When Nathan H. Nelson writes that we ought to read “The Church,” the longest section of poems in George Herbert’s The Temple (1633), as a psalter, he is in good company. Critics have long noted the influence of the biblical psalms on The Temple. But in his newest book George Herbert’s 82: Psalmic Social Disorientation in The Temple, Nelson also wants to move us “beyond lexical similarity into the complexities of collection-structure, thematic poem-grouping, rhetorical-liturgical modalities, and postures of supplication” (3). To do so, Nelson applies both biblical- and literary-critical methodologies, structuring his slim volume in two parts, ultimately arguing that “Humilitie,” a little-studied poem in The Temple, ought to be read as a “refraction” of Psalm 82. Connecting this reading to psalms of corporate lament, Nelson argues that “Humilitie” helps us better understand how Herbert navigates “biblical social justice” in his work (15). George Herbert’s 82 presents a compelling argument for the value of intertextual and interdisciplinary studies of Herbert, justifying the volume’s place as the third in the series “Frameworks: Interdisciplinary Studies for Faith and Learning.”
Nelson uses the first chapter to outline the “collection-structure” of The Temple, first describing how biblical critics categorize biblical psalms (e.g. praise, lament, royal, and wisdom) and then applying those categorizations to Herbert’s collection. Then, by charting the frequency of Herbert’s psalmic references (according to the biblical index of Helen Wilcox’s 2007 edition of Herbert’s poems), Nelson makes a striking discovery: the frequency of praise, lament, royal, and wisdom psalms in the Book of Psalms are, in many cases, only a few percentage points different than the frequency of the psalm’s references in The Temple. For example, Nelson outlines how praise psalms make up 40.66% of the Book of Psalms and 40% of Herbert’s psalmic references; psalms of lament make up 44.66% of the Book of Psalms and 41.23% of Herbert’s references (8). Yet, psalms of community lament, which are of special interest to Nelson, appear less frequently in Herbert’s Temple than in the Book of Psalms. Nelson attributes this to Herbert’s desire to avoid overt politic references and instead focus on biblical social justice, a term that Nelson generally uses to refer to a society rightly ordered to God’s will.
In chapter 2, Nelson shifts his focus to one specific example of psalmic refraction, developing a comparative reading of “Humilitie” and its referent, Psalm 82. Both might be described as courtly poems, but that is where the two text’s similarities seem to end. Yet Nelson argues that in “Humilitie,” we see the “vice-regents” of Psalm 82 holding court, “wherein a showy semblance of moral elevation without God’s presence turns out to deconstruct itself” (34). In other words, the chaos of “Humilitie” is what happens when the God who “standeth in the Congregation of the mightie” of Psalm 82 leaves the lesser gods to their own devices (Psalm 82:1 KJV). The reading is fresh and compelling, discussing the reaction of the poem’s personified virtues to the Ciceronian passions each of the poem’s animals represent. But because Nelson is insistent on resisting common sociopolitical or allegorical readings of “Humilitie,” what exactly these psalmic refractions of biblical social justice ought to produce in a reader (or in Herbert, the meditative writer) remain murky. For instance, Nelson writes that “Humilitie” “counsels administrative temperance and compassion,” and it is hard not to read this without considering at least some of the sociopolitical implications it might have held for Herbert, who wrote most, if not all, of The Temple while still in public life (45).
Likewise, because much of the criticism on “Humilitie” was written some decades ago, Nelson’s book feels slightly unmoored from recent scholarship; his treatment of Herbert as a puritan has generally fallen out of fashion as historians and literary critics have sought to complicate Herbert’s theology (and the term “puritan”). Gary Kuchar’s monograph George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word: Poetry and Scripture in Seventeenth-Century England (Palgrave, 2017) is perhaps the most recent nuancing of Herbert’s theological and poetic relationship to the extremes of puritanism and Laudianism in the Church of England. Stronger engagement with more recent work on the psalms in early modern literary and religious culture from scholars like Hannibal Hamlin would also have strengthened the context of Nelson’s claims.
Nevertheless, this volume is as accessible as it is interesting, and Nelson presents an original close reading and analysis of a poem often overlooked in Herbert scholarship. It joins recent work like Daniel Gibbons’ study of Herbert and the Book of Common Prayer in Conflicts of Devotion: Liturgical Poetics in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), in emphasizing how an attention to intertextuality enriches Herbert studies. Because of its short length—the book in many ways reads like a well-argued lecture—it is well suited to an upper-level course on early modern devotional poetics. Nelson’s close reading and well-balanced interdisciplinary approach fits well with the “Framework” series, with its focus on the value of liberal approaches to scholarship, and would serve as a useful model for students beginning high-level research. Likewise, the book is helpful for those of us interested in expanding our approaches to Herbert, particularly by incorporating other disciplinary methodologies, as Nelson does to strong effect.
Abigail Scott Rawleigh is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Notre Dame.
Abigail Rawleigh
Date Of Review:
May 27, 2023