Re-Reading Thomas Traherne: A Collection of New Critical Essays (review)

The extraordinary rediscovery over the last century of a series of Thomas Traherne’s original manuscripts has become a familiar narrative. The new works have progressively made explicit a much greater imaginative and intellectual range than was at first recognized in his writing, and have provided a wealth of evidence about late seventeenth-century manuscript culture. Each new manuscript in turn has been heralded as transforming our understanding of Traherne, but subsequent scholarship has often failed to realize this potential. This collection of essays replicates this cycle of promise and disappointment: while it contains many new approaches and insights, as a whole it falls short either of embracing the new texts, or of fully utilizing existing scholarship.

The volume consists of nine essays, varying widely both in theme and quality, with an introduction by Jacob Blevins which reviews critical trends, and a brief epilogue by Alan Bradford. Many of these studies are contextual: Lynne A. Greenberg discusses images derived from evolving property law, Cynthia Saenz analyzes Traherne’s views on language, and Carol Ann Johnston suggests a debt to the culture of the court masque. Kevin Laam examines the use in Christian Ethicks of The Whole Duty of Man, while Raymond-Jean Frontain relates Centuries to interpretations of the Psalms. Two essays explore the nature of consciousness in Traherne’s work: Gary Kuchar, in the most intellectually substantial of the contributions, discusses the role of spectral figures, while James J. Balakier applies modern studies of the transcendental “fourth state” to Traherne. Susannah B. Mintz juxtaposes Traherne’s “ableist” (4) stance with his fantasies of deafness and muteness, while Finn Fordham analyzes his revisions to the manuscript of Commentaries of Heaven.

There is much here which is interesting and stimulating, and most of these subjects would repay further study; but the volume also has serious shortcomings. While some essays give welcome scrutiny to recently identified works, other contributors show no awareness of the existence of any texts discovered since the first decade of the twentieth century. Blevins rightly stresses the need for full publication of all the works, but that this is not complete cannot explain this neglect. There is also scant recognition in the text, bibliography, or list of desiderata for future scholarship, of manuscript studies as an area of knowledge; the only essay that analyzes a manuscript does so in a vacuum, with minimal reference to existing work. Similarly unsatisfactory is a reliance on outdated scholarship: several contributors use inadequate editions, such as Dobell’s Centuries (1908); while Gladys Wade’s 1944 biography can no longer be correctly described as “a reasonable context” (xi) for the study of Traherne, nor arguments based on her highly problematic assumptions that Traherne belonged to a “devotional circle” including Susanna Hopton (95) or that he had “direct contact” (145) with the court.

In small details too, insufficient heed is paid to Traherne’s plea for “Accuratness,” discussed by Fordham. More active editing could have eliminated many inconsistencies, such as the four different conventions used for citations from Centuries, the appearance of Hopton as both “Susanna” (94) and “Susannah” (105) in the same essay, and the very erratic indexing. There are frequent inaccuracies in quotations; two contributors, for example, transcribe the title page of Commentaries incorrectly, but with different mistakes (118, 217). There are also factual errors: Poems of Felicity was not “publicized in 1900” by Dobell (109), but identified by H. I. Bell in 1910; Chambers’s 1989 edition of the poems from Commentaries contains no facsimiles (115); and The Ceremonial Law is not a “political poem” (170).

Notwithstanding these problems, this uneven collection is valuable, as Bradford comments, in “the way it puts its contributors into implicit dialogue” with each other (225). There are many unexpected links between contributions with very different approaches: Saenz and Fordham on Traherne’s struggle with the imperfection of words, Kuchar and...