The Sermons of John Donne, Volume VI

The Sermons of John Donne, edited by Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter, Volume VI, encompasses Donne’s preaching between 1623 and early 1626, a turbulent period marked by the failure of the Spanish Match, the death of James I, the accession of Charles I, and the devastating plague of 1625. These sermons show Donne navigating a nation in anxiety and transition, while also processing his own near-fatal illness of late 1623. The *Devotions upon Emergent Occasions* arose directly from that sickness, and the sermons that follow often carry the same sharpened awareness of mortality, divine judgment, and resurrection. Beginning with his recovery sermon on Easter Day, 1624, Donne reflects repeatedly on bodily frailty and the promise of eternal life, themes woven with his characteristic mixture of casuistry, Scriptural exegesis, and poetic imagination.

This volume also includes his first sermons at St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West, where his pastoral manner softened into plainer instruction, emphasizing love between pastor and flock and the daily duties of Christian life. By contrast, his great cathedral and court sermons retain a more elaborate and rhetorical style. His funeral sermon for James I, preached at Denmark House, balances biblical typology with restrained commemoration, markedly different from the florid panegyrics of his contemporaries. Throughout, Donne returns to central convictions: that sin itself, though real, is a privation that God may fold into His providence; that affliction and plague are both judgment and mercy; and that the body, often despised in ascetic extremes, remains honored by God as His creation and destined for resurrection. Particularly moving are the sermons preached during and after the plague, in which Donne evokes the horror of mass mortality yet insists on consolation in the communion of saints and the eternity of divine mercy. Together, these sermons present Donne at the height of his powers, shaping his poetic theology of sin, suffering, and salvation in a moment of national and personal crisis.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1953.