A reimagining of Devotions upon Emergent Occasions as an original treatment of human life shaped by innovations in seventeenth-century science and medicine. In 1624, poet and preacher John Donne published Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, a book that recorded his near-death experience during a deadly epidemic in London. Four hundred years later, in the aftermath of our own pandemic, Harvey and Harrison show how Devotions crystalizes the power, beauty, and enduring strangeness of Donne s thinking. Arguing that Donne saw human life in light of emergent ideas in the study of nature (physics) and the study of the body (physick), John Donne s Physics reveals Devotions as a culminating achievement, a radically new literary form that uses poetic techniques to depict Donne s encounter with death in a world transformed by new discoveries and knowledge systems.
