Approaching from bibliographical, literary, cultural, and intercultural perspectives, this book establishes the importance of Hesperides, or the Muses’ Garden, a largely unexplored manuscript commonplace book to early modern English literature and culture in general. Hesperides, or the Muses’ Garden is a seventeenth-century manuscript commonplace book known primarily for its Shakespearean connections, which extracts works by dozens of early modern English authors, including Shakespeare, Bacon, Ben Jonson, and Milton. This book sheds light on the broader significance of Hesperides that refashions our full knowledge of early modern authorship and plagiarism, composition, reading practice, and canon formation. Following two introductory chapters are three topical chapters, which respectively discuss plagiarism and early modern English writing, early modern English reading practice, and early modern English canon formation. The final chapter further expands the field to ancient China, comparing commonplace books with Chinese leishu, exploring Matteo Ricci’s cross-cultural commonplace writing, and re-reading Shakespeare’s sonnets in light of Ricci’s On Friendship. The solid book will serve as a must read for scholars and students of early modern English literature, manuscript study, commonplace books, history of the book, and intercultural study.

Locating Milton: Places and Perspectives collects nine previously unpublished essays that examine Milton’s works as the product of his unique intellectual experiences at home and abroad, while also tracing the ways in which those works themselves express the influence of his travel, his reading, and his political engagement. Following an interpretive introduction that seeks to locate Milton through his last surviving letter, the first group of essays examine how young Milton locates himself through his travels in Italy, how Milton’s early reading leads him to situate himself intellectually, and how the intellectual framework Milton generated remains pertinent to students and communities today. The second group calculates the impact of early modern mathematical and scientific models on Milton’s cosmology, demonstrating how Milton’s complex negotiations of such models give form and perspective to his greatest poetic works. The final group of essays locates Milton distinctly through his works’ global reception, ranging from the anonymous English poem Praeexistence, to Milton’s place in the “new world” and science fiction, to his presence as a figure inspiring political resistance in communist Hungary.

This comprehensive bibliography lists some 500 source texts published in the British Isles or abroad from 1479 to 1660 and more than 2,000 works of secondary literature from 1900 to the present.