Explore the vast range of titles available.

This book brings together ten essays on John Donne and George Herbert composed by an international group of scholars. The volume represents the first collection of its kind to draw close connections between these two distinguished early modern thinkers and poets who are justly coupled because of their personal and artistic association. The contributors' distinctive new approaches and insights illuminate a variety of topics and fields while suggesting new directions that future study of Donne and Herbert might take. Some chapters explore concrete instances of collaboration or communication between Donne and Herbert, and others find fresh ways to contextualize the Donnean and Herbertian lyric, carefully setting the poetry alongside discourses of apophatic theology or early modern political theory, while still others link Herbert's verse to Donne's devotional prose. Several chapters establish specific theological and aesthetic grounds for comparison, considering Donne and Herbert's respective positions on religious assurance, comic sensibility, and virtuosity with poetic endings. 

L’attribution probable du livret du premier véritable opéra anglais, le Vénus et Adonis de John Blow, à Anne Kingsmill Finch ne résout pas seulement l’un des petits mystères de l’histoire de la musique. Ce texte, lorsque lu parallèlement aux autres œuvres dramatiques de Finch, éclaire d’un nouveau jour la manière particulière dont la comtesse de Winchilsea façonne sa voix, pensée comme performance, dans sa poésie lyrique. L’implication de Finch dans le domaine musical à la Restauration permet de mettre en lumière la tension qui existe plus tard dans sa poésie entre la parole et le chant, tous deux sexués. Elle élucide peut-être aussi les raisons pour lesquelles Finch a souvent été considérée à tort comme un poète préromantique. Anne Kingsmill Finch’s most probable authorship of the libretto to the first through-sung English opera, John Blow’s Venus and Adonis , does not only elucidate one of the mysteries of the history of music. Considered alongside Finch’s other dramatic works, it reverberates on the way the Countess of Winchilsea shapes her own voice in her lyric poetry, thought of in terms of performance. Finch’s engagement with Restoration music helps to account for the tension later at work in her poems between gendered song and speech. It may also explain why she has often been misconstrued as a pre-Romantic poet.

According to the French art historian, Daniel Arasse, the secret of a painting often lies hidden in a detail that bears the keys of the true unseen thought of the whole work. 1 will also look at some of the ways in which his advice resonates with the domestic imagery of his poetic work, The Temple, and his art of singling out everyday objects as significant \"details\" of Gods transfiguring presence. In his seminal book, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England, Christopher Hill drew attention to the importance of the household as one of the basic units for the exercise of godly discipline and to the spiritualization of the household, placed under the authority of the godly patriarch.' The work of historians of religion over the past few decades has lead to considerable revision of mistaken ideas about the state of church buildings in the wake of Reformation iconoclasm and the role played by images as well as the senses at large in Protestant spirituality.

[...]extending the investigation of Herbert's knowledge of theology to the Greek tradition, I would like to suggest that the beauty of Herbert's poetry can be likened to that of icons as defined by the Fathers of the Byzantine Church. What Bienz fails to specify, however, is that this distinction between artistic pedagogical tools and doctrine is a traditional distinction in the writing of many Church Fathers. [...]it is, paradoxically, through his very knowledge of patristic sources that Herbert learns how to dissociate the specific function of his art from that of dogma. 14-18) \"Sweetnesse readie penn'd\" is readily understood by many critics as referring to Scripture. [...]for them, Herbert's sole literary model becomes the Bible. [...]the word which sounds without is a sign of the word that shines within, to which the name \"word\" more properly belongs.

Anne Kingsmill Finch’s most probable authorship of the libretto to the first through-sung English opera, John Blow’s Venus and Adonis , does not only elucidate one of the mysteries of the history of music. Considered alongside Finch’s other dramatic works, it reverberates on the way the Countess of Winchilsea shapes her own voice in her lyric poetry, thought of in terms of performance. Finch’s engagement with Restoration music helps to account for the tension later at work in her poems between gendered song and speech. It may also explain why she has often been misconstrued as a pre-Romantic poet.

[...]for salves, his wife seeks not the city, but preferrs her garden and fields before all outlandish gums. [...]among the few French handbooks that would have been available to the Herbert brothers at the beginning of the seventeenth century - apart from the very popular French Littleton, French Scholar, and French Schoolmaister by the Huguenot Claude de Sainliens, alias Claudius Hollyband - John Eliot's \"more sprightly\" Ortho-epia Gallica (London, 1593) may have retained their attention.12 In his manual also subtitled Eliots Fruits for the French, the author addresses his \"Gentlemen Readers, Students of the French tongue,\" lauding French as a Courtly Speech, spoken and vnderstood by most Princes, Noble-men, and Gentlemen in all parts of Christendom because still the finest wits delight to read bookes of State, Pollicie, Marciall discipline, Phisicke, Humanitie, Historie, Diuinitie, and a number of most rare spirits haue written thereof in French.13 Eliot also draws particular attention to the poetical qualities of this \"Noble, Famous, and Courtly language\" as he goes on to explain that: In her attempt to \"challenge the orthodoxy established by Martz that Counter-Reformation meditation is the rhetorical and spiritual mode adopted by Herbert,\" Elizabeth Clarke has suggested that the books George asked Henry to send back to him from France may just as well have been volumes of poetry but that, contrary to assumptions, Herbert disconnects himself from the direct influence of Saint François de Sales and the flourishing devotional baroque lyrics the latter's Introduction à la vie dévote helped to foster in France.42 According to Clarke, the author of The Temple was only too aware both of his own voice and that of his Church to let foreign voices speak above his own. The youngest, Henry, later to become master of the revels, ironically acted as the importer or smuggler of a \"Latin Stock\" for his brother; the eldest, Edward, used the foreign press to publish what he feared would be censored at first in England, but hoped that George's legitimizing eye would help him import his book within the sphere of orthodoxy before exporting it throughout Christendom; the third, George, sought all at once to transplant, convert, and distribute the foreign word, bringing it home to God, in order to make \"one place ev'ry where.\"

L’attribution probable du livret du premier véritable opéra anglais, le Vénus et Adonis de John Blow, à Anne Kingsmill Finch ne résout pas seulement l’un des petits mystères de l’histoire de la musique. Ce texte, lorsque lu parallèlement aux autres œuvres dramatiques de Finch, éclaire d’un nouveau jour la manière particulière dont la comtesse de Winchilsea façonne sa voix, pensée comme performance, dans sa poésie lyrique. L’implication de Finch dans le domaine musical à la Restauration permet de mettre en lumière la tension qui existe plus tard dans sa poésie entre la parole et le chant, tous deux sexués. Elle élucide peut-être aussi les raisons pour lesquelles Finch a souvent été considérée à tort comme un poète préromantique.