In this book, some of the most eminent critics of seventeenth-century literature and some of the liveliest younger scholars explore the interconnections among Milton's politics, poetics, and prose writings. While the essays focus on Milton's prose, they open up new perspectives on his major poems and on seventeenth-century ideologies, theologies, and interpretive practices. These essays challenge the notion of Milton's prose as an "achievement of the left hand," proposing a complex relation between text and context, the aesthetic and the sociopolitical, issues of representation and the politics of gender.