9, 18, 46–8; 24. 23–4. As Poole points out, if Milton was thinking of the depiction of Martin IV in Dante, then the note should really be under the next heading in the manuscript, ‘Gula’ (Gluttony).

32. Of Reformation, 24.

33. Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 228–51.

34. Of Reformation, 25, 37.

35. Ibid., 26, 29–32.

36. Ibid., 41, 50–1, 53, 17.

37. See, respectively, Nigel Smith, ‘The Anti-Episcopal Tracts: Republican Puritanism and the Truth in Poetry’, in McDowell and Smith, Oxford Handbook, 155–73 (161); Janel Mueller, ‘Embodying Glory: the Apocalyptic Stain in Milton’s Of Reformation’, in David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (eds.), Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose (Cambridge, 1990), 9–40.

38. Of Reformation, 89.

39. See e.g. Thomas N. Corns, ‘Milton’s antiprelatical tracts and the marginality of doctrine’, in Dobranski and Rumrich (eds.), Milton and Heresy, 39–48; N. H. Keeble, ‘Milton and Puritanism’, in Corns (ed.), Companion to Milton, 124–40 (128–9).

40. Cited in Complete Prose Works, 1: 978.

41. Of Reformation, 43, 44.

42. Ibid., 42–3.

43. Ibid., 67–8, 72, 53.

16. The Poetics of Polemic

1. James Egan, ‘Milton and the Marprelate Tracts’, Milton Studies, 8 (1975), 103–21; Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1994), 297–304.

2. Animadversions, 8.

3. Ibid., 7–8.

4. Ibid., 8.

5. The Reason of Church-government, 11.

6. Ibid., 4.

7. Ibid.

8. Areopagitica, 17.

9. Ibid., 13, 18.

10. Ibid., 32.

11. The Reason of Church-government, 22, 24. On depictions of the Adamites, alleged to go naked as a sign of their restored perfection, see David Cressy, ‘The Adamites Exposed: Naked Radicals in the English Revolution’, in Cressy, Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1999), 251-79; on Familists and the Family of Love, see e.g. Como, Blown by the Spirit.

12. The Reason of Church-government., 29.

13. Jason Rosenblatt, ‘Milton, Natural Law, and Toleration’, in Achinstein and Sauer (eds.), Milton and Toleration, 126–43 (132). The classic argument for a revolution in Miltonic thinking in 1643–5, sparked by a reformulation of the relationship between natural law and divine law, is Ernest Sirluck’s introduction to Complete Prose Works, 2: 1–216.

14. Oxford Milton, 11: 113–14.

15. The Reason of Church-government, 10.

16. Ibid., 25.

17. Ibid., 53.

18. My argument here bears some comparison with that of Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace, who observes that Milton ‘smuggles the ethical self-image into his literary construction’ (99); on Homeric shame in the tract, see Richard Strier, The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (Chicago and London, 2011), 248–82.

19. Hales, Tract Concerning Schismes and Schismaticks, 1.

20. For arguments for Walywn’s influence on Milton, see most recently David Williams, Milton’s Leveller God (Montreal and Kingston, 2017), 37–42. The most influential account of Milton in relation to ‘popular’ radical culture has been Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (1977); for discussion and qualification of the idea of radical religious culture in the mid-seventeenth century as an efflorescence of popular culture, see McDowell, English Radical Imagination.

21. Marc Schwarz, ‘Lay Anglicanism and the Crisis of the English Church in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Albion, 14 (1982), 1–19; Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 209–27.

22. For the argument that Milton in 1641–2 ‘was no “Presbyterian” in the ways that we have currently thought about Presbyterianism, that is, in the Scottish, or Continental Calvinist version’, see Sharon Achinstein, ‘John Milton and the Communities of Resistance, 1641–42’, in Roger D. Sell and Anthony W. Johnson (eds.), Writing and Religion in Early Modern England, 1559–1689 (Aldershot, 2009), 298–304 (294).

23. Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Milton, Marvell, and Toleration’, in Achinstein and Sauer (eds.), Milton and Toleration 86–106 (102–3), citing Hugh Trevor-Roper’s influential and much-discussed essay, ‘Religious Origins of the Enlightenment’, in Trevor-Roper, Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change, 2nd edn. (1972), 193–236 (234–6). For recent, sceptical appreciations of Trevor-Roper’s arguments, see the essays by Noel Malcolm and John Robertson in Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Historian, ed. Blair Worden (2016). A more recent work that has much in common with Trevor-Roper’s thesis, and which persuasively puts de Thou, Sarpi, and Milton together, is Gatti, Ideas of Liberty in Early Modern Europe.

24. The Reason of Church-government, 23.

25. Ibid., 36, 37.

26. A point made in Poole (ed.), Milton, Areopagitica and Other Writings, xxiii.

27. Paradise Lost, 7. 31; Oxford Milton, 11: 373–5.

28. The Reason of Church-government, 37.

29. Ibid., 38; Harington, ‘Life of Ariosto’, in Orlando Furioso in English Heroic Verse (1591), 417-18.

30. The Reason of Church-government, 38.

31. Ibid., 39–40.

32. Ibid., 40–1.

33. Areopagitica, 4.

34. Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace, 98.

35. The Reason of Church-government, 40.

36. Ibid., 60; An Apology Against a Pamphlet, 19.

37. The Reason of Church-government, 64.

38. My position here is similar to that of Richard Strier in The Unrepentant Renaissance, 292–3, although Strier regards Milton as more fully invested in the structures of the Presbyterian system.

39. Anon., A Modest Confutation of a Slanderous and Scurrilous Libel, Entituled, Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence against SMECTYMNUUS (1642), sigs. A3r–v.

40. An Apology Against a Pamphlet, 17, 15–16.

41. Ibid., 16.

42. Ibid., 16, 5.

43. Ibid., 17.

44. Ibid., 17–18.

45. Ibid., 14.

46. Oxford Milton, 11: 277–8.

47. An Apology Against a Pamphlet, 45.

48. The Reason of Church-government, 62. For Milton’s ‘connection between a distinctive national language and a nation’s political climate’ in the early prose, see Hannah Crawforth, Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge, 2013), 147–84 (158).

49. Complete Prose Works, 4. 1: 625.

50. An Apology Against a Pamphlet, 50.

51. The suggestion of Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 156, that the poem ‘may have functioned as a spoof between uncle and nephews’ does not ring true to the dignified tone of the sonnet, although it does usefully invoke the pedagogical context in which Milton was likely studying Euripides in the early 1640s.

Epilogue: Towards Regicide and Epic

1. For a discussion of the theology of the De Doctrina Christiana that makes this general point, see Richard Strier, ‘Milton’s Fetters, or, Why Eden is Better than Heaven’, in Peter C. Herman and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.), The New Milton Criticism (Cambridge, 2012), 25–48.

2. Early Lives, 63.

3. Areopagitica, 3; Defensio Secunda, 90–1.

4. Sharon Achinstein, ‘Saints or Citizens? Ideas of Marriage in Seventeenth-Century Republicanism’, The Seventeenth Century, 25, 2 (2013), 240-64.

5. Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004), 318–415, is the most comprehensive guide to the Presbyterian polemical campaign of the mid-1640s against Independency and sectarianism.

6. Palmer, The Glass of God’s Providence (1644), 57. Prynne’s comments are in Twelve Considerable Serious Questions (1644). See the useful reprinting of the major attacks on Milton in 1644–5 in The Divorce Tracts of John Milton: Texts and Contexts, ed. Sara J. van den Berg and W. Scott Howard (Duquesne, PA, 2010).

7. Young, Hope’s Incouragement pointed at in a Sermon, Preached in St Margarets Westminster, before the Honourable House of Commons (1644), 32; Oxford Milton, 11: 162, 165; Milton, The Judgement of Martin Bucer, 15.

8. Poole, ‘More Light on the Literary Remains of Alexander Gil the Younger’, 215.

9. See, in the interim, my narrative of the composition of the Tenure in Oxford Milton, 6: 12–45.

10. Roy Gibson and Catherine Steel, ‘The indistinct literary careers of Cicero and Pliny the Younger’, in Hardie and Moore (eds.), Classical Literary Careers and their Reception, 118–37 (125).

11. The point is well made by Blair Worden, ‘John Milton: Literature and Life’, in Paul Hammond and Blair Worden (eds.), John Milton: Life, Writing, Reputation (Oxford, 2010), 1–21 (4).