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

"The Countrey Parson is full of all knowledg," wrote George Herbert (1593–1633) in the pastoral manual that was his last major publication. "He condescends even to the knowledge of tillage, and pastorage, and makes great use of them in teaching, because people by what they understand, are best led to what they understand not" (F.E. Hutchinson, ed. [1941], 228). Adapting Herbert's advice to his own sympathetic, New Historicist reading of The Country Parson, Ronald W. Cooley presents original and instructive insights derived from his impressive erudition in early modern theology, law, medicine, and agriculture, as well as current theories of literature, sociology, and historiography. Cooley contextualizes Herbert's work among early modern English schemes for social improvement and thereby demonstrates that The Country Parson, far from being the pious self-portrait for which Izaak Walton mistook it in 1670, is a professional manual of instruction for young Anglican clergy struggling to adapt their newly completed studies in divinity to the demands of daily parish life.

Employing Stephen Greenblatt's term "self-fashioning," Cooley demonstrates that Herbert idealizes the parson in order to set a high social and moral standard, to assert clerical primacy among the rival learned professions of medicine and law, and to instruct his intended readers through strategic flattery. Though the same evolving late Jacobean Calvinism informs both of Herbert's major works, Cooley explains, the public, rhetorical voice of The Country Parson is the opposite of the intimate, confessional voice speaking the lyric poetry at the heart of The Temple. In 1630–31, Herbert writes as a recent Cambridge University Orator, now beginning a new career in parochial ministry. With careful wit he harmonizes the Covenant theology of his university years with Bishop Laud's increasing enforcement of ceremony. Nonetheless, the church censored posthumous publication attempts in 1638 and 1640, so The Country Parson did not see print until the Interregnum.

Cooley convincingly represents Herbert's complementary efforts to reconcile differences of Puritan and Laudian, clergy and laity through the persona not of an ascetic Christian Everyman but of a practical 1631 Wiltshire parson. Linguistically, Cooley observes, Herbert deliberately uses "I" to model confession, "we" to join the pastor to his flock in worship, and — most frequently — "the parson" to dignify the clergyman as a compassionate leader set apart by education and divine calling. A resident of Saskatchewan, Cooley is sensitive to Herbert's ambivalent portrayal of agrarian reforms, such as enclosure, which both enhance productivity and eliminate family farms, and with Herbert he recognizes the anticlerical suspicions a young university man confronts in offering his leadership to a rural community.

Herbert represents the parson in traditional terms as a patient "father to his flock" (Hutchinson, 250), but Cooley recognizes the elusiveness of the term father in Herbert's England, where socioeconomic forces challenged patriarchal authority from the body politic to the microcosmic level of primogeniture. Thus Herbert retains the language of patriarchy but describes the parson's governance as a mutable paradigm of deputizing, modeling, and sharing control, and Herbert recognizes the submission a parson owes his aristocratic patron as clearly as does Jane Austen's Mr. Collins — though Herbert's tact and wit honor the role that the latter fills with comic unctuousness.

Cooley's study of The Country Parson enlightens other agrarian literature, including Jonson's "To Penshurst" and Milton's Paradise Lost. His longest chapter reads Herbert's late poems through the parson's confident voice. While the earlier poems of The Temple, such as "Redemption," often confess human helplessness even to utter a need, the later ones, such as "The Water-course," usually advise the reader to seize spiritual betterment. "Turn the pipe and waters course / To serve thy sins," the parson urges one who suffers the rank growth of afflictions...