John Milton

Although John Milton is best known for his poems such as Paradise Lost, his prose works, including Areopagitica, The Tenure of Kings, and The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, are important in their own right. In this selection of Milton’s prose, C.A. Patrides presents the best possible texts of complete works in a format designed to enable students to understand Milton the thinker as well as to judge for themselves the achievements of Milton the artist in prose.

First published in 1974, C.A. Patrides ‘s edition of Milton’s prose has proved invaluable to students and scholars of Renaissance literature because it includes mostly the complete texts of Milton’s prose works. Now, in this new and updated edition, Patrides has revised his introduction and his bibliography to reflect advances in Milton scholarship in the past ten years. In addition, the selections have been expanded to include passages from Milton’s theological treatise De doctrina Christiana.

C.A. Patrides is G.B. Harrison Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author or editor of over twenty books, among them Milton’s “Lycidas”: The Tradition and the Poem (new and revised edition, University of Missouri Press, 1983).