Picturing Divinity in John Donne's Writings

Kirsten Stirling is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. A former president of the John Donne Society, she has written extensively on a range of topics, including early modern poetry, Scottish Literature, and J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan.

• Introduction: Verbal and Visual ArtMaking and breaking imagesDonne's knowledge of artDr. Donne's art galleryIconoclasm and anxiety in Donne's poetry1. ShadowsPortraits of Donne"His Picture"The picture in the heartLikeness2. Art and the ApophaticThe "well-made and well-placed picture"The sculptor and the statueThe red glasseThe "curious masterpeece" and the Imago Dei3. Annunciation: Representing the Unrepresentable"In little roome": the circumscription of the divineThe Incarnate WordSwerving away from ekphrasis"A circle... whose first and last concurre"4. Crucifixion Negative theology and "The Crosse"The Deus Absconditus and the Cross in Donne's Good Friday PoemThe "Picture of Christ crucified"5. Judgement Resurrection. Imperfect.The face of God in the Holy SonnetsImagined cornersVision and RevisionUt pictura poesisConclusion

It is always refreshing when a scholar invested in theology is also comfortable with uncertainty, fluidity, and unknowing. Both Stirling's broader arguments and her specific readings repeatedly resist certainty, definitiveness, or consistency; Picturing Divinity claims untidiness and unknowing as important lyric and doctrinal territory. Stirling's literary analyses are also often nuanced, subtle, and open-ended, and this is just as true of her readings of the sermons as it is of the holy sonnets or secular poems... Stirling raises important issues about how we should think about the figure, the artwork, the icon, and the image in a writer like Donne in a moment of English culture like his. Her work models important questions about how to study influences, allusions, and intertextuality in early modern writers: John Donne and beyond.