The Selfe Undone: Individualism and Relationality in John Donne and Aemilia LanyerThis essay draws on three lectures I gave during my year as a research associate in the Womenʼs Studies in Religion Program at Harvard University. My thanks to audiences at Harvard, Vanderbilt, and Brown Universities and, in particular, to the wonderful director of WSRP, Ann Braude; my WSRP colleagues Gannit Ankori, Shahla Haeri, Rosemary Carbine, and Jia Jinhua; and to Sarah Coakley, Janet Gyatso, Susan Harvey, Amy Hollywood, Stephanie Paulsell, and Jonathan Schofer.

There is something right about the hoary old claim that Protestantism spawned individualism. It has been challengedfrom all sides: by those who argue the reverse, by historians of religion who point out that introspective piety was not unique to the early modern period, and by scholars who demonstrate that early Protestants were deeply invested in ecclesiology and communal rituals. Yet this claim—even though clunky and inadequate—remains important, not least because it highlights an enduring link between the way we interpret early Protestant texts and the way we understand individualism today. Consider John Donneʼs famous denial of isolation, written nearly four hundred years ago: “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe.” This statement compels us because it refutes what often feels irrefutable: that each person is, essentially, a solitary being, and that, while this existential state may be ameliorated, it is an unavoidable fact of life.