The sermons of John Donne are widely regarded as being fixated on human mortality, and making a major contribution to the Western tradition of memento mori as a consequence. This study argues that this is a distortion of his thought; that the preoccupation of his sermons was not with death per se, but with life (specifically, with the particulars of Christian doctrine within which death is subsumed by resurrection); and that, as a result, Donne’s was a radically orthodox voice within seventeenth-century English Protestantism. This thesis is advanced in three chapters devoted to Donne’s sermons on I Corinthians 15, then buttressed by chapters on Donne’s deployment of 1 Corinthians 15 in other sermons, and on how his perspective on the resurrection compares and contrasts with that of near-contemporary representatives of Laudianism and Puritanism respectively.