Materiality and Devotion in the Poetry of George Herbert

George Herbert, his contemporaries, and readers inhabited a world of material things that were spiritually animated but deeply troubling. Habitual providential and typological interpretation imbued matter with meaning, and connected it with the rest of Creation; using material things was an act of interpretation, devotion an act of habitual reading. Materialist philosophies rejected distinctions between body and soul; injunctions to continuous prayer made every place and every bodily motion a potential house of and vehicle for prayer. At the same time Protestant doctrine and Church of England policy, expressed in sermons, visitation articles and works of theology as well as devotional manuals, prayer books and even physiologies and biographies, policed the ways and conditions in which material things, bodies, and spaces might be properly used in devotion. Herbert's Temple is built, read, and used in this world of continual textual and material 'reading'. By a close reading of The Temple, this book explores how Herbert and his readers understood, experienced, and used material objects in devotion. The Temple is an edifice built of paper and ink, of Biblical allusion, and of analogy to both physical churches and spiritual communities of believers: a material and spiritual, literal, and figurative construction. In his verse, Herbert plays with the boundaries between material and spiritual presence, and between literal and figurative signification; in its devotional poetics material and spiritual meanings inform one another and its readers' devotional lives. Materiality and Devotion in the Poetry of George Herbert focuses in turn on three of the most significant kinds of material things seventeenth-century English believers encountered in devotion: their bodies, church buildings, and books.

Table of Contents:
Part I: The Body at Prayer 'Lost in flesh': The body, prayer, and poetry in The Temple 1: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations: Praying voices in The Temple 2: 'My heart hath store, write there': Hearts and poetry in The Temple 3: 'Down with thy knees, up with thy voice': Bodily prayer in The Temple Part II: The Church Building 'A braver Palace then before': The Temple and the church building 4: 'All show'd the builders, crav'd the seers care': Building sacred space in The Temple 5: 'Betwixt this world and that of grace': Living on land in The Temple and The Country Parson 6: 'Dissolution sure doth best discern': Commemoration in the church and The Temple Coda: 'The hand you stretch/ Is mine to write': Devotion and the material text

About the Author :
Francesca Cioni completed her PhD on materiality in George Herbert's works in 2020 and was appointed as an HRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of York. She has since worked as a cataloguer at the British Library while undertaking independent research on early modern English literary and devotional cultures.

Review :
This book displays an impressive range of interest and engagement, and considerable theoretical and methodological ambition alongside its historical expertise: for most of the argument this comes off splendidly, and offers a genuinely new perspective on Herbert, his works and his social and devotional contexts...Materiality and Devotion in the Poetry of George Herbert is a fine work, learned and agile, and it deserves a wide readership. At the heart of this excellent study of the poetry of George Herbert are close readings of the poems, beginning with 'The Posie' and its multiple meanings in relation to its 'own materiality and literary form'. This is not simply another of the many books on Herbert, but a profound exploration of the complex liturgical and devotional life of post-Reformation England in the seventeenth century, focusing not just on Herbert himself but on the often hagiographical tradition that quickly built up around The Temple and his parochial life in Bemerton after his death. This book is not an easy read, but it is eminently worth taking seriously, for its attention to the 'materiality' of the poems guides us into a world that is quitedifferent from our own, one in which 'religion' saturates everything. Well-written and deeply researched, Franscesca Cioni's bookoffers a comprehensive study of the relationship betweenmateriality and devotion in Herbert's The Temple. Cioni's book is "monumental." In risking the horrible pun, I simply mean toconvey that the book is itself a monument, its own temple, inwhich Cioni explores material forms, "surfaces" - texts, bodies, buildings, land, monuments, and the literary as well as the "material afterlives" of Herbert's verse. Anyone interested in the question of Herbert and materiality will find value in this informed and scholarly work.