Table of Contents

List of illustrations and maps
Note to Readers
General introductionJeanne Shami, M. Thomas Hester and Dennis Flynn:
Part 1: Research resources in Donne studies and why they matter
Jeanne Shami: Introduction
Gary A. Stringer: The composition and dissemination of Donne's writings
Ernest W. Sullivan, II: John Donne's seventeenth-century readers
Lara M. Crowley: Archival research
Gary A. Stringer: Editing Donne's poetry: part 1: From John Marriot to the Donne Variorum
Richard K. Todd: Editing Donne's poetry: part 2: The DonneVariorum and beyond
Ernest W. Sullivan, II: Modern scholarly editions of the prose of John Donne
Donald R. Dickson: Research tools and their pitfalls for Donne studies
Hugh Adlington: Collaboration and the international scholarly community
Part 2: Donne's genres
Heather Dubrow and M. Thomas Hester: Introduction
M. Thomas Hester: The epigram
Gregory Kneidel: The formal verse satire
R. V. Young: The elegy
Michael W. Price: The paradox
Ernest W. Sullivan, II: The paradox: Biathanatos
Anne Lake Prescott: Menippean Donne
Dayton Haskin: The love lyric
Margaret Maurer: The verse letter
R. V. Young: The religious sonnet
Kirsten Stirling: Liturgical poetry
Michael W. Price: The problem
Graham Roebuck: The controversial treatise
Jeffrey Johnson: The essay
Graham Roebuck: The anniversary poem
Claude J. Summers: The epicede and obsequy
Camille Wells Slights: The epithalamion
Kate Narveson: The devotion
Jeanne Shami: The sermon
Margaret Maurer: The prose letter
Part 3: Biographical and historical contexts
Dennis Flynn and Jeanne Shami: Introduction
Patrick Collinson: The English Reformation in the mid-Elizabethan period
Dennis Flynn: Donne's family background, birth, and early years
Alexandra Gajda: Education as a courtier
Dennis Flynn: Donne's education
Albert C. Labriola: Donne's military career
Paul E. J. Hammer: The Earl of Essex and English expeditionary forces
Steven W. May: Donne and Egerton: the Court and courtship
Andrew Gordon: On late-Elizabethan courtship and politics
Dennis Flynn: Donne's wedding and the Pyrford years
Anthony Milton: New horizons in the early Jacobean period
Johann Sommerville: The death of Robert Cecil: end of an era
Dennis Flynn: Donne's travel and earliest publications
Jeanne Shami: Donne's decision to take orders
Alastair Bellany: The rise of the Howards at court
Peter McCullough: The hazards of the Jacobean court
Emma Rhatigan: Donne's readership at Lincoln's Inn and the Doncaster embassy
Malcolm Smuts: International politics and Jacobean statecraft
Clayton D. Lein: Donne: the final period
Simon Healy: Donne, the patriot cause, and war, 1620-29
Arnold Hunt: The English nation in 1631
Alison Shell: The death of Donne
Part 4: Problems of literary interpretation that have been traditionally and generally important in Donne studies
Dennis Flynn: Introduction
Achsah Guibbory: Donne and apostasy
Theresa M. DiPasquale: Donne, women, and the spectre of misogyny
Debora Shuger: Donne's absolutism
Albert C. Labriola: Style, wit, prosody in the poetry of John Donne
Hugh Adlington: Do Donne's writings express his desperate ambition?
Judith Scherer Herz: "By parting have joyn'd here ": the story of the two (or more) Donnes
Lynne Magnusson: Danger and discourse
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Jeanne Shami is Professor of English at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, where she has taught since 1977. In 1992, she discovered a manuscript of a John Donne sermon corrected in his hand. She published a parallel-text edition of this sermon in 1996 (John Donne's 1622 Gunpowder Plot Sermon: A Parallel-Text Edition). Shami is the author of John Donne and Conformity in Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit (D.S. Brewer, 2003) and Renaissance
Tropologies: The Cultural Imagination of Early Modern England (Duquesne University Press, 2008). She is past president of the John Donne Society (2002-03) and has won its award for distinguished publication three times
(1996, 2000, 2003). Dennis Flynn is Professor of English at Bentley University and a past president of the John Donne Society. He has published numerous review and articles in Donne studies; authored John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility; and co-edited three volumes in the ongoing Donne Variorum project as well as John Donne's Marriage Letters at The Folger Shakespeare Library. M. Thomas Hester is Alumni Distinguished Professor of English at North Carolina State
University and the author/editor of numerous books and articles on Renaissance literature---most recently, Donne's Marriage Letters in the Folger Shakespeare Library (with Dennis Flynn and Robert P. Sorlien) and Talking
Renaissance Texts: Essays on the Humanist Tradition (with Jeffrey Kahan). At present he is an editor of The Oxford Edition of the Prose Letters of Donne, with Dennis Flynn and Ernest W. Sullivan, II. He is also Editor of The John Donne Journal.

Reviews

`field of Donne studies that would be difficult to equal elsewhere.'
Ruth Mills Robbins, Comitatus