Holy ambition, the rhetoric of courtship in the sermons of John Donne

grantor: University of TorontoThis thesis develops a common theme in seventeenth-century remembrances of John Dome-the-preacher as God's courtier in the pulpit. Donne, who so thoroughly played the courtier for much of his life, finally turned his energies and skills to drawing his congregations into a courtship of the Divine. In the sermons, Donne visits various cultural discourses (patronage, law, economics, wooing) to derive rhetorical matter for defining and then redirecting his audience's motives toward increased devotion to God. I begin by outlining Kenneth Burke's notion of rhetoric as courtship--the stylistic use of identification strategies for overcoming conditions of estrangement--and by illustrating these ideas with an extensive reading of the cultural context from which Donne derived his sermons' courtship-strategies. In my second chapter, I argue that the goad of hierarchy is central to Dome's configuring of his congregations motives and demonstrate his strategic use of cultural courtship-structures as similitudes for inducing analogous desire in his congregants' devotional experience. In the third chapter I then relate these methods of 'inventio ' (the finding and selecting of material) to the 'dispositio ' (arrangement) of Dome's sermons, where the symbolic purification and ritual cure of his audience's motives are achieved; here I also introduce Burke's related notions of form and "temporizing of essence" and argue that these are fundamental to the operation of courtship as theorized by Burke and employed by Donne. The remaining chapters consist of close examinations of three sermons in which (on the surface at least) courtship references are not readily apparent. Here I direct attention to the operations of 'inventio' and ' dispositio' at work in the several strategies that I have collected under the topic of courtship. I thereby demonstrate that to read Donne's sermons simply for style, imagery patterns, or topical references is to miss a great deal of their suasive, and literary value which can only be found in the deeper structure of the sermons.Ph.D