Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

by Katherine Rundell

If you are a scholar, they offer notes to an A–Z of Renaissance religious flashpoints: Aquinas, bishops, casuistry, Divine Right of Kings, Erastianism, Foxe, Gnostics, heresy, incarnation, Judaism, Koran, Laudian ceremonialism, Manicheans, numerology, oaths, Plots (Gunpowder), Queen Henrietta Maria (for speaking clumsily of whom he was reprimanded), recusancy, scholasticism, Thirty-Nine Articles, utopianism, vanitas, Worms (Diet of), Xenophon, York, Zoroaster. But they can also be mined by those reading for other, less erudite and more unpindownable reasons.

This is one example of how witty and humorous this book is.