Picturing Religious Experience: George Herbert, Calvin, and the Scriptures

By Daniel Doerksen

Little has been said about the relationship of Herbert’s writings to those of John Calvin, yet the latter were abundant and influential in Herbert’s Church of England. Accordingly Picturing Religious Experience studies Herbert’s poetry in relation to those writings, particularly regarding “spiritual conflicts,” which the poet himself said would be found depicted in his book of poems. Much more than is generally realized, Calvin wrote about the experience of living the Christian life—which is also Herbert’s subject in many of his poems. Altogether, this study maintains that Herbert owes to his religious orientation not just themes or details, but an impulse to observe and depict the inner life, and scriptural patterns which significantly contribute to the substance and literary excellence of The Temple.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Nov 10, 2011
• ISBN: 9781644531136

Book preview

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Preface

Admiration and respect for the poetry of George Herbert convinced me long ago that I could happily spend a lifetime learning and teaching about his work. With the help of Herbert and John Donne (and church historians such as Nicholas Tyacke, Peter Lake, Kenneth Fincham, Patrick Collinson, and Anthony Milton) I became acquainted with writings in the Church of England of their time. My interest in Calvin stemmed from two graduate seminars at the University of Chicago under the direction of church historian Jerald Brauer, where I learned for the first time that there were significant moderate puritans in the English church, and that they deserved literary study. To my surprise, George Herbert, no puritan, shared some of their notable features.

Although I have written much involving Calvin and the English church, my own religious orientation is neither Calvinist nor Episcopalian, but Anabaptist. My enthusiasm for George Herbert and for some of the writings of Calvin has been stirred not by confessional loyalty (after all, Calvin and mainline Protestants, as well as Roman Catholics, persecuted the Anabaptists of their time) but by admiration for the writings of two great, insightful Christian thinkers and writers, with both of whom I also share a high esteem for the Scriptures, and an interest in close interpretation of literary texts. What also delights me is that Herbert’s poetry is inclusive rather than exclusive: not about a uniquely holy man (see chapter 2), but picturing the actual life of struggling believers (like me) and would-be believers.

I have much to be thankful for. I was aided in my graduate work by a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, a University of Wisconsin Wilson Fellowship, and a Canada Council Fellowship. My subsequent research on backgrounds for Herbert’s English poetry involved repeated leaves spent in England with support grants from the University of New Brunswick and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The staff at British libraries and archive centers were very helpful. Consequently I was able to find out and publish (a) details of the Herbert family London church, previously unidentified, and support there for the view of the English church presented by recent ecclesiastical historians; (b) unexpected complications in the arrangements for the publication of Herbert’s poems in 1633: and (c) the remarkable early publishing history of Herbert’s The Country Parson. I also became a member of the Institute for Historical Research in London, and read a paper there in a Tudor and Stuart seminar conducted by Professor Conrad Russell.

My own studies of English literature as influenced by the Calvinist or Reformed nature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean leadership of the Church of England have touched on a range of major authors, including Edmund Spenser, Donne, Herbert, and John Milton. These studies all owe something to the excitement I felt when I first read Rosemond Tuve’s Reading of George Herbert, Louis Martz’s Poetry of Meditation, and Joseph Summers’s George Herbert: His Religion and Art. Historical criticism at its best can do what Herbert said the studious should do: copie fair, / What time hath blurr’d. Tuve and Martz demonstrated the value of reading literature with attention to its origins in a culture. Joseph Summers gave readers a more accurate picture than Tuve or Martz of the church in which Herbert’s poetry had its roots, and Barbara Lewalski spelled matters out in more detail.

After that came Richard Strier, Gene Veith, Christopher Hodgkins, Elizabeth Clarke, and others. But Strier’s otherwise excellent treatment of Herbert makes rather much of Lutheran theology, whereas Anthony Milton’s study of the English church of Herbert’s time clearly shows its Reformed, not Lutheran, alignment. This book continues beyond previous work in tracing a distinctive relationship between actual writings of Herbert and Calvin on the Christian life.

I thank Paul Stanwood, Alan Rudrum, Helen Wilcox, and Christopher Hodgkins for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this book in manuscript form, and Diarmaid MacCulloch for correspondence about the exact nature of the English church. Of course I am responsible for any errors that remain. I have also benefited greatly by the advice of anonymous readers at the Cambridge University Press and the University of Delaware Press. My debt to Nan Doerksen is far above rubies (Proverbs 31).

Portions of this book have appeared elsewhere in earlier versions, and are used here with permission, as follows: ‘Growing and Groning’: Herbert’s ‘Affliction’ (I), English Studies in Canada, 8 (1982), 1–8; The Laudian Interpretation of George Herbert, Literature and History, 3rd series, 32 (Autumn 1994), 36–54; Bearing the Cross: The Christian’s Response to Suffering in Herbert’s The Temple, in Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Theory, ed. Holly Faith Nelson et al. (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2010), pp. 97–110; and George Herbert, Calvinism, and Reading ‘Mattens,’ Christianity and Literature 59 (no. 3, Spring 2010), 437–51. Also, the chart on page 3 is reproduced with permission from Daniel W. Doerksen and Christopher Hodgkins, eds. Centered on the Word: Literature, Scripture, and the Tudor-Stuart Middle Way (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 24. Extracts from John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, tr. F. L. Battles, 2 vols. are copyright Westminster Press and SCM Press, 1960, and are reproduced by permission of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd. and Westminster John Knox Press, www.wjkbooks.com.

Chapter 1

Herbert and Calvin

In this book I develop further what some previous writers have claimed: a close relationship between actual writings of Calvin, the outstanding sixteenth-century biblical commentator, and those of George Herbert, a seventeenth-century devotional poet whose excellence is widely recognized.¹ The proof is in the pudding. Evidence is given here that some of the most distinctive Herbert poems share close ties with passages in Calvin’s biblical commentaries, especially those on the Psalms. As a result this book presents significant new readings of many poems, such as Man, An Offering, Miserie, Nature, and Submission. Although Calvin and Herbert both have a high view of doctrine, what matters in their common texts is not formal theology but a focus on personal spiritual experience that is important to both writers. Indeed I suggest that the very impulse to write of such experiences, as well as some patterns for doing so, can be traced to biblical writings as seen and interpreted by first Calvin and then Herbert. The interdisciplinary nature of this book should attract and reward the attention not only of readers and scholars of literature, but also of biblical scholars and readers, historians, particularly those of church history and of the history of ideas, and of readers and writers about spirituality.

This study offers a new perspective on Herbert’s devotional verse. Although he had a now recognizable place in the Church of England of his time, the mature Herbert was not a partisan but a moderate who deliberately reached out to a wide spectrum of possible readers.² In this study his poems are approached and understood not in the light of theological doctrines or arguments (in partial contrast, for example, to Richard Strier’s approach through Lutheran theology)³ but instead in spiritual and experiential terms. Although Calvin’s writings were important for Herbert, the poet was not interested in the Reformer’s disputes with the Roman church or with the Anabaptists, but in his biblical commentary; and in his later years Herbert like his bishop John Davenant increasingly sought to bring the Protestant church in England and beyond into spiritual unity.

The relationship between Herbert’s poetry and Calvin’s non-controversial writings has not been fully explored, most likely because Calvin and the nature of his influence in the English church have been seriously misunderstood, as has the make-up of that church in the time of Herbert. In literary circles Calvin has sometimes been thought of only as a tyrannical monster who oppressed the people of Geneva and exerted baneful influences on puritans in England. Those who actually read Calvin may have been put off by the harsh tone of some of his polemical writing (in fact no worse than that of the saintly Sir Thomas More), and may not have noticed the moderate, sometimes quite imaginative biblical commentary whose excellence and undogmatic quality John Donne commended.⁴ Sir Philip Sidney and his sister the Countess of Pembroke consulted Calvin’s commentary in preparing their verse translation of the Psalms, a work praised by Donne and probably formative in some ways for Herbert’s verse (see chapter 3 below). Some aspects of Calvin’s theology have doubtless offended readers, both then and in later times. But Robert Burns’s Holy Willie’s Prayer, a brilliant satire of religion gone wrong, should not be confused with a true evaluation of Calvin’s actual teaching and influence. Later in this chapter I take up Calvin as a scriptural commentator.

Serious confusion about the Church of England in Herbert’s time is being corrected by historians; but literary people have not necessarily been taking notice, nor have historians paid much attention to literary consequences. That church was not simply divided into Anglicans and puritans. Instead, at the very center of a middle way poised between Rome and Anabaptist Amsterdam (not Geneva) were Calvinist divines. As Patrick Collinson puts it, Calvinism was the theological cement of the Jacobean church, binding together conformists and moderate puritans.⁵

See the chart given here of the English middle way, which is roughly consonant with the four-group spectrum that Kenneth Fincham outlines.⁶ Some of these church leaders,⁷ including the majority of the church’s leading bishops, were moderate Calvinist conformists, such as Herbert’s own bishop, Davenant, at Salisbury. (Conformist is a term, intended unpejoratively and replacing Anglican, but not limited to Laudians, to describe church people satisfied with English liturgy and polity. By contrast, puritans in varying degrees desired changes in church rites and structures.) Others at the church center were moderate puritans, for example heads of some Cambridge and Oxford colleges, like Davenant’s long-time friend and correspondent Samuel Ward. In the reign of James I many bishops tolerated moderate puritans because they were diligent preachers, and such puritans in turn put up with what they considered an imperfect liturgy or polity because they cared more about preaching the gospel than what they ultimately considered secondary matters. (It should be clear that moderate as used here means avoiding extremes but not lukewarmness.) The resulting Calvinist consensus⁸ was not without some stresses and strains, but the fact of mutual tolerance and interaction had important consequences, and in my work I have been emphasizing the literary effects. The Calvinists were opposed in the church by the Laudians (also called Arminians) and their avant-garde predecessors. These, who favored an emphasis on ceremony and order more than on the preached word or the inner life, were only a small minority before 1625, when Charles I decided to advance them.⁹

The moderate church leaders, conformist and puritan, gave much attention to the inner life of the believer. Although they held firmly to church doctrine as seen especially in the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, those at the church center were much concerned about practical divinity. Kenneth Fincham’s study of the bishops of James I shows that the Calvinists among them tended to see themselves as preaching pastors, while the Laudians sought to be custodians of order.¹⁰ Books of Herbert’s time that concerned themselves with discussing spiritual conflicts and how to deal with them were in demand, and were typically written by Calvinists. It was in this milieu that Herbert wrote his poems picturing spiritual conflict.

Where does George Herbert fit in the church of his time? My own research on this has revealed that the London church of the Herbert family beautifully exemplifies the Calvinist consensus. Often in the past assumed to be a Laudian simply because he was a conformist, Herbert grew up and was educated in a London and Cambridge where Calvinism flourished.¹¹ The middle way church leadership of his time (midway between Rome and Anabaptist Amsterdam, but theologically with Geneva) was strongly Protestant and indeed Calvinist. It ranged from Archbishops Bancroft and Abbot to many leading bishops, to Dr. Thomas Mountford, rector of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the Herbert family London church, who was on the chapters of St. Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, and included puritan Cambridge dons and college heads. Later a close friend of Donne, Mountford regularly encouraged moderate puritans like Dr. Robert Hill to lecture to his congregation. This church was only one of many examples of the consensus previously mentioned. In Cambridge when Herbert was there John Davenant lectured on Calvinist theology, and the moderate puritan Richard Sibbes was a popular (and learned) preacher. Herbert doubtless heard many a puritan sermon in his Cambridge days, such as at the university church Great St. Mary’s, and in his Latin verses¹² he made fun of puritan excesses, but his mature writing reflects his respect for diligent pastoral preachers. It is not by accident that a number of his excellent lyrics in The Temple share images and ideas with the writings of Sibbes,¹³ a moderate who actually persuaded fellow puritans to conform for the sake of the gospel. The ethos of both Herbert and Sibbes owes something important to the writings of Calvin.

Calvinism has often been misconstrued. The term may bring to mind kill-joys, narrow-minded people, religious extremists, the smug, and the hypocritical. Unfortunately some such people can be found in most societies or religions and fully deserve opprobrium, but these stereotypes tell us nothing about the essentials of Calvinism. That term indicates the teachings of Calvin and his followers, but the English phenomenon is now understood by historians as conveniently including influences from other reformers, such as Bucer and Bullinger.¹⁴ Still, Calvin’s own writings exerted a most powerful influence in England. Unfortunately even historians sometimes think of Calvinism as necessarily extreme, or as centered on predestination, while Calvin advocated moderation, and he and his followers taught foreordination (following St. Paul and Augustine among others), without regarding it as central to the Christian faith. Bishop Anthony Rudd, who recognized the English church as Calvinist, did not even mention predestination in any of his five printed sermons.¹⁵ What was and remained central for English Calvinist writers was a very biblical-based spreading of the gospel, preaching the good news. It is for this reason, most likely, that historians repeatedly refer to them as evangelical protestants—language that should not frighten away good modern readers. Even skeptics like Richard Strier and Stanley Fish have written excellent books that benefit from insights into the literature of such religious experience.¹⁶

Calvinism in Elizabethan and Jacobean England had widespread and beneficial literary effects, in an era that was one of the most lively and creative in English literature. These effects have only begun to be explored. For example, in my own writing I have shown how predestination actually works in Spenser’s Faerie Queene I, x, giving a shape to the story fully in keeping with Church of England teaching in Article 17 of the Thirty-Nine.¹⁷ Elsewhere I have demonstrated that though Donne was not a puritan, his participation in the Calvinist consensus imparted some interesting puritan qualities to his literary imagination in the sermons. Also, as one sharing in the scripturalist moderation of Calvinist church leaders, Donne aspired to be a preaching pastor, rather than a custodian of order like Lancelot Andrewes. For this reason he deliberately avoided attacks on moderate puritan members of his own church, the Church of England, and like other Calvinists became an advocate for toleration within a significantly varied church.¹⁸ I have also shown how John Milton was affected by his youthful experience of the Jacobean and Caroline church.¹⁹ Although a beginning has been made,²⁰ there is much more to be done by those willing to explore the interaction of the words of Scripture, word-centered preachers, and writers of some of the greatest works of the early modern period. And notably the attention Calvin and Calvinists gave to personal religious experience should lead to fruitful studies.

WRITING OF SPIRITUAL CONFLICTS

In this book I concentrate on a major aspect (but not the whole) of Herbert’s poetry, the portraying of spiritual conflicts. Herbert considered this so important that in sending the manuscript of his English poems to his friend Nicholas Ferrar, he said Ferrar would find in it a picture of the many spiritual Conflicts that have past betwixt God and my Soul.²¹ Though often cited, this comment and its immediate context have seldom been taken seriously or critically enough. This book is therefore also an attempt to read The Temple in the light of Herbert’s own spoken observations about it. (It is not however intended to deny the value of the many fine studies of various kinds that Herbert’s work has already attracted.)

The vivid portrayal of spiritual conflicts is a biblical idea and biblical practice given special attention in Calvin’s writings. Much more than is generally realized, Calvin wrote about the experience of living the Christian life, which is also Herbert’s subject in many of his poems. How Calvin’s writings could be significant for Herbert is easier to comprehend if one properly understands their relation to the English church of Herbert’s times. Fortunately those writings are now easily accessible, Church historians have established the significant presence of English Calvinism, and Calvin scholarship itself is alive and well.²² In the remainder of this chapter, I will point out fascinating parallels between some of Herbert’s poems, give some specific reasons for looking to Calvin for light on Herbert, and say something about Calvin the Scripture commentator.

My second chapter focuses on the significance and the implications of Herbert’s spiritual conflicts statement, as well as the ways in which early interpreters approached the poems in the light of it, or of its partial reflection in Ferrar’s preface to The Temple. It traces the development of a Laudian interpretation, takes up reasons why such an interpretation developed, and why a Calvinist reading does more justice to the spiritual conflicts aspect of The Temple.

The third chapter in a sense follows up some of Barbara Lewalski’s insights and more specifically shows that in literary Scriptures such as the Psalms, read in Protestant fashion, Herbert could find both a precedent and specific patterns for the literary depiction of the inner life as one of recurrent conflict and resolution. Calvin’s preface to his commentary on the Psalms offers a particularly helpful introduction to some of the patterns and to the experiential criteria applied to such representational art. In this chapter I also draw on some useful ideas from E. H. Gombrich, distinguished art historian, author of Art and Illusion.

In the fourth chapter Herbert’s portrayal of inner experience is put into the context of Protestant introspection and its goal: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. Rejecting a speculative for a practical approach, writers like Calvin and Herbert maintain that in all of life, it is with God that we have to do. Man and God are always viewed in dynamic relation to each other; human fallen nature is always seen in the context of redemption.

Two final chapters give detailed attention to the known-yet-mysterious patterns of conflict and resolution in The Temple. The life here depicted is one of recurrent inner renewal, involving a turning away from self to God. Afflictions, the tension between this world and the next, the struggle for order, and prayer conflicts are parts of such a biblical reading of experience. Like conflicts, resolutions are recurrent, never final, in the earthly life. Vicissitudes Herbert sees as God’s tempering of man to bring about spiritual temper or poise.

FASCINATING PARALLELS

George Herbert’s Bitter-sweet,²³ arguably one of his most characteristic poems, portrays the speaker’s relationship with God, in a picturing that gains its vitality from conflict.

Ah my deare angrie Lord

Since thou dost love, yet strike;

Cast down, yet help afford;

Sure I will do the like.

I will complain, yet praise;

I will bewail, approve;

And all my sowre-sweet dayes

I will lament, and love.

Unlike hymns or devotional writings that suggest the life of a Christian believer is continually happy, Herbert’s poems recognize a God who can be angry with a believer, who can even cast down and strike; yet a God who continues to be loved. Where does Herbert get such ideas? One place to look is in the Scriptures, particularly the Psalms. In this book I present the case for Calvin’s commentaries on those Scriptures, highly esteemed and widely available in Herbert’s Church of England. As I suggest below, even the striking title of Herbert’s poem may owe something to them.²⁴

In a 1979 study that anticipates some of my approach in this book, Barbara Lewalski called attention to the Bible, read as English Protestants read it, as a most important context for English poetry of that time, including Herbert’s. Lewalski pointed to biblical models for different genres, including the lyric, and maintained that

an extensive and widely accessible body of literary theory, chiefly pertaining to the Bible and to fundamental Protestant assumptions about the spiritual life and about art, can be extrapolated from . . . biblical commentaries, rhetorical handbooks, poetic paraphrases of scripture, emblem books, manuals on meditation and preaching. [Also that] such theory, and the biblical models it identified, helped to shape contemporary attitudes about religious poetry, contributing directly to the remarkable flowering of the religious lyric in the seventeenth century.²⁵

In this book I claim that Herbert freely chose to make use of such patterns in his poetry, and that for him the Christian faith as expressed in the Scriptures and interpreted in his Church of England was more liberating than restrictive.²⁶ It is also helpful to understand that the English (Calvinist) milieu for this poet was not static, but was in a continuing process of change; and that Herbert, Donne, and others themselves contributed to aspects of that change.²⁷ Also, while writers in the English church had firm convictions about essential doctrine, as expressed in the Thirty-Nine Articles, they were (in varying degrees) open to readings of medieval and non-Protestant continental writers.

Since Herbert is known to have been a conformist, one natural place to look for background to his poetry is in the English liturgy.²⁸ After all, Herbert echoes the Prayer Book phrase whose service is perfect freedom²⁹ in his deathbed message to Nicholas Ferrar. Mattens and Even-song, for example, are poems located near each other in The Temple whose titles come from the Book of Common Prayer. Joseph Summers notes a connection to the Prayer Book, in that both poems are musical and that the morning and evening services were two of the three with which a Cathedral choir is most concerned.³⁰ However, these poems (like many of Herbert’s) are spoken in a much more personal voice than the prayers in the liturgy, and I found myself looking elsewhere for more particular light on their words, imagery, or other patterns. I discovered such help for Mattens in what may seem to some an unlikely source—the writings of Calvin, with the poem actually echoing the reformer’s words and patterns.

Here, at the beginning of one of his most beautiful poems, Herbert echoes words from Calvin that were likely well known to many English readers his time. I cannot ope my eyes, / But thou art . . . there . . . begins Herbert, clearly recalling what Calvin says early in the Institutes: [God] daily discloses himself in the whole workmanship of the universe. As a consequence, men cannot open their eyes without being compelled to see him.³¹ Calvin repeats the phrase cannot open their eyes in the immediately following section of the Institutes (1.5.2). The same chapter of the Institutes also offers a parallel for Herbert’s what is a heart, / That thou shouldst it so eye and wooe (lines 9–10) when Calvin observes that God sweetly attracts people to himself.³² Further details in Calvin help elucidate the poem as a whole.³³

Imagery and characteristic words from Calvin can be found elsewhere in significant parts of Herbert’s poems. In The H. Scriptures (I), lines 8–9, Herbert uses Calvin’s distinctive image of the Scriptures as corrective spectacles, when he writes, this is the thankfull glasse, / That mends the lookers eyes. In the same poem Herbert’s comparison of the Scriptures to heav’ns Lidger [ambassador] here/Working against the states of death and hell (lines 11–12) echoes Calvin’s description of the gospel as an embassy for reconciling men to God.³⁴ The silk twist and labyrinth imagery at the end of The Pearl closely follows another Calvin comment on the role of the Scriptures.³⁵ Jeanne Clayton Hunter calls appropriate attention to Calvin’s and Herbert’s similar use of water and pipe imagery.³⁶ Elsewhere, the language of bitterness and sweetness, in Bitter-sweet and other poems, has close analogues in Calvin.³⁷ I have previously shown that the wonderful poem The Flower has many parallels in the writings of Sibbes, a moderate puritan.³⁸ But there are interesting resonances in Calvin too, as in the following passage from his Sermons on Job:

For let vs consider what the state of the faithfull is during their life in this world . . . . Let vs come back to that which Sainct Paule saieth too the Colossians, that is to witte, that we be dead, and that our life lieth hid in our Lord Iesus Christ, and God will shewe it in due time. And by this we see a goodly similitude in that which Iob setteth down. For he saith, that the trees fade at the comming of winter, there appeareth no more greennesse in them, and it seemeth that all is dead when the leaues are falne off, and the trees the~selues frost bitte~: & yet for al that, life ceasseth not to lie hid both in the rootes and in the heart of them. We see that when the spring time is come, all shootes forth agayne, and the liuelinesse that was vnseene for a time, sheweth it selfe a newe.³⁹

This observation of a parallel in nature bears resemblances to the imagery in the second stanza of The Flower, which further describes the Lord’s returns . . . ev’n as the flowers in spring (line 2):

Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart

Could have recover’d greennesse ? It was gone

Quite under ground; as flowers depart

To see their mother- root , when they have blown;

Where they together

All the hard weather,

Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

I have italicized greennesse, root[es], and dead which all appear both in the Golding translation here given, and in the poem. Shortly after this passage Calvin refers to Paradise as an alternative to the fluctuations of the earthly spiritual life, as Herbert does twice in The Flower.⁴⁰ The Colossians reference is a favorite in both Calvin and Herbert; the latter has a poem based on it, with obvious resonances to The Flower: "Coloss. iii. 3. Our life is hid with Christ in God." The parallels I have found in Calvin for Herbert poems would resonate for many readers in England, where for a time the Institutes had been assigned as a university text,⁴¹ and where the intense interest in the Bible doubtless turned many to Calvin’s widely available writings (see below). As in the case of Tuve and Martz (mentioned in my preface and cited below), the discovery of such parallels should not be regarded as merely an interesting novelty, but taken as a clue to interpretation, helpful in part because they make us aware of what Herbert’s first readers could be expected to take into account.

THE RELEVANCE OF CALVIN’S WRITINGS FOR HERBERT

In November 1973, Dame Helen Gardner, Donne and Herbert scholar, wrote me in response to a request, saying I think a study of Herbert as a ‘Calvinist’ would be a very valuable thing to do (personal communication). Since that time, a number of scholars have supported the idea of Herbert as a Calvinist, while some others have resisted.⁴² Getting a proper understanding of English church history of the time has helped to clarify matters, and goes a long way to seeing why and how the writings of Calvin can help illuminate Herbert’s poetry. But not enough has yet been said about Herbert and the writings of Calvin himself. One reason for that is that Herbert readers are generally unfamiliar with the Reformer’s writings, particularly those on the Christian life, and Calvin scholars by and large don’t know Herbert’s works. Why not put two and two together: a great Christian poet who values the Scriptures in the highest possible terms, and whose writings are filled with biblical allusions,⁴³ and Calvin’s writings about Scripture, prominently available and highly influential in the England of Herbert’s time. This book argues for a significant relationship, in which Herbert not only includes specific echoes of the earlier writer at points, but also follows his scriptural patterns, including those for his picture of many Spiritual conflicts.

Just as Tuve (204–10) and Martz (6–13), and more recently Elizabeth Clarke and R. V. Young, took some trouble to explain why medieval or continental Roman Catholic materials should be available and significant in early seventeenth-century England,⁴⁴ it is reasonable to show the relevance of Calvin’s writings in Herbert’s religious milieu. For one thing, it should be noted how widely available those writings came to be in England. According to Andrew Pettegree, a tally of the revised Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, 1475– 1640 indicates that English editions of Calvin’s works easily outstripped all other continental writers, and dwarfed the production of native English theologians.⁴⁵ Pettegree also reports that Leedham-Green’s substantial survey of books recorded in Cambridge wills, carefully analyzed, confirms the preeminent position of Calvin as the dominant theological influence in Elizabethan England (280). He cites Francis Higman’s bibliographical studies showing that England was far and away the biggest market for Calvin’s work in translation. The fact that translators and patrons of Calvin’s works in English included both puritans and people linked with the church establishment suggests that the preeminence of those works depended on Calvin’s ability to appeal simultaneously to both the Elizabethan establishment and the emerging radical opposition, thus pointing to what has been called the Calvinist consensus (Pettegree 281–83).⁴⁶ And all this is not even to mention the many Latin editions of Calvin available in