Volume 54, Number 10 · June 14, 2007
Love & Heresy in John Donne
By John Carey
John Donne: The Reformed Soul
by John Stubbs
Norton, 565 pp., $35.00
John Donne is remembered as a great Elizabethan love poet, some would say the greatest love poet in the English language. But he might easily, had things fallen out differently, have been remembered as a Catholic martyr. He was born, in 1572, into one of the foremost Catholic families in England. His mother was related to the martyr Sir Thomas More, and her brother, Donne's uncle Jasper Heywood, was the head of the Jesuit mission in England. This was a time of anti-Catholic persecution. It was high treason for a Catholic priest to be found anywhere in Queen Elizabeth's realm. Those who were captured were executed in a manner designed to strike terror into the beholders. They were hanged, then taken down while still alive, their genitals were chopped off and thrown into a brazier, and their bowels were torn out. Donne was educated by Catholic tutors 'hungry,' as he recalled, to become martyrs themselves, and it seems that they took him to witness these exemplary penalties. He remembered seeing Catholic bystanders praying to the priest's mangled body, in hope that the new martyr would take their petitions to heaven.
Review, 4002 words
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