John Donne: man of flesh and spirit David Edwards Continuum, 368pp, £20 ISBN 0826451551

Libertine and moralist, churchman and self-encomiast, John Donne wrote with a unique muscularity about religion - and with a remarkable combination of brutalism and intricacy about love, death and sex. Although best-known for the sinewy diction of his songs and sonnets, he was also the author of many very different texts: a muddlesome tract on suicide, a crudely unsuccessful satire on the character of the Scots and a corpus of sermons that runs to more than a million words.

In this new biography, David Edwards is at pains to re-evaluate Donne's credentials. He argues that Donne scholarship has gravitated, in recent years, towards the finicky secularism of (predominantly American) academia, and that studies of his work have exaggerated his negative qualities in order to make their subject more fruitfully contentious. Edwards is especially unhappy with those critics of Donne who have failed to take his religion seriously, and his concluding chapter offers a detailed and interesting appraisal of Donne's preaching and beliefs.

It is clear from Edwards's quotations that Donne's performances in the pulpit were as mercurial as his verse. He boldly claimed that "company is the atheist's sanctuary", that David, the king of Israel, was a "better poet" than Virgil, that "lascivious glances" are the origin of adultery, and that the penis is the cause of all sin. His own misdemeanours repeatedly became the anecdotal touchstones of his theology; but equally, theology was an instrument with which to prod not just the cogwheels of his conscience, but also the embers of his ardour and his will.

A former cleric, Edwards is well placed to examine the nature of Donne's faith. The seriousness of his purpose does not, however, prevent him from employing a style that proves by turns casual, gruff and histrionic. At one point, he poses no fewer than 18 questions - mostly rhetorical - in the space of a single page. He writes of relationships that "end in tears" and of Donne's being "one of the lads". Elsewhere, he is elliptical (as in a reference to "the deep things of God"), bathetic ("Donne could be very positive about marriage") and downright alarming ("Sex had battered his young manhood"; "Donne wrote about raw sex").

This said, there is an engaging candour in Edwards's approach, of a sort one would seldom find in a professorial monograph. For instance, the title of Donne's essay Biathanatos is deemed "unappetising", while his poem "Metempsychosis" is simply "boring". The printing of his letters was "a mess". As regards those who damn Donne's religious writings, claiming that they were propelled merely by their author's desire for ecclesiastical preferment, Edwards observes that they are often intent on promotions of their own, though they would not expect their ambition to be used as evidence of a lack of critical integrity.

Comments of this nature are characteristic of Edwards's reluctance to pay craven homage to existing scholarship. R C Bald's thorough biography, first published more than 30 years ago, is treated with the respect it deserves, but more recent accounts are frequently rubbished. Edwards suggests that many of the criticisms levelled at Donne are anachronistic: to think of him as a misogynist is frankly unhelpful, to deplore his sexual politics smacks of prudery.

There is no escaping the impression that Donne's reputation is a fragile one, easily polluted by misrepresentation. Dismissed by Dr Johnson for his apparent failure in "moving the affections", he was barely mentioned in Hazlitt's influential Lectures on the English Poets, and had to wait until the 20th century to find a new champion, in T S Eliot. Perhaps the greatest boost to Donne's modern reputation, however, has been his consistent inclusion in British curriculums. Deliciously open to the forensic efforts of amateur criticism, his lyrics have become a sort of parade ground within which students can marshal the vocabulary of interpretation.

If nothing else, the achievement of Edwards's biography is to remind the reader that there is more to Donne than a cartoonish amalgam of solipsism and self-hatred. Donne himself warned Charles I that a king's political inertia could result in his being overlooked by history: "Posterity shall not know him, not read who he was." By allowing Donne to speak to the reader in his own words, Edwards may save him from such an ignoble fate.

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