Toland’s Milton, the Acta Eruditorum , and the Reception of English Republican Ideas in the German Enlightenment

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the reception of John Milton’s work in Germany from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. Due to the potentially treasonous content of his Defensio (1651), Milton’s writing was not widely read in Germany and mainly circulated clandestinely. Moreover, the Latin Defensio was only accessible to an educated audience. It was with the first German edition of Paradise Lost in 1682 that Milton won broader appeal as a poet. A turning point in his reception in Germany came with J. B. Mencke’s review of John Toland’s Life of Milton (1699), which provided much needed biographical and contextual information on the author and would shape his reputation for the next century and beyond.