Understanding John Donne’s Conformity: Discretion and Other Survival Strategies in the Seventeenth-Century Pulpit.

Jeanne Shami
Department of English

13 November 2003

This study proposes to examine the late Jacobean pulpit, and particularly the sermons of John Donne, as an index of “conformity” and its expression in the years immediately preceding and including the transition from the Jacobean to the Caroline monarchy (1621-1625). During these years, sermons, always important in Jacobean religious and political culture, became sites of contention for important matters of religious and national identity, contention epitomized by James I’s Directions to Preachers. These Directions, issued on 4 August 1622 by George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury, were an attempt to reduce to order a pulpit that had become increasingly critical of and outspoken about the implications for religious belief and practice of James’s domestic and foreign policies. Whether or not the Directions were actually effective in controlling the kinds of pulpit discourse that James intended, however, their issuing exposed fault lines in the Church of England that contributed to a reconfigured Caroline church and the demise of the Jacobean order.  The crisis they both reflected and precipitated was, to some, barely perceptible at the time. But the pressures they exerted worked a tectonic shift in the balance of forces within the English church, the effects of which were profound.

The crisis in the late Jacobean English church is evidenced first by the pressures of censorship to make language conform to certain “acceptable” standards at a time when these standards were not well understood or articulated, nor the consequences of unacceptable speech clear. Under pressure, some preachers exceeded the boundaries of conformity, and paid the legal and political consequences, while others applied strict laws of self-censorship to their words. The forces brought to bear also radicalized formerly conformist divines, many of whom became increasingly aware of the pulpit’s persuasive power and attempted to manipulate it. Efforts to control the number, content, and location of sermons also intensified rather than diminishing religious controversy. A dominant anti-papist discourse was fractured among divines, all of whom had differing motives and styles for distinguishing themselves from the Church of Rome. In the last years of James’s reign, this discourse was complicated by increasingly open anti-puritan and anti-Calvinist rhetoric. All of these circumstances were exacerbated by the extension of pulpit debate into print. At stake for all of these preachers and controversialists was the definition of the Church of England, through a process of public and communal debate that would have profound consequences for religion―and politics―in decades to follow.

In particular, this study attempts to place the sermons of John Donne in the context of these historical circumstances affecting pulpit discourse, and of Donne’s personal circumstances and vocational responsibilities during these years. Donne’s crucial role in the events surrounding the Directions in 1622 to the death of James and Charles’s accession make him the ideal barometer of these political and religious crises, and a test case for responding to historical claims about late Jacobean sermons. Although he is no way “typical” of any particular preaching agenda or style, his sermons articulate these crises in their most complex forms and expose fault lines in the late Jacobean English church that produced their most profound effects only after Donne’s death in 1631. Donne’s vision for the Church of England meant that he resisted the pressure to radicalize, although his sermons bear all the marks of the tension to stay whole. Milton has suggested that one of the prized names that opponents battled to claim was the name of “moderate,” an observation that further complicates our understanding of religious discourse in the sermons under examination. The historical impact of James’s most extravagant pulpit critics and supporters has been recorded, but these voices at the extremes tell only part of the story. This study arises out of a general sense that the middle ground has been written out of the history of the pulpit in early-modern England, in part because post-revisionist historians are suspicious―and rightly so―of self-proclaimed moderates, and even of moderate-sounding preachers.  This might explain why the extreme voices of dissent or endorsement have been recorded, while sermons of the majority of preachers have been ignored or, as in the case of Donne, appropriated for other political agendas. But it is at the risk of misrepresenting the nature and extent of public discussion in the sermons that we neglect this vast body of material.

The crisis for conformist discourse enacted in late Jacobean sermons, particularly those of John Donne, points to the pulpit as a medium of public debate on the nature of the English church and its future directions. While the Reformation had initiated an anti-papist rhetoric that defined that institution as “not-Catholic,” preachers discovered they had a stake in arguing that the church was also not-puritan, and, more controversially, not-Calvinist. In this context, the significance of James’s Directions to Preachers lies not so much in external penalties imposed―preachers arrested, words expunged or misquoted, penal laws enforced, imprisonments―but in the pressures internalized that resulted in self-censorship, resistance to change, distrust, and suspicion.  Historians have commented on the polarization of views resulting from such moments of crisis, but it is also true that the Directions prompted preachers such as Donne to greater efforts of moderation and negotiation between hard-line extremes, and greater commitment to shared values. Certainly, on several occasions, Donne’s professional life intersected with the political and religious turning points of the age, but, among divines, he was never the most powerful ecclesiastical administrator or political counselor. Nor did his vision of the Church of England prevail in his lifetime. Nonetheless, his capacious imagination envisioned―and then modeled―ways of dealing with the crises facing conformists. His experience as a public figure in the 1620s expresses in all its complexity the religious conflicts of the age.

Link to publisher’s information about Jeanne Shami’s book John Donne and Conformity in Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit (Boydell & Brewer, 2003)