English professor and colleagues discover another John Milton-owned book

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — For the second time in five years, Claire M.L. Bourne, associate professor of English at Penn State, is part of a team of scholars responsible for identifying a book that they said almost certainly belonged to 17th century English literary giant John Milton.

Bourne co-wrote an essay published today (May 15) in the London-based The Times Literary Supplement in which she and fellow researchers Aaron T. Pratt and Jason Scott-Warren detail their efforts to identify Milton, best known for the epic poem “Paradise Lost,” as the former owner and annotator of a copy of the second expanded edition of Raphael Holinshed's two-volume history of Britain, published as “The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland” in1587 but known widely as Holinshed’s “Chronicles.” It’s only the 10th known Milton-owned book that’s been discovered, and the second consecutive one that Bourne has had a hand in authenticating.

Bourne and Pratt, the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer curator of early books and manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Center at University of Texas at Austin, made the discovery in March while attending a research forum for the Phoenix Public Library’s Alfred Knight rare book collection at Arizona State University. Knight’s copy of Holinshed’s “Chronicles” was among the titles in the collection made available to the invited scholars, and Pratt first caught the distinctiveness of the handwriting in the marginalia of the unsigned book.

“Aaron called me over, and we started doing comparisons,” said Bourne, a specialist in book history, textual studies and Renaissance literature. “When you’re trying to match writing, you have to go letterform by letterform — look at the ‘e,’ look at the ‘s.’ We were doing that, going back and forth, from the handwriting samples. There are two Milton manuscripts that actually survive, which is great for this type of work. So, we’re using those to compare letterforms, and the more letterforms we compared, the more we realized this is probably Milton.”

From there, Bourne and Pratt texted Warren-Scott, professor of early modern literature and culture at England’s Cambridge University, for his thoughts. He was quickly convinced it might be a match.

Fortunately, the team already had experience identifying the ninth known book belonging to Milton.

While a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania more than a decade ago, Bourne came across a copy of “Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies” — published in 1623 and commonly known as the First Folio — at the Free Library of Philadelphia. After Bourne published her findings, they caught the attention of Warren-Scott, who believed the book belonged to Milton. In 2019, following input from other scholars via a thread on X, formerly known as Twitter, they were able to gain a preliminary “crowdsourced authentication” of the book, according to Bourne.

Through that project, the team studied and described the predominant features of Milton’s handwriting and annotating practices, from his developed-over-time italic “e” to his uneven “s.”

“There’s not a massive evidence base, but Milton is distinct enough, in both the letterforms of his handwriting, and in the way he marks up his own books, that we know Milton when we see Milton now,” Bourne said. “And his writing actually changed over the course of 10 years, so we can usually approximate when he wrote something. ... Milton’s also interested in textual variants, like synonyms or different spellings, and has a distinctive way of marking them in the margins, such as his use of ‘vide,’ meaning ‘see.' And he uses these very energetic, swoopy brackets. They appear in quite a few of the books, most distinctively in the Shakespeare Folio.”

One of Milton’s existing manuscripts, the “Commonplace Book,” located at the British Library, includes some of his notes on the books he read. In it, he cites Holinshed more than any other author, according to Bourne.

After returning from the rare book conference in Arizona, Bourne spent 10 days closely comparing the passages marked in the Holinshed to what Milton cited in the “Commonplace Book.” In the end, more than 90% of the citations corresponded with each other, Bourne said.

“Which to me is pretty persuasive evidence on top of what we already have,” Bourne said. “It was astonishing — and I’m a skeptic when I go into this type of work.”

In addition, the Holinshed had marginal cross references to books that Milton cites elsewhere, among them Edmund Spenser’s “A View of the State of Ireland,” which he refers to in the margins as the “Dialogue of Ireland.”

“No one else of that period refers to that tract by that title,” Bourne said.

What’s also fascinating about the Holinshed, Bourne noted, is that it shows Milton in the process of developing his well-known radical republican views around the time of the English Civil Wars.

“He cites Holinshed in a tract that justifies the execution of Charles I. So, his anti-monarchical views are very much getting worked out right at the same time he’s reading the Holinshed,” Bourne said. “This particular edition, the second edition, Shakespeare also used as source material for his history plays. He would have used it right after it was published. I think it’s a testament to the longevity of Holinshed that Milton is using it in 1639, 1640. The book still had currency 50 years later.”

Now that Bourne and her collaborators have documented their work in The Times Literary Supplement, they plan to write an academic journal article that fellow scholars can use in their own work.

Meanwhile, Bourne is currently working on a grant proposal for a project that would allow her to digitize all of Milton’s known books, transcribe all of the marginalia and make them open access.

“The fact that we’ve found another of Milton’s books shows it’s a viable project,” Bourne said. “It’s also reason to continue looking for more of his books. What I’m interested in is how readers have used books over their lifetime. These books have biographies — really interesting lives — and I see part of my job as telling their stories.”