Eckhardt Joshua - Religion Around John Donne

Religion Around John Donne

PETER IVER KAUFMAN , Founding Editor

Books in the Religion Around series examine the religious forces surrounding cultural icons. By bringing religious background into the foreground, these studies give readers a greater understanding of and appreciation for individual figures, their work, and their lasting influence.

Religion Around John Donne

Joshua Eckhardt

The Pennsylvania State University Press
University Park, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Eckhardt, Joshua, author.

Title: Religion around John Donne / Joshua Eckhardt.

Other titles: Religion around.

Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2019] | Series: Religion around | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Summary: Explores the ways in which the religious controversies and beliefs that surrounded John Donne were circulated in late Elizabethan and early Stuart EnglandProvided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019000514 | ISBN 9780271083377 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Donne, John, 15721631Religion. | Donne, John, 15721631Library. | BooksEnglandReligious aspectsHistory17th century. | Manuscripts, EnglishReligious aspectsHistory17th century.

Classification: LCC PR2248.E25 2019 | DDC 821/.3dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019000514

Copyright
2019 The Pennsylvania State University

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Published by
The Pennsylvania State University Press,

University Park, PA 168021003

The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses.

It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.481992.

Writing a book about old books can leave you in debt to virtually everyone who has preserved them and provided access to them. I acknowledge part of the debt in my citations by naming the institutions that currently house the artifacts and consistently welcome readers to consult them. One of these institutions, the American Antiquarian Society, welcomed me not only to its reading room but also to its scholars house. Another, the Huntington Library, provided me with funds for travel and housing. At the Huntington, Steve Tabor and Vanessa Wilkie endured many questions about the Bridgewater Library and Ellesmere manuscripts. Other librarians elsewhere have also provided invaluable access to their original sources. Renae Satterly went out of her way so that I could consult Donnes books at Middle Temple Library; Emily Naisch did the same with Izaak Waltons books at Salisbury Cathedral Library. John Overholt helped me navigate Houghton Library holdings from a distance; in the reading room, his colleagues showed me the fore-edges of a series of composite volumes, gloriously reunited on a cart. Christopher Smith of Chichester Cathedral Library and Maria OShea at Marshs Library confirmed the order of items in Sammelbnde and, where allowed, their shelf-marks as well. Librarians all over Oxford and Cambridge also granted me access to their holdings and information, in both university and college libraries. I record my individual debts to them in the notes and, throughout the book, I try to turn attention to some of their predecessors, the earlier caretakers of the sources for this study.

Nevertheless, the following chapters and citations leave out many others who also helped me produce them. Virginia Commonwealth Universitys Humanities Research Center and English Department funded several necessary trips to libraries. Near those libraries, friends have graciously provided room and board: Chris, Anne, Peter, Tom, Alun, Carol, and, most frequently, Dan. Without your generosity and ideal locations, I could have done only a small fraction of the research that has gone into this book, if I could have done it at all.

I certainly would not have written the book without Peter Iver Kaufman. When Peter started the Religion Around series, he could not have imagined how literally a book historian would take the title phrase that he devised. He nevertheless invited one to write the book on Donne for the series after only one meeting. He never wavered in his enthusiastic support for my plan to survey the religion around Donne in manuscript collections, composite volumes of booklets bound together, and early modern libraries and bookshops.

Audiences at several conferences and symposia generously engaged early drafts of this book, specifically at the University of Pennsylvania Medieval-Renaissance Seminar; Lincoln College, Oxford (under the auspices of The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne with support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council); the Centre for Early Modern Studies, also at Oxford; the Renaissance Society of America (in panels sponsored by either the Renaissance English Text Society or the John Donne Society); and the Modern Language Association (again under the banner of the Donne Society). Several of my colleagues and students have twice read and discussed early (and abandoned) drafts of the introduction in the HRCs premodern reading group at VCU.

Tracy McLawhorn and Gary Stringer provided innumerable facsimiles of Donne manuscripts. David Colclough and Dennis Flynn encouraged and supported the project from an early stage. Julian Neuhauser designed the first database for my photographs of Bridgewater Library shelf-marks. Erin McCarthy and Daniel Starza Smith read and commented on drafts. John Lee edited part of chapter 3 under the title Publication, in A Handbook of English Renaissance Literary Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), 295309. Arthur Marotti has done the same for part of chapter 4 as Deaths Dvell in Sammelbnde, in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts (Renaissance English Text Society, forthcoming). Both publishers have magnanimously permitted me to include these essays, in slightly revised form, in this volume. Kathryn Yahner at Penn State Press located two anonymous peer reviewers who were willing and able to give this book a generous reception. They made a number of worthwhile suggestions for revision. So too have a member of the Presss Editorial Committee and the Presss managing editor, Laura Reed-Morrisson. I have tried to adopt nearly all of their suggestions. I thank the readers, the Press, and all those listed above for helping to improve this book. Finally, I thank my mom and dad for providing an education, particularly in religion. This book is for them. Any proceeds, however, go to the people who surround me with small collections of books and papers: Sarah, Silas, Ira, and Levi.

The quotations in this book preserve original spelling insofar as digital type and house style allow. For instance, I have removed the long s but retained the use of u/v in the originals. The quotations also reproduce the capitalization, superscript text, underlining, and cancellations in the original sources. Some of the quotations contain asterisks, carets, macrons, left square brackets, and equals signs. Most of these symbols approximate the marks made by a scribe or a compositor, whether that person intended to abbreviate a word (as in the case of macrons), to hyphenate a word (using what looks like an equals sign), or to separate a word or phrase from writing nearby (for instance, with a left square bracket). But I have added some marks that are not in the originals. Wherever I have expanded an abbreviation or added any letters, I have done so within square brackets, with two major exceptions: Ive regularized the titles of printed books, and Ive occasionally changed or added a final punctuation mark at the end of a quotation. I have made these concessions to standard practice in the United States with grave misgivings, and with the caveat that readers should not mistake book titles for semidiplomatic transcripts, or the punctuation at the end of a quotation for that of the original source. When I am not quoting a source, I capitalize proper names but not loose affiliations: Catholics and Calvinists but not puritans or protestants. Likewise, I use the lowercase when referring to the would-be presbyterians of England, as opposed to the actual Presbyterians of Scotland.