"Full of all Knowledg": George Herbert's Country Parson and Early Modern Social Discourse (review)

Abstract

Ronald W. Cooley, "Full ofali Knowledg": George Herbert's Country Parson and Early Modem Social Discourse. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. 238 pp. $50. by Cristina Malcolmson According to Ronald Cooley, "the man who wrote The Country Parson . . . was a man embarking on a career, not a man who despaired of having one" (p. 41). Supported by thorough scholarship and extensive knowledge of church history, Cooley makes a strong case for this claim, and future biographers of Herbert need to consider it carefully. The virtue of this approach is that it completely sets aside Izaak Walton's hagiography, which defined Herbert's life as a retreat from the worldly court to the peaceful Anglican conformity of the countryside. Amy Charles, in her biography of Herbert, and David Novarr, in The Making of Walton's Lives as well as his detailed review of Charles's book (in the George Herbert Journal 1, no. 2 [1978]: 4962 ) tried to dispel this myth, but it still reigns today, in such standard texts as the Norton Anthology ofEnglish Literature (see, for example, the seventh edition, 2003, volume 1, pp. 1218 and 1596). Cooley's book requires that we imagine Herbert in 1632 at the age of thirtynine fully committed to a holy life at the same time that he sought patronage, writing works for an audience rather than private exercises. Far from withdrawing from the world and court, Cooley's Herbert is a conforming Calvinist, intelligently alert to the new Arminian ascendancy developing around Charles I. The Country Parson, then, treads a vexed via media between the newly acquired authority of the Arminians and the godly elite of the Puritans, whose zeal Herbert attempts to discipline as well as harness. Cooley argues that Herbert's text follows the Jacobean program that sought godly social reform as well as church conformity. He agrees with Christopher Hodgkins (in Authority, Church, and Society in George Herbert: Return to the Middle Way) that Herbert is a liturgical and ecclesiastical Protestant. However, Cooley disagrees with the notion that Herbert was nostalgic about the Elizabethan settlement of days gone by. Rather he was actively pursuing James Fs goal of an inclusive church. The style of The Country Parson is one of "advance and retreat" (p. 44) promoting the goals of the Jacobean program, but yielding when possible before the liturgy and vocabulary of the Arminians (for example, in the use of the word priest). The Country Parson contributes to the development of the clergy as 1 12Book Reviews a profession rather than one oí the three estates. The text adopts the language of other professions like medicine and the law, but also competes with them to establish the clergy as a contemporary instrument of social control. Herbert addresses University men like himself without experience of the country, and demonstrates how to instruct rural parishioners in Christianity and strict obedience to the state. He also teaches the Protestant work ethic and the value of agricultural innovation to all levels of society. Herbert heartily endorses patriarchalism, which Cooley approaches as "a systematic social and political theory" emerging and dying in the seventeenth century (p. 117), but Herbert's work provides evidence of the limits of this theory as well as newer modes of covert indoctrination. Cooley compares the earlier Williams manuscript to the later Bodleian manuscript, and finds a new ministerial voice and a concern for practical piety. Finally, and throughout the work, Cooley argues for the modernity of Herbert's text, linking it to Weber's theory of legal-rational systems of authority. This modernity is embedded in the contradictory social discourses of the seventeenth century, which attempt to wed tradition with innovation. Cooley provides the invaluable service of analyzing the relationship between the precise religious and political situation of the early 1630s and The Country Parson. By doing so, he makes his case that Herbert was no meditative recluse, but also no ingratiating spokesperson for Charles's Arminian cause. The style of the work is "ambiguous and evasive" (p. 52) because the only other alternative was to be emphatically Laudian. Cooley is quite admirable in his grasp of the crucial historical issues at stake. He works from the research...