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Scholars discover rare 16th-century tome with handwritten notes by John Milton

Poet crossed out one racy passage, deeming it "an unbecom[ing] tale for a hist[ory]"

Add one more title to that small list, as scholars recently discovered a copy of Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland in the Phoenix Public Library, containing handwritten notes in Milton's distinctive hand. A London printer named Reginald Wolfe started the project and hired Raphael Holinshed and William Harrison to help him create a "universal cosmography of the whole world." Naturally, Pratt was intrigued and examined the handwritten marginalia more closely, finding "scratchy brackets" with notations that looked very much like ones known to be written by Milton in a Shakespeare First Folio discovered in the Philadelphia Free Library in 2019.

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