John Milton (1608–1674) was the eldest son of a self-made London businessman. Before entering Christ's College, Cambridge, Milton had mastered Latin, Greek, most modern European languages, and Hebrew. After graduating in 1632, Milton returned home and for the next six years followed his own rigorous reading program. In 1637, he wrote the elegy Lycidas, a contribution to a volume memorializing a college classmate. Throughout the next year, Milton traveled through Europe, returning home after hearing of looming troubles in England. The next twenty years, 1640–1660, were a period of controversy during which Milton devoted most of his energy to writing prose. He wrote a number of tracts, essays, and pamphlets, including his Areopagitica, a defense of unlicensed or uncensored printing. He also served in the position of Latin secretary to Oliver Cromwell, the leader of the Puritans who had taken over England. In 1651, at the age of forty-three, Milton went blind. The next year, his first wife died. In 1656, he married Katherine Woodcock, who died in childbirth two years later. In 1663, Milton married his third wife and returned to writing poetry. During the last fourteen years of his life, he published his three major poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. Milton's writings reveal the influences of two powerful and contrasting intellectual and social movements, the Renaissance and the Reformation. These two paradoxical sources of work place him within the tradition of Renaissance Christian Humanism.