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.

Francesca Cioni, Training and Projects Cataloguer, British Library

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.