This publication is the third of sixteen projected volumes of The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne, an edition that emphasizes the sermon’s moment of delivery (its date, institutional setting, and audience) rather than its status as textual artifact. The edition’s original organizing principle is to group sermons by venue, and to rely on early manuscript witnesses where available as keys to the sermons’ rhetorical pointing for particular audiences.

The introduction provides a useful review of contextual materials, especially those that clarify the nature and scope of Donne’s legal learning—notably what his legal references reveal about his political and moral engagements with civil, common, and canon law; his dominant concern with the common law and prerogative justice; and the hermeneutic mechanisms that these concerns establish for applying professional, political, doctrinal, and devotional points to his audiences. The front matter also includes a clear description of principles and conventions for handling the copy text. As all of these sermons survive in only one print witness, with no manuscript tradition, the textual decisions are straightforward. Perhaps most usefully, the volume inserts these Lincoln’s Inn sermons into a calendar of sermons for 1620–23, which, although not complete (as we await further volumes), is keyed to Potter and Simpson for ease of access and comparison. A highlight of this volume’s many original contributions is Ettenhuber’s redating and arranging of five sermons on the three persons of the Trinity (sermons 4–8) based on evidence gleaned from their contents, texts, and examination of Donne’s routines as reader in divinity to the Benchers. Even more impressively, the conceptual and occasional relations between these sermons are plausibly argued.

The volume’s commentary notes, comprising headnotes, sources, suggestions for further reading, and glosses, are consistently excellent. The quality of contextual materials provided is first-rate, although the choice of what to emphasize (i.e., the relations between particular words and their varied political, polemical, spiritual, and rhetorical contexts) is always complicated. For example, Ettenhuber finds cogent grounds for connecting the redated sermons (all preached during three weeks in Easter term 1621) to the circumstances and tensions surrounding the impeachment of Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon. This subject has already garnered attention in Donne studies (Gifford, “Time and Place in Donne’s Sermons,” PMLA 82 [1967]: 388–98), but that source isn’t referenced here because the sermon discussed by Gifford was not a Lincoln’s Inn sermon, but was preached at Whitehall, 8 April 1621 (and therefore part of volume 2, not yet published). In this case, chronology as well as venue might have been invoked, perhaps by mentioning Gifford’s article in “Further Reading” as a way of supporting the significance of the impeachment for the Lincoln’s Inn sermon. The situation raised for me the larger question of how the completed edition will handle such matters of cross-referencing, a feature that scholars would surely appreciate, but that may prove difficult to achieve. Also, to support what is surely a richly nuanced treatment of the sermons’ aesthetic and rhetorical imperatives in this volume, even more discussion of rhetorical pointing in particular sermons that traces the sermon’s originary moment of delivery would have been appreciated.

These calls for further information notwithstanding, the volume makes an exceptional contribution not only to Donne studies, but to sermon studies more generally. Not only does it provide plausible new dates for five sermons, but it illuminates their structural and institutional relations as sermons delivered during Easter term 1621. Its handling of the sermon at the dedication of the new chapel is exemplary. In fact, the annotations throughout the entire volume are superb—erudite, judicious, comprehensive, and always exciting. They bring us closer than we have been to what Donne’s audiences heard and experienced, and will surely lead to informed scholarly assessments of his decorous adaptations of legal forms and modes of argumentation to his sermons preached to these people in this venue. Scholars will undoubtedly be indebted to this volume and this edition for a long time to come, and are encouraged to cite already published volumes as their authoritative textual and commentary sources.