The Campion Lecture: Donne's Roman Catholic Sources

We are delighted to welcome Professor Peter McCullough, Sohmer Fellow in English Renaissance Literature at Lincoln College, who will deliver the next Campion Lecture entitled: 'Donne's Roman Catholic Sources'.

Roman Catholicism has long been a fixture in accounts of Donne's biography, verse, and polemical prose. This talk surveys the substantial new evidence accruing in The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne (2013 - ) of Donne's deep and largely unrecognised use of Catholic scholarship in the pulpit, especially biblical criticism from the post-Tridentine 'Golden Age', a majority of which was by Jesuits. Particular attention will be paid to Donne's strategy of suppressing acknowledgement of his debt when accepting, rather than rejecting, their work in his unfailingly Protestant sermons, and the talk will conclude by considering the unremarked case of a sermon preached to and for a congregation of acknowledged recusant Catholics.