Returning to John Donne by Achsah Guibbory (review)

In this book, Achsah Guibbory gathers together previously published articles, written over the course of her career-long engagement with the writing of John Donne, along with three new articles written especially for this volume. Guibbory has organised the book into three sections – 'Time and History', 'Love', and 'Religion' – and within this structure, the essays follow, by and large, a chronological path.

'Love' is the largest section and contains some of Guibbory's most important essays on Donne's poetry. Certainly, 'Love' is an apt title for the section; yet on reading the essays included there, Guibbory's recognition of the importance of religion to Donne's writing, even in the supposedly more secular Songs and Sonnets, is strikingly clear. Especially in essays like 'Donne, Milton, and Holy Sex', or '"The Relic", The Song of Songs, and Donne's Songs and Sonets'", Guibbory pays careful attention to how religion informs Donne's praise of human sexual love. The articles collected in the 'Religion' section do, however, focus more strongly than those in the other sections on Donne's own religion and on the avowedly religious works, such as the sermons, the Holy Sonnets, and Pseudo-Martyr.

Of the newer essays included here, the most interesting is the last and longest, 'Donne, Milton, Spinoza and Toleration'. In it, Guibbory considers the whole of Donne's writing in relation to what she calls the 'pre-history' of toleration, and argues that Donne's record of relative toleration stands in favourable contrast to Milton's intolerance of Roman Catholics and Jews, while resembling Spinoza's advocacy of religious freedom later in the seventeenth century. Another of the new essays opens the volume with Guibbory's meditation on Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, and a short essay on Donne's darker side, 'Depersonalization, Disappointment, and Disillusion', concludes Part II.

It is a pleasure, on reading or re-reading these articles, to observe the evolution of Guibbory's understanding of Donne over the course of her career, however, even the earliest essays show Guibbory's extensive knowledge of her subject and her assured and engaging writing style. This book usefully pulls Guibbory's work on Donne together into one volume, making essential reading for anyone interested in Donne, or more generally in the study of literature and religion in the early modern period.