The sixteen essays in this collection reflect the individuality and diversity of varied ideas and approaches to Milton scholarship.

Readers will no doubt discern points of contiguity among the essays in this volume. For example, several essays investigate sources - literary, pictorial, architectural - and Milton's use of those sources in his poetry. Others view Milton from the perspective of his age and seventeenth-century contemporaries such as Michael Drayton and Aemelia Lanyer.

Still others use the twentieth-century methodologies of transformational grammar, deconstruction, and chaos theory to reread Milton's works and assess their prophetic potential. Overall, the essays demonstrate the continued scholarly commitment to a search for truths in and about Milton's works, a process that began in the seventeenth century and promises to continue unabated into the next millennium.