Abstract
In the years prior to his ordination, John Donne was envisioning a State Church that he later sought to preach into being from the pulpit of St Paul’s. This chapter examines specific rhetorical deployments of language used by Donne in his sermons and earlier polemic Ignatius His Conclave (1611), as well as by the English Jesuits in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Based on his treatment of lunatic satire and the doctrine of equivocation, it argues that Donne was not a simple monarchist, nor an obsequious flatterer of the king. He was not afraid, in his sermons, to bring his sovereign under the fear of God, though he had to be diplomatic about it; he put his trust in a stable commonwealth with a righteous prince, accountable to God, and a reformed but Catholic church—a church, that is, founded on the apostles and the Fathers—answerable to God and the prince.
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Houliston, V. (2021). Paul’s Cross and the State Church: The Case of John Donne and the Jesuits. In: Altman, S., Buckner, J. (eds) Old St Paul’s and Culture. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77267-3_7
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