John Donne's and Early Modern Visual Culture

by Ann Hollinshead Hurley

This study differs from other approaches to John Donne’s poetry in arguing that his verse, already well served by the insightful close readings of earlier generations of scholars, can now profit from being read in the context of early modern cultural experience, specifically its visual culture. It points out that the focus on visual culture allows for a non-monolithic, flexible reading of Donne’s verse, in part because it acknowledges that while the complexity of his religious identity has been well explored, the complexity of his secular interests has perhaps been less thoroughly examined. Since a study of early modern visual culture is deeply concerned with the vicissitudes of the image, both religious and secular, such a context serves to integrate what in Donne sometimes invites polarity. The book uses an approach that is both interdisciplinary and new historicist in its methodology.

The term “visual culture” rather than “visual art” is used, as the latter is too restrictive. While “visual art” refers only to visual artifacts, “visual culture” refers more extensively to thinking about and practicing the use of images, something that marked almost every facet of life in Reformation England. Moreover, visual culture, as one of the most pervasive cultural contexts of the early modern period, supplies a particularly fitting cultural setting for a poet like Donne, who was especially well read in both the aesthetic and religious documents that form the intellectual substratum of this culture. Additionally, while literary studies have for some time engaged the cultural background of a poet’s work, it has been only recently that art historians have begun to think about the cultural practices out of which visual art emerges. That thinking gives new definition to the field of visual culture, both in its practices and in the justification of its approach, and invites a study such as this to explore its position.

Moreover, as one whose upbringing was Roman Catholic but whose adulthood was closely identified with orthodox Angli- canism (as dean of St. Paul’s), Donne was the best positioned among his generation of poets to experience and articulate the conflicted location of the English Ref- ormation poet. Enticed by his craft to use images, yet constrained by Protestantism to distrust them, the English poet was caught in the deep cultural rift between iconophilia and iconophobia.

The book covers five major topics: “Donne and Painting: The Early Politics”; “Donne and Festival: The Structure of the Lyrics”; “Donne and London : Representing Representations”; “Donne and the Crisis in the Image: The Internal Made Visible”; and “Donne and Collecting: Moving Away from Patronage.” Each chapter establishes a specific visual context and then applies that context to detailed readings of the poems.

The chapters are in roughly chronological order and assert the argument that, for Donne, visual culture operated not only as a direct influence, but more frequently as a figure for things that could not be said safely in verse. His handling of the materials of visual culture in his verse suggests both a wariness about that visual culture and an attentiveness to its place and potential. Moreover, for Donne, as for other English poets of his generation, that place is quite clearly not only aesthetic but, perhaps more frequently, practical and political.

It is Donne’s poetry that focuses the attention here, and by turning in each chapter to specific poems, the book seeks to provide at least a beginning of an answer to a central question that underlies the whole study: What would a historicized en- gagement with the verbally sophisticated language of Donne’s poetry be like when that poetry is read in the context of our understanding of the visual culture of his time? By bringing together a background in cultural criticism, art history, and close reading, Hurley provides an answer to that question, and supports that answer through analysis of a number of Donne’s poems.

LC 2004023303
ISBN 1-57591-089-6
Printed in the U.S.A.