This is the fourth volume to be published in Oxford’s 11-volume edition of the Complete Works of John Milton, the first complete scholarly edition for nearly 100 years. It brings together (for
the first time in a single volume) Milton’s English writing in prose on the political issues that exercised him throughout his life - civil and religious liberty, republicanism and the
constitution of a free commonwealth, the rights and duties of citizens, resistance of tyranny and the role of military force in securing national stability. The eleven pieces here presented in
chronological order, from The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) to Milton’s last prose work, his translation of the proclamation announcing the election of John Sobieski as King of Poland
(1674), articulate his responses to the unprecedented events of the seventeenth century - civil war, regicide, the Commonwealth, Cromwellian rule, the Restoration of monarchy and the restored
Stuart regime -- events which shaped the social, political and religious structures of modern Britain. They do so with unrivalled polemical and rhetorical skill, instinct with revolutionary
fervour and political idealism.
Each title is freshly edited from newly examined and collated copies of either the first and subsequent seventeenth-century editions or of the manuscript record to give the most accurate and
authoritative texts. A headnote to each analyses and discusses (often with new evidence) its composition, production and reception. A very substantial general introduction sets the writings in
the context of European intellectual history and of contemporary British controversy and polemic. References and allusions to events and to texts are elucidated by full and detailed annotation
and commentary which takes full account of recent Milton scholarship but also often draws on original research. Taken together, these features constitute the definitive edition of these texts
for the 21st century.
Both editors are established seventeenth-century scholars with expertise particularly in the political and religious literature of the Civil War, Interregnum and Restoration periods.
