The British Milton Seminar, founded by Professor Tom Corns in 1991, held its 50th meeting on Saturday 18th October 2014 at the Birmingham and Midland Institute. To mark the occasion, a consolidated list of the programmes for all fifty meetings was compiled and distributed. Please see below for the list.
At the 50th meeting, it was announced that Tom Corns would step down as joint convenor of the BMS. Dr Sarah Knight has kindly agreed to join Dr Hugh Adlington as co-convenor henceforth.
BMS 1: 23 March 1991
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) a seminar on Milton’s politics and gender politics, initiated by a paper from Nigel Smith (Oxford), ‘Doing Milton right’;
(pm) a forum on editorial approaches to Milton including position statements from scholars currently or recently involved in editing Milton, among them John Creaser (Royal Holloway), Gordon Campbell (Leicester), L. A. Davies (Birmingham), Martin Dzelzainis (Royal Holloway) and Thomas N. Corns (Bangor).
BMS 2: 28 September 1991
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) a seminar initiated by a paper from David Norbrook (Oxford), ‘Public and private in Milton’;
(pm) a set of short papers, followed by discussion, on Milton in relation to other writers. The papers included:
‘Milton and Shakespeare’ by H. Neville Davies (Birmingham),
‘Milton and Vaughan’ by Robert Wilcher (Birmingham),
‘Milton and Dryden’ by Romald D. Bedford (Exeter), and
Milton and Coleridge’ by Peter K. Kitson (Bangor).
(John Stachniewski withdrew his paper on ‘Milton and Bunyan’ because of ill health.)
BMS 3: 28 March 1992
?Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) ?Roger Pooley;
?Cedric Brown
(pm) ?Regina Schwartz: ‘Milton, domination and the gaze’.
BMS 4: 11 July 1992
Second Reading University Literature and History Conference: Politics in English Culture, 1520-1660
(am) Julia Walker (SUNY at Geneseo), ‘Anti-text and Milton’s politics of alternative revisionism’;
David Armitage (Cambridge), ‘John Milton: poet against empire’;
(pm) Tony Davies (Birmingham), ‘Borrowed language: Milton, Jefferson, Mirabeau’;
Paul Stevens (Queen’s University), ‘Purity and possession: “Leviticus thinking” and Renaissance colonizing texts’.
BMS 5: 11 July 1992
Second Reading University Literature and History Conference: Politics in English Culture, 1520-1660
Plenary lecture: Mary Ann Radzinowicz (Cornell), ‘Tendentious purposes: Donne and Milton on Moses’.
BMS 6: 26 September 1992
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) a seminar on the ideological orientation of Milton’s early poetry, initiated by a paper presented by Michael Wilding (University of Sydney);
(pm) Mindele Treip (Cambridge), ‘Allegory and accommodation in Raphael’s account of the war in heaven’;
Stella Revard (University of Southern Illinois), ‘Hercules and Samson Agonistes’.
BMS 7: 20 March 1993
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) a seminar on Milton’s God, with N. H. Keeble (Stirling) speaking on the Son, Gordon Campbell (Leicester) on the Father, and Nigel Smith (Oxford), responding, and commenting on the role of the Holy Spirit;
(pm) Arthur Sandved (Oslo), ‘On translating Paradise Lost into Norwegian’;
Julia Walker (SUNY at Geneseo), ‘Milton’s Mask, pornography, and the revocation of chronological absolution’.
BMS 8: 25 September 1993
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) David Reid (Stirling), ‘Paradise Lost and Thomson’s The Seasons’;
Willy Maley (Goldsmiths’, London), ‘Representing Ireland: Milton’s Observations and Spenser’s View’.
(pm) Margaret Kean (Oxford), ‘“Voluminous and vast”: Milton’s snaky woman – encountering Sin in Book 2 of Paradise Lost’;
Thomas N. Corns (Bangor), ‘Milton’s angels’.
BMS 9: 19 March 1994
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Paul G. Stanwood (UBC, Vancouver, and York), ‘Milton and Hooker’;
Gordon Campbell (Leicester), ‘The biographical implications of Milton’s sonnet on Shakespeare’.
(pm) a forum on the provenance of De Doctrina Christiana, initiated by a paper reviewing the current (and forthcoming) debate and defining the issues, by John Hale (Otago), Thomas N. Corns (Bangor) and Gordon Campbell.
BMS 10: 24 September 1994
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Joad Raymond (Oxford), ‘“On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” and Milton’s daily muse’;
Michael Schoenfeldt (U of Michigan), ‘Paradise Lost and Appetite’.
(pm) a forum on Milton in the context of Anglo-Dutch literary relations, initiated by Richard Todd (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam).
BMS 11: 18 March 1995
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Jeremy Maule (Cambridge), ‘Milton and the primitive church’;
Chris McCully (Manchester), ‘Milton and Wordsworth: prosodic influences’.
(pm) Gordon Campbell (Leicester), on the Iusta Eduardo King, and a forum on current issues in Milton biography.
BMS 12: 7 October 1995
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Ronald Bedford (University of New England, Australia), ‘Milton, the Restoration and the sense of irony’;
Laura Lunger Knoppers (Pennsylvania State), ‘??’.
(pm) Margaret Kean (Oxford), ‘Dreaming of Eve: the poetic ideal in Milton’s Eden’;
Nigel Smith (Oxford), ‘Milton and Marvell’.
BMS 13: 16 March 1996
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Estelle Haan (Queen’s, Belfast), ‘Mantuan, Milton and “the fruit of that forbidden tree”’;
Karen Edwards (Exeter), ‘Milton and biology’.
(pm) Rosa Flotas (Estudis Universitaris de Vic), ‘Milton and the Kabbalah’;
Mindele Treip (Cambridge), ‘The use of biblical parallelism in Paradise Lost’.
BMS 14: 5 October 1996
Room G.P. 6A, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Kay Stevenson (Essex), ‘From Dryden to Mrs Siddons: rewriting Paradise Lost’;
Cedric Brown (Reading), ‘Milton’s Bible’.
(pm) Group presentation by Gordon Campbell (Leicester), Thomas Corns (Bangor), John Hale (Otago), David Holmes (UWE) and Fiona Tweedie (Glasgow), ‘Milton and De Doctrina’.
BMS 15: 8 March 1997
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Margaret Kean (Oxford), ‘Godly arithmetic: the sum of Paradise Lost’;
Jeremy Maule (Cambridge), ‘Milton’s Hammersmith’.
(pm) Joseph Shub (Tel Aviv and CES, London), ‘Milton’s Apology as an art of discourse’;
Joad Raymond (Aberdeen), ‘Currents in Milton studies’.
BMS 16: 18 October 1997
Room G.P. 6A, Birmingham Central Library
(am) John K. Hale (Otago), ‘Milton’s languages and the Cambridge context’;
Estelle Sheehan (Queen’s, Belfast), ‘Milton, Manso, and Ovid’s Chiron’.
(pm) Sharon Achinstein (Northwestern), ‘Imperial dialectic: Milton and conquered people’;
Dennis Kezar (Charlottesville), ‘Samson Agonistes and the art of dying’.
BMS 17: 21 March 1998
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Neville Davies (Birmingham), ‘Building the lofty rhyme: elegiac construction in Lycidas’;
Nicholas von Maltzahn (Ottawa), ‘Milton and the attack on republican humanism at the Restoration’.
(pm) John K. Hale (Otago), ‘The multiple simile, Paradise Lost I.283-313’;
Karen Edwards (Exeter), ‘Raphael Diodati’.
BMS 18: 17 October 1998
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Robert Wilcher (Birmingham), ‘Poems (1645)’;
Graham Parry (York), ‘Milton and Sandys’.
(pm) Thomas H. Luxon (Dartmouth), ‘Manliness and godliness in Samson Agonistes’;
Anthony Welch (Cambridge), ‘Spaces of time: Fowler’s chronology and the structure of Paradise Lost’.
BMS 19: 20 March 1999
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Tony Davies (Birmingham), ‘Revolutionary turns’;
Warren Chernaik (QMW, London), ‘Milton and Winstanley’.
(pm) Three papers on Ireland:
Jim Daems (Bangor), ‘The dismembered concubine: the Irish rebellion and Judge 19-21’;
Joad Raymond (Aberdeen), ‘Milton, Ireland, and the dating of the History of Britain’;
David Loewenstein (Wisconsin-Madison), ‘Representing the Irish revolt: militant Protestantism and the English republic’.
BMS 20: 23 October 1999
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Jesse Swan (Northern Iowa), ‘The Lauder controversy’;
Estelle Sheehan (Queen’s, Belfast), ‘Milton and Thomas Gray’.
(pm) Valerie Rumbold (Birmingham), ‘Milton and Pope’;
Group presentation by Gordon Campbell (Leicester), Thomas Corns (Bangor), and Fiona Tweedie (Glasgow), ‘“Yet once more”: De Doctrina revisited’.
BMS 21: 18 March 2000
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) John Rumrich (University of Texas, Austin), ‘Milton’s timepiece: “On time”’;
Su Fang Ng (Michigan and Mainz), ‘Milton’s family of brothers’.
(pm) Lee Morrissey (Clemson), ‘Reading in Milton and Dryden: “with more than a literal wisdom of enquiry”’;
John Coffey (Leicester), ‘John Milton and political violence in post-Restoration England’.
BMS 22: 7 October 2000
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Neville Davies (Birmingham), ‘Art shall meet art: Milton, Dryden, and King Arthur’;
Peter J. Kitson (Dundee), ‘Milton among the Romantics’.
(pm) Joad Raymond (UEA), ‘Milton and the Scottish origins of the explosion of print’;
Thomas N. Corns (Bangor), ‘Milton, Scots, and Presbyterians.’
BMS 23: 17 March 2001
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Neil Keeble (Stirling), ‘Wilderness exercises: adversity, temptation, and trial in Paradise Regained’;
Christophe Tournu (Grenoble), ‘John Milton: a seventeenth-century radical caught between humanism and Puritanism’.
(pm) Karen Edwards (Exeter), ‘A Milton bestiary’;
Margaret Kean (Oxford), ‘“O brave new world”: Dryden’s enchanted isle or Milton’s Eden?’.
BMS 24: 6 October 2001
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Gordon Campbell (Leicester), ‘Milton and the water supply of Cambridge’;
Nicholas von Maltzahn (Ottawa), ‘Paradise Lost and post-theodicy theology’.
(pm) Gareth Twose (Manchester), ‘Aspects of the syntax of Milton’s prose and poetry’;
Roy Flannagan (University of South Carolina, Beaufort), ‘The design, the apparatus, and text for a new edition of Paradise Lost’.
BMS 25: 23 March 2002
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Thomas N. Corns (Bangor), ‘Putting Milton together again: Paradise Regained and the polemical prose’;
??.
(pm) William Poole (Cambridge), ‘Access denied: Milton and uncertainty’;
David Loewenstein (Wisconsin-Madison), “The time has come”: apocalytic and millenarian vision in the late poems’.
BMS 26: 26 October 2002
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Robert Wilcher (Birmingham), ‘“Adventurous song” and “presumptuous folly”: the problem of “utterance” in Paradise Lost and Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder’;
Jameela Lares (U. of South Mississippi), ‘The other 47 chapters: Paradise Lost, Books XI-XII and Genesis commentary’.
(pm) Martin Dzelzainis (Royal Holloway), ‘Milton and “their gibberish laws”’;
John Hale (Otago), ‘The importance of Milton’s Latin’.
BMS 27: 22 March 2003
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Laila Ghermani (Sorbonne – Nouvelle), ‘Shades of black humour in Eden: Paradise Lost, Book IX (1046-1133& 648-862)’;
Kevin Killeen (Birkbeck), ‘Paradise Lost and the scope of accommodation’.
(pm) Erik Dube (Connecticut), ‘Milton and food: Christian epiphany and hunger in the major poems’;
William Poole (Cambridge), ‘Two early readers of Milton: John Beale and Abraham Hill’.
BMS 28: 25 October 2003
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) A panel session on Paradise Regained: John Creaser (Royal Holloway, chair), Martin Dzelzainis (Royal Holloway), Margaret Kean (Oxford), Nigel Smith (Princeton);
(pm) Noel Sugimura (Oxford), ‘So spake the Archangel: divine narration and confused causation’;
Matthew Jordan (Liverpool JMU), ‘Milton in 1642’.
BMS 29: 20 March 2004
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Sarkhar Kuhnova (Charles University), ‘Voice in Milton’s Masque’;
Lauren Shohet (Villanova), ‘Tradition and the individual talent: Philip Pulman’s Paradise Lost’.
(pm) A discussion of Paradise Lost Book III, initiated by short presentations from Nicholas McDowell (Exeter), Iain MClure (Royal Holloway), and William Poole (Cambridge), who chaired the session.
BMS 30: 23 October 2004
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Noel Sugimura (Oxford), ‘Scarred philosophy: accidental forms and Milton’s idea of prime matter’;
Ann McGruer (Keele), ‘Education and reason in Milton’s Of Education and Areopagitica’.
(pm) A discussion, chaired by Ceri Sullivan (Bangor), of Milton and Violence, with particular reference to the poems of the 1671 volume. Position papers from Gordon Campbell (Leicester), Matthew Jordan (Liverpool JMU), Margaret Kean (Oxford), and Richard Serjeantson (Cambridge).
BMS 31: 12 March 2005
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Sharon Achinstein (Oxford), ‘Milton in 1641: Presbyterian?’;
Robert Wilcher (Birmingham), ‘The drama of Paradise Lost Book IX’.
(pm) A discussion of Paradise Lost Book X. Position papers from Kay Stevenson (Essex), Nicholas McDowell (Exeter), Stella Revard and Peter Lindenbaum.
BMS 32: 22 October 2005
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Joad Raymond (University of East Anglia), ‘Dryden’s fall: dreams, angels, freewill’;
David Loewenstein (Wisconsin – Madison), ‘Milton’s evolving nationalism and the English revolution: political strains and contradictions’.
(pm) to mark the 400th anniversary of the conspiracy, two papers on Milton’s poems on the Gunpowder Plot, by Robert Appelbaum (Lancaster) and Graham Parry (York).
BMS 33: 11 March 2006
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Robert Cockcroft (Nottingham), ‘Samson’s shipwreck: a fresh look at Milton’s nautical imagery’;
Thomas N. Corns (Bangor), ‘Milton and Roger Williams’.
(pm) a panel discussion and debate on the topic: ‘Areopagitica: a text for our times?’, including position papers from Norman Burns (SUNY), Ann Hughes (Keele), and others. The session will be chaired by David Loewenstein (Wisconsin – Madison).
BMS 34: 14 October 2006
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Karen Edwards (Exeter), ‘“A Chest of two of choice Music-books”: Seicento innovation and Milton’s poetry’;
Thomas N. Corns (Bangor), ‘How useful are the early lives?’.
(pm) Laura Jacobs (Birkbeck), ‘Milton’s positive presentation of his blindness: a historical contextualisation’;
Edward Jones (Oklahoma SU), ‘The Miltons at Horton: the decision to tour the continent and the marriage of Christopher’.
BMS 35: 17 March 2007
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Julia Walker (SUNY, Geneseo), ‘Displaced chronology in Paradise Regained’;
Martin Dzelzainis (Royal Holloway), ‘“When God commands to take the trumpet”: truth-telling and lying in Milton’.
(pm) Nicholas McDowell (Exeter), ‘“To Mr H. Lawes”: Friends Reunited?’;
Neville Davies (Birmingham), ‘Musical responses to Milton by some nineteenth-century composers’.
BMS 36: 13 October 2007
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Rosanna Cox (Kent), ‘“Outlandish Flatteries”?: Milton, Mylius and Networks of Diplomacy, 1649-53’;
Roger Pooley (Keele), ‘4004 and all that: What’s important about Genesis in the seventeenth century’.
(pm) James Kelly and Catherine Bray (Oxford), ‘The keys to Milton’s “two-handed engine”;
William Poole (Oxford), ‘The genres of Milton’s Commonplace Book’.
BMS 37: 8 March 2008
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Noel Sugimura (Cambridge), ‘Thinking through angels’;
Cedric Brown (Reading), ‘John Milton and Charles Diodati: reading the textual exchanges of friends’.
(pm) John Leonard (Western Ontario), ‘The troubled quiet endings of Milton’s English sonnets’;
Paul Stevens (Toronto), ‘Milton’s Polish hero and the Duke of Monmouth: longing for a hero’.
BMS 38: 25 October 2008
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Neville Davies (Birmingham), ‘Celebrating Milton in 1908’;
Anne McLaren (Liverpool), ‘Fathers, sons and freedom in Areopagitica’.
(pm) panel: The future of Milton studies – Noel Sugimura (Cambridge), Rosanna Cox (Kent), William Poole (Oxford); respondent: Gordon Campbell (Leicester).
BMS 39: 14 March 2009
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Robert Wilcher (Birmingham), ‘The Greening of Milton Criticism’;
Elliott Visconsi (Yale), ‘Milton’s Civil Religion’.
(pm) Amy Fleck (San Jose State University), ‘Milton, the Monarchy, and a Nation of Pismires’;
Thomas N. Corns (Bangor), ‘Milton, Winstanley, and man called Adam’.
BMS 40: 10 October 2009
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Hugh Adlington (Birmingham), ‘Milton and satirical book catalogues of the interregnum’;
Jonathan Olson (Liverpool), ‘Milton’s revisions to the second edition of Paradise Lost’.
(pm) Iain McClure (Epsom), ‘Milton’s medieval brain and perception in Paradise Lost’;
Noel Sugimura (Cambridge), ‘Sublime pathos, Milton and the passions in Paradise Lost’.
BMS 41: 13 March 2010
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Robert Cockcroft (Nottingham), ‘The pathos of Satan’s fall’;
Peter E. Medine (Arizona), ‘Milton’s Tetrachordon: context and text’;
(pm) Jeffrey Miller (Oxford), ‘Ames, the Sabbath, and the development of De Doctrina Christiana: Milton’s typically abrogative mind at work’;
Cedric Brown (Reading), ‘“Above all, Mr Skinner”: the older Milton and the visits of friends’.
BMS 42: 16 October 2010
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Hannah Crawforth (King’s College London), ‘Lycidas and elegies for Sidney’;
Nicholas McDowell (Exeter), ‘Laudian Milton’;
(pm) Adam Swann (Strathclyde), ‘“By degrees of merit razed”: the currency of conquest in Milton’s History of Britain’;
Edward Jones (Oklahoma SU), ‘Christopher and John Milton in the Ipswich Record Office’.
BMS 43: 19 March 2011
Shakespeare Memorial Room, Birmingham Central Library
(am) Sarah Knight (Leicester), ‘Milton the student’;
Thomas N. Corns (Bangor), ‘Milton’s churches’
(pm) Ben Burton and Sharon Achinstein (Oxford), ‘The printers of Tetrachordon: new findings’;
Warren Chernaik (King’s College London), ‘Tragic freedom in Samson Agonistes’.
BMS 44: 22 October 2011
Birmingham and Midland Institute
(am) Mandy Green (Durham), ‘Elegia VI and the Epitaphium Damonis, and Elegia I and the Milton-Diodati prose letters’;
Ryan Netzley (Southern Illinois University, Carbondale), ‘What happens in Lycidas?: novelty, possibility, and events’.
(pm) Islam Issa (Birmingham), ‘Milton and Islam: Paradise Lost in Arabic in twenty-first-century Egypt’;
A discussion led by Gordon Campbell (Leicester) on ‘Milton and the King James Bible’.
BMS 45: 17 March 2012
Birmingham and Midland Institute
(am) Matt Jordan (independent scholar), ‘Milton’s Apology: credit and the origins of self-esteem’;
Thomas N. Corns (Bangor), ‘John Toland’s Milton’.
(pm) Colin Timms (Birmingham), ‘Comus at Exton in 1745/48’;
Rachel Willie (Bangor), ‘Inscribing textuality: Milton, anti-theatricalism, and the performance of print’.
BMS 46: 20 October 2012
Birmingham and Midland Institute
(am) James Kelly (Cambridge), ‘Professing English at Cambridge (1925): knowing “everything in the world about Milton”’;
John Hale, ‘Questions arising from editing De Doctrina Christiana’.
(pm) Bonnie Landor (Oxford), ‘Chastity, tyranny and the throne of state: Comus and its Caroline context’;
Noel Sugimura (Georgetown), ‘“Terror be in love / And beauty”: Eve & the tyranny of beauty in Paradise Lost’.
BMS 47: 9 March 2013
Birmingham and Midland Institute
(am) Hugh Adlington (Birmingham), ‘“All that follows to p.50 very indifferent”: Richard Hurd reads Milton, 1751-1800’;
Edmund C. White (Oxford), ‘From “fides et mores” to “faith or ma[n]ners”: Areopagitica and the counter-Reformation hermeneutics of Christian practice’.
(pm) Margaret Kean (Oxford), ‘Standing up for early Milton’;
Colin Lahive (University College Cork), ‘Romance in Paradise Lost’.
BMS 48: 19 October 2013
Birmingham and Midland Institute
(am) John Coffey (Leicester), ‘Milton and Augustine revisited’;
Nicholas McDowell (Exeter), ‘Milton and Pamela’s Prayer: revisiting a cold case’.
(pm) Ivana Bičak (Leeds), ‘Gaudensque viam fecisse ruina: the grotesque mode in the epic Poetry of Milton and Lucan’;
Cedric Brown (Reading), ‘Milton and Cyriac Skinner revisited’.
BMS 49: 15 March 2014
Birmingham and Midland Institute
(am) Peter E. Medine (Arizona), ‘Colasterion: Milton’s response to “one of reprobate ignorance”’;
Miklós Péti (Károli Gáspár University), ‘Milton in Greece – allusions to Hellenic topography in Paradise Lost’.
(pm) Warren Chernaik (King’s College London), ‘“Tyrannie must be”: Milton and the Restoration’;
Thomas N. Corns (Bangor), ‘Catholicism and De Doctrina’.
BMS 50: 18 October 2014
Birmingham and Midland Institute
(am) Edward Jones (Oklahoma State University), ‘The elusive potential of Gregorio Leti’s collection of Milton’s state papers’;
Tess Somervell (Cambridge), ‘The Nunc Stans and reading Paradise Lost’.
(pm) Shigeo Suzuki (Nagoya University), ‘A whisper of Grotius: the rule of charity in Milton’s divorce tracts’;
Panel: past, present and future of Milton studies – Gordon Campbell (Leicester), Edward Jones (Oklahoma SU), Sarah Knight (Leicester), Rachel Willie (Bangor)
The British Milton Seminar 