The Divorce Tracts of John Milton: Texts and Contexts

Acknowledgments

vii Acknowledgments TS This project began when our students at the University of Washington, the University of Denver, and Saint Louis University wanted to read more of Milton’s prose, especially his divorce tracts. This book is for them. We are deeply grateful to past editors and commentators, especiallyErnestSirluck ,LowellW.Coolidge,andArnoldWilliams,who prepared the second volume of the Complete Prose Works of John Milton for Yale University Press. Yale University Press allowed us to include many of their notes in this collection. Sharon Hampel deserves special thanks. She contributed the notes on Milton’s debt to Hebrew law and learning that enrich our understanding of Milton’s work. Special thanks are also due to Victor Castellani for his expertise with Greek and Latin sources, and to Peggy Keeran and Jennifer Bowers for their assistance with research strategies. We also wish to thank the editorial team at Duquesne University Press, especially Kathy Meyer, for their expertise in preparing this book for publication. W. Scott Howard is very grateful to the University of Denver for support provided by the Division of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and by research grants from the Professional Research Fund, the Faculty Research Fund, the Walter Rosenberry fund, and the Office of Internationalization; and for sabbaticals awarded in 2000, 2005, and 2009. Sara van den Berg is very grateful for support provided by Dean Donald G. Brennan and the College of Arts and Sciences, Saint Louis University; for a 2002 summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities; for a Mellon Faculty Development Grant from Saint Louis University; and for a sabbatical awarded by Saint Louis University in 2007. viii Acknowledgments Portions of the introduction originally appeared as: Sara van den Berg’s “Women, Children, and the Rhetoric of Milton’s Divorce Tracts,” EMLS 10, no. 1 (2004): 1–13; W. Scott Howard’s “Milton’s ‘Divorcive’ Liberties: Ecclesiastical, Domestic or Private, Civil, and Cosmological,” EMLS 10, no. 1 (2004): 1–12; and the coauthored article, “G. M. Revealed: Printer of the First Attacks on The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce,” Milton Quarterly 38, no. 4 (2004): 242–52. We thank the editors of those journals for permission to incorporate revised passages from those essays in our introduction. Sara van den Berg thanks John Shawcross, Michael Lieb, Helen Marlborough, Charles H. Parker, Stella Revard, Jonathan Sawday, Regina Schwartz, and Steven Zwicker for their help at key moments, and David Cormier for bracing discussions of Milton’s prose. W. Scott Howard thanks John Shawcross, Annabel Patterson, Thomas Corns, Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler, Jameela Lares, Richard DuRocher, Nicholas von Maltzahn, and Nigel Smith. This volume is dedicated to the memory of Albert C. Labriola, for his encouragement of this project and for his inestimable contributions to Milton scholarship. ...