John Donne was a cleric in the Church of England and an English poet of the 17th century. His works include love poems, sonnets, religious poems, satires, epigrams and Latin translations. John Donne was the father of metaphor compared to his contemporaries. His style it’s various with many ironies and paradoxes along with his dramatic perspective. He wrote also erotic and sexual poems which were masked with many religious symbols.
Recently, in the archives of Westminster Abbey was found a handwritten document among with hundreds of fragments of documents. This manuscript is a copy of Donne’s The Courtier’s Library. This library catalog could have influence the society and devastate other writers of the 17th century, because it was filled up with sensitive topics like religious corruption and the Jacobean era.
This obscure work was written in the early 1600s and this copy which was found in the archives of Westminster Abbey was handwritten in 1603. “It gives us important new clues about the life and writing of one of our most important writers,” said Daniel Starza Smith, a lecturer in early modern English literature at King’s College London, according to a news release.
The keeper of important documents at Westminster Abbey, Matthew Payne found the lost manuscript while he was reading some unsorted contents. The handwritten document was in Latin and with a little help, Payne was sure that this manuscript it’s the Catalogus Librorum Satiricus, or The Courtier’s Library.
Nobody knows how this copy made its way to Westminster Abbey. Smith said that “Donne was horrified at the corruption of truth by the powerful, greedy, and willfully ignorant, and he responded with this vicious satire, which was too dangerous to print until after his death. This discovery helps us understand how it circulated furtively among his trusted friends.”
