John Donne’s family were committed Catholics. His two uncles were Jesuits. One of them, Jasper Heywood, was the leader of the Jesuit mission in England, while Donne’s mother was a recusant who was forced to leave the country in 1595. In this detailed and historically contextualized study, the author argues that Donne was greatly influenced in his journey from militant Roman Catholicism to ordination in the Church of England by Ignatius of Loyola’s religious ideals and in particular by his Spiritual Exercises. The book describes the pervasive influence of the Spiritual Exercises on late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Catholicism and Protestantism. In this light, it offers a close reading of Donne’s preordination religious poems and prose with constant reference to the sermons. These works are usually read through the tinted lenses of ‘Catholicism’ or ‘Protestantism’ or other religious ‘-isms’. The reading proposed here argues instead that Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises were for Donne a means to transcend the simplistic and perilous divisions of contemporary Catholicism and Protestantism.

Francesca Bugliani Knox graduated in 1976 from Pisa University (Dott. Lett.) and was senior lecturer in the English Department of the Università IULM, Milan, from 1986 to 2002. In 2009 she was awarded a PhD by Heythrop College, University of London. She is now Research Fellow at Heythrop College and Teaching Fellow at UCL. Her publications include translations into Italian as well as books and articles on various aspects of English and Italian literature from the Renaissance to the present.

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