Milton

De Doctrina Christianais John Milton’s systematic theology: fifty chapters in two books, arguing almost entirely by proof-text, and heterodox in ways that would have been dangerous to publish. It was not published in his lifetime. It was not published for a hundred and fifty years after his death.

This site presents it in parallel — Milton’s Latin beside an English translation, chapter by chapter, with every scriptural citation indexed and resolved. Both columns are drawn from Charles Richard Sumner’s edition of 1825, the editio princeps, which printed the Latin and Sumner’s own English in the same year. Both are in the public domain.

In November 1823, Robert Lemon the elder, Deputy Keeper of His Majesty’s State Papers, opened a press — a large cupboard — in the Old State Paper Office in the Middle Treasury Gallery at Whitehall, and found a manuscript treatise bundled together with a collection of Milton’s state papers. The parcel was addressed to a merchant named Skinner. It had been lying in government custody, so far as anyone can reconstruct, since Sir Joseph Williamson placed it there around 1677, having pressed Daniel Skinner into surrendering the papers he had been trying to get printed in the Low Countries.

The manuscript is now SP 9/61 at the National Archives. Sumner — then chaplain to George IV, later Bishop of Winchester — edited and translated it, and both volumes appeared at Cambridge in 1825. Milton’s early biographers had recorded that he wrote a systematic theology and that it was unpublished at his death; nobody had seen it.

It matters, for an edition like this one, that SP 9/61 is not a clean authorial document. It is a work in progress, in more than one hand. The bulk of it is a scribal fair copy by Jeremie Picard, who served as Milton’s amanuensis between 1658 and 1660; the opening sections are recopied in the hand of Daniel Skinner, apparently because they had been revised past the point where a printer could use them. The text was kept in separate fascicules, roughly a chapter each, with wide left margins — a working arrangement that let a blind man have one chapter at a time read to him and add scriptural material to it. Campbell, Corns, Hale and Tweedie reconstruct all of this in detail, and conclude that the treatise reached its present state around 1660 and was never made ready for the press.

So there is no single moment at which Milton signed off on this text, and an edition that implied otherwise would be lying about its own foundations.

In August 1991, at the Fourth International Milton Symposium in Vancouver, William Hunter argued that the attribution of the treatise to Milton was unsafe. The manuscript does carry Milton’s name, but in a hand that is not clearly Skinner’s and possibly added later, and Hunter’s point was that the attribution therefore needed evidence beyond the work’s general agreement with the rest of Milton. The question dominated Milton studies for the better part of two decades.

It was answered. Thomas Corns convened the research group whose findings are set out in Campbell, Corns, Hale and Tweedie’s Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana(Oxford, 2007), which traces the manuscript’s passage from Milton’s desk to the cupboard almost without a gap, and tests the Latin stylometrically against comparable works. Their conclusion is worth stating precisely, because it is more interesting than a simple yes. Systematic theology in the seventeenth century was an appropriative genre: its authors absorbed their predecessors’ arguments and proof-texts wholesale and made them their own by dissenting at the points that mattered. Measured that way, De Doctrina Christianais at least as much Milton’s as Wolleb’s and Ames’s treatises are theirs — and nobody disputes those.

That is said here once, plainly, and then left alone. It is not relitigated in the chapter notes.

This is an edition of Sumner 1825, not of the manuscript. The 1825 Latin was set directly from SP 9/61, which is a point in its favour; but the transcription has been questioned by scholars who have had the manuscript unbound and on a lightbox, and this edition has not seen the manuscript at all. Where you need the critical text, the place to go is the edition prepared by John Hale and Donald Cullington for the Oxford Complete Works of John Milton, which is a fresh transcription and a fresh translation. It is in copyright, and it should be bought.

What this site offers instead is the thing that is free to offer: the 1825 text, both languages, aligned paragraph to paragraph, fully searchable, deep-linkable, and indexed by scripture. That is not a substitute for Oxford. It is the version that can be put in front of anyone, anywhere, at no cost, which is a different kind of usefulness.

Each layer is transcribed from the scan of its own 1825 volume — the Latin from the 524-page editio princeps, the English from Sumner’s separate translation volume — and each is checked against the page image. The two volumes have the same editor, the same year, and the same chapter divisions, so alignment is a matter of measurement rather than judgement: the offset between scan page and printed page has been anchored independently for each volume and holds without drift across the whole run.

Optical character recognition is used as a finding aid and never as the text of record. On these scans it mangles chapter titles, drops others entirely, and is least reliable exactly where the citations are densest. Anything doubtful is read off the page image, and the printed page governs.

Milton quotes scripture in Latin from the Junius–Tremellius Bible, the Protestant Latin version that the whole genre used. Sumner’s English quotes the Authorized Version. The two do not always number the same verse the same way, and Sumner converted from one to the other inconsistently. Across the corpus the two columns print different numbers for the same citation several hundred times.

For a long stretch of this project those disagreements were recorded as Milton’s errors, silently corrected by Sumner. That was wrong, and it was wrong for an embarrassing reason: nobody had opened the Bible Milton was actually using. When a copy of Junius–Tremellius (Hanau, 1603) was finally read page by page, chapter division by chapter division, roughly thirty-five of those supposed errors turned out to be nothing of the kind. That Bible simply divides some chapters at a different verse, so both numbers point at the same words and both are right. One chapter alone fell from sixteen alleged errors to three.

Twenty-three of those chapter divisions have now been read off the page images and recorded, and the index of scripture says, for every divergence, which of them it is: a known difference of numbering, an open-ended reference that one edition closes, or a case nobody has checked yet. The last of those is printed as what it is. A great many citations are marked not yet checked, and that mark means we have not opened his Bible at that chapter — not that Milton got it wrong. Calling a citation an author’s mistake is a claim about a real person, and this edition would rather print an honest blank than a confident guess.

Each layer is printed as it stands in its own volume. Where the Latin cites one verse and the English another, both are shown and neither is adjusted toward the other. Where Sumner made a silent editorial decision, it stays, and is noted rather than reversed. Obvious scanning damage is repaired; anything that might be a real feature of the printed page is flagged and left for someone to settle against the image. This is an edition of Sumner, not an improvement on him.

Book II is complete — all seventeen chapters, on worship and on duty toward God and neighbour. Book I, the thirty-three chapters on God, creation, and redemption, is under way. It ends with the chapters that carry the treatise’s reputation, and those are scheduled last, when the conventions are fully settled and nothing about the process is still being invented.

Everything here should be cited as a draft. Corrections are wanted, not merely welcomed — a misread word, a citation resolved to the wrong verse, a divergence we have classed wrongly. Write to wilson@wrootlabs.com. It will be fixed, and the correction recorded. Terms of reuse are on the rights page; the short version is that all of it is free.