The first full-length study to uncover the profound impact of early modern musical culture on George Herbert's religious verse.

Described by one contemporary as the 'sweet singer of The Temple', George Herbert has long been recognised as a lover of music. Nevertheless, Herbert's own participation in seventeenth-century musical culture has yet to be examined in detail. This is the first extended critical study to situate Herbert's roles as priest, poet and musician in the context of the musico-poetic activities of members of his extended family, from the song culture surrounding William Herbert and Mary Sidney to the philosophy of his eldest brother Edward Herbert of Cherbury. It examines the secular visual music of the Stuart court masque as well as the sacred songs of the church. Arguing that Herbert's reading of Augustine helped to shape his musical thought, it explores the tension between the abstract ideal of music and its practical performance to articulate the distinctive theological insights Herbert derived from the musical culture of his time.

George Herbert (1593-1633), the celebrated devotional poet, and his brother Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648), often described as the father of English deism, are rarely considered together. This collection explores connections between the full range of the brothers’ writings and activities, despite the apparent differences both in what they wrote and in how they lived their lives. More specifically, the volume demonstrates that despite these differences, each conceived of their extended republic of letters as militating against a violent and exclusive catholicity; theirs was a communion in which contention (or disputation) served to develop more dynamic forms of comprehensiveness. The literary, philosophical and musical production of the Herbert brothers appears here in its full European context, connected as they were with the Sidney clan and its investment in international Protestantism. The disciplinary boundaries between poetry, philosophy, politics and theology in modern universities are a stark contrast to the deep interconnectedness of these pursuits in the seventeenth century. Crossing disciplinary and territorial borders, contributors discuss a variety of texts and media, including poetry, musical practices, autobiography, letters, council literature, orations, philosophy, history and nascent religious anthropology, all serving as agents of the circulation and construction of transregionally inspired and collective responses to human conflict and violence. We see as never before the profound connections, face-to-face as well as textual, linking early modern British literary culture with the continent.

This book uses textual and material evidence -- in poetry, prayers, physiologies, sermons, church buildings and monuments, manuscript diaries and notebooks -- to explore how material things held spiritual meaning in George Herbert's poetry, and to reflect on scholarly approaches to matter and form in devotional poetry.

The visual, material, and literary cultures of the English Renaissance are littered with objects that depict, utilise, or respond to the metaphor of musical harmony--yet harmony in this period relied on a certain amount of carefully mannered dissonance. Using visual and literary sources alongside musical works, author Eleanor Chan explores the rise of the false relation, a variety of dissonance that, despite being officially frowned upon by contemporary theoretical treatises, became characteristic of English vocal music between ca. 1550 and 1630.

This volume replaces the traditional image of George Herbert as meditative recluse with a portrait of the poet as engaged throughout his life with the religion, politics and society of his time. Instead of an isolated genius living in retreat from the world, Herbert appears as a man writing public verse, active within an important social circle, and committed to nationalistic Protestantism. The book attends to the poetic brilliance of his verse as well as the institutions and contexts that influenced him: the upper class coterie, Cambridge University, and the Church of England.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Literature and the Senses critically probes the role of literature in capturing and scrutinizing sensory perception. Organized around the five traditional senses, followed by a section on multisensoriality, the collection facilitates a dialogue between scholars working on literature written from the Middle Ages to the present day. The contributors engage with a variety of theorists from Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Michel Serres to Jean-Luc Nancy to foreground the distinctive means by which literary texts engage with, open up, or make uncertain dominant views of the nature of perception. Considering the ways in which literary texts intersect with and diverge from scientific, epistemological, and philosophical perspectives, these essays explore a wide variety of literary moments of sensation including: the interspecies exchange of a look between a swan and a young Indigenous Australian girl; the sound of bees as captured in an early modern poem; the noxious smell of the 'Great Stink' that recurs in the Victorian novel; the taste of an eggplant registered in a poetic performance; tactile gestures in medieval romance; and the representation of a world in which the interdependence of human beings with the purple hibiscus plant is experienced through all five senses. The collection builds upon and breaks new ground in the field of sensory studies, focusing on what makes literature especially suitable to engaging with, contributing to, and challenging our perennial understandings of, the senses.