New studies offer a revisionist interpretation of Donne's career, making a polemical case for studying the full range of his writings. During his life, John Donne occupied a range of professional positions, in all of which he produced writings considered by his contemporaries to be worthy of interest, collection and annotation. Donne's lifetime also coincided with the period during which the notion of the profession became increasingly significant. This volume makes a strong argument for the importance of Donne's professional writings to our understanding of his oeuvre and of the cultureof late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Studying in depth his remarkable use of a wide range of terms and even whole vocabularies - legal, theological, and medical, among others - it shows how Donne moulded his identity as a professional intellectual with the languages that were at hand. A tightly focussed series of essays by scholars of international reputation and younger experts in the field, John Donne's Professional Lives contains new discoveries and fresh interpretations. It offers a revisionist interpretation of Donne's career and makes a polemical case for studying the full range of his writings.Contributors: JAMES CANNON, DAVID CUNNINGTON, LOUISA. KNAFLA, PETER MCCULLOUGH, JESSICA MARTIN, JEREMY MAULE, MARY MORRISSEY, STEPHEN PENDER, JEANNE SHAMI, ALISON SHELL, JOHANN P. SOMMERVILLE.DAVID COLCLOUGH is a lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London.

John Donne's life story is inextricably tied up with the fabric of a society in the throes of religious persecution. In his biography of Donne, John Stubbs chronicles not only a long and bitter sectarian conflict, but also the love story of a young couple who broke the rules of their society, and paid the ultimate price.

A comprehensive selection of Donne's works which contains, in addition to the poems, excerpts from all the prose writings, among them relatively unfamiliar items such as Donne's private letters, his comic onslaught on the Jesuits Ignatius His Conclave and his defense of suicide Biathanatos. Over 130 excerpts from the sermons are drawn from all 16 years of Donne's preaching career, culminating in the full text of his last sermon Death's duel. In the introduction, editor John Carey, author of the acclaimed critical biography John Donne: Life, mind and art locates Donne's writing in its turbulent social and historical context.