From "tav" to the cross: John Donne's Protestant exegesis and polemics

These quotations, taken from two of Donne's sermons on the THebrew Bible,² distinctly evoke this Protestant preacher's method of biblical exegesis. The vivid depiction of Donne's scholarly searching for- and weighing of-revered interpretations of a biblical text is the concern of the first passage, with a particular emphasis on the early church fathers. The second passage directly declares his partaking of the Reformation's preoccupation with the literal or historical sense of the biblical text as a basis for a more contemporary, even figurative application of its significance (B. Hall 76-78). Taken in tandem, these quotations define the features of Donne's biblical hermeneutics, moving (though not necessarily in equivalence) between Catholic and Protestant and between the literal and the figurative.