Areopagitica and Other Writings

Description

A major new edition of Milton’s selected works of prose, including his political and doctrinal writings and the famous Areopagitica
 
John Milton was celebrated and denounced in his own time both as a poet and as a polemicist. Today he is remembered first and foremost for his poetry, but his great epic Paradise Lost was published very late in his life, in 1667, and in his own time most readers more readily recognized Milton as a writer of prose. This superbly annotated new book is an authoritative edition of Milton’s major prose works, including Of Education, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, and the Divorce tracts, as well as the famous 1644 polemical tract opposing licensing and censorship, Areopagitica.

For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.“An engaging, accessible, and reliable introduction to Milton’s prose . . . Sprightly, purposeful, and crisp [with a] deft and lucid introduction . . . The editorial apparatus is economical but pertinent. . . . [The] notes are always relevant and reliable.” —Milton QuarterlyJohn Milton (1608–1674) was born in London and studied at the University of Cambridge. Thereafter he spent some years in private study, visiting France and Italy in the late 1630s. Upon his return to a nation now in political crisis, he devoted himself to teaching and to the publication of a series of increasingly radical pamphlets on religious and political liberty, including defenses of divorce, a free press, and the right of a people to depose and execute a tyrannical king. After the Restoration he was politically muzzled, but in this period he published his mature poetic masterpieces, including Paradise Lost (1667).
 
William Poole (editor) is a tutorial fellow at New College, Oxford. He has published widely in the areas of early-modern literary, intellectual, and scientific history.GB