These two volumes comprise a biography of John Donne, Dean of St. Paul’s and metaphysical poet. These volumes cover his tumultuous career in parliament, his writings and patronages, his marriage and his career with the Church of England.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

New studies offer a revisionist interpretation of Donne's career, making a polemical case for studying the full range of his writings. During his life, John Donne occupied a range of professional positions, in all of which he produced writings considered by his contemporaries to be worthy of interest, collection and annotation. Donne's lifetime also coincided with the period during which the notion of the profession became increasingly significant. This volume makes a strong argument for the importance of Donne's professional writings to our understanding of his oeuvre and of the cultureof late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Studying in depth his remarkable use of a wide range of terms and even whole vocabularies - legal, theological, and medical, among others - it shows how Donne moulded his identity as a professional intellectual with the languages that were at hand. A tightly focussed series of essays by scholars of international reputation and younger experts in the field, John Donne's Professional Lives contains new discoveries and fresh interpretations. It offers a revisionist interpretation of Donne's career and makes a polemical case for studying the full range of his writings.Contributors: JAMES CANNON, DAVID CUNNINGTON, LOUISA. KNAFLA, PETER MCCULLOUGH, JESSICA MARTIN, JEREMY MAULE, MARY MORRISSEY, STEPHEN PENDER, JEANNE SHAMI, ALISON SHELL, JOHANN P. SOMMERVILLE.DAVID COLCLOUGH is a lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This is a complete facsimile edition of fourteen autograph letters of John Donne that are among the greatest treasures of the Folger Library. The letters, dating from February and March 1602, relate to Donne's clandestine marriage to Anne More and are addressed to his father-in-law, Sir George More, and to Sir Thomas Egerton, the lord keeper, who was also Donne's employer. The text of a letter provides one part of the story, while its very tangibility -- the ancient folds, the grime and fingerprints deposited by the writer, deliverer, and readers, the broken seals, the ink blots, the idosyncratic spelling, the location of a signature -- tells another. An understanding of a letter's written and unwritten social signals brings into focus a fuller, grittier, and a clearer view of life in 17th century England. M. Thomas Hester is professor of English at North Carolina State University, Raleigh. Robert Parker Sorlien is professor emeritus of English at the University of Rhode Island. Dennis Flynn is professor of English at Bentley College, Waltham, Massachusetts. John Donne's Marriage Letters was recognized in the AIGA "50 books/50 Covers" competition as one of 100 examples of outstanding book and book cover design produced in 2005.