The articles in this special issue of Milton Studies on “Precarious Milton” explore some of the ways Milton’s life and works might be illuminated by considering them in relation to the subject and experience of precariousness in its myriad forms, from the early modern period to today. This issue thus joins growing scholarly interest in precariousness now emerging within early modern studies more broadly.1 The following seven articles, however, also do something unique: together they represent, to our knowledge, the first scholarly collection on the subject of precariousness in early modern studies written by authors who themselves, at the time the articles were begun, belonged to the swelling ranks of what have come to be known as “precarious scholars,” meaning scholars who possessed their doctorates but who lacked a tenured, tenure-track, or comparably secure faculty position in higher education.2Milton furnishes especially ripe terrain for an investigation of precariousness. No life can be wholly free from the forces of contingency, instability, insecurity, or uncertainty. Milton’s, though, was a life both more recurrently and more decisively precarious than many, and precariousness appears as an explicit, almost gnawing concern within his writings throughout his career. There is the obvious case of his going fully blind when he was in his early forties, which rendered him precariously dependent on others, day by day, and left him fearful that his “talent” as a writer might now forever be “lodged with him useless.”3 Before and after his blindness, virtually every one of the controversial public positions that Milton took in his writings was also precarious in a variety of senses, involving real elements of risk and throwing his reputation—not to mention, during the Restoration, his survival—into jeopardy on multiple occasions. Every major character in Milton’s three crowning poetic achievements—Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes—is centrally confronted in one way or another with precariousness as well, from Satan, buffeted (in at least one pivotal moment) by “ill chance” and more continually by his own unsteady recognition that his existence is not nearly as “secure” as God’s, to Milton’s Samson, whose “gift was” so precarious that God “hung it in his hair.”4Just as physical, professional, and other forms of precariousness played a significant role in Milton’s life and works in ways the articles in this special issue as a group examine, so have conditions of precarity been shaping the field of Milton studies in recent years. In his landmark 1977 book Milton and the English Revolution, Christopher Hill spoke with a mixture of wariness and censure of the “vast output” of “the immensely productive Milton industry, largely in the United States of America.”5 Michael Lieb, writing at the same time, declared that “the Milton industry, like the Shakespeare industry, shows no sign of waning.”6 Over the now nearly fifty years since those remarks were published, however, any such assessment of the academic landscape would have to be radically altered. Much scholarship on Milton continues to be written, including by junior scholars, and Milton is still taught around the world in higher education, where every year new flocks of students enjoy reading, discussing, and writing about Milton’s poetry and prose.7 Yet even amid these abiding signs of strength and hope, indications are everywhere that the academic study of Milton has become a field in jeopardy.On one hand, the declining fortunes of Milton studies in higher education merely track broader patterns of eroding concern for early modern studies and, more generally, the humanities. Even the most outstanding junior scholars specializing in any facet of early modern literature increasingly struggle to find secure academic employment; if every year new generations of undergraduates have their minds and hearts expanded not only by Milton but by many other subjects in the humanities, new droves of junior scholars simultaneously witness their own promising academic futures shut down and are driven from academia altogether.8 Meanwhile, whole departments or divisions in the humanities are being axed. In the United Kingdom, for example, universities where English literature degree programs have recently been “suspended” or shut down entirely include Canterbury Christ Church University and Sheffield Hallam University; and the universities of Cardiff, Durham, East Anglia, Kent, and Portsmouth, among others, have all announced “compulsory redundancies” or faculty lay-offs in the humanities as well.9 In North America, recent examples of colleges and universities that have similarly taken formal steps to “reduce the number of faculty positions associated with” the English Department, to make dramatic cuts to course offerings in English, or to “eliminate” outright or begin “suspending new admissions” for departments or programs in English or “Literature” include, to name only some, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Marymount University, Saint Mary’s University (Halifax), West Virginia University, York University’s Glendon Campus, and one of our own home institutions, Montclair State University.10 Nor are these changes restricted to Anglophone countries. Facing budget reductions, two leading universities in the Netherlands, Leiden and Utrecht (another of our home institutions currently), have decided to address their financial difficulties by cutting several humanities degrees.11 As all this is occurring, the humanities departments or divisions that remain are also regularly turning (or being turned against their will) further away from premodern studies—paring back requirements that students must take certain premodern courses, for instance, and/or not replacing retiring or expiring faculty who used to teach such now less-requisite matters—which is leading to fewer and fewer opportunities in higher education for students to encounter early modern material or for faculty to teach it.12 And in a vicious cycle at once propelling and reactive to the foregoing developments, government and other private philanthropic funding for premodern humanities teaching and research in higher education has likewise been rapidly declining.13 These dire circumstances have beset premodern studies writ large and many other fields across the humanities, and they have fallen hard on Milton studies or what Hill and Lieb called “the Milton industry.”One can measure the acuteness of the problem for Milton studies specifically in various ways. Consider, for example, the evolving output of Milton scholarship by publishers such as Cambridge University Press, Duquesne University Press, and Oxford University Press, which in the later twentieth and now early twenty-first centuries have been three of the leading fonts for scholarly books devoted to Milton. Between 1986 and 1995, Cambridge University Press published 12 new books (excluding reprints) with Milton or one of his works in the title. Over the succeeding decade from 1996 to 2005, that number increased to 19 new books, and it held steady at 19 over the following decade, from 2006 to 2015. During the most recent decade, 2016 to 2025, however, that number has, as of this writing, dropped to seven new books (two by the same author) and all by scholars who were already well-established and had published multiple books previously. Duquesne University Press, long another major purveyor of new scholarship on Milton and his works, published 47 new books titularly concerning Milton from 1986 to 2017 but zero thereafter, with the press having been forced to announce that it would “no longer be publishing new books” in any subject, even as “it is initiating a venture into online publishing.”14 During the same most recent decade from 2016 to 2025 that saw the number of books produced by Cambridge University Press with references to Milton in their titles drop to 7, Oxford University Press published twice as many works, 14, in that category. This 14, however, still represents a drop from the 21 such works that Oxford published the preceding decade from 2006 to 2015, and that total number of 14 books published most recently whose titles herald a direct concern with Milton is also inflated by the press’s salutary, ongoing publication of the new Complete Works of John Milton, whose volumes were commissioned before the present decade.Not every university press or academic publisher tells the same story. In an exception to the pattern, the number of books published by Routledge with titles referring to Milton or his works jumped from 4 in the period between 2006 and 2015 to 12 between 2016 and 2025. The reverse, however, happened at Palgrave, which went from 7 books titularly concerning Milton between 2006 and 2015 to a mere 2 between 2016 and 2025.15 It is also true, of course, that some amount of new scholarly work on Milton in book form continues to be found in studies whose titles in themselves do not expressly indicate a focus on him (though that was true in prior decades as well). Nevertheless, even with exceptions to the rule such as Routledge, the overall trend remains clear: the publication of books dedicated to Milton is sharply decreasing.By far, though, the most essential metric for gauging the severity of the challenge that Milton studies now faces is the number of jobs in higher education available to Milton scholars, particularly new, up-and-coming scholars. Take, for instance, the country that Hill, half a century ago, seemed to conceive of as being the field of Milton studies’ primary engine room: the United States. While precise numbers of available jobs in US higher education over the past decade can be difficult to determine, between fall 2014 to the month of this writing (May 2025) there were advertisements posted for at least 279 tenure-track jobs in English Departments around the United States seeking a scholar even possibly specializing in early modern literature.16 (We use the phrase “even possibly specializing” because some job postings include early modern literature as one of several hypothetical areas of concentration allowed for the prospective hire.) Of these 279 positions, only 17 (or 6 percent) mention Milton, and 16 of those job openings date from 2018 or earlier. Since 2018, that is, there appears to have been only one job for a tenure-track position with a college or university English Department that has included a reference to Milton anywhere in the job description. By comparison, most of the advertisements in the last eleven years that ask for early modern expertise explicitly call for a scholar specializing in the study of Shakespeare.Happily, some of the job advertisements from 2014 onward that did not refer to Milton still led to the hiring of scholars who had done or went on to do exceptional work in Milton studies. So one could argue that the picture is not quite as bleak as these grim numbers make it seem. Then again, one might with more accuracy maintain that the situation has, in fact, been worse than those statistics would connote, particularly for junior Milton scholars. For of the 17 advertisements that mentioned Milton, not all expressed a desire for an individual specializing in the study of him; some job postings, for example, mentioned Milton only in gesturing to a given English Department’s general range of offerings. Also, at least one of the 17 job openings was canceled before any hire was made.17The story of what has been happening to the place of Milton studies and the humanities more broadly in higher education is not the same everywhere, but similarly alarming narratives could be constructed in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and beyond.18 These developments and their consequences have rippled throughout early modern studies as a discipline and affected many within higher education. We would argue, however, that the burden of this difficult time has fallen disproportionately on precarious scholars.Across higher education, the category of precarious scholar is a capacious one. Some precarious scholars hold one or more adjunct, term-limited, or otherwise contingent position at a university or college, frequently teaching larger numbers of students for less pay and with less job security than their tenure-track colleagues.19 Others work in jobs entirely outside of higher education. Still others lack any stable, paid employment. It is also worth noting that the term “junior scholar” is not a synonym for precarious scholar, as many of those without secure employment have worked in higher education for as long as others even in more secure, senior positions and have an impressive track-record of publications and of attracting external funding; indeed, some precarious scholars may have once held supposedly secure positions in higher education themselves, before the current rounds of cuts and closures. Understandably, not all precarious scholars continue to produce scholarship in these circumstances. As Erin Bartram stressed in a notable essay on the subject, such writers and thinkers do not “owe” their research and publications to an academia that might have benefited from their work but that could not be moved to find a hospitable place for them.20 Many precarious scholars, however, persist with their scholarship, in spite of everything, and this special issue of Milton Studies features a vital selection of work by some of those who have.The special issue originated in the summer of 2021 with an international call for essay proposals from precarious scholars, whom we defined as scholars at least one year beyond receipt of their doctoral degree in any field of study and who were not currently employed in a tenure-track or comparably permanent faculty position in a college or university. In the time since, two of this special issue’s now seven contributors have found tenure-track or roughly equivalent positions in higher education, albeit in one of the two cases outside the discipline of English literary studies. The other essayists in this issue, however, still do not hold secure positions within higher education and perhaps never will, despite their litany of scholarly achievements. Several other contributors who were important parts of this collection as it first took shape are also no longer represented in these pages. For some, the ongoing conditions of their precarious academic employment or unemployment made completing their articles impossible, while others chose or were driven to leave academia and desist with their scholarly work in full. Proud as we are of the articles that this collection encompasses, we nonetheless feel the loss of the missing articles that in better times would have been included here, too.21The articles that remain in this issue do not purport to draw a straight line between precariousness—academic or otherwise—in Milton’s time and our own, nor do they presume that Milton’s experiences with, and ruminations on, precariousness make him our exact contemporary. Neither does every contribution to this collection refer expressly to its author’s own experiences as a precarious scholar. The articles range across topics, from the precarious nature of public philosophical inquiry as conceived in Milton’s Areopagitica and later reconceived in the work of Leo Strauss, to the salvific role of “stooping” as depicted in Paradise Lost and responded to by Jane Austen. Others look at the precariousness of Milton’s various intellectual communities and his own experiences outside of the university, as well as the precariousness faced by the contemporary clergymen whose profession Milton never joined but with whom his career continued to be bound up like a double helix. The issue also contains contributions on the precarious reception of Milton’s ideas “in new, international contexts” in the years immediately following his death and the early days of the German Enlightenment; the precarious use made of Paradise Lost by frequently precarious readers of color in the context of later eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century abolitionist politics; and the precarious ability “of data to manage uncertainty” and help explain a “precarious world” from Milton’s era to our present moment.22 Amid their differences, however, all the articles in this special issue harness the insights of precarious scholars to investigate precariousness in relation to Milton’s life and works at a time in modern history when the institutionalized study of Milton in higher education is gravely under threat.One final question that we grappled with during the creation of this special issue was the track record Milton studies as a field has had to date of valuing, supporting, or promoting the contributions of precarious scholars. One could again measure such a thing in various ways, but one metric for gauging it would be to look at how frequently precarious scholars have been invited or selected to share their work in recent high-profile special issues or edited collections in the field. We cite below the dispiriting levels of representation of precarious scholars gathered from a survey of such recent publications, from which we note that our issue’s own home, Milton Studies, is not excluded—though we naturally wish to acknowledge that with this special issue the problem has been recognized and foregrounded in an important venue. Among recent special issues in the field, for instance, none of the 6 contributors to the special issue of Milton Studies on “Is Milton Good for the Jews?” (2024) were precarious scholars, and none of the 8 essays in the special issue on “Shakespeare and Milton” (2023) or of the 20 in the two special issues on “Milton Today” (2020 and 2021) were written by precarious scholars either (though, it is worth observing, one of the essays in the “Shakespeare and Milton” issue was co-written by a graduate student at the time, and one of the essays in the first of the two “Milton Today” special issues was also written by a graduate student). Among some recent edited collections, meanwhile, 0 of 12 essays in the volume Milton Now (New York, 2014), 1 of 29 in Milton in the Long Restoration (Oxford, 2016), 1 of 43 in the New Companion to Milton (Chichester, 2016), 0 of 12 in Queer Milton 1 of 16 in Milton (Oxford, and 1 of in Milton’s were by precarious scholars. might case by for such so work done by scholars in less than secure circumstances the field as a not least by whose important scholarship might otherwise be a of and we the field of Milton studies not merely to but to of the must be ways to current in higher education and to place more precarious Milton scholars in academic jobs of more as well as to that even those who remain in precarious positions are given of job and for their the same time, and of those other essential are to be in the term or Milton studies must begin more fully to that numbers of scholars in the field, perhaps especially in the case of the new of Milton scholars, are and be the field is going to have any worth it must find more ways to those scholars and their We must to the insights of and precarious scholars more to the of the This special issue of Milton Studies to do that and seven and It one we hope, to the there be
Miller et al. (Sun,) studied this question.