Reading George Herbert in the RestorationSharon Achinstein
sharon
achinstein
Reading George Herbert in the Restoration
F
rom its first publication in 1633
The Temple
was unquestionably oneof the bestsellers of the seventeenth century, running to eleven
editions by century’s end. The transformations in this single work overits printing history render a caveat to current scholars who attribute“fixity” to print and “fluidity” to manuscript culture. As a text inmotion, across this period,
The Temple
tells us as much about the historyof ecclesiological strife as it does about poetic longevity and passing thetests of time in literary value, since later editions are not simply reprints,but contain changes in layout, typography, ordering, prefatory andindexical matter, among other features. It was in the Restoration periodthat Herbert became an Anglican icon, as the Church of England becamethe Anglican Church. Herbert’s
Little Book
and the figure of Herberthimself were instrumental in the construction of a uniform AnglicanChurch.
George Herbert, the “Anglican Saint,” was enshrined by Izaak Walton.As a country parson of moderate ecclesiology, with abundant concernfor practical piety and noble obscurity, Walton’s Herbert became a focalpoint for writing the history of Anglicanism across the turbulent seven-teenth century. Yet Walton was not the only one reading Herbert forcontemporary interest. Both Nonconformists and Anglicans sought toput Herbert to use in the ecclesiological struggles in the later seventeenthcentury. Through Herbert’s legacy, conformists mounted an ideologicaldefense of the “Restored” Church. The orthodox found in Herbert aforerunner in the plot of “Restoration,” since he could be molded toan image of the irenic pre-civil war Church. In addition, however,Nonconformists, no less than the orthodox, were interested inauthorizing their devotional practices and theology by an appeal tothe legacy of George Herbert; for them, Herbert stood for authenticspiritual communion with the Divine, a Puritan’s Puritan whosesimplicity and immediacy offered a potent critique of ceremonial
religion. Herbert scholars themselves have argued over the Anglican andPuritan elements in their poet. The point here is not to validate onereading over the other or to argue that both strands of interpretationare latent in the original Herbert. Instead, it is to see how the inheritorsof his legacy appealed to this literary figure in creating their ownreligious and political traditions. Both orthodox and nonconformingbelievers were taken by his honesty and simplicity, an inspirationfor each to seek a stable ground on which to lay faith and to createdevotional poetry.
Before Walton adopted the poet for an Anglican hagiography, severaleditions of Herbert’s
Temple
were published by the known Noncon-formist London bookseller Philemon Stephens, whose long associationwith Herbert was passed on to his publisher son, and then to his wife,Dorothy Stephens, who licensed Herbert’s poems after the death of herhusband in 1670.
1
Philemon Stephens was a mainstay in dissenting pub-lishing; it was Stephens, for instance, who brought out twelve editionsof the works of the Independent divine John Owen after 1643. Espe-cially for dissenting poets, Herbert became all but orthodox, standingfor devotional authenticity in a corrupt age. In defending a doctrine ofearthly poverty in
Saints’ Everlasting Rest
, Richard Baxter recommendsHerbert’s riddle “A Poor mans Rod when thou dost ride, is both aWeapon and a Guide.” Milton cites Herbert’s
Outlandish Proverbs
;Baptist Thomas Vincent counseled godliness to the victims of the fireand plague by citing Herbert; the Nonconformist publisher John Duntonadvised readers of
The Athenian Mercury
that Herbert was especiallyappropriate to women readers. Richard Baxter signed off his powerfultome
Saints’ Everlasting Rest
with a verbatim transcription of Herbert’s“Home,” as if that poem summed up the whole of his preceding book.
2
1.
Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, 1640–1708
(London, 1913)
,
II, 419. My thanks to Nigel Smith, Annabel Patterson, and especially Kathleen Lynch for readingthis work in progress.
2. Some of these admirers are mentioned in
The Works of George Herbert
, ed. F. E. Hutchinson(Oxford, 1972), pp. xliii–xliv. All citations of Herbert’s poetry are to this edition. ThomasVincent,
God’s Terrible Voice in the City
(1667), p. 231. I thank David Norbrook for calling thisreference to my attention. John Dunton frequently quoted Herbert in his journalism, and his
Author’s Farewell-Sermon
ends with a quotation of the whole of “Peace,” in
Dunton’s Remains
(1684),pp. 215–17. See also the catalogue compiled by Robert H. Ray,
The Herbert Allusion Book: Allu-sions to George Herbert in the Seventeenth Century
. Texts and Studies, 1986,
Studies in Philology
83(1986); and Ray, “Herbert’s Seventeenth-Century Reputation: A Summary and New Consider-ation,”
proves to bepromiscuously available to multivalent readings and competing genea-logical claims of church disciplines.”
3
What is of interest here, rather than choosing the “right” reading, isthat Herbert became the point of contact in the dispute between differ-ent conceptions of worship; the centrality of Herbert was the one thingupon which all sides could agree. That he was central, moreover, tells usabout the key issues—aesthetic and ecclesiological—through whichDissenters identified their differences from the orthodox. In order tounderstand the complexity of the cultural sources of Restoration ideo-logical strife, and the effects, this essay highlights how, at the same timeas the Anglican tradition claimed Herbert for their own, the poet alsobecame a powerful Nonconformist symbol. The two legacies are differ-ently related to the original: in political controversy and ecclesiologicalunsteadiness, Herbert came to seem an emblem of a harmonious, mod-erate Anglican church; yet in poetics and theology Herbert maintained
The Reception and Influence of George Herbert to 1715
(Oxford D. Phil, 1984), puts such allusions incontext, and is especially good on Nonconformist adaptations (pp. 199–251). John T. Shawcrosshas compiled later allusions in “Additional Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Allusions toGeorge Herbert,”
George Herbert Journal
15:1 (1991), 68–72; and in “More Early Allusions toDonne and Herbert,”
John Donne Journal
13:1–2 (1994), 113–23. Significant Nonconformist usesof Herbert include Samuel Crossman’s
Young Mans Meditation
(1664), and his
The Young Man’sDivine Meditations
(1678); Richard Baxter,
Saints’ Everlasting Rest
(1662), p. 490. Sebastian Köppl,
Die Rezeption George Herberts im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert
(Heidelberg, 1978) devotes a chapterto the Puritan reception of Herbert. Other Nonconformists alluding to Herbert include JohnBunyan, Samuel Bury, Thomas White, Peter Sterry, Ralph Venning, Oliver Heywood, JohnBryan, and John Reynolds. On Julia Palmer, see
The “Centuries” of Julia Palmer
, ed. V. Burkeand E. Clarke (Nottingham, 2001); and Helen Wilcox, “ ‘Scribbling under so Faire a coppy’: thePresence of Herbert in the Poetry of Vaughan’s Contemporaries,”
Scintilla
7 (2003), 185–200.Herbert was popular among the funeral sermon crowd: cited in William Bates’s funeral sermonfor John Manton (1678), John Howe’s sermon for Richard Fairclough (1682) as well as in thefuneral sermon for Bates (1699). Herbert was useful to cite in supporting radical social causes:Baxter’s
Crucifying of the World, by the Cross of Christ
(1658) uses Herbert in a class attack, to lancethe greedy and idle nobility and gentry (sig. a3). Herbert’s “America” is also quoted in an anti-slavery tract by the Virginian minister Morgan Godwyn,
Trade Preferr’d Before Religion, and ChristMade to Give Place to Mammon
(1685). On Herbert and women readers, see Helen Wilcox,“Entering
The Temple
: Women, Reading, and Devotion in Seventeenth-century England,” in
Religion, Literature and Politics in Post-Reformation England, 1540–1688
, ed. Donna B. Hamilton andRichard Strier (Cambridge, Eng., 1996), pp. 187–207; and her “’Scribbling’.” I have treated suchNonconformist use of Herbert more extensively in
Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England
(Cambridge, Eng., 2003), pp. 200–09.3. Kathleen Lynch, “Devotion Bound: A Social History of the Temple,” in
Books and Readersin Early Modern England
, ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia, 2002), p. 179.
true devotion, relishing internal states and inspired writing rather thanthe rote exercises of imposed ceremony for Dissenters. There were manyHerberts, but by precisely locating Herbert’s dual canonization withinRestoration ecclesiological and poetic controversy I hope to shed lighton the ways that aesthetics, theology, and ideology intersected at a timewhen these discourses were not distinct.
i i
The pattern poems in George Herbert’s
Temple
are some of the mostmemorable strains of poetry inherited from this seventeenth-centuryflowering of lyric. Herbert’s stylistic attempts to conjoin content andform in such poems as “Easter Wings” and “The Altar” were a unity ofsight and word, at once a purification of the aesthetic and a denial of themediation of language. These poems called attention to themselves asmade objects, becoming the things they themselves were to represent,and they were emblems in a volume whose aesthetic work was to modelits format after the physical structure of a church. Although Herberthimself was dead by the time the book found its way into print in 1633,these object-making matters of layout and design were present inHerbert’s manuscript versions of his “Little Book.” Herbert’s “LittleBook” had a porch, a lintel, and an altar, all of these elements paving theway to the entrance into the central body of the volume, subheaded“The Church.” Randall McLeod, in a powerful revisionist analysisunder the name of Random Cloud, has done more than anyone tochastize those editors who disfigure Herbert by ignoring the significanceof these typographical and design elements.
4
Tantalizingly, he raises thequestion of the ideological contours of typography and format so centralto the meanings of Herbert’s work, refusing to assign intentionality tosuch matters of design and layout. The bibliographical evidence is robustfor an ideological reading, however. Over the successive printings ofHerbert’s
Temple
, the physical appearance of the words on the page wastransformed by successive editors to weather the ecclesiological contro-versies over a uniform Church.
During the period of Anglican synthesis over the meanings of devotionalritual after Uniformity, Herbert’s designs came to signify in ideological
4. Random Cloud, “FIAT
f
LUX,” in
Crisis in Editing: Texts of the English Renaissance
contests over the shape and nature of worship. Images of churches andaltars could not but enter the ecclesiological fray, and the ways in whichthey did so in the Restoration offer an exciting chapter in the history ofliterary reception. But this is more than simply reception; by attendingto these material transformations, we ask about the materiality of textswithin their political contexts, and through observing the changes informat and design, we witness actual readers reading, making sense of,and attempting to control meanings by implementing such changes. Asthe portable, spiritualized church of the duodecimo 1633 edition wastransformed in its concrete formats in later renditions, Herbert’s poetrywas subject to intense scrutiny by forces of Anglicanization and, simul-taneously, of disestablishment. In the hands of able interpreters, Herbertwas to become the shape of a sturdy and chastened Anglicanism; but hewas also to become the paragon of Dissenting poetics.
In the Restoration, and amidst controversy over worship, the tenthedition (1674) of
The Temple
made a break with the previous nine indaring and ideologically resonant ways. The 1674 edition includedWalton’s
Life of Herbert
(1670), and introduced with slight retouching anengraved portrait of Herbert, made first for Walton’s
Lives
(1670) byR. White. This volume offered a physical revolution in its stylistic formatwhich had ideological implications: the two first poems in the groupingcalled “The Church”—“Superliminare” and “The Altar”—were nolonger figured in print, but had become engravings. The poems hadbeen transformed from word to thing and became illustrative matter,figured in a manuscript hand. No longer verbal pictures, the poemsappeared as visual clues adorning the full-scale three-dimensional rep-resentations of architectural objects; the words now figured in a mimeticdesign which the reader was to behold as well as read. The engravedfigure, “The Altar,” was no longer a classical altar, but very much aChristian altar under a classical canopy (fig. 1).
These two poems had undergone transformation since the first editionof
The Temple
(1633), but none so dramatic as this. The media leap intoengraving may of course be seen as a refinement of the physical attemptsin previous editions to make words into representational objects. Inevery edition before 1674 these two poems had drawn attention tothemselves by significant typographical difference from the rest of thepoems in the volume, whether by ornamental floral borders, blackoutlining, or extra lines (fig. 2). In the first edition they were centered onthe pages; there was a good deal of white space; and the printers’
ornaments above and below the type of the words of the poems gavethem decorative flourish. In subsequent editions the poems’ outlines ofthin black were framed by ornamental borders or by the addition of extralines in the case of “Superliminare.” “Superliminare” appeared on a pagebordered with horizontal ornamental bands, and from the third (1634)edition onwards was topped by a rounded arc of black lines above,sometimes with ornaments above and below the text. After the firstedition “The Altar” was outlined by black, the poem set off as a figureagainst a ground, with ornamental bands above and below the text. Theprinting of these poems, making an introduction to the reading experi-ence, had always differed from the rest by format, flourish, and layout.By outlining the words with decorations, these later editions suggested thatthe poems were not simply poems but beautiful objects, representations—
Fig. 1: George Herbert, “The Altar,” The Temple (1674). Reproduced bykind permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library
signs aligning with signifiers, existing in the two-dimensional space ofthe line on the page, abstraction in art.
In the 1674 edition, by contrast, all of that ornamentation, with itsmimetic structure of denotation by abstraction, was abandoned; inits place, the reality of things would be signified in a different way. Thewords of the texts, the simple efforts of typography, no longer spoke forthemselves. Instead of the type adorned by printer’s ornaments andthin outlines, “Superliminare” and “The Altar” would become elaborateengravings, images rather than texts. They signified therefore not as
Fig. 2: George Herbert, “The Altar,” The Temple (1633). Reproduced bykind permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library
diagrams or abstractions, but as objects representing three-dimensionalspaces. The words of the poems were no longer in type, but were fash-ioned to resemble a manuscript hand. These designs made literal thesteps to a figural representation of a Church. Another significant changewas in the layout of the book as a whole; in the 1674 edition, for the firsttime, these poems (along with their elaborate engravings) faced eachother as leaves on a page opened up to reveal both at once. The Altarwas no longer to be seen subsequent to entry into the space of a Church.The reader of
The Temple
became a viewer of the beauty of holiness. Thecontent of these engravings and their changed relation to each other addsdepth and substance to the meanings of Herbert within Restorationecclesiological controversy.
Now a portal with referential mooring, the 1674 “Superliminare” isunambiguously an entrance to a late-seventeenth-century church, theinterior of which can be glimpsed through an inviting, half-open door(fig. 1). The placement of the poem on the lintel of that doorway givesa guided passageway into the space of the church; as McLeod has demon-strated, the order of reading and placement of the “Superliminare” versesaccords with an entrant’s crossing the threshold in time and space.
5
While the words of Herbert’s poem themselves suggested a metaphorof reading as entry, the physical presentation of the poem through thethree-dimensional representational space made increasingly specificwhat sort of entry this was to be. The graphic styling of “Superliminare”presents an image of a neoclassical church exterior. Beneath the archthere is a three-dimensional expansion of the outlined arch in the previ-ous editions; there is a neoclassical ornamented lintel. Classical columnsinset into rectangular columns symmetrically flank the portal, their topsembellished with vegetable ornament. The illusion of depth is achievedby scoring on the columns, on the internal domed ceiling of the porticoentryway, as well as by the foreshortened perspective of the short pas-sageway leading into the sanctuary. There is to be sure some dialoguewith another collection of devotional verse, Richard Crashaw’s homageto Herbert, his
Steps to the Temple
, whose frontispiece images had in1646, and again in 1670, figured the interior and exterior of a Church byengravings (fig. 3). In the 1674 edition of Herbert, however, people are
5. Random Cloud, “Enter Reader,” in
The Editorial Gaze: Mediating Texts in Literature andthe Arts
, ed. Paul Eggert and Margaret Sankey (New York, 1998), pp. 3–50.
absent in the image; instead, the readers themselves would become thecongregation on their way to communal service, to an authorizedspace of worship. In the 1674
Temple
, far above the recessed portalentrance is the festooning of ornamental wreaths. This is a classicalchurch, to be sure, and one in line with the Restored regime’s neo-classical designs. The 1674
Temple
engravings develop what might becalled an Anglican iconography. They proposed the precise shapes andspaces for worship; they registered commitment to visible objects withina visible church.
In fact, the pictures in “Superliminare” and “The Altar” bear a remark-able resemblance to the image gracing the frontispiece of anotherdevotional work, the state-authorized Book of Common Prayer,imposed by Uniformity in 1662, where David Loggin’s engravingshows an inviting door flanked by recessed columns opening onto a
Fig. 3: Title page, Richard Crashaw, The Steps to The Temple (1670). Repro-duced by kind permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library
congregation.6 The images associated with the Uniformity-imposedBook of Common Prayer were diverse: the printed prayer bookcertainly attracted images.7 These prayer-book images point to the waysthat we might read the engravings in Herbert’s Temple. Classical pillarsand recessed interiors would have been familiar to worshiping Christiansfrom their devotional practices; the iconography of Herbert’s “Altar”and “Superliminare” resemble the adornments in architecture and themimetic attempts of those books enjoined by state worship. The newformat of Herbert’s two poems should be seen in relation to the icono-graphy represented in printed editions of the 1662 Prayer Book, with itspreface composed by Sanderson (whose Life Walton would also write).That 1662 Book of Common Prayer was an emblem not merely ofdevotion, but of the state–sponsored regulation and discipline of devo-tion. It reprinted the Act of Uniformity in full, and it offered an expla-nation of why some ceremonies were abolished and some retained.8
Another 1662 Prayer Book title-page engraved by David Loggan boreremarkable similarities to the shapes of the “The Altar” of 1674. Flankedby a pair of double columns, atop of which are represented two flaminghearts (emblems to be used in subsequent editions of Herbert’s poems,e.g. 1703), was the wording of the title-page, some of which is presentedin the same “hand” as the imitation “manuscript hand” represented in“The Altar” (fig. 4).9 The visual command to align Herbert withuniformity of worship could not have been clearer.
Unlike the prayer book images, however, the engraved “Superliminare”in the 1674 Temple represents not an entire building but an entryway, aclose-up, with a triple frame leading inwards. “Superliminare” com-prises a series of framing shapes that lead the viewer’s gaze to the interiorof the space on the page, something like a Chinese box within boxes.The white space of the page is strictly demarcated from the interiorimage by fiercely dark cross-hatching, which corresponds to no particular
6. See David Loggan’s title-page engravings for the Book of Common Prayer (1662), WingB3622A; and Book of Common Prayer (1669), Wing B3635A; other Restoration Books ofCommon Prayer represented the insides of classical churches in fine engraved illustrations;see, e.g., Book of Common Prayer (1664), Wing B3628; Book of Common Prayer (1665), WingB3631.
7. I thank Judith Maltby for assistance in understanding the theology and architecture of theserepresentations.
8. Book of Common Prayer (1662) Wing B3622.9. Book of Common Prayer (1662), Wing B3622.
architectural shape, but represents “foreground.” This shape is super-scribed by a wreathed fresco or stone-carved ornament; inside these isthe ornamental arch in which the layers of columns are inset. A shortpassageway leads in toward a door, and then the viewer glimpses theinside of the church itself. The triple look inside presents a surprise: whatis central is not the altar, as in the 1662 Prayer Book, but a preacher, whois raised above the congregation in a pulpit. What is viewed as importantin this interior image is the preacher, signifier of the Word perhaps, hewho mediates as an authorized interpreter of the service. The human
Fig. 4: Title page, Book of Common Prayer (1662), Wing B3622. Reproducedby kind permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library
participation in communal worship is also signified in this engraving bythe backs of the communicants sitting in the audience.
Although the vantage of the interior of the church presents the con-gregation and its priest, the altar is nonetheless very much on view: it isto the right, on the facing leaf. For a second revolution in format hadbeen introduced in 1674. Up until this edition, each of the preliminarypattern-poems had been found on successive pages; here, for the firsttime, they appear on facing leaves. Every edition up until the 1674,including the Williams and Bodleian manuscripts, had presented“Superliminare” and “The Altar” on separate leaves (in the printedversions, found on pages 17–18), recto and verso: one had to turn thepage to find “The Altar.” In that page-turning, the hand of the readerforced the “turn,” an action imitating the surprise of entering a newspace, an allegorical movement, after which we “symbolically step intothe Church proper, immediately to confront its Altar,” as McLeodexplains: this is a moment of “incarnation.”10 In 1674 one did not haveto turn the page to enter that Church. Now set alongside “Superlimin-are” was “The Altar”: both were meant to be taken in at the samemoment. Church and Altar, side-by-side, manifest two parts of the sameprogram. Paired with the view of the exterior door of the church withits vantage point on the pulpit, the simultaneous viewing of the altar andthe pulpit take on the metonymic significance of the importance of boththe Word and the Sacrament: ministry and ritual. Herbert’s Temple wasthus in 1674 brilliantly coordinated through image, layout, and design tomatch Anglican orthodoxy.
Herbert’s construction as an Anglican saint was an uneven devel-opment in the history of moderate orthodoxy. To understand howHerbert’s writings were useful after the return of monarchy, we mustexplore Herbert’s religious politics in the Civil War years. Amidst thebloodshed and social turbulence, the Cromwellian church had fought anecclesiological war, expelling ministers who failed to adhere to its reli-gious policies. The period Clement Walker catalogues as “The sufferingsof the Clergy” was one during which Herbert became a symbol for thedisenfranchised ministry, an image around whom the godly ministers,denied their work, could maintain faith. It was during the Interregnumperiod, when the sequestered minister Barnabus Oley (1602–1686)edited and brought through the press Herbert’s A Priest to the Temple,
in a volume entitled Herbert’s Remains in 1652.11 Oley himself hadpreached to Royalists during sieges in Yorkshire, and had been severaltimes punished for assisting forces against Parliament.12 On its final pagehis slender volume, printed for Timothy Garthwait, bore the imprimaturof John Downham, June 30, 1651. Oley’s work fits squarely in thecontext of a besieged and disenfranchised clergy; he began the 1652 Lifewith a prophetic confession to his fellow ousted ministers, heavily sprin-kled with apocalyptic biblical citations. Bearing the message that themisfortune of the ministry resulted from God’s anger, which hadwrought punishment on King and clergy, Oley offered his fellow suffer-ers the image of three divines who would serve as patterns of reformed“service in the Sanctuary”: Thomas Jackson, Nicholas Ferrer, andGeorge Herbert.13 Why three “holy and heavenly souls” (sig. A8), in awork that represents the writings of George Herbert? Oley, experienc-ing the persecution of the Cromwellian church, spoke to a shadowclerical body, vaunting the merits of those three examples of “singularsincerity in Imbracing, and transcendent Dexterity in Defending theProtestant Religion established in the Church of England” (sig. A11).Oley brought out three separate editions of the works of Thomas Jacksonduring the 1650s; he also sought to achieve through publishing what hecould not achieve on the pulpit.
With his publication of Herbert’s book, Oley took up the mission toreform the clergy for its sins. Focusing on Herbert’s advice on pastoralconduct, Oley emphasized the practical over the theological, showed anopportunely safe lack of interest in politics while voicing his commit-ment to unity; the aim was counsel to the ministry during its bleakesthour. Explaining the fall of his beloved English Church, Oley confessesits sins: “That our prayers stood so long, was a favour by God granted usat the prayers of these men, (who prayed for these prayers as well as inthem) and that they fell so soon, was a punishment of our negligence,(and other sins) who had not taught even those that liked them well, touse them aright” (sig. B3). Details of Herbert’s life would create a collective
11. Elizabeth Clarke, Theory and Theology in George Herbert’s Poetry (Oxford, 1997), p. 263,comments on Oley’s “Royalist” purposes in the Interregnum; her “The Character of a Non-Laudian Country Parson,” Review of English Studies 54:216 (2003), 479–96, sets out the politicaldevelopments surrounding the publication of The Country Parson.
12. Walker Revised: Being a Revision of John Walker’s Sufferings of the Clergy, ed. A. G. Matthews(Oxford, 1988), p. 208.
portrait of conformity: the pastor demonstrates the virtues of friendship,humility, charity, and—importantly—the use of a set liturgy (sig. c3).And just as Herbert in his own life had repaired his local church atLeighton, so Oley wished “what good may come by this Book, towardsthe repair of us Church-men in point of morals” (sig. b9). Publishedunder conditions of censorship, Herbert’s Priest to the Temple was meantto become, during the Interregnum period, a rallying symbol for theexcluded clergy.
But with the renewal of episcopacy after 1660, and especially after theimposition of Uniformity in 1662, the meaning and shape of orthodoxywere still left to be settled. As John Spurr and others have shown, theRestoration Anglican Church was no mere replication of the pre-CivilWar Laudian institution. On the contrary, the experience of civil war andthe ecclesiological turmoil had hardened some positions, and had createdfluidity in others. The Restoration Church had to be formed, and it wasformed in reaction to, and through interpretation of, the traumatic yearsof the Civil War.14
George Herbert would become an object within that struggle to unifythe post-Puritan Church of England. Barnabus Oley, restored to highecclesiastical office soon after the Restoration, brought his Herbert outof its pastoral retreat with his second edition published in 1671, a volumethat no longer highlights “Herbert’s Remains” as the selling point as itsfirst title-page, but instead simply titling its work, A Priest to the Temple.15
At that later moment the church Oley sought to defend was in a differentposition, and the emphasis on “priest” was paramount. A new prefacewas added to address the new situation, specifically referring to thecontext of debates over the formal shape and inclusiveness of the newChurch. Oley defended a uniform clergy and also charged a youngerministry with the task of remembering the dangers of breaking uniformity.The legacy of the Civil War years left a lesson they should not forget.
Looking back with some vindication of his earlier prophetic lamentsand professions, Oley’s 1671 edition consigned his embarrassing 1652prophetic preface to the rear of the volume. This, among other shifts inbook design, tells us about the altered state of its desired reception, and
14. John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven, 1991); I. M.Green, The Reestablishment of the Church of England, 1660–1663 (Oxford, 1978); Gary S. De Krey,London and the Restoration (Cambridge, Eng., 2005), ch. 2.
15. Bearing the imprimatur of Thomas Tomkyns and dated May 24, 1671, the work waslisted in the Term Catalogue for May 30, 1671, offered at the price bound of 1s. 6d.
how history and Herbert are encoded in this work for a new historicalsituation. Oley comments on the layout shift by an “Advertisement tothe Reader” inserted following the final chapter in Herbert’s tract,explaining that in 1652, when the first edition had appeared, “violencehad gotten the upper hand” (sig. K7), but now, thanks to “the Almighty,who changeth Times and Seasons,” there has been “wrought a wonder-ful deliverance” (sigs. K7-K7v). The earlier preface was superseded butnot forgotten; in the 1671 volume, it stands as retrospective evidence ofthe truth of Oley’s prophetic utterance of loyalty to the cause of theEnglish Church.
A backward and a forward glance are two gestures of the same projectof memory. Herbert’s works, both his poetry and, especially, his prac-tical ministry, became usable memory objects. In 1671, Oley in his prefacetakes note of contemporary ecclesiological controversy, taking time outin a rather large section of his preface to polemicize against a work of theprevious summer which had appeared in the wake of the Second Con-venticle Act, John Eacherd’s The Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt ofthe Clergie (1670).16 In 1671, then, A Priest to the Temple would be usefulto forge cohesion within a newly disciplined Church, arousing would-be ministers by engaging with the past, but also with the current church’senemies. Oley warned of the dangers of forgetting the Church’s brutalmid-century history.
In his eagerness to engage in contemporary ecclesiological strife,Oley’s appeal to the legacy of George Herbert was a masterstroke ofhistorical revisionism. Exhorting his readers to look back to the pre-CivilWar church, Oley envisioned that as thriving in “an Halcyonian Calm, aBlessed Time of Peace . . . of which Time, when the King, Saint Charlesof B. M. and the Good Archbishop of Canterbury (with others) wereendeavouring to perfect the Clergy in Regularity of Life, Uniformityof officiating.”17 Writing a reconstructive history of the pre-Civil WarChurch, Oley praised the good mission of the Laudian reforms and sug-gested that the Restored ministers renovate that program, just as Herberthad renovated his local church. A new generation of younger ministerswere in danger of forgetting the bloody strife that had erupted over
16. [ J. Eacherd] The Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergie and Religion (1670).Many times reprinted, this work by the Master of Catherine Hall, Cambridge, bore a date of August8, 1670, although it was entered into the Stationers’ Register on June 29, 1670; SR II, 413.
17. Barnabus Oley, “The Publisher to the Reader,” A Priest to the Temple, second ed. (1671),sig. A5v.
Church controversy, and were once again becoming lax; the politicalstruggles over nonconformity and the broader comprehension proposalsas well as fears about the King’s commitment to a broader toleration,perhaps even of Catholics, smacked to the High Church Oley of back-sliding. Addressing an audience of ministers and potential ministers,Oley joined their moral reform to the movement of the Laudian pre-Civil War programs. The figure to whom they should turn for inspirationwould be the pastor described by George Herbert, an emblem of thathalcyon moment that had been so rudely destroyed by “Schism, Factionand Jealousie” (sig. A6). In language relevant to the problems of noncon-formity in the Restoration, Oley stressed again and again that ministers,Nonconformists especially, ought to “conform to that Holy Characterdelineated in the Book” (sig. A6v, emphasis mine). Oley also turned hiseye to the Nonconformists, speaking to his “Non-Conforming Brethren;Both, to those that are out of Parochial Cures, and to those that havingBenefices, Conform with duplicity of mind” (sig. A7v). Oley urgedthem to “come in with speed” (sig. A8) to the Church to “conform to thatIdaea of a Clerk, which the Noble Holy Herbert hath pourtraied in thisBook” (sig. A7v, emphasis mine).
The ideological drama in which Herbert played a role in consolidatingRestoration Anglican orthodoxy would thus have many components.Oley’s was commemorative, monumental, the search for a figurethrough which to do the work of memory and inspire cohesion to anewly disciplined and uniform Church. Another tactic was in the realmof history writing. Herbert’s service in creating Anglican political mem-ory is taken a step farther by the royal chronicler William Howell, inanother early Restoration attempt to recover an unbroken tradition forthe Anglican church. The myth of “restoration” depended upon findingcontinuity, and that meant the construction of a narrative whole. In hisnarrative of the reformation of religion Howell printed a long quotationfrom Herbert’s “Church Militant” while narrating the history of theCouncil of Nicaea, an event that inaugurated the Church’s control overheresy. Nicaea was an inflammatory topic in the Restoration conflictover ceremonial uniformity, providing powerful precedent of the state’sright to ally with the Church to decide orthodoxy, and it became a short-hand term to justify the right of the state to mandate religious practice;Andrew Marvell would devote a good portion of his A Short HistoricalEssay Concerning General Councils (1676) to disputing the Council ofNicaea, and his publisher was thrown into jail for putting it into print.
Herbert’s lines which praise “How deare to me, O God, thy counselsare!” (“Church Militant,” l. 47, emphasis mine) Howell interprets as ajustification of “Councils.” It is true that Constantine was a figure inHerbert’s poem; but there he was the father of the British Church, thetemporal figure who brought Christianity to Empire (ll. 90–96). InHowell’s “restoring” narrative, however, Constantine is praised as thefigure overseeing the Nicene Council, whose achievement was to defineheresy in Arianism and to institute persecution from within Christianity.18
Howell’s 1661 history, An Institution of General History Being a Compleatbody thereof, from the beginning of the World to the Monarchy of Constantinethe Great, was a volume of great success, translated into Latin, andexpanded through the seventeenth century.19 Thus Herbert’s poemsupplied precedent for a persecuting church in the construction ofAnglicanism following 1660.
i i i
The greatest artificer to shape Herbert as an Anglican icon was IzaakWalton whose Life of Herbert appeared in 1670. Walton is one of theinventors of the genre of modern literary biography. His rise fromhumble origins as an unknown linen draper, without the facility in Latinand other languages taken for granted by his subjects, is a remarkablestory. In his self-avowed “labor of love,” Walton fashioned Herbert inthe image of his ideal minister for a “Restored” Anglican Church.Walton shapes the future through an appeal to the past, as does any literarybiographer, by selecting some aspects of Herbert’s life and suppressingothers. Herbert had played a role in Walton’s earlier work, The CompleteAngler (1653). There Walton invoked the genial spirit of his patron saintby quoting in full Herbert’s “Vertue” to illustrate the pleasures of
18. On the controversies over Constantine’s “achievements” as a topic for dispute withinRestoration ecclesiological struggle, see Richard Baxter, The True History of Councils (1682),pp. 128–40. In A Short Historical Essay Touching General Councils, Creeds, and Impositions in Mattersof Religions (1676), in The Complete Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, ed. Annabel Patterson (NewYork, 1966), IV, 104, Marvell wrote that Constantine “produced a pestilence,” that is, the riseof bishops. See also Gary De Krey, “Reformation in the Restoration Crisis, 1679–1682,” inHamilton and Strier, pp. 242–44; and Mark Goldie, “Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism,”in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner(Cambridge, Eng., 1993), pp. 221–22.
19. Howell’s An Institution of General History (1661), cited in John Shawcross, “An Allusionto ‘The Church Militant,’” George Herbert Journal 6 (1983), 49.
meadows and flowers.20 The Life of George Herbert would be, according toWalton, “writ, chiefly to please my self: but not without some respect toposterity; for though he was not a man that the next age can forget; yet,many of his particular acts and vertues might have been neglected, orlost, if I had not collected and presented them to the Imitation ofthose that shall succeed us.”21 Under the guise of writing for personaluse, Walton in his very posture as a private man will create a work thatcelebrates the virtues of privacy, domestic piety, and retreat; yetWalton also turns an eye to the present, to the outward polemical con-text, to a public, as well as to the future he hopes to shape out of anorthodox tradition. His is to be, explicitly, a hagiography, and has beencalled by the modern biographer of Herbert “a classic of Christianliterature.”22
Walton’s biography did not explicitly take up the ecclesiological issuesof conformity in the Restoration, as did Howell’s history. Walton’sHerbert was ideologically coded in another way. The timing of The Lifeof Herbert could not have been more politically acute. It appeared at avital moment in the history of official legislation against Dissenters, justafter the passage of the harsh Second Conventicle Act (April 12, 1670).While Charles was signing his Secret Treaty at Dover on May 22, 1670,High Church Anglicans were tightening their grip on Conformity. TheLife probably appeared in early May, entered into the Stationers’ Registeron May 12.23 The political context of Walton’s publication within thehistory of debates over Restoration Anglican persecution has not beenadequately understood, and I put Walton’s publication in that context tocomprehend the ways that Dissent pressed the Anglican orthodoxy toclarify and to defend its ideologies of exclusion.24 Walton’s nostalgia;his representation of the simple muted tones of humble nobility in his
20. The Compleat Angler, ed. Jonquil Bevan (Oxford, 1967), pp. 111–12, 259–60.21. Izaak Walton, The Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George
Herbert (1670), sig. A6.22. Amy Charles, A Life of George Herbert (Ithaca, 1977), p. 201.23. SR II, 412. David Novarr, “The Publication of the Life of Herbert,” Appendix D, in The
Making of Walton’s “Lives” (Ithaca, 1958), p. 511.24. Paul Stanwood’s biography, Izaak Walton (New York, 1998), sees the Lives’ ideological
work; and Clayton D. Lein explores Walton’s anti-Puritanism in “Art and Structure in Walton’sLife of Mr. George Herbert,” University of Toronto Quarterly 46:2 (1976/1977), 162–76. See alsoRichard Wendorf, “ ‘Visible Rhetorick’: Izaak Walton and Iconic Biography,” Modern Philology85 (1985), 269–91; and Wendorf, The Elements of Life: Biography and Portrait-Painting in Stuart andGeorgian England (Oxford, 1990); and Novarr.
Life of Herbert; his character of a man of moderation and easy sociability,all harmonized in a new image for the ministry within a uniform Churchallied with the state. Paul Stanwood rightly stresses Walton’s desire to“exalt the church and those persons, often well born and aristocratic,who serve it professionally,” highlighting the focus on training andreforming a clergy after a time of ecclesiastical upheaval.25 This polemicalaspect of Walton’s achievement has a harder edge, however, sharpenedby political controversies over Dissent, specifically over the passage ofnew legislation penalizing Dissenters. This political context has goneunnoticed in Herbert and Walton scholarship, in part because the genialpastoral images have been naturalized within the historiography ofAnglicanism: Walton’s self-portrait and his literary profiles are immenselyappealing, and Walton made them into bestsellers to boot. These arenonetheless images aimed to respond to, and to resolve with finality,the central political conflict of the Restoration period, and it is to thatcontext I wish to turn.
The lapsing of the First Conventicle Act on March 1, 1669 lefthard-line advocates of Uniformity in search of tighter measures. Underthe leadership of Archbishop Sheldon, who authorized the printing ofWalton’s Life, a renewed campaign of political repression againstDissenters was launched by supporters of the Anglican church in 1669,responding to the boldness of Nonconformists after the fall of Clarendonand the lapsing of the Conventicle Act. Samuel Parker, one of Sheldon’schaplains, soon raised to the bishopric of Oxford, shot the first volley inthis onslaught with his Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, a pamphlet thatcoincided with the assembly of Parliament that October, and that waslicensed by Parker himself on September 23, 1669.26 Writing at Shel-don’s request, Parker defended with vitriol the need for ecclesiasticalsovereignty over consciences in matters of religion, and with poisonousraillery insisted that the civil magistrate could legislate matters of out-ward religion. With his scabrous style Parker could not have aimed towin converts, but rather sought to harden the resolve of those professingloyalty to the Restored Anglican Church, to shore up support againstDissenters among the orthodox. It was a crucial moment for developinga strong front in defense of the Church. In the spring of 1669 the firstConventicle Act of 1669 had lapsed, and parliamentary debates
25. Stanwood, Izaak Walton, pp. 43–44.26. SR II, 405. Spurr, Restoration Church, pp. 57–58.
beginning in the autumn session of that year, all the way through to theculmination of the Second Conventicle Act in April 1670, focused onthe question of Dissent. During that period, while bills were introducedin both Houses against conventicles, a pamphlet war progressed betweendefenders of Anglican persecution and those defending Dissent, includ-ing the Independent John Owen, Truth and Innocency Vindicated (1669);and Anglicans Simon Patrick, A Continuation of the Friendly Debate(1669); Roger L’Estrange in Toleration Discussed (1670); and WilliamAssheton, prebendary of York, with Toleration Disapproved and Condemned(1670), among others. In the streets civil unrest about the impendinglegislation kept parliamentary moderates in favor of delaying the passageof the Bill until softer measures or compromise could be found.27 InMarch, Sir Edward Harley reported to his wife from Westminster itspassage in Commons “to the grief of my soul.”28 On April 12, 1670,Parliament finally passed a bill calling for sharper penalties with theSecond Conventicle Act, after which time the government adjourned,even as the pamphlet war and civil unrest went on unabated.
The Act consolidated the relationship between church and stateby considering nonconformity as a seditious conspiracy; it stiffenedpenalties against Dissenters, empowering a single justice of the peace(formerly two justices were called for) to take action punishing Non-conformists; judges who knowingly failed to take action were to be fined£100; and it rewarded informers with a portion of the levy assessed uponthe convicted Dissenters; further, it continued the judicial short-cuts of theoriginal Act in providing that “the mere recording of the offence by thejustice would be ‘taken and adjudged a full and perfect condition.’”29
This bill was attacked for putting an arbitrary power into the hands of asingle magistrate; Andrew Marvell called it “the quintessence of arbitrarymalice,” and described the King’s rare attendance of Parliament to seethe Bill through (“The King has ever since continued his Session amongthem, and says it is better than going to a Play”) in a letter to William
27. C. E. Whiting, Studies in English Puritanism from the Restoration to the Revolution, 1660–1688(New York, 1931), pp. 497–506; De Krey, pp. 107–15.
28. Sir Edward Harley to his wife from Westminster, March 12, 1669/1670, Historical Manu-scripts Commission, Fourteenth Report. Manuscripts of his Grace the Duke of Portland (London,1894), III, 313.
29. Douglas R. Lacey, Dissent and Parliamentary Politics in England, 1661–1689: A Study in thePerpetuation and Tempering of Parliamentarianism (New Brunswick, 1969), p. 61, citing Statutes, V,648–51.
Popple on April 14, two days after the Act was passed. Marvell echoedthe shock of Dissenters but also saw the political implications of theentire program of which the Bill was a part, which included a proviso(not passed) of restoring to the King “all civil or eclesiastical [sic] Prerogativeswhich his Ancestors had enjoyed at any Time since the Conquest.”Commented the partisan Marvell: “There was never so compendious aPiece of absolute universal Tyranny.”30
The debates over the Act within Parliament were amplified by a loudpolemical campaign launched by high authority from within the Church.The period of 1669–1670 had brought about a perceptible turn towardpolitical repression instigated from Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop ofCanterbury, at the top level of the hierarchy, reaching downwards.Sheldon ordered his bishops to investigate illegal religious worship intheir dioceses and to tighten discipline within the Church upon laxor sectarian worship. He sent further letters to his bishops urging theimportance of suppressing illegal worship in the conventicles and toalign with civil magistrates in their efforts.31 The Act, which was to gointo effect May 15, aroused Nonconformist resistance across thecountry, and searches for weapons became regular in London as part ofheightened security after Dissenters thronged into the city.32
Bishop Parker’s opposition served the official campaign to defendconformity by heightened repression of Dissent. Another was the tamer,moderate portrait of Anglican virtue and its appeal to a legitimate ancestry,the image enshrined as the Anglican worthy from the pen of IzaakWalton. Unlike Parker’s satire, Walton’s Life of Herbert was a social andpolitical document that resisted direct confrontation. The book pre-sented an image of Anglican conviviality, moderation and an unchal-lenged ministry: not at all what the Anglican hierarchs were themselvesexperiencing in their discipline and politics in the Restoration. Celebrat-ing the humble virtues of practical ministry, Walton found in Herbertthose qualities of social harmony rather than an ardent religiosity,
30. Andrew Marvell, Letters to William Popple, in The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell,ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1971), II, 314, 317. See also John Spurr, p. 59; RichardAshcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, 1986),pp. 26–28.
31. See Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, p. 26. Among this group were Sheldon, Sancroft,Parker, and L’Estrange. See also Keith Feiling, History of the Tory Party, 1640–1714 (Oxford, 1924),p. 136.
32. Richard Greaves, Enemies Under his Feet: Radicals and Nonconformists in Britain, 1664–1677(Stanford, 1990), p. 203.
polemicism, scholarship, or zeal. Herbert, like Walton’s text, was abovethe narrow factionalism and polemic: recoiling from issues of power,refusing to engage in political conflict, Herbert nobly led a life ofpeaceful retreat. Like the cultural world represented in The CompleatAngler, Walton’s Herbert offered an instance of pastoral traditionalism,and the pun on “Angler” and “Anglicanism,” hinted at the consistentideological program in Walton’s writing career: a refutation of the ethosof Puritanism of the 1640s and 1650s and a search for community basedon the authority of shared institutions.33 Walton was lucky that Herbertdid not survive to take sides in the ecclesiological revolutions of the1640s. As current scholarship on Herbert is unearthing his Puritan lean-ings, and as moderate and lay Anglicans during the 1630s are understoodin a more complex way, Walton’s Herbert gains visibility as a polemicalconstruction.34 A universal type, a remnant of a finer, more harmoniousmoment when the English church could be remembered with the patinaof historical hindsight (a patina that current scholars in the history of reli-gion in the 1630s are currently stripping), Herbert becomes the idealcountry minister, and will, by the fiat of Walton’s pen, be pattern for anew generation of orthodox ministers.
Along with his aim to inculcate virtue in the restored Anglican ministry,Walton is at pains to place Herbert squarely within an Anglican frame-work, far from Puritan associations. As Joseph Summers remarks, “Walton’s
33. On Walton’s Complete Angler as an ideological document, see Steven N. Zwicker, Linesof Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca, 1993), pp. 64–75. Such ideo-logical codings were endlessly open to recoding, however. Nigel Smith has explored howWalton’s Angler was appropriated by the Nonconformist and radical Richard Franck in theRestoration in “Oliver Cromwell’s Angler,” The Seventeenth Century 8 (1993), 51–65.
34. Here I do not consider the theology of Herbert, which has been the focus of much recentHerbert scholarship, but his afterlife in the construction of Anglican ecclesiology. Attention tothe theology of Herbert will reveal, however, that the later Nonconformists were extending hisradical doctrine of the spirit, responding to his emphasis on pastoral preaching, and on the cen-trality of the Bible, as outlined by Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in GeorgeHerbert’s Poetry (Chicago, 1983). Later Anglicans were responding to his criticism of schism, andhis attitude toward uniformity and order of worship. See G. E. Veith, Jr., “The Religious Warsin George Herbert Criticism: Reinterpreting Seventeenth-Century Anglicanism,” George HerbertJournal 11 (1988), 18; see also Christina Malcomson, Heart-Work: George Herbert and the ProtestantEthic (Stanford, 1999), pp. 17–26, which explores the impact of the circle of Puritans in hispatrons and in his family; and Dennis Doerksen, Conforming to the Word: Herbert, Donne, and theEnglish Church before Laud (Lewisburg, 1997). On the complexities of moderate Civil War Angli-canism, see Judith Maltby, “From The Temple to Synagogue: ‘Old’ Conformity in the 1640s–1650sand the Case of Christopher Harvey,” in Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, ed. PeterLake and Michael Questier (Suffolk, 2000), pp. 88–120.
image of Herbert seems to move through a pastoral England remotefrom the realities of early seventeenth-century England.”35 That glowingview was no simple nostalgia, however; it was a calculated political effortto arrange the past to suit the present. For instance, Walton excised theidentity of a major source for his work. Although he relied on the parli-amentary radical Arthur Woodnoth for information about Herbert’slife, Walton conveniently never credited his source. Woodnoth was fre-quently at Little Gidding, and Herbert entrusted Woodnoth to overseethe reconstruction of the Leighton chapel; it was Woodnoth who wasthe executor of Herbert’s will (Ferrar took over the literary executor-ship, although Woodnoth was involved in the publication of Herbert’stranslations36). Woodnoth, who lived until 1651, had a later career asparliamentarian, serving Sir John Danvers, who would become a leadingregicide. Danvers was Herbert’s stepfather; Sir Robert Harley, a Pres-byterian radical, was also Herbert’s relation by marriage and was said tobe on excellent terms with his cousin George. Leaving out Herbert’sunorthodox associates and relations, Walton suppresses a more militantPuritan background than an Anglican biography could allow.37
In Walton’s Life, Herbert was a brilliant, aspiring courtier; the glitter-ing Cambridge University Orator who charmed a King; he had aspiredto the courtly position of Secretary of State, and learned the relevantlanguages for a diplomatic post under James (p. 40). This was a Herbertwho took pleasure in courtly company, and frequently removed fromCambridge to grace courtly circles (pp. 40–41); the royal gift of a sine-cure is amplified by comparison to Elizabeth’s bestowal of the same poston Sir Philip Sidney (p. 40). Even after his initial turn to the Church,Herbert could in no wise be mistaken for a Puritan, as he still “enjoy’dhis gentile humour for Cloaths, and Court-like Company” (p. 40).Herbert’s brief time in Parliament is not of interest to Walton. Rather,Herbert’s court hopes are the focus, and the court Walton sees as theproper aspiration of a worldly nobleman; it was simply the death of Jamesalong with two powerful patrons that put an end to Herbert’s rise. InDavid Novarr’s summary Walton’s aim in highlighting Herbert’s courtly
35. Joseph H. Summers, George Herbert: His Religion and Art (London, 1945), p. 2.36. Charles, p. 189.37. On Woodnoth, see Novarr, pp. 305–08; 331–35; 513–15; Herbert’s will appointing
Woodnoth as Executor is reprinted in F. E. Hutchinson, Works, p. 382; and Charles, Life, pp. 168–71, 178–79; Summers, George Herbert, pp. 28–33, is sensitive to Walton’s omissions and outlinesHerbert’s associations.
associations was “an illustration of the thesis that the Church was a pro-fession not below the dignity of men of talent and education andfamily.”38 Scholars have investigated Herbert’s turn from the court,however, and have shown that decision to be far more complex thanthis. Walton’s possible distortion of the facts in order to achieve hisemphasis should also tell us about the perceptions of the relationbetween church and state that Walton’s Lives attempted to frame.Walton gives a powerful resolution to Herbert’s struggle over whetherto accept the position at Bemerton by making Archbishop Laud himselfresponsible for the positive decision: “the Earl [of Pembroke] acquaintedDr. Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury, with his Kinsmans irresolution.And the Bishop did the next day so convince Mr. Herbert, That the refusalof it was a sin” (p. 59). As it happened, Laud never intervened in a mannersuch as this. The portrait makes Herbert’s decision to enter the ministryseem a result of obedience as much as personal intention.39 This wouldhave been conformity at its best: with hindsight, Walton gives that act ofobedience as utterly vindicated.
Through his portrait of Herbert’s early career, Walton asked his read-ers to consider not only that the nobly born might enter the ministry butthat the ministry was another means of achieving the goal of politicaladvancement. Ambitions of the cloth and the robe in the restored Angli-can Church could amount to the same thing. Although Walton presentsHerbert’s eagerness to take the ordination (p. 70), the fact is that Herbertwaited to be ordained priest quite a time, delaying from the moment ofhis presentation in April until September 19. There were several occa-sions on which Herbert could have been ordained in the interveningmonths, but Herbert’s delay may be understood by modern scholars tosignify the intensity of his inner indecision and turmoil about such adecision. In the absence of his ordination, Herbert was exempt from theoffices of administering the Sacrament or giving absolution.40 NicholasFerrar interprets his reluctance to be ordained as a sign of his greaterpiety. In “The Printer to the Reader,” he writes, “As for worldly matters,his love and esteem to them saw so little, as no man can more ambitiously
38. Novarr, p. 313.39. F. E. Hutchinson, Works, p. xxiv; and Charles, p. 147, doubt Walton’s anecdote about
Laud’s alleged intervention. Summers, p. 35, points out that Herbert’s closest associates at thistime were opposed to Laud, and explains Herbert’s withdrawal from a political career because ofhis convictions, including opposition to Charles’s war policy, pp. 41–42.
seek, than he did earnestly endeavour the resignation of an EcclesiasticalDignity, which he was a professor of. But God permitted not theaccomplishment of this desire, having ordained him his instrument forre-edifying of the Church belonging thereunto.”41
Walton’s Life also shows Herbert the conforming minister, an abledefender of the liturgy and ceremonies of the Established Church. Hissermons were lessons in orthodox adherence: Herbert would “explainthe reasons for all the other Collects and Responses in our Service; and,made it appear to [his congregation], that the whole Service of the Church,was a reasonable, and therefore an acceptable Sacrifice to God” (pp. 73–74). A bulky section of the Life recounts Herbert’s liturgical practices asa minister, specifically the details of his adoption of the order of serviceas dictated by the Restored Book of Common Prayer (pp. 74–85). Thisdefense of the particulars takes over ten pages, as Walton meticulouslylists how Herbert in his service conducted the liturgy, order, and theorthodox ceremonial practices of the Anglican service, including whento say the Lord’s Prayer and the order of specific set prayers; to bow; tostand; to repeat the Creeds; to celebrate Holy Days, including March 25,and Christmas, all matters of ceremonial controversy, and often thereasons for the godly to refuse conformity. All were concerns in Resto-ration England over the question of uniformity of worship.
Tiny omissions tell us about Walton’s desire to represent the EstablishedChurch as allied to worldly authority. For instance, Walton deletes ele-ments from the account of Nicholas Ferrar that were found in the“Printer to the Reader” in the 1633 The Temple and which survived inthe Restoration editions of the volume. In his preface Ferrar had praisedHerbert’s supreme attachment to the Bible as the sole authority: “NextGod, he loved that which God himself hath magnified above all things,that is, his Word: so as he hath been heard to make solemne protestation,that he would not part with one leaf thereof for the whole world, if itwere offered him in exchange.”42 Such scriptural attachment, over allothers, and especially over attachment to the English Church, was notfound in Walton’s Anglican Life; it would smack of the Dissenters’commitment to the Word over the Established Church. That Herbert’s
41. George Herbert, The Temple (1679), sig. A9.42. George Herbert, The Temple (1633), sig. ¶ 2v. The Temple (1667) prints Ferrar’s “The
Printer to the Reader” immediately following the title-page, which includes this passage. In the1674 edition, Ferrar’s note is further back in the volume, after the title-page and after two addedprefatory poems. See B. Oley, sigs. C4–C4v.
own ceremonialism was not as precise as the Laudians, and later, as theorthodox would like, is nowhere mentioned, if it was at all known toWalton: Herbert’s church’s communion table, for example, served alsoas his altar, and it was not, in Herbert’s day, yet raised and railed.43
Walton’s Life of Herbert was published while the author was absentfrom London, but if it did not have the author’s final sanction, it none-theless bore an impressive imprimatur signed by Samuel Parker anddated April 21, 1670.44 That imprimatur (see fig. 5) bore not only the
43. Herbert’s successor, Thomas Laurence, apparently made the Laudian innovations of theraising of the communion table and its transformation into an altar by the addition of railings; theimplication is that Herbert’s own altar was not so high church; see Charles, p. 228.
44. On the publication history of Life and Lives, see David Novarr, “The Publication of theLife of Herbert,” Appendix D, in The Making of Walton’s Lives, pp. 510–12, which argues the Lifewas printed before The Lives, overturning the order in John Butt, “A Bibliography of IzaakWalton’s Lives,” Oxford Bibliographical Society Proceedings and Papers, 2 (pt. iv, 1930), 334–35.
Fig. 5: Imprimatur, Izaak Walton, Life of Mr. George Herbert (1670). Repro-duced by kind permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library
name of Samuel Parker, but also adorned that name with flattering super-latives, designating Parker’s role within the structure of High Churchecclesiastical patronage, authorizing Parker as a minion to Archbishopof Canterbury, Gilbert Sheldon: “Reverendissime in Christo Patri ac Dom-ino, Domino Gilberto Achi-ep: Cantuar: a Sac: Domest.” The authorizingname of Sheldon boasts the book won approval from the highest officeof ecclesiastical patronage, exceeding the requirement a printer be given.
This wording of the imprint is unusual, and if we look further, we seehow it denotes the disarray in licensing practices within the printingindustry that coincided with the period of civil unrest and the parliamen-tary debates over uniformity in 1669–1670. King and court were urgingstricter control because of the outpouring of material critical of the gov-ernmental authorities during the spring of 1670. The Stationers’ Companywas faulted for failing to maintain successful surveillance over the print-ing trade as outlined in the 1662 Printing Ordinance, which itself hadbeen a step backward for the Stationers’ Company’s assault on RoyalPrerogative. As Cyprian Blagden, the historian of the Company, puts it,“the clock was put firmly back to 1637.”45 The Company was in 1669ordered by the Crown to adopt new by-laws for further control of thepress, especially regarding unlicensed (often sectarian) publication, orbe threatened with the forfeiture of their Charter which he had issuedin 1667. Laws were adopted in August 1671 that required the printingof the License and Licenser’s name, as well as the printer’s name, beattached to every book, as well as harsher control of seditious and libel-ous works. These laws would not go into effect until 1675, since theStationers’ Company was for a long time unwilling to cooperate withL’Estrange and the government.46 Further, during the spring of 1670, theecclesiastical authorities had also taken an unusually active part in licensingbooks, by an authority that challenged the proper channels of theStationers’ Company’s process of regulation. Parker and others designated
45. Cyprian Blagden, The Stationers’ Company: A History, 1403–1959 (Cambridge, Mass., 1960),p. 148.
46. Fredrick S. Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, 1476–1776 (Urbana, 1952), pp. 257–59.The Printing Act of 1662, also called the “Licensing Act,” sought to prevent abuses in the pressand was particularly aimed against seditious books. In August 1670 legal proceedings, threatenedin 1664, were begun, by order in council, to require the Company to evince by what authority—quo warranto—it acted, “or failed to act, in suppressing libels and in clearing up the Law Patentquarret with Atkins and Streater,” according to Blagden, pp. 154–55. The Stationers’ CompanyCharter would have been forfeit, if it had not been for the intervention of Sir Roger L’Estrange,to assure the Government of more effective control.
by the bishops were issuing licenses which overrode the patent-rightsof others, creating a separate channel of authority in publishing comingfrom Sheldon. In May the irregularities were so significant thatL’Estrange, the Surveyor of the Press, protested to the King to rescindthese alternate authorities.47
The imprimatur, then, warrants authority from the Church hierarchyrather than from the Company of Stationers. In offering the superlativetitle of the ecclesiastical patron who permitted the book’s entrance intothe world, Walton’s book performs the act of courtly obeisance to apatron appropriate to a petitioning author. The imprimatur (see fig. 5)has the additional character of decorated ornamental border, a typo-graphical adornment also found in the Dedicatory verses of the 1674edition. Walton probably had no hand in the arrangement of this page;the printers were likely responsible. Highlighting Sheldon’s approvalrather than the ordinary Stationers’ Company licensers, their attention tothis special imprint helps to set this work within its particular ideologicalcontext as an arm of the Sheldon ideological machine to institute disci-pline in the Church. With the exception of Walton’s 1670 Lives, there isno comparable printed imprimatur in the succeeding volumes of The Lifeof Herbert. Walton did acknowledge Sheldon as the spur to his compositionof the Life of Hooker, and in his preface to the 1670 Lives also alluded toSheldon’s patronage and encouragement.
Walton’s Herbert is a model of piety and compassionate ministry. Thedetails outlined here are not meant to detract from that generous portraitof a figure worthy of imitation, an image to inspire ever new generationsof Anglican ministers. That Walton’s Life participated in the controver-sies in his own day over ceremonies and uniformity should enrich thatportrait, however, since the adoption of a legacy ought to be achievedwith critical evaluation of the hagiographic sources; perhaps a moreinclusive Anglican Church would have prevented the persecutions ofthe Restoration period. Along with the contemporaneous rewriting ofthe biography of Richard Hooker, the Anglicanization of Herbert was acampaign in the realm of memory: a shaping of history of the pre-CivilWar Church, and a search for legitimacy through ancestral invocation.48
Walton’s four lives were wrapped up into a single volume available by
47. George Kitchin, Sir Roger L’Estrange (London, 1913; rpt. New York, 1971), pp. 185–86.48. On Hooker, see Frederic E. Pamp, “Walton’s Redaction of Hooker,” Church History 17
June 1670. At that particular moment a better image could not have beenfound to unite Anglicans in their commitment to a uniform Church.Herbert represented an irenic, unbroken history linked to the pre-CivilWar Church, emblem of a moderate who had been adverse to contro-versy, whose life and writings embodied the best of Anglican piety andpractice. As the Church sought to organize itself anew, Herbert was akey figure through which to unify ministerial allegiance.
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Just as the orthodox celebrated their ecclesiology in Herbert’s name,so Nonconformists used him to justify the opposite: Herbert becamethe locus classicus for defending resistance to state-sponsored outwardpractices. Nonconformists took Herbert’s poetics as a model for theirpoetry of devotion, laying claim through him to an alternate set of literaryvalues to those of Restoration public poetry. In the rendition offeredby the ousted minister John Bryan, for instance, Herbert was made topresent the opposite ecclesiological view to Anglican Uniformity. Forthe nonconforming Bryan, Herbert’s temple referred to that communionauthorized by God, not by the Anglican church. Bearing the radical titleof The Nonsuch Habitation: Or, Dwelling with God, Bryan’s collection ofsermons, listed in the February 1669–1670 Term Catalogue, with a prefaceby Richard Baxter, offered a disestablished Church. Dwelling with Godmeant not inside the bricks, stone or mortar of a visible church, butwithin that incomparable body designed by God. Bryan, a Presbyterianwho during the Civil War period held a parliamentary appointment toTrinity Church, Coventry, and who was ejected in 1662, preachednonetheless after his exclusion and educated a generation of youngerDissenters. In 1670 he published his volume of eight sermons which usedHerbert’s poetry as the template to authorize unorthodox liturgical prac-tice, especially to justify worship in any physical location, defending thepractice adopted by Nonconformists who refused to participate insidethe walls of Anglican parish churches. Bryan never came into the AnglicanChurch; after a period of illicit preaching, he received a formal licensefor his Presbyterian congregation in 1672.
Although the title, Nonsuch Habitation, boldly asserted that one mightdwell with God in a truer space than that of the official church, theprinted title-page of 1670 gives a sanitized title: Dwelling with God, theInterest and Duty of Believers. In Opposition To the Complemental, Heartless,
and Reserved Religion of the Hypocrite.49 It was published by the prestigiousprinter James Allestry, who also brought out John Milton’s History ofBritain that same year. Sermonizing on Psalm 91, Bryan’s work maintainsan anti-orthodox stance, vaunting that the Lord (not a Temple) is thebeliever’s true habitation. His sermons stress that externals of worship,including place and ceremony, were not essential to true worship. In thiscollection Bryan used Herbert as a measure of virtue, quoting Herbert’spoem “The Foil” in its entirety, in an appeal to “The Spheer of Virtue.”50
That image of virtue is a rod with which to condemn the spiritualbankruptcy of the Restoration church, as Bryan specifically brands thosewho, “having stifled Conscience, give themselves over to work alluncleanness, with greediness; [those who] live, as if they had no God toserve, no soul to save, or as if their souls served only, as the souls ofSwine, to keep their Bodies from putrifying” (p. 173).
If Herbert is powerful as an image for this Nonconformist to pitch amoral reform in the name of virtue, however, his poetry also authorizesa purified form of devotion. Bryan’s tract is a defense of worship outsidethe orthodox church. The sermons recreate a “beauty of holiness,” butonly within the realm of the spirit: spatially, Bryan moves away frompublic ceremony and into the compass of the domestic household andthe individual heart. Baptism alone will suffice for membership in theKingdom of Christ (p. 291): sacrifice is simply that offered in prayer,which comes to replace formal ceremonies. As Bryan boasts an internalizedreligion stripped of outward show, he defines a church communion as“signifyed by this dwelling of the Spirit in Believers” (p. 68). Godlinessis not ceremonial performance: “Nor in a form of Godliness, ‘tis notthe outward profession of the true Religion, nor frequent use of holyOrdinances, or religious exercises, publick, private, secret, that hath anymore power to bring rest and quiet to the soul, than Elisha’s staff laidupon the dead Childes face, had to bring heat or life into it” (pp. 103–04). Herbert’s poetry readily justified such radical anti-institutionalismand anti-ceremonialism. This is the Herbert who thought and wrotehis compressed lyrics while wrestling with the meaning of outwardceremony; who loved music, but who loved the word of God most of
49. The work has a tantalizing publication history; it bears the imprimatur of March 9, 1668–1689; and is nowhere in the Stationers’ Register. It is listed in the Term Catalogue for February17, 1670, and the work has 1670 on its title-page. Why so long between the imprimatur and thepublication? When did the title fall off?
all; the Herbert who earnestly sought God’s presence through prayer;the Herbert who struggled to feel the movements of the Spiritwithin, the experimental Herbert.51 In his sermons Bryan intriguinglyadopts and edits this Herbert in his treatment of such controversialmatters as the Sacrament, prayer, ornamentation, and worship within achurch. Nowhere does Bryan call Herbert’s volume of poetry The Temple;it is always “The Church.”
High on the agenda for Restoration Nonconformists—as it was forpre-Civil War Puritans—was the question not simply of theology, but ofritual. How did the Sacrament signify communion with God? How wasthe Lord’s Supper to be observed? What were the tokens of mediation?Could those tokens be coerced? Bryan dissents from orthodox inter-pretation of such questions of mediation in his understanding of theSacrament, and the texts of Herbert are what validate his interpretation.Herbert’s poem on the Lord’s Supper, “The Banquet,” Bryan takes as aliteral feast upon a table, not as a transaction whereby Christ is madeactually present (“In a cup / Sweetly he doth meet my taste”), but aharbinger of things to come. Bryan’s hermeneutic strategy is to empha-size absence rather than presence, and to forge an allegory of feasting toproject a millennial bounty that is yet to come, imaging a great house-hold in which God will provide for the faithful in heaven or after theSecond Coming: “Here is therefore no such provision of food, no suchsumptuous fair in any House as this. Solomon’s, so much admired, wasas Husks; yea, and stark hunger compared to this; and each of theHoushold fares alike” (Dwelling, p. 36). Herbert’s poetry is the sign ofsuch transvaluation of the here and now into a millennial future.
Much as the Bridegroom in Canticles was taken to be Christ the Loverin devotional writing, the feast here is a token of a future bounty, neithera commemoration of the blood and body of Christ nor a mystical parti-cipation in the communion thereof. Instead, when Bryan approves ofHerbert’s “The Banquet,” he silently emends it, theologically challeng-ing the propitiatory nature of the sacrifice, as he leaves out Herbert’slines that “God took blood, and needs would be / Spilt with me” as wellas leaving out the reference to the ceremonial object of the cup (Dwelling,pp. 34–35). As Bryan omits these references, he interprets the doctrine ofeucharistic grace more in a Zwinglian than a Calvinist sense, revisingorthodox dogma, interpreted in Reformed theology as commemoration,
51. This is the sense of Herbert presented in Richard Strier, p. 143.
as mandated in the Thirty-first Article of Religion.52 Bryan’s supper ismillennial, based on absence. Although his impulse, like Herbert’s, is tospiritualize the references to food, banquets, rich furniture, and a sump-tuous household, as well as to remove all overtones of sacramentalism andto contrast the physical worldly objects to a higher, immaterial realm withwhich they are compared, he takes that theology a step further and purgesthe present figures in light of a typological narrative of future grace.53
In his millenarian hermeneutic Bryan reads allusions to ceremonies ina typological, rather than in a liturgical, dimension. This is a remarkabledifference from an Anglican reading. To this end, Bryan quotes“Conscience,” “Even-Song,” “Church Music” and “The Odour” toinsist that ceremony is a performance of interior action. The first twostanzas of “The Odour” are quoted, emphasizing the “sweet content” ofwords. His citation of this poem is a rebuke to High Church ritualisticuse of actual incense. Taking up Herbert’s “Church Music,” Bryandefends music with the quotation of the whole of the poem, but hemakes sure to redefine and constrain the interpretation of the poem care-fully: “How infinitely sweeter must that Musick be to the Eares of thisHousehold, which the Organ of the Holy Scripture, the Keys whereofare stricken with the hand of the holy spirit, makes with such strains asthese: Fear thou not, for I am with thee; be not dismayed, for I am thy God, Iwill strengthen thee” (p. 55). The truest instrument is the Holy Scripture.Bryan continues, “This is the Musick that David desired to hear, whichhe calls joy and gladness. Such Musick and Dancing there is to it, in thisHouse every moment, and frequently an expression of spiritual joy andjollity” (p. 56). From Herbert’s “Even-Song” Bryan takes up the momentof bedtime to praise a metaphorical “Bed of Assurance of Divine Love”(p. 41), following a Puritan reading of Song of Songs in spiritualizing the“love” between God and his people, a central theme of Herbert. AfterBryan quotes the whole of Herbert’s “Peace,” he asserts the spiritual
52. On the differences between Zwinglian and Calvinist interpretations of the Eucharist,see Kilian McDonnell, John Calvin, the Church, and the Eucharist (Princeton, 1967), pp. 86–91;B. A. Gerrish, “Sign and Reality: The Lord’s Supper in the Reformed Confessions,” in The OldProtestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage (Chicago, 1982), pp. 118–30; andStephen Mayor, The Lord’s Supper in Early English Dissent (London, 1972), p. xiii.
53. In this interpretation Bryan pushes even further the anticeremonial interpretation of thealtar of the pre-Civil War controversy; e.g., the Puritan Joseph Mede rejected the altar both byhistorical and canonical citation in the The Name Altar, . . . anciently given to the Holy Table (1637),but did not offer a typological interpretation (which one might expect, given his millenarianismgenerally).
superiority of inner worth over outward rewards: “Pleasures, Riches,Honours, under which all the good things of the World are compre-hended, are utterly impotent, altogether insufficient to give the Soul ofMan any Rest” (p. 101).
Bryan thus offers a reading of Herbert which stresses neither Herbertin his church nor Herbert the practicing Anglican minister, but ratherthe spiritual reformation ongoing in Herbert’s poetry, the inwardnessand Puritanism of the sweet singer. The collection features a prefacewritten by Richard Baxter, who reined in the theological radicalism ofthe work, suggesting that when Bryan counseled the worship of God inunorthodox places, his was “not any Fryar-like, fanatical, notion, ofdeification by an indwelling in GOD.”54 These were words to little avail.Bryan’s volume was one of the few books owned by John Bunyan.55
Bryan’s sermons do not portray Herbert the man, but show howHerbert’s poetry mediates God’s word. His use of Herbert shows howappeal to this figure could legitimate Restoration anti-liturgical practice.All in all, his “Nonesuch habitation” contrasts starkly to the externalglories of Anglican worship; as Bryan charges, “This is a living House,other Houses are made of dead materials, Wood and Stone, most ofthem of Clay” (Dwelling, p. 59), surely a radical refutation of the ornate,classical temple and altar represented in Restoration editions of Herbert.
There are, then, at least two Herberts in the Restoration. For manyNonconformists such as John Bryan, Herbert became the symbol ofspiritual purification and devotional striving, where aesthetic joinedwith theological and ecclesiological programs. Like Bryan, many Non-conformist poets undertook a revision of Herbert’s own words to suit aDissenting context. Since at the heart of Nonconformity was a disagree-ment about the nature of mediation, the aesthetic and ecclesiologicalcomponents of Herbert’s legacy are intertwined. The poems in The Templebecame open to an unorthodox construction of its author as the aestheticsof immediacy, mystery, and profound devotion breathed life into a newgeneration of poets in the Restoration period. Not only was Crashawtaking steps to enter The Temple. Herbert’s poetry seemed to inviteall—low, high, women, the poorly educated, and the humble—to enter.
If the historical context of the canonization of Herbert tells us aboutpolitical conflict over Dissent, what can the ways readers were rewriting
54. Richard Baxter, “To the Reader,” in Bryan, sig. A8.55. Hutchinson, Works, p. xliv.
Herbert tell us about their responses to that political conflict? Could read-ing and rewriting Herbert become a kind of political resistance? Howdid battles over interpretation occur over key canonical texts? Whenthey opened Herbert’s text to repeated and varied acts of appropriationby a diverse audience, his adapters promoted a process of usable exchangevalue, a fluid scenario rather than what Bryan calls “dead wood.” Herbert’svalue to later readers is his use value; but the persistence of the name“Herbert” gives his works the status of an objective value, as a relic. Herbert’sname was sanctioned through its authorizing function; but his worksthemselves were taken as open, transcriptions of a story that was larger thanthe single author belonging properly to no one in particular but to God.
To whom did Herbert belong, then? In the Restoration, Herbert’sTemple was published by several different publishers, continuing theassociation with Philemon Stephens by his successor son (1656, 1660,1667), and then R. S. (1674, 1678, 1695). Herbert was to have two moreeditions by 1709. In 1697, when the hymn version of Herbert’s poemswas published, the copyright appears to have been held by R. S. Theeminent Presbyterian publisher Thomas Parkhurst brought out SelectHymns, Taken out of Mr. Herbert’s Temple (1697), and we can assume heheld copyright of that work. Parkhurst had begun publishing theologicalworks in the early 1650s, and by the Restoration had become the majorpublisher of the Nonconformists, most notably of Richard Baxter, andhe brought out most of the hymnals of the Restoration, including thoseof William Barton, Joseph Boyce, Matthew Henry and Samuel Bury. Hewas “the most eminent Presbyterian bookseller,” according to JohnDunton, who apprenticed with him; they later co-published together.56
Herbert’s works may have been legally bound by copyright legislationthat emerged at the end of the seventeenth century, but their adaptationinto hymnal form does not seem to have counted as theft of literaryproperty belonging to the publisher. “Herbert” as a name is not a pro-perty belonging to Herbert, or to the publisher, but will be open andaccessible to all imitators and adapters. The theft is not hidden by theauthor of Select Hymns, Taken out of Mr. Herbert’s Temple who explains:“I hope I shall not be counted a Plagiary seeing I claim nothing here as my own,but what they [i.e. Herbert and others] allow me, viz. a Liberty to Sing and
56. Neil Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in the Later-Seventeenth Century(Athens, 1987), p. 123; Henry Plomer, A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers . . . 1641 to 1667(London, 1907); and A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers . . . 1668–1725 (Oxford, 1922).
use their Hymns, which I was no more able to do in their Metre and Tunes, thanI was able to compose them as they did.”57 Herbert and other divine poetsbelong as much to all as one could say that “meter and tunes” or hymnsbelong to anyone. All that belongs to the creator of this volume is a right,a “liberty to sing”: but this is surely a challenge to a uniform and publicobservance as dictated by state-sponsored orthodoxy.58
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This essay has uneasily balanced three approaches which need to beincluded in a renovated methodology for the history of reception: astudy of the ideological contexts in which the republication of an authorbears meaning, a material history of that republication, and an analysis ofhow a range of readers made sense of a significant literary forbear. Weare only just beginning to understand how major authors are chosen bysuccessors who retroactively construct a legacy from them and how thefacets of publication bear on those constructions. A robust history ofreading needs to include the material as well as the ideological contoursof reception. If we have learned anything, it is that Herbert’s Anglicansainthood cannot be taken for granted. Contemporary Herbert scholarshave focused on theological and political readings of Herbert in thecontext of the first publication of The Temple in 1633, and have askedhow it engaged with the pre-Civil War—some have argued, Laudian—Church.59 If Herbert has not been understood as the later Nonconformists’poet, this is as much because of the refusal to see the Dissenting literarytradition as significant as it is to the success of the ideological work of hisearliest canonizers. Barnabus Oley’s coupling of The Temple with hisSynagogue and Walton’s, his hagiographic Life contributed to reading
57. Select Hymns Taken out of Mr. Herbert’s Temple (1697). Augustan Reprint Society, 98(Los Angeles, 1962), sig. A2.
58. See my analysis of the literary economy of the hymn in Literature and Dissent, pp. 210–42.59. Herbert’s adherence to the Laudian church is a matter of recent scholarly debate; for an
incisive contextualization, see Kathleen Lynch, “George Herbert’s Holy ‘Altar,’ Name andThing,” George Herbert Journal 17:1 (1993), 41–60; and for overviews, see Achsah Guibbory,Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, Eng., 1998), pp. 44–78; and Gene Edward Vieth, Jr., “The Reli-gious Wars in George Herbert Criticism: Reinterpreting Seventeenth-Century Anglicanism,”George Herbert Journal 11:2 (1988), 19–35. Heather Asals in Equivocal Prediction: George Herbert’sWay to God (Toronto, 1981) and Stewart stress the Anglo-Catholic, contra Strier, Love Known,who sees Herbert as anti-ceremonialist.
Herbert within Anglican orthodoxy. Previous scholarship has over-emphasized the Anglican afterlife of Herbert’s poetry, and that is onlyhalf the story; Dissenters made ample use of this forebear.60 Eighteenth-century Dissenters kept Herbert close to their hearts: John Wesley putover forty poems from The Temple into his collections of hymns anddevotional poems, and he published Select Parts of Mr. Herbert’s SacredPoems in 1773.61 The contested legacies of Herbert have never settled thepoet definitively into a theological pigeon-hole.
For writers across a range of theological points of view, Herbert was aconstruction achieved through the medium of print—whether throughtypography, ornament, layout, binding, or the ordering of works withina volume—as well as through the ideological meanings of the words andimages themselves. By asking us to attend to the politics of publicationand politicized publication traces, the “history of the book” has much tooffer in thinking about reception of Herbert. The Temple was in printthrough much of the seventeenth century. From its first appearance in1633, the small duodecimo volume ran to eleven editions by 1695. Thecentury’s shifts in theology, ecclesiology and politics did not leaveHerbert’s Temple unscathed. On the contrary, the republication of thatvolume is a lens through which to view the state of the Church throughthe contours of this turbulent century. The poems of Herbert, like thePrayer Book, evolved as they came to serve the Church in its programof doctrinal and practical conformity. Herbert was a bellwether forecclesiological strife; in the typographic representations of Herbert’spoems may be witnessed the ideological program of uniformity withinthe Anglican Church. But Herbert became a key site of appropriation forthe very reason that his poems offered space to contest Anglican theologyand practice. Citation of Herbert was a place for ideological action, aperformance of “Herbert” that was both the same and different.
OXFORD UNIVERSITY
60. Ray, for the use of Herbert in martyrologies for King Charles; see also Sidney Gottlieb,“A Royalist Rewriting of George Herbert, His Majesties Complaint to his Subjects (1647),” ModernPhilology 89 (1991), 211–24.
61. See F. E. Hutchinson, “John Wesley and George Herbert,” The London Quarterly (August 1936).
