As Michael Schoenfeldt's brief introduction indicates, this essay collection surveys John Donne's literary, historical, religious, and, to a lesser extent, philosophical context. Thus, by definition, it covers a broad and highly diverse oeuvre, detailing the poet's many influences and contributions to seventeenth-century culture and far beyond—from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Toward this end, Schoenfeldt assembles an unusually large number of short essays, thirty-one in all, concretely covering separate, if also overlapping, Donnean topics; useful but not exhaustive suggestions for further reading are also included.
His authors treat their subjects in an impressively timely, clear, and perspicuous manner, although their strong focus on specifics comes somewhat at the expense of a broader picture of Donne's relationship to his contemporaries and their shared traditions and antecedents. That limitation stems partly from the essays’ brevity but, generally speaking, the book is far less concerned with the poet-preacher's debts to major figures or movements or even the impact of recent developments in religion and politics than with his own highly individualistic employment of novel aesthetic devices and techniques. References to his contemporary engagements and closest friends and patrons are hardly lacking, although there is little information on his wife, marriage, children, or even the contemporary English Church. To be fair, existing evidence on these subjects is scant or highly debatable, and the book does include two very different accounts of the intellectual influence of the New Science or New Philosophy of his day and his own relation to nature, playful as well as serious. Unfortunately, however, the one essay most specifically concerned with the New Science—a knowledgeable piece by Margaret Healy—is at times misleading. Donne's work does not simply showcase his acute understanding of the changes wrought by Copernican theory, but, as in The First Anniversary, regularly uses it to document the imminent “decay of the world.” Ignatius His Conclave locates the great astronomer in hell, although in this multileveled satire, hell is not a place of punishment but simply of illusion and deceit.
In any case, the volume does an outstanding job of covering what Donne's fame chiefly rests upon now—his wonderfully clever, often enticingly conflicting accounts of modern love. His other most notable invention, the metaphysical style, also receives excellent treatment, and thankfully it is not dismissed as a misnomer or mistake inherited from Ben Jonson or Samuel Johnson, but rather as Donne's serious and enduring departure from classical tradition. Richard Strier's delightful essay on the “Unity of the Songs and Sonnets” beautifully details how that departure produces cohesion within diversity in the love poems, while Gordon Teskey provides an eloquent, incisive account of precisely how transformative Donne's metaphysics actually is.
Other authors usefully buttress these essays by commenting not just on his remarkably anti-mythical, largely anti-Ovidian orientation but also on his deliberate difficulty and its end result, his own private mythology of love and loss. The divine poems are also competently covered, although they receive comparatively short shrift here. Fortunately, this gap is partly compensated for by generous and accurate treatments of Donne's controversial and theological prose, as in an unusually intriguing essay by Andrew Hadfield. Other authors provide somewhat more traditional accounts of the poet's educational, legal, and medical background; his portraits; and his manipulation of oral, manuscript, and print culture. Important additions to this material include new and insightful investigations of how money, prison culture, and the contemporary understanding of the passions affected Donne's world in ways that make it very different from our own. All these essays aptly reflect the volume's overall concern with material and bodily culture, while the concluding contribution by Linda Gregorson aptly illuminates Donne's influence on twenty-first-century religious poets, broadly understood.
As a whole, Schoenfeldt's volume offers a very strong sampling of newer voices and themes in Donne studies, which is surely welcome, although it seems more difficult to say whether that feature comes at the expense of older ones. Personally, this reader would have appreciated more thorough coverage of Donne's large and well-established debts to the past, particularly the Neoplatonic and skeptical traditions he uses in such complex and fascinating ways, but no one could complain that this collection fails to offer a very broad view of “Donne in context.”
