This catalogue provides extensive bibliographical descriptions of 224 editions and translations of Milton's works printed before 1801, as well as less detailed descriptions of 233 other works, the more important Miltoniana in the Library.

First published by Otago University Press in 2005. The book brings together seventeen essays by John Hale on topics ranging from Milton's verse paraphrase of Psalm 114 in 1624, at the age of 15, to his rearrangement of Paradise Lost along arguably Virgilian lines in 1674, the year of his death. Fourteen of the essays were published previously from 1982-2003 in geographically scattered journals, some of them not readily accessible. Three new essays on the theological treatise De Doctrina Christiana are included and, together with an essay of 2003, they apply the subject of multilingualism to that work. The essays are grouped into five sections - "Composing,""Language-Arts,""Self-Understanding,""Paradise Lost and its Early Reception,"and "De Doctrina Christiana and Language-Issues."Brief preambles or headings are added to each section and an "Afterword"follows each chapter. This five-part structure and the new preambles and Afterwords invest the volume with a rationale, shaping it into a book in its own right.

Bringing together literary criticism, historical bibliography, and religious, political, and print history, this volume offers a definitive scholarly edition of John Milton's Paradise Regain'd and Samson Agonistes. The scrupulously-edited text is based on extensive collation of the 1671 and 1680 volumes. Drawing on new archival sources and up-to-date historiography, a detailed Introduction sets out the cultural, religious, and political contexts of 1670-71, including continuing opposition to the Restoration regime and the major contribution made to that opposition by publishers and print. While the meanings of the 1671 poems have been much discussed and debated, print and publishing history has been little addressed in teaching editions or scholarship. New archival materials on Milton's publisher, John Starkey, and his printer, John Macock, open up the radical print networks in which Milton's poems were produced, published, and circulated. The Textual Introduction and Headnote also provide a thorough discussion of the contributions of the printing house to the text. Reconstruction of the octavo sheets used in printing the text shows that multiple compositors worked on the text and thus helps to explain variant spelling and address longstanding issues of dating. A discussion of Milton's bold transformation of classical epic and tragedy provides literary historical context. This edition also breaks new ground by including materials on early owners and readers, who actively shaped the texts with corrections, annotations, and references to biblical and classical sources. As an aid for students and scholars alike, Textual Commentary provides precise OED word definitions, identifies biblical, classical, historical, and geographical references, and explains Latin, Greek, and Hebrew usages. This volume will be of interest to scholars of Milton, of Renaissance literature, of print and publishing history, of history of the book, and of early modern cultural, political, and religious history.

"... A history of the Alexander Turnbull Library"--P. vi.

An original study of Milton's authorship and the material production of his texts in relation to the booktrade.

A guide to print culture in Aotearoa, the impact of the book and other forms of print on New Zealand. This collection of essays by many contributors looks at the effect of print on Maori and their oral traditions, printing, publishing, bookselling, libraries, buying and collecting, readers and reading, awards, and the print culture of many other language groups in New Zealand.

Four hundred years after his birth, John Milton remains one of the greatest and most controversial figures in English literature. The Oxford Handbook of Milton is a comprehensive guide to the state of Milton studies in the early twenty-first century, bringing together an international team of thirty-five leading scholars in one volume. The rise of critical interest in Milton's political and religious ideas is the most striking aspect of Milton studies in recent times, a consequence in great part of the increasingly fluid relations between literary and historical study. The Oxford Handbook both embodies the interest in Milton's political and religious contexts in the last generation and seeks to inaugurate a new phase in Milton studies through closer integration of the poetry and prose. There are eight essays on various aspects of Paradise Lost, ranging from its classical background and poetic form to its heretical theology and representation of God. There are sections devoted both to the shorter poems, including 'Lycidas' and Comus, and the final poems, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. There are also three sections on Milton's prose: the early controversial works on church government, divorce, and toleration, including Areopagitica; the regicide and republican prose of 1649-1660, the period during which he served as the chief propagandist for the English Commonwealth and Cromwell's Protectorate, and the various writings on education, history, and theology. The opening essays explore what we know about Milton's biography and what it might tell us; the final essays offer interpretations of aspects of Milton's massive influence on later writers, including the Romantic poets.

This is a descriptive catalog of one of the world's largest collections of Milton and Miltoniana. Housed at USC's Thomas Cooper Library, the Wickenheiser Collection contains more than six thousand volumes, including more than sixty 17th-century editions of Milton's writings and significant holdings of 17th-century Miltoniana.

A Handbook of Editing Early Modern Texts provides a series of answers written by more than forty editors of diverse texts addressing the 'how-to's' of completing an excellent scholarly edition. The Handbook is primarily a practical guide rather than a theoretical forum; it airs common problems and offers a number of solutions to help a range of interested readers, from the lone editor of an unedited document, through to the established academic planning a team-enterprise, multi-volume re-editing of a canonical author. Explicitly, this Handbook does not aim to produce a linear treatise telling its readers how they 'should' edit. Instead, it provides them with a thematically ordered collection of insights drawn from the practical experiences of a symposium of editors. Many implicit areas of consensus on good practice in editing are recorded here, but there are also areas of legitimate disagreement to be charted. The Handbook draws together a diverse range of first person narratives detailing the approaches taken by different editors, with their accompanying rationales, and evaluations of the benefits and problems of their chosen methods. The collection's aim is to help readers to read modern editions more sensitively, and to make better-informed decisions in their own editorial projects.