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  • Introduction
  • Sidney Gottlieb

When it was announced that the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America was going to be held at Cambridge University in 2005, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to re-examine George Herbert's multi-faceted connections to his alma mater. Chauncey Wood organized two panels under the broad heading of "George Herbert: Cambridge Scholar" and assembled a wide-ranging group of papers that examined not only Herbert's literal Cambridge environment, activities, and alliances but also his complex relationship with what Cambridge stood (and perhaps still stands) for: the ways of learning, wit, and public service, sometimes secular, and sometimes sacred.

The papers presented at these sessions provoked spirited discussion and commentary, and seemed to fit so well together that the natural next step was to make them more widely available by publishing them in the George Herbert Journal. In the following pages we include slightly revised and expanded versions of the conference papers. They retain the liveliness of their original oral delivery, but incorporate full notes and also expand a bit beyond the strict limits of the traditional twenty-minute conference time slot.

As the respondent for both of those sessions I had plenty to say at that time, mostly by way of trying to express my appreciation for how these essays, individually and collectively, illuminate a pivotal time in and pivotal issues of Herbert's life. Pivotal is exactly the right word: most of the essays show a Herbert engaged in a balancing act, pulled one way while wanting to lean another, trying to envision and live a life – a holy life in this world – not torn apart by either/or logic and choices that repudiate what one was and is, but unified and sanctified by a synthesizing, reconciling, and forgiving faith and (to use a word that Herbert would not have used but which we need not shy away from) imagination. Although the phrase rarely came up in the sessions, the [End Page v] essays show Herbert vigorously reconceptualizing the via media as a dynamic process, not a static position: not an arithmetical mean between extremes that may be a safe but inauthentic or even sophistic compromise and resting place, but a tense wavering, a perpetual negotiating and accommodating requiring perpetual energy, intelligence, and sensitivity. I was (and continue to be) struck by the extent to which all the session papers, in their various ways, insightfully examine this defining quality of Herbert, his devotional agility.

As much as I had to say then by way of response, though, and am tempted to repeat and expand on now, the experience of working with these essays closely to help prepare them for publication has convinced me that they really need only the simplest of introductions. The essays are wonderfully clear and, like Herbert's poems, comment quite nicely on one another, often in unexpected ways. They are arranged here in the order that they appeared on the program. The three essays from the first session use Herbert's "The Pearl" as a take-off point to examine what is by no means a simple renunciation of "the wayes of Learning." Anne-Marie Miller Blaise uses patristic sources to help illustrate how Herbert devised and relied on a "theology of beauty" as a replacement for more conventional and perhaps suspect forms of knowledge to educate us and lead us to God. Christopher Hodgkins shows how "The Pearl" dramatizes Herbert's "lover's quarrel" with learning, and his close reading of the poem tracks Herbert's intricate dance with his beloved. Chauncey Wood uses a little-known scholarly treatise owned by Herbert to gloss one of the dark figures at the heart of this poem, a figure highlighting and supporting Herbert's subtle awareness that giving something up is rarely – and need not be – an absolute and "unqualified" action.

In her essay from the second conference session, Elizabeth Clarke replaces Izaak Walton's politically motivated and fundamentally misleading emphasis on Herbert's "royal and aristocratic patrons during his career at Cambridge University" with a much more detailed survey of the widely diversified Cambridge people who were Herbert's friends at school, were instrumental in preserving...

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