John Donne and the Matter of Bell Metal

• In Event: Donne in Dialogue

Abstract

Bells toll through Donne’s poetry and prose. In the Devotions, Donne exploits the properties of bell-metal that allow it to be broken down—atomised, itemised, or melted—and, in its re-formation, re-figured as a new body and as sound. Although bells could of course be melted down and re-formed, in fact many pre-Reformation church bells remained, surviving in remarkable numbers into the seventeenth century. Donne draws on metallurgy and the properties of bronze to reveal changing perceptions of these old objects. In his work, bells of the old church are heard and not seen; as sound, their metal becomes mutable, subject to ‘matter’s multitemporality’ (Jonathan Gil Harris), so that the Roman Catholic history of their bronze is overwritten. By interrogating the interplay of sound and metal in Donne’s metallurgic metaphors, this paper proposes ways of thinking about the palimpsests of the old religion in the writing of seventeenth-century England.

Author

• Katherine Hunt, University of Oxford