George Herbert

Famed for his heart-searching devotional lyric poetry, George Herbert (1593-1633) also authored some of the finest and most influential English prose of his era: The Countrey Parson, his oft-cited pastoral manual, still valued for its spiritual insight, shrewd advice, and a style at once lively and refined, engaging and serious; A Treatise of Temperance and Sobrietie, his translation of Luigi Cornaro's jovial Italian tract on dietary health; Notes on Valdesso, his judicious and appreciative commentary (and sole theological work) on the Considerations of controversial Spanish humanist Juan de Valdés; his collections of Outlandish Proverbs and Jacula Prudentum, pervasively popular for centuries and shot through with familiar wisdom and wit; his Letters, providing the most intimate records of and reflections on his brief life; and his Will, dictated and witnessed as he lay dying of tuberculosis in his Bemerton rectory at the age of 39. Each of these works, frequently cited as contexts for his renowned English poetry, appears here for close study in its own right. Volume I: English Prose offers textual and critical introductions and annotations, a concise title essay and overview of prominent criticism for each chapter or section in subdivided works, and, above all, rigorous scholarly texts based on the earliest and best manuscript and print sources--some newly discovered or confirmed. Serious literary art by any measure, Herbert's English prose has emerged in recent years from the shadow of his rightly famous poetry. Such attention stands here fully justified: an edition whose accessible texts, combined with extensive and meticulous critical apparatus, will equip scholars for new discoveries and accelerate the already global interest in Herbert's work.