Handwritten notes from Paradise Lost poet John Milton have been identified in two volumes of a 16th-century book held by a library at the University of Texas.
It is only the third known surviving example of reading notes by Milton, and the book is one of just nine to have survived from his library.
The annotations were found in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles (1587) in the Burton Barr Central Library in Phoenix, Arizona, by Dr Aaron Pratt, curator of early books and manuscripts at the University of Texas, who recognised the style of the “e” and brackets in the notes.
He sent photos to Prof Jason Scott-Warren, from the University of Cambridge’s English Faculty, who confirmed that the handwriting was Milton’s.
The text is believed to have been a source of inspiration for Milton, who attended Christ’s College, Cambridge, for seven years.
But the notes show him censoring Holinshed by crossing out a lewd anecdote about the mother of William the Conqueror, Arlete, tearing her smock “from top to bottom” after being summoned to the bed of Robert I of Normandy.
Mlton crossed through it with a single line and compared it to the style of a pedlar hawking wares on the streets, saying it was “an unbecom[ing] / tale for a hist[ory] / and as pedlerl[y] / expresst”.
Prof Scott-Warren said: “The adverb ‘pedlerly’ was quite rare in writing at the time so we are seeing Milton really stretching language to express his contempt.
“Milton is renowned as an enemy of press censorship, but here we see he was not immune to prudishness.”
Prof Scott-Warren, director of the Cambridge Centre for Material Texts and a fellow of Gonville and Caius College, compared the handwriting in the Holinshed annotations with Milton’s handwriting preserved in two surviving holograph manuscripts - the Commonplace Book at the British Library and the Trinity Manuscript, held at Trinity College, Cambridge.
It is thought that Milton’s books were sold off in batches after his death in 1674, but the latest find suggests more of them may still exist.
In 2019, Prof Scott-Warren identified Milton as the annotator of a copy of the Shakespeare First Folio in the Free Library of Philadelphia, building on research by Claire Bourne, an associate professor of English at Penn State.
