The years between Donne’s marriage in December 1601 and his ordination in January 1615 were the central period in his religious development during which, though he retained Catholic habits and sympathies, he began to refer to the Church of England as his church and ultimately took Anglican orders. Over forty years ago, G. R. Elliott pointed out how Donne’s biographers have slighted these middle years, portraying them as a merely dull hiatus between the libertine brilliance of Donne’s youth and hislater eloquent piety:

But Bald and earlier biographers have generally misunderstood Donne’s middle years, on account of their acceptance of the idea, first expressed by Walton, that at the time of his marriage Donne had long since discarded his Catholicism and was either a free-thinking sceptic or a convinced adherent to Anglicanism. This has obscured the character and crucial importance of the middle period, which (like the whole of Donne’s life and work) cannot be comprehended apart from the conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism that continued to polarise English religious life during the first decade of the seventeenth century.