KATRIN ETTENHUBER. Donne's Augustine: Renaissance Cultures of Interpretation.

Abstract

In Donne's ‘Satyre 1’, the student poet asks to be left alone in his ‘standing wooden chest, / Consorted with these few books’, chief among them ‘God's conduits, grave divines’. The image is an intriguing one: what did Donne have in his library, and how did he read? Katrin Ettenhuber's important study provides, for the first time, a comprehensive picture of how an older Donne—the author of Biathanatos, the Essayes in Divinity, and 160 or more sermons—consorted with his favourite patristic authority: Saint Augustine. Her statistics on Donne's reading are impressive enough: she identifies 61 Augustinian works (seven of them spurious) quoted in the sermons alone (p. 28), where his twentieth-century editors, George Potter and Evelyn Simpson, found 24. Yet it is not simply the breadth of Donne's reading in Augustine which is striking, but the sense that he held a uniquely influential place in Donne's mind. While it is no surprise to find an early modern preacher citing Augustine above all other Church Fathers, Donne's acquaintance with him is profound and complex; his citations are, Ettenhuber persuasively suggests, not merely displays of learnedness, but processes of theological self-orientation and self-definition.