George Herbert's Country Parson and the Enclosure of Professional Fields

Abstract

George Herbert's Country Parson and the Enclosure of Professional Fields by Ronald W. Cooley The study of professions and professional discourses has become increasingly important to historians and literary historians of early modern England, professionals who are themselves jockeying for position on the boundary between adjacent disciplines. The skeptical response of many historians to literary "New Historicism," with its heavy reliance on the theoretical work of Michel Foucault, illustrates both the late-twentieth-century professional jostling, and the need for further research into professions and professionalism. HistorianDavid Cressy has insisted that to think of Stuart England in Foucault's terms, "to argue from France to England, and from the 1780s to the 1610s, is an exercise in anachronism and dislocation," largely because early modern England lacked the professional and bureaucratic machinery to implement the sort of "panoptic" system of social control Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish.1 Such a position depends, at least in part, on the prevailing view that the rise of professions is closely linked to the beginnings of urbanization and industrialization in eighteenth-century England.2 But many historians of early modern England have challenged this view in the last fifteen years or so, exploring the training, practice, and social role of the emerging professions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in rural as well as urban areas.3 It seems increasingly clear that if early modern England had not developed the professions as instruments of social control, it was in the process of doing so. If this point is implied by the emergence of "semi-independent professional hierarchies" as an increasingly prominent feature of the English social order, it is confirmed by the sweeping ambitions registered in professional handbooks like George Herbert's A Priest to The Temple, or, The Country Parson His Character, andRule ofHoly Life!' At one point in the book, Herbert declares that "The Countrey Parson desires to be all to his Parish, and not only a Pastour, but a Lawyer also, and a Phisician."5 The statement is part of a web of allusions to, and borrowings from, the burgeoning early modern discourse of callings and professions, the raw material out of which Herbert fashions his portrait of an idealized rural clergyman.6 Indeed 2 Ronald W. Cooley the book implicitly remarks on its own composition when Herbert writes that The Country Parson is full of all knowledg. They say, it is an ill Mason that refuseth any stone: and there is no knowledg, but, in a skilfull hand, serves either positively as it is, or else to illustrate some other knowledge, (p. 228) Herbert puts his precept into practice, employing his knowledge of law and medicine, "to illustrate some other knowledge," in this case the knowledge of "the Dignity . . . and the Duty" (p. 225) of a parish clergyman in the Church of England. But Herbert's reliance on legal and medical terminology does more than demonstrate his facility for similitudes. The analogies and distinctions between the priest, the physician, and the lawyer register The Country Parson's participation in a complex struggle for professional and discursive territory. A sense of the book's audience and of the social forces that helped to produce it is important here. The Country Parson is often read through the lens of the Civil War, as an idyllic portrait of the golden age in the Church of England. Completed in 1632, and surely intended for an audience of contemporaries, the book was published in Herbert's Remains in 1652, almost two decades after Herbert's death. Needless to say, a great deal had changed in the religious life of England in these two decades. The 1652 volume, and the second edition of 1671, contained prefatory material by Barnabus Oley, an ejected Laudian clergyman. Oley's nostalgia has colored subsequent responses to the text, though ironically, as Daniel Doerksen has shown, it was probably Oley's "Arminian party . . . that prevented the publication of The Country Parson much earlier, say in 1639."7 If we move beyond Laudian nostalgia and consider the forces shaping Herbert's sense of the Church of England in the 1620s and early 1630s, we can begin to see The Country...