{"id":6730,"date":"2006-07-21T23:28:16","date_gmt":"2006-07-21T23:28:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/07\/the-reformed-soul.html"},"modified":"2006-07-21T23:28:16","modified_gmt":"2006-07-21T23:28:16","slug":"the-reformed-soul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/07\/the-reformed-soul.html","title":{"rendered":"The Reformed Soul"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the Guardian, a review of a new bio of John Donne, by England’s Poet Laureate (the review, not the book)<\/a><\/p>\n

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Books that emphasise the conflicts in Donne are hardly rarities. Paradoxes haunt the previously standard John Donne: A Life (published by RC Bald in 1970) and the best critical studies (including John Carey’s landmark Life, Mind and Art, 1981). But no biographer has taken more trouble than John Stubbs to put them in a post-Reformation historical context and to examine their causes and their effects. His evocation is at once highly readable – because it’s dashing as well as detailed – and sombre: although the poems may sometimes be playful, they arose from circumstances that were often frustratingly difficult. By giving these problems due weight, Stubbs manages to make Donne seem recognisable and sympathetic, and also the inhabitant of a world that has long since disappeared. <\/p>\n

Donne was born in 1572, the son of Catholic parents who understood that if they wanted to get on in the world they would have to play down or actually disguise their faith. As it turned out, his father didn’t have much time to make his mark: he died when Donne was four. (It’s tempting, though, to think his trade influenced Donne in deep and subtle ways. He was an ironmonger: images of hammering, beating and forging occur throughout his son’s poems, and his gradual move from a secular to a religious life might also be said to represent a larger sort of re-shaping.) His mother was a different matter. Long-lived and devout, she helped to shape Donne’s career both by reminding him of first principles and by proving how dangerous they could be. Her faith required her to spend much of her life outside England. <\/p>\n

Donne and his younger brother Henry got used to treading carefully from the start. They were educated first at Hart Hall in Oxford, where they hurried to finish their studies before turning 16, at which age anyone wishing to take a degree had to swear an oath of loyalty to the Reformed, Protestant church. Then they went to Cambridge (probably: the record of Donne’s early life is pretty vague), where they were able to continue working – though still cautiously. Catholics were generally treated as outsiders at best, and at worst (and the worst happened to several members of Donne’s family) were harried, tortured and put to death. Two years after Donne became a student at Thavies Inn in 1591, his brother Henry was visited by some of Topcliffe’s papist-hunters; they discovered he was sheltering William Harrington, a young Yorkshireman who had trained as a seminarian priest in Europe. Harrington was brutally mutilated, then executed, and Henry dispatched to Newgate. As Stubbs says, incarceration in the plague-filled gaol "was all but a death sentence": he only lasted a little while. <\/p>\n

We don’t know the degree of Donne’s original devotion to Catholicism, and therefore can only guess what it cost him to suppress his faith. But we can easily see the effects in the poems he began writing during this time. The tension of their arguments, their interest in reconciling opposites, and their compacted logic may be aimed largely at affairs of the heart, but they are matters of the mind as well, and as such reflect the larger picture of Donne’s circumstances. To stand apart, wittily putting down women, might have been a (sometimes misogynistic) way of asserting independence and superiority; the same things are also a sign of exclusion and anxiety – characteristics that are often missed by critics who highlight the poems’ wittiness.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the Guardian, a review of a new bio of John Donne, by England’s Poet Laureate (the review, not the book) Books that emphasise the conflicts in Donne are hardly rarities. Paradoxes haunt the previously standard John Donne: A Life (published by RC Bald in 1970) and the best critical studies (including John Carey’s landmark…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Reformed Soul - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/07\/the-reformed-soul.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Reformed Soul - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From the Guardian, a review of a new bio of John Donne, by England’s Poet Laureate (the review, not the book) Books that emphasise the conflicts in Donne are hardly rarities. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6730\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}