Milton Quarterly

About Milton Quarterly

Milton Quarterly — Journal Profile

Milton Quarterly is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal devoted to the life, works, career, literary surroundings and cultural afterlife of the English poet and polemicist John Milton (1608–1674), published by Wiley (John Wiley & Sons) in the United States. Library guides to Milton studies summarise its contents in the journal's own terms: it publishes in-depth articles, review essays, and shorter notes and notices about Milton's works, career, literary surroundings, and place in cultural history. It carries print ISSN 0026-4326 and online ISSN 1094-348X — the pair stored on this JournalsWorld record and confirmed by the OpenAlex source record for the title, which lists both identifiers together and names Wiley as host organisation. The journal has appeared since 1967, publishes four issues a year, and is one of the two principal periodicals in the world devoted entirely to Milton, the other being the biannual Milton Studies. For anyone working on Milton — on Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, the prose tracts, the divorce pamphlets, the Latin and Italian poems, or the poet's reception across four centuries — this is a first-rank venue and a standard point of reference.

At a Glance

History — from a 1967 newsletter to a Wiley quarterly

The journal began in 1967. Roy Flannagan, then building a career that would spend thirty-two years at Ohio University, began what was to become Milton Quarterly in that year, according to his publisher biography for his book John Milton: A Short Introduction — a biography that also records his presidency of the Milton Society of America, his turn as the Society's Honored Scholar in 2001 following C. S. Lewis and Northrop Frye in that role, and his editorship of the Riverside Milton, the standard one-volume edition of Milton's works. Library guides to Milton studies note that the quarterly was preceded by the Milton Newsletter, and the journal's publishing history is best understood as the professionalisation of that newsletter into a full peer-reviewed quarterly as Milton studies itself grew into a large international subfield in the late twentieth century.

The stored JournalsWorld record gives publication coverage from 1967 to 2025, and current evidence confirms the journal is still active in the mid-2020s: a review published in Milton Quarterly in 2025, on a major new history of early modern reading, carries the imprint “Milton Quarterly published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd” and the journal's Wiley Online Library address. OpenAlex, resolving the title through its ISSN endpoint, records 2,452 works under the journal's name across its run, with annual counts beginning in 1967 — forty-two works in that first year, and forty-seven in 1969 — reflecting the newsletter-era density of short items as well as full articles. Four issues a year over nearly six decades makes Milton Quarterly one of the most productive single-author journals in literary studies, and its back run is correspondingly large: a near-complete record of what the field has argued about since the late 1960s.

That continuity is the journal's defining institutional feature. Single-author journals live or die by the size and energy of their author's scholarly community, and Milton's community — organised internationally, with the Milton Society of America at its centre and a major conference and collection culture around it — has sustained two periodicals, several book series and a steady stream of editions. Milton Quarterly is the faster-moving of the two Milton journals: where Milton Studies, published biannually by Penn State University Press, tends to gather longer essays in themed volumes, the quarterly mixes substantial articles with review essays that take stock of new books and with short notes and notices that record discoveries, correct the record and keep the field's bibliography moving. A researcher entering Milton studies will typically read both, but will check the quarterly first for what is new.

Scope — one author, every approach

The journal's stated territory, as carried in university library guides drawn from its own descriptions, is Milton's works, career, literary surroundings and place in cultural history. Each element of that formula does real work. “Works” covers the full canon: the epic and dramatic poetry, the shorter poems in English, Latin and Italian, the prose of the civil-war decades — the antiprelatical tracts, the divorce pamphlets, Areopagitica, the regicide defences, the late History of Britain and the theological treatise De Doctrina Christiana whose attribution and editing remain live questions. “Career” opens the door to biography, bibliography, book history and the study of Milton's reading, his manuscripts and his print afterlife. “Literary surroundings” admits the contemporaries against whom Milton is read — Marvell, Dryden, the Spenserian tradition, the metaphysical poets, the republic of letters in which the young Milton travelled to Italy and met Galileo. “Place in cultural history” admits reception: Milton in the Romantics' hands, Milton in translation across the world, Milton in visual art, music and political argument, and Milton's presence in contemporary debates about freedom, governance and morality.

Secondary summaries of the journal's aims describe an explicitly interdisciplinary practice: rigorous analysis of Milton's works across themes such as religion, politics and philosophy; historical contextualisation that situates Milton within the socio-political landscape of the seventeenth century; approaches that merge literary analysis with theology, philosophy and cultural studies; a growing attention to how Milton is read and adapted in cultures around the world; and an interest in how Milton's themes speak to modern societal debates. OpenAlex's topic analysis of the journal's actual contents is consistent with that description, grouping its output under Renaissance literature and culture, poetry analysis and criticism, Reformation and early modern Christianity, libraries, manuscripts and books, and medieval literature and history at the field's edge. The practical test for an author is double: a submission must be about Milton — centrally, not incidentally — and it must advance an argument or a piece of evidence that other Miltonists will need. Work on the broader early modern period with only a passing Milton connection belongs in a general early modern journal instead, several of which are named below.

The mix of genres inside the journal deserves emphasis, because it shapes how scholars use it. The in-depth article is the core genre: a fully argued essay of the length normal in literary studies, peer reviewed and carrying the journal's authority. The review essay is the journal's stocktaking instrument, in which a recent book or a cluster of books becomes the occasion for an assessment of a whole question — the 2025 review of a five-hundred-page history of early modern reading, engaging its claims about literacy, humanist reading practices and the psychological consequences of print, is a recent example of the form at work. The notes and notices are short, and deliberately so: a newly noticed source, a corrected date, a bibliographical refinement, a brief reply. Together the three genres make each issue function as a small newsletter of the field in the best sense, even though the journal long ago outgrew its newsletter origins in scale and rigour.

Editorial leadership and peer review

The journal's founding editor, Roy Flannagan, set its character: an editor who was himself a major Miltonist, the editor of the Riverside Milton and a past president of the Milton Society of America, running the journal from Ohio University for much of its life. The name of the journal's current editor could not be verified from an official publisher source fetched for this profile — Wiley's journal pages did not render for direct checking — and this profile therefore names no current editor rather than risk an outdated one; authors should take the current masthead from the journal's Wiley Online Library page, where the editorial board and the editor's name are displayed for each volume. What can be said on verified evidence is structural: the journal is published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, its articles carry Wiley DOIs built on the online ISSN (a 1993 article's DOI, 10.1111/j.1094-348X.1993.tb00807.x, shows the pattern), and its content model — articles, review essays, notes — has remained stable across decades and across the move from print to the Wiley Online Library platform.

Peer review follows the standard practice of Wiley humanities journals, with manuscripts assessed by specialist readers in Milton studies; the precise review model and the current submission route are stated on the journal's Wiley page and in its author guidelines there, and should be checked at the moment of submission because publisher systems and requirements change. Two pieces of practical guidance hold regardless of system details. First, fit is judged strictly: editors of single-author journals return work whose Milton connection is peripheral, however good it is on its own terms. Second, the journal's three genres have different gates — a discovery that makes a strong note may not sustain a full article, and a book that merits a review essay will be handled by commission more often than by unsolicited offer — so authors with a non-standard item should query the editor before preparing it in full.

Metrics, indexing and how to read them

As with every journal in this directory, the figures depend on the database, and this profile names its sources. The thin listing that this profile replaces recorded an h-index of 15 for the journal, drawn from the Scopus-based data behind that listing — a figure consistent with secondary metric summaries that have put the journal's h-index in the low-to-mid teens in recent years, alongside a SCImago Journal Rank around 0.16 and small journal-level citation averages typical of a humanities quarterly, where citation is slow and books matter more than articles. OpenAlex, resolving the journal through the ISSN endpoint at checking time (October 2026) as source S201910397, records 2,452 works and 3,353 citations with a summary h-index of 20 and an i10-index of 62. The two h-index figures are not in conflict once their coverage is understood — OpenAlex counts the journal's long run of short items and a wider citation graph — but neither should be quoted without its source attached.

Secondary rankings have placed the journal in the first quartile (Q1) of its literature category, the standing the old JournalsWorld record also carried; in a field the size of Milton studies, quartile labels say less than the simple fact that the journal is one of the field's two dedicated periodicals and is read by effectively everyone who publishes on Milton. The journal is not listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals — a DOAJ search by ISSN at checking time returned no listing — which matches its subscription model. Its contents are indexed in the standard literary-studies bibliographies (library guides list the MLA International Bibliography and the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature as the field's discovery tools, alongside JSTOR and Project MUSE for early modern material), and its articles are fully discoverable through Wiley Online Library, Crossref and OpenAlex metadata.

Access and open access

Milton Quarterly is a subscription journal published by Wiley, and most of its contents sit behind institutional access. It is not, however, a closed shop: individual articles appear in open access form under Creative Commons licences — the 2025 review essay cited above is published under a CC BY-NC-ND licence with the author holding copyright — which is the pattern of Wiley's hybrid open access programme, under which authors or their funders may pay to make an accepted article free to read. No article processing charge figure for this journal could be verified from a publisher source fetched for this profile, so none is quoted here; authors considering the open access route should take the current charge from the journal's Wiley page at the time of acceptance, since Wiley revises its price lists. For readers, the realistic routes are a university library subscription, the open access subset, and the extensive print holdings of the journal in research libraries, where its run beginning in 1967 is commonly held complete.

How to submit

Submissions are handled through the journal's presence on Wiley Online Library (journal code “milt”; the journal's address there is built on its online ISSN, 1094348X). Before preparing a manuscript, an author should read the current aims, scope and author guidelines on that page, confirm the current editor and submission system, and decide honestly which of the journal's three genres the work belongs to. Manuscripts should be prepared as original, previously unpublished scholarship addressed to specialists: the journal's readers know the primary texts intimately, so quotation, dating and reference to the standard editions must be exact, and engagement with the existing Milton scholarship — much of it published in this journal and in Milton Studies — is expected rather than optional. Review essays and notes follow the same route unless commissioned. Because the editorial details that matter most (current editor, system, formatting) are exactly the ones this profile could not verify from a live publisher fetch, the Wiley page is the controlling source, and this profile's account should be treated as orientation rather than instruction.

Similar journals

The closest relative is Milton Studies (print ISSN 0076-8820, online ISSN 2330-796X), the biannual Penn State University Press journal profiled elsewhere in this directory, which publishes longer essays on Milton's life and writing, his contexts, his influence and the history of critical response to him. Beyond the Milton pair, authors and readers move naturally to The Seventeenth Century and English Literary Renaissance for the period frame; to ELH and Studies in Philology for literary-historical argument in English studies; to Literature and Theology and Reformation for the religious dimensions of Milton's work; and to ANQ for short notes on literary questions when an item is shorter than even the quarterly's notes genre. Each title has its own record in this directory and its own publisher page, which should be checked for current status.

Frequently asked questions

What are the ISSNs of Milton Quarterly? Print ISSN 0026-4326 and online ISSN 1094-348X, listed together by OpenAlex (source S201910397) and stored on this JournalsWorld record.

Who publishes Milton Quarterly? Wiley — John Wiley & Sons Ltd — in the United States, on Wiley Online Library under the journal code “milt”.

When was Milton Quarterly founded, and by whom? In 1967, by Roy Flannagan of Ohio University, who began what became the quarterly in that year and edited the Riverside Milton; library guides record an earlier form as the Milton Newsletter.

What does Milton Quarterly publish? In-depth articles, review essays, and shorter notes and notices about Milton's works, career, literary surroundings and place in cultural history.

How often does it appear? Four issues a year, as its name states.

What are its metrics? Source-dependent: the old JournalsWorld listing gave an h-index of 15; OpenAlex (checked October 2026) records 2,452 works, 3,353 citations and a summary h-index of 20. Quote a figure only with its database named.

Is Milton Quarterly open access? It is a subscription journal with a hybrid open access option; individual articles, such as a 2025 review essay under a CC BY-NC-ND licence, appear free to read. It has no DOAJ listing.

How does it differ from Milton Studies? Frequency, publisher and genre mix: the quarterly (Wiley, four issues a year) mixes articles with review essays and short notes, while Milton Studies (Penn State University Press, twice a year) gathers longer essays. Their ISSNs do not overlap, and they are separate journals, not editions of one title.

Sources and verification

This profile was researched in October 2026 from: the OpenAlex source record resolved through the ISSN endpoint for 1094-348X and 0026-4326 (source S201910397; ISSN pair, Wiley as host, works and citation counts, summary statistics, topics, first-year coverage); university library guides to Milton studies at the University of Illinois and the University of Puget Sound (contents description, the Milton Newsletter predecessor note, the journal's place among Milton periodicals); the publisher biography of founding editor Roy Flannagan in his John Milton: A Short Introduction (Wiley, 2008), as reproduced by booksellers (1967 founding, Ohio University, Milton Society of America roles); a 2025 Milton Quarterly review essay's published front matter (Wiley imprint, journal address, CC licence); secondary metric summaries for the SCImago standing; a DOAJ search by ISSN, which returned no listing; and the pre-existing JournalsWorld record (ISSN pair, coverage 1967–2025, h-index 15), checked against those sources. The current editor's name and the current article charge could not be verified from a live publisher fetch and are therefore not stated.