Notes to Chapter 1Register of Christ’s College, 1505–1905, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1910–13), I, 387, 414–16.
Other poets of Christ’s before Milton’s time were Barnabe Googe and the emblematist
Francis Quarles ( Peile, Biographical Register, I, 56, 387, 254).
9 John Peile, Christ’s College (London, 1900), 121–59, and Peile, Biographical Register, I,
211–12, 141–2, 89–90, 94, 295–6, 143–4, 185–6.
10 Mullinger, University of Cambridge, II, 567; III, 15–63; John Twigg, The University of
Cambridge and the English Revolution, 1625–1688 (Cambridge, 1990), 11–41. The mas-
ter of Christ’s from 1609 to 1622, Valentine Cary, had been a fervent anti-Calvinist. In
Milton’s years the university’s chief governing officers, the annually elected vice-chan-
cellors, were John Mansell, John Gostlin, Henry Smyth, Thomas Bainbridge, Matthew
Wren, and Henry Butts.
11 Donald L. Clark, “John Milton and William Chappell,” Huntington Library Quarterly 18
(1955), 329–50. Masson (I, 129) quotes a contemporary who claimed that Chappell
“Arminianized” many of his students; that doctrinal bent is likely enough, since Arch-
bishop Laud later supported his appointment as Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, and
Bishop of Cork. Later also he wrote an art of preaching, Methodus Concionandi (London,
1648) and a tract on The Use of Holy Scripture (London, 1653).
12 The work was published in Latin in 1627 but not in English translation until after the
revolution began (The Key of the Revelation, London, 1643), rpt. in Works, 1648, 1664.
As Christopher Hill points out in The World Turned Upside Down (New York, 1972,
95–6), no vernacular translations of seminal works on Revelation and Daniel were
published in England until the early 1640s, since prophetic application of the apocalyp-
tic signs to the present historical moment had radical political implications troubling to
the establishment (the casting down of kings, the rule of the saints). See John Rumrich,
“Mead and Milton,” MQ 20 (1986), 136–41.
13 Letters to and from Mede and a variety of correspondents are published in Thomas
Birch, ed., The Court and Times of Charles I, 2 vols (London, 1848). Vol. 1 contains
letters written during the 1620s to and from Mede and Sir Martin Stuteville (a kins-
man), Dr James Maddus (a Londoner with connections in German universities and the
court), Sir William Boswell (Charles I’s resident at The Hague), John Pory (writing
from Venice, Amsterdam, and Virginia), and others.
14 The curriculum prescribed by the Elizabethan statutes of 1561 – rhetoric in the first
year, logic in the second and third, metaphysics in the fourth – had been much modi-
fied in practice.
15 Directions for a Student in the Universitie by Richard Holdsworth, a tutor at Emmanuel in
Milton’s time, outlines a course of study in which Latin and Greek literature and the
Bible (in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and English) are studied throughout; first-year tutorials
focus on logic and ethics; and students in subsequent years take up politics, rhetoric,
physics (natural science), astronomy, geography, metaphysics, and theology. Holdsworth’s
Directions is reprinted in Fletcher (II, 623–64). At Trinity, contemporary records indi-
cate that lectors read and expounded Aristotle to the students, progressing from logic to
ethics, physics, and metaphysics; their other major texts were Isocrates, Demosthenes,
Plato, Homer, Hesiod, and Cicero. See Fletcher, II, 53–350 and Masson, I, 259–72.
16 According to his records, Bibles, catechisms, Calvinist theology texts, Latin and Greek
Grammars, the major classical poets, rhetoricians, and historians as well as English trans-
lations of such texts were often purchased, as were some English texts, including Bacon,
Notes to Chapter 2