Explore the vast range of titles available.

Ever since their rediscovery in the 1920s, John Donne's writings have been praised for their energy, vigour and drama - yet so far, no attempt has been made to approach and define systematically these major characteristics of his work. Drawing on J. L. Austin's speech act theory, Margret Fetzer's comparative reading of Donne's poetry and prose eschews questions of personal or religious sincerity and instead recreates an image of John Donne as a man of many performances. No matter if engaged in the writing of a sermon or a piece of erotic poetry, Donne placed enormous trust in what words could do. Questions as to how saying something may actually bring about that very thing, or how playing the part of someone else affects an actor's identity, are central to Donne's oeuvre - and moreover highly relevant in the cultural and theological contexts of the early modern period in general. In treating both canonical and lesser known Donne texts, John Donne's Performances hopes to make a significant contribution not only to Donne criticism and research into early modern culture: by using concepts of performance and performativity as its major theoretical backdrop, it aims to establish an interdisciplinary link with the field of performance studies.

Literature of the Stuart Successionsis an anthology of primary material relating to the Stuart successions. The six Stuart successions (1603, 1625, 1660, 1685, 1688-9, 1702) punctuate this turbulent period of British history. In addition, there were two accessions to the role of Lord Protector (those of Oliver and Richard Cromwell). Each succession generated an outpouring of publications in a wide range of forms and genres, including speeches, diary-entries, news reports, letters and sermons. Above all, successions were marked in poems, by some of the greatest writers of the age. By gathering together some of the very best Stuart succession writing, Literature of the Stuart Successions offers fresh perspectives upon the history and culture of the period. It includes fifty texts (or extracts), selected to demonstrate the breadth and significance of succession writing, as well as introductory and explanatory material.

New England Puritan sermon culture was primarily an oral phenomenon, and yet its literary production has been understood mainly through a print legacy. InJeremiah's Scribes, Meredith Marie Neuman turns to the notes taken by Puritan auditors in the meetinghouse in order to fill out our sense of the lived experience of the sermon. By reconstructing the aural culture of sermons, Neuman shifts our attention from the pulpit to the pew to demonstrate the many ways in which sermon auditors helped to shape this dominant genre of Puritan New England. Tracing the material transmission of sermon texts by readers and writers, hearers and notetakers,Jeremiah's Scribeschallenges the notion of stable authorship by individual ministers. Instead, Neuman illuminates a mode of textual production that pervaded communities and occurred in the overlapping media of print, manuscript, and speech. Even printed sermons, she demonstrates, bore the traces of their roots in the oral culture of the meetinghouse. Bringing material considerations to bear on anxieties over the perceived relationship between divine and human language,Jeremiah's Scribesbroadens our understanding of all Puritan literature. Neuman examines the controlling logic of the sermon in relation to nonsermonic writing-such as conversion narrative-ultimately suggesting the fundamental permeability among disparate genres of Puritan writing.

The Temple (1633), a book of devotional lyrics by the English poet George Herbert, was a site of innovation in the seventeenth-century book trade. Scholars of book history have attended to its numerous editions, but one important paratext has been largely ignored: the expansive subject index that was appended to the collection in the printshop of Philemon Stephens in the 1640s. This subject index instrumentalized the collection. By using Stephen Orgel’s methodology of ‘the archaeology of texts’, this essay demonstrates how this index activated homiletical readings of Herbert’s poems. The essay uses the index first to reconstruct some of its readings. It explores the assumptions about the uses of lyric poetry that made such readings possible, and considers why twentieth-century critics have rejected them. While the essay connects the index to The Temple with earlier biblical and homiletical finding aids and an early modern cultural disposition to reading for action, it also marks, in the demise of this disposition, an origin for the modern practice of indexing lyric collections by first line. In closing, the essay compares the affordances of these two kinds of book index with the collation and search functions prepared for a recent digital edition. 

Lancelot Andrewes, a main translator of the King James Bible, was Jacobean England's dominant theological figure. The techniques Andrewes applied to the revision of his 1620 Easter sermon are examined.

Walton gives virtually no dates in his accounts, he invents the speeches of his characters, he offers little detail in descriptions of their personal appearance, and he idealizes them into virtuous, patient Christians who might all have qualified for sainthood in the Restoration Church, had that Church decided to create its own Anglican saints. ^eir similarities are empha- sized, their distinctiveness played down. Among the stereotypes of the genre we meet: the preacher whose ambition is to die in the pulpit, the divine who is so preoccupied with matters of the spirit that he doesn't notice that his house is on fire, the student who cannot leave his books for a moment, such as John Preston who would read Aquinas in the barber's chair, or the statesman ever musing upon policy. Childhood is usually ignored (\"all children are alike in their Long-coats\"), youth is rapidly passed over, but the last days, even hours, of a subject's life are attentively dwelt upon. ^e protracted deathbed scenes that are characteristic of seventeenth-century biographies, which reached their zenith in Burnet's account of Rochester's end, were important because they revealed the condition of the soul, the depth of faith that gave proof of salvation. [...]anyone interested in the cultural history of the seventeenth century would benefit from reading this book, which is full of jewels twinkling in the grass on ancient graves.