1. Now one of the entries in Milton's commonplace book that touches on the subject of chastity strikes me as a particularly charged one for its terrifying image of violence.

2. Actually we have Milton's commonplace book, his reading notes, and you can find it all in English translation in volume one of The Complete Prose Works of John Milton.

3. Milton, like so many of his contemporaries, kept a commonplace book and, as you can imagine, he kept it for the most part in Latin.

4. I think there's a connection here between the image from the commonplace book and the treatment in Milton's mask of this strangely conjoint phenomenon of virginity and speechlessness.

5. The text into which any early modern seventeenth-century writer would jot his or her thoughts into, his reading notes, was always called a commonplace book.