John Milton

Edited with Introduction, Notes and Commentary N. H. Keeble, Professor Emeritus of English Studies, University of Stirling, and Edited with Introduction, Notes and Commentary Nicholas McDowell, Professor of Early Modern Literature and Thought, University of Exeter

N. H. Keeble is Professor Emeritus of English Studies at the University of Stirling, Scotland, from which he retired in 2010 as Senior Deputy Principal. His academic and research interests lie in English cultural (and especially literary and religious history) of the early modern period, 1500-1725. His publications in this field include studies of Richard Baxter: Puritan Man of Letters (1982), The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in later seventeenth-century England (1987), The Restoration: England in the 1660s (2002), a two-volume Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter (1991; with Geoffrey F. Nuttall) and editions of texts by Richard Baxter, John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, Lucy Hutchinson and Andrew Marvell. He currently leads an AHRC funded project to prepare a scholarly edition of Richard Baxter's Reliquiae Baxterianae for publication by Oxford University Press.

Nicholas McDowell is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Thought at the University of Exeter. His visiting positions have included Membership of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He is the author of The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630-1660 (OUP, 2003) and Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit (OUP, 2008), and he is the editor, with Nigel Smith, of The Oxford Handbook of Milton (OUP, 2009; paperback, 2011), which was awarded the 2009 Irene Samuel Award of the Milton Society of America for most distinguished collection. In 2007 he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize by the Leverhulme Trust. He is currently writing an intellectual biography of Milton.

"demonstrates the diffusion of literary language into high politics...These moments exemplify not just the meticulous scholarship through which the editors this volume have situated these tracts anew, but the novel avenues for interpretation that they have opened up in doing so, surely the most important gauge of a new edition's success...This volume makes outstanding contributions to our local understanding of Milton'¢s political prose." - Joe Moshenska, The Times Literary Supplement

"exemplifes the benefits of the readiness of literary critics to engage with historical scholarship [and] surpasses the corresponding portions of the Yale [edition of the texts] in scholarly exactness and judgement." - Blair Worden, London Review of Books

"Through its introduction, headnotes, freshly edited texts, and elaborate endnotes, the volume synthesizes much of the bibliographical and historical work on Milton's English political prose writings that concern civil and religious liberty, republicanism, and the resistance of tyranny. It also adds additional scholarship on the European reception of Eikonoklastes, including collation of the French edition, and provides rich information about the circumstances, context, and subsequent print afterlife of these works." - Milton Society of America Awards Committee

"This is the finest edition of these works that we have had or are likely to have. The care over producing totally trustworthy texts of these extraordinary writings is itself extraordinary...my abiding sense is one of awe at the scale of editorial concentration and gratitude, for, as the dust-jacket puts it, âtaken together [all the] features constitute the definitive edition of these texts for the twenty-first century." - John Morrill, Milton Quarterly

"this edition deserves to be widely used" - Jason Peacey, English Historical Review