The Correspondence of John Donne
John Donne was one of the most influential authors and thinkers to emerge from early modern England. He is most famous today for his poems and sermons, both of which have received extensive scholarly attention. But his prose letters have never been collected and edited. The Oxford University Press edition of John Donne's Correspondence will fill this major gap in the English canon. Donne's letters are rich in biographical and intellectual content, but they present highly complex problems of dating, attribution, and comprehension that have frustrated attempts to order and understand them. Indeed, the edition has a somewhat legendary status in the field, as the longest running unfinished commission from OUP – it was originally commissioned in 1929, the year of the Wall Street Crash! A team of editors from the UK, United States, and Canada is hard at work to bring this major project to completion.
We have recently been helped in this endeavour by a significant grant from the British Academy to complete a section of the project on Donne's connections to Venice and the English ambassador Sir Henry Wotton. The Modern Humanities Research Association has also generously funded a post-doctoral fellow to assist with important attribution work. The project also has a fully funded PhD student working on the copy-texts of Donne's letters, thanks to the Leverhulme-funded programme Knowledge Orders before Modernity.
Funding
- British Academy mid-career fellowship 2026, £144,461.22.
- MHRA Research Fellowship, £29,500.
- Knowledge Orders before Modernity (Leverhulme Trust scheme), fully funded PhD student.