No More Heroes Anymore? The Latest Life of John Milton

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Notes

1. The other quatercentenary biographies are Anna Beer, Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, & Patriot (London: Bloomsbury, 2008) and Neil Forsyth, John Milton: A Biography (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2008). David Hawkes's biographical ‘essay’ appeared the following year: John Milton: A Hero for Our Time (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2009).

2. “Milton's Classical Republicanism,” in Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 14.

3. Barbara K. Lewalski, “How Radical Was the Young Milton?’ in Milton and Heresy, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 50.

4. See Edward Jones, “‘Ere Half my Days’: Milton's Life, 1608–1640,” in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 14 n. 31.

5. Graham Parry, Glory, Laud and Honour: The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2006; pbk. edn., 2008), 154–55. See also Thomas N. Corns, “Milton Before ‘Lycidas’,” in Milton and the Terms of Liberty, ed. Graham Parry and Joad Raymond (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), 23–36.

6. John Leonard, “‘Trembling Ears’: The Historical Moment of ‘Lycidas’,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 21 (1991): 59–81; Edward Jones, “‘Church-Outed by the Prelates’: Milton ad the 1637 Inspection of the Horton Parish Church,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 102 (2003): 42–58.

7. For my own recent engagement with these issues, see Nicholas McDowell, “Authorship and Authority in Recent Milton Criticism,” The Seventeenth Century 24.2 (2009): 361–70; Nicholas McDowell, “How Laudian Was the Young Milton?” Milton Studies 52 (2011): 3–22.

8. See further Nicholas McDowell, “From Belfast to Baghdad: Editing Milton's Prose for the Twenty-First Century,” Critical Quarterly 52.4 (2010): 37–47.

9. In this respect, John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought might valuably be read alongside Nigel Smith's Is Milton Better Than Shakespeare? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).