Petrarchism and repentance in John Donne's <span class='italic'>Holy Sonnets</span>

Gary Kuchar

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511481444.006

Chapter 5 - Petrarchism and repentance in John Donne's Holy Sonnets

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009

Gary Kuchar

Show author details

Gary Kuchar: Affiliation:
University of Victoria, British Columbia

Book contents

Get access

Summary

By making unusually explicit the shared cultural assumption that the capacity for godly sorrow is tensed as feminine in early modern England, Lanyer figures women as possessing a greater ability to experience the reciprocity of empathic, selfless, love for Christ than men. If Lanyer had seen any of John Donne's Holy Sonnets in manuscript, she would have had good reason for making such a gendered claim. For Donne, the compassio that Lanyer depicts as “feminine” in nature is psychically violent, even traumatizing. In this respect, the same cultural discourse that provided Lanyer with a way of representing women as having unmediated access to the sad delight of incarnationist theology, inspired in Donne a psycho-spiritual crisis. Like Lanyer's depiction of men in Salve Deus, the speakers of Donne's Holy Sonnets are not naturally inclined to the life of faith, especially when it comes to opening themselves to the terrifying intimacy of God within the soul. On the contrary, most of the poems depict the devotional life as a counter-intuitive struggle. And whereas Lanyer takes the theological and devotional amorphousness of Jacobean England as an occasion for synthesizing pre-Tridentine iconography with Lutheran ecclesiology, Donne experiences the multiplicity of coexisting devotional practices and theological systems in early seventeenth-century England as a significant religious problem.

Information

Type: Chapter
Information: The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England , pp. 151 - 183

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511481444.006 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

McGrath, Alister E., Luther's Theology of the Cross: Martin Luther's Theological Breakthrough (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), p. 151.Google Scholar

Donne, John, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Raspa, Anthony (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1975), pp. 39–40.Google Scholar

St. Augustine, , Confessions, trans. Chadwick, Henry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar

Peterson, Douglas L., “John Donne's Holy Sonnets and the Anglican Doctrine of Contrition,” Studies in Philology 65 (1959), 504–18Google Scholar

Strier, Richard, “John Donne Awry and Squint: The ‘Holy Sonnets,’” Modern Philology 86 (1989), 357–84Google Scholar

Stachniewski, John, “John Donne: The Despair of the ‘Holy Sonnets,’” ELH 48.4 (Winter 1981), 677–705CrossRef Google Scholar

Stachniewski, John, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)Google Scholar

Cefalu, Paul, “Godly Fear, Sanctification, and Calvinist Theology in the Sermons and ‘Holy Sonnets’ of John Donne,” Studies in Philology 100.1 (Winter 2003), 71–86CrossRef Google Scholar

Lewalski, Barbara, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 256.Google Scholar

Grant, Patrick, “Augustinian Spirituality and the Holy Sonnets of John Donne,” ELH 38.4 (December 1971), 542–61CrossRef Google Scholar

Sherwood, Terry, Fulfilling the Circle: A Study of John Donne's Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), chapter 6Google Scholar

Fletcher, Angus, “Living Magnets, Paracelsian Corpses, and the Psychology of Grace in Donne's Religious Verse,” ELH 72.1 (Spring 2005), 1–22CrossRef Google Scholar

Young, R. V., “Donne's Holy Sonnets and the Theology of Grace,” in Summers, Claude and Pebworth, Ted-Larry (eds.), Bright Shootes of Everlastingness: The Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), pp. 20–39.Google Scholar

Ann Koory, Mary, “‘England's Second Austine’: John Donne's Resistance to Conversion,” John Donne Journal 17 (1998), 144, 149Google Scholar

Ferry, Anne, The ‘Inward’ Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)Google Scholar

Dubrow, Heather, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 226–28Google Scholar

Rollin, Roger B., “‘Fantastique Ague’: The Holy Sonnets and Religious Melancholy,” in Summers, Claude and Pebworth, Ted-Larry (eds.), The Eagle and the Dove: Reassessing John Donne (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986), pp. 131–46.Google Scholar

Petrarch, , Petrarch's Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics, ed. and trans. Durling, Robert M. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 582.Google Scholar

Durling, Robert, “Petrarch's ‘Giovene donna sotto un verde lauro,’” Modern Language Notes 86 (1971), 19Google Scholar

Freccero, John, “The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics,” Diacritics 5 (1975), 34–40CrossRef Google Scholar

Mazzotta, Giuseppe, “The Canzoniere and the Language of the Self,” Studies in Philology 75 (1978), 271–96Google Scholar

Foster, Kenelm, “Beatrice or Medusa: The Penitential Element in Petrarch's ‘Canzionere,’” in Brand, C. P., Foster, K., and Limentani, U. (eds.), Italian Studies presented to E. R. Vincent (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1962), pp. 41–56Google Scholar

Greene, Thomas M., The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 316 fn. 4.Google Scholar

St. Augustine, , Expositions on the Book of Psalms, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Schaff, Philip, vol. VIII, ser. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1996), p. 133.Google Scholar

Wenzel, Siegfried, “Petrarch's Accidia,” Studies in the Renaissance 8 (1961), 38CrossRef Google Scholar

Braden, Gordon, “The Petrarchan Career,” in Smith, Joseph H. and Kerrigan, William (eds.), Pragmatism's Freud: The Moral Disposition of Psychoanalysis (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press), p. 145.

Corthell, Ronald, Ideology and Desire in Renaissance Poetry: The Subject of Donne (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997), pp. 62–63Google Scholar

Bell, Ilona, “The Role of the Lady in Donne's Songs and Sonets,” SEL 23 (1983), 113–29.Google Scholar

Marotti, Arthur, John Donne: Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), p. 78.Google Scholar

Kerrigan, William, “What was Donne Doing?” South Central Review 4 (1987), 12.CrossRef Google Scholar

Pinka, Patricia P., This Dialogue of One: The Songs and Sonnets of John Donne (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1982), p. 27Google Scholar

Tournay, Leonard D. makes much the same point in “Donne, the Countess of Bedford, and the Petrarchan Manner,” in Stringer, Gary A. (ed.), New Essays on Donne (Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1977), p. 50.Google Scholar

Kerrigan, William and Braden, Gordon, “Milton's Coy Eve: Paradise Lost and Renaissance Love Poetry,” ELH 53.1 (1986), 32.CrossRef Google Scholar

Clements, Arthur L., John Donne's Poetry, 2nd edn. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), p. 42.Google Scholar

Guss, Donald L., John Donne, Petrarchist: Italianate Conceits and Love Theory in the Songs and Sonets (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1966), p. 150Google Scholar

Richmond, H. M., “The Intangible Mistress,” Modern Philology 56.4 (1959), 217–23CrossRef Google Scholar

Waller, Marguerite R., Petrarch's Poetics and Literary History (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980).Google Scholar

Žižek, Slavoj, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (New York and London: Verso, 1994), p. 96.Google Scholar

Lacan, Jacques, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: Seminar VII, ed. Miller, Jacques-Alain and trans. Porter, Dennis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), p. 151Google Scholar

Harari, Roberto, Lacan's Seminar On ‘Anxiety’: An Introduction, trans. Lamb-Ruiz, Jane C., revised and ed. Franses, Rico (New York: Other Press, 2001), p. 36.Google Scholar

Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Dell, Floyd and Jordan-Smith, Paul (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1927), p. 9.Google Scholar

Kristeva, Julia, Black and Sun: Depression and Melancholy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 12Google Scholar

Hooker, Richard, A Learned and Comfortable Sermon of the Certaintie and Perpetuitie of Faith in the Elect (Oxford, 1612), pp. 9–10Google Scholar

Flesch, William, Generosity and the Limits of Authority: Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 39–40.Google Scholar

Dyke, Daniel, The Mystery of Selfe-Deceiving Or A Discourse of the Deceitfulnesse of Man's Heart (London, 1614), pp. 76–77.Google Scholar

Donne, John, The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, ed. Coffin, Charles M. (New York: Modern Library, 1952), pp. 168–69, lines 25–27.Google Scholar

Lewis, C. S., A Preface to Paradise Lost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942), p. 100.Google Scholar

Donne, John, John Donne: The Divine Poems, ed. Gardner, Helen 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 13CrossRef Google Scholar

Silver, Victoria, Imperfect Sense: The Predicament of Milton's Irony (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 76.Google Scholar

Huntley, Frank L., Bishop Joseph Hall and Protestant Meditation in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study With the Texts of The Art of Divine Meditation (1606) and Occasional Meditations (1633) (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York, 1981), pp. 3–12Google Scholar

Martz, Louis, The Paradise Within: Studies in Vaughan, Traherne, and Milton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), pp. 17–34Google Scholar

Kuchar, Gary, Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of Sacramental Devotion in Early Modern England (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2005).Google Scholar

Freud, Sigmund, “The Uncanny,” Art and Literature, trans. Strachey, James (New York: Penguin, 1985), p. 356.Google Scholar

Rank, Otto, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, trans. Tucker, Harry, Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), pp. 49–68.Google Scholar

de Certeau, Michel, The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Smith, Michael B. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 195.Google Scholar

Tanner, John S., Anxiety in Eden: A Kierkegaardian Reading of Paradise Lost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 30.Google Scholar

Grossman, Marshall, The Story of All Things: Writing the Self in English Renaissance Narrative Poetry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), chapter 5.Google Scholar

DiPasquale, Theresa, “Ambivalent Mourning: Sacramentality, Idolatry, and Gender in ‘Since She Whome I Lovd hath Payd her Last Debt,’” John Donne Journal 10 (1991), 45–56.Google Scholar

Jeffrey, David (ed.), A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1992), p. 130.Google Scholar

Luther, Martin, “Preface to Romans,” in Martin Luther: Selections from his Writings, ed. Dillenberger, John (New York: Anchor, 1962), p. 25.Google Scholar

Linsley, Joy L., “A Holy Puzzle: John Donne's ‘Holy Sonnet XVII,’” in Frontain, Raymond-Jean and Malpezzi, Frances M. (eds.), John Donne's Religious Imagination: Essays in Honor of John T. Shawcross (Conway, AR: UCA Press, 1995), p. 204Google Scholar

St. Augustine, , On the Trinity Books 8–15, ed. Matthews, Gareth B. and trans. McKenna, Stephen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 168Google Scholar

Marion, Jean-Luc, God Without Being: Hors Texte, trans. Carlson, Thomas A. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. xxiv.Google Scholar

Accessibility standard: Unknown

Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.