'Full of All Knowledg': George Herbert's Early Modern Social Discourse by Ronald W. Cooley

Abstract

MLR, I0 I .2, 2oo6 5 I9 'Full of all knowledg': George Herbert's Early Modern Social Discourse. By RONALD W. COOLEY. (Mental and Cultural World of Tudor and Stuart England) Toronto, Buffalo, New York, and London: University of Toronto Press. 2004. vii + 238 pp. $50; ?32. ISBN o-8020-3723-2. This would appear to be the first scholarly monograph entirely devoted to George Herbert's attractive, but deceptively limpid, treatise A Priest to the Temple; or, The Countrey Parson. His Character and Rule of Holy Life. It was first printed posthu mously in a collection, Herbert's Remains, assembled by Barnabas Oley, appearing in this form in i652 and subsequently (as a single volume, its text minimally modified) in I67 I and I675. Herbert's preface is dated I632, the year before his death at thirty nine- and three years after Charles I's dissolution of Parliament, an event Ronald Cooley mentions in passing on page 6I. The Countrey Parson is therefore unlikely to have been widely disseminated before theWar of the Three Kingdoms and the establishment of the Commonwealth. Proto-Caroline though its composition may be, its impact cannot have been fully felt before the Protectorate and the Restoration. Cooley does not focus on the work's reception (it was clearly not widely available in manuscript), placing his emphasis firmly on its genesis in the early Stuart English Church. How are we to genericize Herbert's treatise? Its subtitle's 'character' and its 'brief chapters and crisp aphoristic prose' (p. i6) lead Cooley to see it, persuasively, as a form of the Theophrastan 'character'. He may not be the first to do so, but he develops the idea further than his predecessors. (Later, on page 9I, he interestingly proposes the term 'georgic'.) Cooley draws attention to a light self-mockery in the work. Would that his own writing style were lighter and crisper than it frequently is. The most reader-friendly chapter is the sixth: here Cooley proposes, interestingly, that the poems in The Temple (I633) that can reasonably be established as 'later' appear to be moving away from the confessional 'God-man' conversation of the bulk of the Williams collection (? I626) to amore socio-economic 'man-man' one; in other words that the later poet Herbert (? I628-30) is already writing and thinking as a country parson rather than as Everyman. Thus several poems, especially 'The Glimpse', are illuminated as never before with reference to the contemporary crisis in theWiltshire cloth industry (pp. 152-58). Yet the historical framework constructed inCooley's first two chapters is tentative. He has read widely but seems not to have digested this reading in such away as to make his reader feel in sure hands. In his first chapter he falls into the familiar trap of telling us what he is or is not going to do, rather than getting on with it. In his second there ismuch speculation about possible influences. Cooley relies deferentially on a group of historical authorities with such radically different approaches to the period that it is not easy to distil his own from them. Still, as suggested above, when he subsequently homes in on The Countrey Parson itself, Cooley is on much surer ground. If the work's ecclesiological position seems to us at times difficult to define (advocacy, but not prescription, of celibacy; encour agement of the use of incense), its sense of an early modern social community-and the parson's central place in it-is not. In wishing to expound these, Cooley offers four areas for discussion: 'worship, social regulation, agricultural technology and land use, and domestic relations' (p. 5). Here, if presented at times a bit repetitively, there is some genuinely interesting and detailed micro-history; and one certainly gains a strong sense of what Peter Laslett, cited intermittently in this part of the discussion, famously called 'the world we have lost'. That this is so is probably truest of the discussions of the country parson's knowledge of herbal medicine and the practice of pagan-derived seasonal festivity, and of the kind of authority-perhaps among the 520 Reviews earliest to have been lost to his eighteenth- and nineteenth...