February 2024 MSA Newsletter Addendum

Time to sign up for the MSA Dinner at RSA24

As our annual in-person MSA Dinner resumes next month at RSA Chicago, we are hoping for a great turnout. Especially after years of pandemic isolation and zoom meetings, it will be wonderful to see each other in the flesh, to share a meal, to briefly conduct business, to hear our annual commissioned poem, and to celebrate our award winners and Honored Scholar.

We will meet in the West Annex Room of the Berghoff Restaurant in Chicago on Friday, March 22. Doors to the cash bar will open at 7:00 p.m., with dinner starting around 7:30. Please feel free to join us at the cash bar even if you are unable to stay for the full meeting. 

As we need a count, we are asking those interested to purchase tickets by Friday, March 8. Tickets are $90 for tenured faculty and $70 for others; wine and beer included. To purchase, go to the MSA website: miltonsociety.net.

Call for Papers

The Milton Society invites proposal for its three sponsored sessions at MLA 2025, described below. If you would like to submit a proposal, specify the session and send 150-word abstract and brief cv to MiltonSocietySec@gmail.com no later than February 23.

John Milton: A General Session: The Milton Society of America invites proposals considering any aspect of Milton’s writings and historical significance.

Milton and Love: The Milton Society of America invites proposals offering new considerations—theoretical, historical, philosophical, or literary—of love in Milton’s writings.

Milton and Visibility: The Milton Society of America invites proposals considering visibility, broadly conceived, in Milton’s writings. Potential topics include disability, visual art, race, labor.

News

David Loewenstein reports that the new edition of Paradise Lost for the Oxford Complete Works of John Milton is now in press. Edited by David and Thomas Corns, the edition includes the first two published versions of the poem, as well as a new transcription and assessment of the manuscript of Book 1 of the poem. There are extensive commentaries reassessing the poem’s intersections with the political and religious controversies of its age, its engagement with Biblical, classical, and Renaissance literary texts, its relation to De Doctrina Christiana, and its rich linguistic and verbal achievements. The edition includes a new account of the poem’s publishing history during the Restoration.  The edition will be published in two volumes.

David adds that he will be giving a paper on Milton in a panel not sponsored by the MSA. He will present “Tyrannical Powers: Representing Tyranny in Milton’s England” in “Writing Tyranny in Early Modern English Literature,” on Saturday, March 23, 4:30-6:00 PM, Palmer House Hilton, Salon 3, Third Floor.