In this authoritative edition of John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost is presented in the original language of its 1674 publication, with explanatory annotations and word glosses.

• 
  
• Edited by one of the world's leading Milton scholars, the author of the acclaimed The Life of Milton (Blackwell 2000), which won the Milton Society of America's James Holly Hanford Book Award
  
• Offers readers the opportunity to experience the brilliance and beauty of Paradise Lost as it was experienced by his contemporaries
  
• Presents Paradise Lost in its original 1674 form
  
• Incorporates accidentals (spelling and punctuation) from the 1674 edition
  
• Recovers Miltonic rhythms, pronunciations, and sound qualities often lost in modern editions
  
• Annotates names, places, biblical and literary allusions, and unfamiliar words
  
• Includes illustrations by John Baptista Medina from the 1688 Folio edition

Barbara K. Lewalski is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English Literature and of History and Literature at Harvard University. She is author of the definitive critical biography, The Life of Milton (Blackwell, 2000), which won the Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hanford Book Award, and which has been widely celebrated. Her many other publications include Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (1985); Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning and Art of Paradise Regained (1966); and Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (1979).