PrefacexivAcknowledgments
I cannot begin to indicate, let alone properly thank, all the scholars, past and present,
whose writings or comments have contributed to this book. To mention them here
by name would be to replicate the notes and bibliography, which are themselves
only a partial and inadequate record of debts accumulated over a scholarly lifetime
of reading and thinking about Milton and his milieu. I have profited especially from
stimulating and helpful responses to portions of this work in progress by colleagues
in the Northeast Milton Seminar, the Milton Society of America, the International
Milton Symposia at Bangor and at York, the Literature and History Conference at
Reading, England, the Renaissance Society of America Conference in Florence,
and the Renaissance Doctoral Conference at Harvard. Several libraries and their
research librarians made needed resources available: the British Library, the Bodleian
Library, Trinity College (Oxford), and Christ’s College Libraries in Cambridge Uni-
versity, the Public Record Office, the Guildhall (London), the Widener and Houghton
Libraries at Harvard University, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the New York
Public Library, the J. Pierpont Morgan Library, and the Newberry Library.
Special thanks are due to Gordon Campbell, who kindly sent me a typescript of
his Milton Chronology before publication, to Cedric Brown, who did the same with
his John Milton: A Literary Life, to Susanne Woods, who read the entire manuscript
and pushed me to think harder about several issues, to Violet Halpert, who read the
proofs with the expertise of a Miltonist and an editor, to colleagues at Harvard who
supplied answers to particular questions, and to several generations of graduate stu-
dents in Milton seminars at Harvard and Brown who were a continuing source of
valuable ideas and insights. David Lewalski used his graphic skills to make my
photograph of Milton’s gravestone useable.
This book was especially fortunate in its editors: the series editor Claude Rawson,
who invited the biography and gave the manuscript a meticulous and helpful read-
ing, Andrew McNeillie of Blackwell Publishers, who offered encouragement, sug-