IN John Donne's “The Good Morrow,” love is imbued with the power to collapse time and space, conferring upon the existential limits of the one and the material bounds of the other a kind of relative elasticity—one that contracts and expands in response to the lovers’ gaze because, as the speaker suggests, “love, all love of other sights controls, / And makes one little room, an everywhere.” While Donne's aubade takes a measure of poetic license in imagining this all-inclusive space, the argument nonetheless resonates in the cultural history of England, in particular when the power of love to enact such change aligns with other forms of authority. Indeed, the prerogatives of the sovereign are not unlike those of love, for both have the capacity to remake the perceptual landscape at the individual and collective levels, and in doing so, to insist that the subject, like a lover, accede to that presumption of control.

Donne's deeply cartographic imagination may thus be mapped onto more material “rooms,” in particular those that have played an important role in the exercise of sovereign power. When a monarch dictates what can and cannot be said on a given matter, those spaces where such discourse unfolds become interwoven with that historical moment. While this might be said of many architectural artifacts, it is especially true of London's Blackfriars, where centuries of use have made “one little roome, an everywhere” in which traces of long past speech and still resonant silences accrue. The “little room” in “The Good Morrow” evokes a limitless world transposed into an implausibly limited space through the lovers’ mutual gaze. Moving beyond the familiar conceit of the microcosm (even as he employs it), Donne suggests a radical re-placement of the world in all its topographical complexity in the lovers themselves, who find in one another a place for everything and everything in this place, though it is important to note that the lovers I discuss in this current article, Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon, were rather more star-crossed that those imagined in Donne's idyllic aubade.

This article takes as its premise the possibility of finding, if not everything, then at least a significant segment of pre-modern London’s cultural world within “one little roome”: the recurrently repurposed precinct of the Dominican Friars Preachers or Black Friars.