Gender and the Sacred Self in John Donne by Elizabeth M.A. Hodgson (review)

humanities 369 studies of Galileo's two major works, the Dialogue of 1632 and the Two New Sciences of 1638; and the third volume, essays on Galileo's instruments and on topics other than Galileo. Accompanying the essays are sixty-eight plates, which are sometimes shared among the papers and are frequently essential to understanding them. A chronological bibliography of Drake's publications is appended. An adequate but far from comprehensive index appears at the end of each volume. The frontispiece is a wonderful informal photograph of Stillman Drake, staring into the camera with an expression that is good-natured but almost disconcertingly intense. (BRUCE STEPHENSON) Elizabeth M.A. Hodgson. Gender and the Sacred Self in John Donne University of Delaware Press. 224. US $38.50`The single overriding argument of this book,' in its author's words, `is that in all of his sacred texts Donne is precisely fascinated by the gendered idea of a woman as a tool in the exploration and expression of his own masculine , poetic, and priestly self at moments of liminality.' To explicate this sentence would be to offer a description of the scope and methodology of the book. By `sacred texts' Hodgson means Donne's overtly religious writings in prose and verse: the sermons, the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Biathanatos, the `Holy Sonnets,' `La Corona,' the hymns, and (in a final chapter which aims at and very nearly achieves a synthesis of what has gone before) The Anniversaries. There are references to and even brief discussions of a few poems from the Songs and Sonets ('Love's Alchemy,' for example) and even fewer of the verse letters (notably `To Mr. Tilman After He Had Taken Orders'), but secular texts are cited only in so far as they contribute to the assessment of Donne as a religious writer. Thègendered idea' which fascinates Donne is in fact a complicated set of related ideas: pregnancy, maternity, the tainted condition of the female body, the subordination of wives to husbands, virginity, chastity, infidelity, and the sexual power by which women are able to cause effeminate lassitude in men. This isn't a complete list, but it's enough to suggest that Donne drew upon and made his contribution to the whole catalogue of misogynous tropes which Christianity conferred so generously on early modern culture. Such rhetoric is a `tool' for Donne in the sense that he uses it to establish the godliness and manliness required by his refashioning of himself as an Anglican priest. And the `moments of liminality' during which Donne's rhetoric of gender is tested are the rites of passage of the Christian soul: `Baptism: ``The Second Birth''' (the title of Hodgson's chapter 2), `Marriage: ``Joyes Bonfire''' (chapter 3), and `Death:``Involved in Mankind''' (chapter 4). The ceremony of churching, which marked the return of a new mother 370 letters in canada 1999 to the congregation, is given special treatment as a subsection under baptism. It shares with baptism the function of `postnatal cleansing,' though in churching it is not the child but the mother who is purified. Hodgson cites the relevant Old Testament decree (Leviticus 12:2B7), and notices how it is echoed in Roman Catholic liturgies, such as the Sarum missal. In the Catholic ritual, the mother would return to the priest thèchrism' (also `chrisom' and `chrisom-cloth'), the white robe in which her child was baptised, and which would have been its shroud had the infant died in its first month. The ceremony is reinflected by the Book of Common Prayer as an offering of thanksgiving to God for delivering the mother from the perils of pregnancy and childbirth; in Ecclesiastical Polity Hooker explicitly denies that churching has anything to do with the (false) belief that a woman is `unholie' during her confinement. Within this cultural context Hodgson reads the rhetoric of several sermons, such as that`Preached at Essex house, at the Churching of the Lady Doncaster.' The conclusion she reaches is both predictable and, in my view, unearned by anything Donne has said: `In this sermon, then, Donne creates the strongest case for his own authority when he considers the pervasive presence of sinful female fleshliness...