This book will be required reading for Miltonists for a long time to come. Thirty-eight impressive essays, by thirty-four contributors, present Milton’s writing in an “unfolding biographical and historical context” (v). It is a handsome volume and beautifully organized.

Part I’s biographies by Edward Jones and Nicholas von Maltzahn provide accounts, respectively, of Milton’s earlier and later years. Part II includes Estelle Haan on the linguistic versatility of his early Latin poetry, Gordon Teskey on the beauties of the early English poems, Ann Baynes Coiro on the Maske read in the context of masques in the 1630s, Nicholas McDowell on “Lycidas” in relation to Marlowe, and John Leonard on “opposed impulses towards opacity and tranquility” in the endings of Milton’s English sonnets (137).

The next three parts of the volume focus on the prose. In Part III, Nigel Smith defines Milton’s distinctive “Republican Puritanism” in his antiepiscopal tracts, which include “ancient political and civic thought” (172). Sharon Achinstein explains the divorce tracts’ relation to Parliament’s efforts to define marriage, while Diane Purkiss analyzes their implications for the lives of women. There are also two essays on Areopagitica: historian Ann Hughes shows how Milton negotiated the complexities and tensions in Parliament’s debate over church government and the press; Blair Hoxby traces the way the tract weaves together the “liberties” Milton found in the Bible, the ancients, and common law.

Part IV, the largest section except for that devoted to Paradise Lost, illuminates Milton’s engagement with the political issues of the Commonwealth and Protectorate into the Restoration. Stephen M. Fallon unfolds the arguments of Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, while McDowell discusses the regicide tracts’ uses of Shakespeare. Joad Raymond examines Milton’s arguments in his three Defences, marking differences among them, while Haan uncovers Milton’s witty use of the Latin poets in the Defensio. N. H. Keeble discusses Of Civil Power, The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings, and The Readie and Easie Way as republican tracts. Elizabeth Sauer examines the difficult relation between toleration and nationhood in the late religious tracts. This section concludes with a wide-ranging essay by Paul Stevens that takes on not just the prose but also the major poetry, showing the persistence yet complexity of Milton’s enduring commitment to the “nation.”

Part V, more of a miscellany, discusses Milton’s Commonplace Book (William Poole), Of Education (Timothy Raylor), History of Britain (Martin Dzelzainis), and De Doctrina Christiana (Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns).

Milton’s great poems are the subject of the rest of the volume, with eight essays devoted to Milton’s Paradise Lost. Charles Martindale finds Milton producing “something radically new” through profound “engagement with the classical epic tradition” (441). On either side of Stephen Dobranski’s informative essay on editing Milton stand elegant essays by John Creaser (on the energetic verse rhythm of Milton’s epic) and Karen L. Edwards, whose meticulous reading of two passages demonstrates how the interaction of “the metaphoric world imported into the poem” and “the world of seventeenth-century England” creates the “world” of the poem (497). Nigel Smith returns to the issue of heresy, emphasizing its original meaning in Greek philosophy as “choice” as he examines “Creation” and “Love in Paradise”, and the poem’s emphasis on free will theology. A brief essay on “God” by Stuart Curran is followed by two views of the politics of the epic: Susan Wiseman on Milton’s representation of Eve in relation to seventeenth-century women’s writing on obedience, and Dzelzainis on how Milton’s experience of the political culture of Cromwell’s regime informs Paradise Lost.

Laura Lunger Knoppers’s invaluable essay on the political and religious contexts of the “1671 Poems” opens Part VII. One essay on Paradise Regained, compared with three on Samson Agonistes, reflects current interests. Focusing on the climactic action of Paradise Regained, John Rogers shows the poem’s Arianism and dependence on Paradise Lost. While the essays on Samson acknowledge the revisionist critical position that questions Samson’s heroism, they implicitly counter those readings. For R. W. Serjeantson, contemporary literature of political resistance would make Samson’s actions seem legitimate. Regina M. Schwartz looks at Samson’s violence in terms of “biblical violence,” understood to be “just” and “redemptive,” not retributive. Elizabeth Harvey, attending to the function of emotion, passion, and the senses in the poem, finds the poem not an “incitement to violence” but a “homeopathic remedy” leading to “ethically responsible ways of being” (666).

The final part, Part VII, concerns reception and influence, though Martindale’s earlier essay discusses Joseph Addison. Anne-Julia Zwierlein reveals political subtexts of Milton’s eighteenth-century reception. Joseph Wittreich shows how Milton became the source of the Romantic writers’ “visionary poetics” (704).

As this brief overview suggests, this Oxford Handbook offers various critical and scholarly approaches to Milton. Though most essays are historicist, others primarily concern aesthetics, genre, and poetic language. But even the historically oriented essays in the volume are attentive to language and the text. Some essays on Milton’s poems draw connections with the prose, thus giving readers a strong sense of Milton’s integrity as a writer and thinker. Adding to the coherence of this handbook, certain issues reappear: Milton’s heretical independence, his engagement with republicanism, his preoccupation with the nation. Multiple perspectives on the same text or issues contribute to the sense of an ongoing conversation among the contributors.

The currency of this superb volume makes it something every Miltonist (or budding Miltonist) will want to read now. Still, limitations and exclusions are inevitably created by any collection’s boundaries and its editors’ focus. Religion in this handbook is mainly theology (and even, mainly, heresy), although religion had much larger purchase in Milton’s time—and in his writing. Indeed, in the volume as a whole politics trumps religion, and the (masculine) classical tradition gets more attention than the Bible, or feminist perspectives.

There could be fuller acknowledgement of important scholarship. While some authors footnote a generous number of critical and scholarly works, other essays are light in their references. Sometimes recent work is overlooked (e.g., Sauer’s otherwise excellent essay does not mention Douglas Brooks’s important collection Milton and the Jews). Moreover, since religion in this volume is restricted to matters of theology, some essential work goes unmentioned. I fear a consequence of limited references and no separate bibliography may be that junior or future scholars will not read anything that is not explicitly mentioned here. That fourteen of the thirty-four contributors are connected with the Oxford edition of The Complete Works of John Milton (and uniquely suited to make important, original contributions to Milton studies) means that the handbook will effectively stand as its companion, shaping the future of Milton studies. For that reason, I could have wished for even greater inclusivity in the scholarship cited—and that all thirty-eight essays were by different scholars.

Still, this first-rate volume presents much of the best thinking around about Milton, informed by new insight and research. And although it addresses specialists, several particularly accessible essays would be useful even for undergraduates—von Maltzahn’s life, Leonard’s on the sonnets, Campbell and Corns’s definition of key theological terms, Stevens’s on national identity, and Smith’s on heresy in Paradise Lost.