Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Murray Roston, The Soul of Wit: A Study of John Donne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974) p. 54, for example, regards Donne and Crashaw as 'artistically, if not historically poles apart'. He makes a fairly typical claim that his 'intention here is not to elevate Donne by denigrating Crashaw' (p. 58). Yet this is often precisely what occurs and not solely in an older school of criticism. Adverse comparison of Crashaw with Donne is a handy tool, as we can see in Joan Bennett, Five Metaphysical Poets: Donne, Herbert, Crashaui, Vaughan and Marvell (Cambridge University Press, 1964) pp. 92-3, and most recently in William Kerrigan, 'The Fearful Accommodations of John Donne', English Literary Renaissance (ElR), vol. IV (1974) pp. 352, 359-60 . 2. See Louis Adrian Montrose, "'In Mirrours More Then One": Eliz­ abethan Ideology and the Spenserian Text', in Jonathan Hall and Ackbar Abbas (eds), Literature andAnthropology (Hong Kong Univer­ sity Press, 1986) pp. 12-14. 3. See Anthony Low's illuminating discussion of the gender prejudicial criticism which has shaped the views of Donne and Crashaw in Love's Architecture: Devotional Modes in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (New York University Press, 1978) pp. 137-8 . (Further refer­ ences to this work may be indicated by page number in the text.) Low mentions F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot but George Williamson, The Donne Tradition: A Study in English Poetry from Donne to Cowley (New York: Noonday, 1958) pp. 111-12, articulates their traditional point of view when he speaks of Crashaw's 'feminine way that is alien to Donne's masculine sensuality'. Roston, The SoulofWits, pp. 71-2, also speaks approvingly of 'the virile dialectic of Donne's love poetry', his 'tough rationalism', and 'firm logical pattern' based on 'the hardest mathematics'. In contrast, and without embarrassment, Crashaw is depicted as 'aesthetically ineffective' and relying upon 'images of maternal suckling' (p, 58). 4. The description, intended pejoratively, is to be found in Legenda lignea ... And a Character of some hopeful! Saints Revolted to the Church Rome and is quoted in L. C. Martin (ed.), The Poems, English, 236 Notes 237 Latin,andGreek,ofRicilard Crashaw (Oxford:Clarendon, 1927)p. xxxvi. 5. See Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Quartet, 1978) p. xxi, pp . 252-4. 6. Montrose, "Tn Mirrours .. /" , p. 14, emphasises the fact that with the striking exception of Queen Elizabeth I, 'all forms of public and domestic authority in Elizabethan England were invested in men'. 7. Anthony Stafford, The Femall Glory (1635), introduction by Maureen Sabine (Delmar, NY: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1988) p. 221. (Further references to this work may be indicated by page number in the text.) 8. Patrick Grant, The Transformation of Sin: Studies in Do/me, Herbert , Vaughan and Traherne (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974) p. 58. 9. See Donne's letter of autumn 1608 to Henry Goodyer in M. Thomas Hester (ed.), Letters to Severall Persons of Honour (1651) (Delmar, NY: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1977) p. 34. (Further references to this work may be indicated by page number in the text.) 10. William Drummond of Hawthornden quoting Jonson in A. J. Smith (ed.), John Donne: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975) p. 69. 11. See George Walton Williams' translation of 'Mulier Canaanitis' in his edition of The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaui (Garden City, NY: Doubleday-Anchor, 1970) sacred epigram no. 183, pp . 334-5. (Crashaw is quoted parenthetically throughout from the Williams edition except where the earlier Martin edition is explicitly cited.) 12. Thus, for example, Austin Warren concludes his classic study of this poet, Richard Crashaw: A Study in Baroque Sensibility (London: Louisiana State University Press, 1939), with a series of devastating remarks arising from the images of maternal succour and abundance in Crashaw's verse: that many readers must have felt themselves in the presence of someone 'sick or unmanly' (p. 202), that 'he knew what it is to be a child and a scholar and a wit and an artist, but he did not know what it is to be a man' (p. 204). Though Warren cannot quite bring himself to spit it out, the issue appears to be one of Crashaw's sexual manhood. 1 UNSPEAKABLE DOMINA 1. See Donne's Verse Letter 137, 'To the Countess of Bedford', U. 11, 33, in The Complete Poetry of John Donne, John T. Shawcross (ed.) (Garden City, NY: Doubleday-Anchor, 1967) p. 226. (Donne is quoted parenthetically throughout from the Shawcross edition except where specifically indicated otherwise.) Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison : University of Wisconsin Press, 1986) p. 210, argues that Donne constructs his relationship to Lady Bedford in this poem as one in which he is the learned reader and 238 Feminine Engendered Faith she is the obscure text. But he is the first to admit that Donne needed her much more than she needed him. 2. W. Milgate cites this reference to the Lothian portrait in Donne's will. See 'Dr. Donne's Art Gallery', Notes and Queries (N&Q), vol. CXClV (1949) p. 318. Both John Bryson , 'Lost Portrait of Donne', The Times; 13 Oct. 1959, p. 15, and Louis Martz, The Wit of Love: Donne, Crashaur, Carew, Marvell (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969) p. 192, n. 6, think it likely the painting hung in the Deanery. 3. See R. V. Young's discussion of reading Donne as a manuscript poet in "'0 my America, my new-found land": Pornography and Imperial Politics in Donne's Elegies', South Central Review (SCRev), vol. IV (1987) p. 39. 4. See, for example, 'Feminist scholarship and the social construction of woman' in Gayle Greene & Coppelia Kahn (eds), Making a Dif­ ference: Feminist Literary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1985) p. 13. 5. See the recent ess ays of Judith Scherer Hertz, 'An Excellent Exercise of Wit' and Anna K. Nardo, 'John Donne at Play in Between' in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds), The Eagle and the Dove: Reassessing fohn Donne (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986) pp. 3-14, 157-65. 6. See Edmund Campion to Claude Aquaviva, 17 November 1580, in Philip Caraman (ed.), The Other Face: Catholic Life under Elizabeth 1, (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1960) p. 82. 7. Izaak Walton, Lifeof Dr. fohn Donne (4th edn, 1675) in Alexander M. Witherspoon and Frank J. Warnke (eds), Seventeenth-Century Prose and Poetry, 2nd edn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963) p. 268. (Further references to this work may be indicated by page number in the text.) 8. I am indebted to Ernest B. Gilman for this suggestion. See "To adore, or scorne an image": Donne and the Iconoclastic Contro­ versy', fohn Donne [ournal (JDJ), vol. V (1986) p. 72. 9. In her 'Commentary', on stanza V to 'The Virgin Mary' in 'A Litanie', Helen Gardner dismisses its variant Catholic title 'Our Ladie' as a likely scribal liberty. See Gardner, The Divine Poems of fohn Donne, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978) p. 48. (Further references to this work may be indicated by page number in the text.) 10. See Bryson, 'Lost Portrait', pp. 13-15 and Martz, The Wit of Love, p. 192, n. 4. William Drummond correctly recalled the Domina, without seeing the need for special comment, but misquoted the rest of the inscription on the portrait. 11. John Carey, fohn Donne: Life, Mind and Art (London: Faber, 1981) p. 23. (Further references to this work may be indicated by page number in the text.) 12. See A. M. Allchin's discussion of 'Our Lady in Seventeenth-Century Anglican Devotion and Theology', in E. L. Mascall and H. S. Box (eds), The Blessed Virgin Mary: Essays by Anglican Writers (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1963) pp. 55-8 . Notes 239 13. William Crashaw, The Sermon at the Crosse, printed by H. L. for Edmond Weaver (London, 1608) p. 64. (Further references to this work may be indicated by page number in the text.) 14. See Dennis Flynn, 'Donne's Catholicism: II', Recusant History, vol. XIII(1976) pp. 17B-95 and 'The U AnnatesSchool" and the Catholicism of Donne's Family', fDf, vol. II (1983) pp. 4-6, as well as Edward Norman, Roman Catholicism in England from the Elizabethan Settle­ ment to the Second Vatican COl/ncil (Oxford University Press, 1985) p. 14. They remind us of the chronic spiritual confusion of these times and the difficulty of distinguishing clearly between Catholic and Protestant. Flynn notes the pattern of Catholic heroism and recantation in Donne's family and argues that his conversion to Anglicanism did not occur overnight but over a fifteen-year period extending from his marriage in 1601 to his ordination in 1615, during which time he continued to exercise Catholic forms of private worship. 15. See Coppelia Kahn, 'The Absent Mother in King Lear', in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers (eds), Rewrit­ ing the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modem Europe (University of Chicago Press, 1986) p. 35. (Further references to this work may be indicated by page number in the text.) 16. C. L. Barber, 'The Family in Shakespeare's Development: Tragedy and Sacredness', in Murray M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn (eds), Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980) p. 196. 17. D. W. Harding, 'Coherence of Theme in Donne's Poetry', Kenyon l~evi ew (KR), vol. XIII (1951) pp. 431-2. 18. See Nardo, 'John Donne at Play', in Summers and Pebworth (eds), The Eagle and the Dove, p.