Eikon Basilike: with selections from Eikonoklastes

John Milton

Nov 2005 · Broadview Press

About this ebook

Published just after the execution of King Charles I in 1649, Eikon Basilike is a defence of the king’s motivations and actions prior to and during the British civil wars. Nine chapters of Eikonoklastes, John Milton’s response to Eikon Basilike, are also included in this edition. Here Milton, writing from a republican perspective, attacks the substance and style of the King’s Book. These fascinating texts are now available in an edition that also includes a rich selection of historical documents.

This Broadview edition’s critical introduction discusses the publication history and both seventeenth-century and current debates regarding the work and its authorship, while the appendices provide a generous selection of contemporary responses to Eikon Basilike and accounts of the king’s trial and scaffold speech.

About the author

Jim Daems currently teaches in the English Department at the University College of the Fraser Valley. He is the author of Seventeenth-Century Literature and Culture (Continuum, 2005).

Holly Faith Nelson Assistant Professor of English at Trinity Western University, has co-edited The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse and Prose (2000) and Of Paradise and Light: Essays on Henry Vaughan and John Milton (University of Delaware Press, 2004).