John Donne and Scientific Observations of the Soul

Abstract:This article uses John Donne’s Devotions alongside the devotional texts of seventeenth-century women writers in order to demonstrate an early modern cultural impulse toward using scientific observational methods to gain knowledge of individual salvation. These women writers often observed the soul through practices similar to those used in the budding new science community in their personal spiritual and devotional writings. These texts suggest that women were not only active and independent in their own social lives, but also that women writers should play an important role in our understanding of seventeenth-century English Protestantism and its anticipation of the coming Scientific Revolution. Donne works as a tool through which we may view and understand the cultural swings of the seventeenth century in England, while the women writers demonstrate the widespread cultural use of observational techniques for understanding personal spirituality.