John Donne's Sermons Preached at the Inns of Court: A Critical Edition (The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne, volume 4)

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This project will produce a critical edition of the sermons preached by John Donne (1572-1631) at Lincoln's Inn during the early years of his employment as the Society's preacher. It will provide carefully edited texts in original spelling, with full textual and interpretive apparatus. The volume is Vol. IV of the Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne (general editor Dr Peter McCullough), which plans to offer readers the first fully annotated critical edition of Donne's sermons. Although a significant achievement in its time, the current scholarly edition, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. by George Potter and Evelyn Simpson (1953-62) is by the standards of modern scholarship deficient. Potter and Simpson undertook only limited collation, provided minimal annotations, and a lack of historical understanding led to the misdating and incorrect assignment of place of preaching for a considerable number of sermons. In addressing these deficiencies the new edition will be a landmark publication in early modern studies. The volume will collate all available witnesses and provide carefully edited texts, privileging those texts which are closest to the sermon as delivered by Donne (as opposed to posthumously published texts). Each sermon will be presented with a full textual apparatus, evaluating the significance of any variants. The sermons will be framed with an introductory headnote and a commentary explicating meaning, identifying sources, and tracing literary and historical allusions. These annotations will render the sermons accessible to a full range of readers, including scholars, undergraduates, and the general reader. Donne's life-long and intimate relationship with the congregation at Lincoln's Inn (he had studied in the Society as a student and was personally connected to the Society by numerous friendships) render these sermons unique in the corpus of his preaching. By bringing them together (in Potter and Simpson's chronologically organised edition they were interspersed with sermons preached in quite different pulpits) and framing them with a scholarly introduction drawing attention to the specific character of the Lincoln's Inn pulpit, the volume will, for the first time, enable a reader to appreciate these sermons in the institutional and social contexts in which they were delivered.