This volume is the twelfth in OUP’s edition of Donne’s sermons. This edition has set very high standards of scholarship and presentation, and this volume, which contains Donne’s St. Paul’s sermons for 1626, is no exception. In keeping with the approach taken by the series as a whole, this volume offers a carefully collated edition of the sermons, accompanied by detailed headnotes dealing with textual issues, suggestions for further reading, and a line-by-line commentary on the text. Lund notes that “the defining factor of early modern sermon criticism in recent years has been its attention to occasionality: to the individual moment of preaching and its theological, political, social, and institutional contexts” (xxix). The edition is committed to advancing this approach by “balancing closely contextualized reading with an attention to the sermons” (xxix) and their formal properties, and exploring the relationship between form and context. This commitment emerges clearly in the volume’s apparatus, which provides a detailed treatment of the sermons’ preaching, printing, and Donne’s use of sources. Anyone who has worked on Donne’s sermons is conscious of their debt to George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson’s ten-volume edition, which, since their publication in the early 1960s, have provided the only widely available access to the sermons. However, anyone who cut their teeth on these unannotated editions is likely to feel rather envious of students and scholars who encounter Donne’s sermons for the first time in the company of such comprehensive and cogent guidance.

The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne series, then, has set very high standards, which are amply and ably maintained by Mary Ann Lund’s contribution. This volume contains the nine sermons preached by Donne as Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, between February and June of 1626. During this period, Donne also served as prolocutor to Convocation. The volume covers a shorter period of time and contains fewer texts than any of the others in the series, but Lund makes a clear case for the importance of these sermons for an understanding of the mature Donne, notwithstanding their general critical neglect (xxviii). Notably, it includes a series of sermons on Psalm 32, which were previously undated. The editors have established a compelling case for assigning these sermons to this period, and our understanding of the sermons and of Donne are both materially assisted by this.

The introduction to this volume does a fine job of setting the context for these sermons. In clear and elegantly written sections, Lund addresses the biographical context of the sermons, explores the setting in which they were preached—including a helpful discussion of Donne’s use of sermon series—and examines some of the dominant themes of these sermons. Donne’s use of assorted translations of the Bible, patristic writings, contemporary commentaries, and secular learning are also commented upon with economy and clarity. It is also worth remarking that the presentation of the volume matches its contents. The volumes of this edition are beautifully produced, and elegantly laid out, and the editorial conventions adopted by the project are laudably rigorous and sensible.

The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne is an important and significant project, and it has been a pleasure to watch the volumes appear. This twelfth volume maintains the high standards of earlier volumes and stands firmly on its own merits as an exemplary piece of scholarship.