This nine volume set presents in easily accessible format the extensive information now available about John Milton. It has grown to be a study of English civilization of Milton's time and a history of literary and political matters since then.

Kant and Milton brings to bear new evidence and long-neglected materials to show the importance of Kant’s encounter with Milton’s poetry to the formation of Kant’s moral and aesthetic thought. Sanford Budick reveals the relation between a poetic vision and a philosophy that theorized what that poetry was doing. As Plato and Aristotle contemplate Homer, so Kant contemplates Milton. In all these cases philosophy and poetry allow us to better understand each other. Milton gave voice to the transformation of human understanding effected by the Protestant Revolt, making poetry of the idea that human reason is created self-sufficient. Kant turned that religiously inflected poetry into the richest modern philosophy. Milton’s bold self-reliance is Kant’s as well.Using lectures of Kant that have been published only in the past decade, Budick develops an account of Kant based on his lifelong absorption in the poetry of Milton, especially Paradise Lost. By bringing to bear the immense power of his reflections on aesthetic and moral form, Kant produced one of the most penetrating interpretations of Milton’s achievement that has ever been offered and, at the same time, reached new peaks in the development of aesthetics and moral reason.

Despite the persistence and popularity of addressing the theme of eating in Paradise Lost, the tradition of Adam and Eve’s sin as one of gluttony—and the evidence for Milton’s adaptation of this tradition—has been either unnoticed or suppressed. Emily Stelzer provides the first book-length work on the philosophical significance of gluttony in this poem, arguing that a complex understanding of gluttony and of ideal, grateful, and gracious eating informs the content of Milton’s writing. Working with contextual material in the fields of physiology, philosophy, theology, and literature and building on recent scholarship on Milton’s experience of and knowledge about matter and the body, Stelzer draws connections between Milton’s work and both underexamined textual influences (including, for example, Gower’s Confessio Amantis) and well-recognized ones (such as Augustine’s City of God and Galen’s On the Natural Faculties).

The conversation of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, that most obvious of Milton's additions to the Biblical narrative, enacts the pair's inquiry into and discovery of the gift of their rational nature in a mode of discourse closely aligned to practices of Socrates in the dialogues of Plato and eponymous discourses of Xenophon. Adam and Eve both begin their life "much wondering where\ And what I was, whence thither brought and how.” Their conjoint discoveries of each other's and their own nature in this talk Milton arranges for a in dialectical counterpoise to his persona's expressed task "to justify the ways of God to men." Like Xenophon's Socrates in the Memorabilia, Milton's persona indites those "ways of God" in terms most agreeable to his audience of "men"––notions Aristotle calls "generally accepted opinions." Thus for Milton's "fit audience" Paradise Lost willpresent two ways––that address congenial to men per se, and a fit discourse attuned to their very own rational faculties––to understand "the ways of God to men." The interrogation of each way by its counterpart among the distinct audiences is the "great Argument" of the poem.

This groundbreaking book, the first to examine Milton's thinking about matter and substance throughout his entire poetic career, seeks to alter the prevailing critical view that Milton was a monist-materialist--one who believes that all things are composed of material and all phenomena (including consciousness) are the result of material interactions. Based on her close study of the philosophical movements of Milton's mind, Sugimura discovers the "fluid intermediaries" in his poetry that are neither strictly material nor immaterial. In doing so, Sugimura uses Paradise Lost as a fascinating window into the intersection of literature and philosophy, and of literary studies and intellectual history. Sugimura finds that Milton displays a tense and ambiguous relationship with the idealistic dualism of Plato and the materialism of Aristotle and she argues for a more nuanced interpretation of Milton's metaphysics.