In his current project, entitled Holy Attention: John Donne’s Holy Sonnets and Early Modern Prayer, David Marno (English) argues that attention played a central role in early modern devotion because it was seen as the paradigm of human action capable of soliciting and responding to divine grace. Reading Donne’s devotional poems as prayers, Professor Marno argues that the unprecedented popularity of the genre of devotional poetry in the period was due to poetry’s distinct attributes that could be used for creating this devotional attention. While a Townsend Fellow, he will develop this thesis on Donne’s Holy Sonnets into a larger argument about the ways in which early modern literary works can offer insight into religious practice.