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

The difficulties highlighted by the increasing merging and inter-relationship between the discipline of English and that of History are evidenced in this work. The cross-disciplinary approach can often produce informative and enlightening texts as long as the boundaries are maintained. As an examination of a literary text, this 'reading' is valuable as an analysis of the lesser known work of George Herbert. Its stated remit is to situate a single text within the discourses through which seventeenth-century English people understood their world. Cooley sees his text as a 'focus for a sustained analysis blending literary criticism with the insights of social, cultural, and intellectual history.' Perhaps the problem is that he combines this focus with not only the new historicism in literary studies, but also the revisionist and counter-revisionist movements in early modern English historical studies.

Essentially, the attempted scope is far too large and The Country Parson as text becomes lost in the mixing of structures of authority according to Weber, the theoretical paradigms of Michel Foucault, and the historical scholarship of Lawrence Stone. The author is largely critical of all these authorities but fails to offer or show any initiative in providing an alternative of his own, most particularly through the literary text which should be at the centre of the discussion.

The problems of claiming a historical significance from a literary viewpoint are very apparent in this work. The text is evidence that the insights of specialist historians have been relied upon; their conclusions are accepted but not analysed from the viewpoint of the author or from that of the literary text. For a work published in 2005, some claims can no longer be agreed with: the concept of the 'new clericalism' of the 1620s and 1630s has been undermined by research publications which analyse printed sermons from the 1570s onwards. To present the text as one of the few available means of educating new clergy is to discount the significant amount of manuscript circulation which we now know occurred during the early modern period. Nor is any credence given to the educative impact of quite regular visitation sermons, which the clergy were all required to attend. Cooley seems to have made the assumption that Herbert wrote the book with the intention of publishing it but there is no concrete evidence for this. How much Herbert actually practised his profession is also open to question since the parish records of Bemerton during Herbert's tenure give no evidence of his actual participation in pastoral work. The experiential significance of Herbert's work for new clergy is therefore somewhat fraught but Cooley does not deal with this issue.

More to the historical point, so much work has been published and research undertaken since Lawrence Stone's published works in the field of social history. Indeed, the field of social history has broadened considerably thanks to the significant building blocks with which Stone and his contemporaries provided the discipline, a fact which makes the contextualisation of Cooley's work within the parameters of 1970s social history a real problem. The bibliography attests to this time warp as most of the historical works cited are concentrated in the 1980s, with a few in the 1990s but nothing after 1994 which is an original publication. Whether the reader is a supporter of Stone or not, the historical debate which Cooley asserts the book will undertake is limited in its scope because of the lack of readings from more recent contributions to the discipline.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Chapter 5, 'Pastor as Patriarch: Gender, Family, and Social order in The Country Parson.' Before exploring Herbert's contribution to the discourse on early modern patriarchy, Cooley begins with an overview of the historiography of the debate, securely...