John Donne's Lincoln's Inn Sermons (vol. 5 of the Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne, gen. ed. Peter McCullough)

The aim of this project is to produce a critical edition of the sermons preached by the poet and divine John Donne (1572-1631) at Lincoln's Inn from 1620 to 1623. The edition will establish accurate texts of the thirteen sermons preached during this period, recording textual variants and assessing their significance. It will supply a general introduction as well as detailed notes on each sermon, elucidating its historical context, documenting Donne's use of sources, glossing difficult words, and tracing allusions to contemporary events and texts. The project is part of a sixteen-volume edition of Donne's sermons, to be published by Oxford University Press, and aims to make Donne's preaching accessible to scholars, students, and a general reading audience.

In recent years, scholars have started to recognise the immense significance of religion to the social, political, and cultural life of early modern England. Rediscovering the sermon as a forum for public debate has been an important part of this process. We have been aware of the popular appeal of preaching for some time: W. Fraser Mitchell, a pioneer of sermon studies, noted in 1932 that for every 'person who witnessed a play or ten who happened to read it, thousands may, without exaggeration, be said to have attended sermons, or afterwards studied them from shorthand notes or in printed copies.' Sermons make up about 15% of the entries in surveys of printed books in the early modern period, and scholars estimate that about one hundred sermons were preached in seventeenth-century London every week. We have also been aware of the sermon as a literary artefact, thanks to Donne's twentieth-century editors, George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, who prepared a ten-volume edition of the sermons between 1953 and 1962.

However, Donne's preaching also has much to tell us about the cultural, religious, and socio-political climate of early modern England. In order to make these voices heard, the new Oxford edition will provide, for the first time, full explanatory notes on the sermons. More importantly, however, it will arrange the sermons not according to a (largely speculative) chronology, but by place of preaching. Focusing on a sermon's "place" fundamentally changes our perspective on early modern preaching: it allows us to move away from the sermon as a book produced for private consumption and points towards a more complete appreciation of preaching as an event, in its own geographical, social, and religious contexts. Donne's sermons were originally spoken rather than written down, delivered on a particular occasion, at a place of worship with its own physical and metaphysical properties, and to a particular audience.

Donne's audiences, of course, were not simply passive recipients of religious doctrine. The lawyers of Lincoln's Inn, for instance, were important stakeholders in the political life of the capital, and their interests intersected and competed with other important constituencies, at the royal court and in episcopal palaces. Donne's late Lincoln's Inn sermons are intensely personal and acutely political at the same time: some of the lawyers in the audience would have been close friends from his own days as a student at the Inn, but he also engages with topics of broader significance. The legal issue to which he returned most persistently between 1620 and 1623 was the fraught relationship between royal prerogative justice and the common law dispensed by ordinary judges. The question of when and how the king had authority to intervene directly in the legal process occupied Donne a great deal in the early 1620s, and was a subject with obvious (and obviously sensitive) political ramifications. His legal sermons have much to tell us about the ways in which civil society organised itself in the early modern period, and about the complex relationship between the laws of religion and the laws of the land.

Donne's sermons may never attract a large enough readership to rival the popularity of his poems, but there are significant applications for his preaching nonetheless. Seventeenth-century London was a site of intense religio-political debate and conflict, crystallised in complex relationships between different constituencies of interest. Of course, the original circumstances of Donne's preaching do not translate easily into twenty-first-century Britain, but there can be little doubt that the 'Turn to Religion' is felt not only in academia, but in society at large. And although the nation's preachers may not be propelling the country into a revolution as they did 400 years ago, a new edition of Donne's Lincoln's Inn sermons offers a good opportunity to examine the significance of religion in the lives of professional and local communities.

Experience of road-testing the impact of my sermon research on audiences in Cambridge has revealed a number of potential benefits to sections of the wider public. I have given a talk to an audience of lawyers and businessmen at Pembroke College about Donne's views on usury and charity in the Lincoln's Inn sermons, which resulted in lively discussion about legal ethics and the role of preaching at the Inns of Court. And I have presented some of the preliminary fruits of my research at a lunchtime event at the Centre for Research in the Arts Social Sciences, and Humanities, which was open to a general audience. Based on these initial presentations of my research, I propose two principal groups of users or beneficiaries:

(1) The members and Benchers of Lincoln's Inn. Like Donne's original audience, the current members of the Society combine a strong sense of corporate and professional identity with participation in the community of London, and in national and international affairs. To signal its commitment to these wider socio-cultural and political issues, the Society has a tradition of appointing Honorary Benchers: current members include Nelson Mandela, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, William Hague, and Robin Eames (Anglican Primate of Ireland until 2006). My project investigates sermons preached to lawyers, in the context of a developing public sphere, and of complex notions of political participation and civic responsibility. I aim to address these issues as part of an event at the Inn for members of the Society, which will invite three prominent lawyers to preach on one of Donne's favourite legal Scripture texts, James 2.12 ('So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the laws of liberty'). The projected date is spring 2014, to coincide with the publication of the edition and to capitalise on the publicity work of OUP.

(2) Residents of the city of Cambridge. The University of Cambridge has established a successful series of programmes for communicating its research to a wider audience. "The Naked Scientists Project" (www.thenakedscientists.com) has furthered public understanding of the natural sciences through public talks, radio programmes, and podcasts. "The Cambridge Festival of Ideas", an annual event which takes place in the autumn, features public talks and discussions on a wide range of social and cultural subjects of interest. I plan to build on this interest from the wider public by organising a series of three talks and discussions in collaboration with the "Cambridge Theology for Public Understanding" project. The talks will be given by speakers involved in preaching for specialist congregations--chaplains based at Cambridge Colleges, specific congregations in Cambridge (e.g. Christian, Jewish, and Muslim), and local prisons--and will aim to reassess the significance of preaching in general and for specific and local audiences more particularly. My aim is to publish the talks in podcast form on the project's dedicated website, on the OESJD website, and on the Video and Audio section of the Cambridge University website. The projected date is autumn 2013.