Milton’s diacritics in six languages, though mostly typical of his time, allow some inferences about his language attainments and scholarship. For Latin verse, he uses accents to disambiguate rhythm or meaning. For Greek scholarship, he is punctilious. Italian authors are culture to him, French ones merely data. His Hebrew accents suggest neither a theological fundamentalist nor a textual conservative. His English verse ones reflect both etymology and rhythm, but where these part company he gives priority to rhythm.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Hale, J. K., (2025), "Observations on Milton’s Accents", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Hale, John K. "Observations on Milton’s Accents." Renaissance and Reformation 31 (3): 2010. 23-34. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v31i3.11626. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.