John Donne is now a strong candidate for the most popular Renaissance writer after Shakespeare. Paying tribute to the living vitality of Donne's literary voice, and the kaleidoscope of social detail embedded in his writings, Richard Sugg offers a vibrant engagement with the author's work, life and times. He shows how Donne's fiercely original mind produced remarkable and challenging new images of selfhood, love, friendship, and of a natural world marked by the unstable movement from religion to early science. To fully appreciate Donne's life and writing it is necessary to comprehend the strangeness of his social and intellectual milieu: the peculiar mixture of splendour, violence and suffering which spilled across his path in the streets, theatres and churches of seventeenth-century London, and the attitudes and ideologies expressed within them. This book offers readers not just Donne, but his world.Richard Sugg is the author of ten books, including The Smoke of the Soul (Palgrave, 2013), Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians (2nd edn 2015), A Singing Mouse at Buckingham Palace (2017), Fairies: A Dangerous History (Reaktion, 2018), and The Real Vampires (Amberley, 2019). He is currently completing Talking Dirty: The History of Disgust. A 3rd updated edition of Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires will be appearing shortly. His work has appeared widely in international press, radio and television. He has previously lectured in English and Cultural History at the universities of Cardiff and Durham.