Paradise Lost and the Cosmological Revolution

Rather than provide a bibliography of such heterogeneous materials as have fed into this study, I would direct interested readers in the first instance to my footnotes, which provide full citations of texts quoted or referred to. Many authors appearing there may be searched in the Index. Primary works are also increasingly searchable and accessible electronically. I particularly recommend the following access points:

• EEBO (Early English Books Online, based on the Short Title Catalogue)

• Accessible via major research libraries.

• www.worldcat.org

• WorldCat offers enhanced access via major research libraries and provides direct links to many digitized rare books.

• www.e-rara.ch

• Digitized rare books published from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries and held in Swiss libraries.

• www.bsb-muenchen.de

• Bavarian State Library (offering access to many digitized rare books).

• www.hab.de

• Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel (offering access to many digitized rare books).

If one wishes to explore the history of astronomy and cosmology further, one cannot do better than to sample the writings of the great astronomers themselves: Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Galileo. Wilkins’s Discovery and Discourse are likewise highly worthwhile, as is Burton in his function as a gatherer of miscellaneous opinions (in the “Digression of Air” in The Anatomy of Melancholy). Michael J. Crowe’s Theories of the World From Antiquity to the Copernican Revolution provides an accessible introduction to the problems of astronomy. Albert Van Helden’s Measuring the Universe: Cosmic Dimensions From Aristarchus to Halley is also informative and historically interesting. My own anthology The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining the Universe From Heraclitus to Hawking offers stimulating, historically organized excerpts from more than eighty prominent cosmological writers across more than two millennia. Another useful and intriguing anthology is Crowe’s The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, Antiquity to 1915: A Source Book (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008) . Two large, ambitious studies of Copernicanism are Blumenberg’s The Genesis of the Copernican World and, more recently, Robert Westman’s The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011) . Also indispensible in this category, of course, is Thomas Kuhn’s The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. Finally, few studies are as informative and stimulating as John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler’s The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) .

Most articles on Milton are searchable and accessible electronically via the Modern Language Association (MLA) bibliography and via the JSTOR collection. Many of the books relevant to Miltonic themes pursued in this volume are given astute critical attention in John Leonard’s magisterial final chapter of Faithful Labourers, “The Universe” (pp. 705–819), in addition to appearing in his extensive bibliography.