Adams, Robert M. and George M. Logan, eds."The Seventeenth Century" in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th ed., Vol. I. Norton, 1993

Provides a good introduction to both the period and the poem, situating Paradise Lost in the context of Milton's life and works, the seventeenth century as a whole, and the epic tradition.

Berry, Boyd M. Process of Speech: Puritan Religious Writings and "Paradise Lost". Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976

Discusses Paradise Lost in the context of the English Civil Wars and Puritan ideology. He compares the battle scenes in heaven to the unheroic Puritan militarism of Cromwell's troops

Chnstensen, Inger. '"Thy Great Deliverer': Christian Hero and Epic Convention in John Milton's Paradise Lost and C S. Lewis's Perelandra ," in Kennedy, Andrew and Overland, Orm (eds), Excursions in Fiction, pp. 68-88. Novus, 1994 Compares the presentation of the epic hero and the epic...