In deliberate acknowledgement of some of the most contentious issues of his day, Donne engages the structure of the Roman Catholic rosary in his attempt to offer the church of the Elizabethan era a model of Christ-centered worship. Finding both the idolatry in Roman Catholic worship and the severe Protestant rejection of "forms of joy and art" in worship to be equally undesirable, John Donne sought a return to biblical worship by centering his concerns upon the person of Christ. Within the seven sonnets of his crown-sequence La Corona, Donne unfolds two parallel journeys, that of Christ in Incarnation and that of the soul with Christ, in order to affectively render a model of worship as beautiful and unending as it is fixed wholly upon the work of the Incarnate Christ. Realizing the shortcomings of human understanding in matters of worship, Donne confidently offers the knowledge of Christ as the solution to the problems that threatened the church of his day.

This project primarily focuses upon the sonnet sequence La Corona in exploration of these matters, but it likewise considers the context offered in Donne's sermons, sacred writings, and other pertinent texts from his time.