Witnessing to the Faith

Absolutism and the Conscience in John Donne’s England
This book examines John Donne’s theory of royal absolutism within a tradition of conformist thought.It argues that Donne displaced the conventional opposition between Catholics and Protestants and instead divided English subjects into two political categories: those who obey the law and those who break it.
This study utilises John Donne’s works concerning the Jacobean Settlement as a contextualised case study to examine a seriously pressing issue in contemporary society: the issue of Catholic loyalism post-1603 and the disputes that thistopic sparked over the matter of conformity.Altman examines Donne’s polemic in line with the vast expanse of literature relating to the pamphlet war and situates Donne’s arguments within a strong contemporary tradition of conformist thought. Within this context, the study argues that Donne articulated a theory of royal absolutism that would have struck home with many contemporaries who, whether Catholic or not, were faced with a regime determined to bring them into conformity. It further contends that the religio-political standpoint represented by Donne was not only fairly obvious to the English state but was also widely accepted by it.