The Phenomenology of the Sermons of John Donne

• Mia Trageser, English, University of Delaware

• Kristen Poole, English, University of Delaware

My project investigates the auditory experience of the sermons of John Donne, one of the foremost English poets and preachers of the seventeenth century. The sermons he gave rivaled the contemporary plays of Shakespeare as a form of entertainment, but while scholars have focused on the content of the sermons, there has been little attention to the experience of the audience and orator, which naturally differed from today. My methodology is that of historical phenomenology, the study of the lived sensory experience; this approach recognizes that sensory experience is not a human universal, but contingent upon a person’s historical and cultural context. In the early seventeenth century in England, sermons were an occasion of worship and devotion, and hearing them was thought of as a sacrament, which made the phenomenology of sound particularly relevant. Early modern people understood the physical process of hearing as not only passive but active. For instance, Helkiah Crooke contends in Mikrokosmographia (1615) that the ear has to work to recreate the sound which one ultimately hears. This idea places an emphasis on the agency of the hearers of the sermons, and their active acceptance of the Word of God. Further, the biblical Parable of the Sower informs the early modern understanding of sermons as a practice. In this parable, a farmer spreads his seeds on different types of soil, symbolizing God spreading his Word to different people; the seeds either grow or fail, indicating various levels of receptivity. To be open to God’s Word, then, people needed open ears to receive the seed. This metaphor, then, also functioned sexually, creating an image of impregnation through the ear, harkening back to the Virgin Mary. The experience of hearing sermons in the 17th century was thus an intimate, almost sexual one that entailed complex questions of consent.