Project MUSE®: George Herbert Journal - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/349
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in George Herbert Journal.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1977) through current issueLatest Articles: George Herbert JournalTWOProject MUSE®George Herbert Journal1931-11920161-7435Latest articles in George Herbert Journal. Feed provided by Project MUSE®George Herbert’s Godly Interiors: Where Everything is “Plain, but Clean, Whole and Sweet”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/967521
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According to the French art historian, Daniel Arasse, the secret of a painting often lies hidden in a detail that bears the keys of the true unseen thought of the whole work. He opens what he calls his “close history” (“histoire rapprochée”) of painting with a double definition of the very notion of “detail” based on the difference, marked linguistically in Italian, between the particolare and the dettaglio. Whereas the particolare is any small fragment of a larger figure, a dettaglio results from the action of an agent working at isolating something, bringing it into being, as it were, by structurally extracting it from a broader context.1 A detail, in other words, can either be a relatively insignificant portion
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/349/image/coversmallGeorge Herbert’s Godly Interiors: Where Everything is “Plain, but Clean, Whole and Sweet”2025-08-09text/htmlen-USGeorge Herbert’s Godly Interiors: Where Everything is “Plain, but Clean, Whole and Sweet”2025-08-092025TWOProject MUSE®1063352026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-09Impossible Art: Groaning Beautifully at Herbert’s “Church” Door
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/967522
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There are two main embarrassments that beset the contemporary reader, and especially the teacher, of George Herbert’s poetry when initially we open his masterpiece, The Temple. The first of these was not Herbert’s fault: it is the subtitle added posthumously to his original manuscript title.1 He had named it simply “The Temple,” but the printers at Cambridge in 1633 had a nose for marketing; so they added their own subtitle in order to take advantage of a then-current vogue for books of emotional, expressive personal devotion. This subtitle can nowadays stir snickers from the back row of the classroom: it’s that pregnant phrase “Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations.” These words almost certainly sounded innocent
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/349/image/coversmallImpossible Art: Groaning Beautifully at Herbert’s “Church” Door2025-08-09text/htmlen-USImpossible Art: Groaning Beautifully at Herbert’s “Church” Door2025-08-092025TWOProject MUSE®570832026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-09George Herbert’s “The Church-porch” and the Native Plain Style
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/967523
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In a seminal essay in 1939, Yvor Winters argues for the centrality of the plain style in the English lyric, and in a revised version of that essay he describes Herbert’s “Church-monuments” as “the last word in the sophistication of the plain style.”1 Later attempts to analyze Herbert’s plain style focus on different poems but also foreground a kind of plainness emerging from patterns of eloquent complexity.2 But Herbert’s poetry also exhibits a different kind of plain style, one which deliberately eschews sophistication and perhaps for that reason has attracted less notice. It is a style akin to what Winters calls the “native plain style” when he is distinguishing poets of the earlier sixteenth century (figures
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/349/image/coversmallGeorge Herbert’s “The Church-porch” and the Native Plain Style2025-08-09text/htmlen-USGeorge Herbert’s “The Church-porch” and the Native Plain Style2025-08-092025TWOProject MUSE®621492026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-09George Herbert’s The Country Parson Through the Ages
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/967524
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“The Country Parson is, of course, the book by which Herbert is best known.”1 The anonymous nineteenthth-century author of this comment on George Herbert’s The Country Parson also makes the following remark about his poetry: “Most persons merely know [Herbert’s] poetry by a few lines culled here and there to provoke a smile at their quaintness and want of rhythm.”2 Herbert’s twenty-first century admirers may themselves smile at this “quaint” judgment regarding Herbert’s verse. But there are similarly time and culture-bound critiques of Herbert’s prose masterpiece, The Country Parson, in every age, including our own. Herbert’s ideal parson drawn, as he says, as a model for himself and all pastors, has called forth a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/349/image/coversmallGeorge Herbert’s The Country Parson Through the Ages2025-08-09text/htmlen-USGeorge Herbert’s The Country Parson Through the Ages2025-08-092025TWOProject MUSE®602872026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-09“When the soul unto the lines accords”: An Historically Informed Performance Studies Approach to George Herbert’s Musical Verse
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/967525
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Transcribing, performing, and recording seventeenth-century musical settings of George Herbert’s verse has offered a fruitful way into his lyrics for me as a scholar and a singer and has been a means of bringing Herbert’s poetry to new audiences. In this essay, I’d like to show how an historically informed performance studies approach to George Herbert opens up his poetry to new avenues of interpretation, and allows his poems (as songs) to reach new audiences, and old audiences in new ways, so that they can live on in live performance and in contemporary ears and eyes. To do this, I will first briefly review what I mean by performance studies and historically informed performance in particular; second, I’ll explore
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/349/image/coversmall“When the soul unto the lines accords”: An Historically Informed Performance Studies Approach to George Herbert’s Musical Verse2025-08-09text/htmlen-US“When the soul unto the lines accords”: An Historically Informed Performance Studies Approach to George Herbert’s Musical Verse2025-08-092025TWOProject MUSE®711592026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-09Materiality and Devotion in the Poetry of George Herbert by Francesca Cioni (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/967526
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Well-written and deeply researched, Franscesca Cioni’s book offers a comprehensive study of the relationship between materiality and devotion in Herbert’s The Temple. Cioni’s book is “monumental.” In risking the horrible pun, I simply mean to convey that the book is itself a monument, its own temple, in which Cioni explores material forms, “surfaces” – texts, bodies, buildings, land, monuments, and the literary as well as the “material afterlives” of Herbert’s verse (p. 27). Not only does the book situate Herbert’s devotional poetics within the context of contested “material texts, spaces, and bodies of seventeenth-century English worship” (p. 4), but it also takes a turn toward historical phenomenology in its
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/349/image/coversmallMateriality and Devotion in the Poetry of George Herbert by Francesca Cioni (review)2025-08-09text/htmlen-USMateriality and Devotion in the Poetry of George Herbert by Francesca Cioni (review)2025-08-092025TWOProject MUSE®195072026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-09