John Donne's Sermons Preached at St Paul's Cathedral, 1626-7 (The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne, vol. 13)

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This project will produce a critical edition of thirteen sermons by the poet and preacher John Donne (1572-1631) as Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in 1626-7, a fertile and highly politically charged period in his career. This will be published as Vol. 13 of The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne (16 vols, general ed. Peter McCullough, 2013- ); Vol. 12, on 1626 at St Paul's, has been edited by the fellow. This landmark edition presents all of Donne's sermons in original spelling and for the first time provides full annotations on the texts, along with extensive textual apparatus and full collation of manuscript and print sources. The defining characteristic of the edition is its organisation by place of preaching. This marks a major change from the previous edition by George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (1953-62), in which sermons are ordered chronologically and without annotation. The new edition allows the reader to observe how Donne's rhetoric is geared towards his different congregations and reveals the continuities between sermons preached at the same venue. The sermons in Vol. 13 illuminate the vital role that sermons played in public discourse during the seventeenth century: religious conformity, the political threat posed by foreign Catholics and native non-conformists, and the English church's self definition are all major preoccupations in Donne's cathedral preaching during this period, and show his intervention in heated debates of the mid-1620s. The volume reveals how far Donne's pattern of preaching went beyond the dean's duty as stipulated by cathedral ordinances, demonstrating him to be a clergyman with a strongly pulpit-centred piety who actively advanced sermon provision in London. The research project will provide a full commentary on each sermon, for the first time documenting all of Donne's sources, glossing difficult vocabulary and idioms, explaining allusions to contemporary events and person, and translating quotations from the ancient languages (Latin, Greek, Hebrew). The fellow's work on Vol. 12 has already uncovered a large number of unacknowledged sources in Donne's St Paul's sermons; the project will extend this work to demonstrate the often-complex ways in which Donne drew on material to frame his own readings of Biblical passages. Six of the sermons in Vol. 13 are undated in their original, posthumous publication (1640), and five of them unplaced. This project will date them with confidence to the years 1626-7, based on a wealth of internal evidence and comparisons with other sermons preached at St Paul's at the same period. It thus enriches our picture of Donne's activities during these years and advances scholarship on the cathedral in the early modern period.The project's associated leadership activities will build on the fellow's experience of editing two volumes of Donne's sermons in order to develop shared reflection on, and heighten awareness of, the process of scholarly editing. A series of audio interviews will be recorded with academics currently engaged in a range of early modern scholarly editing projects, and with the senior commissioning editor for literature at Oxford UP who oversees major early modern editions. These interviews will be available on a free online resource that documents the techniques, processes and challenges of scholarly editing. This resource is designed in particular to inspire and assist early careers researchers to pursue editing, and will address the subject of how the activity can fit into one's academic career and the skills that editors must develop. This topic will also be central to the PhD and early careers training workshop run as part of the leadership activity. The interviews will draw on the large number and diverse range of current and recent editorial projects under contract, many of them funded by the AHRC, providing a point of intersection between them and a site to explore ideas, while encouraging new collaborative editorial work.