George Herbert: Sacred and Profane (review)

Helen Wilcox and Richard Todd have edited a good collection of essays, based on papers read at a conference held in Groningen, Holland, in 1993 to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of George Herbert's birth. (A larger companion volume, published simultaneously, Sacred and Profane: Secular and Devotional Interplay in Early Modern British Literature, collects non-Herbert essays from the same conference.) The "profane" in the title might raise questions, since this poet is unremittingly sacred. But in "Aaron" he himself admits to the "Profaneness in his head," and the editors claim that "the mingling of sacred and profane" is "fundamental" in Herbert, and "part of that approachable quality that marks these lyrics out even among other religious texts" (p. vii). The alternative term "secular" helps clarify the sense of "profane" intended, but even so some of these essays (by Di Cesare, Cummings, Young, and Wilcher) seem to address only the sacred. Although arranged in four groups, these essays are actually of two main kinds: those dealing with context (the introduction, groups one and four), and those (the rest) concerned primarily with aspects of Herbert's art, especially his use of language. There is something to learn from each of these contributions, but (as usual) one must also read critically. In his introduction, Todd appropriately addresses the English historical context and tries to evaluate some "isms." He is one of the growing number of Herbert scholars who read recent historical writings documenting what Herbert's Church of England was actually like. (By contrast, Di Cesare's essay immediately thereafter unaccountably "rescinds from documents" [p. 19] and instead offers "speculations" [p. 17].) Accordingly, Todd knows that "Anglican" is an anachronistic term for Herbert's time, and that there was then no simple Anglican-Puritan split (p. xiv). He values some of Lewalski and Strier's work, but imprecisely refers to the latter (who unlike Schoenfeldt does a rather traditional kind of historical scholarship) as a New Historicist. Also he attributes to Lewalski and Strier more of