“‘Loves halowed temple’: Erotic Sacramentalism and Reformed Devotion in John Donne’s ‘To his Mistress going to bed,’” Modern Philology 119, no. 2 (2021): 248–75.

This essay poses a corrective to the longstanding critical tradition that reads John Donne’s elegy “To his Mistress going to bed” as a satirical attack on both Reformed doctrine and sexual love. I argue that Donne’s seriousness about the poetic task of describing reciprocal sexual desire stems from his earnest consideration of Reformed religion, at a time in his life when he was assessing the implications of relinquishing his Catholic faith and converting to the religion of the state church. Although critics have written much about Donne’s latent nostalgia for his Catholic past and about the mature Protestantism of his later years, considerably less attention has been given to how Donne’s experience of conversion shaped his view of both Reformed doctrine and sexual devotion in his early love poems. In its description of sexual love as an extension of religious experience, the elegy captures Donne’s imaginative movement among possible devotional models during a turbulent decade in his religious development. As the elegy details a particular moment of erotic foreplay, the poem explores the larger theological question of what emerging Reformed models of devotion might offer that their Catholic and classical counterparts could not.