This paper attempts to tease out the contemporary political resonances found in John Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr. While it is true that Pseudo-Martyr aligns itself with absolutism, it does so in a very complex and ambivalent manner, rejecting political patriarchalism and adopting a moderate sense of the obedience due to the monarch.

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Original publication: Jensen, Phebe. "“The Obedience due to Princes”: Absolutism in Pseudo-Martyr." Renaissance and Reformation 31 (3): 2010. 47-62. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v31i3.11628. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.