Book Launch: John Donne’s Physics

A reimagining of devotions upon emergent occasions as an original treatment of human life shaped by innovations in seventeenth-century science and medicine.

In 1624, poet and preacher John Donne published Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, a book that recorded his near-death experience during a deadly epidemic in London. Four hundred years later, in the aftermath of our own pandemic, Harvey and Harrison show how Devotions crystalizes the power, beauty, and enduring strangeness of Donne’s thinking. Arguing that Donne saw human life in light of emergent ideas in the study of nature (physics) and the study of the body (physick), John Donne’s Physics reveals Devotions as a culminating achievement, a radically new literary form that uses poetic techniques to depict Donne’s encounter with death in a world transformed by new discoveries and knowledge systems.

In conversation with Prof. John Rogers, English, University of Toronto.

Elizabeth D. Harvey is professor emeritus of English at the University of Toronto, a literary critic, and a psychoanalyst. She is the author or editor of several books, including Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture and Luce Irigaray and Premodern Culture: Thresholds of History. She is currently completing a book on Anne Carson, Anomalous Minds.

Timothy M. Harrison is associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England, also published by the University of Chicago Press. He is now working on two book projects: Horizons of the Mind: Self and World in Early Modern Persian and English Poetry and The Anthropology of John Milton.

John Rogers is author of The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton, as well as numerous essays on a range of seventeenth-century literary and cultural topics — from the poetry of Aemelia Lanyer and Andrew Marvell to the physico-theological speculations of Isaac Newton. He is currently completing Milton’s Poetry and the Theologies of Liberalism and Latter-day Milton: Paradise Lost and the Creation of America’s God.