Includes bibliographical references (pages [756]-812) and indexes.
General introduction / Jeanne Shami, M. Thomas Hester, and Dennis Flynn -- Introduction / Jeanne Shami -- The composition and dissemination of Donne's writings / Gary A. Stringer -- John Donne's seventeenth-century readers / Ernest W. Sullivan -- Archival research / Lara M. Crowley -- Editing Donne's poetry : from John Marriot to the Donne Variorum / the Donne Variorum and beyond / Richard Todd -- Modern scholarly editions of the prose of John Donne / Research tools and their pitfalls for Donne studies / Donald R. Dickson -- Collaboration and the international scholarly community / Hugh Adlington -- Heather Dubrow and M. Thomas Hester -- The epigram / M. Thomas Hester -- The formal verse satire / Gregory Kneidel -- The elegy / R.V. Young -- The paradox / Michael W. Price -- The paradox : Biathanatos / Menippean Donne / Anne Lake Prescott -- The love lyric / Dayton Haskin -- The verse letter / Margaret Maurer -- The religious sonnet / Liturgical poetry / Kirsten Stirling -- The problem / The controversial treatise / Graham Roebuck -- The essay / Jeffrey Johnson -- The anniversary poem / The epicede and obsequy / Claude J. Summers -- The epithalamion / Camille Wells Slights -- The devotion / Kate Narveson -- The sermon / The prose letter / Dennis Flynn and Jeanne Shami -- The English Reformation in the mid-Elizabethan period / Patrick Collinson - Donne's family background, birth, and early years / Dennis Flynn -- Education as a courtier / Alexandra Gajda -- Donne's education / Donne's military career / Albert C. Labriola -- The Earl of Essex and English expeditionary forces / Paul E.J. Hammer -- Donne and Egerton : the court and courtship / Steven W. May -- Donne and late Elizabethan court politics / Andrew Gordon -- Donne's wedding and the Pyrford years / New horizons in the early Jacobean period / Anthony Milton -- The death of Robert Cecil : end of an era / Johann Sommerville -- Donne's travels and earliest publications / Donne's decision to take orders / The rise of the Howards at court / Alastair Bellany -- Donne and court chaplaincy / Peter McCullough -- The hazards of the Jacobean court / Kenneth Fincham -- Donne's readership at Lincoln's Inn and the Doncaster embassy / Emma Rhatigan -- International politics and Jacobean statecraft / Malcolm Smuts -- Donne : the final period / Clayton D. Lein -- Donne, the patriot cause, and war, 1620-1629 / Simon Healy -- The English nation in 1631 / Arnold Hunt -- The death of Donne / Alison Shell -- Donne and apostasy / Achsah Guibbory -- Donne, women, and the spectre of misogyny / Theresa M. DiPasquale -- Donne's absolutism / Debora Shuger -- Style, wit, prosody in the poetry of John Donne / Do Donne's writings express his desperate ambition? / "By parting have joyn'd here" : the story of the two (or more) Donnes / Judith Scherer Herz -- Danger and discourse / Lynne Magnusson