Following the editors introduction to the collection, the essays in Scholarly Milton examine the nature of Miltons own formidable scholarship and its implications for his prose and poetryscholarly Milton the writeras well as subsequent scholars historical and theoretical framing of Milton studies as an object of scholarly attentionscholarly Milton as at first an emergent and later an established academic discipline. The essays are particularly concerned with the topics of the ethical ends of learning, of Miltons attention to the trivium within the Renaissance humanist educational system, and the development of scholarly commentary on Miltons writings. Originally selected from the best essays presented at the 2015 Conference on John Milton in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the essays have been considerably revised and expanded for publication.
Thomas Festa is Professor of English at the State University of New York New Paltz. He is the author of The End of Learning: Milton and Education (2006) and some two dozen scholarly articles as well as co-editor of the award-winning feminist teaching anthology Early Modern Women on the Fall (2012) and two previous essay collections dedicated to Miltons works Milton Materialism and Embodiment (2017) and Scholarly Milton (2019). KEVIN J. DONOVAN Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University co-directed with Charles W. Durham and Kristin A. Pruitt the biennial Conference on John Milton from 1991 to 2015. With Thomas Festa he co-edited Milton Materialism and Embodiment (Duquesne UP 2017). He also wrote the Survey of Interpretive Criticism for the New Variorum Shakespeare King Lear edited by Richard Knowles (forthcoming 2019 MLA) and is associate editor of the volume.