John Donne's "Desire of More"

This volume is composed of thirteen essays by an international group of acclaimed Renaissance scholars on the presence of Anne More Donne in the poetry of her husband. In his epitaph for his wife upon her death in 1617, John Donne called her "Faeminae lectissimae, dilectissimaeque"--A woman "most choice" and "most beloved and loving": but these Latin terms of endearment also figured her as a woman both "well-read" and "very well-read." This book aims to endorse and to explore that view of her that is espoused by the poet in his epitaph through readings of his "readings" of her presence and absence as central subjects of Donne's own presentations of himself, his world, and his God.