In his commentary on John Donne's epigram on Niobe, Robin Robbins notes that that grief-stricken mother was a 'favorite subject since ancient times' and cites a range of poems on her from the Greek ...Anthology that were 'often translated and imitated in the Renaissance'. Robbins lists as examples the anthology's poems 7.54.9 and 16.129-133, but he rightly does not identify a specific model for Donne's contribution to the tradition from among this group, each of which gives quite a different treatment of Niobe's tragic fate than does the English poet. Robbins does, however, note the similarity of the conceit of Donne's distich to that of an epigram by Angelo Poliziano, as well as to strikingly similar lines by Faustus Sabaeus.
James S. Baumlin’s Theologies of Language in English Renaissance Literature offers a revisionist history of discourse, taking Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton as its touchstones. Their works mark ...stages in die Entzauberung or “disenchantment,” as Max Weber has termed it: that is, in the “elimination of magic from the world.” Shakespeare’s Hamlet questions the word-magic associated with medieval Catholicism; Donne’s love lyrics ironize the sacramental gestures of their poetic-priestly speakers; more radical still, Milton’s major poems and polemical prose empty language of sacral power, repudiating human persuasion entirely over matters of “saving faith.” Baumlin describes four archetypes of historical rhetoric: sophism, skepticism, incarnationism, and transcendence. Undergirding the age’s competing theologies, each makes unique assumptions regarding the powers of language (both communicative and performative); the nature of being (including transcendent being or deity); the structure of the psyche (whether sin-weakened or self-sufficient); and the capacities of human knowing (whether certain knowledge is communicable—or even possible). Working within divergent theologies of language, the poets here studied take theological controversies as explicit themes. The crisis of Hamlet begins not in a king’s murder simply, but in his dying without benefit of the sacraments. As if compensating for their loss, young Hamlet “ministers” to Gertrude while acting as “scourge” to Claudius. Alternating between soul-cursing and soul-curing, Hamlet plays sorcerer and priest indiscriminately. Appropriating the speech-acts of Catholic sacramentalism, Donne’s lyrics describe a private “religion of Love,” over which the poet-lover presides as officiant. Or rather, some lyrics present him as Love’s Priest, there being as many personae as there are theologies of language. Beyond Love’s Priest, Baumlin describes three such personae: Love’s Apostate, Love’s Atheist, and Love’s Reformer. Focusing on “Lycidas” and De Doctrina Christiana, Baumlin outlines Milton’s plerophoristic “rhetoric of certitude.” Such texts as these explore the problematic status of preaching. (Can human eloquence contribute to salvation?) They explore competing definitions (Aristotelian vs. Pauline) of pistis—meaning alternatively (religious) “faith” and (rhetorical) “persuasion.” And they invoke conflicting typologies (classical vs. Hebraic) of authorial ethos. Baumlin’s study ends with a glance at the Restoration and Royal Society’s final “disenchantment” or secularization of discourse.
In recent decades, it has become clear that John Donne's seventeenth-century readership is larger and more varied than was once believed. One audience that has not been given much scholarly ...attention, however, is English puritans on both sides of the Atlantic. This article brings to light several possible avenues for the transmission of Donne's works to these readers and then identifies explicit references and poetic allusions to Donne by writers of these theological and ecclesiastical persuasions.
Hokama aims to demonstrate that John Donne appropriated a number of metaphorical conceits in his elegy 'To his Mistress going to bed' (ca. 1590s) from Francisco de Vitoria's Latin lecture De Indis, ...which was written in 1537-38 and delivered the following year in 1539. He maintains that Donne rejected Vitoria's view of propriety in sexual relations, arguing instead for the importance of sexual freedom outside of the bounds of matrimonial and canon law. Vitoria was a Spanish jurist and Dominican theologian, and a founding thinker of the School of Salamanca, a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century group of thinkers in Spain, Portugal, and the Spanish Netherlands who engaged with questions of international law and jurisprudence--including topics relating to European expansion in the New World. Vitoria maintains that neither the American peoples' unbelief nor their refusal to convert to Christianity is grounds for the Spanish to deny the native peoples their property and civil rights. Additionally, Vitoria maintained that Christian princes and the pope have neither legal nor moral authority to force the American peoples to convert to Christianity, nor may they be punished for their refusal to convert.
John Donne has been one of the most controversial poets in the history of English literature, his complexity and intellectualism provoking both praise and censure. In this major re-assessment of ...Donne's poetry, Hugh Grady argues that his work can be newly appreciated in our own era through Walter Benjamin's theory of baroque allegory. Providing close readings of The Anniversaries, The Songs and Sonnets, and selected other lyrics, this study reveals Donne as being immersed in the aesthetic of fragmentation that define both the baroque and the postmodernist aesthetics of today. Synthesizing cultural criticism and formalist analysis, Grady illuminates Donne afresh as a great poet for our own historical moment.
Gontarek situates Urania's opening sonnet within Penshurst's three-dimensional acoustic environment and compares it with the harmonic effects of madrigal, a form that that inherently suggests the ...fragmentation and contradictions associated with female subjectivity. The musical contexts which inform the Sidney-Herbert writings and performances have been astutely assessed by Gavin Alexander.1 Although there is no essay in the special issue to cover the family's important connections with a vibrant musical coterie - British and European - this was addressed through a performance of Mary Wroth's Love's Victory, staged during the conference in Baron's Hall on 27 September 2022 (pictured on the front cover). In the case of the final song that Venus calls for to celebrate love's victory, marked as 'The song' (5.7.133-4), we do not even have a lyric. Incidental music for Venus, "Der Andere Masch-erada" by the celebrated composer Robert Johnson, was also taken from Brade's 1617 collection,4 while incidental music for Cupid was John Dowland's "The Right Honourable the Lord Viscount Lisle, Lord Chamberlaine to the Queen's most excellent Majestic, his Galliard" (i.e, Robert Sidney). 153-8) and the song by Venus's priests beginning Move thy powerful hand withdraw" (4.3.17-38).6 Robin Jeffrey points out that to meet the practical demand of finding tunes to fit "both the phrase and stanza length" of Wroth's lyrics and the mood of the particular dramatic moment, "we went to the composers that Mary Wroth would have known on a daily basis in her life in and around the court," writers such as Thomas Campion, John Dowland, Philip Rosseter, Martin Peerson, and Robert Jones.
Sullivan examines the phrase "For whom the bell tolls" by John Donne and the possibility that it may have its origin in an edifying anecdote by William Perkins. In Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions ...(1624), Donne tells of hearing the passing bell tolling, and wondered about it. Visitation articles enquired about the precise time at which the bell was tolled: before death (a Christian duty, allowing prayer for a soul still on earth) or after death (a superstitious practice, encouraging heretical prayer for a soul now gone to judgment. Not to want the bell tolled was condemned as schismatic, an offence against Christian charity and community. It should be a moment when individuals in the parish came together in prayer.
Commentary on Robert Herrick's epigram "The Parcæ, or Three Dainty Destinies. The Armilet" has concentrated on its reimagining of the grim and dreadful Fates or "Parcæ" of classical mythology as ...pretty girls and pointing out precedents for bracelets made of hair in poems by John Donne and in seventeenth-century culture more broadly. While the surprising "daintiness" of the "Destinies" and the nature of the object they are crafting certainly merit that attention, the witty turn at the poem's end has not been explicated or acknowledged in critical discussions. That turn involves a complex and indirect pun on the unstated but implied verb "die," with the sexual implications that that word often carries in Renaissance literature. It is important to recognize this pun because a witty concluding turn is often regarded as a hallmark of the epigrammatic form; indeed, Julius Caesar Scaliger, arguably the most important literary theorist in the early modern period, called it the anima or soul of the epigram (Citroni 39).
