The Virtual John Donne Project uses digital modeling technology to enable users to explore the lived religion of England in the early seventeenth century. Our goal is to recreate worship services in the specific settings of their original performance so they may be experienced as they unfold in real time.
While theological controversies of the day were debated among the learned, to the vast majority of the English the reformed Church of England was defined by the occasions of corporate, liturgical, and sacramental worship they participated in and were formed by. These services brought the private events of their lives — from birth to marriage to death — into the realm of public life.
Or, as church historian John Booty has put it, “In the parish churches and in the cathedrals the nation was at prayer, the commonwealth was being realized, and God, in whose hands the destinies of all were lodged, was worshiped in spirit and in truth.”
John Donne – Dean, St. Paul’s Cathedral, London
The Virtual John Donne Project addresses the issues of lived religion by using digital modeling technology to explore, in their public setting, events in the early years of John Donne’s career as Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral.
John Donne was elected and installed as Dean of St Paul’s on November 22nd, 1621. He remained as Dean until his death on March 31st, 1631. Donne had been ordained Deacon and Priest of the Church of England by the Rt Rev John King, Bishop of London, in the Bishop’s Chapel adjacent to the Cathedral on January 23rd, 1615.
As part of his responsibilities for maintaining the daily round of worship services at the Cathedral, Donne was assigned to preach inside the Cathedral at major festivals of the Church Year. He was also called upon to take part in the rotation of preachers at Paul’s Cross, outside the Cathedral, as well as on special occasions before other congregations.
Use the links provided below to navigate to three projects that combine visual and acoustic modeling to explore sites and events in Donne’s ministry during his time as Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral. To return to this page at any time, click on the NAVIGATION tab found on each of these three sites.
The essays and other resources found below demonstrate how the visual and acoustic models can serve as research tools, enabling us to draw on the experience of worship and preaching in our discussions of Donne’s career as Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral.
This site also serves as a repository of links to other online resources for the study of early modern London. To gain access to these links, click on the RESOURCES tab above.
St Paul’s Cathedral from the Southwest. Image by Smith Marks, Rendering by Austin Corriher
SECTION ONE: ESSAYS BUILDING ON THE VIRTUAL JOHN DONNE PROJECT
Essay 1. Materializing Lost Time and Space: Implications for a Transformed Scholarly Agenda
The websites clustered under the umbrella site The Virtual John Donne Project enable us to experience worship and preaching in London in the early 1620’s as events that unfold in real time and in the liturgical contexts and physical spaces in which they were originally performed. The purpose of these sites is to make possible the study of lived religion in early modern London. “Lived religion” is a term that some scholars of religion use to distinguish the subject of their study from a focus on cognitive matters — on creeds, for example, or on formal statements of belief, or on the content of theological treatises. Lived religion is the study of what one practitioner has described as “the forms of action by and through which a religious tradition, church, or community works out the nature and boundaries of what it is to be religious.”
St Paul’s Cathedral, the Choir from the West. From the Visual Model, rendered by Austin Corriher.
The Websites
The content of the Virtual John Donne Project gives us access to the lived religion of London because it recreates worship services that took place both inside St Paul’s Cathedral (The Virtual Cathedral Project) and outside the Cathedral in Paul’s Churchyard (The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project), as well as the service of Consecration of Trinity Chapel at Lincoln’s Inn (The Trinity Chapel Project).
The worship services inside St Paul’s constitute the full liturgical day as scripted by the Book of Common Prayer, including Morning Prayer, or Matins, the Great Litany, Holy Communion, and Evening Prayer, or Evensong, required to be used on Sundays and Holy Days in all churches, chapels, and cathedrals in England from the middle of the 16th century until it was withdrawn from service by the Puritan party when it was victorious in the English Civil War of the 1640’s. Two of these four services – Morning and Evening Prayer – were required to be observed every day of the year. While the style of worship at St Paul’s – with its use of choir and organ — differed from the style found in one’s typical parish church, the rites themselves were the same.
The Paul’s Cross Preaching Station. From the Visual Model, rendered by Austin Corriher.
On the Paul’s Cross Project’s website, we can experience John Donne’s Gunpowder Day sermon from 1622 as though we too were standing or sitting in Paul’s Churchyard for the full two hours of the sermon. We can also explore the question of just how well people could hear Donne’s sermon, by listening to it from several locations inside the Churchyard. On the Trinity Chapel website, we can explore the design of Trinity Chapel at London’s Lincoln’s Inn on the morning of the Feast of the Ascension in May of 1623 and the service of Consecration of the Chapel conducted that day by George Montaigne, Bishop of London. John Donne, former Preacher to Lincoln’s Inn, preached the sermon that day as part of the sequences of services – including Morning Prayer, the Great Litany, and Holy Communion – that inaugurated worship in the Inn’s new worship space. On the Cathedral Project website, we are able to experience the liturgical day in its festival form – Easter Day 1624 – when morning worship started at 10:00 and included three services, Morning Prayer, the Great Litany, and Holy Communion with a sermon of about an hour, as well the liturgical day in its ferial, or ordinary form, which included only Morning and Evening Prayer.
When we add up the time folks were required by law to be in church on Sundays and Holy Days, the total comes to three or so hours in the morning. Evening Prayer — also known as Evensong – began at 4:00 (probably moved to 3:00 in the shorter days of winter) and – when it was followed by a sermon, as it was customarily at St Paul’s — added another 2 hours of time in church on Sundays and Holy Days before it was done. For most of us, spending 5 hours in church on Sundays is difficult to imagine, but for Donne and his colleagues on the staff at St Paul’s, this was just another day at the office.
These Easter Day recreations give us the experience of worship on Sundays and Holy Days. To give the experience of all the other days of the year, we have included recreations of a ferial, or ordinary, day – a Tuesday after the First Sunday in Advent, a Sunday in late November of 1625. This day serves as a representation of every day in the year other than Sundays and Holy Days, with only the services of Morning Prayer in the morning and Evensong in the afternoon, each one lasting about three quarters of an hour.
Trinity Chapel, the West Front. From the Visual Model, rendered by Austin Corriher.
The daily and weekly services of worship were, in turn, imbedded inside cycles of readings that continued throughout the seasons of the Church Year, beginning in Advent and running through Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, and Easter, until Trinity Sunday and the Sundays after Trinity, which brought worshippers back once more to Advent, when the cycle begins again. Each of these days has its own assigned readings of the Psalms, the chapters of each book of the Bible, and special prayers for specific Holy Days and occasions in the life of individual members of every congregation. Worshipping communities, following the Lectionary, read the Hebrew Bible through once a year, the New Testament three times a year, and the Book of Psalms once a month.
Clergy in the Church of England took – and still take – vows at their ordination to read – either with their congregations or on their own – Morning and Evening Prayer and the Lessons appointed for each day. In cathedrals these Daily Offices were conducted in the Choir, with musical settings of the Psalms and anthems. Clergy in parish churches might have read the Offices on their own, or, like George Herbert, read the Offices in their churches and invited their congregants to join them. The Canons of St Paul’s Cathedral took this discipline one step further; they divided the Psalms up among them so that, collectively, they read the entire Book of Psalms through every day.
The rites of the Prayer Book focus our attention on the public worship of the Christian community. Members found meaning in their lives through their participation in their local worshipping community. Instead of concerning themselves with the private and individualistic question of whether or not they were members of God’s Elect, worshippers took part in corporate worship, a rhythm of reading, proclamation, confession, absolution, affirmation, intercession, and communion, as very members incorporate in the “mystical Body of Christ, the blessed company of all faithful people, heirs through hope of God’s everlasting kingdom.”
Here, private and personal events over one’s lifespan took on meaning through being brought into the life of that community. Parents were required to bring their new-born children to church for Baptism in the first 5 days of their lives, then bring them to church for religious instruction on Sundays at Evensong in anticipation of the Rite of Confirmation, to receive Holy Communion at least 3 times a year, to be married in church, to be ministered in sickness by the local vicar acting on behalf of the congregation, and to be brought to church for one’s funeral and burial in consecrated ground.
Trinity Chapel, the Choir from Above. From the Visual Model, rendered by Austin Corriher.
Modeling Lived Religion
Taken together, the practice of Prayer Book worship created, enabled, and informed the lived religion of early modern England. But this is rarely acknowledged as significant when we as scholars turn our attention to the works of early modern religious writers. Sermons are treated as theological treatises, mined for their evidence for the theological leanings of the preacher rather than locating sermons in the context of worship services. Devotional works are read autobiographically, or in relationship to various genres and styles of religious writing, rather than in relationship to the ongoing worship life of congregations.
Sampling Lived Religion
To take but one example, John Donne’s classic devotional work the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. Here, the scholarly consensus is that the Devotions gives us insights into Donne’s personal biography, his own spiritual progress through his illness in the fall of 1623, his inward journey from sickness to health, offered as an example for the private and inward journey of others. But, when one enters the work, one is immediately immersed into the cycles of worship and prayer, of the systematic reading of scripture, of the systems of communication among the faithful – in short, the world of lived religion. Donne hears the Choir of the neighboring St Paul’s singing the Psalm; he is visited by other clergy who come to him to conduct the Prayer Book’s rites of ministry to the sick; he hears the bells of local parish churches ringing out messages about the lives of its parishioners and calling its members to worship. He draws on citations from the Apocryphal Book of Ecclesiasticus to inform his understanding of his illness, not because it is an especially appropriate source for comfort and understanding but because it is one of the books appointed by the Prayer Book lectionary for reading during late November and early December, precisely the time in which Donne was confined to his bed.
Consequences
Given this recognition of the corporate and communal lived religion of the Church of England in the early modern period, and given the ways the Virtual Donne websites give us access to early modern worship services as events that unfold for us in real time, as they did in the 1620’s, it is appropriate to ask how this understanding calls on us to reframe our scholarly study of early modern religious literature. What follows is chiefly concerned with sermons, but – as we have already seen from our glance at Donne’s Devotions – is also applicable to devotional writings as well.
St Paul’s Cathedral, the Choir from Above. From the Visual Model, rendered by Austin Corriher.
At its heart is the recognition that – whether in manuscript or printed form – what we think of as a sermon is a script for a performance, a rite of corporate participation, not primarily a theological treatise. A sermon takes place in the context of the performance of a larger script — the worship services scripted by the Prayer Book — that provides the context for preaching, whether or not a particular sermon was delivered in the context of a Prayer Book scripted service, an addendum to one of those services, or as a stand-alone lecture, because whoever was preaching that sermon was also reading the appointed Lectionary readings and participating in the performance of those services on a daily basis as he was preparing to preach that sermon. Indeed, the act of preaching, the performance of the sermon, was sufficiently understood to be so integral to the early modern concept of a sermon that many clergy in our period refused to have their sermons printed. In our study of them, therefore, sermons and devotional writings need to be located in the context of the terms, resources, and goals of the ongoing worship life organized, enabled, and supported by use of the Book of Common Prayer.
The Liturgical Context
Sermons – according to the Book of Common Prayer – were required on Sundays as part of Holy Communion, which followed Morning Prayer and the Great Litany on Sunday mornings. According to William Harrison, in his detailed description of worship in the Church of England, sermons also followed Evening Prayer. So the sermons John Donne preached at St Paul’s were among them. And, while some sermons were delivered more lecture-style – outside the formal context of Prayer Book worship, all sermons were prepared and delivered by clergy who were taking part in the ongoing cycles of scripture readings and worship created by the Prayer Book’s Lectionaries. So when we address our attention to a sermon, we need to do so by placing it in the context of the Biblical lessons read that day and at least the week before it was delivered. We need to know if the preacher drew on those texts in the development of his sermon (as Donne did in his Trinity Chapel sermon) as well as what light those Lectionary readings cast on the actual Biblical texts he chose to cite in the sermon.
The Text
At the same time, we need to recognize that what we have, and call a sermon, is likely to be something, at least potentially, quite different from what we are really interested in, which is the sermon delivered. What we have – whether in manuscript or in print – is an after-the-fact reconstruction of the sermon delivered. Many early modern preachers did not preach from complete drafts of their sermons, but from notes. The complete version they wrote down for themselves and perhaps for publication in the days and weeks after they had delivered it surely differed from the sermon delivered – either because of faulty memory of what was actually said, or because of second thoughts about what was said. Even if the preacher did work in the pulpit from a full draft of the sermon, he had the opportunity to revise the script before it went into his archives or to the print shop. Hence our awareness of the potential separation between the sermon delivered and the surviving draft of the sermon should alert us to the need to pay special attention to surviving aspects of the sermon that reflect most clearly the preacher’s awareness of and interaction with his congregation.
St Paul’s Cathedral, the Choir from Above. From the Visual Model, rendered by Austin Corriher.
The Congregation
Early modern sermons are to be considered as one side of a two-way conversation between clergy and laity. We must, therefore, pay attention to ways in which congregations took part in a worship service, whether by responding to prompts by the clergy – “The Lord be with you/And with thy Spirit,” for example – or by taking part in corporate recitations of longer parts of the service, such as the Lord’s Prayer, the Creeds, and the Confessions. So, who was in a particular congregation is worth knowing if we are fully to understand the sermon as we have it. The new Oxford edition of the sermons of John Donne recognizes this in the way the editors have chosen to group Donne’s surviving sermons in terms – not simply of chronology, as Potter and Simpson did the California edition of the 1950’s and early 1960’s – but of the sites in which Donne delivered them. So we have the sermons Donne preached in the Chapel Royal, before the royal court, the sermons preached at Lincoln’s Inn, the sermons preached at St Paul’s Cathedral or at Paul’s Cross, and so forth. In the process, the editors have helped us recognize differences among Donne’s sermons in terms of subject matter and style of composition that reflect differences in the composition of those congregations.
In addition, we need to pay attention to points in early modern sermons where the congregation is directly engaged, whether this be in the form of jokes, or of references to common experiences or points of reference, or, as Donne does at the end of a sermon from the late 1620’s, to the conventions of sermon delivery, in this case the hourglass that marked the time of the sermon as it was in the process of being delivered. We also need to pay attention to ways in which a given sermon takes its place in the larger liturgical framework of the worship service. So we are called to attend to the specific emphases of the Lectionary readings, the prayers, and other parts of the service unique to that day on the Church Calendar, as well as to our understanding of the overall didactic intent of liturgical worship, in the context of the historical moment in which the sermon was delivered.
One thinks of the opening words of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, preaching at the Chapel Royal on Christmas Day 1610 – “There is a word in this text, and it is hodie, by virtue whereof this day may seem to challenge a special property in this text, and this text in this day. Christ was born, is true any day; but this day Christ was born, never but to-day only. For of no day in the year can it be said hodie natus but of this. By which word the Holy Ghost may seem to have marked it out, and made it the peculiar text of the day.”
Paul’s Churchyard, the Paul’s Cross Preaching Station. From the Visual Model, rendered by Austin Corriher.
The Places
We must also consider the physical location of the sermon-as-event – the worship space inside a church building or – for sermons like the ones delivered in London at Paul’s Cross – the outdoor space, as well as the acoustic properties of that space, the size of the congregation in attendance, and the makeup of that congregation, in terms of social class, educational background, and the like. One of the more powerful recognitions we have come to is the fact that the sermons Donne preached at St Paul’s were heard by a congregation perhaps no larger than 50 people. Another concern for us needs to be consideration of the specific space in which a sermon was delivered. This would include the shape of the space, the acoustic properties of the space, the sight lines, and the location of the congregation in relationship to the preacher. We have been able to determine, for example, that – even without amplification — if the crowd was relatively quiet, people all across Paul’s Churchyard could hear the preacher of a Paul’s Cross sermon.
Conclusion
Attending to these concerns in our discussions of early modern religious texts will bring us closer to understanding how they were to work as part of worship, as part of the overall experience of Prayer Book Worship, making their own unique contribution to the experience of the day as well as taking their part in the larger worship process. Our challenge is to recognize more deeply that religious texts are at heart works performed to further the larger ends of worship. Sermons of course do contain discussions of theological issues but the point of a sermon is to be part of a service of worship that draws the congregation together, over a course of time, to be formed as community and to be enabled, inspired, and empowered to live the lives to which they are called as God’s people. This happens, not simply by hearing sermons preached on their own, but through the process of experiencing sermons preached in the context of worship services in which scripture was read and expounded, Creeds were recited and affirmed, confession was made and absolution received, prayers of intercession and thanksgiving were offered, and the bread and wine of Holy Communion was consumed, by means of which corporate action, as John Booty put it years ago in the Preface to his edition of the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, the nation was enabled to be “at prayer, the commonwealth was being realized, and God, in whose hands the destinies of all were lodged, was worshipped in spirit and in truth.”
St. Paul’s Cathedral, the West Front. From the Visual Model, rendered by Austin Corriher.
ESSAY 2. “Stirred up to godliness (and) able also to exhort others by wholesome doctrine”: Enabling Lived Religion in Early Modern England
This essay builds on work with digital visual and acoustic modeling tools to recreate the experience of worship and preaching in various sites in early modern London, chiefly in and around St Paul’s Cathedral during John Donne’s tenure as Dean of the Cathedral from 1621 to 1631. Grouped together as the Virtual John Donne Project, this work recreates John Donne’s Paul’s Cross sermon for Gunpowder Day, November 5th, 1622 in Paul’s Churchyard; two full days of worship inside St Paul’s Cathedral from the mid-1620’s, with sermons by Donne and Lancelot Andrewes; and the service of consecration and dedication for Trinity Chapel at London’s Lincoln’s Inn, held on May 22nd, 1623.
These websites thus provide experiential resources for understanding worship in English cathedrals and parish churches in the early seventeenth century. Chief among them are visual depictions of St Paul’s Cathedral around 1625 ( and well before it was destroyed by the Great Fire of London in 1666) depictions are linked to auralized recordings of services appointed for use every day of the year — the Divine Services of Morning Prayer (Matins) and Evening Prayer (Evensong) — as well as services appointed for a narrower range of days — (the Great Litany, appointed for Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays and Holy Communion, appointed for Sundays and Holy Days).
These services recreate two full days in St Paul’s Cathedral — an ordinary (or ferial) day (that is, a day that is not a Wednesday, Friday, Holy Day, or Sunday), specifically the Tuesday after the First Sunday in Advent in 1625 and a Festival Day, Easter Sunday in 1624. These services reflect in the choice of music – whether survivals of medieval chant or compositions by contemporary composers like Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Tallis, or St Paul’s own Adrian Batten — and differences in style of performance that distinguish differences between a festival, or special, occasion and an ordinary, everyday occasion.
St Paul’s Cathedral, the Choir, from the Pulpit. From the Visual Model, rendered by Austin Corriher.
My argument here is for the value of adding the experience of the passage of time and their liturgical context to our consideration of the theological content of sermons, liturgies, and other religious discourses that come down to us from the early modern period. We now receive the works of Donne, Hooker, and other leaders of the English Reformation in hefty and handsomely bound volumes; while there is certainly gain in this, what is missing is the ephemerality of occasion and context, dimensions vastly more significant to their original participants. Donne’s sermon for Gunpowder Day in 1622, for example, was not part of a regular preaching obligation for Dean Donne but as the result of a specific request from King James I that he do so to defend the King’s authority in conducting foreign policy.
Over the past decade, the use of digital modeling has enabled those of us working on the various parts of the Virtual John Donne Project to restore the specifics of performance, physical setting and the passage of time to some of the occasion-specific texts that survive from the early modern period. Using digital humanities grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities – your taxpayers’ money at work — to support the work of over a hundred people — actors, linguists, historians, musicians, graduate students in architecture and acoustic engineering, and many others — all contributing in large ways and small, we have been able to recreate the experience of specific spaces and occasions otherwise lost to us.
Included on the website are recordings from our reconstruction of all the services of representative days of occasions of worship, including Morning Prayer, or Matins; the Great Litany, Holy Communion, and Evening Prayer, or Evensong. These contain both spoken and sung parts of all these services, heard from six different listening positions, to illustrate how the qualities of sound vary in volume and resonance from one physical location to another. This kind of work is especially important because — while the theological controversies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were debated among the learned — to the vast majority of Englishfolk the reformed Church of England was defined by the occasions of corporate, liturgical, and sacramental worship they participated in through public performance of the liturgical texts contained in the Book of Common Prayer. From its very first edition in 1549, the Prayer Book enabled and defined the religious life of England, this “one use” bringing the nation together in common worship, promoting “wholesome doctrine” and the “advancement of godliness” through the “daily hearing of holy Scripture” and celebration of Baptism and Holy Communion in the language of the people.
St Paul’s Cathedral, the Choir, looking East. From the Visual Model, rendered by Austin Corriher.
The corporate experience of Prayer Book services thus sought to unite the nation, forming a deeper and truer sense of corporate religious identity and giving the private events of folk’s lives — from birth to marriage to death — a richer meaning through their linguistic and liturgical incorporation into the realm of English public life. Or, as church historian John Booty has put it, in admittedly idealistic terms, “In the parish churches and in the cathedrals the nation was at prayer, the commonwealth was being realized, and God, in whose hands the destinies of all were lodged, was worshiped in spirit and in truth.”
Taken together, and in an age when the individual’s relationship with God was becoming more and more central to Christian understanding, these rites emphasize the corporate and collective work of the Church, since the formation of Christian identity, belief, and practice is here understood to be conducted in and through the public, corporate worship of the Church. This emphasis is visible, especially, in Thomas Cranmer’s 1552 revision in the Book of Common Prayer, when he replaced the moment of the priest’s elevation of the consecrated host with the distribution and reception of the consecrated elements of communion by the congregation.
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theological arguments about the presence of Christ in the Eucharist were inevitably shaped by efforts to distinguish the Reformers’ position from that of Catholic tradition, that in the prayer of consecration said by the priest the substance of the bread and wine were transubstantiated into the Body and Blood of Christ. In this understanding, Christ’s presence is located physically, at a moment in time (the end of the recitation of the words of institution), and in a particular place (in the hands of the celebrant as he raises the consecrated elements for adoration by the congregation) and as the work of one person (the consecrating priest) acting before an essentially passive congregation.
Celebration of Mass, Elevation of the Consecrated Host. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Theological discourse about the meaning of this moment – static descriptive accounts of the Real Presence of Christ in the consecrated bread and wine – are descriptive of this moment, this moment alone among the long sequence of acts scripted by the text of the Mass. To use a theatrical metaphor – appropriate, since liturgical worship involves people wearing distinctive clothing who play specific assigned roles in the enactment of a scripted event — in this tradition of worship, the priest is the performer, God is the prompter, and the congregation is the audience.
Focusing on this moment, while it reflects a high doctrine of Eucharistic presence – the consecrated bread and wine really and truly are the Body and Blood of Christ – also distances the event of which it is a part from the actual culmination of the story on which it is modeled. In Paul’s version of the story, of course, Jesus takes the bread, gives thanks, breaks the bread, and gives it to his followers with the instructions to “take and eat.” But by the late Middle Ages, a similarly high doctrine of human sinfulness had led to a situation in which obedience to this command of Christ was rare. Actual reception of the consecrated bread (but not the wine) by the laity required extensive lay preparation, codified in the rite of Penance, involving personal confession of one’s sins to a priest and the priest’s proclamation of absolution.
This distancing of the laity from active participation in the Mass culminated in a decree of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 that the laity were required to receive Communion only once a year. In a sense, the elevation of the host by the consecrating priest for viewing by the congregation – accompanied by the ringing of bells to call the congregation’s attention to what the celebrant was doing – came to be a substitute for the congregation’s regular active participation in the Eucharistic feast. Those of us familiar with Eamon Duffey’s classic study The Stripping of the Altars will surely remember his account of people moving around inside a church or even running from church to church while priests at multiple altars were fulfilling their obligation to celebrate the Mass daily so that layfolk could see as many elevations of the consecrated host as possible.
Celebration of Holy Communion, Distribution of the Consecrated Host. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
The significance of Cranmer’s deletion of the elevation of the consecrated bread and his moving the congregation’s reception of the consecrated bread to follow directly after the priest’s recitation of the narrative of Jesus’ Last Supper with his followers can now be more fully appreciated. Here, Cranmer clarifies for us that the rite enables the congregation to participate in Communion with Christ, not by simply observing a representation of Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary in the elevation of the consecrated Host, but by participation through time in the entire action with the bread and wine, or as one of the late 16th century commentaries on the Church of England’s Catechism put it, through “Bread and Wine, together with the actions of blessing, breaking, distributing and receiving, exercised in and about the same.”
Cranmer’s 1552 rite affirmatively locates the meaning of the Eucharistic celebration away from what is signified by the brief moment of elevating the consecrated host. Instead, it is to be found in the full process through time of priest and congregation as they jointly participate in the action of “blessing, breaking, distributing and receiving” the bread and wine of communion.
This understanding of the way Christ is present in the Eucharist has been aptly described by Christopher Irving as “a transposition of a sense of “real presence” to that of “real participation.” In this view it is through the work of the people of God, embodied in the priest’s and congregation’s actions of “blessing, breaking, distributing and receiving, exercised in and about the same,” the relationship between the bread and wine of communion and the congregation of participants is clarified, since both become “the Body of Christ for the Body of Christ.”
St Paul’s Cathedral, the Altar Area from Above. From the Visual Model, rendered by Austin Corriher.
Cranmer articulates his understanding of “real participation” in the prayers at the end of his Communion Service. “Offering” and “Sacrifice” are here understood in terms of corporate action — “here we offer and presente unto the, O Lord, our selves, our soules, and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice unto the, humblye beseching the, that al we which be partakers of this holye communion, may be fulfilled with thy grace, and heavenly benediction.”
Through a series of liturgical actions scripted by the Prayer Book’s texts, the congregation becomes one Body, both really and aspirationally, for Cranmer. Or, as he puts it, “thou doest vouchsafe to fede us, whiche have duly received these holy misteries, with the spiritual fode of the moste precious body and bloude of thy sonne, our saviour Jesus Christ, and doest assure us therby of thy favour and goodnes towarde us, and that we be very membres incorporate in thy mistical body, whiche is the blessed company of al faithful people, and be also heyres through hope of thy everlasting kingdom.”
Cranmer also abolished the need to go through the act of private confession and receiving of absolution for one’s sins before receiving communion; instead, he made as part of the Communion rite of 1552 – and in all subsequent versions of the Book of Common Prayer — a public confession and receiving of absolution situated in the rite as corporate and public preparation for the celebration of Holy Communion and the congregation’s receiving of the consecrated bread and wine.
The Virtual St Paul’s Cathedral Project enables us to experience the rites of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer as embodying a theology of Eucharistic meaning found not in a moment of time but in an unfolding of events through time, participated in by clergy and laity who collaborate to reenact all the characters, roles, and events involved in biblical accounts of Jesus’ Last Supper with his followers. To continue our use of a theatrical metaphor, in this tradition of worship, the congregation is the performer, the priest is the prompter, and God is the audience.
The Virtual St Paul’s Cathedral Project thus addresses issues raised by emerging fields of study and practice such as digital archaeology, data visualization, historic acoustic reconstruction, recreation of soundscapes, material culture studies, historical geography, liturgical studies, and material religious studies. These fields seek to recover the experience of past time through integrating data about ephemeral and material events and practices into forms of presentation that enable students of the past to explore the changing past from multiple perspectives and in simultaneous narratives.
St Paul’s Cathedral, the Ceiling. From the Visual Model, rendered by Austin Corriher.
The Cathedral Project also addresses ongoing issues in a number of traditional and developing academic disciplines. These include English Reformation history, where revisionist historians’ emphasis on theological debates among Church elites, including the faculties at Oxford and Cambridge, as well as their use of continental sources for defining the Reformed tradition, ignore the content and significance of daily worship in the nations’ cathedrals and collegiate and parish churches. These fields also include the work of literary scholars who have sought to fit major writers like Donne and Herbert into preconceived understandings of one or another theological or spiritual tradition rather than attend to the formative reception of worship and the reading of biblical texts that structured the daily content of these writers’ own devotional lives.
The Virtual Cathedral Project, however, provides us with new tools for research into these issues by enabling us to experience the rhythms of set texts and variable readings that defined and structured the hours of each day and the seasons of the Church year. We are able to glimpse more fully the structuring experience provided by Cranmer’s reinterpretation of liturgical worship, the context, for example, for Walton’s account of George Herbert’s daily practice of conducting his observation of the Daily Offices:
“Mr. Herbert’s own practice . . . was to appear constantly . . . twice every day at the Church-prayers, in the Chapel. . . strictly at the canonical hours of ten and four,” joined by “most of his parishioners, and many gentlemen in the neighbourhood, constantly to make a part of his congregation twice a day: and some of the meaner sort of his parish . . . would let their plough rest when Mr. Herbert’s Saint’s-bell rung to prayers, that they might also offer their devotions to God with him.”
St Paul’s Cathedral, the Choir Screen. From the Visual Model, rendered by Austin Corriher.
Yet we know today that – especially in the world of religious practice and devotion to the sacred — old habits die hard. In spite of Cranmer’s efforts to increase the frequency of lay folk receiving communion, the best the Church of England was able to achieve by the middle of the 17th century was to insist that the number of times people were expected to receive Communion be expanded from one time a year to three times a year. This, even though the Prayer Book contains an “exhortation” which the curate is to read “at certain times when” he “shall see the people negligent to come to the Holy Communion.” In this exhortation, the curate instructs his congregation that he calls “you in Christ’s behalf,” that he exhorts “you as you love your own salvation, that ye will be partakers of this Holy Communion.”
But perhaps it was the language of an exhortation that the rubrics require to be read at every Communion service, in which the curate insists that while “the benefit is great, if with a truly penitent heart and lively faith we receive that holy Sacrament . . . so is the danger great if we receive the same unworthily.” “For then,” he is scripted to say, “we be guilty of the body and blood of Christ . . . We eat and drink our own damnation. We kindle God’s wrath against us.” In any case, it would take 400 years and another liturgical revolution or two for Episcopalians in the United States and Anglican churches in England and in other countries to have the communion service as the main service on Sundays. It is especially sobering to remember that the official Book of Common Prayer for the Church of England is still the one adopted by the Church and Parliament at the time of the restoration of the monarchy in 1662.
St Paul’s Cathedral, the South Aisle of the Nave, Looking Westward. From the Visual Model, rendered by Austin Corriher.
ESSAY 3.“The Whole Congregation at One Instant Pour Out Their Petitions’: Addressing the Challenges of Implementation in the Use of the Book of Common Prayer,” is forthcoming in Researching the English Reformation: Essays in Honor of W.B. Patterson, ed. Benjamin M. Guyer and William E. Engel (Berlin: Brill, 2025).
This essay explores the challenges faced Cranmer when he sought to reform the Church of England through use of a Book of Common Prayer when studies of the literacy rate in in England at the time show that among men probably no more than 40% could read and among women perhaps no more than 10% could read. In addition, the ability to read was heavily class-dependent, with members of the relatively small class of the nobility far more likely to be able to read than the rest of the population.
St. John’s Episcopal Church, Williamsboro, NC. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons
That essay includes discussion of one of the ways Cranmer and his supporters used to enable layfolk to participate in Prayer Book services was to replace medieval wall paintings with the texts of three longer passages from Morning Prayer — the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Apostles’ Creed, This practice continued in colonial churches, as seen here in St John’s Episcopal Church in Williamsboro, North Carolina, built in 1773.
SECTION TWO: SPREADING THE WORD: CONVERSATION WITH THOMAS DABBS
YouTube Full Talk: https://youtu.be/79WgvX9GbEw
YouTube Short: https://youtu.be/qDrJFJtGXZY
YouTube Web Page (now featuring the clip): https://www.youtube.com/c/SpeakingofShakespeare
Podcast on Buzzsprout: https://speakingofshakespeare.buzzsprout.com/1732460/9736523
SECTION THREE: PROJECT REVIEWS
Reviews in Digital Humanities for June 2024 (https://reviewsindh.pubpub.org/pub/the-virtual-john-donne-project/release/1) has a very positive review by Erin McCarthy (University of Galway).
Samples from McCarthy —
“The sites are therefore able to offer users deep, immersive experiences of specific points in time rather than broad generalizations about early modernity, the 17th century, or a similarly capacious temporal span.”
“The technology is highly sophisticated, drawing upon best practices not only in digital humanities but also in architecture and acoustics. Consequently, the project not only offers a rich interactive experience for humanities scholars but represents a genuine contribution to these disciplines as well. The project sites thoroughly document the evidence underlying the creation and implementation of each model. What becomes very clear is that every detail, from the ambient noise in a sermon recording to the neighboring buildings visible in the visual models, has been considered and chosen purposefully.
“[The Virtual Donne Project] thus exemplifies the potential for innovation, impact, and reach that truly collaborative, interdisciplinary digital work can have.”
Review in Knowledge Commons — https://works.hcommons.org/records/dka1k-f7e62
DH Awards 2022 — First Runner Up in the Data Visualization Category
Ben Markham, President of Acentech, the acoustic engineering firm that handled acoustic modeling for the Paul’s Cross Project, has written a piece about the importance to their work of their involvement with our Projects.
The Digital Public History website has published a review of the Virtual St Paul’s Cathedral Website —
Take Me to Church: The Virtual St. Paul’s Cathedral Project
P.O.E.M.S Group website includes announcement of the Virtual St Paul’s Cathedral Project website — https://www.poemsgroup.org/forum/announcements/virtual-donne
The North Carolina Disciple (Journal of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina) — “Recreating History: How a multiyear visual and auditory matting project allows modern people to experience worship in St Paul’s Cathedral before the Great Fire of London.” Fall 2022 issue, pp. 20-21. Also online at https://www.magloft.com/app/episcopal-diocese-of-north-carolina#/reader/47537/186738
https://out-of-the-archives.pubpub.org/pub/v4co8ha7/release/4
PBS NC — Science North Carolina/Tech Science — Feature story on the Virtual Cathedral Project, broadcast September 13th, 2022 (story begins at 12 minutes and 20 seconds into the half-hour show. https://video.pbsnc.org/video/tech-science-fzn61p/
City of London website — Story on the Virtual St Paul’s Cathedral Project with link to the website
PHYS.ORG Online Science News Journal — Recreating the sights and sounds of 17th century London
Renaissance Society of America — Virtual Donne Sites Online
Digital Public History Website — Take Me to Church: The Virtual St. Paul’s Cathedral Project
Mississippi University for Women — What it Means to do DH
Medieval.eu — Medieval St. Paul’s Cathedral Destroyed in the Great Fire Reconstructed in VR
Southeastern Renaissance Conference — “SRC Member John Wall Launches Donne Cathedral Project”
St Paul’s Cathedral, London — Tweet — “Have We Found a Time Machine?”
NEH White Paper on the Virtual Cathedral Project — “Acoustic Modeling in Historical Research”
St Paul’s Cathedral, the Tower, in Morning Light. From the Visual Model, rendered by Austin Corriher.
SECTION FOUR: PROJECT HISTORY
The origins of the Virtual John Donne Project lie in a graduate seminar I took at Harvard University in the fall of 1969. Taught by Herschel Baker and entitled “Religion and Literature from More to Milton,” this course brought the cultural and literary components of the English Renaissance together with the intellectual controversies of the English Reformation. The basic components of the Virtual John Donne Project emerged gradually in my own scholarly work as a graduate student at Harvard and as a young faculty member at North Carolina State University. My early work focused on the publications of the English Reformers, including the official documents of the emerging Church of England, and the literature on religious topics written by people who were influenced by the Book of Common Prayer, the English Bible, and the Books of Homilies.
Over time, my very personal efforts to understand the very public culture of the reforming Church of England grew into a project that came to involve a large number of people. Among them were professional actors, theologians, linguists, historians, engineers, and acousticians. But the largest single group was made up of students in the Colleges of Design and Engineering at North Carolina State University and in Jesus College of Cambridge University. They, in the end, made the models, transformed the historical, archaeological, and visual data into visual and acoustic experiences, and provided for us these recreations of the time, space, and sound of worship and preaching in London in the early 1620’s. Without their time and talent the Virtual John Donne Project would not exist.
Paul’s Churchyard, the Cross Yard. From the Visual Model, constructed by Joshua Stephens, rendered by Jordan Gray.
Over the years of development for the Donne Project, several key moments stand out. A good number of important people happened to be nearby when I was telling folks the kind of project I was interested in developing. They expressed their interest, made suggestions about whom I should talk to, or said they could help with something. Their comments were timely, or led to other conversations, or turned into partnerships. Without their time and talent, the Virtual John Donne Project would not exist.
The first of these was Bernard Frischer. From his work with the Rome Reborn Project, I was aware that lost buildings and landscapes could be recreated using visual modeling technology. I was also aware that there were a large number of images of medieval St Paul’s Cathedral that gave us information about how it looked before the Great Fire of London. So I met with Dr Frischer at the University of Virginia, showed him some of the historic imagery of St Paul’s Cathedral, and asked him how well he thought the data I had lent itself to the kind of project he had pioneered with Rome Reborn.
Paul’s Cross, from the Sermon House. From the Visual Model, constructed by Joshua Stephens, rendered by Jordan Gray.
“Yes,” Dr Frischer said, “you can do that.” But then he changed the entire scope and ambition of the Project when he said, “And you can hear it too.” And then he spent the rest of our meeting introducing me to the technology of acoustic modeling. especially how acoustic modeling could recreate the acoustic qualities of historic spaces, so that recording of sounds made today could be experienced as though they were being made and experienced in recreations of spaces that had not existed for hundreds of years. Without Dr Frischer’s guidance, the Virtual John Donne Project would not exist.
With this transformed model for the project, my next major contact was David Hill, then a young Assistant Professor of Architecture but now Professor and Head of the School of Architecture at NC State University. One day early in the history of the Project, I mentioned my idea of using virtual modeling tools to a long-time friend in the College of Design, who said that I needed to get in touch with David, because he knew all about these kinds of projects. And indeed, he did. David became a partner and co-Principal Investigator and friend and supporter — and contact person for a long list of graduate students in Design whose work you can enjoy as you explore all the components of the Virtual John Donne Project. Without David’s commitment, the Virtual John Donne Project would not exist.
The officers at the National Endowment for the Humanities were always helpful, especially Jason Rhody, who one day, while I was consulting him about why we were having trouble getting funding from the NEH, suggested that I was going about the application process the wrong way, that I should carve out of the larger project a smaller one, a “proof of concept” project, that would require less funding but would demonstrate the power of the technology we wanted to use. I immediately thought of what became the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project, which earned us our first NEH grant. Without Jason’s help, and the funding from the NEH it led to, the Virtual John Donne Project would not exist.
Paul’s Cross from 25 feet. From the Visual Model, constructed by Joshua Stephens, rendered by Jordan Gray.
The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project required the script of a sermon John Donne delivered at Paul’s Cross. Seeking authenticity, I contacted the linguist David Crystal, who graciously agreed to prepare a script for us in early modern London dialect. And then, when I asked him if he knew any actor who was good at using this dialect, he suggested his son Ben Crystal, who played the role of Donne the Preacher for both the Paul’s Cross and the Cathedral Projects. Without David and Ben, the Virtual John Donne Project would not exist.
The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project also required acoustic engineers who could take Ben Crystal’s recording of Donne’s sermon made in an anechoic chamber to eliminate any traces of the space in which the recording was made and auralize it so that it would sound like it had been delivered in Paul’s Churchyard. When I had trouble finding such a person, my friend John Randell suggested I contact his friend Ben Markham, of Acentech, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And so Ben and his colleague Matt Azevedo produced a version of Ben’s recording for the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project that enables us to hear it from 8 different listening positions and in the presence of 500, 1200, 2500, and 5000 people. Without Matt and Ben, the Virtual John Donne Project would not exist.
Along the way, I was introduced to John Schofield, who at the time was polishing up the manuscript for his epic work St Paul’s Cathedral Before Wren (2011), a volume that contains practically everything we can know about pre-Fire St Paul’s from the archaeological and visual record. John supported us through thick and thin. Without John’s vast knowledge of the cathedral and of early modern London and his generosity of spirit in sharing his great learning, the Virtual John Donne Project would not exist.
Wireframe Image of the Acoustic Model, Paul’s Churchyard, the Cross Yard. Wireframe from the Visual Model, constructed by Joshua Stephens.
As we got more deeply into the Virtual St Paul’s Cathedral Project, we recognized our need for a choir. I had already been in touch with Roger Bowers of Jesus College, Cambridge, about choosing the repertoire for the choral performances. Happily, Roger introduced us to Richard Pinel, then Choirmaster of Jesus College, and his organists and singers performed admirably in their roles. Ben Crystal, reprising his role as John Donne, also put us in touch with the Shakespearian actors Colin Hurley and William Sutton to play the roles of clergy at St Paul’s. David Crystal played the role of Lancelot Andrewes. Without their help, the Virtual John Donne Project would not exist.
Once we had all the recording done, we discovered the NEH would no longer support our use of commercial acoustic engineering firms, so we needed an in-house acoustic engineer to auralize over six hours of recordings. Happily, Yun Jing had just been hired by the College of Engineering at NC State, so he took over that role. He became a third co-Principal Investigator, and with his graduate students auralized all the recordings and also developed an open-source acoustic modeling program, openly available for download from the Virtual Cathedral’s website. Without Yun Jing’s help, the Virtual John Donne Project would not exist.
Paul’s Churchyard, overhead view, from the north east. From the Visual Model, constructed by Joshua Stephens, rendered by Jordan Gray.
The final editing of the sound was done at NC State by Neal Hutcheson, a member of the staff of NC State’s Linguistics faculty. Without Neal’s help, the Virtual John Donne Project would not exist.
Guy Holborn, then Archivist at Lincoln’s Inn, gave me access to archival material that went into recreation of Trinity Chapel on the day of its Consecration, May 22, 1623. Without Guy’s assistance, the Virtual John Donne Project would not exist.
We have also benefitted from an active and supportive Advisory Committee, the members of which have changed somewhat over the years, but have included Diarmaid MacCulloch, Gordon Higgott, Damian T. Murphy, Jeanne Shami, Arnold Hunt, Mary Morrissey, Emanuela Vai, Roze Hentschell, Mary Ann Lund, and the great pioneer of work in the digital humanities, Willard McCarty. Without their efforts to keep us in the right track as these projects moved forward, the Virtual John Donne Project would not exist.
As I look back over the years of work that went into all the components of the Virtual John Donne Project, I feel humbled that so many distinguished folks gave so much of their time and expertise to its success. This was truly a collective effort, the work of many hands. Being a part of it has been the highlight of my career in the academy.
John N. Wall Professor of English Literature Emeritus, North Carolina State University
St Paul’s Cathedral, the Visual Model. Rendered by Austin Corriher.
SECTION FIVE: DIGITAL DONNE — Resources from the John Donne Society — http://johndonnesociety.org/sites.html
SECTION SIX: Components of the Virtual John Donne Project
Paul’s Cross Project
The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project provides the experience of hearing John Donne’s sermon for Gunpowder Day, November 5th, 1622 in Paul’s Churchyard, the specific physical location for which it was composed.
The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project helps us to explore public preaching in early modern London, enabling us to experience a Paul’s Cross sermon as a performance, as an event unfolding in real time in the context of an interactive and collaborative occasion.
Trinity Chapel Project
The Virtual Trinity Chapel Project reconstructs the Service of Dedication conducted by the Rt Rev George Montaigne, Bishop of London, during which Donne preached. Drawing on original documents and contractors’ bills, it also reconstructs the original interior of this building.
John Donne served as the Reader in Divinity at Lincoln’s Inn in London from October 24th, 1616 until February 11th, 1622. Donne was recalled to Lincoln’s Inn on May 22nd, 1623 to preach at the consecration of the Inn’s new chapel.
St. Paul’s Cathedral Project
The Virtual St Paul’s Cathedral Project enables us to experience worship and preaching at St Paul’s Cathedral as events that unfold over time and on particular occasions in London in the early seventeenth century.
Events featured on this site include two full days of services. A festival day — Easter Sunday 1624 — includes sung Matins; the Great Litany; Holy Communion, with a sermon by Bishop Lancelot Andrewes; and Evensong, with the sermon preached that day by John Donne, Dean of the cathedral. A ferial, or ordinary day — the Tuesday after the First Sunday in Advent, 1625 — includes Matins and Evensong.
Donne Online
St Paul’s Cathedral, the East Front. Image by Smith Marks, Rendering by Austin Corriher
FINIS