The contributors to the present volume are all competent in at least two languages, and some have grown up in bilingual environments. The same was true of John Milton. His facility in languages is widely acknowledged, but the bilingualism of his culture is not, especially among those who can access only part of it. Milton was educated through the medium of Latin at St Paul’s School and at Cambridge. Much of his writing was in Latin, in both poetry and prose, and he also spoke the language as a student, a traveller in continental Europe, and a civil servant during the Commonwealth and Protectorate. In due course some of Milton’s English works were translated into Latin, in part because Latin was deemed to be superior to English as a literary language. The Latin Milton was an important presence in eighteenth-century England, and in this volume Estelle Haan’s two chapters show how the translation of Milton into Latin during this period shaped both the perception of his poetry and the debate about the nature and purpose of translation....
