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The Oxford Milton
Oxford University Press has completed the commissioning of a new eleven-volume edition of the Complete Works of John Milton. It hopes to publish the first volume on the quatercentenary of Milton’s birth and to complete publication by 2012. The general editors are Thomas Corns and Gordon Campbell, and the general textual editor is Archie Burnett. The edition will be governed by six principles:
1. The edition will be textually scrupulous, in the way the Columbia edition was
intended to be, although adopting current bibliographical standards, practices,
and theory. It will establish the text for the current century.
2. The edition will revisit the textual history of each element of the oeuvre and
will reconsider all dubia. The textual apparatus will be full and exhaustive.
3. All works in languages other than English will be included, together with new
translations on facing pages. It will include, newly edited, the complete works of
Milton, including the state papers, Commonplace Book, and letters, but excluding
documents that belong more properly among the life records (contracts,
receipts, other legal papers, etc.).
4. It will be an old-spelling, near-diplomatic edition.
5. Each text will have a headnote and there will be relatively light annotation of
a noninterpretive kind. There is no intention to “take on” the Carey-Fowler
edition of the poetry. The strategy for annotation will assume a target readership
generally competent in early modern English, with some knowledge of
seventeenth-century English history, and with access to the commentary tradition
and teaching editions. This is an edition for the scholarly community and
for advanced graduate students.
6. Texts will be consistently related to the physical form in which they appeared.
This is particularly important in the case of the poetry, where, for example, both
the ten-book and twelve-book structures of the principal early editions of
Paradise Lost will be apparent in the new edition.
Here are the details of the eleven volumes:
1. Paradise Lost: David Lowenstein; textual editor, Thomas Corns.
2. Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes: Laura Knoppers.
3. Shorter Poems: Barbara Lewalski will be volume editor and will edit the English
poems, Estelle Haan will edit the Latin and Greek poems, James Knowles
will edit the Maske and Arcades, and Andrew McNeillie will undertake verse
translations of the Italian sonnets.
4. Tracts on Church Government and Toleration: Nicholas von Maltzahn.
5. Divorce Tracts: Sharon Achinstein.
6. Vernacular Regicide and Republican Tracts: Neil Keeble will be volume editor and
will edit late tracts; Nick McDowell will edit 1649 tracts.
7. Latin Defences: Joad Raymond.
8. De Doctrina Christiana: John Hale will be volume editor. The treatise will be
jointly edited and translated by John Hale and Donald Cullington.
9. EducationalWritings and the Commonplace Book.The volume editor will be Nigel
Smith. Linda Mitchell will edit Accedence Commenc’t Grammar, Jameela Lares
will edit Artis Logicae, Tim Raylor will edit Of Education, and William Poole
will edit the Commonplace Book.
10. The Histories: Martin Dzelzainis.
11. State Papers and MiscellaneousWriting:Volume editors, Edward Jones and Gordon
Campbell; David Money will edit Epistolae Familiares, Sarah Knight will edit
the Prolusions, and Edward Jones will edit the State Papers, the “Theme on
Early Rising” and compile a checklist of sources for Milton’s marginalia.
William Poole will edit the “Outlines for Tragedies.”
[taken from Milton Quarterly, Volume 41, Number 3 (October 2007)]