A new edition and translation of John Milton's 'Prolusions'

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Compared with most other areas of Renaissance literature, the plays, poems and orations students and scholars composed at the early modern universities have been relatively neglected. However, over the last few years several educational and literary historians have emphasized how important the experience of higher education was in shaping the literature that these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors produced. This new edition and translation of Milton's 'Prolusions' will be a valuable addition to this burgeoning field of research, and will be based on new research conducted into Milton's university career and the place of these speeches within his contemporary academic, literary and social milieu. The 'Prolusions', which Milton wrote and delivered in the Public Schools and in College while he was a student at Cambridge, are among the least known and least read works of one of the most celebrated writers of early modern England. Yet a close study of the 'Prolusions', made possible through consulting this Latin text and English translation, will help scholars better understand how Milton's literary and argumentative technique developed during his university career, and will clearly illustrate the impact Milton's academic training in rhetoric and formal disputation had on his later writing. This new edition and translation of the 'Prolusions' will give the reader access to Milton's formative academic career, whether she wants to read the original Latin text or is more comfortable with the English translation. The headnote and annotation will offer new biographical and contextual information to assist the reader's understanding of Milton's densely allusive and frequently recondite text. For the Milton specialist, or for the reader interested in such topics as the early modern universities in England, Renaissance educational curricula, prose satire, juvenilia, rhetoric, the use of Latin, seventeenth-century intellectual history, or an author's literary development, this new edition and translation of the 'Prolusions' will be both valuable and timely.