1. Voltaire,Essay on Epick Poetry of all the European Nations(London: Jallasson, 1777), p. 131.
2. Jean Gillet,Le Paradis perdu dans la littérature français. De Voltaire à Chateaubriand(Paris: Klincksieck, 1975), p. 21. Gillet’s position accords with that of the Roman Church in considering heretical books and ideas to be dangerous and ‘poisonous’ mainly to ‘the feeble–minded who are many’ (‘infirmiores qui plurimi sunt’). The latter statement was made by Pius VI in his encyclicalInscrutabile divinae sapientiae(25 December 1775) in which the Pope affirmed that most Catholics could be easily influenced by dangerous and heterodox books. See the paragraph, ‘De tutela infirmorum’, in Patrizia Delpiano, ‘Per una storia della censura ecclesiastica nel Settecento’,Società e storia, 105 (2004), 487–530 (pp. 518–22).
3. On the relationships between Milton, Italian academies, and academics, seeMilton in Italy: Contexts, Images, Contradictions, ed. by Mario Di Cesare (Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1991), pp. 1–60 and Gordon Campbell,John Milton, inOxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004),xxxviii, 333–49.
4. John Milton, Sonnet XVIII. 14: ‘Early may fly the Babylonian wo’. SeeThe Works of John Milton, ed. by Frank Allen Patterson, 18 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–1940),i, Part I, 66.
5. Where the Roman Inquisition is dismissed as ‘Two or three glutton Friars [who] rake through the entrails of many an old good author’. John Milton, ‘Areopagitica’, inComplete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. by Ernest Sirluck, 8 vols (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953–1982),ii(1974), 503.