When he was dean of St Paul's Cathedral, Dunne deliberately expanded and enhanced the preaching provision there. He wrote his devotions upon emergent occasions in January 1624 when he was near death from a viral illness. They are divided up into these stages, but within them, they are meditations, expostulation and prayer. It starts with this idea of, you know, this myth, I am well and ill this minute. And then addresses God with this. So it's the most remarkable performance and indeed an achievement for someone who's just getting better from serious illness. If I may read the passage that perhaps is the most celebrated, no man is an island, entire of itself
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Donne (1573-1631), known now as one of England’s finest poets of love and notable in his own time as an astonishing preacher. He was born a Catholic in a Protestant country and, when he married Anne More without her father's knowledge, Donne lost his job in the government circle and fell into a poverty that only ended once he became a priest in the Church of England. As Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, his sermons were celebrated, perhaps none more than his final one in 1631 when he was plainly in his dying days, as if preaching at his own funeral.
The image above is from a miniature in the Royal Collection and was painted in 1616 by Isaac Oliver (1565-1617)
With
Mary Ann Lund
Associate Professor in Renaissance English Literature at the University of Leicester
Sue Wiseman
Professor of Seventeenth Century Literature at Birkbeck, University of London
And
Hugh Adlington
Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham