Elizabeth D. Harvey

A reimagining of Devotions upon Emergent Occasions as an original treatment of human life shaped by innovations in seventeenth-century science and medicine. In 1624, poet and preacher John Donne published Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, a book that recorded his near-death experience during a deadly epidemic in London. Four hundred years later, in the aftermath of our own pandemic, Harvey and Harrison show how Devotions crystalizes the power, beauty, and enduring strangeness of Donne’s thinking. Arguing that Donne saw human life in light of emergent ideas in the study of nature (physics) and the study of the body (physick), John Donne’s Physics reveals Devotions as a culminating achievement, a radically new literary form that uses poetic techniques to depict Donne’s encounter with death in a world transformed by new discoveries and knowledge systems.

A reimagining of Devotions upon Emergent Occasions as an original treatment of human life shaped by innovations in seventeenth-century science and medicine. In 1624, poet and preacher John Donne published Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, a book that recorded his near-death experience during a deadly epidemic in London. Four hundred years later, in the aftermath of our own pandemic, Harvey and Harrison show how Devotions crystalizes the power, beauty, and enduring strangeness of Donne’s thinking. Arguing that Donne saw human life in light of emergent ideas in the study of nature (physics) and the study of the body (physick), John Donne’s Physics reveals Devotions as a culminating achievement, a radically new literary form that uses poetic techniques to depict Donne’s encounter with death in a world transformed by new discoveries and knowledge systems.

Ventriloquized Voices is a fascinating examination of the appropriation of the feminine voice by male authors. In a historical and theoretical study of English texts of the early modern period, Elizabeth D. Harvey looks at the transvestism at work in texts which purport to be by women but which are in fact written by men. The crossing of gender in these ventriloquized works illuminates the discourses of patronage, medicine, madness and eroticism in English Renaissance society, revealing as it does the construction of sexuality, gender identity, and power. The author skillfully juxtaposes such canonical works as John Donne's Anniversaries and Spenser's Faerie Queene with pamphlets on transvestism, midwifery books, and treatises on gynaecology and hysteria. By interrogating the fashioning of gender within a broad range of Renaissance culture, Ventriloquized Voices investigates not only the relationship between men, women and language, but also crucial twentieth-century feminist debates such as essentialism and the female voice.