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

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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! Like her subject, Rundell is keenly aware of the skull beneath the skin. She observes that “the body is, in its essentials, a very, very slow one-man horror show; a slowly decaying piece of meatish fallibility in clothes, over the sensations of which we have very little control”. Death – sudden, and often violent – stalks this book, just as it did Donne’s life. Five of his children were either stillborn or died before they were 10, and he even had a prophetic vision of one of them dying while he was away on a trip to Paris in 1612. Little wonder that Donne’s long-suffering wife, Anne, perished, exhausted, in 1617. Yet as Donne wrote in his 10th Holy Sonnet: “Death be not proud, though some have called thee/Mighty and dreadful, though are not so.” His religious faith might have been, at times, quixotic, but it was sincere and a source of comfort to him, his congregation and his readers. Costa Book Awards 2017" (PDF). Costa Book Awards. January 2018. Archived from the original (PDF) on 3 January 2018 . Retrieved 3 January 2018. Moshenska, Joe (29 March 2022). "The Poet and the Whale". Literary Review . Retrieved 28 February 2023.

Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell; and A Companion in Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell; and A Companion in

As this new biography comments, his restless hungers and desires made Donne “incapable of being just one thing. He reimagined and reinvented himself, over and over.” It notes that he loved the trans- prefix on words because he believed that we were creatures born transformable; and it observes that the one constant running through his life and work is his steadfast belief that we, humans, “are at once a catastrophe and a miracle”. There is the meat and madness of sex in his work – but, more: Donne’s poetry believed in finding eternity through the human body of one other person. It is for him akin to sacrament. Sacramentum is the translation in the Latin Bible for the Greek word for mystery: and Donne knew it when he wrote, ‘We die and rise the same, and prove/Mysterious by this love.’ He knew awe: ‘All measure, and all language, I should pass/Should I tell what a miracle she was.’ And in ‘The Ecstasy’, love is both a mystery and its solution. He needed to invent a word, ‘unperplex’, to explain: Helen Dunmore wins posthumous Costa poetry prize". BBC News Online. 2 January 2018 . Retrieved 2 January 2018.Super-Infinite is a stylish, scholarly and gripping account of Donne’s ecstatically divided self, ‘hurried by love’ and by man’s ‘inborn sting’: a work super-relevant to our own troubled times.” The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2022". The Baillie Gifford Prize . Retrieved 17 November 2022. Rundell's third novel, The Wolf Wilder, tells the story of Feodora, who prepares wolf cubs – kept as status-symbol pets by wealthy Russians – for release into the wild when they become too large and unmanageable for their owners. [12] Understand, this was literally plague-ridden: The years in which Donne lived were marked by frequent outbreaks -- 1593, 1603, 1625, with smaller outbreaks in between. The 1603 outbreak, Rundell tells us, was particularly deadly. Based on London's current population it would be the equivalent of 880,000 dead Londoners in less than three months. Unimaginable. No life of Donne can be a hagiography. Apart from all the ambiguities around the marriage, it is hard for the contemporary reader to stomach the humiliating flatteries that pretty much every aspiring literary figure of the era had to offer to potential benefactors. In a society still dependent on patronage to an extent we can barely imagine, very few could afford to stand on their dignity. It is tempting to reduce – as some have wanted to do – Donne’s priestly career to a last, barrel-scraping effort to find secure employment. But Rundell insists that this is a skewed picture when set against the evidence of Donne’s own letters; he is never less than serious about ordination and its demands.

Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite: The… | Baillie Gifford Prize Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite: The… | Baillie Gifford Prize

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. And then there is the work Donne is most famous for; the love poetry and the erotic verse. To call anyone the ‘best’ of anything is a brittle kind of game – but if you wanted to play it, Donne is the greatest writer of desire in the English language. He wrote about sex in a way that nobody ever has, before or since: he wrote sex as the great insistence on life, the salute, the bodily semaphore for the human living infinite. The word most used across his poetry, apart from ‘and’ and ‘the’, is ‘love’. Drabble, Emily (3 April 2014). "Katherine Rundell wins the Waterstones children's book prize 2014". The Guardian. London . Retrieved 23 January 2017. O my America! my new-found land!” is a deservedly celebrated line, but Donne’s roving fingers exploring the woman’s body can hardly fail to evoke the story of colonial penetration and possession that was beginning to dominate the political imagination of the age. Donne was fascinated by maps. Rundell has some good things to say about the place of maps in Britain’s political imagination in the period as part of a defence strategy, and also about how they can work as metaphors for a strange and unexplored human body, one’s own or another’s – a theme that Donne develops with gusto. But this reminds us that mapmaking was no innocent activity in this first era of transcontinental empire-building.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.

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne - Winner of Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne - Winner of

His life was blighted by poverty, but his poetry made exhilarating connections between sex, faith and death. At the time, the penalty for being a Catholic priest was to be hanged, drawn and quartered – which meant being stretched, hung until almost dead, and then having the arms and legs severed from the body while crowds looked on. One Richard Simpson was caught by a priest hunter – not unlike a bounty hunter – in 1588, and was hanged, drawn and quartered in the company of two other men. A bystander remarked that he ‘suffered with great constancy, but did not evince such signs of joy and alacrity in meeting death as his two companions’. (This evokes Samuel Pepys’s laconic note of 1660: ‘I went out to Charing Cross to see Major General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered – which was done there – he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition.’) It’s unclear from the Privy Council records exactly what happened to Thomas – but tradition holds that he was executed as his family looked on. McElroy, Steven (26 August 2016). " 'Life According to Saki,' a Play Set in World War I, Wins Edinburgh Award". The New York Times. New York City . Retrieved 23 January 2017.

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Rundell's writing is the star of this show: it's sparky and textured, original and alive - if she wrote a novel I'd read it like a shot - but, somehow, Donne the man sort of slips between the floorboards of this biography and never really emerges as a fully-fleshed (ha!) person. Rundell's vast enthusiasm is almost there in his place, a kind of simulacrum for the man. Maybe the very complexity of Donne and his various metamorphoses is too much for a biographer to capture because this is the fourth biography I've read and none of them feel complete. It was there that his sister Elizabeth, Donne’s mother, came to minister to him, and to secretly carry messages between Jasper and another Jesuit, William Weston. If caught, Elizabeth would not have been safe from punishment by virtue of her sex: in 1592 a Mrs Ward was hanged, drawn and quartered for helping a Catholic priest to escape his pursuers in a box; a Mrs Lynne was put to death for harbouring a priest in her home. Once, Weston disguised himself in other clothes and came with Elizabeth into the Tower, an act of astonishing bravery or stupidity or both, to go into arms’ reach of the jailers. Weston was terrified: ‘I accompanied her to the Tower, but with a feeling of great trepidation as I saw the vast battlements, and was led by the warder past the gates with their iron fastenings, which were closed behind me.’ Donne, aged twelve or thereabouts, accompanied them, perhaps as a way of making the party seem innocent and familial; he wrote, later, that he was once at ‘a Consultation of Jesuits in the Tower, in the late Queen’s time’. Heywood petitioned his one-time playmate the Queen for leniency. She granted it: he was deported to France, and from there to Rome, never returning to the country of his birth, where they were so liable to cut him into four. In Partnership with St Martin-in-the-Fields. This series of nine lectures is inspired by the words of Martin Luther during the Reformation. Distinguished speakers investigate those things in which we believe deeply – and for which we would be prepared to make a costly stand.

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (Audio Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (Audio

Donne’s family prized good jokes in extremis (and, evidently, casual sexism as a comic trope). His grandfather became famous for his deathbed comedy: his confessor, repeating over and over that ‘the flesh is frail’, to which Heywood: ‘Marry, Father … it will go hard but you shall prove that God should a made me a fish.’ 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 ] Beautifully written, with lots of subtle and not-so-subtle humour. Clearly the author enjoys John Donne very much and is a kind of kindred spirit particularly to his wit and poetry and zest for light and darkness, and her voice and his (pretty liberally quoted) work very well in counterpoint. There's a good bit of weird Renaissance lore thrown in for good measure, facts that set Donne off as a man of his time as well as for all time. 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.)Katherine Rundell was born in 1987 and grew up in Africa and Europe. In 2008 she was elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Her first book, The Girl Savage, was born of her love of Zimbabwe and her own childhood there; her second, Rooftoppers, was inspired by summers working in Paris and by night-time trespassing on the rooftops of All Souls. She is currently working on her doctorate alongside an adult novel. Prizewinning children’s-book author Rundell, a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, delivers a fresh, delightful biography of John Donne (1572-1631). A staunch admirer—she places the “finest love poet in the English language” alongside Shakespeare—her book is an “act of evangelism.” Donne “was incapable of being just one thing,” writes the author. “He reimagined and reinvented himself, over and over.” She nimbly captures Donne in all his guises as well as the historical period in which he lived. A “lifelong strainer after words and ideas,” a youthful Donne kept a commonplace book at Oxford—now lost; Rundell suggests its technique of literary alchemy influenced his method of writing. At London’s Inns of Court, he mostly studied frivolity and wrote some “bold and ornery and intricate” poetry that “sounded like nobody else.” As Rundell reports, The Oxford English Dictionary records some 340 words he invented. Donne dressed fashionably and wore “his wit like a knife in his shoe.” In 1596, bereft after his brother’s death, Donne was “keen to get away” and tried his hand at privateering. Working for a wealthy friend, he wrote numerous rakish, erotic verse with stylistic “tussles and shifts,” often untitled, which he shared with others rather than publish. Alongside poems that “glorify and sing the female body and heart,” Rundell writes, “are those that very potently don’t.” It should come as no surprise, she notes, that someone who lived through a plague, watched many of his 12 children die young, and had suicidal thoughts wrote some of literature’s greatest poems about death. Long dependent on patronage to cover debts, “slowly, in both doubt and hope, Donne’s eyes turned towards the Church,” and he was ordained. King James appointed the “star preacher of the age,” famous for his metaphor-laden sermons, Dean of St. Paul’s in 1621. Something shifted in me that night. A small voice in my head said, maybe you can make a way for yourself as a poet here, too.’ A wonderful, joyous piece of work . . . with fierce, interrogative intelligence. It is fantastic to have this most elusive and mysterious of men brought out into the light, for all to see.”