Peter McCullough Introduced by Triona Adams

English fellow Professor Peter McCullough talks about the poet John Donne’s powerful prose sermons and why Lincoln College Chapel is suited to their delivery before giving a reading of a sermon that was first preached before the court of James VI and I on the first Friday of Lent, 1623.

Donne is best known for the erotic and religious verse of his flamboyant youth and vexed early adulthood. But, following ordination, in the final 16 years of his life,  he composed some of the most powerful prose of the period – dazzling sermons preached in early modern London’s most prestigious pulpits. The sermon read by McCullough reveals Donne at the height of his powers, crafting an oration of structural symmetry, metaphorical elaboration, and emotional power equal to any of his Holy Sonnets, if on a larger, but still intimate, scale.

McCullough is fellow in English at Lincoln, professor in the Oxford English Faculty, and general editor of the Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne. He reads Donne’s sermons to students, convinced that these works are best experienced as first intended – in performance rather than on the page.

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