The primrose path to holiness

‘No thanks. Too much sex.’ Thus an elderly friend dismissed my offer to lend him John Stubbs’s compendious biography of John Donne. His fears are groundless. Stubbs tells us virtually nothing about the paramours who inspired Donne’s youthful poems, partly because no new information is available and partly because the poet’s exquisite testimony on the subject renders further details superfluous. Instead he focuses on Donne’s struggle with his religious conscience, a conflict which typifies the difficulties faced by England’s religious communities in the early 17th century.

Donne was born a Catholic during the reign of Elizabeth I (he was the great-great-grandson of Sir Thomas More) and he was sent to Oxford in his early teens so that he could gain an education before being compelled, as 16-year-old scholars were, to take the Protestant oath.