Benjamin Stillingfleet’s Notes on Paradise Lost, Lost and Found

Abstract This essay reveals that the annotated copy of Richard Bentley’s edition of Paradise Lost (1732) with MS notes attributed to Benjamin Stillingfleet (1702–1771), now housed in the British Library, is not, as has been assumed for over 170 years, in Stillingfleet’s autograph hand. Drawing on book history, biography, and manuscripts in various archives, this essay tells a three-way story about Stillingfleet’s holograph annotations on Paradise Lost, their partial transcription in the Bentley edition, and a set of‘original’ manuscript notes on the epic that Stillingfleet made while in Geneva in the early 1740s. It recounts how a predominantly male socio-literary culture—in which private manuscripts circulated among friends and were lent to antiquarians and editors alike—preserved one set of Stillingfleet’s handwritten notes in his interleaved two-volume Tonson edition of Paradise Lost (1727), while a partial copy of those notes was made by Stillingfleet’s close friend, Thomas Dampier (d. 1777), dean of Ely, in his interleaved copy of Bentley’s edition. Although Stillingfleet’s original and earlier‘sketch’ of manuscript notes appears to have been lost, the remarkably rich set of autograph notes on Milton’s epic made by Stillingfleet in the Tonson volume tantalizingly suggests what Stillingfleet’s prospective edition might have looked like, and how it positioned itself against Bentley’s edition of 1732. Stillingfleet’s autograph notes therefore significantly help in better understanding not only Milton’s reception history in the eighteenth century, but also the role his epic played in the eighteenth-century debate between the Ancients and the Moderns in English Enlightenment culture.