Milton as Multilingual: Selected Essays, 1982-2004

Book excerpt: First published by Otago University Press in 2005. The book brings together seventeen essays by John Hale on topics ranging from Milton's verse paraphrase of Psalm 114 in 1624, at the age of 15, to his rearrangement of Paradise Lost along arguably Virgilian lines in 1674, the year of his death. Fourteen of the essays were published previously from 1982-2003 in geographically scattered journals, some of them not readily accessible. Three new essays on the theological treatise De Doctrina Christiana are included and, together with an essay of 2003, they apply the subject of multilingualism to that work. The essays are grouped into five sections - "Composing,""Language-Arts,""Self-Understanding,""Paradise Lost and its Early Reception,"and "De Doctrina Christiana and Language-Issues."Brief preambles or headings are added to each section and an "Afterword"follows each chapter. This five-part structure and the new preambles and Afterwords invest the volume with a rationale, shaping it into a book in its own right.