In their new edition of John Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana, part of the Oxford University Press Complete Works of Milton, John K. Hale and J. Donald Cullington accomplish what no previous editor has done, namely, make Milton’s original Latin itself available. Not only do they provide a new precise and complete Latin transcription per se, they foreground the successive corrections and annotations made in an array of distinct scribal hands since the 1650s. The feat is extraordinary: Hale and Cullington do nothing less than establish an accurate and reliable Latin text. Milton, already blind, dictated his work of systematic theology to a series of amanuenses toward the end of the 1650s: Jeremie Picard, Daniel Skinner, and several anonymous scribes. Never published during his lifetime, the editio princeps only appeared in 1825, after the manuscript was discovered in the Public Records Office and wrested from obscurity. The editors of the new edition point, repeatedly, to the process of composition and its effect on the manuscript. We readers encounter Milton’s Latin and see precisely how it has come down to us, mediated by scribes and successive editors. Ours is an unparalleled access to the manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana, and the sophisticated and succinct notes to Milton’s Latin enable us to grapple with the textual history of the work as well as to its distinct style. The primary objectives of the edition are achieved with great success. Critical notes highlight the text as well as the argument over the provenance of the work that has preoccupied scholars since its discovery.

In a masterful introduction, Hale and Cullington (with contributions from Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns) frame the text for a new generation of readers. They are admittedly focused on stylistic and textual matters, expending less effort here to situate De Doctrina Christiana in relation to other works of systematic theology — certainly less effort than in the older Maurice Kelley–John Carey edition, published by Yale University Press in 1973. Nevertheless, this is not the task at hand for Hale and Cullington — and their object, a reliable Latin text with a new facing-page English translation, rectifies a vexing problem of access and translation. Even the most recent Yale edition lacks Milton’s Latin text, giving readers only the (admittedly exciting) translation. In addition, beyond the text itself, the present introduction does much to frame De Doctrina Christiana, with laudable emphases on Ramism and the organization of the work; the history of De Doctrina Christiana, in manuscript and print; the different scribal hands on the manuscript; Milton’s Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; and, of course, instructions on how to read the Latin text together with the new translation. The editors’ attention to Milton’s use of scripture is particularly informative — and, indeed, here this new edition far exceeds previous efforts. Hale and Cullington demonstrate, with reason and clarity, how Milton used successive editions of the Latin Bible edited, annotated, and translated by Franciscus Junius, Immanuel Tremellius, and Theodore Beza (completed by 1580 but available in multiple editions throughout the seventeenth century). They illustrate, across invaluable footnotes and endnotes, both Milton’s fidelity to and deviations from the Junius-Tremellius-Beza Bible. In a work like De Doctrina Christiana, so grounded in Scripture, these minor details are of paramount importance. The new emphasis on the Latin text will certainly enable readers to place Milton the prose stylist and theologian in direct conversation with a host of Reformed Scholastics and controversialists.

How De Doctrina Christiana relates to Milton’s late poetic projects is still an unsettled matter. The editors offer frequent notes inviting comparison with Paradise Lost, but never in a heavyhanded way that suggests that the dogmatic work is in some way the interpreter of the later epic, or vice versa. Perhaps more could have been said upfront about the genres of systematic theology in the seventeenth century, but the editors do explore Milton’s commitments to Ramism and the shape of De Doctrina Christiana as a Ramist exercise. Their editorial comments, as well as the invaluable Ramist diagram at the end of the introduction, help readers approach De Doctrina Christiana as a work of Reformed Scholasticism — a difficult and unfamiliar genre of early modern writing for modern readers, and particularly those steeped in Milton’s poetry and not systematic theology or spiritual loci communes.

While the editors claim that their achievement is the Latin text, and that one might easily read this restored Latin text alongside earlier translations, the new translation is magnificent. Granted, Hale and Cullington do less in their translation to foreground the comparative peculiarity — even heresy — of Milton’s theological positions than the Kelley-Carey edition. But Hale and Cullington produce a more literal translation, retaining the lexicon and structure of the Latin. When minor liberties are taken, they are noted; the reader is always made aware of the primacy of the Latin text. This is enabling and exciting as it invites the reader to find potential continuities or distinctions between De Doctrina, the earlier theological works (for instance, the divorce tracts or the pamphlets on episcopacy), or the poetry. The translation does not read like Milton’s English but, rather, illustrates how he wrote and thought in Latin. There are, nevertheless, several tics in the translation that warrant attention. For instance, Milton on annihilation. Milton establishes, in his treatment of Creation in 1.7, that “cum non solum à Deo, sed ex Deo sint omnia, non posse quicquam rerum creatarum in nihilum interire” (294) — in English, “since all things are not only from God but out of God, no created thing can perish into nothing” (295). Milton uses a Scholastic language here, and both the verb annihilo and the noun annihilatio emerge in a larger discussion of metaphysics. And here Milton determines, with certainty, that God can neither create from nothing (ex nihilo) nor annihilate. But in the succeeding chapters, the translators render several distinct Latin terms as “annihilate”: exscindo (334–35), extinguo (434–35), and the participle forms of extinguo (434–35/441–42) — words that might be better rendered less technically, in terms of destruction and extinguishing, on an entirely different register than Milton’s ontological treatment of annihilation. These are strange inconsistencies that have the potential to confuse readers without Latin. In this particular case, as elsewhere, the stakes are high — how one understands annihilation in De Doctrina Christiana influences the degree to which one associates Milton with Moloch in book 2 of Paradise Lost, for instance, or the perfection of God in Book 3.

Moreover, this new edition of De Doctrina Christiana is considerably slighter on comparative and historical notes than the Kelley-Carey version. There are few references to theologians outside of a relatively small canon of known Ramist influences, and the reader is seldom directed to notable contemporary works, events, or points of contention. We learn little about Milton’s debts to medieval Scholasticism or to such Reformation stalwarts as Jean Calvin, Martin Luther, Philipp Melanchthon, or Girolamo Zanchi. Johannes Wollebius, David Paraeus, William Perkins, and William Ames are mentioned, but there are few efforts to read Milton against his relevant contemporaries — for instance, Gisbertus Voetius, Francois Turretin, or Hugo Grotius. A generation of scholarship on Reformed Scholasticism goes unnoticed in the present volumes, particularly work by Richard A. Muller, just as there are few substantial references to work on the radical Reformation. One wishes for a more comprehensive set of notes locating Milton’s work in relation to pertinent theological conversations and controversies.

These are, however, relatively minor issues; rather than detract from the present achievement, they challenge us to read closely and carefully, as the editors intended, and to find new connections between works. In a sense, this new edition of De Doctrina Christiana arrives at precisely the right time, complementing recent studies of Milton’s philosophical and theological preoccupations and adventures. It sets a new agenda for Milton studies as well as for scholarship on seventeenth-century systematic theology, Latin style, and a number of discrete theological points. It also provides invaluable insight into the details of prose composition and editorial practice — of particular interest to students of the later blind Milton, writing incendiary religious doctrine under difficult conditions. De Doctrina Christiana has never been more accessible or more exciting.