This chapter surveys the contingencies and forces of influence between the two prose genres ofearly modern sermons and essays. With reference to the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne, it argues that essayists who turned to printed sermons for inspiration found in them unique modes of rhetorical self-fashioning. Sermons bring to the fore questions of style that reveal how learned preachers attempted to construct a sacred authorial persona, whose aim was not just to convey the force of an idea, but frequently to evoke its experiential consequences in the pursuit of a religious life. It also considers how the Montaignian essay form offered itself as a model for preachers seeking to perfect, or essay, their voice in preparation for their religious vocation as divine mediators.

Focusing on Donne’s view of natural theology, especially from 1614 onward, this chapter makes two central claims. First, considering Donne biographically, I argue that while there is important continuity in Donne’s career (insofar as he engages with the book of nature throughout), his vocational turn in the years 1611–1614 refocuses, reshapes, and intensifies that engagement: the skeptical and noncommittal attitude toward apprehension of the divine in the sensible world that can be traced in the Songs and Sonnets is replaced by a clearer and altogether more hopeful tone in the Essayes, with Donne further developing his insights about the book of nature in his sermons and the Devotions. Second, I argue that Donne’s insights deserve to be included in historical studies of natural theology in the early seventeenth century and his exclusion has been partly facilitated by scholarly emphasis on his earlier work, although this is changing.

This chapter seeks to remedy the decontextualization of Donnes Songs and Sonnets, to restore them alongside not only Donnes satires examined in Chapter 2, but also the other poets and writers that appear in this book and that were Donne’s closest peers. In doing so, the aim is both to resituate these lyrics amidst the urban culture in which Donne was so immersed through nearly all of his writing life and to connect these quintessentially metaphysical poems to the contemporary urban writing of the 1590s. Donnes lyrics reveal a similar concern with the social worlds of London in their persistent attempts to close out the particulars with which Nashes prose and the Inns satires engage. As a result, these poems are as much about the spatial realities of urban everyday life as they are about desire. Stylistically Donne’s Songs and Sonnets look less like a clean break with the past and more like an affirmation of an urban aesthetic that suffused the literary works of a certain subsection of 1590s London. Donnes lyrics take up the skeptical materialist style of this group of urban writers, at once obscure, various, and vibrantly immediate.

This chapter traces the precise urban realities that encouraged the Inns of Court satirists to turn to Thomas Nashe’s urban metaphysical style as they constructed the satires and epigrams that poured from the Inns. In doing so, I aim to clarify both Nashe’s and the city’s central place in the development of this poetic mode, a centrality that has been underrecognized in our literary genealogies. In this confluence of authors writing and reading amidst the city’s various spaces in the last decade of the century, we can see more clearly an urban metaphysical aesthetic, at once plenist, obscure, digressive, and visceral, being put into practice. The first part of this chapter explores the vogue for verse satire in the last years of the century, linking it both to the precise urban conditions out of which its authors wrote and to Nashe’s own skeptical impulses. The latter half examines the satires’ and epigrams’ formal features to show how these poems, just as Nashe’s prose before them, self-consciously reorganized and reprocessed the urban experience in ways that we now associate with the metaphysical style.

This essay provides insight into some of the content of Britten and Pears’s book collection. It draws attention to why certain volumes were used as the source material for various musical works. The essay also emphasises how friendships with writers, such as art historian Kenneth Clark and novelist and critic E. M. Forster, influenced key aspects of Britten and Pears’s lives: their passion for fine art and their faith in pacifism. This survey of the collection underlines why their books are often useful bases of information for biographical background about both musicians. Their library tells us stories about their childhoods and discloses their interests in topics ranging from classic English literature to gardening to the developing genre of gay fiction. Additionally, it adds context to fundamental aspects of their lives, such as their anti-war stance and their enduring commitment to one another.

Reveals the profusion of boxes in early modern England, valued for practical and aesthetic reasons. While boxes are often very mundane, they might also be associated with events such as marriage, and are frequently bequeathed as items of intrinsic value. Wills and inventories demonstrate the ready slippage between boxes as furnishings for rooms, and furnishings for the mind – one author stores up his faith in ‘my Breste, the Cheste of my mynde’. His words illustrate the blurring of the material and the metaphorical that can happen inside boxes. Considering Elizabeth I’s bedchamber, hiding places in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and moments of enclosure in John Donne, this chapter interweaves close readings of wills and prayer manuals with objects such as velvet boxes and parish chests. It establishes a key quality of the box: although it is one of the most physically solid and constraining kinds of object, it offers flexible imaginative possibilities.

After performing ritual gestures of mourning, Job’s friends sat with him in silence for seven days and seven nights. They ‘thoght that he wolde not have hearkened to their counsel’, the annotators of the Geneva Bible explained.1 Early modern English culture acknowledged bereavement as a harrowing experience and recognised the challenges consolers faced when trying to offer solace. Overwhelmed by the loss of a loved one, grief-stricken mourners might, like Job, be reluctant to accept the remedies of religion and philosophy. To be sure, those who indulged in excessive sorrow were castigated, but so were consolers when their insistence on faith and reason was felt to betray a lack of sympathy for the bereaved. The fictitious author of an answer letter included in Angel Day’s The English Secretorie, a letter-writing manual published in 1586, pointed out the inefficiency of the consolatory epistle sent to him by his ‘brother’, whose severity, he implied, was ill advised: ‘Follie were it for mee to thinke or you to beleeue, that the pensiue imagination of a thing so neere … coulde with the vehemencie of a fewe specches (more of zeale then equitie deliuered) be sodenly remooued’.2 The multiplication of formal templates for such replies shows that in England as well as on the Continent, consolation came to be perceived as a dialogic exchange.3 Epistolary practice and friendly ‘conversation’ opened up a conceptual space for debating the ethical and rhetorical limits of consolation.4

Chapter Three studies ‘the word’ by merging two fields of association: first, the agglomeration of human labours, social practices, cultural values, and codified grammatical systems that made possible and supported the acquisition of Latin; second, the inhuman order of the ‘verbum Dei’. Each of these fields of association has, as its ultimate aim, the transformation of individual lives. It is under the rubric of this shared objective that I bring them together here. The first half of the chapter explores aspects of the medieval Latin grammatical tradition and its early modern afterlives. My goal is to make some seventh-century wranglings on the subject of the Latin case system serve as a point of entry into later fashions of prose style, and into the pedagogical disciplines of systematic imitation that were developed to teach Ciceronian Latin to schoolboys. The second half of the chapter explores a range of texts associated with St Paul, St Augustine, and Martin Luther in order to characterize the linguistic and spiritual stakes of medieval and early modern Britain’s absorption into Rome.

Chapter Two studies how Rome figures in shifting conceptions of the problem of the self. The chapter’semphasis is on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers and texts, ranging from Edmund Spenser and John Donne to Sir Thomas Wilson and John Milton. English perspectives on Rome, however, were mediated to a significant extent by continental writers such as Petrarch, Joachim Du Bellay, and Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. Writers trained within (and in Petrarch’s case, actively forging) the traditions of humanist inquiry celebrated their commitment to returning ad fontes. In practice, however, their engagements with a ‘text’ as complex and ramified as Rome risked leaving them endlessly navigating tributary brooks, creeks, streams, and rivers rather than reposing comfortably at the source. The chapter brings together scenes of schooling, staring, and travel in order to study tensions between understandings of the self as being an immured condition of metaphysical finitude, on the one hand, and as being formed via the absorption of capabilities that arrive from the outside, on the other.

Suicide is a neologism. First conceived in 1643 by Baconian polymath Sir Thomas Browne, it gradually entered enlightened parlance, universalised by Hume’s On Suicide. Previously, richly descriptive and differentiated depictions of the paradox of self-killing permeated the globe. Current research suggests a stronger fixation with self-killing in the West. Condemned by medieval theologians as the sin of despair, alternate tropes appeared during the Renaissance as humanists reintroduced classical models of toleration. Painters elevated Lucretia to the icon of Republican resistance. By the seventeenth century enlightened rationalism had emboldened John Donne to compare Christ’s passion to suicide. Nevertheless, popular culture and the authorities continued to punish the crime of self-murder harshly. Current research allows comparisons with Asia. In Japan, acceptance of seppuku and shinjū contrasted with condemnation for self-sacrifices by Christian converts. In India, Western observers alternately wondered naively at widow burnings (sati) or questioned their consensual nature. In Qing China, a cult of pious widows who killed themselves to avoid forced remarriage gained such popularity that the emperor introduced laws to moderate the proliferation of memorials. Ultimately, the interpretation of self-killing reveals much more about cultural values than it does about the state of mind of individuals performing the violent act.

This chapter investigates how Donne’s ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’ and Thomas Nashe’s Choice of Valentines make cultural use of Amores 1.5 and 3.7. Framing the analysis through articulations of power and impotence, we see how literary representations of sexual performance or failure reveal covert engagements with questions of politicised myth-making and story-telling. Sex is read here as a vocabulary which has a potent place in the support and subversion of the Augustan and Elizabethan regimes.