De Doctrina Christiana ["On Christian Doctrine"]: This is a theological treatise in Latin, probably written in the 1650s, as Rogers indicates. The manuscript was discovered only in the 19th century. This work is of great interest in that it expresses some heretical ideas not obviously present in Paradise Lost. Among these is the doctrine of monist materialism, the idea that the material universe is suffused with God's goodness and ultimately not separate from the divine. This idea is described by Rogers on 112-113.
The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates: This is a 1649 tract by Milton defending the right of the people to execute a king.
Defensio pro Populo Anglicano ["Defense of the English People"]: Milton wrote this in 1651 at the request of the Cromwell government; it defends the revolution and the regicide against published attacks by the French scholar Claudius Salmasius.
The Readie & Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth: Published in 1660 with the Restoration seeming inevitable, this was Milton's last attempt to persuade his countrymen to keep a republican government rather than a monarchy.
Rogers' thesis is that the "vitalist moment" - a brief period in the mid-seventeenth-century when some natural philosophers (what we now call scientists) held that matter was not lifeless and mechanistic, but that body and soul were inseparable and, in the extreme formulation, that "all material substance was infused with the power of reason and self-motion" (1) - attracted some on the Puritan left as an analogy for revolutionary politics. In the chapter you are reading, he argues that Milton's apparent onetime interest in vitalism reappears in Paradise Lost as an alternative political image of the cosmos.
The Levellers (referred to on 107) were a political movement of the 1640s dedicated to popular sovereignty and equality.
The "Good Old Cause" (143) was that of Cromwell and the New Model Army - the Puritan/republican political cause.
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