Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne - Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2022

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In a recent interview with prize director Toby Mundy for READ SMART, the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction’s podcast, Rundell credits John Donne as ‘the finest writer of desire and sex and love and passion in the English language ever […] a burning original.’ To Rundell he offers us ‘a kind of galvanic vision of language as a set of possibilities that can be bent to express the unique and unwieldy quality of each human mind.’ She sees Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne as a work of advocacy born of great passion, having had a long-term fascination with the poet since she wrote her PhD thesis on him. She has spent ten years studying his works and life and writing this book and is adamant that ‘you cannot get bored of him […] because he has in him the capacity to infinitely renew himself’. She wrote three drafts of the book before she was happy with the final work. a b c d Bradbury, Lorna (25 April 2014). "Katherine Rundell: children's novelist and thrill-seeker". The Daily Telegraph. London . Retrieved 22 January 2017. He took his galvanising imagination and brought it to bear on everything he wrote: his sermons, his meditations, his religious verse. In the twenty-first century, Donne’s imagination offers us a form of body armour. His work is protection against the slipshod and the half-baked, against anti-intellectualism, against those who try to sell you their money-ridden vision of sex and love. He is protection against those who would tell you to narrow yourself, to follow fashion in your mode of thought. It’s not that he was a rebel: it is that he was a pure original. They do us a service, the true uncompromising originals: they show us what is possible. The facts of Donne’s life are well known. In addition to Carey’s study, there’s a recent comprehensive biography by John Stubbs. Donne was born into a Catholic family at a time of persecution; family members were imprisoned and tortured. Donne moved between success and penury, with a stint in law, an unsuccessful foray as an adventurer in Spain, and a period at court that ended when he secretly married Anne More and was thrown in prison by her father. Then there were years as the impoverished, frustrated father of 12 children (six died), a period of grief after his wife’s early death and his final efflorescence, at once unexpected and inevitable, as a clergyman who was swiftly promoted to dean of St Paul’s. Sir Philip) Sidney’s woman’s hair is gold, her shoulders ‘be like two white doves’ and her whole person ‘out-beauties’ beauty itself. Donne’s counter-blazon takes that tradition and knifes it in a dark alley. He writes how the sweat of his own mistress’s brow is ‘no sweat drops, but pearl carcanets’, while on his companion’s mistress:

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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. There was to be an exhibition. There were lots of pictures like his, apparently – of waiters, pastry cooks, valets, bellboys.’ 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! People came to experience the sheer stage presence; but they also relished the physical energy of the words, the music of rhythms and cadences constructed by an expert rhetorician. And the subject matter was of intense concern: most hearers believed that what Donne was talking about had something to do with their ultimate nature and fate as human agents, and the detail of this was the topic of fierce public contest, literally a question of life and death.Fresh, delightful . . . [Rundell] nimbly captures Donne in all his guises as well as the historical period in which he lived . . . Written with verve and panache, this sparkling biography is enjoyable from start to finish.” The poem could be seen as one of domineering masculinity, except that at the end of it there’s a joke: only the man stands naked. ‘To teach thee, I am naked first; why then/ What need’st thou have more cov’ring than a man?’ Donne was not sent to school. He was missing very little; the schools of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England were grim, ice cold metaphorically and literally. Eton’s dormitory was full of rats; at many of the public schools at the time, the boys burned the furniture to keep warm, threw each other around in their blankets, broke each other’s ribs and occasionally heads. The Merchant Taylors’ school had in its rules the stipulation, ‘unto their urine the scholars shall go to the places appointed them in the lane or street without the court’, which, assuming the interdiction was necessary for a reason, suggests the school would have smelled strongly of youthful pee. Because smoking was believed to keep the plague at bay, at Eton they were flogged for the crime of not smoking. Discipline could be murderous. It became necessary to enforce startling legal limits: ‘when a schoolmaster, in correcting his scholar, happens to occasion his death, if in such correction he is so barbarous as to exceed all bounds of moderation, he is at least guilty of manslaughter; and if he makes use of an instrument improper for correction, as an iron bar or sword … he is guilty of murder.’ Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing.

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She completed her undergraduate studies at St Catherine's College, Oxford (2005 – 2008). During this period she developed an interest in rooftop climbing, [15] inspired by a 1937 book, The Night Climbers of Cambridge, about the adventures of undergraduate students at that university. [14] Academic career [ edit ]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. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? From standout scholar Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite presents a sparkling and very modern biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death. The Bald John Donne: A Life from the 1970s remains the standard scholarly biography: dusty? yes; dry? yes; but all the detail we need for studying Donne is here and meticulously referenced. Carey's John Donne, Life, Mind, and Art is typical of Carey: opinionated, uneven, wild speculation with no evidence, but provocative and stimulating; the more recent Stubb ( John Donne: The Reformed Soul: A Biography) is a modern take using frameworks of ambition and power to assess Donne's life but, despite that title, doesn't engage with the fact that for Donne (and his peers) religion was bound up with faith, something we might struggle with in our secular society. And Stubb doesn't engage with the poetry. And now Rundell where, I'd say, her own lively vision obscures Donne. Rundell has an engagingly idiosyncratic and playful style, with chapter titles that include The Erratic Collector of His Own Talent, The Anticlimactically Married Man and The Paradoxical Quibbler, Taking Aim at Women. It suits her subject, who took delight in combining high learning with bawdy humour; only Donne could suggest, as he did in his poem The Flea, that his mistress should surrender herself to his attentions after both have been bitten by the titular insect. But there is welcome revisionism, too. Rundell debunks the traditional, self-perpetuated image of the young Donne as a lothario, observing that “women of his class would have been hard to seduce … make a mistake … and you could be punished for life”. The great chronicler of libertine passions emerges here as serially monogamous and uxorious, if hardly chaste: he had 12 children, after all.

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It was in the spring of 1574, when Donne was a toddler, that disaster first came for the family. His mother’s uncle Thomas Heywood was suddenly and without warning arrested. A house on Cow Lane, close to Donne’s own home, was raided; officials discovered Thomas, a priest and former monk, along with ‘divers Latin books, beads, images, palms, chalices, crosses, vestments, pyxes, paxes and such like’. (A pyx was the box used for wafers: a pax was a piece of engraved wood which was kissed by Catholics during the Peace. Before the invention of the pax the congregation used to kiss each other, until it was felt this was unreasonably intimate – and plaguey – for church.)a b c d de Lisle, Tim (22 January 2017). "British Novelist Bringing Edwardian Wit Off-Broadway". Newsweek. New York City . Retrieved 23 January 2017.