Knowledge of medicine was not terribly advanced, of course. “Because smoking was believed to keep the plague at bay," Rundell informs us, "they [students of the Merchant Taylors’ school] were flogged for the crime of not smoking." One popular prescription, said to work with numerous diseases, were made of mummies* (preferably “the fresh unspotted cadaver of a red-headed man)… aged about 24, who has been executed and died a violent death”). How oddly precise. (*NB: Mummies have not been judged by FDA to have efficacy in treating Covid.)

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne - Winner of

Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards 2018 winners". Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards. 1 February 2018. Archived from the original on 12 August 2018 . Retrieved 11 August 2018. Katherine Rundell makes Donne come alive as a remarkable and extraordinary and almost boundless human being. His life was one of despair and joy, the sacred and the profane, deep love and pain, and this book is filled with such infectious passion and fascinating detail that it shines like its subject. A triumph.” Inspired by John Carey’s approach of forty years ago that the life of Donne leads to a more comprehensive reading of his work, Rundell paints vivid pictures of Donne and his times which open the mind and stay there, as well as readings of the poems that launch us into fresh space. Historians might want more of the wider context. Literary critics might want more poems under the microscope. This, however, is a wonderful achievement, full of idiosyncrasies, some revision of past narratives about Donne, and, most of all, an intoxicated love of Donne in his all his chaos and glory. Love’s Growth’ hangs on the idea of apparently infinite love, made more – which, once you have read all that he wrote, is wholly unsurprising. John Donne was an infinity merchant; the word is everywhere in his work. More than infinity: super-infinity. A few years before his own death, Donne preached a funeral sermon for Magdalen Herbert, mother of the poet George Herbert, a woman who had been his patron and friend. Magdalen, he wrote, would ‘dwell bodily with that righteousness, in these new heavens and new earth, for ever and ever and ever, and infinite and super-infinite forevers’. In a different sermon, he wrote of how we would one day be with God in ‘an infinite, a super-infinite, an unimaginable space, millions of millions of unimaginable spaces in heaven’. He loved to coin formations with the super-prefix: super-edifications, super-exaltation, super-dying, super-universal, super-miraculous. It was part of his bid to invent a language that would reach beyond language, because infinite wasn’t enough: both in heaven, but also here and now on earth, Donne wanted to know something larger than infinity. It was absurd, grandiloquent, courageous, hungry. The Good Thieves. Illustrated by Matt Saunders. Bloomsbury Children's Books. 13 June 2019. ISBN 978-1408854891. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: others ( link)

I was completely absorbed by Super-Infinite, grabbed from the first sentence. Rundell’s erudition helps us understand Donne the thinker, her storytelling genius brings Donne the man to life, in his ‘hat big enough for a cat to sail in’. Vivid, exuberant language pulls this unpredictable, sometimes unreadable man, into our grasp. Her sizzling prose blows away the cobwebs of academia and makes this a deeply satisfying, joyful read.” Eternity, in its particular manifestation as infinity, is Rundell’s central theme. This is a determinedly deft book, and I would have liked it to billow a little more, making room for more extensive readings of the poems and larger arguments about the Renaissance. But if there is an overarching argument, then it’s about Donne as an “infinity merchant”. In embracing infinity, he turned eternity into a mathematical concept, and there is pulsing excitement to his quest for this quality, which runs through his writing about sex, death and God – his three great subjects. To read Donne is to grapple with a vision of the eternal that is startlingly reinvented in the here and now, and Rundell captures this vision alive in all its power, eloquence and strangeness. Donne’s mother, Elizabeth Heywood, was the great-niece of the Catholic martyr Thomas More. She sounds to have been formidable, unafraid to assert herself: a woman of whom it was whispered (erroneously) that she carried the head of Thomas More in her luggage when she travelled. Donne’s father, also John Donne, was an ironmonger, though not of the horny-handed, rugged variety; he was warden of the Ironmongers’ Company. The family had once owned magnificent estates, before they had been confiscated by the Crown in the various Tudor shake-downs of Catholic landowners. He married, in Elizabeth, the daughter of a musician and epigrammatist who had played for Henry VIII; so Donne was born into a family who had known the smell and touch of a king. O my America! my new-found land!” is a deservedly celebrated line, but Donne’s roving fingers exploring the woman’s body can hardly fail to evoke the story of colonial penetration and possession that was beginning to dominate the political imagination of the age. Donne was fascinated by maps. Rundell has some good things to say about the place of maps in Britain’s political imagination in the period as part of a defence strategy, and also about how they can work as metaphors for a strange and unexplored human body, one’s own or another’s – a theme that Donne develops with gusto. But this reminds us that mapmaking was no innocent activity in this first era of transcontinental empire-building.

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (Audio Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (Audio

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell is tonight, Thursday 17 November, named winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2022. The winner was announced by Chair of Judges, Caroline Sanderson, at a ceremony hosted at the Science Museum and generously supported by The Blavatnik Family Foundation. The announcement was streamed to readers around the world via the Baillie Gifford Prize social media channels. As this new biography comments, his restless hungers and desires made Donne “incapable of being just one thing. He reimagined and reinvented himself, over and over.” It notes that he loved the trans- prefix on words because he believed that we were creatures born transformable; and it observes that the one constant running through his life and work is his steadfast belief that we, humans, “are at once a catastrophe and a miracle”. It would have been my loss to to have missed this wonderful book. "Super-Infinite" is ... I don't know what word best captures it: Filled with insights about John Donne and his writings? Yes. Smart and insightful? Sure. Informative? Yes. Fun to read? Absolutely!Throughout his life, beset as he was by illness and money worries, Donne retained an unremitting self-belief, justified by intellectual genius and personal charm. Although his work can be difficult, it speaks seductively to our anxiety-riddled times: to read his poetry is to be reassured and challenged simultaneously. He was the leading cleric of his age, one of the great English poets of love, death and sex, and the first writer to advance an intellectual argument in favour of suicide, in his posthumously published essay Biathanatos. Like Whitman, and Bob Dylan, he contains multitudes.

Super Infinite review: A masterful biography of John Donne Super Infinite review: A masterful biography of John Donne

From standout scholar Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite presents a sparkling and very modern biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death. For all their length, his sermons were never sombre or staid: they were passionate performances, attempts to strike a match against the rough walls of the listeners’ chest cavities. Drabble, Emily (3 April 2014). "Katherine Rundell wins the Waterstones children's book prize 2014". The Guardian. London . Retrieved 23 January 2017. Declaring his poetry to have the power to be transformative, Rundell says that her book is a biography “and an act of evangelism”. It is successful. I defy anyone to read her descriptions (“he wore a hat big enough to sail a cat in”) or her summaries (“Tap a human, he believed, and they ring with the sound of infinity”) and not be wanting more. Edward Alleyn: the greatest actor of the age, the man who made Faustus his own, Master of the King’s Bears, and possessed, in the etchings, of a beard that looks like he cut it with a rusty ice skate.A wonderful, joyous piece of work . . . with fierce, interrogative intelligence. It is fantastic to have this most elusive and mysterious of men brought out into the light, for all to see.” Donne is, of course, the subject of this remarkable work, and Rundell looks at him with an admiring but levelheaded eye. He was a complicated person who wrote complicated poems and sermons. “He would write a twelve-line sonnet that would take you a week to read,” Rundell notes (handily summing up my grad school experience). And: “To read the full text of a Donne sermon is a little like mounting a horse only to discover that it is an elephant: large and unfamiliar.” (This was at a time when sermons lasted anywhere from one to three hours! Donne's sermons attracted thousands of listeners, so many in fact that sometimes people were nearly killed by the crush.) The same cannot be said, I fear, of Philip Yancey’s modern paraphrasing of Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. Yancey came across these 23 meditations — written in 1623, during a bubonic plague epidemic in London — as he tried to think his way through Covid-19. The purpose of his A Companion in Crisis is “to make more accessible for twenty-first-century readers the timeless insights from one of our greatest writers”. He slashes “anything that required explanations” and seeks “to tame Donne’s complicated writing style into something that modern readers can more readily absorb”. Oh dear. The result is like some boiled strawberries: all that remains is a little of the original colour and taste, but nothing that you’d want to savour for long. Rundell, Katherine (2016). 'And I am re-begot': the textual afterlives of John Donne (Thesis). University of Oxford.