Early Seventeenth-century England Research Articles

Attending to the Passion in Early Modern England: Lancelot Andrewes's Good Friday Sermons

This article investigates writing about the Passion in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. It examines the sermons preached on Good Friday by Lancelot Andrewes (1555 – 1626). Like many Protestants, Andrewes hoped to minimize the idolatrous potential of the Passion. Rather than problematizing the sensuality of the Crucifixion, however, Andrewes's sermons cultivate an interpretive disposition that can read it correctly. Drawing on Bernardine and Augustinian models, he treats the attention of his listeners as a vital resource for negotiating the outward materiality of the Crucifixion: reading the Passion “with due attention” reveals through its carnality an eternal message of divine love and integrates it within a broader pattern of scriptural reading. Andrewes's openness to the roles of mental and ocular sight in worship commits him to explaining how outward surfaces reveal inner truths. His theorization of attention in these sermons sheds new light on post-Reformation readings of the Passion's iconography.

‘Physicians of the Soul’: Clerical Responses to Demonic Temptation and Possession in Early Modern Reformed English Protestant Theology

Abstract: Recent scholarship has highlighted the centrality of demonic temptation (to commit sin) in early modern Reformed English Protestantism. This article develops this argument further by examining the manifestation of, and the clerical response to, demonic possession in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Demonic possession is framed here as an expression of intense conflict with demonic temptation: a reading that emphasises the spiritual effects of this affliction on the soul. Moreover, it presents English clergymen—particularly those of Puritan convictions—as predominantly concerned with treating the effects of demonic temptation on the soul. In this role, they thereby fashioned themselves as ‘physicians of the soul’. Through examining a range of early modern English works of practical divinity, demonology, and demonic possession, this article establishes the broader ‘Godly’ concern with demonic temptation, along with how this concern shaped their conceptualisation of demonic assault and spiritual healing.

Preaching and the body: Lame Mephibosheth in early seventeenth-century England and Scotland

ABSTRACT “Lame Mephibosheth” is a minor character in 2 Samuel, but one who features in multiple contexts in sermons and other religious writing of the Jacobean and Caroline periods. This article uses close reading to build on previous scholarship on the use of the Saul-David narrative in the political sphere, demonstrating the use of Mephibosheth’s disabled body in this area as well as in wider theological contexts. Mephibosheth’s lameness is assigned significance regarding sin, whether original or otherwise, and is associated with birth, accident, and disease, depending on the preacher’s intended message. Mephibosheth represents an unusually authentic and consistent disabled biblical figure and is used to express disability as a category, as a synecdoche and through inclusion in lists. The overlooked figure of Mephibosheth illuminates early seventeenth-century attitudes to the body, whereby the physically disabled body is manipulated and posed in the service of the spoken and written word.

Invention: The Language of English Renaissance Poetics by Rocío G. Sumillera

Reviewed by: Invention: The Language of English Renaissance Poetics by Rocío G. Sumillera Catherine Bates Invention: The Language of English Renaissance Poetics. By Rocío G. Sumillera. Cambridge: Legenda. 2019. x+159 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–781883–20–4. Keeping good company with the current surge of interest in Renaissance poetics, this meticulously researched and useful book shows how the concept of 'invention' undergoes a critical development during the early modern period. Through a series of carefully marshalled arguments and extensively illustrated examples, Rocío Sumillera convincingly demonstrates that the 'conceptual richness' (pp. 2, 125) of Renaissance inventio results from its intermediary position between classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, on the one hand, and Romanticism, on the other. While referring widely to Italian, French, and Spanish sources, Sumillera focuses specifically on sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England to trace the evolution of this critical concept, as it shifts from being a functional term in classical logic and rhetoric to assuming much wider connotations of artistic originality and creativity. Key to this development is the change from invention as a form of finding (from in +venire, literally 'to come upon') to invention as a form of devising, making, or creating. To explore how and when this change takes place, Sumillera considers inventionʼs relation to imitation and imagination, respectively. With their origins in Plato and Aristotle, theories of imitation have always struggled with the question of ideality—whether the object imitated or the imitation itself might be in some way exemplary—and this problem comes to the fore when the object being imitated is another author. While there is little dignity in slavish copying, imitatio assumes an altogether more 'inventive form' (p. 49) when—differentiated as aemulatio—it aims to alter, personalize, and surpass the original. As for theories of the imagination—although originating in the quite different discipline of natural philosophy and associated there with questions of perception and cognition—the 'image-making faculty' was similarly understood to work with both 'what had already been experienced' and 'new realities never even perceived' (p. 111): in other words, to be capable of producing something potentially better and new. The idea that a human artist might create something out of nothing—surpassing not only literary forebears but nature herself in 'making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew', as Philip Sidney puts it in the Defence of Poesy—was alien to the Greeks; for the polytheistic societies of antiquity saw the gods or Muses as sources of inspiration rather than as the single, ideal, creator God of Christianity in whom the human artist might find the ultimate model, 'the heavenly Maker of that maker' (Sidney, again). It was in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, interestingly enough—when scholastic Christianity was at the [End Page 278] height of its reach and power—that the notion of inventio first entered the field of poetics: through the poetic treatises of men such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf and John of Garland, and through the medieval artes poetriae that taught the principles of composition and interpretation (that is, the writing and reading of literary texts). By the same token, however, in exercising a creative power more properly deemed divine, the human artist ran the risk of presumption if not of sacrilege and blasphemy, which is why such creativity also roused strong opposition (especially among the Calvinists, with their emphasis on human depravity): an anti-poetic sentiment that was to feature particularly strongly in the English Reformation. All in all, this is a detailed yet wide-ranging scholarly book that will serve students and scholars equally well. Although its focus is English Renaissance poetics, the breadth of reference to European sources gives this study a notable ballast and breadth. Sumillera is particularly adept at the selection and presentation of primary quotations, finding the perfect examples—and plenty of them—to illustrate her argument. This makes the book a great resource, as well as a pleasure to read. Catherine Bates University of Warwick Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association

‘Dark Deeds Darkly Answered’ – The Political Economy of Prodigality in Measure for Measure

ABSTRACT This paper re-examines Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure as an extension to the prodigal plays in early modern England. Tracing the literary evolution of prodigals on stage, this paper explores diverse dimensions of prodigality and their dynamics in Measure by looking into three unconventional ‘prodigals’ – Angelo, Claudio, and the Duke. Angelo and Claudio, in line with Mat in London Prodigal, adopt the issues of marriage and dower that connect Measure to the prodigal husband plays of early seventeenth-century England. Duke Vincentio’s prodigality is investigated through the play’s oblique link between the ruler’s generosity and laxity of the state. His political strategies to manoeuvre the prodigal state, on the one hand, resemble prodigal husbands’ pursuit of self-interest in that his political use of deceit reinforces his sovereignty by achieving both fear and love of his people to his benefit. On the other, his political prudence pertains to another aspect of a prodigal, that of a risk-taking prince anticipating the proto-capitalist combination of creditor and debtor whose delegation of power and disguise foreground the political economy of security.

Edward Coke, William West, and the Law of Libel

ABSTRACT This note uncovers a new source for Edward Coke’s seminal account of the law of libel in his 1605 report De libellis famosis: the second part of William West’s Symboleography (1594). West adapted much of his popular English law book, including his definition of libel, from the work of the German civilian Hermann Vulteius. Coke in turn borrowed wholesale from West. That borrowing not only underscores the sixteenth-century roots of Coke’s law of libel but also suggests the difficulty of disentangling common law practice from civil law precept in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England.

‘With sound of lute and pleasing words’: The Lute Song and Voice Types in Late Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century England

AbstractThe Elizabethan and Jacobean lute song (1597–1622) represents one of the most iconic genres of all early music. Although much literature has been dedicated to this repertory, the issue of the voices for which this music was probably intended still remains surprisingly underexplored. This subject has, moreover, acquired greater significance in light of research undertaken by Simon Ravens (2014) and Andrew Parrott (2015), which has challenged the plausibility of the falsetto voice in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, particularly in sacred music.This paper explores the issue of the types of voices that most likely performed the Elizabethan and Jacobean lute song in three ways. Firstly, contemporary English evidence for lutes and viols is analyzed together with information regarding tuning and transposition. Secondly, the music itself is investigated, including the part names and clefs used alongside the tessitura of the melodic line. Finally, a detailed examination of evidence for the tenor and falsetto voice is presented, including a critical examination of the word ‘faine’ (usually assumed to mean ‘falsetto’). The collective results are then brought together to refine current ideas regarding the voices used in the Elizabethan and Jacobean lute song.

Allegorization and Racialization inThe Faerie Queene

Ania Loomba has suggested that we attend to two techniques of racialized governance in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England: “the creation of internal hierarchies within a population” and the increasingly reified assumption of “correspondence between the ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ of human beings.” This essay claims that The Faerie Queene produces a surprising resemblance between racialization and allegory as a literary form. Testing this hypothesis primarily in Book V’s scenes of racialized punishment, it explores how allegory produces internal hierarchies and a correspondence between the outside and inside of beings in the poem. At the same time, it suggests Spenser’s immanent critique of allegory as technique and mode might also be viewed as the poem’s own analysis of the intimacy between racialization and colonial violence, repeatedly revealing the failure of the production of difference and the instability of racialized hierarchy.

Naming Plantations: Toponyms and the Construction of the Plantation System in the English Atlantic

Abstract This essay pioneers a critical approach to place naming in early America, which offers new insight into the evolving definition of plantation. In early seventeenth-century England, planting was understood as a public effort to establish new commonwealths. Only gradually around the Atlantic world did plantations become predominantly associated with private places producing staple crops with enslaved labor. This essay uses the radically underutilized evidence of place-names to explore how this slippage occurred on the ground, and the way it shaped, and was shaped by, the individuals who embraced the status of “planter.” The names that individuals gave to the places they called plantations reveal how they perceived the plantation and the political, economic, and social relations it structured. By analyzing data from nearly 5,000 named tracts of land patented in four Maryland counties between 1634 and 1750, this essay charts the changing popularity of distinct elements within plantation names, including geographic descriptors, affects of the landowner, and European place-names. It reveals there was no straightforward rush to carve up the land into privatized commercial units. Instead, individuals initially structured plantations around communal frameworks defined variously by manorialism, urban civic traditions, and shared geographic lexicons. As the tobacco economy consolidated into the hands of a slave-owning class, plantation names reframed places as subjective manifestations of planter identities. These conclusions adjust our understanding of the transition to capitalism and slavery in Maryland and they also offer a blueprint for a broader toponymy of the plantation in the Atlantic world.

Characterizing a legal–intellectual culture: Bacon, Coke, and seventeenth-century England

A characterization of the ideas of Francis Bacon and Edward Coke, two preeminent English lawyer-scholars, provides insights into the nature of the legal–intellectual culture of early seventeenth-century England. This emerging culture remains underexplored, even though it immediately preceded and provided essential input into the ‘culture of growth,' the eighteenth-century cultural paradigm viewed as a catalyst for England's historically unprecedented technological advance and economic growth. To develop insights, we employ a methodology not previously used in this context, applying structural topic modeling to a large corpus comprising the works of both Bacon and Coke. Estimated topics span legal, political, scientific, and methodological themes. Legal topics evidence an advanced structure of common-law thought, straddling ostensibly disparate areas of the law. Interconnections between topics reveal a distinctive approach to the pursuit of knowledge, embodying Bacon's epistemology and Coke's legal methodology. A key similarity between Bacon and Coke overshadows their differences: both sought to build reliable knowledge based on generalizing from particulars. The resulting methodological paradigm can be understood as reflecting a legacy of common-law thought and constituting a key contribution to the era's emerging legal–intellectual culture. More generally, our analysis illustrates how machine learning applied to primary texts can aid in exploration of culture.

The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635 by Megan L. Cook

Reviewed by: The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635 by Megan L. Cook Alexandra Gillespie Megan L. Cook. The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. x, 288. 12 illus. $59.95. We—and I use that "we" advisedly, to mean we readers of the reviews section of Studies in the Age of Chaucer—know that Chaucer was an important figure in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Writers of the period tell us so quite plainly. In Spenser's Faerie Queene, [End Page 397] he is "Dan Chaucer, Well of English, undefiled." For John Foxe, he is likewise an inspiration, a "right Wiclevian, or else was never any" (Cook, 123, 73). Chaucer's works were a model for Wyatt and Surrey, and a source for Shakespeare and Milton. They were proof that, even in a distant and darker age, an English writer could foot it with the greats—"kis the steppes where as thow seest pace / Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace" (TC, V.1791–92). Filled with the same yearning—hoping he might "their high steps adore"—Spenser could defend the vernacular of his Virgilian Shepheardes Calender by pointing to Chaucer himself. Caroline Spurgeon's Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Allusions is still a useful survey of this and similar literary evidence of Chaucer's early modern reputation. E. P. Hammond's Chaucer: A Bibliography is a thorough record of manuscripts and printed books, which, circulating widely in the 200 or so years after his death, earned Chaucer that reputation. In recent decades, many critics—Kathleen Forni, Helen Cooper, Thomas A. Prendergast, Seth Lerer, Joseph Dane, Stephanie Trigg, and James Simpson among them—have framed our assessment of the mark that Chaucer made on early modern England in many different ways—from study of bibliographical ghosts and a canon of apocrypha to myth of congeniality and the revolution—to "scramble" to claim Chaucer's authority for a host of different causes (Cook citing Cooper, 200). Megan Cook's study is a welcome new landmark in this rather crowded landscape. The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635 picks up the story of the Chaucerian inheritance at the moment that that story becomes, as Cook's title suggests, an antiquarian and scholarly one. Her book describes the movement of the early moderns' Chaucer out of the hands of scribes such as John Shirley and early printers such as Caxton, De Worde, and Pynson (who was Richard, not Robert [18]) as he became not just a literary model, but a subject of antiquarian and scholarly interest. In the period 1532–1635 Chaucer's texts increasingly required explanation—full as they were of "hard words" (see Cook, Chapter 4)—but they also opened up all kinds of historical topics to contemporary view. These topics included the corruption of the pre-Reformation ecclesiastical establishment and the abuses rife among the regular orders (Chapter 3), and also the life, noble connections, family, and tomb of the poet himself (chapters 2 and 4). Chaucer became, in Cook's central argument, "an ideal figure with which to think through early modern [End Page 398] England's relationship to its medieval past" (20), a past worth celebrating, but from a useful distance. The result of this historical negotiation was, argues Cook, a "'secret history' of Chaucerian reading," and it here forms the basis for Cook's new account of the influence of England's old poet. Two words from Cook's title are particularly important to this account. One is the title "antiquary," which was first applied by Henry VIII to his subject John Leland, who was famous for laboriously journeying around England, taking stock of the libraries of religious houses on the eve of the Reformation. One result of these researches was Leland's De viris illustribus, a collection of biographies and bibliographies of England's great men: Chaucer was among them, his life story, as Cook shows, confected by Leland's bookish scraps, hearsay, and hopeful invention. As self-identifying English antiquaries increased...

Edward Gresham’s Astrostereon, or A Discourse of the Falling of the Planet (1603), the Copernican paradox, and the construction of early modern proto-scientific discourse

This paper investigates the functioning of the ‘Copernican paradox’ (stating that the Sun stands still and the Earth revolves around the Sun) in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, with particular attention to Edward Gresham's (1565–1613) little-known and hitherto understudied astronomical treatise – Astrostereon, or A Discourse of the Falling of the Planet (1603). The text, which is fully appreciative of the heliocentric system, is analysed within a broader context of the ongoing struggles with the Copernican theory at the turn of the seventeenth century. The article finds that apart from having a purely rhetorical function, the ‘Copernican paradox’ featured in the epistemological debates on how early modern scientific knowledge should be constructed and popularised. The introduction of new scientific claims to sceptical audiences had to be done both through mathematical demonstrations and by referring to the familiar concepts and tools drawn from the inventory of humanist education. As this article shows, Gresham's rhetorical techniques used for the rejection of paradoxicality of heliocentrism are similar to some of the practices which Thomas Digges and William Gilbert employed in order to defend their own findings and assertions.

Estimating a Culture: Bacon, Coke, and Seventeenth-Century England

A characterization of the ideas of Francis Bacon and Edward Coke, two paramount English lawyer-scholars, provides insights into the nature of the legal-intellectual culture of early seventeenth-century England. To develop the insights we employ a methodology not previously used in this context, applying structural topic modeling to a large corpus comprising the works of both Bacon and Coke. Estimated topics span legal, political, scientific, and methodological themes. Legal topics evidence an advanced structure of common-law thought, straddling ostensibly disparate areas of the law. Interconnections between topics reveal a distinctive approach to the pursuit of knowledge, embodying Bacon's epistemology and Coke's legal methodology. A key similarity between Bacon and Coke overshadows their differences: both sought to build reliable knowledge based on generalizing from particulars. The resulting methodological paradigm can be understood as reflecting a legacy of common-law thought and constituting one key contribution of these authors to the era's emerging legal-intellectual culture.

Witches and Equivocation in Macbeth

Shakespeare's Macbeth, a Jacobean play, was first performed in front of King James I, whose obsession regarding witchcraft was widely manifested in the early seventeenth century England. This essay is an attempt to explore the manifestation of the witches as projected in Macbeth with an emphasis on equivocation and their connections toMacbeth, the eponymous hero of the play.

Scripture and Power: Four Anecdotes from Early Seventeenth-Century England

AbstractThis article examines conceptions of the Bible in early seventeenth-century England by discussing four instances of antagonism toward the Bible. In 1601/2, a group of papists rent and scattered the Bible and the prayer book in their parish church. In 1602, Katherine Brettergh suffered from a crisis of faith, during which she repeatedly threw her Bible away. Also in 1602, the young boy Thomas Harrison, possessed by the devil, snatched books of the Bible from anyone around him and tore them apart. Around the same time, in Christopher Marlowe’s play about Faustus, Doctor Faustus vowed to burn Scripture. In all four cases, views and emotions regarding the Bible were expressed by violent gestures. What is common to these unrelated episodes is an assumption that the Bible was somehow powerful; that the Bible was not simply Holy Scripture but rather a forceful and efficacious book. In the article I analyse this sense of forcefulness in the Bible. Historians are now paying more attention to the Protestant material Bible and the ways the book was employed as quasi-magical object. The article extends this focus on Bible and power to new directions. I examine notions of power in the Bible, expressed by people on the religious margins – some Catholics, a few Godly, one sorcerer – and I examine the attribution of power to Scripture without clearly distinguishing between textual (referential) and material (magical) uses.

John Bois's Annotated Septuagint and the King James Bible

This article uses an annotated copy of the 1587 edition of the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, as a window onto the relationship between biblical criticism and vernacular translation in early seventeenth-century England. The author recently identified the book's annotator as John Bois (1561–1644), one of the principal translators of the King James Bible of 1611. The article explains why this and other material pertaining to Bois and the King James Version has previously been overlooked and considers how further evidence might be uncovered in the future. As Bois's annotations indicate, translators' decisions were shaped by questions that scholars throughout post-Reformation Europe were asking about the Bible's cultural context, composition, and transmission. These technical questions all had important theological implications, which scholars of biblical translation will only be able to appreciate if they expand their horizons beyond national boundaries and look at Latin sources alongside vernacular ones.

The Guitar in Tudor England: A Social and Musical History by Christopher Page

MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS The Guitar in Tudor England: A Social and Musical History. By Christopher Page. (Musical Performance and Reception.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. [xix, 248 p. ISBN 9781107108363 (hardcover), $99.99; ISBN 9781316257975 (e-book, Cambridge Books Online).] Music examples, figures, tables, appendices, bibliography, index.Although the four-course Renaissance guitar flourished above all in France, where several publications for the instrument appeared in the 1550s, it was played by men and women of varied social and musical backgrounds throughout Europe. The English were no exception. But unlike the cittern, a related four- or six-course wirestrung instrument popular in England and elsewhere, the Renaissance guitar (or in the English of the time) has received little attention from scholars interested in Tudor musical life. The surviving sources, moreover, offer limited and often obscure evidence of repertoire, development, or social meaning. The purpose of Christopher Page's book is to frame a social and musical history of the guitar in Tudor England by gathering the relevant literary, archival and pictorial documents in a more comprehensive manner than has yet been attempted (p. 7). Indeed, by complementing the known print and manuscript sources with a number of new archival documents, Page is able to offer credible accounts, for the first time, of many of this instrument's basic social and musical characteristics.The book is divided into two parts. The first examines extramusical evidence of the guitar's role in sixteenth- and earlyseventeenth-century England. Chapter 1 reproduces and reviews the six known images of the guitar produced in Tudor England, with special attention paid to the Eglantine Table, a decorative panel inlaid with designs of several musical instruments. The six images are often vague in what they represent, but Page draws from them a number of inferences: that by 1568 the guitar was considered a fitting appurtenance for English nobility, since in that year one appears in the decorative border of Robert Dudley's engraved portrait; that fourcourse guitars may have come in various sizes or even sets; and that the instrument may have held antique associations in England as it did elsewhere in Europe. A drawing included in a 1604 publication also seems to depict a guitarist playing in consort, but Page stresses that this last implication is uncertain and corroborated nowhere else in the historical record. The next two chapters showcase the author's gift for archival sleuthing. In chapter 2, Page examines books of accounts, royal and estate inventories, and various university documents to establish who specifically owned guitars in Tudor England. He finds evidence of possible ownership by more than two dozen individuals spanning the social gamut from royalty to yeoman. How these and other English guitarists came into possession of their instruments, few of which appear to have been manufactured in England, is the subject of chapter 3, a fascinating introduction to the gittern trade. The few surviving sixteenth-century London Port Books, i.e., records of imported commodities compiled by customs officials, attest to an international trade in instruments and strings. Grocers, haberdashers, goldsmiths, and other small businessmen dominated the trade in the 1560s, while one John White, a draper, appears alone to have specialized in the importation of guitars. By tracing the affairs of these individuals in other documents, Page throws into relief a small but active community of London merchants with capital to invest in their city's musical activities.Page turns to the guitar's music and performance in the final four chapters of the study. First up is James Rowbothum's An instruction to the Gitterne, ca. 1569, the only tutor for the four-course guitar published in England and the sole instruction for the instrument to survive, albeit partially. Eight test-pulls, or prepublication review pages, remain of the work, which appears to be a translation of a lost French original by Adrian Le Roy. …

God v Caesar: Sir Edward Coke and the Struggles of His Time

In the 1580s at Temple Church, a youthful Edward Coke, recently admitted to the bar, most likely witnessed the ‘Battle of the Pulpit’ waged between the Anglican Richard Hooker, who preached on Sunday morning, and the Puritan Walter Travers, who answered him on Sunday afternoon. That contest symbolised a broader conflict between the Anglicans and the Puritans in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England over economic and political affairs that Coke would, in his own way, try to reconcile in both the theory and practice of English law. Embracing Hooker's emphasis on the past and the seamless continuity of the English legal tradition, Coke would endeavour to make it look as though the strong contemporary impulses in favour of economic freedom and parliamentary government, close to the hearts of many Puritans such as Travers, were but a normal expression of the ‘ancient constitution’ associated with the reign of Edward the Confessor in the first half of the eleventh century. Though Coke temporarily succeeded in conciliating some of the Puritans, the compromise would not satisfy everyone.

Desperate Father or Murderous Fool? The Genesis of One Migratory Legend of Poverty, Fecundity and Multiple Birth

This study explores attitudes expressed in one specific Devon legend, concerning the multiple birth of seven children, as it was told in early seventeenth-century England. A diachronic study of related Western European narratives offers fresh insights. These earlier legends reveal how certain elements were discarded whilst others were retained within this migratory tale. The focal point of this story evolves over time from the medieval stigma attached to multiple births and towards the relationship between faith, fate, family size and household economics.

Book Review: Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert

Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert. By John Drury. Chicago, 111.: University of Chicago Press, 2014. xix + 396 pp. $35.00 (cloth).Late in this splendid literary biography, John Drury writes that achievement of candour and simplicity invited imitation. He had made poetry look as if anyone could do it so long as they did not put on airs: the deceptive appearance of an which concealed art (p. 285). Like the poetparson of Bemerton, Drury, through his elegant prose style, mastery of a wide variety of scholarly sources, attunement to poetry, and passion for Herbert the artist in all his complexity, makes it look easy. However, there are a number of reasons why no one before him has managed to write this book. Drury delivers a learned but accessible biography that offers the reader rich readings of the poetry and an invitation into the shifting landscape of early seventeenth-century England, when religious and political storms were brewing that would eventually, after Herbert's death, break into Civil War.George Herbert (1593-1633) poses a number of challenges as the subject of biography. He had a reputation for saintliness immediately upon his death, capitalized on by one of his early biographers, Izaak Walton, who made him a model clergyman of a lost golden age of the English Church. Herbert did not have a dramatic life. He spent his childhood and youth in intense study. Early in his career, he held a prestigious position as University Orator for Cambridge, making florid Latin and Greek speeches to visiting dignitaries. He struggled between choosing a prestigious court career and the ministiy, delaying his priestly ordination for years. He was often ill, and recovered in various country houses. Finally, in his late thirties, he married, was at last ordained priest, and received a living at Fugglestone and Bemerton, serving his parishioners faithfully for three years before succumbing to tuberculosis just shy of his fortieth birthday.The facts of Herbert's life alone do not make for scintillating reading; fortunately, Drury focuses on Herbert's rich inner life, his fascinating aristocratic family, and his friends, some of the brightest luminaries of his age (including Lancelot Andrewes, John Donne, and Francis Bacon). Throughout, he gives excellent readings of the poems.Drury is the best of anyone who has written on Herbert's vocational crises, making a solid case from surviving letters that from his student days he was torn between a strong desire to take holy orders, serving the church either through parish ministry or theological scholarship, and the equally strong desire for secular preferment and a prestigious career at court. …