Hammonds is a scholarly, accessible work that pays extremely close attention to details and offers abundant context for scholars and students of Miltons political thought. Students of mid-seventeenth-century English political thought might also find the book useful, as the legion of primary sources (and the excursus into Hobbess political philosophy) helpfully contextualizes Miltons thought by comparing it to his contemporaries, many of them Miltons polemical adversaries.

John Luke Rodrigue, Modern Language Review

excellent and long overdue ... Hammond's is the first book-length, in-depth study of the very basis of Miltonâs politics, his complex attitudes toward his fellow countrymen. In eminently readable and sometimes witty prose exhibiting a comprehensive knowledge of the intellectual, linguistic, and political contexts in which Milton wrote, Hammond traces Milton's shifting attitudes toward the English people from his Prolusions to Samson Agonistes ... Its linguistic scholarship is so replete and its prose so lucid.

Hugh Jenkins, Milton Quarterly

This is a distinguished book, combining close reading of Miltonic texts with sensitivity to their political, religious and intellectual contexts. Hammond's argument is deeply learned, elegantly written and full of fresh insights that open up significant new perspectives on Milton's conceptions of 'the people' and 'the vulgar'.

David L. Smith, English Historical Review