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

Since Richard Strier's landmark study, Love Known (1983), established George Herbert's theology as firmly Protestant, critics have concentrated their attention on the role played in Herbert's writings by politics and religious "externals" such as forms of worship and church government. Pioneering work by Sidney Gottlieb (1988), Michael Schoenfeldt (1991), and others led to books by Christopher Hodgkins (1993) and Daniel Doerksen (1997), which portray a Herbert who occupied a Jacobean and/or Elizabethan via media, attached to ceremonies and social order but mindful of the priority of the inward experience of salvation. To this line of criticism, Ronald Cooley's book is a welcome addition.

The first full-length study of Herbert's late pastoral manual, The Country Parson, Cooley's book aims to synthesize the research of historians and to fuse the historical with the literary-critical by providing a close reading of Herbert's text as a strategic intervention in historical processes. His focus is both narrow (one short prose work) and wide (early modern culture), and one of his main contributions is to expand the historical territory considered by Herbert studies. Cooley writes that his "is not in any sense a theoretical study"(10). Yet in important ways it is. Particular arguments are informed by Marx and Foucault, and the book as a whole is strongly influenced by Max Weber. In this respect, Cooley's study resembles Christina Malcolmson's Heart-Work (1999). Both offer Weberian readings focused on The Country Parson. But while Malcolmson follows Weber's famous thesis about the "Protestant ethic" and uses The Country Parson to ask questions about Herbert's poetry, Cooley draws on Weber's less-known argument about the rationalization of modern social structures and uses The Country Parson as a way of exploring questions about early modern history. Like Schoenfeldt and Achsah Guibbory (1998), Cooley sees Herbert's writing as expressing the contradictions at the heart of early modern society. Ultimately, his book advances a theory of history according to which innovation and "improvement" gradually alter traditional society by placing "the rhetoric of continuity"(171) in the service of change.

The heart of the book is four chapters on The Country Parson's relationship to developments in religion, professionalization, rural labour and land use, and patriarchal authority. The historical thesis is least evident in the first, which argues that Herbert constructs a religious via media in response to the religious conflicts of the day. The key word in the chapter is "between." Herbert attempts to "steer a course between a retreating conformist Calvinism and an advancing Arminian authority" (41), "between clericalist and populist conceptions of pastoral conduct" (48), "between broad and narrow definitions of preaching" (51), and so on. This portrait resembles those of Hodgkins and Doerksen, but Cooley differs in stressing the instability and strategic nature of Herbert's position.

The next two chapters are the most original in the book. In the first, Cooley argues that The Country Parson participates in the modernizing project of professionalization, engaging with the parson's legal and medical rivals in "a complex struggle for professional and discursive territory" (58). The second explores The Country Parson's relation to changing agricultural practices, including enclosure. Invoking Marx on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Cooley argues that Herbert's inconsistent presentation of the land and of country people reflects the mixture of tradition and innovation that characterized the early seventeenth-century countryside in general and Herbert's Wiltshire in particular. Both chapters advance Cooley's historical thesis. In The Country Parson's "main thrust towards clerical professionalization," he argues, "we might call it innovative, yet it consistently employs the discursive materials of tradition in pursuit of that objective" (68). Similarly, the "specific ideological character" of The Country Parson is "its embrace of an agrarian capitalism sustained and rendered palatable by a residue of traditionalist commonweal rhetoric" (111).

The final chapter...