History Commons^™

Allen D. Breck Award Winner: Nothing’S Paradox In Donne’S “Negative Love” And “A Nocturnal Upon S. Lucy’S Day”, Sean Ford

Quidditas

John Donne's complicated use of paradox is nowhere more inviting than in the grammatical and conceptual use of the word "nothing," especially when Donne chooses to give this noun the quality of substance and presence, rather than using it to denote the absence of anything. Two poems in particular, from the Songs and Sonets, give affirmative existence to a nothing in order to make distinct arguments regard- ing the status of an existing thing. Both “Negative Love” and “A Nocturnal Upon S. Lucy’s Day, being the shortest day” rely on this paradox to give a precise definition of the …

"With Holy Importunitie, With A Pious Impudencie": John Donne's Attempts To Provoke Election, Raymond-Jean Frontain

Quidditas

Donne's use of the imperative when addressing God in the Divine Poems is a maneuver designed to resolve a particularly Protestant dilemma, the same dilemma confronted by the speaker of Elegy 19 under another guise. As C. L. barber and Richard P. Wheeler have pointed out, the reformers' dismantling of "much of the Catholic apparatus of worship in order to isolate the individual worshiper in direct rapport with God through faith...put worshippers at risk in new ways. In areas where the Reformation triumphed, extraordinary anxiety could be generated by the absolute importance conferred upon the individual's faith in the grace …

Review Essay: George Parfitt, John Donne: A Literary Life, Patricia Demers

Quidditas

George Parfitt, John Donne: A Literary Life, St. Martin's Press, 1989, viii, 140 pp., biblio., $35.00

Redemption Typology In John Donne's "Batter My Heart", Raymond-Jean Frontain

Quidditas

In the seventeenth century, notes Barbara K. Lewalski, typological symbolism came to be considered a way for the individual to explore one's own spiritual state and to discover "the workings of Divine Providence in one's own life."

[T]he shift in emphasis in reformation theology from quid agas to God's activity in us made it possible to assimilate our lives to the typological design, recognizing the biblical stories and events, salvation history, not merely as exemplary too us but as actually recapitulated in our lives. These various impulses led to a new, primary focus upon the individual Christian, whose life is …

Who Cast Donne's Tolling Bells?, J. X. Evans

Quidditas

The following paragraph from a funeral sermon written in 1620 by Charles Fitz-Geffrey (1575-1637), an Anglican clergyman, contains imagery so much like John Donne's celebrated figure in Devotion XVII (1624) that it should come to the attention of readers interested in Donne and the literature oof Jacobean England:

Do they who close the eyes and cover the face f the Dead consider that their eyes must be closed, and their faces covered? Or they who shroud the Coarse remember that they themselves shortly must be shrouded? Or they who ring the Knell consider that shortly the Bels must goe the …

The Book Index: Plutarch's Moralia And John Donne, John Shawcross

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Thomas Carew's elegy on John Donne points up an important fact (and distinction); Donne little employed allusions to classical literature and learning such as authors like Edmund Spenser and John Milton did, much to the glee of teachers and the bane of students. But glosses on Donne's works also turn up relatively few contemporary or near-contemporary references to informational volumes, whether in English or in Latin. He knew Galileo's Siderus Nuncius, 1610, and he owned and used such works as Nicholas Harpsfield's Dialogi Sex contra Summi Pontificatus, Monasticae Vitae, Sanctorum, Sacrarum, Imaginum Oppugnatores, et pseudo-martyres, 1566, and …

"A Growing Or Full Constant Light": A Reading Of Donne's "A Lecture Upon The Shadow", Diane Elizabeth Dreher

Quidditas

John Donne's "A Lecture Upon the Shadow" has given rise to extensive critical commentary, most of it devoted to the shadow imagery in the poem. However, no one, to date, has proposed a satisfactory explanation for the shadow's shift in meaning from the realm of natural phenomena to that of conjecture and imagination. Pierre Legouis has concluded that "the similitude does not hold good ... it is imperfect." Yet an acceptable explanation is possible and the similitude does hold good when the poem is considered in terms of its dominant structural pattern, the Bonaventuran meditation. In keeping with meditative practice, …