Consulting Editors

Further specialist expertise is available to the General and Contributing Editors on an ‘as-needs’ basis through the generous agreement of six distinguished scholars to serve as Consultant Editors to The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne, with portfolio for different textual and contextual aspects of the edition.  They are:

Peter Beal, FBA FSA (Manuscripts) 

One of the world's leading authorities on manuscripts, Peter Beal is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London; he also serves as a specialist consultant for Sotheby’s. His Index of English Literary Manuscripts, 1450-1700 (4 volumes, 1980-93), contains the foundational modern bibliography of Donne's and other early modern authors' manuscripts; in the AHRC-funded Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700 (in progress) Beal's updated work will be made available to scholars in the digital age.  Two monographs, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth Century England (1998; based on the Lyell Lectures delivered in Oxford 1995-6) and A Dictionary of English Manuscript Terminology 1450-2000 (2008) are standards in their field, and vital points of reference for the editors of the Donne sermons project. He is co-founder and co-editor of the annual journal English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700, where several of the most salient sermon manuscript discoveries of the past twenty years have first been featured.

Kenneth Fincham (Ecclesiastical History)

Kenneth Fincham is Professor of Early Modern History and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Kent, Canterbury.  His work, including Prelate as Pastor: the Episcopate of James I (1990), and (with Nicholas Tyacke) Altars Restored: the Changing Face of English Religious Worship c.1547-1700 (2007), and several seminal essays and edited collections, has profoundly redefined scholarly understanding of the ecclesiastical world inhabited by John Donne.  He is also one of three directors of the Clergy of the Church of England Database Project, also funded by the AHRC, which provides a relational database of the careers of Anglican clergymen, schoolteachers and ecclesiastical patrons between 1540 and 1835.

Dennis Flynn (Donne's Letters)

A leading authority on Donne, Dennis Flynn is Adjunct Professor of English at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts.  Flynn is the author of numerous articles on Donne, and a study of John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility (1995).  He is also co-editor of three volumes in the Donne Variorum edition of Donne's poetry:  The Elegies (vol. 2, 2000),  The Anniversariesand the Epicedes and Obsequies (vol. 6, 1995), and The Holy Sonnets (vol. 7 pt. 1, 2005). He is now one of several scholars (led by senior editors M Thomas Hester and Ernest W Sullivan II) carrying forward the first scholarly edition of Donne's many letters, for Oxford University Press, begun over 50 years ago by the late I.A. Shapiro of the University of Birmingham.  Cooperation on matters of Donne's biography between these two major Oxford editions of Donne (letters and sermons) is a point of mutual principle.

Chanita Goodblatt (Hebrew & Hebraism)

Associate Professor in Foreign Languages and Literatures at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Dr Goodblatt is the leading modern authority on Donne's knowledge and use of Hebrew in his sermons. She is author of many articles on the subject, co-editor (with Howard Kreisel) of Tradition, Heterodoxy and Religious Culture: Judaism and Christianity in the Early Modern Period (2006), author of The Christian Hebraism of John Donne (2010), and co-editor (with Arthur Marotti) of Religious Diversity and Early Modern English Texts: Catholic, Judaic, Feminist and Secular Dimensions (Forthcoming 2013).  Her linguistic and scholarly expertise is vital to the edition's full reassessment of the often controverted extent of Donne's knowledge and use of Hebrew language and learning. Dr Goodblatt has also published on, and continues to research, the life and scholarship of the sermons' first editor, Evelyn Simpson, née Spearing (1885-1963).

Janel Mueller (Annotations)

Janel Mueller is Professor Emerita of the University of Chicago, where she held several distinguished professorial and administrative posts; she continues to work as one of the world's leading scholars of early modern English literature.  Her first major publication, Donne's Prebend Sermons (1971) set a new standard for the scholarly editing and annotation of Donne's sermons, and is a vital link between the California edition of Potter and Simpson (1953-62) and the present Oxford edition.  She is also co-editor (with Leah Marcus, Mary Beth Rose, and Joshua Scodel) of definitive new editions and translations of the works of Queen Elizabeth I, and is presently preparing a new edition of Donne's works for Oxford University Press's '21st Century Oxford Authors' series.

Jeanne Shami (Preaching & Politics)

Jeanne Shami, Professor of English at the University of Regina (Sasketchewan), has been pivotal in the recent reassessment of Donne's pulpit art and politics.  Author of a stream of important articles placing Donne's sermons in their immediate religious and political contexts, she has also identified several manuscripts of sermons unknown to previous scholars or editors.  Her findings have appeared in English Manuscript Studies (ed. Peter Beal, above), and as John Donne’s 1622 Gunpowder Plot Sermon: A Parallel-Text Edition (1997).  Her monograph John Donne and Conformity in Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit (2003) consolidates much of her vital contextual understanding of Donne's sermons in the period 1621-5.  She is also, with Dennis Flynn (above) and M Thomas Hester, co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of John Donne.