The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography

Barbara K. Lewalski’s Life of John Milton is a major achievement: arguably the most readable of modern Milton biographies, it reshapes our understanding of Milton the man, the thinker, political and religious activist, husband, parent, friend. Given Milton’s self‐consciousness as polemicist and poet, as well as his long years in public service, Lewalski’s careful placement of him within the context of seventeenth‐century England and the Continent, with the period’s intrigues, wars, social upheavals, religious developments and literary reshaping, allows readers to view Milton not against a background that set him apart, but as an intimate participant who gave shape to,...