Early modern Protestants understood, inhabited and used the material world in contradictory ways: the co-existence of iconoclastic destruction and enduring use of pre-Reformation rituals and objects suggest the deep ambivalence people felt about material things in worship. This thesis explores how English Protestants understood materiality: how early modern worshippers ‘read’ the world around them, and how this shaped their reading of devotional poetry. I focus on the work of George Herbert, chosen for his immense popularity in the seventeenth century, and his posthumous – and continuing – alignment with Anglican orthodoxy; understanding Herbert’s writing is crucial to understanding how seventeenth-century English Protestants thought.
This thesis looks closely at two material forms central to early modern worship and the imagery in The Temple: the body in prayer, and the church building. The first part explores the idea of the ‘voice’ (of praying subject, or poetic speaker), the heart (the organ of spirituality and emotion, which performs prayer and which poetry ‘moves’), and bodily performances of prayer. References to ‘voice’, ‘heart’ and ‘knees’ in The Temple hover between literal, symbolic and metaphysical depictions, and the distinctions between these tell us much about the formal and devotional function of Herbert’s verse.
The second part probes how worshippers inhabit church space. First I consider the parish church as a textually constructed edifice, and as a spiritual experience analogous to devotional reading. The next chapter examines land ownership, the changing patterns of which shaped worshippers’ lives; an uncertain and ‘dislocating’ relationship to space enables Herbert to express the Protestant believer’s spiritual state, uncertain of their fixed fate – salvation or damnation. Finally, I discuss the church monument, which shapes how churches were used and communal and spiritual identities were conceived, and allows Herbert to articulate the conflicted relationship between spirit and matter.
The thesis closes by considering the book as a material artefact, and reading and writing as material devotional acts. Herbert was followed by seventeenth-century devotional poets whose works blur the boundaries between literary imitation and devotional exercise. Examining how Herbert ‘reads’ the Bible, and how later poets ‘read’ Herbert, sheds light on the intersections of seventeenth-century devotional and literary practices.
