Milton
John Rogers of Yale leads a full semester on John Milton's poetry and prose, recorded as part of Open Yale Courses. Lectures work through the lyric poems and Paradise Lost in close detail, alongside Milton's controversial prose tracts and letters, tracing his literary sources among classical and Renaissance writers and his influence on later English poetry. Sessions cover biographical material, the political and religious upheavals of the English Civil War period that shaped his work, and the critical debates that have surrounded Milton scholarship, from theological readings to feminist and historicist critiques. The course was taught twice weekly on Yale's campus and filmed in Fall 2007, and it is available with the full set of video lectures under a Creative Commons license, free to watch with no certificate attached. No prior background in Milton or seventeenth-century literature is assumed.