Religion around John Donne is a delight for those of us who are lovers of old manuscripts and books—how they are made and transmitted, collected, and used. Joshua Eckhardt weaves into a compelling narrative a treasure trove of information about early seventeenth-century bookmaking and manuscript culture in contextualizing the story of the religious texts and books surrounding Donne's poems, sermons, and inscriptions. From this unique perspective, Eckhardt creates an invaluable study for grappling anew with the highly charged and polemical divides in early modern England and the sophisticated nuance of Donne's and his contemporaries’ responses to and critiques of those issues.

After a short introduction that situates this volume in the Religion Around series and sketches an overview of the book, Eckhardt organizes his study into five chapters, with an section, “Interlude,” inserted between chapters 1 and 2. In chapter 1, “Religion around Donne's Poems in a Family Library,” Eckhardt takes the reader on a guided tour of the Huntington Library, placing before us various volumes owned by Frances Stanley Egerton, first Countess of Bridgewater. This substantive chapter illustrates that, “by laying these books ‘open to one another,’ modern Huntington readers can reconstruct a nice cultural context” for several works by Donne, and these Bridgewater documents “can show how people in a given place, in an actual home, could have discerned that cultural context” (18). Accordingly, this chapter offers a brilliantly focused view of precisely what Eckhardt means by examining religion around Donne. “Interlude” is subtitled “Mirreus, Crants, and Graius Go to the Library.” The names, of course, come from Donne's “Satyre 3,” and they represent “many of the religious writers and texts around Donne,” whether “in Rome, in England, or in a more reformed land such as Geneva” (54). Thus, the opening chapter and the interlude allow the reader to experience the scholarly practices that inform the remainder of the study.

Chapter 2, “Religious Works around Donne's Inscriptions,” develops from the assertion that “the extant books that Donne used can tell us a lot about the religion around him” by scrutinizing, in particular, “Donne's briefest writings: his inscriptions and marginal marks in printed books” (58). Eckhardt admittedly does not attempt to account for all of the existing books that Donne may have reviewed or owned, but instead calls attention to select Sammelbände, or “composite volumes made of multiple slender books bound together” (59). One, housed in Cambridge University Library, is Sir Thomas Egerton's 1609 Speech of the Lord Chancellor of England that addresses land rights in England for Scottish subjects of King James who were born after he acceded to the English Crown. The other, William Covell's Ivst and Temperate Defence of Richard Hooker's Ecclesiastical Policy, is housed in Houghton Library. The final section of the chapter offers a thoroughly enjoyable discussion of “secondhand books,” that is, books owned by Donne that were later acquired, and commented on, by others.

The second chapter ends with the assertion that “reading books from Donne's library requires reading books from their libraries too, just as reading Donne's writing entails reading collections of texts and books made by others” (89), and the last three chapters respond to this call. The third chapter, “Religious Verse around Donne's Verse,” centers on a poem erroneously included in Donne's works, which Eckhardt identifies as “a defiantly Catholic poem that Donne could not possibly have written” (93). The poem in question is Henry Constable's sonnet “To our blessed Lady,” and the chapter appropriately explores the effects of Constable's religious verse on Donne's. In the fourth chapter, “Religious Prose around Donne's Prose,” it is the collectors of Donne's sermons, both in his lifetime and later, who are the subject of study—collectors such as Thomas Jones, the first printer of Donne's sermons; Izaak Walton, Donne's first biographer; John Fitzwilliam; and the Congregationalist Mather family. Eckhardt's interest in these collectors, quite rightly, is not only the issue of which Donne sermons they owned, but also the relevance of what other sermon collections in their possession surrounded Donne's. The final chapter, “Religious Books around Donne's Works,” serves up, in succession, the story of Donne's final sermon, “Deaths Duell,” that appears in Walton's Life of Donne, a vivid snapshot of London bookshops (and especially that of John Marriot), and a view of Donne through the lens of Walton's own works and his personal library. The back matter of Religion around John Donne includes succinct and informative notes that, for those who wish to do so, could be used as a roadmap for retracing Eckhardt's steps in researching this study; a bibliography that is thoughtfully subdivided into sections for manuscripts, printed primary sources, and secondary sources and that thereby serves as an excellent resource; and a helpful index.

The real pleasure of this book cannot be adequately captured in a review, but only in experiencing it, savoring the details of places and persons, and the texts that enable us to better know them. And as an added pleasure, Eckhardt's prose is clear and lively. For all that the book offers about John Donne, those who read and collected his works, the history of books and manuscripts, and the other gems that generously season its pages, this study is that rare treat of a very agreeable distillation of archival sources.