English-literature scholars have long recognized George Herbert’s frequent allusions to the psalms in his early-seventeenth-century poetry, especially in his collection called The Temple. Biblical scholars have long attempted to categorize the Hebrew psalms according to one overarching principle or another. Most discussions of Herbert’s psalmic borrowings are restricted to explication of individual poems, often with reference to the poet’s own psychology, physical health, family, occupations, and sociocultural context. The current study adds another dimension to the dialogue by examining Herbert’s varying degrees of psalmic reference within categories established by biblical scholars. The resulting data make a case for considering Herbert’s sub-collection called “The Church” to be his psalter, offering a particularly intriguing comparison between one of Herbert’s less-commonly-discussed poems and Psalm 82, one of the biblical collection’s most dramatic works.

Since 1633, when The Temple was first published, many notable Christians have testified of their love for George Herbert's poetry. The great nineteenth-century preacher C. H. Spurgeon and his wife would sometimes read Herbert's poetry together on Sunday evenings. Richard Baxter wrote, Herbert speaks to God like one that really believeth a God, and whose business in the world is most with God. C. S. Lewis described Herbert as a man who seemed to me to excel all the authors I had ever read in conveying the very quality of life as we actually live it from moment to moment . . . Regrettably, as the years have passed, Herbert's poetry has been increasingly neglected outside the academy. Many who would love Herbert have never even heard of him. Others feel intimidated by his poetry, fearing that they do not have the education necessary to understand what Herbert has written. In this book, Jimmy Scott Orrick has made the poetry of George Herbert accessible even to those who have had no experience reading poetry. In addition to providing thorough notes for each poem, Orrick also gives basic pointers about how to read poetry. Why not follow C. H. Spurgeon's example and have a page or two of good George Herbert on your Sunday evenings? Those who follow this prescription will be deeply enriched for having spent A Year with George Herbert.

For every day from Advent Sunday to Christmas Day and beyond, the bestselling poet Malcolm Guite chooses a favourite poem from across the Christian spiritual and English literary traditions and offers incisive seasonal reflections on it. A scholar of poetry as well as a renowned poet himself, his knowledge is deep and wide and he offers readers a soul-food feast for Advent. Among the classic writers he includes are: George Herbert, John Donne, Milton, Tennyson,and Christina Rossetti,as well as contemporary poets like Scott Cairns, Luci Shaw, and Grevel Lindop. He also includes a selection of his own highly praised work.

Contains one hundred of the most anthologized poems in the English language, and includes notes, profiles of the authors, and bibliographic information; presented in chronological order with a glossary, and author, title, and first line indexes.

Michael C. Schoenfeldt here offers the first major exploration of the connections between George Herbert's devotional poetry and the social practices and political discourse of his day. Viewing The Temple and The Country Parson as part of the larger "civilizing process" of Western Europe, Schoenfeldt shows how Herbert discovers in the discourses of courtesy and theology a common vocabulary of authority, selfhood, petition, and discipline. Before entering the priesthood, Herbert nourished contacts in court, was elected University Orator at Cambridge, and served in Parliament. In turning to God, Schoenfeldt argues, Herbert did not simply turn away from the secular world but also turned its language, particularly the language of courtesy, into the medium for his lyric worship of God. The confluence of courtesy and spirituality in Herbert's poetry provides a fascinating insight into a society searching for an appropriate discourse of reverence in a time of baffling change. The first five chapters investigate the manifold ways in which Herbert's life and works exemplify the interdependence of social and religious behavior in the English Renaissance. The sixth and final chapter extends this investigation into the nervous eroticism of Herbert's poems. Considering The Temple as well as Herbert's letters, speeches, Latin poems, collections of foreign proverbs, translations, The Country Parson, and less familiar lyrics, Schoenfeldt offers a thorough and detailed reading of Herbert's rich and conflicted corpus. Prayer and Power is not only a bold redefinition of the accomplishment of one of the finest poets of the English Renaissance but also the first sustained study to advance a cultural poetics of the religious lyric.

Contemporary nudge theory points out that people make good choices over issues where they have had past experience of similar circumstances, where there is reliable, substantial, and relevant information about the situation, and where they will get prompt feedback about the effect of their decision. Yet none of these conditions apply to the most vital choice of action facing early modern Protestants: how can they be saved? In George Herbert and the Business of Practical Piety, Ceri Sullivan uses nudge theory to show how practical divinity disregards the doleful conclusions of predestination--that salvation cannot be earned--to supply readers with suggestions on how to prepare to act, regardless of their final destiny. Such texts create cognitive niches to support cheerful, godly thought and action, in a way which is far from being despairing or compulsive. Their nudges were repeatedly put into practice by Herbert's friends, the Ferrars, who tried to form an ideal religious community at Little Gidding. These prescriptions and examples illustrate how George Herbert's The Temple (1633) is a compendium of the techniques of choice architecture. Herbert's poems are full of the humour emerging from a life of faith which is willing to guard high ideals by low cunning, stooping to use the least little things to change a self. George Herbert and the Business of Practical Piety initially calls on theories of the extended mind to ask what sort of minor physical and social structures scaffold decisions, then examines a selection of nudges used by Herbert: contracts with the self, building a mind, cleaning a heart, conversing with God, making to-do lists, and working on working well.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

This book argues that play offered Hamlet, John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Robert Burton, and Sir Thomas Browne a way to live within the contradictions and conflicts of late Renaissance life by providing a new stance for the self. Grounding its argument in recent theories of play and in a historical analysis that sees the seventeenth century as a point of crisis in the formation of the western self, the author demonstrates how play helped mediate this crisis and how central texts of the period enact this mediation.