Four hundred years after his birth, John Milton remains one of the greatest and most controversial figures in English literature. The Oxford Handbook of Milton is a comprehensive guide to the state of Milton studies in the early twenty-first century, bringing together an international team of thirty-five leading scholars. It both embodies the interest in Milton’s political and religious contexts in the last generation and seeks to inaugurate a new phase in Milton studies through closer integration of the poetry and prose. It is split into eight sections: three on Milton’s poetry, including eight essays on various aspects of Paradise Lost, and three on Milton’s prose writings, several of which have been regarded as crucial documents in the history of liberalism. The opening essays explore what we know about Milton’s biography and what it might tell us; the final essays offer interpretations of aspects of Milton’s massive influence on later writers, including the Romantic poets.