It is a truth universally acknowledged that Milton's formal education emphasized languages, especially Latin and Greek, and further that he practised and applied his languages (some ten of them) lifelong, in the course of reading or translating or composing. It is less often asked what exactly his possession of languages meant to him in the vicissitudes of a busy life, whether as ends in themselves or for access to texts in their original, and whether as means to thought or as resources of stylistic choice. These questions deserve a sustained exploration.

To supply it, we should first see Milton in the most pertinent context, namely renaissance multilingualism. Here is a humanist who wrote poems in four languages (Latin, Greek and Italian as well as his mother-tongue) and whose voluminous prose is almost half in Latin; a lifelong polyglot whose writings evince knowledge of three Semitic languages and further modern languages. How far does Milton typify his milieu, how far does he transcend or ignore or flout it?

A provisional sense can be gained by situating him in relation to a number of key linguistic or languages-related issues. These include: (a) the Questione della Lingua, the question whether (or when) to write in Latin or the mother-tongue; (b) languages as access to the springs of religion and thought for the Christian humanist; (c) the practice and norms of humanist education; (d) related broader questions of Imitatio and intertextuality.