John Donne's Lincoln's Inn Sermons (vol. 5 of the Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne, gen. ed. Peter McCullough)

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The aim of this project is to produce a critical edition of the sermons preached by the poet and divine John Donne (1572-1631) at Lincoln's Inn from 1620 to 1623. The edition will establish accurate texts of the thirteen sermons preached during this period, recording textual variants and assessing their significance. It will supply a general introduction as well as detailed notes on each sermon, elucidating its historical context, documenting Donne's use of sources, glossing difficult words, and tracing allusions to contemporary events and texts. The project is part of a sixteen-volume edition of Donne's sermons, to be published by Oxford University Press, and aims to make Donne's preaching accessible to scholars, students, and a general reading audience.In recent years, scholars have started to recognise the immense significance of religion to the social, political, and cultural life of early modern England. Rediscovering the sermon as a forum for public debate has been an important part of this process. We have been aware of the popular appeal of preaching for some time: W. Fraser Mitchell, a pioneer of sermon studies, noted in 1932 that for every 'person who witnessed a play or ten who happened to read it, thousands may, without exaggeration, be said to have attended sermons, or afterwards studied them from shorthand notes or in printed copies.' Sermons make up about 15% of the entries in surveys of printed books in the early modern period, and scholars estimate that about one hundred sermons were preached in seventeenth-century London every week. We have also been aware of the sermon as a literary artefact, thanks to Donne's twentieth-century editors, George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, who prepared a ten-volume edition of the sermons between 1953 and 1962. However, Donne's preaching also has much to tell us about the cultural, religious, and socio-political climate of early modern England. In order to make these voices heard, the new Oxford edition will provide, for the first time, full explanatory notes on the sermons. More importantly, however, it will arrange the sermons not according to a (largely speculative) chronology, but by place of preaching. Focusing on a sermon's "place" fundamentally changes our perspective on early modern preaching: it allows us to move away from the sermon as a book produced for private consumption and points towards a more complete appreciation of preaching as an event, in its own geographical, social, and religious contexts. Donne's sermons were originally spoken rather than written down, delivered on a particular occasion, at a place of worship with its own physical and metaphysical properties, and to a particular audience.Donne's audiences, of course, were not simply passive recipients of religious doctrine. The lawyers of Lincoln's Inn, for instance, were important stakeholders in the political life of the capital, and their interests intersected and competed with other important constituencies, at the royal court and in episcopal palaces. Donne's late Lincoln's Inn sermons are intensely personal and acutely political at the same time: some of the lawyers in the audience would have been close friends from his own days as a student at the Inn, but he also engages with topics of broader significance. The legal issue to which he returned most persistently between 1620 and 1623 was the fraught relationship between royal prerogative justice and the common law dispensed by ordinary judges. The question of when and how the king had authority to intervene directly in the legal process occupied Donne a great deal in the early 1620s, and was a subject with obvious (and obviously sensitive) political ramifications. His legal sermons have much to tell us about the ways in which civil society organised itself in the early modern period, and about the complex relationship between the laws of religion and the laws of the land.