What kind of scholar was Milton? In our contemporary research universities, whether private or public, occupationally-directed fields seem at odds with “basic research.” With applied research as the goal, academic work whose goal is knowledge alone is increasingly under threat in the USA and the UK by those distributing public coffers. Early modern scholarship was, likewise, not detached from social exigency—after all, training at university was to be training for a career, in the ministry, in law, in diplomacy, in state service. With the values of our current situation in mind, can we gain insight into the early modern scholar? And, vice versa, can the early modern ideas and practices of scholarship illuminate the present? Indeed, the question of what kind of scholar was Milton is not a disinterested question for us. Nor would it be for Milton. Milton did, indeed, possess great learning. Studies of the poet have outlined his grammar school education, with its humanist curriculum; they have analyzed his tract on education; and have hunted down Milton's allusions to reveal his deep knowledge of literary and historical sources; his languages; his use of the Church Fathers; his biblical and rabbinical readings; his engagement with Plato, for instance. Scholars have recently located precise editions of Milton's stated sources, or his association with particular spaces of reading in order to address the particular ways that Milton engaged with his sources in their modern or original editions. The apparatuses to all modern editions of Milton attest to his very evident and deep learning. Even the rejection of all that learning in his late work, Paradise Regained, testifies to the significance of learning in Milton's literary formation.

What kind of scholar was Milton? What was his conception of scholarship? Was he the sort of scholar of the age that produced such figures as those on the Continent who had revolutionized the textual criticism of Latin poetry—Lorenzo Valla or Nicolas Heinsius, for example? Milton was certainly no slouch as a Latinist, language of entry to this world. When Isaac Vossius received a copy of Milton's attack on Salmasius, the Pro populo anglicano defensio, he wrote to Heinsius of his amazement at that literary accomplishment: “I had expected nothing of such quality from an Englishman.” Milton’s philological work on Euripides, too, done early in his literary career, points to an alternative scholarly future for the poet as textual scholar.