Description
Book SynopsisThis book brings together ten essays on John Donne and George Herbert composed by an international group of scholars. The volume represents the first collection of its kind to draw close connections between these two distinguished early modern thinkers and poets who are justly coupled because of their personal and artistic association. The contributors' distinctive new approaches and insights illuminate a variety of topics and fields while suggesting new directions that future study of Donne and Herbert might take. Some chapters explore concrete instances of collaboration or communication between Donne and Herbert, and others find fresh ways to contextualize the Donnean and Herbertian lyric, carefully setting the poetry alongside discourses of apophatic theology or early modern political theory, while still others link Herbert's verse to Donne's devotional prose. Several chapters establish specific theological and aesthetic grounds for comparison, considering Donne and Herbert's respective positions on religious assurance, comic sensibility, and virtuosity with poetic endings.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Russell M. Hillier and Robert W. Reeder, Introduction
Part I: Negative Theology, Political Theory, and the Lyric
Chapter 1: Kirsten Stirling, “Donne’s Negative Theology of the Cross”
Chapter 2: Angela Balla, “Prayer as Political Theory: Conscience, Sovereignty, and
Natural Law in Donne and Herbert”
Part II: Encounters: Exchange and Collaboration
Chapter 3: Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise, “‘Resplendence of women, men’s means to zeal’: Fashioning Female Sanctity in Donne and Herbert’s Commemoration of Lady
Danvers”
Chapter 4: Kimberly Johnson, “Crossings: Sacramental Signs Across the Verse of
Donne and Herbert”
Chapter 5: Greg Miller, “Crucifying Craft: A Donne-Herbert Dialogue”
Part III: Sin, Salvation, and Assurance
Chapter 6: Robert W. Reeder, “‘Extreme Audacity of Penitential Humility’:
Devotions 10 and the Donne-Herbert Dichotomy”
Chapter 7: Kate Narveson, “Imagining Prayer in Donne’s
Devotions and Herbert’s
Poems of Complaint”
Chapter 8: Danielle A. St. Hilaire, “Recuperating the Incapacities of the Fallen Self in
Donne and Herbert: Possibility and Promise”
Part IV: Appraisals
Chapter 9: Christopher Hodgkins, “Donne’s ‘Comedy of Eros’ and Herbert’s ‘World
of Mirth’”
Chapter 10: Helen Wilcox, “‘The dot over the i’: How Donne and Herbert Close
Their Poems”
Appendix: Catherine R. Freis, Richard Freis, and Greg Miller, trans., “Donne and
Herbert’s Latin Poems on the Seal of Christ on the Anchor”
About the Contributors
Index
